The Chinese Communist Party is seeking to reinvent itself, and the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee, which opened on Nov. 9, is meant to be the staging ground for putting the Party on a new path of economic reform.
On Oct. 28, the day prior to the announcement of the dates for the Plenum, a SUV carrying three Uyghurs careened through Tiananmen Square, the symbolic seat of power for the Chinese regime. The car left 28 wounded and three dead in its wake before it crashed and exploded, killing those inside.
The chaos on the square provided an ominous counterpoint to the bright official hopes for a new beginning.
Chaos inside the Party has been visible since Feb. 6, 2012, when former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu seeking asylum. Wang’s attempt to escape ripped the curtain away from the power struggles inside the Party.
A little over a month later former Maoist golden boy Bo Xilai was stripped of his Party titles and put under investigation. The move against Bo only heightened tensions as first Party chief Hu Jintao, and then successor Xi Jinping, waged war against the faction of former Party chief Jiang Zemin.
Around the same time that the Party’s political turmoil came to the surface, the Chinese nation came to realize that an earlier attempt at renewing the Party through economic reform had failed.
After the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1970s the Party had seized on economic reform as a way to survive. But the regime’s political system achieved economic growth at the cost of human rights abuses, environmental devastation, and the over consumption of resources. Now, economic growth is failing and the economy threatens to implode.
Deepening the regime’s crisis, the Party’s ideology is now only window dressing. No matter how many meetings the Party holds in which cadres are forced to recite doctrine, those empty words cannot compel belief.
The ongoing failure of economic growth dissolves the last shred of the Party’s legitimacy. That is why the CCP advertised economic reform would be the business of the upcoming plenum, to give the public reason to believe the Party has a way out.
Factional Struggle
Since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the CCP in November 2012, and Li Keqiang premier in March 2013, the measures they have proposed have encountered intense opposition from the highest levels of the CCP.
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