The Xi Jinping Faction in China

On Friday, the Asahi Shimbun, a Tokyo newspaper, suggested that Chinese ruler Xi Jinping was building a “Zhejiang faction” by promoting longtime acquaintances, some from the Nanjing Military Region of the People’s Liberation Army. Xi served in party posts located in that district.

The report is striking because Xi is at the same time attacking factionalism inside the Communist Party. “Banding together in gangs, forming cliques for private ends, or forming factions is not permitted,”  the official Xinhua News Agency stated after a December 29th meeting of the Politburo, the high party organ.

Xi’s attack on factionalism, while attempting to form a faction of his own, is roiling the Communist Party. 

Xi Jinping’s attack on factionalism is not the first attempt to eliminate intra-party cleavages. The venerable Alice Miller, writing in the most recent edition of the Hoover Institution’s China Leadership Monitor, notes that after the turbulent Maoist years Deng Xiaoping did away with factional discourse. 

Deng started a process of institutionalization of party norms, establishing and enforcing guidelines and rules to ensure stability. By the time of Hu Jintao’s rule, many declared this process successful. For instance, Columbia University’s Andrew Nathan, no friend of the regime, continually spoke of its “resilience.”

But Deng, for all his efforts, did not eliminate either factions or intra-party struggle. Groups continued to form, operate, fight each other, and break apart. He only muted contention, and that had the effect of pushing disagreement out of sight, at least some of the time.  

As a result, factionalism became harder to follow than before. And in the party now there is an even more complex shifting of alliances, where personal allegiance, financial interest, ideology, and circumstance come together. All these factors influence behavior in an organizational setting that often changes in ways difficult to predict or even spot after the fact. The “political ecology,”  as Miller terms it, is particularly opaque.

It is in this context that Xi succeeded Hu in 2012, in an apparently “smooth” transition. His elevation was all the more remarkable because he became China’s supreme leader without the support of any faction he could call his own. Having no faction was a path to the apex of political power—he was the least unacceptable choice to all the factions—but it was no way to rule a system riven with constantly changing circles, cliques, and gangs. So in an apparent effort to hinder his adversaries, Xi initiated an assault on the legitimacy of their factions. In reality, Xinhua’s statement after the December 29th Politburo meeting was an attack on everyone else’s group.

But in the process of launching such a broad-based initiative, Xi has put cadres on edge. As a famed China watcher told me in private recently, Xi has managed to unite against him longtime rivals, his two immediate predecessors. Jiang Zemin, with his Shanghai Gang, and Hu, with his Communist Youth League, are now working with common purpose. 

So the factions that are not supposed to exist are preparing to engage in intra-party struggle against the organization’s leader. And apparently Xi is in some fashion trying to build his own base. Many say he heads the “Princeling faction.” Princelings are the offspring of former leaders and current high officials, and these individuals have diverse views spanning the political spectrum. They do not form a coherent grouping.

Because the Princelings are not a faction—even in the loosest sense of the word—Xi is building his own core of political support with promotions, demotions, and a nationwide purge. Therefore, observers are beginning to talk about a “Zhejiang faction,” a reference to his prior posting to that province.

Willy Lam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong points out that China’s liberals call Xi “the Mao Zedong of the 21st century.”Xi, who speaks in Maoist tones much of the time, may take that as a compliment, but many shudder. Mao, after all, magnified a factional struggle into the Cultural Revolution. 

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