The “Xi-Li fight”, widely rumoured for a while, has turned white-hot. Li Ke-qiang, dubbed a “vulnerable prime minister” since the commencement of his tenure, had his idea of “street vendors economy” ditched by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China(CCPPD) when it was becoming mass fervour sweeping across the nation. It is likened to the Hundred Days’ Reform of the Qing dynasty, in which the jig was up in no time. The dismissal was a big slap in Li’s face by Xi. How could that be endured? Who would respect the State Council administered by Li anymore?

The “one-party dictatorship” upheld by the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) is indisputable. However, the CCP has been managing with an effort to hold the State Council as an organization to take care of the national economy, people’s livelihood and society in minimum esteem. Though former General Secretaries of the CCP and Prime Ministers of the State Council were believed to fall out with each other once in a while, their respective authority and responsibility was clearly delineated, and they would not hold each other back from functioning.

Since Xi and Li assumed office as the President of the People’s Republic of China(PRC) and the Prime Minister of the State Council respectively in 2013, the leadership has been labelled “Xi-Li regime”. Later on, an interesting translated term in English was made up to refer to Li’s economics - “Likonomics”, which stems from commentaries of Huang Yi-ping, Chief Economist of Asia at Barclays Capital. To put it simply, it adopted the policies of de-leveraging, structural reform, transferring the functions of the government, opening markets and tax rebate to spur economic development. Back then, Li gained unparalleled publicity, even in media and commentaries of western countries, until the term was outdone by “Xiconomics” advocated by Xi Jin-ping in 2016. Since then, “Likonomics” has vanished without a trace. In view of his economic policies dying away without known causes, it is convinced that Li has been brushed aside by Xi.

Since Xi successfully amended the constitution at Two Sessions in 2018 to make his tenure perpetual, Li has been turned into a titular prime minister. And their relationship, as commented by Wu Qiang, a Beijing bookman, has stayed away from a No.1-No.2 parallel, and turned to a bellwether-vassal bond. The State Council has since been reduced to an executive body subordinate to the central committee of the party, instead of a regulator of macroeconomic adjustment.

Being a merely nominal figure, Li has disappeared from the US-China trade negotiations, and backed off from dealing with Wuhan pneumonia epidemic. Has he ever tried to stem the tide? The idea of “street vendors economy” remarked by Li at the Prime Minister press conference after Two Sessions could be seen as his blurting out the uncensored. A French correspondent was ingenious at depicting how the idea had burst a bubble of resplendence by laying bare that 0.6 billion people were earning monthly income of below 1,000 RMB on average. It is just a pity that under the current regime, the honest truth was nothing more than blatantly humiliating Xi in public.

Maybe that is why the idea of “street vendors economy” was dumped by CCPPD in less than a week. Was that just a personal proposal blurt out by Li without approval of the CCP? Judged by the inundating publicity at the very beginning, it does not seem to be the case. Paradoxically, the authorities of Beijing city criticized that the scheme was unfavorable to consolidating a desirable image for the nation, which had already risen in the world. The subtext was to let the one who proposed it bear the undesirable image.

However, in the face of both the US-China trade war and Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, was it not more shameful of the CCP to call off the “street vendors economy” at the cost of making the internal political power struggle known to all? Merely for the “desirable image of the nation”, people as humble as street vendors are not allowed to earn a living. Even mainlanders would ask whether the State Council headed by Li Ke-qiang is still credible and authoritative.

(Popcorn Channel)

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