President Xi’s widening crackdown on corruptions gives jitters to Chinese biz leaders

PTI, Feb 1, 2022, 3:51 PM IST

As China entered the new lunar year of Tiger on Tuesday, the inclusion of the vague phrase of ”colluding with capital” in the anti-graft campaign launched by President Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party has sent shock waves across the country and raised concerns of an intensification of the crackdown against the high-tech industry and its billionaire owners, according to a media report.

The mention of Tiger evokes political significance in China as Xi, 68, started his tenure in power in 2012 with an anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking ”tigers” as well as lower-level ”flies”.

Since its launch, the official media accounts say over a million officials including over 50 high-ranking officials of the Chinese military have been punished.

In its latest account, a write-up in the state-run Xinhua news agency said in less than a decade, more than 400 officials at the ministerial level or above have been punished or investigated and over 8,300 fugitives were repatriated from more than 120 countries and regions.

However, the recent arrest of Zhou Jiangyong – once a political rising star and former party secretary of Hangzhou, the city of opulence headquartering top business houses like the auto giant Geely, Wahaha, China’s largest beverage manufacturer and Alibaba, the e-commerce behemoth- has sent shock waves as the “collusion with capital” is one of the main charges against him.

“Is capital evil? China’s widening crackdown has the ring of a bygone era defined by Mao and Marx,” Wang Xiangwei, a Beijing-based columnist wrote in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper.

”The announcement has immediately set tongues wagging about what the vague but potentially significant phrase of ‘colluding with capital’ really means, who or what the word ‘capital’ refers to, and its ramifications,” he said.

“It probably means that the year-long campaign that originally targeted China’s big tech firms but later spread to other private sectors will deepen and more senior officials and businessmen will be implicated this year,” he added.

The CPC since last year has stepped up its cracking down on monopolies, data security on China’s internet platform giants – including Alibaba, Tencent, and Didi Global, besides the abrupt halt of the mega listing of Alibaba’s Ant Group.

Since then, regulatory crackdowns have extended to more sectors including gaming, private education, food delivery, property, and the entertainment and biomedical industries denting investors’ confidence in the ‘reform & opening’ policies initiated by China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in late 1970s, scrapping Mao Zedong’s war against capital and “capitalist roaders” in the name of class struggle.

Deng’s reform & opening policy with the popular slogan “let some people get rich first” has led to unprecedented growth of the Chinese economy, propelling it to the second largest in the world.

“Since Xi Jinping became China’s top leader in late 2012, he has strengthened ideological controls at all levels of society. This has given rise to constant worries about the role of the private sector, which already contributes 60 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product and 80 per cent of total employment, among other things,” Wang wrote.

“On top of the crackdowns, the leadership’s call for ‘common prosperity’, first uttered in August last year, has added to the jitters as it is widely interpreted as targeting the country’s nouveau riche,” he said.

“But hyping the threat of capital serves no purpose other than fuelling more concerns that the country is moving further away from the entrepreneurship and other free-market principles that underpinned its dynamic economic growth of the past four decades,” he said.

The ideological policies of the CPC, which underwent constant change and up-gradation from Mao to Deng, are undergoing major policy shifts under Xi, who has politically well-entrenched himself as the supreme leader on par with Mao.

He is all set to continue with an unprecedented third five-year term in power, possibly for life, unlike his predecessors who retired after two terms.

Xi is widely expected to be confirmed for his third term at the once-in-a-five-year-party congress to be held in the middle of this year.

As he gets set for his third term, he launched a new initiative called “common prosperity for all” Chinese last year which is widely reported to be a new policy of redistribution of wealth, ending the era of billionaires in the country.

Earlier, he launched several political initiatives including the realisation of the Chinese dream broadly defined as reclaiming the lost greatness of the nation, making China a moderately prosperous society, elimination of absolute poverty, consolidation of CPC power over the military and integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan with the mainland.

“Mao was the founder of new China and Deng made it affluent. Xi – who’s overseeing the party at its centenary – will be seen as the leader who made the party and China strong,” Xie Maosong, a senior researcher with Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, told the Post earlier.

Amid concerns that the CPC is returning to its hardline ideology to crackdown against capital, Xi himself clarified the contours of his common prosperity theory in an article published in the party magazine ‘Qiushi’ last month.

“After the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, through a thorough review of both positive and negative historical experiences, our Party came to realise that poverty is not socialism, and thus began breaking down the constraints of outdated systems,” he said.

“This allowed some areas and some people to become better-off first, and drove the liberation and development of productive forces.

Bringing prosperity to all is an essential requirement of socialism, as well as an important feature of Chinese-style modernisation,” Xi said.

“The common prosperity we are working to achieve is for everyone, and covers enrichment of people’s lives in both the material and non-material sense. It is not prosperity for a minority, nor is it rigid egalitarianism,” he said.