China’s 20th National Party Congress, With Ian Johnson

Jim Lindsay:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is China's 20th National Congress. With me to discuss what is likely to happen at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which is set to open this Sunday, is Ian Johnson. Ian is a Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at CFR. He is the author of several books including The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao and Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China. A long time journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Ian won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China. Ian, thanks for coming back on The President's Inbox.

Ian Johnson:
It's my pleasure.

Jim Lindsay:
Now, Ian, China watchers have had the opening of the Chinese Communist Party's 20th National Congress circled on their calendars for a long time. It even came up when we spoke back in early February about the domestic challenges that China faces. Now I know that the meeting is set to take place in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square and it's set to last for a week. Why though is it significant?

Ian Johnson:
Well, it's significant because China has these congresses every five years. And normally what's supposed to happen is that at every other congress, so every 10 years we have a new leader chosen of China. That has been the norm for the past few decades. This year it's been telegraphed for the past several years that's not going to happen. Xi Jinping is going to stay on for a third term and that's immensely significant because it breaks this system that was put in place in the 1990s to prevent the return of strong man rule in China.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, I want to delve into the reasons for that, Ian, but perhaps you could just start off with some boring logistical issues. And the first question I have has to do with COVID. We're in a situation in which China has gone to great lengths to crack down in COVID. It has a zero tolerance policy. But here we are bringing together people from around the country, putting them into a single hall. How do you avoid having COVID disrupt the show? Is it the case that everybody's been quarantined for several weeks? Do senior party officials get western vaccines so their confident on that score? How's it working?

Ian Johnson:
Well, that's something we don't know about the vaccines. But don't forget, China has a zero COVID policy. So really there are in theory no COVID cases in China or in many parts of China. You can be sure that the people who are coming to Beijing, are being tested with nucleic acid tests all the time, even among normal population. A friend of mine in Nanjing, for example, he and his family were being tested every other day. This is the entire population of this giant city. So these people who are coming to Beijing are going to be tested very regularly and I guess they're quite confident that they won't bring COVID with them to Beijing.

Jim Lindsay:
Now, I assume Ian, there's a lot of pageantry that goes along with the party congress. Are we going to see images of Xi Jinping on the floor mixing with regular delegates? Is he sitting up on a high podium isolated from everybody else?

Ian Johnson:
Well, one of the ways I like to think of this is it's similar to the coronation of a king. And just as King Charles III is now the king of Great Britain in the United Kingdom, but he won't be officially coronated until next year. I guess there won't be the big ceremony. So this is similar in that we've known Xi Jinping is going to do this for a while, but he won't actually have the ceremony until next week. However, it won't be as exciting as a British coronation. There won't be some sort of pseudo medieval ceremony with mink robes and what have you. He's not going to be slapping people on the back and pumping of the flesh like that. He'll be sitting mostly at a table and he'll be clapping his hands mechanically just like everybody else does, and there will be a cup of tea in front of him. This is all choreographed. I've seen it in person several times and they have people who come in who are like flight attendants who fill up the cups of tea, synchronized fashion, almost like synchronized swimming. The whole thing is meant to be solemn. It's not like a western political party where you see people on the floor and light bulbs going off and champagne corks popping. It's much more like the meeting of perhaps the cardinals in Rome as I imagine it might be, although I'm not really sure about that either. This is meant to show the dignity, the solemnity of the system, that it's well organized. It's a well oiled machine that this is happening according to rules and regulations. The most exciting thing we'll see is at the very end of it all, he will appear in another room with the other six members. We assume there'll be seven total members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and that will be our first indication of who are the members of this committee. And the order on which they appear on stage will be highly significant because it will show their seniority and that sort of thing. But that's about it in terms of up close and personal of Xi Jinping.

Jim Lindsay:
Okay. Before we get into trying to figure out who's going to be on the Politburo Standing Committee, let's do a preliminary question. Who gets to go to the national party congress and what are they actually doing when they're there?

Ian Johnson:
Well these are people who have been chosen by the party on the basis of their seniority and their role in the government and in the country. These are not ordinary members of the party. It isn't a lottery system. It's basically it'll be governors, party secretaries—who are the heads of provinces and important organizations like that—who will be showing up. What they'll do there, again, this is not going to be a debating session where new policy is hashed out. All of this has been set ahead of time. It will be a series of meetings where barring some sort of dramatic change in the next few days, say somebody dying and they have to come up with a new person to fill a role or something like that, this will all have been hashed out ahead of time. At the very latest this will all have been determined over the summer when the leaders meet at a summer resort north of Beijing. So it's a series of sort of ceremonial, I call it a "rubber stamp" meeting. There won't be a lot of drama behind the scenes.

Jim Lindsay:
So the votes essentially have already been wired ahead of time and the only real mystery is going to be in the unveiling of who gets which slots, correct?

Ian Johnson:
Correct, yeah. And that sort of thing. You can speculate about who's going to get which slot, but it's usually not that productive and we're going to find out next week anyway.

Jim Lindsay:
So the national party congress essentially elects the 370 members of the Central Committee, which in turn elects the Politburo and then somehow we get the Politburo Standing Committee. Can you sort of walk us through what each of those entities is?

Ian Johnson:
Yeah, the Communist Party is organized like a pyramid and near the top you have the Central Committee, which is made up of senior leaders from around the country and in Beijing. Above that you have the Politburo, which has been somewhere around 25 members historically. And then above that you have the Standing Committee. And the Standing Committee is drawn from that. So it's called democratic centralism, but essentially it's an interplay. The Standing Committee of the Politburo will essentially determine who's on the Politburo, and they'll determine who's in the Central Committee. It should be bottoms up, but it's not at all. It's top down.

Jim Lindsay:
So this is really a case in which the leaders really do get to pick their voters in a sense.

Ian Johnson:
Oh, absolutely. That's why there isn't much surprise at all at these meetings.

Jim Lindsay:
Okay. Now I understand that no woman has ever been named to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Any reason to believe that might change this time around?

Ian Johnson:
Not really, based on the people who are in the Politburo and the names that are circulating. The only woman who have had serious influence in China was the wife of Mao, Jiang Qing. And she was a formidable revolutionary. She had credentials in her own right. But obviously her being the wife of Mao elevated her to one of the top positions. She didn't have a formal title at the time.

Jim Lindsay:
What does it say about the Chinese Communist Party that it's dominated by men?

Ian Johnson:
It's basically a bunch of guys that look like they came from IBM central casting in the 1950s. It's blue suits and white shirts and red ties. It's a uniform group. It demands a lot of time. Women are considered to sort of fall out of this when they marry and have children or a child up until recently. And just as this hurts women's career prospects in other countries as well, it basically drops them out of contention. There have been some women who have risen to the top of ministries, in the trade office. In the 1990s, there was a woman who ran the Congress Department, but it's very rare. And they basically are usually single or have some exceptional biographical detail like that.

Jim Lindsay:
So what does it say about the Chinese Communist Party that it looks poised to make Xi general secretary for third term? I thought that was supposed to be the informal norm not to be violated.

Ian Johnson:
Well, it shows that these kind of norms are not set in stone. That there is no real institutional strength or solidity of the party. That the party has tried to put these guardrails in place to avoid this kind of thing happening but is not a mature enough political system to really do that. Xi got rid of it within five years after taking power in 2012. By 2017 it was clear that he wanted to go for a third term and that this system that Deng Xiaoping had put in place was in tatters. There are no checks and balances. That's the basic problem.

Jim Lindsay:
So help me understand what Xi's job is, because he holds, as best I can tell, three distinct titles. He is the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. He is the chairman of the Central Military Commission and he's also president. Now I heard there's been some talk that first title might get changed to chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Why would that change be made? What would its significance be?

Ian Johnson:
Well, the idea there is that you could bump Xi up to being chairman of the party, which was the role that Mao had in the earlier era, in the first 30 years roughly of the history of the People's Republic. And then that would allow him to appoint another general secretary and therefore not violate the rules. But in essence that would be I think just a bit of a slight of hand. It wouldn't really matter that much. I think the consensus is that probably won't happen and that we'll see him keep these three titles. I think it's worth reminding people that even though we often call Xi president, this is the least important of his three titles. It's an honorary position that simply makes him the head of state so that when he goes abroad he gets the 21 gun salute. It also means that he's not going abroad as the head of a party simply but as the head of China. But his real power comes from being general secretary of the Communist Party. And the second most powerful title he has is chairman of the Central Military Commission, which sort of means that he controls the military. So those two things, that's where his power comes from. The presidency is something they created in the 1970s to make somebody head of state in China when it wanted to start interacting with the outside world again and they needed somebody with that title.

Jim Lindsay:
So does this mean that Xi is rejecting the path set forward by Deng Xiaoping who had broken with the practices?

Ian Johnson:
Yeah, absolutely. It means that this idea that you could have some sort of succession, some sort of term limits, that he feels that this is not only not necessary, but he would probably argue if he would ever articulate this, which he hasn't, but that this is counterproductive. That China needs one strong core to push through the institutionalization, the power of the Communist Party over the next decades. China faces a series of absolutely crucial choices and decisions in the coming year and they have to have one strong leader and can't keep rotating out leaders every 10 years.

Jim Lindsay:
But how much different is this in actual practice? Because my sense was that when Deng gave up the formal titles, he for the rest of his life still dominated Chinese politics. People had to respond to him, had to get his approval for doing things. So is this more a sort of change of symbolism rather of substance?

Ian Johnson:
I think it's going back to the way things were in the past. This period when there was this sort of institutional stability and term limits, you could think of that as an interregnum period of about 20 years when it happened and that we're going back to the previous system. I think the system just tends towards strong men rule. When you have this top down system, it's inevitable. If you can essentially appoint your electors as you put it, you are going to be able to get rid of all your opponents and you're going to stay in power as long as you want. Deng did this, because he put in place the system because he was getting quite old. So in the 1980s when he was ruling, he went through a couple of general secretaries of the party and then after the Tiananmen Massacre in '89, by then he was getting quite old. He would die in 1997. He put Jiang Zemin in place and then sort of set up this system. But it only lasted as long as Jiang Zemin was there, and his successor Hu Jintao, and then it fell apart.

Jim Lindsay:
So something else I've heard a lot about, Ian, is that there might be some elevation of Xi Jinping's thought. Can you tell us a little bit about what this means in the Chinese contest? Because I suspect it's pretty foreign to most other people.

Ian Johnson:
Yeah, this is something that matters in terms of getting Xi's vision enshrined in the constitution. That makes it harder to go against Xi or overturn his ideas because it then becomes one of the most important ideologies in the history of the PRC. Up until now, there's been Mao Zedong Thought with thought capitalized.

Jim Lindsay:
Is that significant to that it's capitalized?

Ian Johnson:
Yeah. It's sort of got this institutional position in the constitution, right? And right now Xi Jinping thought, it's not a phrase like that. It will presumably become Xi Jinping thought and then get enshrined into the constitution. I mean, if you want to look at it from a longer historical perspective, it's this idea that Chinese rulers are also sort of philosophers and they come up with grand ideas in the way that leaders in the West don't really. I mean leaders in the West will have some important ideas they try to push through, deregulation or something like that. But they don't sort of write tomes, volumes and volumes of work, which Xi Jinping has. There's even books of dictionaries that sort of decode Xi Jinping's thought. He's made so many religious and cultural references in his writings that there is this dictionary of what is the cultural references in teaching Xi Jinping's thought. This is not all written by Xi Jinping. He has ghost writers galore who do this work for him just like Mao had people help him. But it's to give him this veneer of being a great and deep thinker. But on a more serious note, it means that it's harder to overturn his thing. It's not just with Hu Jintao, he had a couple of ideas, had this thing called scientific development, we're supposed to develop according to scientific principles and not based on some... Which was actually a pretty good idea. But that you can cast aside much more quickly. Jiang Zemin had his ideas, but they were never enshrined in the constitution like this as thought.

Jim Lindsay:
So is any of Xi's thought policy relevant?

Ian Johnson:
It's not like reading Hegel or Nietzsche or something where you can sort of come up with maybe some sort of clear ideas about the person's line of argument. The overall vision that Xi has is that some sort of retrenchment is necessary, that the party has to rule. It has to be in charge of society, has to lead society. It shouldn't just be part of society or one force in society, but it has to command. And I think this is his overall vision. It's been written in many, many articles and things like that, but it's not a coherent whole. It's not like you'd read these books from chapter to chapter and an idea would unfold in front of you or something like that.

Jim Lindsay:
To go back to a point you made a moment ago, Ian, that centralized systems like the Chinese generally tend toward producing a leader who wants to dominate the functioning of the state and of the party. Why is it that Xi was the one who succeeded? It doesn't appear it's because his theoretical writings were so brilliant that they wowed everybody else. Why did he get the golden ticket?

Ian Johnson:
The way I see it, he was brought in to do a job and the job was already recognized before he took power. A pendulum had swung too far, that forces in society had been unleashed by Deng's more laissez-faire attitude towards society. Religious groups were getting too independent, too big. NGOs, et cetera, et cetera, lawyers, the internet, it needed to be brought under control. That started in the late Hu Jintao era. It started around '09, after the Olympics basically in '08. But Xi Jinping could supercharge this because he had levers of power that Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin did not have. And that is primarily due to his family background. He's part of what in China's known as the red aristocracy, the red nobility. These are the sons and daughters of the say hundred or so people who founded the People's Republic in 1949. So he can draw on these connections. So like an old boys network, behind the scenes, beyond the formal channels of power. And that allowed him to push through this vision with the kind of vigor that you didn't see. If you want to make a comparison that might make some people cringe a little bit, you could make a comparison to Hitler taking power in 1933. He was enabled by some of the old aristocracy in Germany, the conservative parties in Germany. Well there's the big ceremony when Hindenburg at the church sort of anointed some chancellor. So he has the, imprimatur of these people. But then when he takes power, he's much more than these groups bargained for. And I think it's like that was Xi Jinping. He was brought on to do a job, but I think he did the job much more efficiently and effectively than they thought and many of these people were then sidelined. So he grabbed power once he had it. And again, the system allows you to kind of do that. His signature policy was anti-corruption and that allowed him to clean up a very real problem in society, but at the same time sideline his opponents.

Jim Lindsay:
So one question I have about the deliberations of the national party congress, Ian, is are we going to see Xi designate somebody as his successor, or are we going to continue with what is in essence one man rule with a great unknown about what might come afterwards?

Ian Johnson:
I think unfortunately it's the latter. We have to remember that under that old quote unquote system that Deng had set up, as imperfect as it was, he had the successor chosen five years before the ruler left office. So Xi Jinping was anointed, essentially successor in 2007. So we knew five years before Hu Jintao left office who would be his successor. There's no indication right now that anyone will be appointed as Xi's successor. Any of the names that are being floated for the Standing Committee of the Politburo are too old. Because we'd have to assume that the person who wants to succeed, Xi would want the two full terms. There are informal age limits that they would apply. The age limit is roughly 68 or 69.

Jim Lindsay:
And I should note that Xi himself is 69.

Ian Johnson:
Right, so Xi has already busted this rule. But assuming his successor would follow that rule, let's say, that would mean that the person taking power would have to be 10 years younger than that. They'd have to be 58 minus the five years until the next party congress. So they'd have to be 53. So they'd have to be in their early 50s. And none of the names being batted about are people that young. So would probably have to be at the next party congress that Xi would appoint somebody. And then I think what he'd probably do is do a Deng Xiaoping, hand it over after then and then rule behind the scenes with his handpicked successor.

Jim Lindsay:
So my understanding, Ian, is that one of the decisions likely to come out of the party congress is who's going to be the successor for China's current premier? Is that a significant post? It's often presented as being the number two person in China, but I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of how the system works.

Ian Johnson:
If I could make another inappropriate comparison, it would be to the mafia. The party is like the mafia. The general secretary is like the don who runs it. The premier is like the consigliere, the hired gun to make things work. So the son-in-law who went to Harvard Business School who can tell you how to invest in clean businesses that won't get you in trouble with the IRS and things like that, to how to launder your money. So the premier tends to be the person who runs the technocratic side of things, appoints the people at the People's Bank of China who set the interest rates. So all the very important things that the world's second largest economy needs to be done. But this is not somebody who's actually going to be able to reverse policy in any significant way. Of course, if they have the day-to-day levers of government, they can perhaps do a few things on the margins. And there's been some speculation that Li Keqiang over the past few months has done things like that. But overall, they are perhaps the second most powerful, but it's much further down the ladder than the general secretary.

Jim Lindsay:
I'm gonna have to take your analogies under advisement for the remainder of our conversation. But let me ask you a question, which is sort of going outside of the national party congress. Does Xi have any critics and what are they criticizing?

Ian Johnson:
Xi does have critics. He has quite a few critics. I would say it's hard to find a serious important public intellectual in China who likes Xi Jinping. Now obviously they've had their access to the media, to social media, to all these kinds of journals and stuff where they used to publish. That's all been limited or eliminated entirely so that it's hard to find these kind of people. People at universities, university professors who don't like his work, who used to publish extensively, have all been silenced, but they still exist. And I think that that's significant, that we have to kind of remember that when we look at China, it's not monolithic. It is run by an authoritarian strong man, but there are many people who don't like it. You see eruptions of this from time to time. For example, during these increasingly brutal lockdowns. You'll see eruptions, even in Wuhan in 2020, there was an amazing outpouring of citizen journalism for about a month or two. People making documentary films, posting stuff on YouTube and elsewhere and even on Chinese social media. That was for a while even tolerated in the chaos around that lockdown. And again, during the various other lockdowns in Shanghai and Xi'an and so on. So you see signs of this, but it's suppressed right now.

Jim Lindsay:
So what are likely to be the substantive consequences of Xi getting his third term, Ian? Are we going to see a significant change in Chinese foreign policy in particular? Or is that change already taking place because this meeting's essentially a coronation locking in what's already been decided?

Ian Johnson:
I think the change is going to be in the sense of negative change that there will not be the kind of course correction that's necessary. And the kind of trends that we've seen building in China, the kind of ossification of policy is likely to continue. We can see this in the zero COVID policy where China has not allowed in the mRNA vaccines and so on. This will eventually change, but they should have changed it about a year ago. It could have been done credibly. Right now there's no sign that this will lift for many months. And also in the economic policy, China is in need of a raft of reforms to free up the economy and get the process going again, that Deng and his successors started of liberalizing the economy. That was not a finished job. There was still a lot more work that needed to be done in the 2000s, and certainly by 2010 there was already a reform deficit, and that has just continued over the past decade. So there needs to be a series of interlocking, maybe more technocratic sort of reforms, but they are very important. And I don't see that happening as Xi stays in power probably with a narrower group of followers, advisors, people who owe their job to him who are less likely to stand up to him. I don't mean stand up and try to attack him, but even just say, "Hey boss, these are problems here. We need to change policy."

Jim Lindsay:
Yes, men. Literally, yes men, I think because they're all men.

Ian Johnson:
Yes, exactly. I think there's more of that is likely to occur. And then the problems you get from that is the problem of information deficit, miscalculations for example, toward Taiwan. We already see a very bellicose strategy being adopted. Over the summer a new policy paper, a white paper issued on Taiwan, that was harder lined than anything we've seen before. These sort of things lead to the kind of situations that can lead to war. I don't mean war is on the horizon, but these kind of miscalculations that we see with Putin, for example. The kind of miscalculations he must have made that led to the Ukraine war, the complete underestimation of the rival, et cetera, et cetera. Those kind of things are much more likely under a third Xi Jinping term and a fourth term in the future.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, that's analogy I could certainly follow, Ian, but let me ask you a bit more about it. Do you think that Xi is beginning to have buyer's remorse for his strategic partnership without limits with Moscow?

Ian Johnson:
He must have that because this is not what they thought they were getting into when they sort of signed up with this, not an alliance, but a partnership with Russia. They thought that they were getting a big league player. Right now, if you think of China's allies and friends around the world, they tend to be almost a rogue's gallery of Myanmar, of North Korea. You have relatively small players on the world stage. With Russia, they thought, we have a member of the permanent five on the Security Council, a nuclear power. Up until recently, China was buying military hardware from Russia. It still has sort of advanced fighters and things like that that China needed. They thought they were getting a country like that. Instead, they ended up with a country that is much more dysfunctional than I think almost anybody thought, with a military that's much weaker than many people thought, that has completely bungled this invasion. It can't have been what he wanted. However, it is closely identified with Xi and it will be hard for him to extricate himself from it.

Jim Lindsay:
Why would that be the case, given that he is essentially the supreme leader? It would seem to me that he faces few institutional constraints on reversing course. There are lots of ways to sort of edge to the sidelines. I would imagine the recent missile attacks the Russians have launched against cities and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine may be a potential exit ramp.

Ian Johnson:
Yes, China's had several exit ramps and it's clear they haven't supported Russia perhaps in the way that Russia might want with some sort of military materiel and that sort of thing. But it is so closely identified with Xi and they've made such a big propaganda point about identifying with Russia, that Russia's relatively justified that it's all the fault of the West and this sort of thing. It would, it's much like the zero COVID strategy. Even before they roll out the vaccines, they first have to explain to people why they're doing that. Why the policy is now all of a sudden wrong. It's not impossible, but they'll have to sort of soften it up with an ideological barrage before they can make that kind of movement. So I think it'll take a while before they can move away from Russia. And then the other question is, where do they move to? They've alienated so many countries around the world. There isn't a major prosperous democratic country that doesn't see China as a systemic rival. This is a change over the past decade. Just remember a decade ago people were still talking about China as a partner or at least a potential partner in certain areas. No politician in the West or in a democratic country, including Japan, South Korea, any OECD country would think of China in those terms anymore. So where are they going to go to? You got the countries in Africa and in Southeast Asia, not all of them are that enamored by Xi Jinping. Southeast Asia, because of all of the forays into the South China Sea, the building of bases. Even countries that have always thought of themselves as in between the two sides like Singapore are making sounds much more pro-American than was sort of imaginable say five years ago. So he sort of, I think, boxed himself into a corner with this.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, I think that's a good point because obviously with the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, the market, if I can use that term, was giving Beijing feedback and that feedback was all negative, that China essentially bearing its fangs alarmed countries. China using its economic power to try to coerce Japan, to coerce Australia went down very badly. But again, there doesn't seem to be a feedback loop in Beijing or if they're getting that message back, they're not acting on it.

Ian Johnson:
Yeah, at least not very quickly. I mean, it does seem like it might not be quite as strong as before. The Chinese ambassador to the United States strikes a more moderate tone than had been the case in the past. But no, you're right. Overall that thing went on way past its due date, and I think anybody would've quickly seen that this was a problem. If you want to make a comparison, when the Biden administration floated this idea of authoritarian states versus democratic states, it went on for a while until people said, "Wait a minute, there aren't that many real democratic states. We need countries like say Vietnam on our camp and so on and so forth. Let's drop that." Now, that's been quietly sort of jettisoned sort of 12 months later. Whereas China just went on and on with this wolf-warrior thing. Basically diplomats acting undiplomatically and quite obnoxiously in their host countries, in some places hasn't stopped.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, we'll see if that changes any time in the near future. But on that note, I am going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ian Johnson, the Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China Studies here at the Council and the author of the recently published "How Xi Will Consolidate Power at China's 20th Party Congress," which you can find on cfr.org. Ian, as always, thanks for chatting with me.

Ian Johnson:
It was my pleasure.

Jim Lindsay:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can find the books, articles, and podcasts mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation, on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with the Senior Podcast Producer, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.