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Ruthless and Cloaked: Beijing Pushes Its Secretive Power Abroad
China’s growing influence confronts the world with a secrecy seen as a fact of life at home
A Chinese soldier stands guard in front of Beijing Great Hall of the People, where the Communist Party has held a twice-a-decade congress over the past week. PHOTO: EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
By Andrew Browne
Oct. 24, 2017 6:18 a.m. ET
The most important moment in the life of China’s Communist Party, the coming-out parade of its top leaders, is the culmination of a process steeped in mystery.
What has gone before the red-carpet walk of the new Politburo Standing Committee, led by Xi Jinping, is anyone’s guess. None of the men at the apex of power are elected by popular vote. Just about everything known about them is filtered through state propaganda.
Ahead of the event, the few clues have been in rolling purges—the most recent prominent victim, widely seen as one of Mr. Xi’s main challengers, stands accused of being part of a coup plot. An anticorruption campaign has cut a swath through the broader Central Committee of top leaders.
Chinese citizens have learned to accept an unaccountable, enigmatic party leadership as a fact of life, the price to be paid for rising living standards.
The rest of the world will have a much harder time coming to terms with this arrangement.
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China has become richer but the party hasn’t become any more transparent. Increasingly, economic, diplomatic and military power in the 21st century will emanate from an organization that was born in secrecy and still obsessively guards its inner workings.
The just-concluded 19th Party Congress has confirmed the party’s reading of a historical progression: Under Mao, China stood up; under Deng, it prospered, under Mr. Xi, it has grown powerful. China now seeks to shape the global system.
The party will be at the vanguard. And power, as it is exercised within the world’s largest political group, is ruthless, peremptory and cloaked.
More than a million officials have faced punishment under the anticorruption campaign. High-level targets disappear for lengthy periods into suburban guesthouses to face party inquisitors, not state prosecutors. Only quite recently have these opaque methods come to the attention of the outside world. In New York this year, the FBI played cat-and-mouse across Manhattan with a group of Chinese security officials dispatched clandestinely to warn a prominent regime critic, the property magnate Guo Wengui, about his antiparty activities.
Australians have woken up to the Chinese party’s covert influence over their own political and academic institutions in the form of gifts from party-affiliated businessmen. The government is now preparing to overhaul laws covering espionage and foreign political interference.
More and more, multinational firms in China operate within an economy directed by party fiat. Mr. Xi’s reworking of the Chinese political order has aggregated control of everything from financial policy to foreign affairs and cybersecurity in the hands of “leading small groups,” all chaired by Mr. Xi, whose deliberations are hidden.
In the democratic West, transparency is often touted as the key to trust in government. But trust has never been the basis of the relationship between the Chinese party and the people in whose name it governs; the party-state functions on the assumption that its rule is constantly under threat. The paradox of power in China is that the stronger the country grows, the more insecure the party feels and thus more prone to bouts of repression.
Instead, the party’s domestic legitimacy derives in large measure from its ability to manage the economy; year after year, it delivers robust growth.
Wait for an economic crisis to test this social bargain at home, and challenge the assumption of China’s unstoppable rise abroad.
President Xi Jinping bows to current and former Chinese leaders at the opening of this year’s party congress.PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
A reckoning isn’t imminent: On Mr. Xi’s watch, the party has likely bought itself time—some economists think five years or more—by clamping down on capital outflows and smothering the markets with regulation. But within this increasingly closeted system, debt is piling up, much of it to support state enterprises, the party’s economic bedrock.
When the debt finally comes due, the trust deficit at home and abroad will exacerbate the panic. When China engineered a slight devaluation of its currency in 2015, foreign investors, unable to peer into the black box of Chinese governance, feared the worst—that the world’s second-largest economy was in such poor shape it needed an exchange-rate boost. Spooked by the political unknown more than the devaluation itself, global markets trembled.
In the wake of the party congress we’re likely to hear endless paeans from state media about “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
The formulation will be a tough sell globally, where the lack of transparency of China’s party apparatus already encounters suspicion, fear and outright resistance.
Mr. Xi wants to set his rule apart from the past as well as what Xinhua once called the “doddering democracy” of the West.
China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, took its name from the Chinese ideogram that means “clear.” The earlier Ming dynasty meant “bright.” However Mr. Xi describes his new era, it has begun in the shadows.
