Matthew Pottinger, former China advisor to the White House, recently drew up, in a column, the edifying assessment of eleven years of purges under the undivided power of President Xi Jinping: “Six members of the political bureau, 35 members of the central committee, 60 generals and probably several million local executives. » (Financial Times, October 9, 2023).
Such events, often perceived as simple technical adjustments, are however not accidental. In the Marxist-Leninist tradition, the primacy of the Party justifies all sacrifices, including on the economic level. To defend the absolute power of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi appears ready to draw a line under four decades of strong growth.
During the 1920s, in the Soviet Union, the New Economic Policy (NEP) desired by Lenin liberalized an economy battered by civil war and famine and produced a spectacular recovery. In the same logic, the policy of “reform and opening” by Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, brought the Chinese economy out of the rut after the chaotic decades of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Communist society then saw the emergence of a new non-communist bourgeoisie, with the “nepmen” in the USSR or private entrepreneurs in China, whose status was recognized in the Constitution in 1988, ten years after the opening of the China. In the USSR as in China, the most profitable companies often straddle the public and private sectors; overlap often results in the erosion of Party power. The rapprochement between the Nepmen and the new Soviet elite is viewed with suspicion by the Party.
“Hunting Tigers and Flies”
At the end of the 1920s, Stalin, now sole master on board, abruptly stopped the NEP; the Central Party Control Commission then initiated a large-scale purge against the “collusion with capitalist elements”. In a few months, the Party lost more than 11% of its membership. Foreign companies (German, American, English, etc.), authorized to invest under the NEP, become targets, as in the Shakhty trial (where engineers from the town of Shakhty are accused of sabotage for the benefit of “foreign capitalists”). in 1928. In China too, distrust grew in the face of collusion between the communist elite and the new private bourgeoisie.
Upon his election, Xi called into question the legacy of Deng Xiaoping by inaugurating the anti-corruption policy: “Hunting tigers and flies. » It is a purge on the scale of the entire society, from members of the government to “small” civil servants, from the upper echelons of the Party to simple members. Private entrepreneurs, once pampered by the Party, are now in the crosshairs: Jack Ma, of the Alibaba group; Bao Fan, of China Renaissance; Chen Shaojie, from Tencent Group…
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