Winter 2018 Issue 58

This year Chinese leader Xi Jinping encountered the most difficult test of his leadership since assuming office in late 2012. The U.S.-China trade war (and the escalating strategic competition between the two countries in particular) have exposed China’s structural vulnerabilities and raised questions about Xi’s responsibility for the rapid deterioration in Beijing’s ties with Washington. As economic woes mounted, elite discontent with Xi’s leadership appeared to be widespread, precipitating an effort by Xi and his loyalists during the summer to bolster his authority. But whatever incipient opposition to Xi existed, it appeared to be short-lived. Xi emerged from the critical summer retreat at Beidaihe in mid- August with no obvious diminution of his authority. Since then, he has intensified efforts to strengthen his power but there are no indications that he has made fundamental adjustments to his domestic and foreign policies.

Xi Jinping’s concentration of power, which had already achieved remarkable success, was further endorsed and institutionalized during the October 2017 Nineteenth Party Congress and the March 2018 session of the National People’s Congress. In recent Chinese political developments, is it possible to detect elite resistance to Xi’s fast-growing power and authority? How are party-state cadres able to display such resistance? Furthermore, how does such resistance affect Xi’s power and governance? This article attempts to answer these questions by, first, looking at how Xi has promoted his concentration of power in the aftermath of the Nineteenth Party Congress; second, discussing four aspects of such elite resistance, and; third, analyzing how Xi has reacted under the new sociopolitical circumstances to elite resistance. It is argued that elite resistance does exist and recently it has been furthered by social and international factors. However, Xi has taken additional steps to strengthen his personal dictatorship over party-state elites. Such a struggle between the dictator and the bureaucrats will continue to shape the dynamics of China’s politics and policy.

Provocative actions on both sides led to heightened tensions and a deterioration in trust between China and the United States in 2018. Chinese authoritative and non-authoritative sources have been consistent in pushing back against what is correctly viewed as a fundamental U.S. shift toward greater hostility and suspicion, although non-authoritative sources use much harsher language. At the same time, both sources call for restraint, dialogue, and cooperation in handling U.S.-China relations, and point out the apparent misalignment of the anti-China attitudes of the Trump Administration compared to the U.S. public and the rest of the world. The likely presence of moderate Chinese views toward the worsening of Sino-U.S. relations suggests the need for the Trump Administration to replace its current confrontational approach to China with a more sophisticated, balanced approach that recognizes the need for continued cooperation with Beijing.

In recent months, scholars in China have taken advantage of the trade tensions and the fortieth anniversary of reform and opening to voice their dissatisfaction with the status quo and to advocate major economic changes. Some very established figures, either directly or indirectly, criticized China’s political system. The main participants were economists who came of age in the 1980s, who perhaps saw this as their last chance before retirement to make a major push for reform. However, the reaction has ranged from lip service to policies that introduce even more distortion to the economy. Meanwhile, it is notable that the younger generation of economists and scholars has largely stayed out of the debate, which does not bode well for internal reform pressures in the future.

Despite increasing political control under Xi Jinping’s leadership, collective action in China is not declining, though it is changing in various ways. Protests continue to be staged around issues related to the distribution of educational resources, housing, space, basic social protection, and the maintenance of market order. Compared with collective action under the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao leadership, recent collective action has a lower level of cross-sectoral support and makes fewer demands for widespread institutional reform. Other characteristics of these protests, however, are more alarming for the state, such as an increased capacity to mobilize and organize across localities and the mobilization of aggrieved groups with close ties to the regime. Although recent protests do not indicate that the regime is under threat, they do suggest some profound problems with the country’s developmental model and the need for more efficient institutional channels to allow the various social groups to negotiate their interests and address their grievances.