August 24, 2015
President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Dec. 23.
Andy Wong/Associated Press
HONG KONG — It was hardly an unusual start to the day for a senior Chinese leader in a country grappling with an economic slowdown. On the morning of July 24, Zhou Benshun attended a meeting to promote one of President Xi Jinping’s signature projects, a plan to boost growth by building a “supercity” that would integrate Beijing with the region around it.
But by 6:10 p.m. that day, Mr. Zhou’s career was over, and he faced years in prison.
The Communist Party’s anticorruption agency announced it was investigating him on “suspicion of serious violations of party discipline and the law,” signaling his ouster as the party chief of Hebei Province, one of the nation’s most populous.
Mr. Zhou’s sudden downfall — he is the first sitting provincial party chief to be purged by Mr. Xi — underscores the uncertainty that permeates the Communist elite as they contend with two unnerving developments beyond their control: an economic slowdown that appears to be worse than officials had anticipated and that could mark the end of China’s era of fast growth, and a campaign against official corruption that has continued longer and reached higher than most had expected.
Driving decisions on both issues is Mr. Xi, who took the party’s helm nearly three years ago and has pursued an ambitious agenda fraught with political risk. Now, weeks before a summit meeting in Washington with President Obama, those risks appear to be growing, and there are signs that Mr. Xi and his strong-willed leadership style face increasingly bold resistance inside the party that could limit his ability to pursue his goals.
Mr. Xi has positioned himself as the chief architect of economic policy — usually the prime minister’s job — and has vowed to reshape the economy, exposing himself to blame if growth continues to sputter. At the same time, Mr. Xi is making enemies with an anticorruption drive that has taken down some of the most powerful men in the country and sidelined more than a hundred thousand lower-ranking officials.
Senior party officials are said to be alarmed by the state of the economy, which grew at the slowest pace in a quarter century during the first half of the year, and now seems to be decelerating further. In a sign of its anxiety, the leadership this month implemented the biggest devaluation of the Chinese currency in more than two decades, sending global markets into plunges.
Mr. Xi’s reputation was also dented this summer by panicked official efforts to prop up the Chinese stock market after a sharp dive in share prices. His government had promoted the market as a good investment to the public for months.
Even before these episodes, early this year a number of party elders had quietly urged Mr. Xi to focus more on reinvigorating the economy, according to an adviser to senior party and government leaders and an editor at a party media outlet, both of whom requested anonymity to describe internal discussions.
The advice was viewed as a sign of their dissatisfaction with Mr. Xi’s management of the economy but also as implicit criticism of his pursuit of high-profile corruption cases that had tarnished their legacies and targeted their protégés, the adviser and the editor said. “Right now, the economic situation is not good, so the core of the party’s work should be shifted more toward the economy,” the adviser said, paraphrasing the message communicated to Mr. Xi.
Among those brought down by Mr. Xi are his predecessor’s former chief of staff, Ling Jihua; the party heavyweight who once controlled the internal security forces, Zhou Yongkang; and two generals who once ranked second only to the party leader in commanding the Chinese armed forces, Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou. Mr. Ling was a protégé of the former president and party chief, Hu Jintao, while Mr. Zhou and the generals owed their rise to Mr. Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, now 89. General Xu died in March while awaiting court-martial on bribery charges. Zhou Benshun, the Hebei party chief, is considered a protégé of Zhou Yongkang and once worked as an aide to him. The two men are not related.
