The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held from October 16 to October 22, 2022. Brookings experts reflect on the elite political gathering and what its outcomes mean for China and the rest of the world.To get more news about 20th CPC national congress, you can visit shine news official website.

The appointments to the Politburo and its Standing Committee confirm even more clearly than ever that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top priority is to maximize his control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) system. He wants his men on his leadership team to lead the agencies responsible for maintaining control. It is no surprise, therefore, that that the Minister of State Security has become a Politburo member for the first time.

Xi was able to dominate personnel selection because he had gained control already of the military, the security agencies, the organization/personnel system, and the propaganda system. He had ignored established norms when they were obstacles to his building his power. Moreover, from the very moment that he became general secretary, he stressed the importance of national security (mainly domestic security) and built new institutions to carry out that priority. His negative definition of China’s threat environment provides a perfect justification to intensify control, and the United States and Taiwan are among the convenient “dangers” to which he can point.

As a result, he has disregarded the conclusions that Deng Xiaoping reached about the reasons for the dysfunction of the CCP system under Mao: concentration of power under one man. Ironically, I doubt that Xi’s father would have agreed with the system he has built.

So, under the Xi system, power is highly concentrated, the flow of information to the top is tightly constricted, and the risks of anyone challenging Xi’s view of reality based on objective information are high. The likely consequence is that Xi & Co. will become even more prone to “group think” than they already are; they will misperceive the reasons that the regime is facing difficulties and never blame its own policies; and miscalculate how China should respond.

Several widely reported incidents of public defiance occurred during the Congress: the one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge, “not my president” posters on several university campuses, and Hong Kong protesters outside of the Chinese consulate in Manchester, UK. These incidents were small-scale, rapidly disseminated then swiftly censored; and contained blatant mockery of paramount leader Xi.

The first two features — small-scale and rapidly disseminated online — are common to the Chinese tradition of popular dissent. However, the last feature — blatant attacks on the reign of China’s paramount leader — is unusual. Popular protesters in China have long learned to couch their resistance in the language of economic grievances and the law. They understand that to make their claims heard, they should focus on bread-and-butter issues while proclaiming unflagging support for the Party. But this time, three sets of dissidents broke from the usual script of defiance to directly criticize the supreme leader and the Party.

These three incidents, although representing only the polar extreme of dissent, tap into a broader undercurrent of societal discontent both within and outside of China that is pressing for the Party to address. In response, the Party has opted out of concessions, with state media opining that “lying flat is no way out” of the pandemic. Tencent has punished commentators of the bridge incident with loss of Wechat account access. And China’s wolf warrior diplomats proclaimed it their duty to use fists to protect their leader’s dignity. This signals that Xi Jinping 3.0 will likely continue favoring repression over concession when it comes to quelling dissent.