‘Xi’s power grab creates a classic dictator’s problem - he’s more likely to make mistakes’
Picture by Yan Ke
The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott
Xi Jinping has abandoned cautious foreign policy in favour of noisy nationalism
In contrast to the chaos caused by the Conservative government in Westminster, this week’s Chinese Communist Party Congress in Beijing was a spectacularly dull affair. But this scrupulously stage-managed event matters for the world because it confirms the future course of one of its most powerful countries. Whether China continues its rise, slips back into being a decaying dictatorship or, perhaps ideally, lands somewhere in-between success and failure will have a big impact on the rest of us.
China is already vying with the USA and could surpass it during the next decade or so to become our planet’s preeminent superpower.
This is a remarkable turnaround from the mess China was in before it began to implement reforms in the early 1980s. Three decades of hard-line dictatorship under Chairman Mao had left it a poverty-stricken backwater with no influence beyond being an occasional nuisance to its immediate neighbours. Attractively named and appallingly implemented projects such as the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” had terrorised China’s people and decimated its society, causing millions of deaths.
Steadily, though, wiser leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Zhiyang took control during the years after Mao’s death. They set China on a path to becoming, in some respects, the most remarkable success story in modern history.
A measured programme of opening up led to China becoming the workshop of the world. Much of the country has now been modernised to an advanced level. It has more miles of high-speed rail services than anywhere else and is a world leader in crucial, cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), lithium-ion batteries and solar power. This progress has lifted about 800 million Chinese people out of poverty over the last four decades, according to the World Bank. In terms of sheer scale, no other country has ever come close to matching this unprecedented achievement.
Picture by Snowscat
China has become an indispensable part of the global economy, which gives it the funds to expand its military and expand its influence around the world in other ways. Notably, China has built relationships with developing countries by giving them massive loans and building huge infrastructure projects, although some nations are now finding the strings attached by Beijing more binding than they had first seemed.
Political progress has been much patchier. Optimistic analysts once hoped that China’s economic transition would, as happened elsewhere, go hand-in-hand with it becoming a democracy based on the rule of law and respect for human rights. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ruthlessly eliminated any opposition to it and maintained its grip on power.
Crucially, though, the CCP under Deng and his successors did establish a stable enough business environment for companies to create the jobs that put millions of Chinese people on the path to prosperity. They also ran an administration just about flexible enough to detect dissatisfaction at grassroots level and respond accordingly. And they built a senior Party leadership system which allowed some different ideas to be discussed within the corridors of power and prevented any individual from acquiring the absolute control Mao had had.
But continued success is no longer a given. This is because China’s current leader Xi Jinping is ripping up the tried and trusted formulas that underpinned China’s rise. Deng Xiaoping’s “keep a cool head and maintain a low profile” foreign policy philosophy has been ditched by Xi in favour of noisy nationalism. As affirmed by this week’s CCP Congress, Xi has also had the term limits on how long he can stay on as President abolished and concentrated power in his own hands.
The problems Xi’s approach could cause are already apparent.
Internationally, many countries have been alerted to the dangers of a more aggressive China. Beijing brazenly reneged on its commitments to run Hong Kong on a “one country, two systems” basis and crushed the territory’s freedoms. It is now threatening to invade Taiwan. In response, a wide range of European, North American and Asian countries are starting to restrict their trade with China and coming together to deter Chinese military aggression.
Picture by Hennie Stander
The consequences of China attempting to capture Taiwan by force could be catastrophic. Invading a country that lies 100 miles across the sea, has difficult terrain and whose people are determined to resist would likely cause at least as much death and destruction as Russia’s idiotic but, in theory, militarily more straightforward invasion of its land neighbour, Ukraine. Such a conflict would paralyse the shipping lanes through which a large proportion of the world’s trade passes, causing an even more enormous economic crunch than the one we are currently experiencing.
A number of internal problems are also building up in China. It has a housing crisis rather different to the one in Britain. Far too many homes have been built, often on pyramid scheme basis, whereby the money received from the purchasers of one building is used as collateral for loans to build the next. This has left some huge contractors on the brink of bankruptcy now that the pool of buyers with the required funds has dried up.
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Meanwhile, China’s “Zero-Covid” policy of endless, brutally enforced lockdowns with no viable plan for escaping from the pandemic is causing both public disgruntlement and economic damage. The global inflation and cost of living problems partly stem from the supply chain complications this Chinese policy has caused too.
The common factor in all of these issues is that Xi’s power grab has created a classic dictator’s problem. Becoming cut off from dissenting voices and sound advice makes misjudgements more likely. And by identifying himself so closely with the policies concerned, he has made it difficult to change course without personally losing credibility. This would be less of a problem for a more collective form of leadership and the situation will only worsen the deeper Xi goes into full-on dictatorship.
As soon as it has a functioning government again, Britain should deepen its cooperation with its allies to deter potential Chinese aggression in East Asia and to protect itself against any significant faltering in China’s economy. This includes finding ways to diversify its sources of essential and high-tech goods away from China, such as creating incentives for companies to produce more of them in the UK.
Nonetheless, there is much that lies beyond our control and will be decided within China. As per the notorious phrase used to describe large banks, this political and economic superpower has become “too big to fail”. Our best hope is that Xi does not succeed in seeking greater world dominance and does not fail to the extent that China sinks into a sharp decline.