Xi Jinping has made it clear he plans to ride this ship all the way down.
At the latest CCP Congress, more leaders were removed, but one official was elevated: Zhang Shengmin. Zhang oversees military purges, and his promotion signals that more purges are coming soon.
As Xi intensifies the power vacuum in China, it will inevitably lead to major policy failures and make it increasingly difficult for the outside world to peek behind the curtain.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Over this past week and into the weekend, the Chinese Communist Party had their party congress, which is, you know, really very little more than a rubber stamp of the leaders policy prerogatives, leader being Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping has basically evolved into a dictator in the mold of some of his predecessors. And to understand where we are right now and what’s about to happen, I think it’s best to take a big step back.
In the aftermath of World War Two, hell during World War Two, there was a civil war in China that was finally resolved in favor of the communists in the 1950s, and a guy by the name of Mao Zedong became the winner and the first leader of China. He was a genocidal dictator of his own people. And over the course of the Thousand Flowers Blooming and the Great leap Forward in the Cultural Revolution, tens of millions of his own people were killed, some for seditious information, like knowing how to work a lawnmower. Basically, if you know how to do something, you were a real problem. Echoes of Trumpism in there, by the way. Anyway, put that to the side anyway. Eventually he died, thankfully, and a guy by the name of Deng Xiaoping took over. And Deng was of the opinion that Mao was a disaster and started to unwind a lot of the horrible things that he had done and set China on the track that it has been on ever since to become a unified, industrialized country, and he’s broadly successful in that. But he also knew that he couldn’t predict what was going to happen ten, 20, 30 years after he was gone. So he forced all of the party committee members to come together, and he picked the next two successors, Jiang Zemin of southern China and Hu Jintao of northern China, because he knew that the country would need the economic and financial acumen of the South…Shanghai, combined with the national zeal of the North around Beijing, in order to form a country that would stick. But he smart enough, know he didn’t know what the country would need next. And so the idea was 20 years later. The North and the South would come together and pick a compromise candidate. Well, they did that about 15 years ago. And that candidate is the guy who’s in charge now. Xi Jinping.
And Xi Jinping didn’t have a big following, and he wasn’t a big institutional powerbroker. So the North and the South thought that they could control them. They were wrong. And ever since then, Xi Jinping has been purging every aspect of Chinese society of anyone who is capable of independent thought whatsoever. And I would argue that he’s pretty much completed that. And now he’s a one man government ruling from a black box, and he’s not giving up power at all. So during the Communist Congress that we just had more people were purged. The purges that were high level from the last year were codified into law. And the body itself is now about one quarter empty because he’s really literally running out of people who can do the job, or who are so brain dead, they’ll just do whatever they were told. This is a real problem in the Republican Party, too, because Trump has destroyed the recruitment arm anyway. One name that was elevated was a guy by the name of Zhang Shengmin, I think is how it’s pronounced. Anyway, this is a guy who has been rolling around the top of the power structure for the last few years as an Inquisitor, and it’s been his job to basically purge the Chinese military, which he has done to the point that I would argue it’s made the Chinese military largely nonfunctional. Regardless of what you think about corruption in the Chinese military, which is very real, there is now only two people on the equivalent of the Chinese joint chiefs, Xi Jinping, the leader, and Zhang, who’s the inquisitor. That’s it. Well, now, Zhang has been elevated to the Politburo. And the only reason you would put an Inquisitor on the Politburo is if you’re planning on doing more purges.
The Politburo is roughly analogous to the US cabinet, and next year Xi will be up for his fourth five year term. You’re only supposed to have two. And so he’s basically already declared that he’s going to be a dictator for life. And now he’s declared that Zhang is going to purge the top of Chinese society for him. And really, all that is going to be left in a few months here is Xi and nothing else. Now that will allow technically decisions to be made very, very quickly. But we’ve already seen the Chinese bureaucracy hollow out because if any information makes it to Xi that he doesn’t want to hear, that he has so punished the bureaucracy that it’s not that they stop transmitting the information, they stop collecting the information at all. So China has become a bit of a black box that is basically driven by a nationalist fuhrer and nothing else. And the Communist Party Congress that we’ve just had now makes sure that that cannot be undone. So Xi will ride this country into the ground with Zhang at his right hand, whipping everybody along the way. The problem that the rest of us have is it’s really hard to get an accurate view of what’s going on inside the country now, because everyone who used to collect that information has now been purged, and anyone who might say something intelligent is now being punished.
So, buckle up.
