Neither do I, despite the unfortunate headline that The Wall Street Journal chose for my article back in 2015.
The Chinese have many phrases that capture complex situations. They have one, “waiying, neiruan” or “hard on the outside, soft on the inside”, and that is a good metaphor, I think, for the Chinese Communist Party today. They are definitely hard on the outside. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he has definitely strengthened the party. I would even date the hardening to 2009, which predates his arrival at the top. There's no doubt about it. Why? As I started to say earlier, he's absolutely possessed by the Soviet collapse, and he saw that on China's horizon.
My article was about the same thing. He and I probably didn't disagree about the state of the party in 2010, 2011 or 2012. He has taken certain steps in the last seven years to strengthen the party. It is definitely stronger today organizationally as a Leninist instrument than it was seven years ago, but I would argue that as a normative instrument and in terms of legitimacy it is weaker. The COVID-19 issue shows part of that weakness in terms of monopoly of media.
This is not a party that's about to collapse. I never thought it was. The best word for it is “atrophy”. All Leninist parties and, I would submit, authoritarian parties atrophy over time. They age like people do and eventually die, unless they're constantly reinventing themselves. There are different ways to reinvent themselves. Xi Jinping has chosen a certain number of lessons from the Soviet collapse, what we would call hardline lessons. There are other, softer lessons that could have been chosen and that his predecessors did. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao practised what I call “soft Leninism”. Xi Jinping is hard Leninism, and I think he's actually making the system more brittle and more fragile as a result.