Xi Jinping's third term bid undergirded by desire to own legacy of Mao Zedong

the chinese communist party is in the midst of a four-day plenum it's the most important event in the country's political calendar it will aim to cement xi in power for a third term joining me live now is michael shoebridge from the australian strategic policy institute what's going on right now is fascinating i know plenum and eyes may glaze over when i say that word but this could be seen as on a par with what happened with chairman mao and he effectively cemented power and deng xiaoping as well this is ji's power play isn't it this plenum effectively yes tom so what she is trying to do is own the legacies of mao and deng so mao had china stand up to the world ding made china rich and she wants to say i own both those legacies and i'm making china strong he wants to create and broadcast this image of strength for the party and for himself and that's partly because there's so much weakness and trouble going on inside china right now the economy across the property finance and energy sectors are affecting the the wealth of the average citizen plus a whole bunch of wealthy chinese communist party families she needs to distract them from that and unify the party behind him before he goes for his third term in the party congress meeting next year that's what this is about and as a lot of commentators have noted a third term without an anointed successor essentially is going to mean an additional term on top the way the chinese leadership has worked we know the next leader for basically the whole term of the previous leader so this will effectively as we see it right now gives xi power out to 2032. he's trying to make himself the only option so he's identifying the party strength with his own personal role as leader that's got enormous risks for him because uh one of bing's actual legacies that she doesn't want to talk about is to try and destroy the cult of the personality the personality of the key leader which was one of the disastrous things about mao xi wants that for himself but he wants to deny he's creating a personality cult it's a real risk for him in the party and that's why this really dry communist party language and the historical resolution he's pushing through is so important it's going to make him the only option yeah you mentioned going back to that i mean this was for people that are china watchers this is what deng xiaoping had to so delicately manage he had his so-called historical resolution and what that meant was he was able to say chairman mao had his place in chinese communist party history and um had all these achievements but there were missteps and of course there were disastrous ones the great leap forward the cultural revolution he killed millions of people tens of millions of people effectively in china and that's what would worry people when they're hearing this that that cult of personality that allowed chairman mao to reign without question that g wants to reign without question as well well and his problem is we're seeing missteps with his rule right now partly because all of that decision making is in his hands so he's bumping into the consequences of decisions he's making about the economy and it's making it worse so the reason that deng dismantled the central authority of the leader and made it a collective leadership was because china got too complicated for one person to rule and we're seeing that now with g so he's got a lot of internal critics and a lot of pressures and the external environments got worse for china under xi with all the wolf warrior aggression it's hard for xi to claim global leadership when he doesn't even turn up to things like the classical climate change conference so he needs this historical resolution to strengthen his hand in the party you talk about complexity i mean if it was complex back then now um it's that on steroids not to mention all the you know modern money markets around the world going in and out of china you mentioned the economy i mean there is still essentially this grand unofficial bargain in china people have their lives very tightly controlled but the economy grows prosperity is increasingly theirs they've lifted themselves up really but the leadership likes to say they've lifted people up out of poverty if that snaps if we see some proper economic jolts through the economy what then fiji's leadership 2032 might not mean much well that's the danger for him and that's why this nationalist card and identifying himself as the strength of the nation is so important that's the one of the explanations for the military intimidation and aggression we're seeing around places like taiwan because if the economy is bad that projection of chinese power through their military becomes a more important card for him and the economy is in trouble and it is affecting average chinese investors there's a lot of exposure to the property market because they're all told that was secure yeah and that's the point as well right that that's for a lot of um chinese citizens that's all their wealth we talk about the australian property market and whether that's sort of leveraged this is everything in terms of chinese prosperity someone's retirement and so on well and it's it's the wealthy party families as well so let's not forget them they're probably more important to zhi's hold on power than the average chinese citizen's emotion because the body's trying to control that so it's the two things combining the trick for g is can he hold all this together to get his next term next year and to do that he has to continue to project strength he's not going to turn from his international uh aggression anytime soon because that's key to his power the sixth plenum there you go i know it's a dull title but this is significant it could be one of the more significant moments in chinese history depending on what happens michael shubridge appreciate your time today thank you thanks very much

Channel: Sky News Australia

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Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021