The most significant part of China’s 19th Party Congress ended in the usual anticlimactic fashion. These events are for show, not debate. Like any good trial lawyer will tell you, you never ask a question in court that you don’t already know the answer to. For China’s Communists, that meant nominating Xi Jinping’s name to be written into the Communist constitution with the votes already tallied.

Without any objection, the final approval was given for “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.” Elevating the current General Secretary to a level equal with Mao, the practical, political effect is to quash all possible dissent. To challenge Xi after this is be to challenge Chinese Communism itself.

For totalitarian states, this is the standard order (and for a good deal too many “democracies”, too). A leader is always looking to tighten his grip on political power because despite the love affair for authoritarianism (especially in the form of technocracy) in the West that kind of system is uniquely fragile. Like an organized criminal operation, the real danger is most often from within the power base rather than from the people outside of it.

I can’t help but wonder, however, if what we are seeing here in the 19th Congress is designed instead for that latter case. China’s great challenge has been for the last quarter-century to modernize not just as a matter of economics but more so social progress; to take the peasants out of their subsistence lives and given them a shot at middle-class progress and even luxury. Economically satisfied citizens are a far better long-term proposition than a politically unstable peasantry prone to fits of righteous anger.

The Chinese system of just such transformation has been partially successful (thanks in huge part to the eurodollar, when it was working). In terms of human history, it has been wildly so, for no nation has ever undergone such massive transformation in such a condensed fashion. But it isn’t yet enough, or so we think – or so China’s politician’s think?