flawed assumptions?

Xi Jinping and 'strength'

Election day in the Chesapeake Bay region dawned with magnificent colour after the lunar eclipse early this morning. I am unsure of many things today but am utterly confident that Beijing’s dawn was no where near as clear, beautiful, nor refreshing. I want to tackle a whole raft of assumptions about China in the next few weeks but one at a time. Today’s topic will be assumptions about strength and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That, my friends, is the title most important to him. We need examine this as Xi Jinping embarks on his third term at that nation’s helm.

The CCP celebrated seventy-three years’ grip on the country only last month, celebrating its control with a massive public commemoration of the establishment of the modern China on 1 October 1949 when Mao Zedong proclaimed China’s repudiation of the humiliating past. Careful orchestration of various reminders of this event is an annual message that Chinese should respect the Party’s rule much as Beijing increasingly seeks to admonish the world that it has ‘great power status’. After all, the CCP asserts, China is only great because the Party makes it so, meaning it must remain in control without the need for any sort of competition for governing.

Later in October, Xi Jinping led a week-long Party Congress which culminated with reversing the restrictions on single-man rule adopted following Mao’s death in 1976. Xi’s consolidation of power within the Party, built upon a decade of increasingly stressing the CCP’s central role in every citizen’s life. Xi sought to reverse the loosening of the Party’s position which began in the late 1970s as China moved towards modernising. Xi believes the modernisation resulted in corruption, decentralisation of power, and transformation in the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens, undermining China. Returning the CCP to the focus of China’s life, he became the could lead ‘national rejuvenation’. This, by extension, allowed him to codify his position as a return to ‘strong man rule with Chinese characteristics’. This strength would prevent luan or chaos.

One of the most obvious manifestations of CCP rule is the hated ‘Zero Covid’ policy Xi insists will eradicate the virus and assure China’s future. This policy leads regularly to cities with tens of millions of citizens aggressively restricted to their homes, subjected to intrusive government-run testing programs, and seeing their lives substantially disrupted across the board in the affected locales. I am especially fascinated by the assumption Xi makes that the now almost three year old ‘Zero Covid’ policy shows strength which he apparently sees as vital to continuing his own and the Party’s hold on power. In Shanghai, for example, the megatropolis of more than twenty million, underwent a full, intrusive urban paralysis for more than two months earlier this year. The power of the Xi Jinping and the CCP to orchestrate this inertia was daunting, illustrating the powerlessness of the average citizen in the face of the CCP promoting ‘collective public good’ the Party leadership announces. He simply will not back down on this policy, as of now, because it apparently would show weakness, even though people are suffering, jobs lost, the economic challenges mount, and China suffers from massive international criticism of this draconian policy.

Does this obstinancy illustrate strength? Governing China is a hard task for anyone as it has been for at least four millenia because China has a huge population over a geographically challenging space with less than advantageous natural resources. A favourite Chinese phrase I think of so often is ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away’. This cultural norm indicates that wherever the central government resides, its power may not be nearly as complete in more distant portions of the country. The United States, it turns out, is not the only country where federal government power chafes against local administrators’ aspirations and applications. Of course the CCP is more willing to exercise draconian steps to assure it meets its goals because there is little public accountability for its actions but is that really indicative of strength or is it indicative of fear and weakness? Is Xi fearful that people will realise he does not see himself as strong if he admits errors?

As Xi sought to intimidate and eradicate any disparate voices from his Party’s party last month, brave Chinese in fact did challenge him. A brave individual took the extraordinary risk of hoisting a banner protesting the Zero Covid policy over a busy highway, a move captured in the immortal digits of the global internet. Even with increased CCP control over the internet since Xi assumed office in 2012, internal reports of this event spread.

More recently, the Party arrested seven individuals who demanded that quarantines end. Tomi Kilgore, 'China sees violent protests against COVID restrictions, and U.S. cases have been rising' Seven people in a population of 1.3 billion is certainly miniscule but growing ever so boldly. If Xi Jinping’s rule has been known for anything, it has been a decade of intolerance for anyone at all challenging the CCP’s rule.

Which takes us back to our assumptions about China. One of the worst ways any of us can view the world is to take a single straightline view of how events will unfold. The current discussion in the United States highlights seeming invincibility of the CCP and Xi. He certainly wants all to see him as an exceptionally powerful figure in China, one who aspires to similar world power. However, this assessment of China’s power occurs at a snapshot in time much as does any photograph. Humans have a hard time capturing changes as they occur as we cannot see the future with certainty. Xi may be more powerful than Deng Xiaoping, the man who brought modernisation to China between Mao’s death and the late 1990s, but will that power endure? What are the threats to that power? What are the forces outside of Xi’s control that could undermine him? What tools can he overuse? That power could dissipate, however, as things unfold because the number of variables we see in any human endeavour are staggeringly high, too high for us to analyse much of the time.

This is not a prediction that the CCP or Xi’s hold on power are about to end. Nor is it indicative that China’s increased aggressiveness in the world will end. It is, however, a recognition that power may be fleeting because human endeavours are dynamic. We forget that both time and variables in governing are vital yet harder for us to assess successfully than we believe. FIN