Tag Archive for: CCP centenary

The Chinese Communist Party and the people

Enough has been said and left unsaid about the history of the Chinese Communist Party on the centenary of its founding to last us all a while. As the doyen of official party historians, Jin Chongji, once explained to his students, good party historians need to tell the truth, but they need not tell all of it. Official party history is crafted on the assumption that partial truths need to be told at very great length.

While the party can hide from its history, it cannot escape its sociology. General Secretary Xi Jinping heads an exclusive elite of powerful Red-Successor families who flaunt their status and privilege. Their group photo was placed on display on 1 July.

Source: Gao Yu/Twitter.

The CCP was formally established as a Leninist vanguard party in Shanghai in July 1921 with a founding vision of achieving national wealth and power by overthrowing the political power of property-owning classes, doing away with private property altogether, building a socialist economy, installing a dictatorship of the proletariat, and promoting world revolution to overthrow liberal capitalism. It has been aiming to achieve those goals on and off ever since.

For a time in the Reform era (1979–2009), the party leadership recognised the inconsistency between the socialist and nationalist goals of that original vision and focused on growing the economy, rebuilding the state, and restoring the party’s standing in the eyes of China’s people and the world. On most measures it succeeded.

In November 2012, Xi took over and promised, in what was to become a signature phrase, ‘not to forget the original vision’ (buwang chuxin). Since then, he has harnessed the resources of a great and powerful country to realise all of the party’s original goals—with the notable exception of world revolution. Exporting Leninist rule or communist ideology to other countries would surrender the party’s authoritarian advantage. China’s trade, investment, security and foreign-influence strategies are parasitical on the conventions of openness, rule of law and reciprocity that are hard-wired into the liberal democratic model. The last thing the government of China can afford is for other countries to model their systems or behaviour on its own.

The reforms introduced in the intervening period were not anomalous. They extended from economic reform to reform of the legal system, civil society, education and media, all essential for achieving the prodigious growth of the Reform era. Nor were they part of an elaborate front, disguising the true intentions of a devious party cabal. There’s no denying that dissimulation is part of the ‘red gene’—the party’s term for its core identity—but China’s reformers weren’t trying to deceive anyone. They were defeated by a party leadership that reverted to Leninist type following the exogenous shock of the global financial crisis.

It is not the party’s Marxist convictions but its changing social composition that explains this reversion. In the lead-up to the centenary celebrations, Xi and his leadership team exercised obsessive control over every utterance on party history, but they were relatively free and easy with their graphics and demographics, allowing grassroots sociologists to have a field day.

Many of the top hundred or so dignitaries given pride of place in chauffeuring and seating arrangements at the grand parade in Tiananmen Square on 1 July were descendants of the highest party, military and government leaders of the civil war period and the People’s Republic’s early years—more than half of them powerful and wealthy ‘Red Second Generation’ (hong erdai) figures in their own right. In the popular imagination, China is owned and run by these privileged successors of the early revolutionary era who have no intention of surrendering their grip on power or privilege through system reform. They make up one big ‘party clan’ (xingdang), to quote another of Xi’s favourite expressions.

In placing his party clan on display, Xi exposed two structural defects in China’s social and political hierarchies. First, nepotism is endorsed at the top of the party, but it’s frowned upon at middle-management and lower levels because it corrodes the leadership’s lines of command over the massive cadre system. A 1994 manual for cadre management devoted two chapters to managing distaff and family relations to prevent their influencing decisions and employment in mid-level staff offices.

And yet nepotism at the top is regarded as essential for party survival. In the early 1980s, Vice-Chairman Chen Yun led efforts to recruit a new generation of cadre-successors to replace those dismissed during the Cultural Revolution. He came to the view that true successors in leadership positions should be selected from among leading cadre families. Failure to keep control over cadre appointments within the families that built and ran the People’s Republic, he reasoned, would spell the end of power and privilege for the lot of them—or, as he put it, ‘If we don’t allow our offspring to take over from us, we’ll be digging our own graves.’

Here’s the thing. The kind of nepotism essential for the leadership’s survival is anathema to the Leninist cadre system through which it runs the country. There has been a long-running stand-off since Xi took charge between mid-level cadres sitting on their hands and a leadership urging them to stand up and get cracking. Millions of cadres grumble that what’s good for the goose ought to be good for the gander.

The second problem with the party’s social formation is the structural separation of the cadre vanguard from the common people of China—or ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’, as they are called in China. Mid-level cadres look with envy on the privileges their top leaders enjoy and yet cling to the privileges that distinguish themselves from commoners, ranging from access to better medical and hospital care, to prized urban registration, to clean and fresh produce delivered through segregated supply lines, to benefits around subsidised housing and vehicles and children’s education, and to privileges reserved for their retirement.

These material privileges derive from a more substantial one: cadres and party members are the only people in China entitled to participate in public life and politics. The political realm is off limits to ordinary people. In a public essay published in 2018, Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun noted that ordinary people look on cadres’ special rights and privileges ‘with mute and heartfelt bitterness’. He was jailed for saying it.

Karl Marx featured prominently in the party’s centenary celebrations but, consistent with party history writing, only partially. Some of his more pertinent observations were overlooked. When the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Bonaparte, was proclaimed emperor 30 years after his uncle’s passing, Marx remarked that the elevation of the next generation of Bonapartes would expose the cult of the original Napoleon to public scrutiny, and mark the beginning of the end of the Napoleonic family legend. That turned out to be one of his more accurate predictions.

This post is excerpted from the author’s forthcoming book, Cadre nation, to be published by UNSW Press in 2022.

The ‘great, glorious, and correct Party!’

The official English-language translation of Xi Jinping’s 1 July speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s foundation is worth close reading for its pointers to the future. At around 5,200 words, the speech took Xi an hour to deliver. Given the significance attributed to the CCP’s centenary, it is intended to be a substantive expression of China’s place in the world, the party’s place in China, and Xi’s place in the party. Here are my top 10 takeaways.

‘The Party has in the people its roots’

Running the speech through an online text analyser shows that the word ‘Party’ is used 84 times and ‘people’ is used 73 times, most typically together:

As we have fought to establish and consolidate our leadership over the country, we have in fact been fighting to earn and keep the people’s support … The Party has always represented the fundamental interests of all Chinese people; it stands with them through thick and thin and shares a common fate with them.

This continues a longstanding propaganda line to conflate the party, the country and the people, meaning that opposition to the CCP will inevitably ‘hurt the feelings’ of 1.4 billion souls. In a speech filled with lies perhaps the biggest porky is that:

The Party has no special interests of its own—it has never represented any individual interest group, power group, or privileged stratum.

Breathtaking!

‘China … is advancing with unstoppable momentum toward rejuvenation’

‘Rejuvenation’ is mentioned 26 times. Xi’s signature goal is ‘rejuvenation for the Chinese nation’ and specifically rejuvenation from the humiliation of foreign imperialists, whose bullying meant that ‘China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before.’

While ‘the Communist Party of China has secured extraordinary historical achievements on behalf of the people’, rejuvenation has not yet been attained. What exactly would a rejuvenated China look like? Xi does not say. It is the journey to that goal which focuses the party and Xi’s leadership is indispensable to the task. ‘Struggle’, another Xi leitmotif, is mentioned 13 times. It is a mobilising call, harnessing the people to seek rejuvenation. In this way, the party justifies its place and its actions and sets out what the people must do in taking ‘well-coordinated steps toward making our people prosperous, our nation strong, and our country beautiful’.

‘Without the Communist Party of China, there would be no new China’

Some Australian state premiers and university vice chancellors may cling to the hope that China will, someday, pluralise, liberalise and become more like Singapore. They should read this speech. Xi makes the case not only for the CCP’s iron control, but for an even more centralised version of party rule:

We must uphold the core position of the General Secretary on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole, and uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership.

Xi stresses that China’s best way forward is through more intense central party control of the military, of business and of Chinese people at home and abroad. ‘With strengthening the Party politically as our overarching principle, we must continue advancing the great new project of Party building in the new era.’

‘Marxism works’

We must continue to adapt the basic tenets of Marxism to China’s specific realities and its fine traditional culture. We will use Marxism to observe, understand, and steer the trends of our times, and continue to develop the Marxism of contemporary China and in the 21st century.

Xi is a Leninist by instinct and a Marxist by adoption. We underestimate the role of both ideologies in shaping Xi’s behaviour and in equipping the CCP with a powerful instrument of control by indoctrination. There are many instances in the speech where Xi instructs his audience to ‘uphold’ the basic tenets of Marxism, socialism, Mao Zedong thought and other party doctrine. Xi has sent the Chinese people back to their ideological books. We can dismiss that from our vantage point, but the party’s ideological roots structure intellectual approaches in everything from military strategy to economic planning and are a powerful instrument of social control.

‘The Party came to recognize the irrefutable truth that it must command the gun’

On the journey ahead, we must fully implement the Party’s thinking on strengthening the military in the new era as well as our military strategy for the new era, maintain the Party’s absolute leadership over the people’s armed forces, and follow a Chinese path to military development.

Xi stresses that the People’s Liberation Army is the party’s military and says, ‘We will take comprehensive measures to enhance the political loyalty of the armed forces.’ Don’t underestimate how deep into PLA life that party instinct reaches. A recent Global Times report noted a concerning level of ‘mental health problems, including anxiety, phobic anxiety, and paranoid ideation’ among PLA Navy submariners. The solution?

The PLA not only arranged medical professionals to take care of soldiers’ mental health, but also take care of soldiers’ mental health during daily political work, which is an advantage of China’s system.

One wonders if that level of brainwashing will help to produce the ‘world class’ military Xi wants.

‘on a collision course with a great wall of steel’

The official English translation of Xi’s speech says:

We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Xi may have resorted to even fruitier language. Media reports have him saying:

The Chinese people will absolutely not allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or enslave us and anyone who attempts to do so will face broken heads and bloodshed in front of the iron Great Wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Either way, it is a remarkable statement, one more usually expected from North Korean leaders  than from the leaders of the ‘world’s second largest economy’. Australians may reflect that a ‘great wall of steel’ will surely need a great deal of iron ore.

‘The Party has always placed the united front in a position of importance’

Few Australians had heard of the United Front Work Department until a couple of years ago. Now we understand the role it plays globally as part of the CCP’s overt and covert influencing campaigns. This is an ominous element to Xi’s speech:

The patriotic united front is an important means for the Party to unite all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, both at home and abroad, behind the goal of national rejuvenation.

And later:

We should strengthen theoretical and political guidance, build broad consensus, bring together the brightest minds, and expand common ground and the convergence of interests, so that all Chinese people, both at home and overseas, can focus their ingenuity and energy on the same goal and come together as a mighty force for realizing national rejuvenation.

In the eyes of the party, there are only ‘overseas Chinese’, not citizens of other countries who happen to be ethnically Chinese.

‘It takes a good blacksmith to make good steel’

Xi stresses that the CCP must constantly reform itself to be an effective ruler.

We must tighten the Party’s organizational system, … remain committed to improving Party conduct, upholding integrity, and combating corruption, and root out any elements that would harm the Party’s advanced nature and purity and any viruses that would erode its health.

Decoded, this means that Xi will continue purges of the party, PLA and security apparatus to strengthen his own control and prevent any alternative power sources from consolidating. Incidentally, this is the only use of the word ‘virus’ in the speech. So much for the party principle of ‘upholding truth’.

‘We will ensure social stability in Hong Kong’

The saddest paragraph in the speech is this one:

We will stay true to the letter and spirit of the principle of One Country, Two Systems, under which the people of Hong Kong administer Hong Kong, and the people of Macao administer Macao, both with a high degree of autonomy. We will ensure that the central government exercises overall jurisdiction over Hong Kong and Macao, and implement the legal systems and enforcement mechanisms for the two special administrative regions to safeguard national security.

Could more lies be packed into two sentences?

‘We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence”’

On Taiwan, Xi’s language is somewhat less alarmist than we have seen recently by at least saying that his aim is to ‘advance peaceful national reunification’, but this is four words out of 5,000 the broader effect of which is to promote a more nationalist, belligerent party-state intent on ‘advancing with unstoppable momentum’.

Then there is this on Taiwan:

All of us, compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, must come together and move forward in unison. We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward ‘Taiwan independence,’ and work together to create a bright future for national rejuvenation. No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

This points to the sense of urgency which Xi has brought to the Taiwan question, as well as a call to Beijing’s supporters in Taiwan that ‘unison’ is needed to move on the issue.

Then there is the theatre of the speech at Tiananmen Square: the goose-stepping soldiers marching with fixed bayonets, the smiling, colour-coded crowds looking again like North Korean dance troupes clapping in unison, the jet flypasts, the politburo lined up in parade-stand pecking order, Xi in his Mao suit and clenched fists. ‘Long live our great, glorious, and correct Party!’ he cries.

Xi says, ‘Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand and gain foresight into the future.’

Australia has never more desperately needed foresight into the future.

The 100-year-old Chinese Communist Party: what’s next?

History rhymes. As do leadership cycles in the Chinese Communist Party. Ironically, the current undisputed leader is a product of Mao Zedong, of similar stature and power, who purged Xi Jinping’s father and inflicted struggle sessions, public ridicule and hunger on Xi as a young man.

Mao taught the CCP that an unconstrained leader was dangerous for the party and for China’s people, because they could take large wrong turns and persist even as they failed in plain sight. But that lesson only held from 1980 to 2012.

It’s hard to forget that Mao killed 36 million of his own people in the disastrous Great Leap Forward, a failed grand agricultural and industrial reform package, or the brutal Cultural Revolution that cemented Mao as the single voice within the state until he died at 82 in 1976.

Since then, Xi has inflicted his own major life lesson on the party and China’s 1.4 billion people: power must be continually reaffirmed and strengthened. That means ensuring other centres of power don’t arise to complicate or challenge Xi within the CCP, or to challenge the party from within China—like its large and successful big tech companies.

I’m thinking of former CCP rising star Bo Xilai and of Alibaba’s Jack Ma—and the 7.5 million people of Hong Kong, with 1 July marking the first anniversary of the brutal national security law’s implementation. Then there’s the Catholic Church’s odd acceptance of party nominations of Chinese bishops.

For Xi, you maintain power by struggle—including against a dangerous external world he sees as hellbent on getting in the way. That’s why he told a hand-picked Tiananmen Square crowd that ‘the Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.’

Three main elements wrought the surge in Chinese prosperity, and all have ended under Xi.

Two domestic elements were the step back from party direction that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms brought after Mao’s death, along with the deeply pragmatic approach to collective leadership and succession he instituted. (Not forgetting that Deng used tanks on his own citizens in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 to maintain party rule—an anniversary it doesn’t celebrate.)

The external element was an open and welcoming global environment, including China’s 2001 acceptance into the World Trade Organization and numerous countries’ China policies that focused mainly on mutual economic benefit, with little attention to large security and strategic differences.

That too is ending, as we see with the historic collapse in views of China across Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea and Australia. And in the converging assessment of the world’s most powerful open societies and economies that Xi’s drive to create a Sino-centred (CCP-centred) global economy and order poses a systemic challenge and isn’t just a matter for Washington to handle. Xi banks on none of this mattering, because China’s economy is at a point where domestic demand can create future growth, and because the China market will remain attractive enough to suck in foreign investment, regardless of how the party uses its power within China or the wider world.

He might be lucky, despite China only now lifting the last of its population out of extreme poverty into plain old poverty, right as the demographic destiny of its ageing population kicks in. At least some of the world’s business leaders agree, musing about the shame that business can’t be disconnected from human rights. Here Xi is banking on no one paying attention to the goals of his ‘dual circulation’ economic strategy: to make China less dependent on other economies, while making them more dependent on China’s. In a world that now understands the leverage others gain if they control your critical supply chains, and where international cooperation is expanding among governments and economies that can trust one another, it’s less likely that bet will pay off.

The next decade looks like it will be at least as tough for the CCP as any of the 72 years it has held onto power. It’ll need to do what it has been doing—increasing spending to maintain internal security.

Xi will also need to conduct rolling purges within the party and within powerful government agencies to ensure his rule and keep potential successors from emerging. We already know that includes the internal security forces he uses to maintain party rule. And Beijing will have to continually reassess whether its active cultivation of ‘struggle’ and difficulty in its international relationships, as with Xi’s rhetoric this week and through military aggression, is the path to global power and influence.

Unfortunately for the CCP, these balances are likely to get harder and Xi may need to take more and bigger risks to stay in power. He may also be at a point where showing signs of changing his mind may weaken his hold on power. That dynamic will grow in importance as Xi, 68, ages and power transition becomes inevitable.

The flip side is the party’s and Xi’s own narrative of the ‘China dream’, the vision that China’s further rise under the party’s wise leadership is inevitable, as is the decline of external powers who might complicate this. In the dream, the 1.4 billion Chinese people identify more and more closely with the party and focus their nationalism on the directions it is taking China.

That’s what the stage-managed ‘flash mobs’ celebrating the party centenary this week with hand-picked adoring crowds with smiles fervent and forced are meant to show.

For the CCP, it’s almost lucky the celebrations are happening during the pandemic, because these orchestrated events become substitutes for actual public gatherings it doesn’t control.

And not having world leaders there congratulating Xi can be explained by travel restrictions, rather than their absence graphically showing China’s soft-power collapse. A few years ago, they would have queued up to share Xi’s moment.

In the party’s China dream narrative, Beijing’s poor international relations and the collapse of Chinese soft power don’t matter for three reasons.

Population views don’t count if elite buy-in to China’s economy is maintained. And any resistance to China’s use of power against and within other societies is simply a growing pain as the world adjusts itself to the CCP—as China’s people have had to. Lastly, great chunks of the less developed world want the wealth they’re told will flow from deeper engagement with China’s market, while being happy to discount or just live with the nastier aspects of Chinese power. Even if that continues to hold true, it’s probably not enough to underpin China’s rise.

The ‘inevitable rise’ narrative ignores the increasing economic health of the US and other open societies as they recover rapidly from the pandemic’s economic impact. It also ignores the growing, if loose, cooperation to deal with the challenge Xi’s China presents to governments and economies that benefit from an open and rules-based order.

Australia has shifted its China policy reluctantly in the past five years, and it is in growing company. That shift is likely to accelerate, given Beijing’s coercive behaviour. The growing gap between Xi’s words of ‘win–win’ mutual benefit in a ‘community of common destiny’ and his own and the CCP’s relentless, threatening drive to power is an unmentionable within China, but an increasingly obvious observation in the wider world.

It’s hard to see Xi disconnecting the linkages that his use of power has created in minds outside China of economics, technology and strategic power.

Forced but fervent celebration was on show in Tiananmen Square because there’s a lot to play for, and a lot of risk to be understood and engaged with. The stakes are high, not just for China, the party and the world, but for Xi and the individuals who orbit around him.

One hundred years of devastation

On 1 July, the Chinese Communist Party will stage a patriotic extravaganza to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Among the achievements it will celebrate is the Baihetan Dam, located on the Jinsha River on the southeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The dam will start operations on the same day.

The CCP loves a superlative. It is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter, with the world’s largest foreign reserves. It boasts the world’s highest railway and the highest and longest bridges. It is also the world’s most dammed country, with more large dams than the rest of the world combined, and prides itself on having the world’s biggest water-transfer canal system.

The dams themselves are often superlative. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest power station, in terms of installed capacity, and the Baihetan Dam is billed as the world’s biggest arch dam, as well as the world’s first project to use a giant one-gigawatt (GW) hydro-turbine generator. With 16 such generators, Baihetan ranks as the world’s second-largest hydroelectric dam (behind the Three Gorges Dam, at 22.5 GW).

All of this makes great fodder for CCP-fuelled nationalism—essential to the party’s legitimacy. China often flaunts its hydroengineering prowess, including its execution of the most ambitious inter-river water transfers ever conceived, to highlight its military and economic might. (Of course, there are also superlatives China will not be flaunting at its upcoming centenary—beginning with the world’s largest network of concentration camps.)

But China’s dams are not merely symbols of the country’s greatness. Nor is their purpose simply to ensure China’s water security, as the CCP claims. They are also intended as a source of leverage that China can use to exert control over downstream countries.

The CCP’s 1951 annexation of the water-rich Tibetan Plateau—the starting point of Asia’s 10 major river systems—gave China tremendous power over Asia’s water map. In the ensuing decades, the country has made the most of this riparian advantage. For example, by building 11 giant dams on the Mekong, just before the river crosses into Southeast Asia, China has secured the ability to turn off the region’s water tap.

But the CCP is failing to consider the high costs of its strategy, which extend far beyond political friction with neighbours. The party’s insatiable damming is wreaking environmental havoc on Asia’s major river systems, including mainland China’s dual lifelines: the Yellow and the Yangtze.

Giant dams damage ecosystems, drive freshwater species to extinction, cause deltas to retreat, and often emit more greenhouse gases than fossil-fuel power plants. More than 350 lakes in China have disappeared in recent decades, and, with few free-flowing rivers left, river fragmentation and depletion have become endemic.

The social costs are no less severe. For starters, given shoddy construction in the first three decades of communist rule, about 3,200 dams collapsed by 1981, with the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure alone killing up to 230,000 people. China has raised its dam-building prowess dramatically since then, and Baihetan was completed in just four years. But as its early dams age, and weather becomes increasingly extreme, catastrophic failures remain a serious risk.

Dam projects have displaced an enormous number of Chinese. In 2007, just as China’s mega-dam-building drive was gaining momentum, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao revealed that, since the CCP’s rise to power, China had relocated 22.9 million people to make way for water projects—a figure larger than more than 100 countries’ entire populations. The Three Gorges Dam alone displaced more than 1.4 million people.

This doesn’t seem to bother the CCP much. Baihetan’s inundation of vast stretches of a sparsely populated highland has forced local residents, mostly from the relatively poor Yi nationality, to farm more marginal tracts at higher elevations. As China shifts its focus from the dam-saturated rivers in its heartland to rivers in the ethnic-minority homelands the CCP annexed, China’s economically and culturally marginalised communities will suffer the most.

And there’s little doubt that this will happen. The CCP has now set its sights on building the world’s first super-dam, on the Yarlung Zangbo River—better known as the Brahmaputra—near Tibet’s heavily militarised border with India.

The Brahmaputra curves around the Himalayas in a U-turn and forms the planet’s longest and deepest canyon, as it plunges from an altitude of 2,800 metres towards the Indian floodplains. Damming it means building at an elevation of more than 1,500 metres—the highest at which a mega-dam has ever been built. And because the gorge holds the world’s largest untapped concentration of river energy, the super-dam is supposed to have a hydropower generating capacity of 60 GW, nearly three times that of the Three Gorges Dam.

The fact that the gorge is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions seems to be of little concern to the CCP, which is far more interested in being able to use water as a weapon against India, its Asian rival. China has already set the stage for construction, recently completing a highway through the canyon and announcing the start of high-speed train service to a military town near the gorge. This will enable the transport of heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote region, which was long thought inaccessible because of its treacherous terrain.

The CCP views its centenary as cause for celebration. But the rest of the world should see the party for what it is: repressive, genocidal and environmentally rapacious. And it should prepare for what the CCP’s second century may bring.

The Chinese Communist Party won’t last forever

Human beings approaching the age of 100 normally think about death. But political parties celebrating their centennials, as the Chinese Communist Party will on 1 July, are obsessed with immortality. Such optimism seems odd for parties that rule dictatorships, because their longevity record does not inspire confidence. The fact that no other such party in modern times has survived for a century should give China’s leaders cause for worry, not celebration.

One obvious reason for the relatively short lifespan of communist or authoritarian parties is that party-dominated modern dictatorships, unlike democracies, emerged only in the 20th century. The Soviet Union, the first such dictatorship, was founded in 1922. The Kuomintang in China, a quasi-Leninist party, gained nominal control of the country in 1927. The Nazis didn’t come to power in Germany until 1933. Nearly all of the world’s communist regimes were established after World War II.

But there’s a more fundamental explanation than historical coincidence. The political environment in which dictatorial parties operate implies an existence that is far more Hobbesian—‘nasty, brutish, and short’—than that of their democratic counterparts.

One sure way for dictatorial parties to die is to wage a war and lose, a fate that befell the Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. But most exit power in a far less dramatic (or traumatic) fashion.

In non-communist regimes, longstanding and forward-looking ruling parties, such as the Kuomintang in Taiwan and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, saw the writing on the wall and initiated democratising reforms before they lost all legitimacy. Although these parties were eventually voted out of office, they remained politically viable and subsequently returned to power by winning competitive elections (in Taiwan in 2008 and Mexico in 2012).

In contrast, communist regimes trying to appease their populations through limited democratic reforms have all ended up collapsing. In the former Soviet bloc, liberalising measures in the 1980s quickly triggered revolutions that swept the communists—and the Soviet Union itself—into the dustbin of history.

The CCP doesn’t want to dwell on that history during its upcoming centennial festivities. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his colleagues obviously want to project an image of confidence and optimism. But political bravado is no substitute for a survival strategy, and once the CCP rules out reform as too dangerous, its available options are extremely limited.

Before Xi came to power in 2012, some Chinese leaders looked to Singapore’s model. The People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the city-state without interruption since 1959, seems to have it all: a near-total monopoly of power, competent governance, superior economic performance and dependable popular support. But the more the CCP looked—and it dispatched tens of thousands of officials to Singapore to study it—the less it wanted to become a giant version of the PAP. China’s communists certainly wanted to have the PAP’s hold on power, but they didn’t want to adopt the same methods and institutions that help maintain the PAP’s supremacy.

Of all the institutional ingredients that have made the PAP’s dominance special, the CCP least likes Singapore’s legalised opposition parties, relatively clean elections and rule of law. Chinese leaders understand that these institutions, vital to the PAP’s success, would fatally weaken the CCP’s political monopoly if introduced in China.

That is perhaps why the Singapore model has lost its lustre in the Xi era, whereas the North Korean model—totalitarian political repression, a cult of the supreme leader and juche (economic self-reliance)—has grown more appealing. True, China hasn’t yet become a giant North Korea, but a number of trends over the past eight years have moved the country in that direction.

Politically, the rule of fear has returned, not only for ordinary people, but also for the CCP’s elites, as Xi has reinstated purges under the guise of a perpetual anti-corruption campaign. Censorship is at its highest level in the post-Mao era, and Xi’s regime has all but eliminated space for civil society, including NGOs. The authorities have even reined in China’s freewheeling private entrepreneurs with regulatory crackdowns, criminal prosecution and confiscation of wealth.

And Xi has assiduously nurtured a personality cult. These days, the front page of the People’s Daily newspaper is filled with coverage of Xi’s activities and personal edicts. The abridged history of the CCP, recently released to mark the party’s centennial, devotes a quarter of its content to Xi’s eight years in power, while giving only half as much space to Deng Xiaoping, the CCP’s true savior.

Economically, China has yet to embrace juche fully. But the CCP’s new five-year plan projects a vision of technological self-sufficiency and economic security centred on domestic growth. Although the party has a reasonable excuse—America’s strategy of economic and technological decoupling leaves it no alternative—few Western democracies will want to remain economically coupled with a country that sees North Korea as its future political model.

When China’s leaders toast the CCP’s centennial, they should ask whether the party is on the right track. If it isn’t, the CCP’s upcoming milestone may be its last.