This is a perfectly rational decision, you just need to look at it from the value system making the decision. The Party's #1 goal is to remain in power. Pretty much everything they do is with that in mind. They also seem to assume that revolution is always knocking at the door. [1] Communism has had a long history of ideological coercion (it's pretty much a founding principle), so this sort of thing should come as no surprise. In fact, it's a lot more subtle than most. [2]
[1] This may not be so far-fetched. Several years ago a Party document was released documenting 100k or 200k protests, ranging from small to large. When the bullet train derailed 3 or 5 years ago, Weibo went wild within minutes and ultimately some provincial Party officials took the fall. And the example of Arab Spring has got to be pretty scary.
[2] I don't know if it is true anymore, but historically people were encouraged to rat out neighbors with ideological deficiencies. Not just in China, this is pretty much standard fare in totalitarian states.
You’re forgetting that China had a renaissance moment under the comunist party. They may not agree with some things but are majorly backing their government. They’re in a way rational, if the communist party fell overnight they’d be in big trouble, they wouldn’t be able to self govern democratically. The problem is that the party is corrupted and has absolutely no plans to reform. It will only get more corrupted before something significant changes.
This needs to be viewed through the lens of the Communist Party's primary motivation: the persistence of the single-party system.
In a single-party system, you can't allow dissent or you will end up with multiple parties, if enough of the dissenters agree with each other.
When someone speaks against the government in China, particularly someone with a high profile like Jack Ma, the government is worried that other people might agree with him, and they might form a movement that demands change and challenges the party's policies.
If the party allows this to happen, that would mean they recognize the legitimacy of political action originating outside of the party. That would be an existential threat to the single-party system.
(Also, the last time the party allowed public dissent, it grew out of control and turned into the Tiananmen Square protests. The party's current leaders remember that time well, and the lesson they took from it is that allowing dissent was a serious miscalculation.)
In an authoritarian state, any spontaneous popular movement is dangerous to the leadership, even if it aligns with their nominal aims (maybe especially then). The CCP has been "Communist" in name only for a long time, but Deng Xiaopings market reforms were probably the most obvious breaking point. It's not unsurprising that students who had been taught about the inevitable victory of Communism would protest against this change of course, especially given the surrounding economic instability.
Although Communism and Democracy are frequently seen as opposites in the West, Chinese propaganda doesn't hesitate to claim Democracy for themselves (there are elections after all) and volunteering in various state-adjacent organizations is encouraged. From the point of view of an upstanding party member, organizing a student rally probably seemed like the right thing to do, in good old revolutionary tradition.
A good portion of the top CCP leadership were promoted based on loyalty rather than meritocracy, so they are generally not the brightest of the bunch.
That being said, I can understand how this would make sense for an audience in China. China was ruined by one revolution after another for the last hundred years, each time under an idealist with a new promise of salvation, people have inevitably become cynical to the idea of violent changes.
China isn't ultimately ruled by a dictator but by a party. You seem to think that the party would allow an incompetent person to assume the top position and stay there, which I don't see evidence for.
It’s inevitable because of the CCP’s leadership and the objective conditions by their analysis. Remember CCP is an ideological party which means core party members do believe CCP as a party is more important than anyone including Xi. All decisions are made because the party’s ideology, not because anyone’s personal decision.
It doesn’t make sense from outside the party as I said so I think your feeling is probably why Kevin Rudd is lobbying in both U.S and Australia for better understanding the situation.
Also you can only go so far ideologically before stopped by the reality (or vice versa in realism because ideology is a larger part of our self-identity). A more ideological CCP only means they are more willing to afford the cost, push as far as they can, and retreat a little bit after over doing it. IMO cost-benefit analysis (or usually, who is the winner / the winning scenario) isn’t very helpful in such context because that’s not CCP’s calculation.
I'm not familiar with the details of the Communist party, but today's China is autocratic. It's a mistake to take the democratic principle of "people can enact change" and take it to an autocratic government (and outright contradiction when using the adjective "totalitarian").
Okay, the government is also "people" in some way. But the "people" who can currently enact change are the ones who benefit from the current government, and it's silly to expect that they have a sudden synchronized change of mind.
For the billions of masses, they don't stand a chance against an organized military response. We've had a taste of that in China itself in 1984, as well as in events leading up to South Korea's Gwangju Massacre.
Parent's "only they can help themselves" quip is just a way of absolving any responsibility: "it's not my problem". I'm not saying whether we can do anything or not, but this kind of statements kill any rational thought towards solving the problem before it's even concieved.
Does anyone care to speculate on the odds that the Communist Party of China loses power/control in the next 5 years? 10 years? From the other side of the world I don't have any idea how likely this is, and I never see anyone discuss it.
The irony is that if they weren't so scared and determined to keep power by any means necessary, they could address the people's stated grievances (justice, corruption, and equal opportunity) and they would keep power by general consent.
What I can't figure out is why they think they need to retain power. Is it because they are scared of what will happen to them if they don't? Do they feel that China without Communism will be chaos? Or is it just institutional momentum?
The CCP is absolutely massive in terms of what percentage of its people are party office-holders. They have unprecedented levels of control over all aspects of Chinese life.
Revolutions grow out of revolts. Revolts grow out of riots. CCP is remarkably adept at managing riots. For riots to grow, you need revolutionaries to amass power. CCP is remarkably adept at policing this kind of action too.
The CCP isn't going away anytime soon. Xi Jinping has way more to fear from intra-party power struggles than from grassroots activism.
Given China’s political structure, wouldn’t it just take one participant (President Xi) to wake up and decide “party over” if it became politically favorable to do so?
This is very true. Mao almost killed the Communist Party. So long as the Party can provide stability and prosperity they will stay in power. But I fail to see the problem here? Most people just want to live their lives- not sit in caves and have philosophical debates about human rights and democracy.
On the order of a lifetime (50-60 years)? No. Especially given that you have an incumbent political party that is (at least in name), still Communist and committed to the equitable distribution of wealth across the population.
China has a lot of internal tensions, not the least of which is that as people become more affluent, they start to want greater transparency from the government, greater fairness, and more independence. All of those desires put them in conflict with the current regime. The party may be able to keep things under control, but I don't think there's any question that it's already grappling to maintain order via censorship, suppression of dissent, etc.
The inner disagreement in Communist party of China could be as big as whether to adopt democracy or more central control of power; whether to stick to communism or drop it. That hadn't break the party into multiple ones so far
The CCP is the only political party in China and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way. The CCP is also known for abducting journalists for reporting on "rumors" (i.e. reporting on stuff the CCP doesn't like), the Tiananmen Square massacre, hiring an army of paid internet trolls to advance the party line on domestic and foreign websites, and trying to set up an Orwellian "social credit" system where things like support for the party line affect whether you can take out a loan from the bank or use the public transit system. I could go on but I think you get the point.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, everything I mentioned has been widely reported on and can be confirmed in ten seconds with a Google search.
[1] This may not be so far-fetched. Several years ago a Party document was released documenting 100k or 200k protests, ranging from small to large. When the bullet train derailed 3 or 5 years ago, Weibo went wild within minutes and ultimately some provincial Party officials took the fall. And the example of Arab Spring has got to be pretty scary.
[2] I don't know if it is true anymore, but historically people were encouraged to rat out neighbors with ideological deficiencies. Not just in China, this is pretty much standard fare in totalitarian states.
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