Fascist China

 Jonathan Manthorpe on the rise of Xi Jinping. The dawn of a fascist China:

Xi Jinping is poised to become the most potent Chinese leader since Mao Zedong — and to guide his country’s continued emergence as a fascist global superpower for at least the next decade.

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is scheduled to start on October 18, when it will appoint leaders and establish the country’s course for the next five years.

Xi undoubtedly will be re-appointed head of the CCP, followed by re-selection as China’s president and head of state early next year.

But he appears also to have overturned the collegial, limited term system of leadership established after the social ravages and tens of millions of deaths caused by Mao’s maniacal leadership.

The system of circumscribed leadership was reinforced after the nationwide uprising against the CCP in 1989; under that system, Xi would only get another five years at the helm, followed by retirement.

But since his appointment to the leadership as a compromise candidate with no obvious personal ambitions in 2012, Xi has worked assiduously to destroy rivals and potential enemies. He has also overseen the construction of a highly sophisticated authoritarian state unmatched by anything in China’s history.

Coupled with this is a vigorously promoted vision of China as a global superpower. In combination, these efforts appear to have successfully cleared Xi’s way for appointment to a third term as leader in five years’ time. By that time, he will be only slightly older than Donald Trump is now....

President Xi began his campaign for supreme power the moment he was appointed head of the CCP at the end of 2012. He launched a vicious and long-running campaign against his potential rivals and critics, a campaign that masqueraded as an anti-corruption drive. About 750,000 CCP and government officials were demoted, warned off, humiliated or expelled in the first three years of the purge — and 35,600 were prosecuted and imprisoned.

Xi’s drive against his rivals even reached the 205 members of the Central Committee, the third most powerful body after the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee. Seventeen members of the Central Committee have been arrested and imprisoned. Among them was Sun Zhengcai, one of the 25 members of the Politburo and the party leader in the province-level city of Chongqing, who once was seen as a potential successor to Xi.

Major victims of Xi’s purge were also people associated with former presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Hand-in-hand with Xi’s attempts to erase challenges from within the CCP has gone a massive increase in repression and social control of Chinese society at large. Ideological and indoctrination campaigns have been launched on a scale not seen since the days of Mao; the Internet and social media are subject to relentless scrutiny and retribution for offenders, while non-governmental organizations and reform-minded lawyers are the targets of unrelenting campaigns of intimidation and imprisonment.

All the aspects of a classic fascist state are in place in China now.

Comments

[Martin Adamson]

Eh? What's fascism got to do with it? It's merely a perfectly normal Communist behaviour. Once again, leftist intellectuals twist themselves into knots trying to prove that leftists who implement orthodox leftist policies are not somehow not leftists at all.

[Stephen K]

"perfectly normal Communist behaviour"
True about the repression etc, but taking a charitable view of what Manthorpe is saying, this leadership style is highly personal. The point being that this means the end of the collective leadership pattern (as opposed to outright one-man dictatorship AKA 'the cult of personality') that has been the preferred option for the main Communist regimes i.e. Russia post-Stalin and China post-Mao. This might be significant, though it is exchanging one kind of horror for another.

[Bob-B]

The fact that China has a capitalist economy suggests that it is more a fascist country than a communist country.

[Stephen K]

"The fact that China has a capitalist economy"
... is a somewhat contentious fact. It's a mixed economy, with an enormous number of state-owned entities. The Wikipedia article on China's economy gives a useful introduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China
Trying to decide whether China should be called fascist or communist is probably besides the point. We can surely agree that it is a powerful dictatorship (I was going to say repressive, but the word repressive is redundant) with aggressive designs. That by itself implies what policy we should follow. The rest is just deciding the colour of the shirts.