The Party That Failed - an Insider Breaks with Beijing | Hacker News Reader

The Party That Failed - an Insider Breaks with Beijing

foreignaffairs.com

11 pointstartoran4 comments

So I should not have been surprised when it turned out that Xi was no reformer. Over the course of his tenure, the regime has degenerated further into a political oligarchy bent on holding on to power through brutality and ruthlessness. It has grown even more repressive and dictatorial. A personality cult now surrounds Xi, who has tightened the party’s grip on ideology and eliminated what little space there was for political speech and civil society.

This comes from a devout Marxist whose family was in the comunist party ranks right from its inception.

Yeah, this is not surprising and this person was expelled from the communist party and is now seen as a fugitive. Xi is really a tyrant and the communist party is utterly corrupt, any people with any good intentions would be purged from the party. She even mentions CCP as "zombie party", this was a very interesting article, thanks for sharing.

Another excerpt from the article describing exactly that:

After 20 years of hesitation, confusion, and misery, I made the decision to emerge from the darkness and make a complete break with the party. Xi’s great leap backward soon left me with no other choice. In 2018, Xi abolished presidential term limits, raising the prospect that I would have to live indefinitely under neo-Stalinist rule. The next summer, I was able to travel to the United States on a tourist visa. While there, I received a message from a friend telling me that the Chinese authorities, accusing me of “anti-China” activities, would arrest me if I returned. I decided to prolong my visit until things calmed down. Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and flights to China were canceled, so I had to wait a little longer. At the same time, I was disgusted by Xi’s mishandling of the outbreak and signed a petition supporting Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been harassed by police for warning his friends about the new disease and eventually died of it. I received urgent phone calls from the authorities at the Central Party School demanding that I come home.

But the atmosphere in China was growing darker. Ren, the dissident real estate tycoon, disappeared in March and was soon expelled from the party and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Meanwhile, my problems with the authorities were compounded by the unauthorized release of a private talk I had given online to a small circle of friends in which I had called the CCP “a political zombie” and said that Xi should step down. When I sent friends a short article I had written denouncing Xi’s repressive new national security law in Hong Kong, someone leaked that, too.

I knew I was in trouble. Soon, I was expelled from the party. The school stripped me of my retirement benefits. My bank account was frozen. I asked the authorities at the Central Party School for a guarantee of my personal safety if I returned. Officials there avoided answering the question and instead made vague threats against my daughter in China and her young son. It was at this point that I accepted the truth: there was no going back.

>This comes from a devout Marxist whose family was in the comunist party ranks right from its inception.

And Xi was a princeling with a much stronger party pedigree, who survived work camps with ostensibly a renewed faith in the party. Wikileaks / CIA dossier on him by former politburo member and family friend of Xi summarized Xi as basically not too smart, but a believer. Not too smart comports with lines in this article, but labelling Xi as not a believer reads more like purity test from disgruntled ideological rival with a bone to pick. Like any political system, there are factions, CCP reformist like Cai Xia and Ren Zhiqiang were understandingly upset over Xi's direction for the country, but their analysis should be interpreted as partisan pieces like political writing elsewhere. Cai herself supported Rens essay denouncing Xi's covid response early in the outbreak, they subscribed to the idea that democratically reforms would have been in a much better position to handle the the epidemic - they believed covid was China chernobyl. There are many pro-reformers who felt the same way at the time. They were spectacularly wrong.

Ren got purged, Cai's in exile now, just another dissident writing for a new audience. Her words should be interpreted accordingly. This entire essays is basically, look CCP under Xi is full of theatre and politics... like politics everywhere, through all time. It's entertaining but not particularly illuminating. I wasn't a big fan of Xi, I knew he was a believer, he's not charismatic, he didn't seem very smart, certainly not paramount leader material, but in retrospect he has delivered much more than what I thought he was capable of. And now that inevitable great powers competition is heating up, I don't think anyone else's reforms and priorities would have postured China to address this rivalry as comprehensively as Xi. Particularly, Xi's military restructuring and modernization would not have occurred under Bo Xilai who was good friends with the corrupt and ineffective military old guard, enough that there were rumors of a coup over his purging. That alone makes Xi the best timeline for long term Chinese interests considering US containment efforts against China predates Xi. He's probably not the best man for the job, but out of all available options in the politburo, and there weren't many, he was the right one.

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