Xi Jinping: The Backlash (Penguin Specials)

Journalist Richard McGregor has given us a concise, useful summary of a troublesome development in international relations, in the form of a global reaction to, for want of a better phrase, the ”Xi Jinping effect" that has gradually becomes manifest since his ascent to the three highest offices in the People’s Republic of China—General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission in 2012 and President of China in 2013. Indeed, the United States and many of its allies in Europe and Asia/Pacific see Xi’s China as the coming decade’s most significant global challenge across every significant transnational domain: political, economic, military, and diplomatic.

Following decades of reform that gradually sought, sometimes cosmetically and other times integrally, to distance the CCP from the state and thereby protect the vibrant private-sector economy from ideological interference, Xi’s rise marks a return to a rigid emphasis on Party primacy in all walks of Chinese life. Xi has mandated Party committees and watchdogs in places where they had generally been sidelined, disbanded, or otherwise excluded in the the high tide of opening and reform in the three-plus decades before Xi. Party committees now play more prominent roles in both Chinese and foreign "private-businesses" operating in China, to include Taiwan, American, and European factories and business offices. Also notable is the renewed roles of party cells and study-and-indoctrination sessions throughout universities, workplaces, the military, and every level of society, in both urban and rural areas.

Moreover, as part of the reemphasis on the Party, Xi revived the prominence of Mao Zedong and his significant historical role, granting The Great Helmsman primary agency in the Party’s Great-Chain-of-Being: Mao, the mythical presence from the party’s founding in Shanghai in 1921 through the epic drama of the Chinese Revolution—the Jiangxi Soviet, the Long March, Yenan, the Anti-Japanese National United Front of proletarians and bourgeoisie following Japan’s invasion of China in 1936, final victory in 1949, with Mao pronouncing from atop Tiananmen, “The Chinese people have stood up!”

In Xi’s mind, surmises McGregor, removing Mao from the equation would delete him from the Chinese Revolution and the Party he led…the entire edifice of Party legitimacy in all sectors thus wobbles and threatens to collapse. The vast majority of living Chinese were born after the Cultural Revolution (1966--1976), the death of Mao (1976), and the decisions of the early 1980s that pointed to Mao’s “mistakes.” Consequently, the population needs to relearn the early lessons, the hardships the Party and the Chinese people faced, and, naturally, that “all our progress is due to the wise leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.” Mao remains, in Xi’s mind, the linchpin of this history and legacy, whose portrait over Tiananmen will never be removed.

McGregor comments on Western concern over the persecution, if not outright suppression, of Muslims in Xinjiang and observes that under Xi, as part of this and other social control indertskings, makes China the most widely and deeply surveilled country in the world, with its pioneering advances in facial recognition technologies and imaginative uses of big data generated by the popular addiction to the internet and its massive large social media universe, all of which feed into China’s social credit system of data-gathering for loyalty report cards on all Chinese. Other measures, both technical and old-fashioned physical (read that as local “goons” who see little harm in dragging a troublemaker into a basement for some straightening out), put Orwell’s Big Brother in the shade. Dissenters are routinely jailed, subjected to grueling, repeated interrogations, and publications closed, with editors punished, for questioning the official line.

McGregor is also critical of Xi’s program of asserting the full range of Chinese interests more aggressively in regional and international affairs, at the same time that the United States under Donald Trump questions its alliances and retreats from international obligations. Since Xi’s assumption of power in 2012 until today, he has steadily raised alarms in the region and beyond, provoking, on and off, calls for Cold War-type responses to his overstepping of normative boundaries established by Deng Xiaoping to “hide our capacities and bide our time.” China’s more provocative behavior is made all the more problematic in the context the erratic inconsistency of a chaotic Trump "China policy" and America’s diminished appetite for leadership, either regionally or globally, even if only the US has the sufficient array of political, economic, military, and soft-power resources to organize an international effort that might nudge China onto a more congenial path...if potential US partners were not as worried by an unreliable Trump as by Xi.

McGregor’s pamphlet contains a few generic recommendations for “standing up to China”: Western and allied solidarity, competing openly, speaking up about Chinese misdeeds, being mindful of China’s interest in picking off and neutralizing via economic interest in mutually beneficial trade regional and more distant friends of democracy one by one, leaving others isolated and, perhaps, ultimately leaving the United States on its own.