All governments make mistakes. What matters is whether they learn from them. Xi Jinping’s record is not reassuring
It is a good moment to remember this quirk of Chinese governance. The annual session of the National People’s Congress , the country’s largely ceremonial legislature, is under way from March 5th to 13th. This year’smeeting comes after a big party congress last October. At that gathering China’s supreme leader, President Xi Jinping, secured a norm-trampling third term and filled his party’s highest ranks with loyal aides.
In China’s opaque political system, one way to understand a new policy is to study old ideas that it repudiates. Mr Xi’s power grab challenges lessons that his predecessors drew from Chairman Mao Zedong’s chaotic rule, when loyalty to the leader and ideological fervour took precedence over good government. In the years after Mao’s death in 1976, economic reformers moved to separate party and state.
Over time more power was decentralised to local governments, whose officials were rewarded for presiding over rapid growth. In the late 1990s, when entrepreneurs could no longer be ignored, the party moved to co-opt them, admitting businesspeople as members. Then came Mr Xi. Soon after becoming leader in 2012, he declared the Communist Party dangerously corrupted by money and distant from the everyday lives of the masses.
Mr Xi talks of the party’s almost 97m members as if they are missionaries in an atheist church, stressing their self-sacrificing “red spirit” and paying homage to “martyrs” who died for the revolution or in the people’s service. That faith-tinged language is usefully clarifying. Most senior officials, whether in a ministry, mayor’s office, state-owned enterprise or university, are party members. One way to think of them is as lay believers, with varying degrees of faith.
China’s “zero-covid” campaign offers real-world evidence of professional judgments trumped by politics. Once the Omicron variant arrived in 2022, some prominent scientists called for greatly increased efforts to vaccinate old and vulnerable citizens and stockpile antiviral drugs. But Mr Xi had declared that lockdowns and quarantines could defeat the virus, so suggesting ways to co-exist with covid-19 was heresy. Experts fell silent or were sidelined.
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