enterprises soared over a period of a few years, up from 54.3 percent in 2012 to 73.1 percent by 2017. The number of private enterprises that have established party organizations increased from 1.627 million in 2013 to 1.877 million in 2017 (Xinhua 2014c, 2018). The way the party organizations (party branches and party groups) operate in the private sector demonstrated the party’s total control of the whole society but not a direct interference with private enterprises’ business operation. It appears that the party wanted to stay informed about the status quo and trend of development in the private enterprises but did not try to take them over and push them out of the economy. Other moves undertaken by the party in recent years, however, demonstrated that the party is gradually intruding in the private sector. The CPC is advocating for the party committees to play a greater role in the management of private enterprises, even foreign companies or joint ventures. It also pushes for democratic management of private enterprises, meaning owners and employees jointly running the business, as shown by Qiu Xiaoping, vice minister of human resources and social security in 2018 (Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of China 2018). The worst-case scenario could be the private sector being pushed out of China’s economy or being nationalized after “accomplishing its historic mission of achieving growth and should leave the market gradually,” as a widely circulated blog post (Wu 2018) claimed in September 2018. Under these circumstances, President Xi came out and mollified private entrepreneurs by announcing high-profile government support for the private sector following extensive concerns and dissatisfaction in the circle of private enterprises in the second half of 2018. Through these institutional arrangements and discipline control, the power of the top-level design has been finally realized and discerned in the state bureaucracy. The private sector has also been aware of the increasingly tightened control from the party under President Xi. It has become evident that, as demonstrated by the top-level design, Xi’s efforts targeted not only the persistent problem in policy implementation, but also substantial and efficient control of the whole state and the society for stable governance in China.
Top-level Design: Top Principle Is Stability, Main Goal Is Sustainable Economic Growth The top priority of maintaining stability has featured in China’s decision-making model in its decades-long effort to push reform for sustained economic growth since Deng Xiaoping, who began to emphasize stability as the priority for the CPC’s ruling in China after the 1989 Tiananmen event. Since then, the party’s top leaders have become increasingly obsessed with stability and made it the core value and top priority in governing China (Yu 2008, 2012). Stability maintenance, that is, ensuring the party’s perpetual rule in China as the overriding principle, has led top leaders to develop a widespread and deep-rooted attribute in policy making: a tendency to be extremely risk-averse. President Xi, unsurprisingly, embraces this core value to promote his top-level design for governing China. While carrying out the institutional changes in China’s decision-making and policy implementation mechanisms, Xi has been seeking sustained economic growth and fulfillment of the blueprint for comprehensively deepening reform. He must walk a tightrope to keep Chinese society stable while promoting his top-level idea for comprehensive reform in economic and other areas. At the same time, sustained economic growth via market-oriented reform has evolved into the fundamental source of legitimacy for the CPC’s rule in China since 1989, as democratic political reform, freedom of the press, pluralism and other universal values have not been appreciated in Chinese society under the CPC rule. Chinese official media and scholars have called this “the symptom of high growth reliance,” which means high economic growth has evolved into the main solution to ease social conflicts and maintain social stability; the slowdown of economic growth would otherwise precipitate instabilities in the society (Chen and Yao 2012; Jing 2013; Chen 2014; Yang 2016). Since 1989, the core task of governing China for the CPC has become a fine balance between the top leaders’ extreme riskaverse tendency and seeking sustained economic growth via deepening market-oriented reform.
Top-level Design for Supremacy: Economic Policy Making in China under President Xi
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