When Xi speaks, Chinese officials jump. Maybe too high

The pressure on them may grow now that Xi has swept away a constitutional term limit on his presidency, strengthening his grip over the country.

But as these recent cases suggest, Xi’s daunting power may undercut effective policy or provoke public ire when lower officials scramble over each other to meet or exceed expectations, often leading to overreach and disarray.

“Whenever China has large-scale, top-down campaigns or initiatives, there are problems with overzealous officials and over-compliance,” said Elizabeth Economy, an expert on Chinese domestic and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who has written a book on policy under Xi.

“China under Xi Jinping will be particularly prone to this challenge,” she said. “He operates almost entirely in a top-down manner, and his emphasis on control means that feedback mechanisms — in terms of signals from both the market and civil society — don’t function well.”

Many Chinese people have welcomed Xi’s brusque, commanding way after what they saw as the listless rule of his predecessor, Hu Jintao. “Orders don’t make it out of Zhongnanhai” — the party headquarters in Beijing — became a common lament under Hu, who handed the reins to Xi in 2012.

Since then, Xi has cast himself as a decisive, unwavering leader with a long-term plan to make China a prosperous and respected great power. On Sunday, the legislature, the National People’s Congress, passed a constitutional amendment erasing a limit of two presidential terms and setting Xi on course to run China for at least another decade.

Xi began his second five-year term as president after a unanimous vote by legislators Saturday. Officials have said that extending Xi’s time in office beyond this term will assure stable policies for decades. The swift, secretive way in which Xi secured his extended reign let officials know that Xi would bulldoze past any resistance to get his way.

“Xi effectively is signaling to opponents of his policy agenda that they cannot wait him out and that they need to get on board with his agenda,” said Ryan Hass, a former director for China at the National Security Council who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “He wouldn’t take this step, and expose himself to such risk, unless he felt it was needed to bust through opposition to his agenda.”

Xi has already established sweeping authority, through his anti-corruption drive, and by creating a plethora of new powers and leadership groups that channel decisions to him. His overhaul of the military also demonstrated a willingness to take on entrenched bureaucracies.

A reorganization of ministries and agencies revealed at the congress Tuesday may let Xi and other leaders better steer bureaucracies. And a new government lineup, to be announced Monday, is likely to put Xi’s close allies atop his administration, making it easier to communicate and refine orders. One such ally, Wang Qishan, became vice president Saturday.

But Xi’s centralization of power over the sprawling bureaucracy can also create confusion and overshooting.

Officials are often reluctant to risk making decisions that draw suspicion of corruption or political disloyalty, a Beijing think tank said last year. But when ordered to act, cadres are often eager to avoid suspicion of sloth. The outcome, several experts said, can be a confounding mix of overreaction to orders and reluctance to act on one’s own initiative.

“Things are shot out of the top of the party, and they’re unworkable when they’re implemented,” said James McGregor, chairman of greater China for APCO Worldwide, who advises companies dealing with Chinese officialdom. “It’s very hard to get an official to make decisions these days, because they’re all scared of doing the wrong thing.”

China’s top-down system has long been prone to overshooting. But several factors may magnify such problems in Xi’s next term.

In recent years, he has installed officials loyal to him across most provinces and ministries, and ardent supporters have sworn unquestioning obedience. Their awed obedience can encourage rigid enforcement of even vague or conflicting policies. Officials rarely suffer serious punishment for over-eagerly imposing Xi’s orders.

“Unless loyalty is absolute, it is absolute disloyalty,” Li Hongzhong, one of the avid loyalists promoted by Xi into the party’s top ranks, said in 2016.

Xi’s efforts to break down walls between the party and government bureaucracies may discourage midlevel technocrats from improving policies. And Xi’s crackdown on rights lawyers, rights advocates, independent-minded journalists and online debate has silenced many voices who could question misguided government decisions.

Nobody sees such overreach producing anything as calamitous as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine. But Sun Liping, a well-known sociologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has warned against a mobilized bureaucracy stoking excessive zeal among subordinates.

“This mobilizing form of government sometimes evolves into a race between officials. ‘If you’re tough, then I’ll be even tougher. If you go to extremes, I’ll go further,'” Sun wrote about recent cases of official overreach in an essay that spread on China’s internet last month before being censored.

“Everything in one fell blow, thunderous bombast, magnified down layer after layer, and then after the task is completed, just chicken feathers everywhere,” Sun wrote, using a slang phrase for scant accomplishments.

Late last summer, to cut coal use in northern China and replace it with cleaner natural gas, officials tore out coal stoves and suspended coal deliveries. But when cold weather arrived, natural gas supplies fell short because planned pipelines had not all been finished.

Xi had ordered Beijing to reduce its population at least as early as 2014. But the effort progressed fitfully until last year, when Xi’s protégé, Cai Qi, apparently eager to make his mark as the new party chief in Beijing, seized on a deadly apartment building fire to push mass demolitions. Tens of thousands ended up scrambling for shelter after losing their homes.

Officials are also racing to turn Xi’s biggest visions into reality, including Xiong’an New Area, the new model city planned for a stretch of land 80 miles south of Beijing. Xi began vocally promoting the idea about a year ago.

Not all of Xi’s policies appear prone to waves of excess zeal. Since destabilizing policy gyrations in 2015, financial policy has settled down, said Barry Naughton, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies Chinese economic policymaking. But if China’s economy hits a rough patch, presenting difficult choices between shoring up growth and reining in debt, that stability may not last.

“It seems to me that bandwagoning, sycophancy, toadying are all becoming much more fundamental,” Naughton said. “That’s got to change the way the system functions as a whole.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

When Xi speaks, Chinese officials jump. Maybe too high

These days when Xi speaks, officials from the top of the Communist Party to the lowest village committees snap to unflinching attention.

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