Only those ignorant of its history think Communist China will survive forever. It won’t.

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How do great powers deal with aging leaders?

In the US, President Joe Biden, 81, has faced day after day calls to stand down after giving a widely panned debate performance against the 79-year-old former President Donald Trump.

In China, there have also been calls for Xi Jinping, the 71-year-old Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to step down.

There is a difference, however. In the CCP tyranny, if Xi surrendered power, he would be dead and he knows it.

A recent spate of purges, disappearances, and mysterious deaths among current and former officials is a case in point — it is making the Xi regime appear bizarre even given the standard abnormalities of CCP-controlled China.

A foreign minister (Qin Gang) disappeared and no one, except Xi and his henchmen, knew if he was dead or alive.  A popular former premier (Li Keqiang) drowned.  His death was uninvestigated and unexplained.  Two ministers of defense (Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu) were purged in late June.  They were both expelled from the CCP; which heralds further punishment down the line.

An estimated 120 high-ranking officials, including military officers, executives of state-owned enterprises, and national leaders, have departed, in one way or another (including commanders of the People’s Liberation Army rocket force, a key element of the military.) These recent arrests mark something new.

It’s true that in the 14 years since he came to power, Xi’s security forces have arrested, sentenced, or executed approximately 2.3 million government officials. But few were of such seniority.

So what’s happening? It is one of the paradoxes of Communist China that anti-corruption campaigns do very little to tackle corruption. Because that’s not the aim.

Wei Jingsheng, China’s most prominent democracy advocate, who grew up with Xi in the same compound reserved for the CCP elite, doesn’t believe Xi is serious about cleaning up corruption.  “If he were, he would change the system,” Wei said.  

Nearly all communist cadres are corrupt because corruption is built into the system as a means to reward loyalty. The flip side of the coin is that (well-grounded) accusations of graft can be made at any time. Xi uses anti-corruption campaigns as a means to get rid of the disloyal or the dangerous.

Wei Jingsheng defied Deng Xiaoping in 1979 by alerting the Party elders to his excesses.  The elders listened, for Wei was one of them, and ushered in a period of more moderate rule compared to the Mao era.  The elders prevented Deng from executing Wei, the fate of all who had previously defied the CCP.  Instead, he got a 15-year prison sentence following a nationally televised show trial, thus setting a precedent of jail rather than death for those who followed in his footsteps.

What of the new, 21st-century Chinese elite? Unnoticed, many “princelings” — progenies of the 500 families that founded the PRC in 1949 — have quietly left with their ill-begotten gains, and settled in exile, mostly in the Los Angeles area. This is not a sign of confidence in the CCP regime when the offspring of its founders have forsaken it.  

The current purges are abnormal, especially their focus on the military, which functions as the guarantor of power. This alone should prompt Washington to examine its approach to the PRC; as it would be foolhardy to take for granted the stability of the regime.  

Huge states may seem impregnable from the outside while rotting from within. Despite the erroneous notion that empires are “too big to fail,” and widespread fears of the instability caused when they crash, they have had a history of either slowly crumbling, as Rome did over hundreds of years; or suddenly collapsing — as the USSR did in 1989 or the Manchu Empire did in 1911.

Motivated by the fear of instability, the British Empire, the preeminent global power of the 19th Century, led soldiers of eight Western nations into China in 1900, to quash the Boxer rebellion and shore up the Manchu Empire.  It was the “stability of the dead,” for the Manchus went on a killing spree, while British soldiers, unconscionably, stood by and watched. The Manchu Empire still collapsed, causing even greater chaos and suffering through the callous prolongation of repression.  

Will the West learn from past mistakes?  Some will not.  For the business community, and many policymakers in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris, the Manchu Empire and its death rattles are simply unknown.  More importantly — there is still money to be made from the vast China market, and many would rather prop up the CCP regime, for it offers “stability,” however bloody and brittle, to continue raking in the cash.  

Still, the decrepit Manchu Empire serves as a better comparison for today’s PRC than the late, unlamented Soviet Union. Failing to learn from our past, or at least be open to the idea of sudden, unexpected change, will give us surprises; and not nice ones.  The American people, and the people of the world, deserve better from their leaders.

The topic of China did not get much play in the debate between President Biden and ex-President Trump.  However, it will intensify as the presidential election draws closer. It is too important to avoid.

Dimon Liu was born in China and fled at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. An independent commentator, she has written for the Asian Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

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