Adam Černý: Chinese leader On the threshold of unlimited power
The resolution, described as “historic” for the third time, highlights the achievements and calls for the people to unite around the person of the party president and secretary general.
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The name list corresponds to the exceptional tribute. Of the regime’s three prominent figures, its founder, Mao Zedong, was mentioned seven times, but the father of modernization reforms, Teng Xiaoping, was mentioned only five times, while the current secretary general of the Central Committee, Xi Jinping, was mentioned seventeen times.
This completes the preconditions for an official and definitive confirmation of his privileged position and unlimited power. The last restriction should fall next year at the party congress, when the limit limiting the stay in the top party function for two consecutive five-year terms disappears for Si Jinping. The state fell for this restriction three years ago.
Why so much power?
That limit was enforced four decades ago by Teng Xiaoping, the father of reforms, who used to open up China’s world economy and support private enterprise, while planning that no one in management could gain power just for himself. It is there that Xi Jinping is heading when he has eliminated or ousted his competitors, for example, when four years ago the party’s top leadership did not allow anyone younger to join its members who could become its challenger.
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Why does Si Jinping need so much power? The first explanation offers the general experience that power is addictive in nature. In this case, two main objectives are clear. The current leader of China, unlike Teng Xiaoping, who combined modernization and economic recovery with private business initiative and who wanted the ruling party to give space to this initiative, persistently pushes for the Communist Party to consolidate its power and for all private enterprise to be power subordinate.
Documents obtained from a public inaccessible meeting of at least 400 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China omit not only mandatory praise. The third “historic” resolution does not even mention the millions of victims of the 1960s Cultural Revolution or those killed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, when army tanks crushed the then democratization movement.
One of the delegates at the Central Committee meeting was missing. He was now former Justice Minister Fu Cheng Hu, officially accused of violating party discipline, which was speculated to have joined the wrong side in the internal party crackdown.
The author is the chairman of the Syndicate of Journalists of the Czech Republic