27 October 2022

In China, It’s One Man, One Ideology, One Party

 Henry Gao

At the closing session of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that the meeting had been a “complete success.” And it certainly was—but only for one person: Xi himself. He was able to achieve all of his objectives: one vision, one leader, and one party.

As Xi announced in the closing session, the first benchmark of success was the unification of vision within the party, which he described as “Chinese-style modernization,” a term that has evolved over the course of the last few decades.

Modernization has been the goal of China since its humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars. The CCP kept emphasizing the idea after it took power in 1949, but most people in China today would associate the concept with Deng Xiaoping, who made the goal of reform to achieve the Four Modernizations—industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology—after he came to power in 1978.



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