MCLC: Xi Jinping and the '4 Comprehensives'

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Xi Jinping and the ‘4 Comprehensives’
Source: China Real Time, WSJ (2/25/15)
Xi Jinping Hopes to Count in Chinese Political History With ‘Four Comprehensives’
By Josh Chin
Connoisseurs of Chinese political numerology can finally take a breath: After more than two years in office, Chinese President Xi Jinping has uncorked his own ordinal political philosophy.
In the past, Chinese leaders have tended to fall into two camps when expounding their theories of development: those who favor numbered lists, and those who opt for more conventional proclamations. Late Premier Zhou Enlai and former President Jiang Zemin were in the former camp, pushing the “Four Modernizations” and “Three Represents,” respectively. Meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping (“Reform and Opening Up”) and former President Hu Jintao (“Scientific Outlook on Development”) opted to eschew the integers.
Questions have loomed about what slogan Mr. Xi, who replaced Mr. Hu at the helm of the Communist Party in November 2012, would use to represent himself in the party’s theoretical pantheon. For a time, some thought he might follow his non-numeric predecessor and go with the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation, a notion he put forward shortly after taking power.  It now appears he has decided otherwise.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily and other Chinese media gave blanket coverage to what Mr. Xi has taken to calling the “Four Comprehensives,” a set of principles emphasizing the need to “comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society, comprehensively deepen reform, comprehensively govern the nation according to law and comprehensively be strict in governing the party.”
Aside from the idea of a moderately prosperous society — a Confucian ideal revived and popularized under Mr. Hu — the other catch-phrases are all closely associated with Mr. Xi, who has cracked down hard on corruption in Communist Party ranks while pushing for legal reforms and warning of the need to be resolute about reforms in general.
It wasn’t the first mention of “Four Comprehensives” in the Chinese press. Mr. Xi introduced the idea during an inspection tour in eastern China’s Jiangsu province in mid-December, according to People’s Daily, and the phrase made a few scattered appearances on Chinese-language news websites earlier this month. But Wednesday was the first time the theory was propagated on a wide scale, suggesting that it had earned widespread acceptance at the top of the party.
“Its great weight and meaning are clear to see – its bears paying attention to,” the People’s Daily wrote in a front-page editorial on the idea. “Standing at the intersection of history and the future, a greater journey is unfolding before us,” it added.
The Four Comprehensives, though vague, are lucid by the standards of numbered Chinese political slogans. The Three Represents, for example, calls for the Communist Party represent “the requirements for developing China’s advanced social productive forces, the orientation China’s advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people.”
Even more confounding is “One Center and Two Basic Points,” a formulation put forward in 1987 by then-Premier Zhao Ziyang that proclaimed that economic development was the central task of the government, which simultaneously had to hold to two key notions: reform and opening up, and the Four Cardinal Principles.
(For the morbidly curious, the Four Cardinal Principles are: the Socialist Road, the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, the leading role of the Party and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought).
It’s not clear what, if any, impact Mr. Xi’s new theory will have on actual policy. What is clear, with China’s annual legislative meetings set to convene soon in Beijing, is that officials throughout the country will be rushing to study it comprehensively.
– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 26, 2015
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