Professor Carl Minzner authored an article for East Asia Forum about the upcoming 19th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
China is in transition. And not in a good way. The partially institutionalised political norms of China’s reform era are buckling. Beijing is steadily sliding away from collective authoritarian rule by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite towards a more personalised variant wielded by President Xi Jinping alone.
Some shifts are relatively minor. Xi’s 2016 designation as the party’s ‘leadership core’ granted him a title denied to his relatively weak predecessor Hu Jintao. But it merely elevated Xi to the status that reform-era CCP authorities employed to refer to three prior leaders — Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin.
Others are more radical. Since 2012, Xi has broken with tacit reform-era party rules against targeting former top leaders (and their families) after leaving office. Long-standing official aversion to anything resembling a cult of personality is steadily being abandoned, as state media increasingly focuses on Xi Jinping alone, to the exclusion of other leaders. Both of those norms developed during the reform era in reaction to Maoist radicalism of the Cultural Revolution.
Now, it appears that the upcoming 19th Party Congress may see two other major reform-era party norms crumble as well.