Part 1: Could Chinese confidence in the CCP collapse?
Part 1 of this series examines confidence in the Chinese Communist Party's competence
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4507596
TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Predicting the fall of China’s Xi Jinping (習近平), or even more dramatically, the entire Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has been ongoing since the early years of the party and in Xi’s case, not long after he took the reins of power. Certainly, right now, their grip on power looks fairly solid.
When I lived in China in the early 2000s, the people I knew and met were mostly optimistic about their own future and China’s. Things were moving in a positive direction: the country was opening up, communications and media were slowly liberalizing, the party was interfering in their lives less, and the economy was booming.
Sure, there were things that they weren’t happy about, but people understood that they were in a period of transition from a much darker and impoverished past and that, all things considered, it was going relatively smoothly. Taiwanese had a similar outlook in the 1970s and 1980s.
But is this still true today? Is there still a sense in China that the future is bright or that the CCP is generally getting things right and moving the country in the right direction?
We don’t, and can’t, know for sure. China is a massive country, and there is no way to be certain what the majority of the 1.4 billion people there, of all sorts of backgrounds, viewpoints and circumstances, are thinking.
It’s not like we can conduct accurate polling or see what issues they’re voting on. Though it is impossible to gauge the full extent of the situation, there are signs that not all is well.
One phrase often comes up when discussing overturning an established order: Slowly, then suddenly. In other words, a long, slow burn of accumulating issues erupts into an out-of-control prairie fire, often sparked by the botched handling of a crisis or multiple crises.
Slow burn
There are two broad possibilities. One is that the slow burn hasn’t reached a critical point, and the people will more or less continue to have confidence in the CCP even in the face of multiple crises. That is very possible.
The other possibility is that those conditions do exist and, faced with multiple crises, the Chinese will lose faith in the party-state and take mass action against it. If they do, the possibilities range from a failed series of mass uprisings like Tiananmen that the party can eventually bring under control, the party itself fearing for its future and sacrificing Xi Jinping, or in the most extreme case, the CCP being overthrown entirely.
This piece examines some of the structural problems that could undermine confidence in the CCP’s abilities should a major crisis arise. The next piece will examine whether that slow-burn situation of popular discontent might already exist.
Finally, we’ll follow up with just some of the shockingly long list of potential massive crises that the CCP could be faced with in the very near future.
The regime rules through a boot heel and benefits approach, with the boot heels being repression, social control, and relentless propaganda. The primary “benefits” are pride in restoring “China’s glory,” rising incomes, and opportunities — though as the economy, income growth, and creation of new opportunities have been slowing, more social reforms have been implemented to further the sense that things are improving and the party is acting in their interests.
The CCP excels at the boot heel side of the equation and invests heavily in its massive internal security and surveillance infrastructure. It’s the benefits side where the party is far weaker.
Disaster response
But fundamentally, neither the boot heels nor benefits are of much use in a crisis if the entire structure has lost the confidence of the people.
This potentially huge vulnerability has already shown itself in the CCP’s bureaucratic inflexibility, ineptitude, and colossal failures in long-term planning. Ironically, these are the very things that the CCP portrays itself to the world as excelling at, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, as they make the case their system is better than “messy” democracies.
Examples of the party-state handling shocks poorly abound and include its responses to natural disasters; its ham-fisted response to the rise of the pandemic in Wuhan; its clumsy handling of the African Swine Flu, causing the cost of a primary food staple to spiral, and the totally avoidable mass power outages last fall.
Almost always, the pattern is the same. First, long-term planning fails to prepare for — or outright creates — an avoidable or otherwise manageable crisis.
As the crisis becomes clear, the initial response is confused and muddled, as no one is willing to take any risks or act outside the rule book. Finally, orders come down from on high, usually too late, and they are almost always brutal and extreme.
Last year’s power outages are a classic example of the many things that weigh on the minds of Chinese when considering the fitness of the regime that rules them. China had plenty of power infrastructure and availability of inputs like coal and natural gas — that wasn’t the problem.
To tackle safety and pollution, the government had ordered many small coal mines to close, which is of course probably a good thing. They had also invested heavily in solar power, so it sounded like good planning.
Supply problem
They compounded the supply problem, however, when they cut off coal imports from Australia to express political displeasure with the country after it had the temerity to suggest the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan be investigated. Apparently, no one had thought to add up all the effects of their various policies and actions on the coal supply.
But the problem ultimately wasn’t lack of supply.
Power is sold at a set state-mandated price, but by tightening supply sources abruptly and not considering the end result, the price to acquire coal of the right types for their power plants skyrocketed. This meant the price to create power became far higher than what was being paid to deliver it to customers, and the whole system began to break down as power companies faced financial disaster.
This created chaos across the country as people’s homes went unheated and unlit with winter approaching. Elevators froze between floors, streetlights went out on busy thoroughfares, and the industrial supply chain was thrown into disarray. In short, the crisis was created by poor long-term planning, bureaucratic inflexibility, and ineptitude in responding to the crisis until it was well underway.
This example, along with a string of recent similarly mishandled crises, exposed the fundamental problems of CCP governance. The question is: if this pattern continues, will the public continue to have confidence in the party?
And will the party continue to have confidence in Xi Jinping, or will Xi fail in his attempt to secure a third term as chairman at the 20th Communist Party Conference later this year?
Part 2: The slow-burning issues eroding CCP supremacy
Part 2 of this series looks at how long-standing issues could erode public tolerance of the Chinese Communist Party regime
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4509978
TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Could Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) fail to be elected to a third term at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) later this year? More broadly, how stable is the party’s rule over China?
The truth is, we don’t know. We can’t look at opinion polling, see voting patterns on the issues, or come to reliable conclusions based on anecdotes of how 1.4 billion people of wildly different backgrounds and situations think. The demise of Xi and the CCP party-state has been predicted for nearly as long as either has been in power, and currently, both look firmly in control.
But all things come to an end eventually. It’s just a question of how and when.
Usually, it happens “slowly, then suddenly.” In the case of authoritarian regimes, their downfall is often a long, slow burn of losing popularity over issues that eventually explode into a prairie fire of discontent, often sparked by mismanagement, a crisis, or multiple crises.
Authoritarian regimes are binary by nature. Pent-up frustrations have no outlet in the polls, protests (without serious risk), or on social media.
This means that either an authoritarian regime manages to control the people's frustrations and lives on, or it doesn’t and ceases to exist. There are only so many people the CCP can shoot before being overwhelmed with societal discontent.
In my first column in this series, I pointed out that in recent years, the CCP’s management of crises has followed a pattern. First, a crisis occurs that is either woefully underprepared for or actually created by very poor long-term planning.
Next, the response is confused and mishandled as low-level officials refuse to take risks, and valuable time is lost. Then, the top echelons of power step in, usually too late, and take a brutalist and extreme approach — often causing more damage and destruction.
That column pointed out that this approach in recent years could have undermined public trust in the ability of CCP to effectively cope with crises. Future columns will look at how China could be facing multiple crises in the very near future. This column looks at existing slow-burning issues that erode people’s underlying tolerance for the regime.
I lived in China for many years, starting just over 10 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. By this point, the majority of the Han population supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP regime.
That most likely wasn’t the case in the conquered portions of the Chinese empire, like Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Though the harsh repression of those peoples has been ongoing, under Xi it sharply escalated.
In the early 2000s, the situation in China was much like that of Taiwan during the later stages of authoritarianism. Han Chinese were largely free to do what they wanted as long as they didn’t publicly criticize the party-state, which they often did without fear in private, and occasionally critical articles would sneak past censors in the non-state press.
Most people in China understood that they were in a period of transition from a collectivized, poverty-stricken society to a modern one and that such transitions are rarely smooth. The key to regime legitimacy was the sense that things were moving in the right direction, and the CCP was responsible for China's relative success.
The state was progressively removing itself from the micromanagement of people’s lives, the economy was booming, incomes were rising fast, and opportunities were plentiful. The CCP banked heavily on the key commodity of hope for individual economic well-being, increasing self-expression, and the “glory of the nation.”
Since Tiananmen, political discontent has been largely kept under control, and the populace has mostly been willing to accept the downsides of CCP rule in exchange for the benefits the regime claims to have provided them. But can it still be said things are moving in the right direction?
The downsides of the CCP's authoritarian governance have long failed to be addressed, and discontent is simmering below the surface. One of the main reasons for public support of the Tiananmen protestors was frustration over official corruption, which is still alive and well.
Corruption is deeply corrosive to any system, as it strikes at the basic human sense of fairness. It means the rich, powerful, and well-connected can do what they like regardless of the rules — but those without economic or social privilege can't and have to suffer the indignity of witnessing those in power flout the rules at their expense.
While all boats rise fast during boom times, rampant corruption is somewhat easier to swallow for the general Chinese population. The propaganda machine under Xi has been loudly touting his corruption crackdowns, some of which do appear to have had some effect — at least on ostentatious public displays of ill-gotten wealth — but much of the crackdown appears to have targeted political opponents rather than genuinely rooting out the problem.
Perhaps the propaganda has convinced the public that the situation has that key component of moving in the right direction, but again, we can’t be sure. If not, then the party-state has a serious problem: corruption is deeply tied to many of the other social and political ills that drive people to protest.
Protests happen quite often in China, but generally over local or specific issues. The Chinese government stopped supplying data on this in 2005, but reports of protests still leak out.
The most common ones are summarized by the USC US-China Institute this way: “The protests often complain about government action or inaction, but the grievances cover a wide range of issues involving labor disputes, rural land grabs, environmental damage or perceived threats, how women or minorities are treated, the actions of other nations, conditions for demobilized soldiers and policing practices.”
Most of those issues are still very common; the first few are directly connected to corruption and the rest relate to the general sense of fairness in China. Pollution is toxic to water and food supplies. It can also be life-threatening, and the factories producing it are often able to avoid regulatory consequences by paying off local officials.
China’s air pollution is among the world’s worst and has proven time and again to be nasty and fatal, and serves as a tangible manifestation of political corruption.
Land grabs are a big problem, and labor disputes are never-ending. They will remain never-ending as long as the right people can be paid off to look the other way. Especially in the case of land grabs, local officials are directly involved in financial impropriety.
Since Xi took office, harsh policing has increased, and women and minorities are treated considerably worse than even a few years ago. Traditional gender roles are being enforced again, and the LGBTQ community is being driven back underground.
While no good statistics are available on anything in China, there are other issues that could cause discontent. Though attitudes vary on each issue, certainly not everyone is happy about the ever-increasing social controls, the rise of social credit, the tightening of censorship, and genocide.
Previously, I had assumed that the Chinese party-state was keeping a lid on widespread knowledge of the genocide, but apparently not. A scholar told me that she had asked her peers based in China, and it isn’t as much of a secret as I’d thought. This is supported by the now open denials of it in CCP propaganda news outlets. Obviously, there is no point in denying something nobody knows about.
No doubt there are many in China who look down on the Uyghurs and support the party-state cracking down on them in the name of “fighting terrorism.” But people could begin to connect the dots and realize that elements of the surveillance and propaganda and repressive techniques pioneered in Xinjiang are now starting to appear in their own neighborhoods and lives.
Disappearances of people you know, cameras everywhere using facial recognition, social credit scores enforcing compliance, and the rise of apps to control movement during the pandemic are hard to ignore. Will the “temporary” social control measures and apps be pulled when the pandemic is over?
Rule by fear and control is brittle but very effective. Until it’s not.
Even the so-called “benefits” the CCP provides are starting to fray, especially the almighty promise of ever-increasing prosperity. Even official numbers show GDP growth slowing, but a common rule of thumb used by China watchers is to cut the official numbers in half, if not by more.
Official numbers now average roughly 5-6%, which if true is quite good — but not quite the stellar 10% annual growth. If the China watchers' rule of thumb is true, the economy is still ticking over nicely for an advanced economy, but it’s not enough to keep up anywhere near the pace of the mass poverty reduction the party has built its reputation on — especially as the wealth disparity between well-connected friends of the CCP and the general public continues to widen.
For young people, the economic future doesn’t look as bright as it once did, as one VOA article summarizes neatly: “Fed up with a culture of overwork, through-the-roof housing prices and skyrocketing living costs, many Chinese youth are "lying flat" to express their frustration with the lack of upward social mobility.”
Realizing that prosperity is slowing, the government has pivoted to social “reforms.” These are often quite popular, but many are double-edged and creating pockets of deep resentment.
Video game use among the young has been sharply curtailed; online fan groups of pop stars have been shut down; more conservative norms are being enforced across the board; and cram schools have been closed.
Many of these moves are intended to cope with real problems, such as shutting down bitcoin miners to reduce stress on the power grid and promoting healthier lifestyles for young people who spend nearly every waking moment not in school stuck in cram schools.
But again, much of this wasn’t handled well. For example, the closure of cram schools was executed with very little warning, throwing a large number of people out of work, shuttering tons of small businesses and burning anyone who owned stock in the larger education chains that promptly collapsed.
All of those people, and those who may have depended on those people’s incomes, were no doubt angry and, in many cases, financially ruined almost overnight. And do you think the wealthy and well-connected are going to stop getting access to further education for their kids?
There is another long, slow burning issue: the household registration (“hukou”) problem. This system ties people to a locale whether they live there or not, and all benefits flow from that.
Like most rapidly industrializing countries, there has been a massive influx of people into urban areas. In China, it has created a “floating population” estimated to be 376 million in late 2020.
These formerly rural people are a permanent underclass, with highly restricted access to health care, public services and unemployment insurance in the cities they live in. Most troubling for parents is that their children are denied quality education, arbitrarily denying them a pathway to upward mobility.
It is extremely difficult to change their household registration, and economic opportunities are scant at “home.” This creates a deeply troubling and unfair situation of dispossession for over a quarter of the population.
So far the CCP has managed to keep these issues from boiling over, and individually, none are likely to cause serious instability. But collectively, they make it likely that many people, if not most, have been negatively impacted and bear resentment. In short, these reforms aren’t the home runs the regime needs to shore up support while the economic engine cools.
If this resentment becomes widespread enough, and people with different resentments recognize the inherent unfairness in their own plight has the same party-state roots as those of other people, there will be a crucial shift from just “I’m screwed” to “We’re all screwed.”
Then the prairie fire of discontent is just waiting for the right spark.
Part 3: Xi Jinping and the CCP are courting disaster
In part 3 of the series, we examine how the situation in Shanghai is just the tip of the iceberg and how Xi and the CCP's survival are on the line
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4511716
TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — China is heading towards a series of crises that could seriously threaten Chairman Xi Jinping’s (習近平) ability to stay in power and potentially destabilize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. With Xi attempting to secure a third five-year term as chairman later this year, this will be a pivotal year for China: either he secures it and continues on his clearly desired path to be dictator for life or his control — and possibly the CCP’s — unravels.
In my previous column, we examined the post-Tiananmen unwritten agreement between the CCP and the Han majority in China, where I lived in the early 2000s. In short, people understood they were undergoing a transition from a poverty-stricken existence, with their lives micromanaged by the party-state, to a modern society and that it wasn’t going to be an entirely smooth process.
Most important was that things were moving in the right direction. The economy was booming, incomes were rising rapidly, opportunities abounded, the nation was once again becoming “glorious” on the world stage, and — as long as criticisms of the government weren’t made too public — people’s lives were becoming far freer.
As long as that sense of movement in the right direction held, the CCP’s rule was secure, with the general support of the public and its problems tolerated. That may no longer be true as the economy slows, freedoms are massively curtailed, and even social initiatives intended to be popular are carried out in a hamfisted manner.
That creates one of the key conditions for major change, which usually happens “slowly, then suddenly.” A long, slow burn of discontent builds that can spark a raging prairie fire when a crisis arises.
But even a discontented public may not be pushed into taking action if there is fundamental confidence in the ability of the state to handle the crisis: people will often tolerate less freedom as well as problematic issues like corruption in exchange for safety and security under the control of effective rulers.
In the first piece of this series, we looked at how the CCP has recently had a very poor record of handling major crises, and this may have shaken the confidence of the public.
A string of crises has arisen through the failure of long-term planning.
The initial official reaction is usually confused, uncoordinated, and inept, as lower-ranking officials are more concerned with their jobs than dealing with the situation at hand. Then, orders are issued from on high, and they are uniformly blunt, brutal, and excessive in their implementation. This compounds the initial crisis and even creates further problems.
We can’t know for sure just how much confidence the Chinese public has lost in the CCP; there are no reliable ways allowed by the party-state to ascertain this, and China is a massive country of 1.4 billion with diverse outlooks and circumstances.
It is safe, however, to assume by this point that confidence isn’t as strong as it once was. And very soon it could be put to the test, as there are a number of potential crises looming.
One is already unfolding in Shanghai, a city of 25 million locked down in a dystopian nightmare. Troops are reportedly being brought in to control the situation as angry mobs scuffle with police outfitted in sci-fi villain-esque white hazmat suits, with some citizens even shouting "Down with Xi Jinping; down with the Communist Party."
Rushed quarantines have seen children separated from parents, pets left behind and sometimes killed, and thousands housed in hastily set up, unsanitary, and crowded concentration camp-style quarantine centers where the lights are left on 24 hours a day and there are no showers. Food and medicine is in short supply, with some reports of starvation and people seeking medical treatment being turned away.
Videos show people wailing and screaming in despair from their apartment blocks while drones and robot dogs roam the city barking out lockdown orders through loudspeakers. Just watching those videos sends chills down the spine. Imagine how those living in this futuristic hellscape must feel.
Try as the censors might, they have been unable to completely lock down the flow of footage and information leaking out. In the best-case scenario for the CCP, this situation can be wound down and the pandemic brought under control — but the people’s confidence will have taken yet another big hit.
But can the CCP bring this under control? Many news outlets are reporting that “full or partial lockdowns are in place in 45 Chinese cities, affecting a quarter of the country's population and about 40% of the economy.”
Considering how contagious Omicron and its new subvariants are, it seems unlikely to be brought under control permanently in a country as huge and connected to the world as China. And yet, amazingly, Xi is doubling down on his “dynamic zero-Covid” policy.
Apparently, Xi’s fear of losing face and damaging his carefully constructed image as the “visionary” behind the now constitutionally enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought” makes zero Covid worth the risk. He does still have time to make a painful climbdown from this and avoid the risk of the nightmare in Shanghai becoming the reality across the nation; after all, Taiwan has pivoted away from its zero-Covid policy. But as of yet there is no sign of him doing so.
Xi is now the face of the policy in Shanghai. This makes it harder for him to blame local officials or foreigners for the disaster, though no doubt he will try.
No matter what he does at this point, he will take damage. However, as long as the situation remains temporary — either by miraculously bringing it under control or changing the policy — he will still have a good chance of holding on to power.
But if the outbreak does spread to other cities and goes on for months, and if lockdowns are handled like in Shanghai, his prospects could change dramatically. People are more forgiving of temporary hardships than of those with no end in sight.
Already supply chains are struggling, but if lockdowns continue to spread across China that problem will be compounded. Though it is unlikely the supply chains would be shut down entirely, they would be seriously disrupted, which means crucial supplies of basic goods like food and medicine could slow to a trickle.
Three massive problems could then be added to the mix: widespread blackouts, food shortages, and spiraling inflation. Without the supply chains operating properly, critical supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas may be disrupted or slowed, making it hard to keep the power on around the clock.
Supplies of fertilizer and seeds are already being constricted in parts of the country during planting season, storing up potential domestic supply crises for harvest season in the fall.
And as the supply of food and other basic necessities is constricted, eventually prices will rise and black markets appear to meet basic demands. Lockdown blockade runners will arise if there is enough desperation.
Some in the government are aware of the threats to the supply chain, and the vice premier (but not Xi) has called for them to be stabilized. The government, however, could be forced to deal with the contradictions between stabilizing and Chairman Xi’s insistence on keeping the zero-Covid policy going, and it’s uncertain whether the CCP can find a compromise.
If it doesn't, it will be disastrous. And an even worse fate for China's rulers could be on the horizon, which is the subject of the next column.
Part 4: For Xi Jinping and the CCP, things could get much worse
The COVID crisis isn't all that could be challenging their hold over China. Part 4 of this series shows there's a lot more brewing
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4513604
TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are struggling with the current COVID crisis as the chaos and horrors in Shanghai playing out across television screens worldwide spread to other Chinese cities.
Alone, this is disastrous but potentially only temporary and survivable for Xi and the party — but other crises lurking around the corner could challenge their hold on power.
Worse for Xi and the party is that they entered this crisis already weakened. An earlier column looked at how the unofficial post-Tiananmen social compact between the party and the country's Han majority is fraying.
Another column examined a pattern in the party’s handling of recent crises: how it initially failed to manage the situation, how this was followed by a brutal, overzealous approach that often created further harm, and how crises were exacerbated or even caused by a failure of long-term planning. Even before the current crisis was playing out, confidence in Xi and the CCP's ability to rule effectively was weakening.
In the previous column, we delved into the current disaster and supply chain issues that could compound it going forward could result in new catastrophes. However, this is potentially just the tip of the iceberg.
No matter what, inflation is set to rise; the only question is by how much. It is already a worldwide problem, but lockdowns or slowdowns in key ports like Shanghai will stoke it further, both for the Chinese and a world dependent on Chinese products.
Xi should be sensitive to this. The Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 got considerable support from the public, not so much out of an idealistic yearning for democracy but frustration with corruption — and crucially — inflation.
So now, Xi is caught between his insistence on being infallibly correct on zero Covid, the extreme infectiousness of Omicron, and the need to keep supply chains functioning and inflation under control.
If he fails on the the latter two, problems will mount further. Factories and businesses will go out of business, starved of crucial components and products and burdened with contracts and backorders made when inflation was still manageable.
That, of course, leads to large-scale job losses and economic decline. Then add to the mix how much of the economy is tied up in property and housing, which was already facing disaster prior to the Shanghai lockdown in what the Financial Times billed “the end of China's property boom” and questioned whether it could be China’s “Lehman moment.”
Much of the Chinese public’s wealth is tied up in property. If the economy (already facing headwinds) is hit severely, many businesses and newly unemployed people may start selling property to stave off disaster, potentially driving down prices. Ironically, inflation could help shore up the market in some ways as people will be more reluctant to sell for cash that is rapidly depreciating in value. Those with cash may buy property as a hedge against inflation, but if basic confidence in the real estate market and the stability of the system fails, the market will go into freefall.
These aren’t the only potential crises that Xi and the CCP could face. In any normal year, there are natural disasters such as typhoons, flooding, sandstorms, earthquakes and extreme weather.
Due to China's location, size, and population, one of those disasters plays out on a grand scale every few years, with flooding and earthquakes being particularly deadly. With the country already reeling from the lockdowns, it may not be able to react effectively to mitigate the damage, which it wasn't great at doing in the best of times.
In addition to resulting in more loss of life than normal, these could further snarl supply chains and fuel even more inflation and delay key essentials reaching the market.
One particularly devastating disaster would be a drought, as China is already facing a water crisis. If the situation were dire, China would no doubt choke off the Tibetan Plateau river system.
The Mekong (which supplies Southeast Asia), Yellow River, Yangtze, Yarlung Tsampo (known as the Brahmaputra in India), Indus, and Karnali all originate in Tibet. Already a major source of tension with neighboring countries, if China cuts off enough of that water supply it would mean disaster for tens or even hundreds of millions throughout the continent.
That would be not only economically disastrous but potentially lead to war.
Also possible are environmental and industrial disasters of the CCP’s own making. Just a few examples include nuclear disaster or, as the largest industrial chemical producer in the world, the risk of an accident sending plumes of toxic gases over a large area. With China's famously low safety and environmental standards and massive industrial base, the list of potential disasters is huge.
There are significant challenges to China’s stability now and a wide range of possible ones in the near future, and most are of the CCP’s own creation. How many may come to pass by the 20th party congress later this year we can’t say for sure, but Xi must be nervous indeed.
There are four possible scenarios going forward: either CCP rule is maintained with enough public support and the situation remains more or less stable, public protests spread but are crushed and a crackdown is successful, the CCP realizes the risks to its own survival and sacrifices Xi to appease the public, or the CCP is overthrown.
In the first case, the CCP and Xi manage to muddle through without the situation becoming severe enough to spark an uprising. That is entirely possible; the risks of challenging the almighty party-state are high, but resentment will almost certainly have risen, possibly storing up problems for the future.
The second possibility is already happening to a certain degree but remains localized and uncoordinated. Should the Shanghai situation spread, however, it could morph into a national movement.
This happened in 1989. While the main focus was on the events on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, protests hit cities across China, but the CCP was eventually able to crush the movement.
The third option also has precedent. After the disastrous Great Leap Forward that left tens of millions dead, the CCP sidelined Mao Zedong (毛澤東), leaving him effectively powerless over the government (at least until he stoked the Cultural Revolution to take back power).
If this were to happen to Xi, they would likely sacrifice him publicly and blame the disasters on him. Unlike Mao, Xi isn’t the founding father of the People’s Republic and isn’t as useful as a figurehead.
There is considerable chatter about factions loyal to former Chairman Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and his protege Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) — both of whom are still alive and led the country when things were perceived as moving in the right direction. Some even theorize that the crackdown in Shanghai is aimed at Jiang’s power base there, but like everything in Chinese politics, all of this is highly speculative.
For the third option to happen, enough of the CCP would need to fear their own survival in power more than challenging Xi. It’s hard to know when that tipping point would occur, but the upcoming party congress would be a good time for the opposition to make its move.
Things would have to really spiral out of control to reach the point where the CCP itself is overthrown, and this remains the least likely possibility. Still, as these columns have pointed out, it is no longer unimaginable.
