Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation: The Reassertion of Ideological Governance in Historical Perspective

Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. How can one make sense of what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing? This essay offers perspectives from the history of the Party and its notable style of rule: ideological governance through rectification (zhengfeng). This Party ‘statecraft’ which dates back to Yan’an in the 1940s and across the Mao period also draws on long-standing Chinese political norms. Xi Jinping is reviving a form of ideological governance in which only the Party can save China and only rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. It is Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation against the reform Leninism of the past three decades and its perceived failures to manage social tensions and Party corruption.