Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have emerged from the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress with much strength. Not only did he launch an unprecedented third term as the party leader, but he also confronted President Joe Biden over Taiwan in their recent in-person meeting.
But does Xi’s dominance in the CCP translate into strength for China’s one-party state? A closer examination suggests that the CCP’s legitimacy may be weaker than ever, and that’s bad news for peace in the Taiwan Strait. Policymakers in Washington should take that seriously.
Unlike in a democracy in which the electorate chooses its leaders, autocrats need to justify in a variety of ways why they are entitled to rule. But in post-CCP Congress China, the party’s authority seems to be in the red on many fronts. There’s a real chance that overtaking Taiwan will become Xi’s only way out of his legitimacy deficit.
Ideology is a common source of legitimacy for many authoritarian regimes. In Mao Zedong-era China, that ideology was communism. But after four decades of market reforms, very few people in China still believe in the idea. To fill the void, Chinese leaders have turned to nationalistic sentiment, in which the sense of humiliation and victimhood looms large. Xi’s “Chinese dream,” for example, vows for a national rejuvenation from a hundred years of being occupied or invaded by foreign powers. Many post-Soviet states that did not become functioning democracies, such as Russia, Belarus, and Azerbaijan, have gone down a similar path.
Nationalism alone doesn’t always cut it though. Achieving communism, if it’s even remotely possible, requires a Communist Party in power. But feeding into a national identity doesn’t. That’s why the CCP needed another source of legitimacy: the performance in satisfying people’s needs. Many observers have pointed out that China’s impressive economic growth, at least until recently, has given the CCP a critical boost in authority. But performance legitimacy is more than economic. The party is also being scored when it tries to curb corruption, reduce inequality, or contain a public health crisis.
The CCP under Xi is not doing well in those regards. The economy grew over 10% per year under Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor. This year, it’s struggling to grow even a third of that. While Xi may have made some progress in anti-graft, China is still about as corrupt as Jamaica, South Africa, and Tunisia, and its rich/poor divide remains among the world’s worst. Not to mention that “Zero COVID,” for which the Chinese people are paying dearly, doesn’t seem to contain the pandemic’s spread.
When the CCP struggles to perform, the issue of Taiwan becomes front and center. Thanks to Xi’s investment in nationalism, there’s a sizable fraction of the Chinese population in support of “reunifying” with Taiwan, even by force, pressuring the party to do just that. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited Taiwan earlier this year, Beijing uttered plenty of tough talk, but it fell short in military actions in some nationalists’ eyes, so much so that they complained about it openly.
It doesn’t help either that two other sources of the CCP’s legitimacy are also crumbling under Xi’s watch. Autocracies often go to extra lengths to pretend that they have elections and follow rules. China’s pursuit of this procedural legitimacy is apparent in how the CCP has taken its national congresses seriously — at least until recently. Party tradition used to bar politicians over 68 from entering top leadership, and the military’s presence in the Politburo was minimal. Xi not only broke those norms at will in this CCP Congress but also dramatically removed Hu from the meeting’s closing ceremony.
The last part of the CCP’s legitimacy comes from its interactions with foreign nations, especially the appearance of being on par with greater powers. But even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi devoted fewer of his international trips to developed countries than Hu did. Not to mention that Zero COVID put a complete stop to his in-person meetings with Western leaders until recently. The CCP used to brag about the number of foreign journalists traveling to Beijing to cover its national congresses, and over 1,800 of them went to the last congress in 2017. This year, the number, much less advertised, dropped to half of that.
The CCP’s weakness is no good news. Taiwan, a functioning democracy with a vibrant economy, has long been a thorn in the side of Beijing, which claimed that democratic institutions are not for the Chinese people. But when the CCP’s own legitimacy runs a deficit, peace in the Taiwan Strait is on the line. I’ve written in this space about concrete steps Washington and its allies can take to help Taiwan become more resilient and sustain peace in the region. Now is the time to put them in action.
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Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda. He’s also the curator of the Wei To Think Again newsletter on U.S.-China competition.
