China's Internal Challenges Will Threaten Xi Jinping's Reign

Yun Tang

Politics, Asia

Political reform paved the way for the collapse of the Qing dynasty, and it is coming for Beijing once again.

Right after New Year’s Day, Peking University Professor Zheng Yefu made a daring call for the ruling Communist Party to “step down gracefully from the historical stage.” His appeal echoed an earlier petition for political reform by one hundred influential Chinese intellectuals, who demanded democracy and the rule of law. Both online manifestoes were censored immediately by the Chinese authorities, who just celebrated forty years of reform and opening-up to the world in mid-December. These sequential occurrences attracted widespread attention on China’s social reality after four decades of reform, President Xi Jinping’s domestic policy, and the possibility of political reform.

The groundbreaking policies initiated by senior leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978 catapulted China into becoming the second-largest economy today with global reach. But since assuming power in 2013, President Xi reversed Deng’s reforms, forbidding discussions of “political reform,” halting the separation of party and the judiciary system, and abolishing his constitutional term limit. His focus is simple: to keep the Party’s absolute rule. When marking the anniversary of those 1978 reforms in mid-December Xi reiterated that “The Party leads everything,” triggering the hundred intellectuals’ outcry.

Despite President Xi’s emphasis on the uniqueness of Chinese society in defense of the Party’s absolute rule, China is not exceptional from the axiom “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In fact, Chinese officials didn’t inherently corrupt the government, but rather the absolutist government corrupted them. Even through Chinese history, the dynastic cycle shows that no absolute rule can escape its downfall brought on by becoming corrupt with its own absolute power. A millennium dynasty is just a dream. Only the rule of law and democracy based on power-checking can keep the government away from its doomed demise.