Most people probably have heard the proverb about the blind men and the elephant, each describing a very different animal depending on the part of the animal by which they stood.
Revision 1: let’s swap out the elephant for a dragon, a Chinese dragon. And that Chinese dragon, well it’s the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Revision 2: let’s swap out China experts for those blind people. As experts, their vision is pretty acute. Even if they were blind in the past, their vision is particularly acute as they’ve seen this dragon before~ this being a specific CCP Dragon: a historically occasionally quite wonderous 3rd Plenum dragon.
This special edition of China Currents is a ‘three-peat’ thrice over. First, this examination of the 20th Party Congress’ 3rd Plenum follows two previous China Currents special editions dedicated to the 18th and 19th Party Congress 3rd Plenums, in 2013 and 2018, respectively. As with those prior editions, the contributors are members of the China Research Center. Second, most contributors to this edition wrote essays for the previous editions as well. Third, it’s Xi Jinping’s third 3rd Plenum, he having broken with the Party’s post Mao two-term norm by extending his status as CCP chair into a 3rd term.
The 3rd plenary session of a CCP Party congress is the point during the 5-year term of a Party chair when the Party puts forth, under the chair’s leadership, a range of general policy pronouncements to guide development for the rest of that Party congress. It informs the 5-year plans that will serve to direct more concrete development activities in the years to follow.
Much like dragons, some 3rd Plenums have been the stuff of legend, notably the 11th Party Congress’ 3rd Plenum which launched Reform and Opening to the Outside World under Deng Xiaoping and the 14th Party Congress’ 3rd Plenum which broke the post 1989 shackles, launching a Socialist Market Economic System which would spawn tremendous growth rates over the next decade.
And Xi’s 3rd 3rd Plenum? Anticipation rose as conventional 3rd plenum dates passed ~ through fall 2023, into winter and spring 2024, before the plenum was finally convened July 15-18. Spectators wondered whether this was a pregnant pause, indicating gestation of a new stage of dragon evolution. The Resolution produced by the plenum, however, produced few oohs and ahs from observers as they observed few if any striking changes to either the policy features or the action plans of the dragon. The very title of Resolution bespoke more of the same: ‘Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization.’ Apparently, Xi ten years prior having determined China’s ‘New Normal’ (新常态) to be an era of high quality development (rather than the high-speed development focus of the previous development era) meant that in the intervening 10 years the Party itself had already established an appropriate ‘new normal,’ thus needing no significant adaptations for this round.
That said, the Resolution suggests not entropy but rather a manifestation of the dragon’s self-assurance as to its hegemonic presence and its insistence in ensuring its ability to assert its prerogative in all domains of socio-economic development. The Resolution’s turgid prose affirms the Party to play a pivotal role in all developmental domains. Seeking to bring the disparate party-state appendages into appropriate coordination with one another is Xi’s New Development Concept (新发展理念). Formulated in 2015, it set forth high quality development’s constitutive principles to be: innovative 创新 coordinated 协调 green 录色 open 开放 shared 共享. These principles seek to provide an organic unity to the dragon’s disparate parts, with the Resolution ostensibly presenting an integration optimally suited for China’s immediate environment, domestic and international. Whether deeds reflect words, however, remains to be seen.
That’s where our contributors prove so helpful. They have kept a close eye on the dragon from their respective angles for some time now, specifically its positioning relative to 3rd plenums. Having seen the characteristics of its movements over the past decade, they are well positioned to assess how closely its deeds have aligned with its words, using that in turn to inform their evaluations of future courses of action.
If the Resolution itself stands as one dimension of Xi’s Development Philosophy ~ Coordinated Development ~ the essays in this edition might be understood as providing analytical purchase on the other dimensions.
Innovative 创新: Economic Policy
Xuepeng Liu returns to examine the dragon’s most recent writhing amidst somewhat conflicting impetuses – spearheading national development and enabling economic and technological innovation, amidst all this striving to find an appropriate business balance between domestic control and international openness.
Shared 共享: Corruption
Andrew Wedeman’s meticulous analysis of current data and cases pertaining to the Party’s campaign against government corruption finds reason to believe that corruption is not a passing malady but rather a chronic condition that the dragon can only manage, not cure.
Green 录色: Environment
Isobel Li and Eri Saikawa revisit efforts to Build a Beautiful China. Homing in on Party efforts to cut air pollution, they believe that while the dragon has the strength to do so, it remains to be seen whether it possesses the willpower.
Open 开放: Regional Development
Abbos Bobokhonov assesses China’s regional developmental strategies that build upon pathways fostered through the Belt and Road Initiative. He finds good cause to believe the dragon will find itself among friends in Central Asia, each side providing welcome nourishment to the other.
There is one contributor who does not fit within Xi’s New Development Philosophy. Yawei Liu provides an even longer-term perspective on the dragon, reviewing key congresses and Plenums since the Party’s founding. In doing so, he questions the viability of the dragon as currently constituted, arguing that by failing to have incorporated a key capacity ~ political liberalization ~ this dragon’s long-term vitality is critically compromised.
Taken together, the essays make the dragon analogy all the more apt, presenting many different textures to this creature and many different motivations to its actions. Viewed from different policy angles, it presents as a dynamic force or a stultifying force, a nurturing presence or an oppressive presence, as a thriving life form or a dying life form. Often, the essays see these countervailing qualities not as either/or but both/and, depending on which motivations the dragon proves to follow.
Amid all the uncertainty, one prediction I’ll make is that that come 2029 we will once again have the opportunity to draw upon the expert insights of China Research Center members to evaluate the aspirations of the 21st Party Congress’ 3rd Plenum (under the continued leadership of Xi Jinping, I’ll wager) relative to the dragon’s actual actions in the 20th Party Congress era.
