Who controls the party? Mao’s unfinished question in Xi’s China

By Prof. Suresh Deman*  

Mao Tse Tung’s death on 9 September 1976 closed an extraordinary chapter in modern Chinese history, but it did not resolve the profound structural questions he left behind. Mao led the generation that achieved the Chinese Revolution, directed a second charged with state construction, and during the Cultural Revolution appealed directly to China’s youth to contest entrenched authority and safeguard revolutionary purpose. While the Cultural Revolution remains deeply controversial and historically destructive, Mao’s legacy endures through his engagement with a central dilemma: who controls the vanguard party once it acquires sovereign power?  

Classical Marxism focused primarily on the contradictions of capitalism, specifically the clash between socialised production and private appropriation. Vladimir Lenin confronted the problem of revolutionary agency by developing the vanguard party—a disciplined organ capable of transforming fragmented labour struggles into unified political power. Yet seizing the state apparatus produces a subsequent predicament. Legal nationalisation does not spontaneously abolish hierarchies of administrative authority, technical expertise, or informational access. Consequently, the revolutionary party risks calcifying into a self-interested governing bureaucracy.  

​Mao’s crucial theoretical contribution was the recognition that contradictions do not disappear under socialism; rather, they transform. The primary antagonism ceases to be solely between capital and labour, shifting toward tensions between party leadership and mass participation, mental and manual labour, town and countryside, and administrative hierarchy and political accountability. In texts such as On Contradiction and his commentary on the Soviet experience, Mao rejected the premise that socialist transition achieves monolithic social unity. He differentiated between non-antagonistic contradictions among the people—manageable via persuasion and critique—and antagonistic class conflicts.  

​The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union validated Mao’s deepest systemic anxiety: that ideological erosion and bureaucratic privilege within the governing stratum, rather than external military conquest, could reverse a socialist state from within. Mao’s warning that "the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party" anticipated how a ruling elite could become the primary agent of systemic dissolution. However, his chosen instrument to combat bureaucratic ossification—mass mobilization during the Cultural Revolution—generated severe institutional disruption, factional violence, and widespread human suffering. While the Party subsequently condemned the movement as a grave historical error, the underlying institutional conundrum of socialist accountability remained unsolved.  

​Following 1978, Deng Xiaoping redirected the nation toward developing the productive forces through market mechanisms, foreign investment, material incentives, and global trade integration under the rubric of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". This orientation lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty and transformed China into the preeminent manufacturing workshop of the world. Yet by overcoming the fundamental constraint of material scarcity, the Deng era generated distinct secondary contradictions: severe wealth disparity, endemic official corruption, environmental degradation, regional imbalances, and an ascendant commercial elite operating in tension with socialist legitimacy.  

​The global financial crisis of 2008 marked an important inflection point, underscoring the hazards of chronic reliance on external demand. Navigating this external shock required a phased developmental transition: initial state-led infrastructure expansion, subsequent capital investment across the underdeveloped rural interior, and the systematic cultivation of new urban hubs. This structural sequence converted long-term capital formation into expanded domestic consumption. Macroeconomic stability came to depend on domestic purchasing power, transforming equitable income distribution from an ethical aspiration into an imperative for sustained growth.  

​The administration of Xi Jinping addresses this altered landscape not through a simplistic return to Maoism or an uncritical continuation of the Deng settlement, but through a dialectical reassessment of both. Xi preserves the sophisticated industrial apparatus, technical capacity, and global integration secured after 1978 while subjecting their attendant social distortions to rigorous Marxist-Leninist discipline. As Kevin Rudd has observed, Xi’s ideological framework reflects a potent Marxist-Leninist nationalism, joining Leninist organizational primacy and centralized authority with Marxist interventions in distribution and a nationalist vision of rejuvenation.  

​Xi’s domestic strategy operates around three core pillars: reinforcing the absolute leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, advancing the goal of Common Prosperity, and safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial reunification, particularly concerning Taiwan. Drawing cautionary lessons from the Soviet collapse, the leadership treats elite cohesion, ideological orthodoxy, and institutional integrity as vital matters of state survival. The sweeping anti-corruption campaign across civilian bureaucracies and the People’s Liberation Army serves as the primary instrument for breaking autonomous patronage networks and reasserting ideological fidelity.  

​Here, the divergence in methodology between Mao and Xi becomes unmistakable. Mao diagnosed bureaucratic degeneration and prescribed mass supervision from below, weakening regular institutional authority in an effort to combat administrative privilege. In stark contrast, Xi diagnoses identical symptoms of bureaucratic decay but mandates centralized Party self-supervision from above. Rather than mobilizing external societal forces, the contemporary leadership concentrates discipline within formal inspection commissions, internal regulations, and political rectifications. The institutional remedy is virtually inverted: Mao dispersed authority to assault bureaucracy, whereas Xi consolidates authority to enforce organizational compliance.  

​This synthesis of ideological discipline and post-reform prosperity is visible in contemporary cultural initiatives. The reintroduction of formal labour education across Chinese schools in 2020 revives the Maoist conviction that intellectual training must remain connected to physical production and civic responsibility to prevent the rise of an insulated technocratic stratum. Similarly, the emergence of commercial rural "hardship camps," where affluent families pay for their children to perform farm labour, illustrates this tension. Unlike the coercive state rustication of the sent-down youth movement, these programs reflect a market-mediated desire among wealthy urbanites to inoculate youth against complacency. The solution to one historical challenge—material deprivation—has generated the subsequent dilemmas of affluence and social stratification.  

​Contemporary Chinese governance is best conceptualized not as a regression from Deng to Mao, but as a sequential progression: revolutionary state-building, followed by productive modernization, followed by structural rectification. Xi retains the post-1978 economic foundation while altering the political terms under which capital operates. Yet this architecture introduces its own internal tensions. Vertical centralization risks dampening local initiative, curbing entrepreneurial dynamism, and restricting independent institutional feedback.  

​Whether a ruling party can act simultaneously as supervisor and the entity under supervision remains the central unanswered question of modern Chinese political economy. Mao's foundational inquiry—who controls the Party—remains urgent. In confronting that dilemma through institutional centralism rather than mass mobilisation, China is testing whether internal discipline can guarantee long-term socialist coherence and stability without generating new contradictions of its own.  

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*Visiting Professor, Director, Consultant

Advisor, Barefoot Layers Training Institute, London. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper