Xi Jinping's tenureship has been a global disaster
It was only a short time ago that covid-19 seemed to be a death-send to democracy and a gift to dictatorships. Watching the tables turn in the last few months is a reminder of how fast global trends can change.
For the last two years, it appeared to be western states suffering from political crises over the pandemic, but as the vaccine rollouts continued and people returned to work, life began to take on some semblance of normality. While in the autocratic world from Tehran to Moscow, strongmen have used the pandemic to shore up their power, making increasingly bad decisions as a result. In Russia's case, the calamitous invasion of Ukraine, and in China’s, a dogmatic zero-covid policy that has set the country on a path to economic turmoil not seen since the late 1980s.
The key difference between the free world and the autocratic one is that democracies can learn from their mistakes relatively quickly, but dictatorships cannot. Their credibility relies on their omniscience. No policy, no matter how ill-thought-out it is, can ever be seen as wrong. Nowhere is this more the case than with China's General Secretary, Xi Jinping.
Unlike Vladimir Putin, China's leader is rather methodical and cautious in his political exploits, favouring the slow bureaucratic machinery rather than shock tactics and military risks, but he is no less averse to the centralisation of power. Unlike Russia, the 1990s was a very prosperous time for China, allowing a huge expansion of its private enterprise and cultural creativity. It paved the way for the boom years from 2001-2015 but also led to rampant corruption in the upper echelons of the party.
Xi Jinping was never supposed to be China’s president. After the mayor of Shanghai’s career exploded in an embezzlement scandal, Xi was floated as a possible replacement. He had garnered a reputation for playing things by the book and was seen by party elders as less likely to stir up trouble. His choice as successor came after a massive power struggle among party elites which saw Chonqing Mayor Bo Xilai attempt to take over the country’s security apparatus and install himself as the next leader. In comparison to the Maoist “New Red” movement that Bo Xilai encouraged, Xi Jinping looked like a moderate and was appointed in 2012 with the usual rhetoric of deepening free market reform and expanding the rule of law.
Few within the CCP foresaw how Xi’s popular anti-corruption drive would allow the complete takeover of the party by a singular individual. In the aftermath of the Bo scandal, the new Chairman embarked on a series of reforms to bring stability to a party seemingly shaken by infighting. He created a special political office called the National Supervisory Commission (NSC), a kind of secret police inside the secret police that was answerable only to Xi and could interfere in any political affair. Over time, the remit of the office expanded. It was used to crack down on any human rights organisations, ostensibly as part of his promise to strengthen the rule of law. This change coincided with the expansion of the surveillance state using mass digital infrastructure. The result was a hollowing out of the country’s already dysfunctional court system, sinking China’s ranking on the rule of law Index over the course of Xi’s ten-year presidency.
The icing on the cake of the stagnating reforms was Xi's much more grandiose personal projects — namely, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the Made In China 2025 Initiative that was supposed to move China into becoming the global leader in innovation and trade. After nearly seven years of such schemes, the BRI has spent almost 1 trillion dollars to build a few railways, and gain leverage over nations like Sri Lanka which are now in a debt default. After a fight with the tech sector, most Chinese tech companies are under defacto nationalisation and are unable to even produce silicon chips for new Huawei phones. Such reforms coupled with declining demographics mean that China is now experiencing its biggest economic slowdown since the 1970s. By seeking to imitate Mao Zedong's political policies, Xi has now managed to achieve Mao-level growth rates, too.
It should be noted that many of China's current problems would have happened without Xi. The one-child policy and the limits of an export-led growth model would have hampered any Chinese leader. Nationalist sentiments were already spurred on by CCP propaganda before 2012, but the leader's personal style has poured fuel on a now nation-consuming fire.
The fundamental reason for the general secretary's policies appears to be a heartfelt devotion to Maoist doctrine. During the cultural revolution, he was sent to a youth camp where he learned the red propaganda that prevailed in the 1960s. There, Xi was modelled into the perfect Maoist bureaucrat, learning the empty slogans present in much of his policies. Political power growing out of the barrel of a gun appears to be the one that he took most to heart.
In the last few years, Xi has also sought to revive the former Chairman’s personality cult, appearing wearing the Mao suit and driving the same model car around Tiananmen square. Earlier this year, he took the ploy a step further and even created his own little red book, which is now required reading for party officials and primary school students. If that wasn’t enough, he now has his own magic potato-growing cult that started after he was filmed touring the countryside earlier this year giving farming advice. All these parallels with the cult leader, however, belie the fact that Xi is a very different kind of dictator to Mao. Xi is the bureaucratic kind, more akin to Ceaușescu or Kim Il-sung than Stalin or Hitler. He lacks the charisma and fanatical zeal that inspires mass rallies. His speeches are so dry and dull that they are almost impossible to distinguish from printed party reports.
This seeming lack of insight may be because of the leader’s educational background, or lack thereof. According to memoirs written by one of his classmates, Xi spent barely seven years in full-time education, interrupted as it was by red guards and labour work in ‘Youth Camps.’ Famous party historian Li Ru on his deathbed revealed his astonishment at Xi’s lack of education after meeting him. “I didn’t realise then his education level was so low,” he recorded. “He barely writes at an elementary school level.”
This cold pencil-pushing, however, hardly makes him any less dangerous, as what Xi lacks in intellect, he makes up for in cunning manoeuvring. He has an extraordinary ability to create political power bases and outflank his opponents. This skill has allowed him to completely centralise power at the party’s 20th national congress, cementing himself as the country’s dictator for life. All hopes that there might be some moderation of his hard-line stance were crushed after the country’s last president Hu Jintao was unceremoniously pulled out of the hall by Xi’s own bodyguard amid confused note-grabbing and pointing. Even while the exact circumstances of the incident remain unclear, the power move echoes similar shakedowns carried about by the likes of Kim Jong-un and Saddam Hussein.
Because of this abrupt end to China’s reform era, most policymakers are now concerned with one key issue: Taiwan. The logic is simple, as all of Xi’s accomplishments come crashing down around his ears, Taiwan might start to look like the one thing he could use to shore up his legacy. It is not hard to see the comparisons with Russia. Xi’s new politburo could hardly be composed of a more sycophantic group of yes-men, none of whom are likely to tell the Chairman anything he does not want to hear. The leader also took the time this summer to purge the one general — Li Yazhou — who voiced concerns about how badly a Taiwanese invasion could go, sending a clear message to the rest about where the country is headed. The leader was recently pictured alone in the centre of the Great Hall of the People at the beginning of the congress, surrounded by hundreds of rows of empty seats, making even Putin’s record-breaking tables look cosy. All of this is not a sign of strength, but of desperate insecurity, and a sense that at any moment, the carefully erected edifice will crumble.
From leaked documents and military training videos, the party is gearing up for a military conflict with Taiwan, and the signs point to a goal of annexing the island before the year 2030. But as US military officials recently opined; China’s economic crisis might bring the timetable much closer. This also appears to be the calculus behind the Biden administration's new chip sanctions, which aim to slow down the CCP’s ability to supply its military with high-tech chips. While some worry that the sanctions may increase the likelihood of a conflict, the CCP is already gearing up for an annexation, chips or no chips, and stymieing its military capacity logically takes precedence. While offering economic advantages or access to tech conferences is surely a worthy effort on the part of the US, they are unlikely to deter a dictator with only one card left to play.
Whatever the outcome of the chip wars and negotiations, Xi may conclude that his country will never be in a stronger position than it is now, and take the risk. This means that the defence of Taiwan must begin now, with the assumption that an attack is imminent. Unlike in Ukraine, there is a good chance that, just like Mao’s failed attempts to take the island in the 1950s, the CCP could fail to land even a single troop garrison in the event of an attack. The US, and its democratic allies, must arm Taiwan every bit as well as they’ve armed Ukraine, if not better, to make Xi’s failure all the more likely. More than anything, this would have the highest chance of toppling not just Xi, but the most murderous government in world history, so their dark stain on humanity’s past may finally be erased.