Bland aspirations betray the challenge of Xi Jinping’s great balancing act

Ruling party conferences are displays of self-confidence, but no one does it on a grander scale than the Chinese Communist Party.

A giant hammer-and-sickle symbol takes pride of place in northwestern Yan’an City on the first day of the Congress. Picture: AFP

Ruling party conferences are displays of self-confidence, but no one does it on a grander scale than the Chinese Communist Party.

Xi Jinping’s 104-minute “report”, which opened the 20th Congress, was not intended to convey detailed plans or to make significant new announcements. It wasn’t an election address or an appeal for support: the renewal of Xi’s leadership has been inevitable for years. This was a celebration of past, present and anticipated success and an assertion of the right of the leadership to govern, in semi-secrecy, as it has for seven decades.

Xi Jinping speaks during the Opening Ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Picture: Getty Images

There is no doubt that the report will be the most-read and most-cited document in China in the next five years. Read aloud by Xi, it will be printed and distributed to each of the party’s 96 million members.

Study sessions will be organised at all levels of the party to grasp the “spirit” of the report, and all party documents from now on will flow from it, invariably invoking the spirit of the report in explaining new policies, initiatives and actions.

“The report has rich content, and we must thoroughly study it, so we will be clearer-minded in the future with a clear sense of direction,” Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of a party newspaper, said. “If we carefully read and think about every sentence in the report, we will find answers to important questions.”

Despite the pomp, though, flickering in the margins were hints of the massive challenges the world’s biggest country faces and the potential for things to go wrong.

Early on came a list of recent Chinese achievements, from manned space flight to the development of supercomputers, all of which would indeed have seemed unthinkable a generation ago.

During Xi’s ten years in office, at an even greater pace than the decades before, the economy has boomed: per capita GDP has more than doubled from 39,800 yuan ($8,312AUS) to 81,000 yuan ($18,132.95AUS).

To claim that “we have won the greatest battle against human poverty in history” is no empty boast. But Xi’s language hints at the difficulties in maintaining this momentum as the Chinese shift from low-wage manufacturing to a mid-income service economy, while struggling to maintain its “socialist” qualities and avoiding extremes of inequality and subsequent unrest.

“We will steadfastly push for common prosperity,” he told the delegates in the Great Hall of the People. “We will promote equality of opportunity, increase the income of low-income earners and expand the size of the middle-income group.” These are bland aspirations, not policy measures, in an economy with youth unemployment of close to 20 per cent.

The expression that acknowledges the difficulty of all this is the promise to pursue “high-quality development”. High growth in itself is no longer enough – it must be the right kind of growth that avoids creating inequalities. The trick is to balance regulation of companies with the state interference.

This is the closest that Xi got to addressing the big debates about China’s economic direction, particularly the role of domestic big tech companies, which are accused of reaping profits without returning benefits to society – and the hugely expanded property market, which has shown signs of bursting.

The Times