Outside the Wall Digest: 33 people were expelled from the party, why can’t Xi Jinping be held accountable?

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing from October 26 to 29. It adopted the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Several Major Issues Concerning Persistently Promoting Comprehensive and Strict Governance of the Party" and confirmed the expulsion of 33 senior officials from the party, the highest number at any plenary session since the reform and opening up. A total of 279 162 Central Committee members and 117 alternate members were present, 36 fewer than the Fourth Plenary Session of last year. Taiwanese online media "Newtalk" this week published a comment by Taiwanese scholar Chen Wenjia, "The Fifth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China strengthens Xi Jinping's centralization of power, and one-party autocracy deepens the crisis of the CCP's governance."

The article points out that this plenary session has pushed "comprehensive and strict governance of the party" to the forefront, but discipline only extends in one direction: the naked manifestation of "strict governance of the party" is that "discipline can be extended downwards, but accountability is difficult to pursue upwards."

The author believes that most of the dismissed senior officials are selected by the central government, and the responsibility cannot be placed solely on individuals: "Xi Jinping emphasizes the party's management of cadres and centralized leadership, so he must bear the corresponding responsibility for selection and appointment. When he cannot be appointed, he attributes it to the central government's knowledge of people, but after the incident, it is all attributed to personal deterioration."

Self-revolution: The scope of supervision is determined by the supervised

Chen Wenjia said that the "self-revolution" repeatedly emphasized by the CCP lacks external checks and balances: "If the scope, methods and consequences of supervision are still dictated by the person under supervision, Xi Jinping, it will be difficult to reach the core of power." The article said, "When power is concentrated in Xi Jinping, but accountability is limited to lower levels, anti-corruption will be difficult to touch the root of the system." Therefore, "The contradiction of Xi Jinping's autocratic governance lies in 'dealing with the ills derived from excessive concentration of power with more concentrated power.'"

The author pointed out that employment standards are also changing officialdom behavior: “When loyalty becomes the overwhelming assessment criterion, it is easy for officials to first judge whether the report is in line with their superiors’ intentions, and then decide how to present the problem.” Over time, “obedience is safer than truth-seeking, and silence is more beneficial than speaking up.” What is ultimately eroded is the CCP’s overall government effectiveness and governance capabilities.

The article concluded: "When Xi Jinping's authority overrides public interests, the entire country must bear the cost of his misjudgment. This is where the 'one-person, one-party dictatorship' deserves the most severe criticism."

Lighthouseism: Why Chinese liberals embrace Trump

The "What is China Thinking" column of the online cultural magazine "China Books Review" published an interview with political scientist Lin Yao "Lin Yao talks about how Chinese people view Trump" this week. Lin Yao teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy in the United States. In 2020, he wrote an article analyzing the "Sichuanization" phenomenon of Chinese public intellectuals. In 2024, he published a collection of essays "Empty Talk".

Lin Yao attributed this phenomenon to "lighthouse doctrine" and distinguished two types. The first is political beaconism: "Many Chinese liberal intellectuals have mainly suffered oppression at home, and their political knowledge mainly comes from domestic experience and trauma." Therefore, they "project their own political experience and political vocabulary onto the United States, constructing an illusory and beautified United States as a psychological fulcrum for their own political resistance." Criticism of the United States therefore seems to dismantle this fulcrum, and they will stand on the side of maintaining a more perfect image of the United States.

The second is civilizational lighthouseism. Lin Yao believes that Chinese liberalism has been mixed with social Darwinism and racism since its contact with the West in the late Qing Dynasty. Many people have assumed that "to have true liberal democracy, there must be a civilization similar to the West behind it." Therefore, they have moved closer to the Western right on issues such as immigration and minority rights.

Lin Yao said that this enthusiasm has dropped significantly in recent years. "The riots on Capitol Hill probably had the greatest impact on liberals, because they were a direct attack on the democratic system." He described the polarization of China’s intellectual circles during Trump’s second term as three paths: some openly turned to conservatism, others were embarrassed to praise them, and some absorbed the far-right narrative framework of the United States and instead praised Israel and criticized Europe and Canada as “white leftists.”

Speaking of the younger generation, Lin Yao said that people who grew up after 2008 "default to the premise that China is getting stronger and the United States continues to decline" and are more inclined to nationalism and nationalism. He also reminded that Chinese public opinion's description of the United States is also extreme: whether it was excessive beautification before or excessive belittlement now, it is all subject to the incentives of domestic politics and traffic - "If in China's current political atmosphere, it is relatively safe to criticize the United States to an extreme and distorted level, and it is easier to gain traffic, they will go in that direction."