On renewing his oath of office, he extolled the absolute leadership role of the Party to the exclusion of all other institutions. “Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west — the Party is the leader of all.”
Hang tough on China. Strength is the only way to win.
They have gone back in time, with echoes of the Maoist era, a period of ruthless purges, ideological education, loyalty tests and personality cults. The philosophy of “Xi Jinping Thought” now permeates public life and education at all levels in China. In official propaganda, it operates as a catch-all phrase to animate everything from how to manage the country to scholarly studies at universities.
The sons of former top leaders, revered scholars who had guided China’s economic miracle, frustrated private entrepreneurs and academics furious about Xi’s unrelenting hard line all complain about Xi’s policies and style.
Xi has for the moment scared off any organized opposition, but his ruthlessness has also caught him in a trap of his own making. Having unleashed the most far-reaching anti-corruption campaign in modern Chinese history, he has left himself with a perilously narrow off-ramp from office. Even with all the political and physical protection his current position offers, if he were to ever step down he knows that he, or at least his family and his close allies, would be vulnerable to being locked up by whomever came after him.
If Xi, and whomever takes over from him eventually, does manage to sustain the system, China will have decisively rebuffed any notions that democracy is the sole system capable of building a successful, rich country. This is not so much the end of the end of history. Xi’s China marks the start of history all over again.
The point is not that Kristof was wrong, but that he fell into the trap that so many foreigners have wandered into for decades, of confusing Western beliefs about how China should reform with the Party’s own convictions about how to govern the country.
CCP leaders have always thrived on a liberal dose of paranoia. The Party system, after all, doesn’t just exist on its own. It operates in opposition to something else: the West and democracy.
The US has admitted many of China’s brightest young students into its beset universities. It helped establish numerous Chinese industries, such as aviation. For long periods, the US was China’s biggest export market. If America was trying to keep China down, as Beijing’s persistent propaganda says, it was going about it in a strange way.
Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us. First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?
On coming to office, Xi didn’t look with fury at the behavior of the US. Rather, he looked with alacrity at the fall of the USSR. Xi was horrified at how the Party had almost evaporated overnight in the Soviet Union. “A big party was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than China does, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”
To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism. It confuses our thoughts and undermines the party’s organizations on all levels.
“Moscow is silent,” Putin was told, in a comment that had a profound impact on his world view. The power vacuum that Putin despaired of in Moscow at the time was taken to heart by Xi, who thought China would be vulnerable to the “hostile foreign forces” only if it let its guard down and allowed the Party to weaken and atrophy. Xi was determined that Beijing would never be silent on his watch.
Later, they were accused of political misdeeds that, within the Party, were worse than mere corruption. The official media said the pair had been conspiring to mount an internal coup to seize control of the Party, and effectively to prevent Xi from ascending to the top party post for which he had been groomed.
It didn’t all go to plan, as the flamboyant Bo used the stage to declare his innocence and label his chief accuser a liar. This state-sanctioned drama was backed up by Xi’s issuance of a new set of rules — the 8-Point-Regulations — directing that officials adopt a more austere, close-to-the-grassroots lifestyle.
There is no such thing as separation between the party and the government. There is only a division of functions.
When Hu became party secretary in 2002, Beijing had only just entered the WTO, with uncertain prospects. Few Chinese including the officials who had negotiated the accession deal, knew how successful China would navigate what lay ahead.
Likewise, China’s military power in 2002 was a fraction of what Xi inherited 10 years later. Beijing had neither the capacity nor confidence to press territorial claims in the South and East China Seas, nor pursue the country’s long-term aim of becoming the dominant power in Asia. Deng Xiaoping’s old dictum, for China to “hide its strength and bide its time” on the world stage, was not just a clever formulation. It also artfully matched Beijing’s strategic situation.
Xi, after all, had emerged as the compromise candidate at that year’s party congress. Certainly, he was a seasoned official from impeccable CCP lineage, and acceptable to both dominant groupings at the top — the “Shanghai Gang” and its titular head, Jiang Zein, and the clique clustered around the China Youth League, headed by Hu. Party elders settled on Xi because he was pliable and “lacked a power base.”
Just as the Party has its own military, it runs an in-house anti-corruption and detention system, the CCDI.
As Xi often reminds the military, the PLA is not the country’s army. It is the military arm of the ruling Communist Party, and has been since its foundation in 1927. Senior officers such as Zhang had the job of ghosting commanders at the same rank, to make sure they stayed loyal to the Party.
He was not only expelled from the Party after his death. His ashes were dug up, removed from the Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing and tossed to the winds.
Senior Chinese leaders of all stripes have long talked a big game on anti-corruption. Until Xi, however, no one had followed through.
In other words, in cracking down on corruption, Xi might have won popular support but he also earned himself a bucketload of bitter enemies, all itching for revenge.
In the decade before Xi came to power, corruption in China worked almost like a transaction tax that greased the wheels of commerce and business. Many senior officials turned a blind eye to the problem, either because they were corrupt themselves, or because they saw the kickbacks as a way to spread the system’s benefits and give poorly paid officials a greater stake in the government. “If they are not given some advantages, why should they dedicate themselves to the regime? Corruption makes our political system more stable.”
In both cases, the 2 Chens were easily pinned for corruption, expelled from the Party, tried and convicted in the courts, and then jailed. But their crimes were as much due to losing internal power struggles with the central government as breaking any law.
US investigators have great power but they must follow the law and eventually their allegations tested in courts. None of those strictures apply in China. The other big difference, of course, is that whereas Mueller was empowered to investigate the president, China’s anti-graft squads went nowhere near Xi.
With rare exceptions, once the Party puts an official or military officer under investigation, their career is over.
Xi has destroyed millions of people in the elite who now all hold a personal grudge against him. These people are not a bunch of uneducated peasants from the sticks in Henan. They had skin in the game.
Under the absolute leadership of the Party the people are nothing; the state is nothing; the constitution is nothing; the law is nothing. The Chinese judicial system is the Communist Party.
Xi himself quoted one of China’s most famous philosophers, Han Wei, the patron saint of the “legalist” school of philosophy over 2 millennia ago. “When those who uphold the law are strong, the law is strong; when those who uphold the law are weak, the law is weak.” Put another way, the ruler sits above the law and command it as an instrument of power.
Wu, a pioneering market economist, said increasing state command of the economy would lead to “crony capitalism” and revive memories of the 1950s, when the Party forced private companies to hand over their assets. Beijing was flattering itself if it believed it had developed according to a unique model of economics rather than getting wealthy through the market like other countries.
He didn’t pretend that there was any secret to the province’s wealth other than local entrepreneurs, although he avoided using the language of the market in describing them. “Zhejiang has maintained these remarkable results because it is an economy of the grassroots,” Xi said. “The common people choose their own development paths.”
Xi was seen as restoring central control after the laxity of the Hu years, a period during which many of the large state enterprises, big enough to be in the top 20 of the global Fortune 500, grew into powerful empires and breeding grounds for serious corruption. Xi faced the aftermath of a decade of rapid expansion and weak internal discipline in the state sector.
In the sessions on the USSR ordered by Xi, officials studied not just the collapse of the USSR but also its aftermath, when a new class of Russian oligarchs enriched themselves with the virtual theft of state assets. Chinese leaders watched in horror as the Soviet Union disintegrated and its assets were privatized.
Richard Liu of JD.com predicted communism would be realized in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalized. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande said everything the company possessed was given by the Party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Industry went even further, saying his life belonged to the Party. “They act as if they are being chased by a bear. They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.
Ma’s high profile made him vulnerable. If there was a presidential election in China tomorrow, Ma might win. That a dangerous position to be in.
With the mountain of data they generate, the BAT trinity are in effect turning into a realtime, efficient and privately run intelligence platform. In that respect, they are ideal private companies. They both drive economic growth and also buttress the political system.
Cold War analogies don’t hold water, because Asian nations and the US are all deeply enmeshed with China’s economy in a way they never were with the USSR. Regional nations, and indeed much of the West, may judge that their economic and diplomatic interests are best served by cutting a deal with China, leaving the US to retreat to its own continent. Beijing knows that its presence in Asia is a geopolitical fact. For the US, it is a geopolitical choice, one that the American public appears indifferent to defending, even if the Pentagon is not.
In private, Kissinger has always been more hard-headed, telling one aide in the mid-1970s: “When the Chinese don’t need us, they are going to be very difficult to deal with.”
Western democracy has its problems. China’s system has its problems, too. When we have problems, we will reform. But the West doesn’t. They think everything they do is right.
The Americans overrated their intrinsic attractiveness and strength as a benign, inclusive, unassailable superpower, especially in the post-Cold War glow of victory against the USSR, another rival communist state. More to the point, they underestimated the Party’s equal and opposite sense of its own exceptionalism. “We wanted to believe that we could convince China that they would be better off with us in charge; that somehow, with more interaction and engagement, the Chinese would come to realize they like to be told what to do by the US.”
The short-term assumption about China has long been that it wouldn’t take the US head-on until it was ready. But the Trump administration has reversed this formula. The question is no longer what might happen when China confronts the US. Rather, the US is bringing on the confrontation itself, for fear of leaving the contest too late.
Before becoming PM in 2015, the former banker and businessman was more captured by the opportunity China offered than any threat the country posed. In office, Turnbull changed his views, disillusioned with China’s protestations of goodwill in foreign policy and its hardball tactics in bilateral disputes. He also charged into battle in one of those gaps the Party had long been playing in, largely uncontested: its attempts to meddle in Australian politics.
Influence and interference operations? Isn’t that just diplomacy? Doesn’t everyone do that?
Australia sells resources; Germany sells its high-quality engineering and design skills, embodied by its top-of-the-range autos. German companies have made huge bets in China over the past 3 decades and continue to do so. Those bets have paid off big time.
Audi sells 3 times as many cars in China as in the US; Mercedes and BMW more than double. China now accounts for 40% of Volkswagen’s global sales. “The future of Volkswagen will be decided in the Chinese market.”
Like Australia, the overwhelming sentiment in Germany until recently was “let the good times roll.”
When Chinese firm Midea proposed buying Kula, a German robotics maker, in late 2016, Angela Merkel was annoyed to discover that the government had no mechanism to block the deal short of declaring it a national security threat.
Closest to the sun was Germany, along with South Korea, which both looked like they would melt in the face of the blaze coming out of Beijing. “Germany did not get nervous until the business community started to get nervous. They have realized the golden era is over.”
Germany’s change of heart resulted in concrete changes in policy, all of them requiring Berlin to expend heavy political capital in Brussels. In late 2017, the European Parliament passed new laws giving the continent greater anti-dumping powers, a measure designed to slow the flow of cheap Chinese goods into the continent. Brussels is also readying an EU-wide screening process to review foreign investments on national security grounds. The process is modeled on the opaque committee headed by the US Treasury that Washington uses to screen foreign takeovers.
Singapore always had an outsize role as a model for post-Mao China. It displayed how economic prosperity could be achieved under crisply efficient one-party rule, immunized from the temptations of liberal democracy. Doubtless, Singapore exaggerated its importance as a model for China. Beijing borrowed from lots of countrires and systems.
For Singapore too, America has become as much part of the problem as the solution. Many senior officials in Singapore despaired of what they regarded as Obama’s emphasis on engaging China on climate change, which they complained came at the expense of security policy and a stronger line on regional territorial disputes. If Beijing could ignore Washington’s protestations and roll over Manila after an international tribunal ruled in the Philippines’ favor over Chinese claims in the South China Sea, why should Singapore stick its neck out? But if Obama failed to stand up to Beijing, Singapore’s complaint about Trump is the opposite, that he is too confrontational. “To actively avoid taking sides actually also requires actively not being pressured to take sides,” said LHL. “Unfortunately, when the lines start to get drawn everybody asks, ‘Are you my friend or not my friend?’”
In 2017, Kishore wrote an article describing the backlash against Qatar for its meddling in various Middle Eastern disputes. “Qatar ignored an eternal rule of geopolitics: small states must behave like small states. The best time to speak up for our principles is not necessary in the heat of a row between bigger powers.” His article, which, in not so many words, was saying that Singapore should not criticize China over South China Sea in particular, provoked an explosive reaction.
Bilahari Kausikan called his colleague’s article “muddled, mendacious and indeed dangerous.” Kausikan said he wasn’t so stupid as not to recognize the “asymmetries of size and power,” but that did not mean Singapore had to grovel to build relationships: “I don’t think anyone respects a running dog.”
China does not merely want consideration of its interests. China expects deference to its interests to be internalized by ASEAN members as a mode of thought; as not just a correct calculation of ASEAN interests vis-a-vis China but “correct thinking” which leads to “correct behavior.” Foreign policy calculations are subject to continual revision; correct thinking is a permanent part of the sub-conscious. This differentiates Chinese diplomacy from the diplomacy of other major powers and represents a melding of Westphalian diplomatic practice with ancient Chinese statecraft.
When China is angry with you, if you are any country other than the US, they punish you. It’s how China manages things.
But for all their value, they have failed to come up with anything like a Plan B — in other words, a way to maintain a rules-based system in the absence of a strong and engaged America.
Although many Australian officials and politicians think they are starting to emerge from the worst of the debate over China, in truth Australia has yet to face a genuine test. The public in Australia and elsewhere will only feel pressure when tensions with China move out of the political esoteric realm of influence debates and into managing an economic rupture. Once Australians start losing their jobs because of Chinese economic sanctions, it is far from certain that the country and its leaders will hold their ground.
Beijing has already diluted ASEAN unity, peeling off Cambodia and Laos, which can be relied on to take China’s line. Those gains, in turn, help Beijing in its bigger and more difficult battle in maritime Asia, where it still feels hemmed in by the US and its allies.
The leadership in Beijing certainly fears facing a united front of foes in the West, collectively marshaling resources to push back against China. As a result, Beijing is deploying well-worn tactics, isolating and punishing some countries while accommodating and rewarding others.
The recent popularity of strongmen in major states will also devalue the strategic credibility of foreign policy and only increase the uncertainty of international politics in the coming decade. Such leaders’ personal interests may often overwhelm national interests, including strategic credibility.