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Why Xi Jinping must tackle the myth of princeling legitimacy to rule China
Lanxin Xiang says the damaging Mao-inspired campaign to establish the president’s authority and questions about the opaque anti-corruption drive indicate that, without serious reforms in the 19th party congress, Xi’s China Dream may be unsustainable
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The 19th congress of the Communist Party of China will be held later this year. Most observers are interested in personnel changes in making predictions about China’s future. But for President Xi Jinping (習近平), that future hinges on the success of no less than China’s cultural restoration.
Xi has never liked the phrase popular in the West: “the rise of China”. He prefers “China’s restoration”, to explain the country’s spectacular rise after a free fall following the Opium Wars.
His idea is to restore “Confucian legitimacy” – that is, the populist concept of the “mandate of heaven” – and repair the ruling machinery badly damaged by widespread official corruption in the past decades.
Whether or not Xi succeeds in handling various aspects of this restoration project, such as the “China Dream” campaign and the anti-West ideological campaign, will determine the future of China after the upcoming party congress.
The idea of the China Dream is not original, for generations of modern Chinese have been pursuing a similar goal. But what is new is Xi’s method of doing so with the help of traditional values, while previous generations had defined the dream as a modernising, and hence an anti-Confucian, project.
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