This week, China is treating the world to elaborate political theater mired in secrecy: the 20th Communist Party Congress.
It's a gathering of more than 2,000 top party officials to choose the next iteration of leaders, including the next head of the Communist party. Despite occasional pretentions at democratic consensus, this party congress' objective is being carefully managed to signal the opposite: that the party's leader now, Xi Jinping, has absolute control over all levers of power as he continues into his third term in office.
Watching from afar, it is easy to feel that the party — under the helm of one man — is very much in the driver's seat. Dissent within China is at a minimum, in large thanks to formidable set of digital surveillance and informational controls. Much of the population's every movement remains controlled through zero-Covid measures. An ongoing purge of civil society has obliterated a once-nascent network of media outlets, NGOs, law firms. Despite some internal party tensions, Xi still looks set to appoint his loyalists into power and thus stay locked on a political agenda of national rejuvenation Xi claims has guided the party for the last century.
Two new books challenge this sense of inevitable permanence of the Chinese party state. China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, written by Dutch historian Frank Dikötter, charts how the party's control over info and financial and political institutions has endured even in the face of economic waste, ideological vacillation, environmental pollution, and appetite for brutal oppression.
