What is Xi’s China that So Challenges Us?

 

“Inciting subversion of state power”

As the world focuses on the hot zone at the Russian/Ukraine border, as Putin’s expansionist policies are on full display, we see occasional expressions of mutual disdain between China and the United States – currently a spat over diplomatic attendance at the upcoming Beijing Olympics over human rights violations – but probably do not fully appreciate what China is becoming under President Xi Jinping. Russia is a military power with a highly limited economy. China has a bigger military and is the second largest economy on earth.  Both have a plethora of nuclear weapons and the sophisticated platforms to deliver them almost anywhere.

Not particularly concerned what the rest of the world thinks, China has amped up its efforts to eliminate local dialects and languages (and their accompanying cultures) in favor of uniform Mandarin, and crushed dissent both within its ethnic districts (like the Uighurs in Western China) and in violation of its treaty obligations by decimating opposition voices in Hong Kong. It has built a huge modern military, secured a base in the Spratly island chain from which to control the South China sea and is saber rattling over Taiwan. Meanwhile, the largest and most powerful economic forces in the People’s Republic of China, the mega-billionaire corporate and real estate oligarchs (and the companies they founded), are disappearing for “reeducation” and “observation,” some never to reappear, and their massive holdings are being cut down to size. 

Big companies are witnessing value-killing regulation, being required to fund billions and billions of dollars of public works under government pressure as “voluntary donations,” and a general effort by Xi to undo the mega capitalism that has made China the second wealthiest nation on earth. Just being big and heavily in the public eye, like Alibaba’s Jack Ma, is apparently not good for an oligarch’s health. Xi seems particularly fond of cutting these folks down to size… and watch them “retire.”

Major activists, particularly in Hong Kong, have long since been moved to mainland China for trials (if any) and are now serving long prison sentences inside the PRC. Xi has now ordered that even minor activists must face a similar fate. Writing for the December 9th Los Angeles Times, Alice Su notes: “China has expanded its crackdown on civil society to those who are lesser known… Wang Jianbing visited dying construction workers. Sophia Huang Xueqin investigated China’s earliest #MeToo cases. Fang Ran wanted to empower factory workers in the south… This year, all three disappeared…. [These l]esser-known individuals such as Wang, Huang and Fang have been vanishing as China tightens restrictions for activism on gender, labor and other issues.

“The three activists were held in a form of secret detention called ‘residential surveillance at a designated location,’ or RSDL, which allows the state to lock up people in ‘black jails’ without trial. The human rights group Safeguard Defenders estimates that 45,000 to 55,000 people have been subjected to RSDL since Xi Jinping became president in 2013, including as many as 15,000 in 2020 alone… Many RSDL detainees are accused of endangering national security. Human rights lawyers, political dissidents, petitioners and members of religious or ethnic minorities have been common targets. 

“President Xi considers civil society a ‘Western’ phenomenon that challenges party authority. He has criminalized and decimated civil society with waves of arrests, starting with a mass roundup of lawyers and rights activists in 2015. Nowadays, security services tend to go after activists on an individual basis, perhaps knowing it attracts less attention… 

“Under Xi’s leadership, the Communist Party is also trying to transform its own system. Disciplinary purges have targeted thousands of cadres and officials for disloyalty or corruption. A party remake of Chinese society is also underway, with billionaires and celebrities pressured to renounce selfish, shallow or foreign-influenced behavior and to vow to serve the party better.”

What’s the headline? China is entering a massive new transitional era from big ticket capitalism back into some old-world vision of highly centrally directed communism. Guess who the central director is and will be for the foreseeable future. Yes, Xi is a relatively young political leader (in his sixties) no longer bound by term limits. His hold on those in the Politburo that “elect” him is fierce.  That communism in any form was a failed policy on any basis in the initial decades of modern China is irrelevant. Remember that China is very good at Trumpian blame of outsiders and subversionists for failure. Xi’s ego, wanting to be more than the forgettable post-Mao leadership names now fading into the history books, requires such a massive reconfiguration of China that history cannot ignore his reign.

So here comes Xi’s new communist empire. China has been here before… and fairly recently. Let’s take a quick look of China’s modern-era transition: Mao Zedong weathered a quarter of century of failed policies. He was defrocked after the disastrous “Great Leap Forward” debacle that ended in the 1960s… and fomented the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to topple all those at the top who opposed him. Unfortunately for him, he was pretty old when that was complete. 

Mao’s feeble attempt to continue his failed policies after his death – through the short-lived Hua Guofeng era – was solidly reversed when an economic realist, Deng Xiaoping (“Some must get rich first”) took over in 1981 and transformed China into the harmony of opposites it has become. His rational: Mao tried to go from feudalism into communism without what he said was a Marxist-Leninist necessary intervening “capitalist” transition. China got rich, prompting many to ask how it could claim to be “communist”. Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin explained that “Communism is what we say it is.” Xi seems to be picking up on that note. Time to kill capitalism. But the United States is still and will for the likely future remain the most significant superpower no matter what China does, right? A really tough question.

We need to understand that most of the world assumes that the United States is just beginning its dramatic fall from grace. We are being marginalized by friends and foes alike. That is certainly the assumption that Japan, Korea, Russia and the EU are making. China and Russia see the key to accelerating that downfall is to foster “all things Trump.” Unfortunately, our heavily polarized nation seems to reflect that approach. The more Trump succeeds, particularly if he moves the election of the President to state legislatures (pending in many swing states) and not the voters… supported by his Supreme Court appointees, the more China and Russia will have much to celebrate. It bolsters Xi’s argument to the world that democracy does not work.

Yet Xi’s policies are not sound. They have failed China before, but he is eliminating any opposition, repressing any movements that challenge him, and he is wildly successful in that effort. By the time China roils through that “backfire,” that is likely to be decades away. In the meantime, China is very much pleased with the rising instability in the only country on earth that can seriously challenge its rising supremacy: the United States of America.

As the US continues to shoot itself in the foot, so will China succeed. Xi cares little what the world thinks of him. China is already ahead of us in AI research, hypersonic missiles and they produce ten times the number of graduating hard science engineers that we do. There is no anti-science movement in China. And while we have a much more powerful military, it is spread so thin over the globe that every computer simulation we have run in a conflict between the US and China over Taiwan (think: Taiwan’s computer chip monopoly is the big asset), China wins easily. For China, the pandemic is no longer hot news, and they can effectively mandate vaccines, isolation and masks no matter how unpopular. We still have powerful factions that are actually opposing the policies we need to end our version of the pandemic.

We also spend so much on our military that we are actually creating a reverse impact on our viability. Ancient Sparta fell with the cost of the best military on earth too. We spend a lot to protect our assets as we let those assets depreciate without sufficient reinvestment. What are we protecting? We have a political leadership, dealing with a badly educated electorate (13,000 school districts), where repeating the mistakes of history is our mantra. We fight culture wars but seriously ignore educating the next generations of super engineers and scientists that are absolutely necessary for economic stability and growth. China, basically President Xi, is smiling.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the United States appears to be creating a magnificent practice of completely and totally ignoring both history’s lessons and what is really going on in the world.