Although Xi Jinping finally ended China's disastrous zero-COVID policy late last year, he has continued to double down on his Leninist project of deepening autocracy at home and aggression abroad. More Sino-Western "decoupling" and the emergence of Cold War-style blocs is all but assured.
Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations and a long-time chronicler of China, has been closely watching the country’s development since the days of Mao Zedong. Here, he speaks with the Polish historian and former dissident Irena Grudzińska Gross about President Xi Jinping’s increasingly iron-fisted rule and China’s regression toward Maoist absolutism at home and nationalist aggression abroad.
Irena Grudzińska Gross: Every day seems to bring new developments that augur a downward spiral in US-China relations.
Orville Schell: Yes. And making matters even more fraught, Xi Jinping has just returned from a three-day official state visit to Moscow, where he met with President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials. As Beijing’s top diplomat Wang Yi put it, China’s goal is “to strengthen our comprehensive strategic partnership” in ways that can “withstand all tests.”1
So, of course, the US and its democratic allies feel threatened, and not just by Russia and China’s bellicosity, but by the unholy alliance of autocrats – Iran, Syria, Belarus, and North Korea – they are assembling. It is hardly surprising that the US and its allies are now actively rallying to create a more effective and collective deterrent that makes Russia feel even more spurned and cast out, and China feel even more threatened by what it views as an unprovoked latter-day containment policy.
Earlier this year, just as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was preparing to meet his counterpart, Wang Yi, to set a floor under the downward slide in relations, a massive Chinese balloon appeared over Alaska, and Blinken canceled his trip. It was an unfortunate missed opportunity to try to start stabilizing the bilateral relationship. Since then, the mutual distrust has ratcheted up almost daily. Now, with China drawing even closer to Russia, the world has been dividing ever more rapidly into two increasingly hostile ideological blocs.
While Russia continues to attack civilians in Ukraine, the Kremlin has hosted a parade of unsavory autocrats, from Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission and, now, Chinese President Xi Jinping himself. As if to eliminate any lingering doubts about China’s position, Xi publicly attacked the US in remarks before China’s National People’s Congress on March 6, declaring: “Western countries led by the US have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.” Calling out the US by name was a first for him.
For his part, China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang, raised the temperature even further by accusing the US of “hysterical neo-McCarthyism” that has put the two countries on a path to “conflict and confrontation.” Finally, when Xi was anointed with a third term on March 10, Putin praised him for his “personal contribution” to strengthening the countries’ “comprehensive partnership.” Putin is now looking forward to even more “fruitful Russian-Chinese cooperation.”
In short, we seem to be moving irrevocably toward deeper hostilities. With new post-Cold War blocs emerging, and with each side blaming the other for the breakdown, it is increasingly hard to see where all this ends.
THE COVID BLUNDER
IGG: This spiral seems to have begun accelerating late last year, around the same time that Xi reversed his “zero-COVID” policy overnight. What happened?
OS: That, too, was unprecedented – almost unimaginable – to those of us who have long followed China. After so many years of Xi’s centralized leadership and successful revival of the CPC as an all-pervasive force and network across China, we are used to seeing any kind of dissent be immediately suffocated. Xi’s fear of an uncontrollable pandemic (and China’s possession of only moderately effective vaccines) led him to sustain his draconian zero-COVID policy, forcing lockdowns on any city, factory, or town that showed the slightest signs of infection.
But then demonstrations against these unprecedented controls erupted, and soon the protests expanded and acquired a more political valence, with some demonstrators even attacking the party and the state. This gave the outside world a peek into what lies beneath the manicured surface of Chinese public discourse. Though we cannot always see it, there is a good deal of stifled critical sentiment.
IGG: Was Xi genuinely fearful of COVID-19, or was the pandemic more of a pretext to tighten control over society?
OS: Xi deftly used the pandemic to test and implement new kinds of surveillance and control. The real question, then, is why he is so fixated on “control.”
He is somewhat anomalous and surprising as a modern Chinese leader. His father and family were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and he, too, got “sent down” for seven years to a very poor part of the country. Despite all this, he really did drink from the political wellspring of Mao’s Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. These were his formative years, when he acquired the toolkit he would use later, first when he became a provincial leader and then as the supreme leader of the People’s Republic (PRC).
Unlike many other earlier Chinese leaders who spent some time abroad in Russia, Europe, or elsewhere, Xi, like Mao, never left China for any great length of time. He thus spent the Cultural Revolution learning how to struggle in the Maoist world, how to survive, and how to overcome.
Now, after so many decades of the reforms and openness that began with Deng Xiaoping, we find Xi taking China backwards, to a statecraft that is more Maoist than republican. It is like witnessing the reappearance of some recessive Leninist gene that we thought would never again be expressed in Chinese politics. Because Xi believes that China is in a fundamentally hostile political relationship with the US and the West, he is bent on fostering self-reliance, even returning to a state that is somewhat reminiscent of Maoist autarchy. Gone is the hope that China might become a responsible global stakeholder through “engagement.” Xi had other ideas, and now we are seeing divergence instead of convergence.
IGG: Why did he end zero-COVID when he did?
OS: At first, it looked like Xi was succeeding in his fight against COVID-19. China did seem to be doing better than the West, both in terms of infections and even the economy. The authorities isolated factories – effectively creating bubbles around them – so that the workers could carry on (and couldn’t go home). Party officials monitored workers very carefully, isolating any who were infected and keeping Chinese supply chains going at a reasonable rate.
Meanwhile, we in the West were somewhat in disarray because we did not have such a coherent and disciplined policy. We were feeling our way in the dark, leading many to view our pandemic response as a chaotic mess.
Now, however, we see that the West’s disorganization ultimately allowed it to gain greater herd immunity, and thus to deal with both the pandemic and the return to normal life in a less disruptive way.
Eventually, China’s public-health success story became a political failure. The people in white hazmat suits – who were testing everybody and inoculating some – became associated with the police and an oppressive state. People who tried to escape from their factories, leave their homes, or protest were beaten. But, after months of being cut off from their families, from stores, and from regular life, many more Chinese began to vent their anger against the state, and this anger about Xi’s COVID overkill started to merge with other latent sources of disaffection.
After all, Xi had also been tightening controls over universities, the media, travel, culture, and just about every other aspect of life. For a while, the pandemic itself allowed him to control this incipient disaffection, by developing a surveillance system the likes of which we have never seen. While zero-COVID has now ended, these new mechanisms of state control will survive. Indeed, they are already antagonizing some elements of society.
FANGS BARED
IGG: Are there still prospects for Chinese collaboration or engagement with the United States and Europe?
OS: During the last few decades, the global economy developed very rapidly, leading to what looked like a win-win for everybody. The assumption was that as long as “engagement” with China continued, the PRC would become more enmeshed in the international marketplace and less antagonistic with democratic political systems.
We knew that China was not going to change overnight or change completely. But the direction and pace of reforms were encouraging enough to keep the global proposition of “engagement” going. We knew that China and America would become more interdependent; but we didn’t see that as a danger as long as China was more or less friendly, supply chains functioned, and the globalized market system kept working.
In any event, the US did develop a massive trade dependence on China, especially in manufacturing, rare earths, polysilicon, lithium, cobalt, and certain pharmaceutical products, and even in some technology sectors. In the case of microchips that were once designed and produced in the US, we started outsourcing the “fabbing” process to Taiwan, South Korea, and even China. This became true of many other goods that could be made cheaper elsewhere, because companies wanted to lower their costs and did not want to maintain big expensive inventories. As a result, we are now deeply reliant on China for critical elements in our supply chains.
But then Xi changed Chinese foreign policy, adopting a very aggressive and bullying attitude that has alienated one country after another. This began in 2017 with punitive diplomacy against South Korea, in response to South Korea’s decision to host a US-made missile-defense system (THAAD) to defend itself against North Korea. Chinese officials objected on the grounds that the system could be used to surveil China, so Xi’s government set out to punish its neighbor, cutting off flights, closing scores of Korean department stores inside China, blocking K-pop and other cultural imports, and – above all – stopping the huge flow of Chinese tourists to South Korea. The Koreans thus were the first to experience the full force of what the Chinese call “wolf warrior diplomacy.”
IGG: Tell us more about that concept.
OS: As Xi became convinced that China was rising (and the West declining) – that “The East Wind is Prevailing Over the West Wind” – he began to throw China’s weight around more, inflicting on others what China itself had experienced at the hands of “Great Powers” in previous centuries. As it happened, two films had been released in China about a powerful warrior who refused to tolerate any offense from anybody, especially foreigners. Xi embraced this unrepentant aggressiveness as the hallmark of a new foreign-policy style, which was meant to underscore China’s new wealth and power.
But this new posture also meant that China took umbrage at more and more statements and actions by Western powers and others, be it Japan, South Korea, Australia, or India. If any of these governments offended China, it followed that they must be punished. No longer was China developing under the banner of a “peaceful rise.” Instead, Chinese foreign policy became increasingly strident, with power understood as the ability to retaliate against those perceived to be adversaries.
As one country after another got a taste of the “wolf warrior” treatment, political leaders began to question China’s professed friendliness. After South Korea, Canada was punished for its role in detaining Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, on charges of violating sanctions against Iran. In retaliation, the Chinese detained two Canadians on spurious charges for almost three years. Then there was Australia, whose crime was to call for a thorough investigation of COVID-19’s origins. China clobbered the Aussies by canceling barley, lobster, beef, and wine imports.
Moreover, China attacked India for no discernable reason. Though the two countries had not had a real war in the Himalayas since 1962, China inexplicably started challenging Indian soldiers in the Ladakh region. India was so put off by this aggression that it joined the Quad, a new Indo-Pacific partnership with Australia, Japan, and the US.
China also heedlessly alienated other countries such as Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania, and imposed arbitrary sanctions on members of the European Parliament, thus affronting all of Europe. Xi’s domestic crackdown was being mirrored by a clampdown abroad.
IGG: This should not be called diplomacy at all, should it?
OS: No. It was very counterproductive. China alienated countries for no apparent reason, except that Xi saw some need to throw the country’s economic and political weight around. While this tendency predated the rise of Xi (recall that when Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China canceled salmon imports from Norway), he took it to a whole new level.
Hence, China also became more belligerent in the South and East China Seas, building and militarizing islands, and claiming one of the world’s most highly trafficked maritime routes as its own. The next assault was on Hong Kong. Violating the terms of the 1997 handover of the territory by Britain, China effectively ended the city’s autonomy and ran roughshod over its free press, electoral system, human-rights protections, and academic freedoms.
Then, Xi turned to the Taiwan Strait, ramping up his belligerent rhetoric and proclaiming that “sooner rather than later” Taiwan must become a part of China. He has declared that China would not eschew the use of military force if that were what “reunification” required. Finally, China has continued to press its claims to various islands south of Okinawa, even though these have long been administered by Japan.
So, we have a whole welter of territorial claims involving countries from Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam to Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. China’s approach has increasingly led policymakers in Washington, and now in Europe, to regard the country as a disruptive and destabilizing force.
PARTY OF ONE
IGG: When and why did China’s “peaceful rise” give way to rising tensions?
OS: It began, as I noted, before Xi came to power, under the previous CPC general secretary, Hu Jintao. Hu was the one who started ramping up the South China Sea issue. But when Xi came to power in 2012-13, he went right ahead and militarized the islands that China had been building, despite having promised US President Barack Obama that he would not do so.
And, again, it was Xi’s aggressiveness that put a stake through the heart of “engagement” as a viable US or Western policy. He is the one who has forced governments around the world to consider whether they are too dependent on China, especially when it comes to technology and other sectors with military implications. More countries are asking themselves whether they want to rely on China for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, and certain microchips. The answer is of course no.
That is why the US passed the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and set limits on the sale of certain kinds of intellectual property, microchips, and chip-fabricating equipment to China, as well as making it illegal for anyone with a US passport or green card to work for certain Chinese tech companies. US strategists are afraid that China will use our technology and intellectual property not just to compete with us but possibly to go to war against us. That, sadly, is where we are today. The relationship is much more adversarial now, and it is rooted in a divergence between fundamentally different political systems. That is why the prospect of greater decoupling now lies at the heart of the relationship between China and the West.
IGG: Now that Xi has secured his norm-busting third term, do you think he sees the risks of overreaching?
OS: While I personally think Xi is overreaching, I do not see many signs that he himself recognizes the danger that he is creating for his country and the world. He is like the hero in a Greek tragedy who succumbs to unbridled hubris. He will continue to hoover up power, just like Mao did.
Mao was “chairman” of the party until he died. But when Deng came to power in 1978, he eschewed that title and set new rules for leadership, prescribing that each party secretary should serve only two terms, for a total of ten years. But Xi – the first party general secretary not appointed by Deng – changed the rules so that he could have more than two terms, both as party general secretary and as president, and potentially rule for life. (President is really a throwaway title; party general secretary is the important job.)
To be sure, at the beginning of his first term (in 2012), many people, including me, thought that Xi might end up being a reformer like Deng, owing to his father’s history as a veteran revolutionary who had been persecuted. But that turned out not to be the case.
Now that Xi has his third term, he will probably secure a fourth term as well. Notably, he has not bothered to appoint any “successor,” even though these are normally designated a few years before the end of the second term. Doing so would have made him a lame duck, which is unacceptable to someone for whom power is everything. Because Xi wants to avoid showing any signs of weakness, he will not allow anyone else near the scepter of power.
IGG: Are there any signs of internal opposition?
OS: Well, the recent “white paper revolution” opposing his zero-COVID policies did show some evidence of disaffection with the extreme controls. But, by centralizing power in his own hands, including through his anti-corruption campaign, Xi has so defoliated the landscape of rivals that there are no overt signs of leadership factionalism or of opposition within the party itself. Xi has used the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to intimidate any dissenters into silence.
The CPC has almost 100 million members, but tens of thousands of them are now in prison. Xi has locked up not only those who were corrupt, but also those who could oppose him. Yet, in doing so, he has created many enemies – and, of course, those enemies have friends. Although they have no way to organize or express themselves publicly, we can be certain that there is much latent discontent. Within some groups, the knives are surely out for Xi.
WHAT THE WORLD SEES
IGG: How do you interpret the scene from the 20th Party Congress last fall, when Hu was rather indecorously escorted from the room?
OS: What made this scene so strange was that we’ve never seen such overt signs of disorder, much less opposition in newspapers or on television, at any other CPC Congress. Hu – Xi’s predecessor as general secretary, who left his post in an orderly fashion after two terms – was scheduled to be sitting on the stage in what is always a thoroughly scripted, highly regimented spectacle. But for reasons we still don’t fully understand, he was escorted out.
Maybe he has dementia – he did look rather lost. Or perhaps he was removed because Xi feared that he might stage some kind of embarrassing protest. Hu did keep trying to grab a red folder on the dais. Maybe Xi worried that he would see the lineup for the Politburo Standing Committee and realize that all his own people had been kicked out. All we really know is that something happened that was not in the official script. For a party that has always been allergic to anything spontaneous, it was an arresting moment.
IGG: But everybody was just sitting there so calmly…
OS: I suspect they were all terrified. Nobody wanted to acknowledge what was going on, lest they commit lèse-majesté in front of Xi.
Now, if I were Xi, I would have stood up, embraced Hu, picked up the microphone, and said to the whole zombie-like collection of assembled party officials: “Let’s thank comrade Hu for his great service to the nation. He’s feeling unwell and now needs to take a rest.” Then, he could have had him escorted respectfully from the room. But no! He was indecorously expelled, and his former colleagues just sat there like robots doing nothing. That little drama says a lot about how the Chinese system works.
IGG: Would you call Xi’s techno-autocracy a neo-communist system?
OS: It is fair to say that Mao was actually a “Marxist” or a “communist” of sorts. He did believe in class struggle, overthrowing the bourgeoisie, “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and so forth. But I think Xi is a pure Leninist. He does have certain aspirations to reduce the inequalities in Chinese society; but his real focus is on building the wealth and power of the state, and he views party organization as the key to that goal. Lenin, too, was a party builder.
After Deng came to power in the late 1970s, the CPC’s standing and power gradually diminished. During the 1980s, party cells were even removed from state enterprises, and private enterprises were left essentially free from direct party control. But Xi has reversed this, proclaiming that, “East and West, North and South, the Party leads on everything.” He has reinstalled party cells not only in state enterprises but also in private ones. And he has rebuilt the party structure in the classical, Leninist fashion – namely, as a highly disciplined, well-organized political apparatus that can rule at home while also seeking to control what happens abroad.
This is done through the party’s immensely well-funded and well-organized United Front organizations, which are now dedicated “to telling the China story well.” To that end, they have appropriated a massive infusion of funds and institutional firepower to work abroad through media, Confucius institutes, cultural exchanges, universities, civil-society organizations, philanthropy, and other channels – all seeking to influence how people overseas view China.
IGG: So, foreign opinion is still important to Xi?
OS: Xi wants China to be an independent superpower, but he also wants to create dependencies among certain foreign companies, so that he can use them as leverage with their governments. Moreover, he has spent a fortune developing his signature Belt and Road Initiative, which promotes economic dependence on China among developing countries so that they will vote with the PRC at the United Nations and support it in its myriad disputes with democratic countries.
Recently, Xi has been focusing on Western investment banks, offering them all kinds of new special rights to set up financial entities and wealth-management arms in China. Some firms are taking the bait, despite China’s increasingly hostile relations with the US.
My own view is that, whether you are from Blackstone or Morgan Stanley, you would have to be deluded not to see which way the wind is blowing. Despite ongoing reliance on China for many supply chains, deeper economic ties are not in the offing, because such co-dependence now comes with huge geopolitical risks. It is hard to imagine that even Elon Musk, who has made a fortune in China with his Tesla factory, will be able to maintain this success over the long term. China now wants to develop its own electric-vehicle industry, and it does not want to rely on Musk anymore.
So, the wind is blowing more and more ferociously in the direction of decoupling, even though that process is neither easy nor welcome. Yes, some US and foreign companies – such as the stalwarts of Germany’s auto industry – have not yet reconciled themselves with the new reality. CEOs do not like to countenance gloomy and disruptive scenarios. But all they have to do is look at what has happened in Ukraine. If China were to move against Taiwan, it would make the fallout from the war in Eastern Europe look like child’s play.
IGG: What do you mean?
OS: Look at what Putin has done out of territorial pique. He launched a full-scale invasion. If companies wait until China attacks Taiwan – or until there is some military accident in the South China Sea or an explosion of tensions with Japan over the Senkaku Islands – it will already be too late to devise a Plan B. Those companies risk losing everything. Some corporate leaders still cannot believe that the era of “engagement” is over, and that China could end up in a conflict with the US. But they need to wake up. I am not predicting a conflict, but such a prediction is becoming impossible to dismiss.
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