Premier Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, both of whom were unceremoniously dropped from the top leadership at last week's Chinese Communist Party Congress, have something else in common.
The two were cast as key figures in a fictionalized plot to overthrow Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a book by Roger Garside, a former British diplomat posted to Beijing. Garside describes the book, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, as one-quarter fiction, three-quarters analysis. In it, Li and Wang, a former vice premier, were portrayed as reform-minded figures who sought to save China from what they saw as Xi's misguided policies.
The two men's exit was not the outcome imagined for them in the book, but Garside told VOA in an interview this week that their ouster showed he was right to identify them as posing the most significant threat to Xi's consolidation of power in his own hands.
While the internal party machinations may have strengthened Xi, Garside does not believe they strengthened China.
"Is China now more likely to prevail in what [U.S.] President [Joe] Biden calls the 'contest for the future of our world'? My answer is emphatically no," he said.
Garside, who is now an associate fellow at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, predicted that for Xi, the cost of the moves in the congress would ultimately outweigh the benefits because the greatest threats to the nation's future are not inside the ruling party but on the outside.
What will undo the party's hold on power is "the array of problems that China faces and to which Xi's political report to the congress offered no solution," Garside said.
Bruce J. Dickson, a political science professor and China specialist at George Washington University in the U.S. capital, agreed that the party leadership unveiled at the congress ensured Xi would be surrounded only by proven loyalists.
"If there was a possibility of coup, [Xi] seems to have put his foot on it," Dickson said in a phone interview, describing the power structure established by the CCP over its 100-year history as essentially "coup-proof." But while his moves to stifle any dissenting voices may be good for Xi politically, Dickson said, "in the long run, they may be detrimental to both the party and to [China's] national interest."
Control of wealth creation
Most outside analysts believe that by sidelining people like Li and Wang, who favored a greater role for market forces in the Chinese economy, Xi has cleared the way for bringing more of the sources of wealth creation under the direct control of the Communist Party.
"Xi Jinping may have killed the golden goose for China because he attributes the source of China's success to the wrong sources," said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.
"He thinks it's due to party control," Stokes said, "when actually much of the success of China is probably better attributed to the party getting out of the way, to some extent, of the population's entrepreneurial spirit, and hard work and innovation, and that requires a degree of freedom."
Apart from the centralization of the economy, Xi was seen by many close watchers of the congress as having used the event to signal a hardening of his administration's determination to bring Taiwan under Beijing's control, by force if necessary.
With no one but loyalists around him, Xi "will not be deterred from completing the Great Rejuvenation of the [People's Republic of China] by 2049," said James Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of intelligence and information operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
And that, Fanell said in an interview, "entails total restoration of the CCP's perceived territory." The first step on that list, he said, "is the total subjugation of Taiwan under the control of Beijing."
Fanell said he believed Xi and the Communist Party "would prefer to obtain this goal via nonviolent means," but that the timeline for an attempted military invasion of Taiwan might have advanced to "sometime before 2025."
