Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tightening grip on power over the last decade has created a new form of corruption in his country’s government as officials compete to show their loyalty to him above all else, a congressional advisory body on US-China relations was told at a hearing on Thursday.
Experts on Chinese politics at the elite and local levels warned that Xi, who abolished presidential term limits and is widely expected to stay in power when his second term ends this year, has wrung out from many cadres across the country any willingness to innovate new ideas or express honest feedback about how policies are working – all potentially destabilising to China, they said.
“It seems like this really just opens the door to a systematic sense of corruption,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of international relations and political science at Boston University, told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “You promote your allies, and that gets you right back to where you were when this whole campaign against corruption started.”
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Washington has watched with alarm as Xi has asserted himself as a powerful authoritarian ruler who has shown an increasing willingness to use Chinese economic and military power around the world to accomplish his geopolitical goals.
The hearing came two days after the US House of Representatives unveiled sweeping legislation targeting China in nearly every aspect of the countries’ tense relationship, from human rights to Taiwan to economic competition.
Congress has spent much of the last year working on a sprawling set of bills that lawmakers say will put the US in a better position to compete against China.
At the hearing on Thursday, experts said that a signature piece of Xi’s policy agenda – his anti-corruption campaign, which has also been used to cull Xi’s political rivals from the system – has led to some improvements at the local level. For example, they said it was now much harder for a local government department to have a lavish meal on the Chinese taxpayers’ dime.
But they also said China’s government in the Xi era has become filled with a pervasive sense that the only way to truly rise through the ranks is to show all-out loyalty to the leader.
Xi is still removing people suspected to be loyalists to former leaders from high levels of government, Fewsmith said.
Earlier this month, former public security vice-minister Sun Lijun, who Fewsmith said was an acolyte of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin two decades ago, was charged with accepting a “huge amount” of bribes.
“His way of fighting factionalism is to create a huge faction of his own,” Fewsmith said of Xi.
Local officials now often have to guess what Xi might want, the experts said, and many are likely to do the bare minimum in their low-paying government jobs rather than inadvertently go in the wrong direction and sacrifice their chance to move up in the system.
“This is an era of authoritarian bureaucrats, not policy entrepreneurs,” said Jessica Teets, an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College.
She used the example of a central government policy issued to stop local companies from polluting. It looks good on paper, Teets said.
“But what we see then, when it goes to the local level, is that sometimes local officials are not implementing anything, either because they’re not sure of what to do or they don’t want to take the risk,” she told the panel.
“And then when Xi Jinping or somebody from the centre is paying attention to them, they all rush out and close down all of the factories, just in case they’re polluting,” she added, whether or not they were trying to improve, and no matter how many people are put out of work.
“I don’t think that this governance style is very effective, ultimately.”
Yuen Yuen Ang, an associate professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, noted that Xi’s power is not completely unquestioned, citing former finance minister Lou Jiwei’s public call last month for more transparency in national economic data.
But Ang, who wrote the 2020 book China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption, said Lou was in a rare position to “come forth and speak some truth, and that got a lot of attention”.
China is now seeing the cost of a “grand bargain” under which local governments have turned over tax revenue to Beijing in return for its permission to finance local spending on credit, she said, a system that ultimately masked the full extent of unsustainable local government debt.
“They only carried out the first audit, I believe, around 2010, and that was the first time that they knew, oh my gosh, we owe so much,” Ang said.
On the military and foreign policy fronts, Xi’s increasingly aggressive approach has dovetailed with an expanded definition of national security to include such diverse areas as food security, public finance and disease control, experts said.
Xi’s creation of the National Security Commission in 2018 has further centralised his control over domestic affairs, military security, military defence, economic security and foreign policy, with him at the apex, said Yun Sun, China Programme director at the Stimson Centre.
China’s traditional “collective leadership” in foreign policy – exemplified in 1999 when president Jiang Zemin tapped a range of sources after the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – is increasingly in the hands of Xi.
“Under Xi Jinping, internal balancing of the top leader’s paramount authority appears seriously constrained,” with China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy unlikely to change during his tenure, Sun said in written testimony.
Xi’s military reforms include better integration of the People’s Liberation Army with the more domestically focused People’s Armed Police and streamlining reporting channels to root out corruption, experts said.
A Jamestown Foundation report this week said Xi appeared to be eliciting support from the military in a bid to better unify the Communist Party in advance of the 20th Party Congress.
“There are self-righteous cadres … who openly express views contrary to the central party authorities,” the report said, quoting the December issue of the official China Discipline and Supervision Journal. “Some cadres refuse to obey orders.”
But experts said on Thursday that Xi’s extensive reforms have created challenges.
One open question is how durable a system increasingly built around Xi will be after his tenure. Another concerns, they added, is the impact on professional competence given the importance of loyalty and how deep-seated Xi’s reforms are given his many responsibilities.
“All roads ultimately lead to Xi, but the system below his level remains convoluted,” Joel Wuthnow, a fellow at the National Defence University, said in written testimony.
The transition from institutionalised military leadership to a personalised leadership that revolves around Xi could also complicate potential crisis management efforts between the US and China in “the fog of war”, said James Mulvenon, director of the Centre for Intelligence Research and Analysis.
“It makes it more difficult for us, for instance, to establish credible defence telephone links with what we think are the operational elements of the PLA,” Mulvenon said.
The witnesses called on the US to devote more resources and talent to understanding an increasingly powerful China and to streamline America’s own military decision-making process.
Those efforts could include advancing legislation introduced last year that would establish a federal programme to translate open-source materials from China, Russia and other countries, said Roderick Lee, research director at the US Air Force China Aerospace Studies Institute.
Once the US has a “high fidelity understanding of how the PLA’s decision making system works … and where we think its going to move towards in the future, we can start identifying where we need to bolster our own capabilities and our own capacity,” said Lee.
Additional reporting by Robert Delaney, Mark Magnier and Owen Churchill
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