But the 19th CCP Congress was a remarkable event. A great change in the Chinese leadership's future orientation was presented to the world.
Starting from some of the measures confirmed by the Congress; there were, for example, profound changes to the Peoples Liberation Army's places in the hierarchy. China's military elite were cut away from their previously dominating position in the CCP. Only 17% of the previous military delegates to the Chinese CP Central Committee were returned to their positions. The anti-corruption campaign accounted for 38 members of the Central Committee losing their places. 53% of the standing CC 'retired.' Overall there was a 70% turn over in the membership of the Party's Central Committee. Only the Party changes in the 9th Congress in 1969, the period of Mao's Cultural Revolution, had the same spread and depth.
The speech styled China as a 'moderately prosperous society' and outlined a 15-year plan to commence in 2020 'to see that socialist modernisation is basically realised.' Next will come a further 15-year plan to 'develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.' Some sort of democracy by 2050. It was the sole mention of the word. Meanwhile developmental gains are still being made.
In the past five years, China's GDP rose from £7 trillion to £10 trillion, contributing more than 30% of global economic growth.
Over the same period it was claimed that more than 60 million more people had been lifted out of poverty. Over 1,500 reform measures had been launched, establishing general frameworks for reform in major fields and lending greater impetus for growth.
But China, it was stated, was still facing severe challenges and would long remain in 'the primary stage of socialism.' Its international status as the world's largest developing country had not changed.
'Some acute problems caused by unbalanced and inadequate development await solutions; and the quality and effect of development are not what they should be,' Xi said.
'China's ability to innovate needs to be stronger'... 'the real economy awaits improvement, and the country has a long way to go in protecting the environment.'
The answer to China's problems was also made clear. In essence the Chinese CP, with 89.5 million members, will take a much stronger grip on Chinese society. This decision has various aspects. First is the centralisation of power around Xi and his immediate supporters - as the Western media duly noted. More profoundly however, the party's centralisation echoes the strong message from the Congress on the need for the centralisation, the homogenisation, of China itself, due, among other things, to 'unbalanced and inadequate development' mentioned in the above quote from the speech. But that in turn is only a part of an even greater mosaic. For example the current campaign against corruption is also to deepen. Already 1000s of local and regional party officials have been expelled from the party and jailed. Congress delegates were housed in basic accommodation and offered simple food. Further measures are promised and corruption is certainly under scrutiny and attack - and, at the same time, the campaign is used as a key weapon to eliminate any inner party criticism of the new direction.
Related to the impact of what Xi called 'unbalanced and inadequate development' a major political decision has also been taken, or solidified, regarding the scope of China's 'great reform.' When Deng Xiaoping opened the road to the market in the 1980s and 90s many debates arose inside China in general and the CCP in particular about the possibility of accompanying economic reform with political reform. This reached its terrible apogee with the counter-revolutionary events during the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. But political reform has remained a topic of debate in the margins - which has also been stimulated by the (rare) comments of Deng himself when he addressed the issue in the 1980s and 90s.
Deng argued that the Soviet example proved that economic development should be won and then consolidated (at the level of what was known then as 'First World' conditions) before a political culture could be built that would allow increasing democracy. Because Perestroika and Glasnost had been implemented before any economic effort to reach 'First World' conditions in Russia, the Soviet Union had been destroyed. Deng never defended any sort of Western model of democracy, but seemed to accept the idea that greater participation by the Chinese people in political life would ultimately be a positive aim - once economic development had reached a reasonable peak.
The 19th Congress has rejected all that. The experience of Hong Kong's mass demonstrations, the Tibet undercurrent of independence, the upsurges in Xinjiang - with its significant Uyghur Muslim population - and other regional and national strains; the emphasis that Trump gave to Taiwan's role and, the under the surface struggle over islands in the China sea, all mean that consolidation of China is now the watchword. Deng's flirtation with democracy with Chinese characteristics is dead. China needs to be concentrated and centralised in every sense and at every level in order, it seems, to deal with the 'unbalanced and inadequate development.' The CCP is the key instrument for that purpose. Its independent bureaucratic power is to be mobilised defining China's needs with its own defence.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. What is the relationship between CCP State power and the actual engine of growth and development - the 'free market'?
China's 'free market' is a matter of considerable controversy and there are no definitive measures of its weight in the overall Chinese domestic economy let alone its part in China's international trade and foreign investment. However, while industry, especially industry oriented to exports, in China is predominately private, China’s largest companies are state owned. Given China’s state monopolies in oil and electricity, it is not surprising that the country’s three largest companies are two giant oil conglomerates and the national electricity grid. The combined revenue of these three giants in 2013 was US$1.3 trillion, which is the same figure as the GDP of Mexico.
Central State companies also dominate telecommunications and transport. The government also owns China’s main banking and finance companies, the tobacco industry, major media and the post office. Altogether these central state companies, often large business conglomerates with hundreds of subsidiaries, took in half of the US$9.2 trillion in revenue earned by China’s top 500 companies in 2013. Beneath the central government, Chinese provinces own more than 100,000 state firms, many of which have joint ventures with private capital.
The Chinese state therefore appears to remain dominant in the domestic economy not least through its key role in finance and banks, and its control of infrastructure.
Two general consequences of China's progress in its relations with capitalism are worth noting before focussing on current political conditions in China. First is the success in Chinese development produced by the opening up of a significant 'free' market within a state system of control. In 1921 Lenin introduced the 'New Economic Policy' (NEP). NEP marked the end of starvation in the USSR's cities and therefore aided the final defeat of the counter revolution. Lenin described the move as state capitalism. China's experience would also seem to show that the capitalist market, albeit controlled by the state, can still function as an instrument of rapid growth in the context of under-development.
Second, there has not been the slightest inkling of any interest in 'democratising' China from the private sector. The attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to weld democratic politics to the 'free market' was always spurious. The Silicon Valley billionaire 'anarchists' were the first to drop their fancies about the new freedom of the world-wide-web in China and the whole free market = democracy show has now been unceremoniously dumped by the 'free world's' main leader.
However, economic corruption, uneven development and social upheaval (China has the largest level of social disturbance in the world according to UN statistics) are never simply causes of problems. They are symptoms. But of what?
Whatever characterisation is applied to the Chinese regime, outside any notion that they are simply capitalist, the contradictions between different types of property, of that owned by the State and that owned by private owners, invariably and increasingly opens cracks and friction in society. Such frictions opened up even in the much smaller NEP experiment in Soviet Russia. They were containable, but not in any longer term and especially not in the context of a global system of capitalism.
There are 594 billionaires in China, ahead of 535 billionaires in the US. A huge and widening gap has opened between the mass of the Chinese population, that has only recently moved from poverty and starvation, and the new rich. There has always been a layer of corrupt officials in the CCP but now corruption is a mechanism used to facilitate the development of this region, to guarantee that planning permit and allow another population movement. It is indispensable to deal with the strained relationship between state monopolies and finance and the need to find large, new chunks of local labour and fast means of exporting fashionable goods. 'Unbalanced and inadequate development' or, more historically put, uneven and combined development, is an absolute necessity of the capitalist system when it encounters under-development. Investment moves to areas with the lowest price of labour - both between countries and within them.
The centralisation of Xi's leadership, the CCP and even the whole of China will not resolve these contradictions. They are unreachable by such measures. Stalin 'resolved' NEP in Russia in 1928 with a ruthless industrialisation, a terrible famine and a mass political purge. The alternative then, outlined by Stalin's critics in the New Course, included the demand for the wholesale democratisation of Communist Party and Russian society as well as a careful and planned industrialisation. The crystallising Communist Party bureaucracy was identified as a major part of the USSR's crisis. The opposition were all murdered for their thoughts. 50 years later, after massive sacrifices and effort by millions, the so called Soviet Union died.
Today, in China, the need to open out an increasingly democratic debate is becoming indispensable in 'solving' the current (and mounting) difficulties. The enormous and genuine 'leap forward' of the mass of Chinese people is the platform for a new accountability of the CCP and the role of capitalist accumulation in Chinese society. Uneven development between the regions and nations in China can be faced and reformed best by decisions made by the very people who live with those difficulties. To open the state to the democracy of China's workers and farmers will certainly 'turn the world upside down'. But it is the real road, the only road that defends the gains that the Chinese people have made and strengthens their future in a way that the Chinese people can decide and embrace and, if necessary, defend.
The answer to China's problems was also made clear. In essence the Chinese CP, with 89.5 million members, will take a much stronger grip on Chinese society. This decision has various aspects. First is the centralisation of power around Xi and his immediate supporters - as the Western media duly noted. More profoundly however, the party's centralisation echoes the strong message from the Congress on the need for the centralisation, the homogenisation, of China itself, due, among other things, to 'unbalanced and inadequate development' mentioned in the above quote from the speech. But that in turn is only a part of an even greater mosaic. For example the current campaign against corruption is also to deepen. Already 1000s of local and regional party officials have been expelled from the party and jailed. Congress delegates were housed in basic accommodation and offered simple food. Further measures are promised and corruption is certainly under scrutiny and attack - and, at the same time, the campaign is used as a key weapon to eliminate any inner party criticism of the new direction.
Related to the impact of what Xi called 'unbalanced and inadequate development' a major political decision has also been taken, or solidified, regarding the scope of China's 'great reform.' When Deng Xiaoping opened the road to the market in the 1980s and 90s many debates arose inside China in general and the CCP in particular about the possibility of accompanying economic reform with political reform. This reached its terrible apogee with the counter-revolutionary events during the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. But political reform has remained a topic of debate in the margins - which has also been stimulated by the (rare) comments of Deng himself when he addressed the issue in the 1980s and 90s.
Deng argued that the Soviet example proved that economic development should be won and then consolidated (at the level of what was known then as 'First World' conditions) before a political culture could be built that would allow increasing democracy. Because Perestroika and Glasnost had been implemented before any economic effort to reach 'First World' conditions in Russia, the Soviet Union had been destroyed. Deng never defended any sort of Western model of democracy, but seemed to accept the idea that greater participation by the Chinese people in political life would ultimately be a positive aim - once economic development had reached a reasonable peak.
The 19th Congress has rejected all that. The experience of Hong Kong's mass demonstrations, the Tibet undercurrent of independence, the upsurges in Xinjiang - with its significant Uyghur Muslim population - and other regional and national strains; the emphasis that Trump gave to Taiwan's role and, the under the surface struggle over islands in the China sea, all mean that consolidation of China is now the watchword. Deng's flirtation with democracy with Chinese characteristics is dead. China needs to be concentrated and centralised in every sense and at every level in order, it seems, to deal with the 'unbalanced and inadequate development.' The CCP is the key instrument for that purpose. Its independent bureaucratic power is to be mobilised defining China's needs with its own defence.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. What is the relationship between CCP State power and the actual engine of growth and development - the 'free market'?
China's 'free market' is a matter of considerable controversy and there are no definitive measures of its weight in the overall Chinese domestic economy let alone its part in China's international trade and foreign investment. However, while industry, especially industry oriented to exports, in China is predominately private, China’s largest companies are state owned. Given China’s state monopolies in oil and electricity, it is not surprising that the country’s three largest companies are two giant oil conglomerates and the national electricity grid. The combined revenue of these three giants in 2013 was US$1.3 trillion, which is the same figure as the GDP of Mexico.
Central State companies also dominate telecommunications and transport. The government also owns China’s main banking and finance companies, the tobacco industry, major media and the post office. Altogether these central state companies, often large business conglomerates with hundreds of subsidiaries, took in half of the US$9.2 trillion in revenue earned by China’s top 500 companies in 2013. Beneath the central government, Chinese provinces own more than 100,000 state firms, many of which have joint ventures with private capital.
The Chinese state therefore appears to remain dominant in the domestic economy not least through its key role in finance and banks, and its control of infrastructure.
Two general consequences of China's progress in its relations with capitalism are worth noting before focussing on current political conditions in China. First is the success in Chinese development produced by the opening up of a significant 'free' market within a state system of control. In 1921 Lenin introduced the 'New Economic Policy' (NEP). NEP marked the end of starvation in the USSR's cities and therefore aided the final defeat of the counter revolution. Lenin described the move as state capitalism. China's experience would also seem to show that the capitalist market, albeit controlled by the state, can still function as an instrument of rapid growth in the context of under-development.
Second, there has not been the slightest inkling of any interest in 'democratising' China from the private sector. The attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to weld democratic politics to the 'free market' was always spurious. The Silicon Valley billionaire 'anarchists' were the first to drop their fancies about the new freedom of the world-wide-web in China and the whole free market = democracy show has now been unceremoniously dumped by the 'free world's' main leader.
However, economic corruption, uneven development and social upheaval (China has the largest level of social disturbance in the world according to UN statistics) are never simply causes of problems. They are symptoms. But of what?
Whatever characterisation is applied to the Chinese regime, outside any notion that they are simply capitalist, the contradictions between different types of property, of that owned by the State and that owned by private owners, invariably and increasingly opens cracks and friction in society. Such frictions opened up even in the much smaller NEP experiment in Soviet Russia. They were containable, but not in any longer term and especially not in the context of a global system of capitalism.
There are 594 billionaires in China, ahead of 535 billionaires in the US. A huge and widening gap has opened between the mass of the Chinese population, that has only recently moved from poverty and starvation, and the new rich. There has always been a layer of corrupt officials in the CCP but now corruption is a mechanism used to facilitate the development of this region, to guarantee that planning permit and allow another population movement. It is indispensable to deal with the strained relationship between state monopolies and finance and the need to find large, new chunks of local labour and fast means of exporting fashionable goods. 'Unbalanced and inadequate development' or, more historically put, uneven and combined development, is an absolute necessity of the capitalist system when it encounters under-development. Investment moves to areas with the lowest price of labour - both between countries and within them.
The centralisation of Xi's leadership, the CCP and even the whole of China will not resolve these contradictions. They are unreachable by such measures. Stalin 'resolved' NEP in Russia in 1928 with a ruthless industrialisation, a terrible famine and a mass political purge. The alternative then, outlined by Stalin's critics in the New Course, included the demand for the wholesale democratisation of Communist Party and Russian society as well as a careful and planned industrialisation. The crystallising Communist Party bureaucracy was identified as a major part of the USSR's crisis. The opposition were all murdered for their thoughts. 50 years later, after massive sacrifices and effort by millions, the so called Soviet Union died.
Today, in China, the need to open out an increasingly democratic debate is becoming indispensable in 'solving' the current (and mounting) difficulties. The enormous and genuine 'leap forward' of the mass of Chinese people is the platform for a new accountability of the CCP and the role of capitalist accumulation in Chinese society. Uneven development between the regions and nations in China can be faced and reformed best by decisions made by the very people who live with those difficulties. To open the state to the democracy of China's workers and farmers will certainly 'turn the world upside down'. But it is the real road, the only road that defends the gains that the Chinese people have made and strengthens their future in a way that the Chinese people can decide and embrace and, if necessary, defend.
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