assuming these positions. Although such rapid mobility has its own disadvantages, it undeniably reflects the changes of times.
A third institution is ruthless meritocracy. In many political systems, particularly democracies, one had to get enough votes before getting political power. Indeed, voting has also come to China and it is becoming increasingly important to test one’s popularity among colleagues or among the people. However, before voting, there is the additional process of selecting. One has to meet all requirements such as education, working experiences (in different parts of the country and at different bureaucratic levels) and many other performance indicators. As a matter of fact, China has several thousand years of meritocracy, and the CCP has increasingly relied on this system for its talent recruitment.
A fourth institution is the so-called “collective leadership” or “intra-party democracy.” The institution was designed by the late Deng Xiaoping. The Maoist personal dictatorship almost brought down the whole party. As the victim of the Maoist personal dictatorship, Deng designed the system of collective leadership, which means that members of the Political Bureau Standing Committee collectively excise political leadership. Such a system is characterized by internal pluralism. There are serious checks and balances in the highest leadership of the CCP. The Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, the highest and most powerful decision-making body, is often regarded as the symbol of highly centralized political system or authoritarianism. However, its members have almost equal power, with each having his decision-making area and having the most important say in that area. Some China scholars call this system “collective presidency,” meaning that major decisions are collectively made.
However, the system also has serious flaws. In theory, the system provides a strong institutional foundation for the number one, such as Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, since the number one concurrently holds the three most important positions in China’s political system, namely, the General Secretary of the CCP, the State President, and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. However, in reality, to hold the three positions does not mean that the holder will be powerful enough to engage in meaningful reforms. The system of division of labor among Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) members tends to veer towards fragmentation since each member only looks after his own territory, and has the most important say in that domain. There was no effective coordination. Therefore, “collective presidents,” at times, have led to situations where there is no president; collective decision has resulted in no decision maker, and collective responsibility has led to situations where no one bears responsibility. This was exactly what happened to the Hu Jintao leadership. When the Hu leadership came into power in 2002, it had an ambitious reform plan. But it failed to carry out what it had planned.
Xi Jinping definitely did not want such a situation to continue during his tenure. In the name of deepening the reform, the Third Plenum last year decided to establish two new bodies which can empower Xi.
First, the Plenum announced the establishment of the Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms (zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu), which would be responsible for the overall reform. This move indicated Xi’s determination to push through the marketization process that had been halted since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008. Xi himself is the head of this body, which will probably override the Central Economic and Finance Leading Group (zhongyang caijing lingdao xiaozu), the highest economic authority usually chaired by the Premier.
More importantly, the Third Plenum also decided to set up a new National Security Council or State Security Council (guojia anquan weiyuanhui). Xi is also the head of this body, which will strengthen his control over the military forces, domestic security, propaganda and foreign policy. This new body is mainly based on the American model that includes a highly empowered group of security experts who can work the levers of the country’s vast security apparatus. But this Chinese body will differ from the American National Security Council in one crucial aspect: the Chinese version will have dual duties with responsibility over domestic security as well as foreign policy.
Before the establishment of the National Security Council, China’s highest-level decision-making concerning external relations and security issues was scattered among the Central Military Commission, which controlled the armed forces, and two separate but in some ways overlapping leading panels, i.e., the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group (FALSG) and the National Security Leading Small Group (NSLSG) at the top. The strengths of these two LSGs have been constantly impaired by horizontal conflicts with other formidable institutional players at a time when Chinese foreign and security policy making has been undergoing dramatic changes, such as pluralization, decentralization and fragmentization.
In Hu Jintao’s time, much of the domestic security and stability maintenance (weiwen) jobs were done by the powerful Central Political and Legal Commission (zhongyang zhengfawei), which was presided by Zhou Yongkang, then PBSC member.
The CCP is confronting an increasingly demanding domestic security situation, with more violent attacks rooted in civic grievances among its citizenry and ethnic conflicts. Lately, China has experienced a new wave of terrorist attacks, including the Tiananmen Square attack and the killing at the Kunming train station. To address the worsening domestic security situation, the country needs a more centralized system.
Over external affairs, when China is further integrated with the globalized world, the number and type of pressure groups involved in security and foreign policy making has expanded substantially with most ministries at the national level, the military, the intelligence, big business entities, media, local governments, non-government organizations and even individuals playing increasingly significant roles in the whole process.
As final arbiters of foreign policy making, the paramount leaders before Xi tended to become more consultative than their predecessors due to their decreasing authority within the Political Bureau in the post-Mao era. Meanwhile, facing a much more complicated external and internal context, the core leader today has many other responsibilities and depends on others to help plan and implement Chinese foreign and security policy, which further reduces personal influence while magnifying institutional and pluralistic impacts upon the whole process. Two of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, had contemplated forming an overall coordinating body, like the US National Security Council, but bureaucratic resistance, particularly from the military, had prevented its creation.
Xi is now strong enough to formally set up such an organization. The new National Security Council is expected to raise Xi’s position as first-among-equals in the PBSC to an all powerful leader that has absolute authority in handling domestic and external affairs. The move grants Xi a level of authority that eluded his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and reverses the trend toward a collective leadership since Deng Xiaoping.
After these two bodies, in February 2014, a third important organization, namely, the Central Small Leading Group on Internet Security and Informatization, was also established. The latest development in March was the establishment of the Small Leading Group of the Central Military Commission to Deepen the Military and National Defence Reform. Xi is again the head of these two organizations.
With these newly established bodies, Xi now enjoys unparalleled power. This could undermine the CCP’s mechanism of “collective leadership.” Such power concentration on the one hand will facilitate bold reforms and forestall policy deadlocks, while on the other hand, it may break the existing power sharing and balance among competing political camps and lead to extreme policies. Moreover, without a sound system of the intra-party democracy, the high concentration of power could lead to resistance from other powerful leaders, and thus power struggles among them. For Xi, the biggest political challenge is on how to solicit cooperation from other leaders while concentrating all powers in his own hand. How this will play out is expected to drive the dynamics of politics in the Xi era.
It is worthwhile to mention another important feature of China’s
