March 8, 2022

Looking Ahead to China's 20th Party Congress

In a Heritage Special Report, Heritage Visiting Fellow Michael Cunningham writes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is gearing up for its most important political event of the decade. Sometime in the second half of 2022, China’s most senior leaders will assemble at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People for the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Maneuvering ahead of the event will dominate political life in China throughout 2022, and the outcomes of the congress will determine the country’s trajectory for years to come.

The CCP has held a national congress every five years since 1977. These twice-a-decade gatherings are the Party’s main platform for presenting top-line policy priorities and announcing senior leadership appointments, making them the most important events in China’s political calendar. This year’s Party Congress will be the 20th such gathering since the CCP’s founding in 1921.

The 20th Party Congress was always expected to be consequential. Based on informal CCP protocols developed in recent decades to remove much of the uncertainty and volatility associated with leadership transitions, Xi was supposed to step down at the end of this year’s gathering, having completed his two terms in office and exceeded the retirement age of 68. A new generation of leadership was to be appointed in his place, which would set the stage for future evolution of Party governance. Now, less than a year before the end of his second term, Xi shows no intention of stepping down. If he gets his way, this year’s Party Congress will not just be consequential; it will be game-changing. However, this outcome is not guaranteed. Contrary to popular notions of Xi as an all-powerful autocrat, he is not the only person who matters in China’s political system. Xi derives his power from the consent of the broader CCP leadership, which, like previous leaders, he must earn through a mixture of performance, maneuvering, and compromise.

How these intra-Party dynamics play out over the next several months will decide what happens at the Party Congress. That, in turn, will in large part determine the trajectory China follows not just for the next five years but for the foreseeable future. In particular, the outcomes of the Party Congress will help answer three important questions.

1. It will determine who leads China for the next five to 10 years and possibly even longer
2. It will reveal how powerful Xi is.
3. It will outline the policy trajectory China will follow for the next five years.

The 20th Party Congress will have profound implications for China’s trajectory in the coming five to 10 years. While the greatest impact will result from leadership appointments and their effects on China’s political stability and Xi’s ability to push through his policy program, the CCP work report presented at the congress will lay out what this program will look like over the next five years and beyond as the Party pursues its 2035 goals. This publicly available document will not include concrete policies—those will be developed by government bodies at a later date—but it will be the most authoritative statement of the Party’s top-line plans. It will serve as the foundation driving the proceedings of the annual NPC sessions and the rationale for policy and regulatory developments in the coming years.

Particular attention should be paid to the jockeying and political horse-trading, which has already begun and will characterize the period between now and the start of the congress. Such positioning will take many forms but will be most clearly seen in personnel changes—especially in key provinces and municipalities—and anti-corruption purges. The crackdowns currently underway in multiple sectors, though aimed in large part at addressing noncompliance in anti-monopoly and other regulatory areas, also likely serve to keep elements of Xi’s opposition on the defensive and help set the stage for the economic realignment measures that will be unveiled during the Party Congress.

Related: Click here to read Heritage Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow Brett Schaefer and AEI Distinguished Senior Fellow Danielle Pletka's report on countering China's growing influence in the International Telecommunication Union.

China Thinks Time Is on Its Side Regarding Taiwan Takeover

Taiwan is in danger of being subsumed by China. But it’s not imminent, and it’s not because of what’s going on in Ukraine—at least not in the way you may think. Bringing Taiwan under its control has been the driving objective of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) foreign policy since its founding. Heritage ASC Director Walter Lohman writes that an invasion of Taiwan, or even seizing one of its outlying islands, however, is fraught with risk for China’s rulers.

First, there is the operational military risk. Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Chinese move on Taiwan involves it getting past hundreds of miles of water. This is one of the most difficult things for any military to do. And this is before it engages in any effort to take and hold ground. Failing in either phase would carry profound political consequences for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) grip on power.

Then there is the risk of blowback from the international community, much as Russia is suffering right now. The eastern half of China is too rich and developed, too deeply integrated into global value chains, to absorb the sort of isolation that the world is now imposing on Russia. Over the past 30 years, the Chinese people have forged a tacit bargain with the Communist Party: Keep the good times rolling, and we let you live. Frozen bank accounts and runs on banks would quickly upend this. Vladmir Putin’s whims do nothing to change these factors.

And now there is Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is leading a direct assault on the peace that the U.S. has kept in Europe for almost 80 years. A Putin win, or even a long stalemate, means a weaker U.S. If you’re in Beijing, you reckon that you just need to continue pressing your global advantages. This historical trendline is Beijing’s greatest ally in taking Taiwan. Sure, there is still work for Beijing to do. History must be enabled. This is what Beijing’s renewed and very successful campaign to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic allies is about. It’s behind its—again, successful—effort to prevent Taiwan’s fuller participation in international organizations. And it’s why Beijing’s talking points on Taiwan never change. Any capital that wishes to maintain diplomatic relations with China is obliged to recognize just “one China.” The nuances vary from country to country. Beijing interprets them all to mean “there is only one China, and Taiwan is a part of China.” And it reserves the prerogative punish any transgressions, actual, imagined or projected.

The Chinese have us coming and going. Wait for history to unfold on the trajectory it’s on, and the Chinese win Taiwan without firing a shot. Force the issue on Taiwan, and go to war.

The only way to solve the puzzle is to change Chinese perceptions of the historical trend. Win in Ukraine, help Taiwan expand its international economic and political ties, and acquire the weapons it needs to defend itself. Most importantly, the U.S. must convince Beijing that it will have the material and resolve to win a war in the Taiwan Strait long into the future. While what’s going on in Ukraine does not make war over Taiwan imminent, in the absence of such an effort, a Russian victory will help seal its fate.

March 16, 2022 @ 3:00 pm EDT - The 2022 B.C. Lee Lecture featuring The Honorable Mike Pompeo

The Heritage Foundation is honored to host former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for our signature event on U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific. Heritage’s annual B.C. Lee Lecture on international affairs was endowed by the Samsung Group in honor of its founder, the late B.C. Lee, to focus on the U.S. relationship with the Indo-Pacific.