Rod Macfarquhar of Harvard spoke to a packed house at HKU in January 2015 following a week of teaching classes there. He thinks XJP and the Party are in trouble. The corruption crackdown is likely to be ineffective, and if it works, could lead to a Cultural Revolution style internal battle — even though he believes Xi is the strongest leader since Mao. He views the movement as a combination of factionalism and anti-corruption but there isn’t enough evidence either way at this point. As for his leadership, Deng had to contend with senior colleagues like Chen Yun (an influential Party leader), which Xi does not have.
Xi is also trying to instill a new ideology by reviving small aspects of Confucianism but Rod
doesn’t seem to think this will go anywhere and sees China as ideology-short. “He is taking a very
dangerous road…He’s fighting a very difficult battle to maintain ideological hegemony over his whole
country and nothing to put in place of western ideas.”
He used interesting numbers to demonstrate the problems with hitting the fleas. With 80M in the
party, if 10% are corrupt, that’s 8M. But add in spouses and relatives, and you reach something like
40M — too many for the Party to deal with. “If he gets all the fleas, what’s left of the Party?
There’s no Party. If he goes for the Tigers, is he going to be immune to plots against him? The
Tigers have accumulated massive influence.” The collapse of Russia also is very much on Xi’s mind.
But using the Party to attack the Party — which Gorbachev failed to do — may lead to the death of
the Party.
The Q&A had two noteworthy questions. One about rumors from “friends in Beijing” that Jiang is next.
He skirted that one. The second was about the future of HK. He said the PRC will have difficulty
replacing the various institutions in HK anytime in the near future.
I had two thoughts. One is that the Party may be more flexible than he believes…his research has
focused on the Cultural Revolution and he may be using that as a paradigm, a time of chaos. The rise
(and rather quick fall it seems to me) of the Guangdong model was nonetheless a hopeful sign. The
second is the impact of the economy on China — can Xi potentially tackle visible corruption (e.g.,
watches and banquets) and ignore bigger corruption (local companies stealing governments blind),
thus convincing the populace the Party is not corrupt but allowing cadres to steal; keeping the
system alive?