Xi’s China, the greatest political experiment

The success or failure of the President’s domestic programme will determine whether there is peace or war in east Asia.

June 02, 2015 12:33 am | Updated November 17, 2021 02:33 am IST

Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash

Can Mr. Xi do it? This is the biggest political question in the world today. “Yes, Xi can,” some tell me in Beijing. “No, he can’t,” say others. The wise know that nobody knows.

There is a great debate going on in Washington about whether the U.S. should change its China policy in response to Beijing’s more assertive stance under President Xi Jinping. This includes the reported stationing of artillery on the artificial islands it is building on underwater reefs in the South China Sea. It also matters to everyone everywhere whether China can sustain its economic growth as it exhausts its ready supplies of cheap labour. Yet even more than in other countries, the future of China’s foreign policy and its economy depend on the quality of decision-making produced by the political system.

By now it is relatively clear that Mr. Xi is trying to steer a complex economy and society through difficult times by top-down changes, controlled by a disciplined Leninist party. He is consciously trying to combine the “invisible hand” of the market with the “visible hand” of the party-state. The “great helmsman” Mao Zedong is clearly one inspiration, but the pragmatic reformer Deng Xiaoping is another.

Much of the reignition has so far been about establishing control over the party, state, military and what there is of civil society, after the Bo Xilai affair made apparent the internal crisis of party rule. Yet, as a hereditary communist, the president may genuinely believe enlightened, skilful authoritarian rulers can handle things best. The sinologist Ryan Mitchell notes that in a 1948 article, a veteran Chinese communist called Xi Zhongxun was quoted as saying “the most lovable qualities of us Communist party folks are devotion and sincerity”. Speaking to party members in 2013, his son, Mr. Xi said that “leading cadres must treat the masses with devotion and sincerity”.

This experiment is life-changing for the thousands of purged officials, who have disappeared into the tender embrace of the relevant party and state organs.

It is also extremely uncomfortable for those Chinese who believe in free and critical debate, independent civic initiatives and non-governmental organisations. It’s not just the inconvenience of finding it difficult to access Gmail and so much else on the Internet. More seriously, I noticed in Beijing today a real nervousness among intellectuals who a few years ago were so outspoken; a sense that the boundaries of what can be said publicly are narrowing all the time. Leading civil rights lawyers, activists and bloggers have been arrested, charged and imprisoned. A new draft law proposes almost Putinesque restrictions on NGOs. Another extends the definition of national security to include ideology and culture, with formulations such as “carrying forward the exceptional culture of the Chinese nationality and defending against and resisting the infiltration of harmful culture”.

Yes, that’s all true, say analysts of the “yes, Xi can” persuasion — and, if they are outside the system, they usually add that it is most regrettable. But, they say, look at the reform programme that is being pressed through with similar determination. Its key features are not easily summarised in familiar political and economic terms, because the Chinese mix is unique. For example, complex measures to address a dangerous overhang of local government debt, the introduction of property rights for agricultural land and changes to the household registration ( hukou ) system may be as consequential as anything that can be captured in a western headline.

If all this were to succeed as intended, western liberal democratic capitalism would have a formidable ideological competitor with worldwide appeal. For the West, there would be a silver lining: competition keeps you on your toes. I suspect the hubris of the early 2000s — both abroad, plotting regime change in Iraq, and at home, in the excesses of financial capitalism — had something to do with the lack of serious ideological competition.

The short, medium and long term This outcome is obviously not what I, as a liberal and a democrat, would wish for Chinese friends. But I do wish for them, and for ourselves, a China that experiences evolutionary and not revolutionary change. But the most important concerns nothing less than war and peace.

A communist regime in crisis would probably find it impossible to resist the temptation of playing the nationalist card more aggressively somewhere in its neighbourhood, building on indoctrination, a selective interpretation of the recent past and a narrative of 150 years of national humiliation. If China is already warning off U.S. surveillance planes from flying over its artificial islands, imagine what it might do if it faced a systemic crisis.

Therefore, while this is not the evolutionary path that many of us welcomed in China around the time of the Beijing Olympics, we must still hope that Mr. Xi’s leadership will manage to “cross the river by feeling the stones”. My greatest concern flows not from the moral dictates of liberal democracy as personal preference, although it would be dishonourable to pretend that those don’t matter, but from the insights of political analysis that lead us to liberal democracy. In the short to medium term, it’s likely that Mr. Xi’s brand of smart authoritarianism will keep not just his party in power but the whole show on the road. That medium term could certainly span the two five-year periods allowed for President Xi’s formal tenure of power. There are so many significant power resources still at his disposal, including some genuine personal popularity and widespread national pride. I would therefore take a bet that, in this narrow sense, “yes, Xi can” will prove correct. But in the longer term? Watch out for a rocky 2020s.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015

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