Thursday Essay: What the Hell Is Going on in China?

"A science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us." —Historian Robert Conquest on Kremlinology, the dark art of deducing who was making decisions in the Soviet Union

There was once a dark art called Kremlinology, whose Cold War-era practitioners inhabited lonely government offices in Washington and London. Their job wasn’t to listen to what Soviet leaders said — especially near the end, when no one could quite make out what Leonid Brezhnev mumbled into his microphone. The Kremlinologist listened for what wasn’t said, deducing who was in charge of what from subtle cues in official publications — or from who stood where on Lenin’s tomb during the May Day parade.

Dictatorships can appear deceptively streamlined from the outside. There's the dictator — hence the name! — sitting atop the pyramid and his will is godlike. From the inside, things are never so simple or clear-cut. The little dictator's biggest job is a 24/7 balancing act between various power centers, maintaining or re-jiggering rivalries, ensuring that no coalition can emerge powerful enough to threaten his rule.

Hitler was so skilled at overlapping and underlapping authority that hardly anybody knew who was in charge of what at any given time. Stalin ruled through terror. Mao would get crazy little notions like his semi-permanent Cultural Revolution that kept the entire country so murderously topsy-turvy that the only remaining certainty was Mao's authority. 

Looked at that way, it's almost a miracle that Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Maoist China lasted as long as they did.

And Another Thing: The CCP remains in charge of China as it has since 1949, but I'd argue that post-Mao reforms established a new system with strangely effective continuity. But stick a pin in that thought because I'll come back to it momentarily.

Things really get screwy during a power transition (even assuming it goes smoothly) or when the dictator is weak.

Think of the USSR in the 35 years or so after Stalin's death until the senescent superpower practically heaved itself onto the ash heap of history.

For five years after Stalin's death in 1953, a collective at first made up of Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov ruled. Needless to say, collective rule was far from seamless, and Western experts struggled to understand who was in charge of what — which was to be expected, since the collective didn't even know. 

Beria wanted liberal reforms and was quickly forced out (and executed, natch). Khrushchev turned out to be the savviest player, and by the time Malenkov and Molotov made their move against him in the Presidium in 1957, Khrushchev had his support lined up in the larger Central Committee.

The next year, Khrushchev got himself named premier in addition to party secretary — merging control of the government and the Party. Malenkov and Molotov were allowed to live, but were never allowed near real power again. Malenkov was internally exiled to Kazakhstan, and Molotov was sent packing to Mongolia, where he served in virtual exile as Soviet ambassador.

Ironically enough, basically the same thing happened to Khrushchev in 1964. Officially forced out for "health reasons," in reality, the Party had tired of his impulsive, mercurial rule and several failed economic reforms. 

In Khrushchev's place, another ruling collective emerged — Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov — only for Brezhnev to manipulate his way to total power within a few years.

Depose, rinse, repeat.

If Khrushchev's rule was unpredictable — throwing the dice on deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba probably sealed his fate — Brezhnev's was nearly impenetrable. Brezhnev suffered from serious health issues, including multiple strokes, arteriosclerosis, and chronic heart problems. By the late '70s, the only thing the West knew for sure was that Brezhnev was incapable of calling the shots, or at least not all of them. 

The pseudo-science of Kremlinology reached its heights as the gerontocratic Soviet leadership reached its creaky depths under Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and finally Konstantin Chernenko. 

And Another Thing: If any of that sounds familiar — well, it should. Americans just lived through four years under a gerontocrat so feeble that day-to-day White House operations depended entirely upon who got to the autopen first. It's a dark art, trying to deduce who ran the country during the Biden administration. Whoever in China was tasked with determining the power behind Biden's throne has my deepest sympathies. 

Things were so much easier when Stalin was alive. You could tell who was in favor because they did what Stalin wanted, and you could tell who was out of favor because he'd had them shot. 

Like Brezhnev, Mao Zedong spent his final years clinging to power as his health failed him. Mao suffered multiple heart attacks, showed symptoms of Parkinson's, and had trouble speaking clearly. Having purposely failed to name a successor, factions formed and strengthened as Mao declined.

After Stalin's death, the Party would never again allow one man to hold so much power. Ditto China after Mao. The Soviet Union could afford no more Great Purges, and Communist China could not risk another Cultural Revolution.

So China's answer to the question of "Who will rule when Mao is gone?" was fairly straightforward...

[pause for laughter]

...except for the arrests, the bloodless coups against Mao's initial successor and his wife's Gang of Four, questions of military loyalty, and a slowly evolving situation eventually dominated by the recently rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping.

Deng is usually remembered for his economic reforms that would soon elevate his country from "children are starving in China" to "China is eating our lunch." 

After Deng's reforms, consensus ruled within the Party's Central Committee, which selected the general secretary. The general secretary wields real power, but is limited by custom to two five-year terms. The government's president — not a position of real power, although chairmen prefer to hold both titles — is constitutionally limited to the same terms.

Whatever you want to call the system Deng helped establish, it was no longer Mao's — Deng's is closer to nationalist-authoritarian than Mao's communist-totalitarian. By the time Deng introduced "socialism with Chinese characteristics" in the early '80s as cover for bringing some capitalism back to China, Maoism had already been backed up against the courtyard wall and shot.

And Another Thing: Naturally, there's a word for Kremlinology with Chinese characteristics: Pekingology. Or at least that's what Westerners called it when we still used "Peking" for the PRC's capital. I suppose if we're going to be politically correct about sorting out China's internal politics, now we ought to call it Beijingology.

The new system functioned well enough, with China enjoying a peaceful and orderly transition of power from Deng to Jiang Zemin, to Hu Jintao, and to Xi Jinping.

But Xi fancies himself unworthy of such limitations. After becoming General Secretary in 2012 (and president the next year), Xi embarked on an "anticorruption" campaign that might be better thought of as "the Great Purge with a human face." It was always a nifty coincidence that so many of the Party members Xi prosecuted for corruption just happened to be Xi’s rivals — or at least potential ones.

By the time Xi graciously accepted (cough, cough) the 20th Party Congress's offer of a third term as General Secretary in 2022, and the National People’s Congress granting him a third term as president in 2023, China was closer to one-man rule than at any time since Mao's health troubles.

Having undone Deng's reforms, there are now multiple signs that Xi's rule is coming undone. Over the last several months, I've read a series of credible reports that Xi might have received a modified Khrushchev treatment.

Let's browse through a few of those stories, starting with retired American diplomat Gregory W. Slayton's question in last week's New York Post: "Is Chinese President Xi Jinping on his way out?" 

The details are too juicy to paraphrase — so here’s a long pull quote:

Over the past few months, unprecedented developments point to the potential, and potentially imminent, fall of China’s “Chairman of Everything” Xi Jinping. Chinese Communist Party elders — including Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor, whom Xi humiliated at the 20th Party Congress in 2022 — are now running things behind the scenes.

Xi is in poor health and likely to retire at the CCP Plenary Session this August or take a purely ceremonial position.

Xi’s downfall has been rumored before. But never have we seen the recent purges (and mysterious deaths) of dozens of People’s Liberation Army generals loyal to Xi; all replaced by non-Xi loyalists.

Zhang Youxia, with whom Xi had a major falling out after helping Xi secure an unprecedented third five-year term, is now the de facto leader of the PLA.

Slayton also revealed that the mausoleum Xi ordered built to honor his father — a mausoleum larger than either Mao's or Deng's — was recently "un-named." Like Shelley's battered and worn statue of the ancient Ozymandias, king of kings, Xi's brand-new mausoleum now stands in tribute to nothing.

Odd, eh?

"Inside the Silent Coup: How Xi Jinping Lost His Grip on China’s Communist Party."

Just a year or two ago, I'd have dismissed that last story as wishcasting because of lines like this one, supposedly from a Russian source: "Xi Jinping is the weakest link in this geopolitical chessboard. His declining health undermines China’s role in this alliance." Reports of Xi's ill health are nothing new, but might have more credibility when cross-referenced with these fresh details. 

Longtime China watcher Gordon Chang wrote in March, "The Chinese military is apparently embroiled in its worst crisis since Marshal Lin Biao died in a mysterious plane crash in 1971," with "two recent waves of purges... [that] have targeted officers loyal to Xi in two factions."

Gen. Zhang's name keeps coming up. Bill Gertz had quite a bit to say about the 72-year-old general in this June 9 report for the Washington Times: China struggling with military reforms needed in time for Taiwan action.

Zhang publicly (!!!) voiced concerns that "the military has not moved fast enough to be ready for an invasion or blockade of Taiwan" by 2027, as Xi ordered several years ago. Zhang's article discussed "weaknesses in military leadership, problems with wartime military-civilian coordination, and an inability to conduct both joint operations and information warfare operations needed for a major joint military campaign."

Gertz concluded: "The warnings by Gen. Zhang are significant since he is vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, the party organ that controls China’s 3 million-troop army."

That also might explain why Zhang felt he could criticize Xi's military reforms, even obliquely, without suddenly finding himself up on questionable corruption charges. 

Did the PLA orchestrate a soft coup against Xi because his military reforms failed? Is Zhang the real power now? We don't know and perhaps can't know until Xi or Zhang or a player to be named later wants us to know. That’s the nature of one-party states: transparency might as well be treason.

What we do know is that Xi's situation appears to be fluid enough that Nikkei Asia ran a report last September claiming that Zhang's "smile hints at changes in China power balance." Traditionally, PLA brass try to "give the impression of being always blank-faced or even frowning when they appear in public." But Zhang "smiled from ear to ear in front of camera crews from domestic and foreign media outlets, including ones from the U.S., after he shook hands with [Joe Biden's national security adviser Jake] Sullivan at the outset of their talks" last summer. 

Nikkei's China expert, Katsuji Nakazawa, concluded that Zhang's smile "clearly hinted at significant changes both in the way China conducts military diplomacy and in the domestic political situation surrounding Xi."

Smiles or frowns aside, the Jamestown Foundation — in a deeply detailed report last month — concluded that the "gathering evidence challenges the image of unchallenged authority that Xi has meticulously cultivated."

This is real tea-leaf stuff, isn't it? So much so that historian Stefan Messingschlager remarked this week in "The Return of Pekingology" that "genuine insights into [China's] elite politics remain persistently elusive."

China's global standing and apparent political stability have radically improved since Mao's death, but opacity still rules. How much truth there is to any of these stories is a matter of conjecture for our Beijingologists, both amateur and professional. 

Xi is no Joseph Stalin or Chairman Mao, and today's China isn't yesterday's Soviet Union or even Mao's China — despite Xi's best efforts at one-man rule. These days, it might be fair to say we don't know where Xi stands in the government, the Party, or anywhere at all.

After his forced retirement, the Kremlin gave Khrushchev a small pension, a car, and a small dacha outside of Moscow. If Xi has been sidelined, fully or in part, he's at least maintained all the trappings of power.

You can almost hear President Trump demanding answers: "Why allow a wily operator like Xi to remain close enough to power to possibly worm his way back in? Why does the person or cabal who sidelined Xi prefer to remain in the shadows? Who in the actual hell is in charge of China?"

This is where the Kremlinologists of old would answer POTUS with their traditional shrug emoji.

My quickie back-of-the-envelope take is that if Zhang is in charge, he might be better aware of the true condition of the People's Liberation Army than Xi seemed to be, and perhaps less likely to start a major war in the Pacific. Or maybe he'd be more likely.

Where's that Official Beijingologist Shrug Emoji™ when I need it?

But if you think we're having fun now, allow me to leave you with this final thought: Vladimir Putin refuses to name a successor, surrounds himself with competing factions, and he's a 72-year-old man ruling a country with a male life expectancy of just 68 years. 

The dark art of Kremlinology never truly went away, and probably never will. That's not because the Russians or Chinese are from Mars, but because they're all too human.

Last Thursday: Sunday's 'Midnight Hammer' Operation Launched in 1941