Xi Jinping launches a New Era for China and the World

How the rest of the world responds to what is happening in the People’s Republic of China, is in my view the critical question of our time. How we do so, will determine the future of liberal democracy, of independent legal systems, of free-thinking writers and free-spirited artists, of religious institutions.

We must ask, what does China want, and what will it do? Its long-time former foreign minister Qian Qichen said that “diplomacy is the extension of domestic policy”. In order to learn why China is behaving as it is internationally, it is essential to understand what drives the communist party that has ruled it for 72 years – and which is today effectively the sole institution in China. No organisation exists, from a football team to a church to a university to a private business, that is not guided, or at least able to be guided, by a party representative or branch within it. The party’s General Secretary Xi Jinping famously says: “Government, the military, society and schools, north, south, east and west —the party leads them all” [1]1 — Nectar Gan, “Xi Jinping Thought – the Communist Party’s tighter grip on China in 16 characters”. South China Morning Post, 25 d’octubre de 2017. Disponible en línia. .

Who is Xi?

It is crucial to understand something about general secretary Xi himself. He is also, in his second most important role, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and in his least important role the President of the Chinese state. Xi is today the most powerful person in the world, aged 67 now constitutionally able to govern for life without a single constraint except the underlying requirement to maintain the confidence of influential members of the party. He has, through the continuing anti-corruption purge that elevated him to the top job, replaced the key officials in both party and government and also in the People’s Liberation Army, that is, the party’s own army, not the Chinese state’s. China’s elite decision-making, via a melange of “leading small groups,” seven of them chaired by Xi Jinping, and the Politburo Standing Committee of seven men (no woman ever chosen in 100 years), has become under Xi especially, a black box. But its core thinking is clear to all who care to take an interest.

Xi is a risk-taker, a dice-roller. He keeps pressing on because of course he believes in historical determinism, in communism’s ultimate victory, and also because of his personal experience of political success —although this naturally involves struggle. In a recent speech Xi used the word for struggle, douzheng, 60 times. In his three hour address to the 19th national party congress —for which I was in the Great Hall of the People, my binoculars fixed on him— Xi said: “This great struggle, great project, great cause, and great dream are closely connected, flow seamlessly into each other, and are mutually reinforcing. Among them, the great new project of party building plays the decisive role… Our mission,” he stressed, “is a call to action. Let us engage in a tenacious struggle.” One of the earliest and most important instructions issued by the party under Xi’s leadership, Document Number 9, requires party members and all officials to guard against and vigorously oppose seven threats: universal values, press freedom, civil society, citizens’ rights, reviewing the party’s version of history, and endorsing either the “capitalistic class” or the independence of the judiciary.

For Xi, China is the greatest, most ancient of civilisations; the party has wrapped itself around everything to do with “China” that it views positively; and the party itself is encapsulated by the figure it has made, however reluctantly and accidentally, its leader for life —himself. His Thought On Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is now enshrined in both party and state constitutions.

There’s no successor to Xi in sight. At some stage, of course, that will create grief for Xi, and for the party. He is surrounded by loyalists. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, a Chinese speaker, said in March: “Most of Xi’s senior officials are terrified of him. They are highly unlikely therefore to be providing frank and fearless advice” [2]2 — Asia Society Policy Institute, “Beijing’s Early Reactions to the Biden Administration: Strategic Continuity and Tactical Change”. 18 de març de 2021. Disponible en línia. .

Pervasive purification

Both the party and Xi are today pervasive, they are able to observe every online message or phone call sent or received by every Chinese person, and to watch through the grid management system every step people take in the real world too. Xi has centralised, restructured and personalised governance through a form of counter-reformation, refocusing on ideology and on the party’s control over China’s understanding of history. Accountability, in this structure, always operates upwards and not downwards.

The party takes the view that the “masses” are unable to think coherently, only to feel. Hence, Chinese people cannot be trusted to vote —but one can very readily “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” as the deputy ambassador to Canberra, Wang Xining, said recently that Australia had done.

Xi’s narrative carries conviction, because he is so sincere about it. While the Soviet Party thought 30 years ago that its problems lay in ideology and party orthodoxy, the CCP came to the opposite conclusion, which Xi underlined in asking: “Why did the communist party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? Because in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the history of the party, to repudiate Lenin and Stalin, was to wreak chaos” [3]3 — Tanner Greer, “Xi Jinping in Translation: China’s Guiding Ideology”. Revista Palladium, 31 de maig de 2019. Disponible en línia. .

Xi’s top priority has been to purify the party which he saw lapsing into slackness and corruption, insisting on personal loyalty, and on the party’s absolute centrality. Networks used to comprise the greatest asset for those within the Chinese hierarchy, as well as for foreigners dealing with the PRC, opening space for much to be negotiated. Now there are rules, which spring from the grand narrative of party ideological primacy.

Victory over three big challenges

Xi has faced three especially big challenges over the past year: how to resolve the persisting protests in Hong Kong, how to survive the initial gross mishandling of the Covid pandemic, and, less troubling – how to cope with a weird American president, a problem that has now gone away, although he may find the new president, who is better known and understood in Beijing, over time becoming more difficult to deal with than Trump.

For Hong Kong, he applied tactics he had already used to subjugate China’s vast western hinterland. Wear down critics, isolate them, punish them, and install devout personal loyalists to key supervisory roles. After party secretary Chen Quanguo did such a good job of “sinicising” Buddhist Tibet, Xi sent him to Xinjiang to do the same to the Muslim Uighurs. By sinicising, Xi means preferencing the dominant so-called “Han” culture including its language, Mandarin, over China’s many other diverse cultures and languages. Beijing started off claiming it was preventing terrorism by targeting Uighurs it branded “splittists”. But it became a program of preventing Uighurs from being Muslim and, to a certain extent, from being Uighur.

In Beijing’s eyes, job done. Then after Covid had closed Hong Kong down, Xi imposed on the city the National Security Law so troublemakers there could be tried and jailed in the mainland. Beijing recently also changed the governance structure so that all leading officials, judges, and those allowed to stand for the legislature, must demonstrate their Chinese patriotism and respect for the communist party, to a new vetting panel. The arrangement of one country two systems agreed for Hong Kong between Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher never appealed to Xi, and has been abandoned. Xi’s New Era governance insists on one country, one system.

The next main goals

Having faced such challenges over the last year, Xi looks to be on much surer ground in this new Year of the Ox, an auspicious year for folk who, like Xi, keep on keeping on, with a premium for strength.

Taiwan, a lively and prosperous democracy with a population greater than Chile, and now also the world’s exemplar in combatting Covid, is Xi’s next and most important target, his final big borderland challenge. Invading and holding down Taiwan is the most assured route into the communist hall of fame for Xi, who next July 23 presides over the party’s centenary. Such great anniversaries are often marked in China by grand military parades. But the party’s anxiety about its own hold over the Chinese people is such that these events are never permitted to be viewed by any member of the public. The streets are closed off, and police instruct even those with apartments facing them that if they venture onto their balconies to watch, they may be shot by army snipers.

In broad terms as itemised by an anonymous but senior contributor to the magazine Politico [5]5 — POLITICO, “To Counter China’s Rise, the U.S. Should Focus on Xi”. 28 de gener de 2021. Disponible en línia. , the goals of Xi comprise, in this order: Keep the party in power at all costs. Maintain national territorial integrity. Grow the national economy fast enough to break out of the middle-income trap, to grow rich before growing old. Gain sufficient military might to deter the US and its allies from intervention over Taiwan, the South China Sea or the East China Sea. Become the world’s top tech power and thus leading economy. Undermine US credibility sufficiently to attract its partners into Chinese association instead. Deepen the relationship with Russia to guard against Western pressure. Diminish the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. Consolidate the Belt & Road Initiative into a dependable geopolitical bloc. Construct a new international order that reflects PRC thinking.

China’s economic challenges

Weaponising its economy —the PRC’s most important strategy of recent years— requires people at home and abroad to stay convinced it will thrive and drive world growth. But what if China’s economy loses its edge, its vitality, its mojo? This has seemed unthinkable. But China’s role as “the world’s factory” —which it has recently resumed thanks to Covid era demand for tech gadgets and health gear, substantially funded by Western governments’ stimulus spending— faces challenges as supply chains diversify. Beijing’s politics is getting in the way of good economic policy. That includes Xi’s distaste for entrepreneurs such as the famous Alibaba founder Jack Ma, as well as its use of trade coercion including against Australian imports. Canada has abandoned free trade talks with China as “not worth pursuing”.

China’s three chief drivers of growth —credit, internal migration and exports— are becoming over time increasingly constrained, while in the longer time its demographics —with the former one-child policy causing it to age very rapidly— will also create big headaches. Xi’s response is to champion a new economic template, called “dual-circulation”, to take centre stage in the new 14th Five-Year Plan, with domestic demand taking over from exports and investment as the core economic driver. Its protectionist element appeals to Xi, but to succeed will require the state to concede a greater role to private firms and the market, something he cannot easily stomach politically. New Guidelines on Strengthening United Front Work of the Private Economy in the New Era say that the party aims “to build a backbone team of private businesspeople that is dependable and usable”. Business people must “maintain high consistency” with the party, the guidelines say.

The battle to reshape the world

Xi’s narrative also underlines that the CCP’s way is best for the rest of the Indo-Pacific region, and for the wider world. His Belt and Road Initiative, to which Chile signed on two and a bit years ago, comprises a highway down which all roads and tech platforms lead to Beijing as they once did to Rome, fuelled and powered by the weaponization of China’s economic heft. The BRI updates the old tribute-state structure through which Chinese emperors received from regional rulers formal acknowledgment of their dominance, and were in return accorded trading rights and a degree of strategic shelter. Yang Jiechi, now China’s top foreign affairs official, said in Hanoi a few years ago: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact”.

Xi has through seizing reefs and islands and building military bases on them, gained control of the South China Sea that is twice the size of the Mediterranean and is now a Chinese lake. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have become tribute states, ensuring that ASEAN, the Association of 10 South East Asian Nations that makes decisions by consensus, cannot counter China’s interests, just as China’s Security Council vote prevents any unwelcome UN action or words. China is no longer a status quo power. It has become a revisionist power, seeking to reshape the world.

Myanmar is the most recent example of success in this goal, at least for now. Strategic pipelines carry oil and gas across Myanmar from the Bay of Bengal to China’s Yunnan province, avoiding a long and risky sea voyage round south east Asia. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi flew to Myanmar for meetings with military chief Min Aung Hlaing 19 days before the coup there. Beijing has stressed that the coup is a domestic matter, and has diluted criticism at the UN. Xinhua news agency described the coup as a “major cabinet reshuffle,” while Global Times said it comprised “an adjustment to the country’s dysfunctional power structure.” Beijing only expressed real displeasure when 32 Chinese factories were burned by protesters angry at what they perceive as China’s backing for the coup.

China has shifted gears in its foreign diplomacy. It now requires its diplomats to adopt aggressive Wolf Warrior language and demeanour. It wishes not only to set the terms in which it engages the world, but even to control the way in which the world speaks of China. Yuan Peng, head of the State Security Ministry’s top think tank, says: “It is no longer important whether it is the truth or a lie, what matters is who holds the discourse power.” The former head of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry, Bilahari Kausikan, says: “China doesn’t just want you to comply with its wishes, it wants you to do what it wants, without being told.” The PRC has developed a strategy of embracing high-value elite partners, who are persuaded that China’s interests are also genuinely the best interests of their own country or organisation.

Such partners are cleverly introduced, through their contacts with Chinese officials, academics, businesspeople and others, to talking points that guide the manner in which they lead their organisations’ discourse on China. They typically include that all people of Chinese ethnicity owe loyalty to the PRC. That the PRC and the party cannot and must not be separated out from ‘China’ and the Chinese people whom the party-state rules, nor from the history and culture of the multi-faceted Chinese civilisation. That anyone who criticises the PRC is doing so because they have fallen under the thrall of Washington. And that democracy or federalism would both be disastrous for China. Australian China expert John Garnaut says that the party is intent on making the world safe for itself.

• References

  1 —

  Nectar Gan, “Xi Jinping Thought – the Communist Party’s tighter grip on China in 16 characters”. South China Morning Post, 25 d’octubre de 2017. Disponible en línia.

  2 —

  Asia Society Policy Institute, “Beijing’s Early Reactions to the Biden Administration: Strategic Continuity and Tactical Change”. 18 de març de 2021. Disponible en línia.

  3 —

  Tanner Greer, “Xi Jinping in Translation: China’s Guiding Ideology”. Revista Palladium, 31 de maig de 2019. Disponible en línia.

  4 —

  Shan Li i Philip Wen, “This App Helps You Learn About China, While China Learns All About You”. The Wall Street Journal, 14 d’octubre de 2019. Disponible en línia.

  5 —

  POLITICO, “To Counter China’s Rise, the U.S. Should Focus on Xi”. 28 de gener de 2021. Disponible en línia.

  6 —

  Zhou Lin, “The Power of Xi Jinping’s Language”, China Today, 7 de febrer de 2018. Disponible en línia.