The mask has come right off of China’s “peaceful rise”. Now it is bow down before the one you serve:
President Xi Jinping has put himself in position to rule China for at least another decade, and possibly for life. The question now is what he’ll do with all that power.
On one level, Xi has made it clear where he wants to take China. At the opening of the Communist Party congress last week, he repeated a goal to make China a modern socialist power by 2035, boosting per capita income to middle-income levels and modernizing the armed forces. Then by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, he wants to ensure the nation “leads the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence.”
It’s how Xi plans to get there that’s unsettling markets. Chinese assets plummeted earlier this week after the president surrounded himself with allies during the twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle, notably positioning Shanghai party chief Li Qiang as premier despite a lack of central government experience. He also signaled a shift of priorities from economic development toward security, heightening investor anxiety over how an unrestrained Xi will steer the country.
“He’d want his legacy in history to be that he achieved the 2049 goal,” said Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and the Royal United Services Institute. “Which if you translate it from party speak, is to become top dog, knock America off its perch, and order the world so that its governance better suits China’s interests and values.”
But Xi’s road map is laden with contradictions: Boosting economic growth while locking down cities under Covid Zero; ensuring technological self-sufficiency while wiping $1.5 trillion off the tech sector; opening more to the world while restricting speech and capital flows. And perhaps the biggest of all, achieving this grand vision while also risking a catastrophic war over Taiwan to complete a “historic mission” and “a natural requirement for realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to politely tell Mr Xi to fuck off. Thankfully I don’t think we will even need to:
- Chinese demographics by 2049 will be paralysing its economy and any global outreach it would like to have. It will look like a poor Japan from here not the US.
- It will be deep in the middle-income trap and struggling to grow at all.
- As it attempts to take Taiwan, it will be cut from the global economy ala Russia.
Ultimately, I can see China ruling over its own sad sack of humanity from Dalian to St Petersburg while most of the denizens of Xi’s dystopia look on with envy at the liberal bloc that comprises much of the rest of the world.
Even that may prove too much. Why the people of Russia would want to live under Xi’s rule is not obvious to me.
In short, China is at the zenith of its power right now and all of this Xi bluster should be seen as a defensive cover of the fact.
Talk about delusional.
