Status: 10.08.2023, 18:30 p.m.
By: Christiane Kühl
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Mao Zedong in the summer of 1960 on the beach of Beidaihe: he invented the meetings in the seaside resort. Even under Xi, the party leadership comes here. And everything is more secret than ever. © imago stock&people
China's party leadership is once again on a secret working holiday in Beidaihe. In a strictly isolated residential complex on the beach, Communist Party grandees used to fight power struggles. Today they are talking about the economy.
Beidaihe/Munich – It's holiday time all over the world, including in China. Even the top of the Communist Party went to the sea, to a strictly isolated guest house in the seaside resort of Beidaihe. The meeting takes place virtually every year, but Beijing never announces in advance when the Communist Party elite will gather there. Instead, at the beginning of the two-week retreat, there is a meager report from the official Xinhua news agency on low-ranking encounters. According to Xinhua, Cai Qi, chief of staff of state and party leader Xi Jinping, met with 57 technology experts in Beidaihe last week and called on them to do more to make China technologically independent. In the meantime, all big-headed creatures are likely to be in Beidaihe.
The meeting is shrouded in absurd secrecy. Nevertheless, every tourist in the seaside resort knows when it starts. Namely, when the beach in front of the pine-lined complex with its spacious residential buildings is cordoned off. Guards then send all walkers away without giving any reason. But that alone is no longer enough in these times: The nearest major city, Qinhuangdao, banned all civilian drones in the region from July to the end of August. Someone could film Xi and his Politburo from above.
Beidaihe: Top executives dive into the "summer office"
For the two weeks, the government's work slows down and the functionaries disappear from the news. Xi Jinping was last seen in public on Monday last week when he held an annual promotion ceremony for generals in Beijing. It was at the event that it was revealed that Xi had replaced the top of his missile forces, which are also responsible for the nuclear arsenal. Since then, speculation has been circulating about corruption and espionage, and even about a connection to the case of the suddenly dismissed Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong had introduced the "Summer Office" of Beidaihe in the 1950s. He himself liked to swim in the sea and was even photographed on the beach in 1960. Under Mao, the top politicians of the Politburo in Beidaihe even held official meetings to discuss landmark policy decisions. Among them were catastrophic decisions such as the starting signal for the "Great Leap Forward", with which Mao wanted to catch up industrially with the Soviet Union and instead triggered a famine. Or the shelling of a Taiwanese outpost on Kinmen Island just off the coast of mainland China in 1958, which was decided in Beidaihe and triggered a deep crisis on the Taiwan Strait. At that time, the world had recognized the then military regime in Taipei as the government for all of China.
This year, the main focus is likely to be on the current problems of the economy. Construction, industrial production and services are weakening, as are foreign direct investment.
Beidaihe: sanatoriums, hotels and Russian holidaymakers
The seaside resort 300 kilometers east of Beijing is home to sanatoriums for retired cadres who like to meet early in the morning or in the evening at the blue hour to swim together in the sea; equipped with red swimming caps and swimming rings, the groups can withstand up to an hour in the warm water. In Mao's time, the foreign diplomats residing in Beijing also traveled to a purpose-built guest house with a private beach. Over the years, new hotels and normal bathers from China have been added. Fish restaurants were built on the promenade, the success of which could be measured by whether they were able to build a new floor above the roof terrace during the winter break.
Bathers in Beidaihe: The beach town has been popular with the Chinese and their Communist Party leadership elite ED © JONES/AFP for decades
Since about 2010, Russian-language signs began to appear in the city. Like other places along the coast, Beidaihe attracts Russian holidaymakers from the middle class of Eastern Siberia. For them, the beaches of China are much closer than the Black Sea coast; and Europe would be too expensive anyway. Today there are surf shops, beach parties in Beidaihe, and an artificial island is being built off the coast.
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Secret Communist Party Meeting in Beidaihe: Out-of-Time Ritual
This bathing life coexists every year with the Communist Party meeting, which seems like a relic that has fallen out of time and that hardly anyone in Beidaihe talks about. Beidaihe once stood for heated power struggles among the members of the Communist Party, in which the long-retired party leaders were also involved. Jiang Zemin, head of state and party leader from 1989 to 2002, influenced Chinese politics until his death last year.
But since Xi Jinping has centralized power over the past decade, retired cadres have less and less influence, a Chinese scientist told Reuters. It is also unclear whether Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao, who was led out of the hall at the Communist Party Congress in October in the middle of a vote on the future party leadership, came to Beidaihe.
Every year, journalists try to find out details of these meetings, usually without much success. The political significance of the meetings has diminished anyway due to Xi's power-political march, reports the Hong Kong South China Morning Post, citing an anonymous source. The party grandees come therefore mainly for a nice summer vacation.