Why China's leaders will never accept blame

In the wake of Wuhan’s covid outbreak in 2019 or the current Shanghai lockdown, I have seen many Western social media users demanding Chinese leaders, in particular top leader Xi Jinping, to accept blame and offer apologies in public. Clearly, in both the Wuhan and Shanghai cases, things went wrong and much better decisions could have been made. But Xi has never accepted blame and, in fact, the blame has been shifted to lower echelons, such as municipal or provincial party leaders. Why is Xi not apologizing?

Some Western analysts and journalists have explained this absence of public remorse by pointing to Xi’s strong relative power compared to his predecessors. Xi, the media constantly reminds us, is the strongest Chinese leader since Mao. He could be leader for life and has no clear factions opposing him within the party. Under this logic, it seems reasonable to argue that Xi can shift blame because of his unchallenged power. However, this explanation is wrong. It is wrong because it fails to take into account China’s contemporary history and what previous Communist Party of China (CPC) leaders did in the past.

Shifting blame from the top leader is not a Xi feature, but the default mode of Chinese politics.

Let’s recall what previous CPC leaders have done in the past.

First, Mao Zedong never accepted blame for the millions of deaths and the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward, even though he was its main promoter and had purged many of the CPC leaders who discouraged it. Second, Deng Xiaoping never accepted blame for the inflation and corruption problems caused by his accelerated reform and opening up, which led to public protests, the most famous of which was Tiananmen in 1989. Third, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao never apologized for problems that occurred under their terms, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the Wenzhou train crash in 2011.

It could be argued that, in some of these cases (or in the Wuhan and Shanghai cases mentioned above), there was little or no direct responsibility on the part of the top leadership, and that they could do nothing to prevent it. In fact, in the CPC’s organizational system, provincial and local teams often have a great deal of autonomy. Beijing’s main power is not to direct them, but only to select or demote them.

However, it is not uncommon in other countries for a president to accept blame for what his subordinates have done, even if he could not have foreseen it. It is considered a way of showing leadership and appearing as a responsible leader. In the Chinese system, it could be argued that the top leader might offer apologies not for creating or failing to stop problems, but for selecting the wrong people to manage them.

What the CPC prioritizes (and what Chinese politics, historically speaking, prioritizes), however, is maintaining the authority and good image of the top leader. Part of the job of the lower echelons is to accept blame for issues for which they have no direct responsibility. This is for the sake of maintaining the stability of the Party leadership and thus the stability of the Party. Under this framework, there is no benefit in accepting blame and appearing to be a “responsible” or “honest” leader, because looking weak is an opportunity for opposing factions to attack the leader or gather forces against him. This is not obvious under Xi Jinping, as key information and internal party debates are censored, but it is easy to see, for example, if you read how political battles between factions worked under Deng in the 1980s.

There is one exception where top Chinese leaders accept public blame: when they are going to fall.

If a top leader loses the support of the majority of the Party, he will be forced to engage in self-criticism, expose his own mistakes and accept them in a closed meeting and/or in public. Usually, for the sake of Party stability, this self-criticism is conducted in a private meeting and then made “public” by publishing or televising it in the Party media. Public acceptation of guilt, in front of a crowd, is rare. One example is the harsh public self-criticisms under Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Another example that comes to mind is Zhao Ziyang taking a microphone in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and accepting his mistakes to calm the students and encourage them to stop demonstrating to avoid violence. However, these two examples occurred at a rare moment in contemporary Chinese politics, when mass movements were taking place in the country.

A more usual thing that can happen is not for the top leader to criticize himself or be directly accused of wrongdoing, but to be criticized indirectly or by omission criticized by certain media or institutions controlled by an opposing Party faction. It was not uncommon to criticize Deng during the Deng era by criticizing a certain policy or political concept he had embraced. In fact, Deng came to power after defeating Hua Guofeng in a political battle that revolved around an abstract “concept”: the “Two Whatevers”, the stance of maintaining Mao’s legacy versus the Dengist approach of gradually breaking away from it and promoting reform and opening. To a foreign eye, the discussions in the Chinese media about the convenience or not of the “Two Whatevers” might have seemed a mere abstract and boring debate. In reality, a fierce battle for control of the Party was being waged. When Western observers joke about the new and supposedly empty “concepts” promoted by the Chinese leadership, they overlook that these are not just about policy, but primarily about the top leader observing what level of support or even dissent he is facing.

In short, it is very rare to see a Chinese top leader accepting blame. If you see it, he is probably going to fall. What can sometimes be seen are indirect and subtle endorsements, absences or criticisms in the Chinese media. This is the signaling to look out for. It’s not obvious or exciting, and most of the time you won’t find anything. But it is the price to pay if you really want to understand what is going on inside the Communist Party of China.

Unfortunately, there is no easy path to understand Chinese politics.