Category: China Page 9 of 12

Recently, I read a speech from 2013 by Xi Jingping, the General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, and China’s leader.

In one respect, it’s turgid and boring; it’s for insiders, other party members.

But in another, it’s fascinating.

In one part, Xi goes on and on about how there have been different periods in the Communist rule of China, and none of them must be repudiated. He doesn’t say that everything that was done was right, but that the earlier struggles and attainments were necessary for the later attainments.

There is no repudiation here of Mao. Perhaps Mao’s actions didn’t always work as expected, but the rule of the Chinese Communist party made China better, even before the reform period.

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(Yes, there was a big famine and the cultural revolution, but there were plenty of famines and purges before Communist party rule. What is important about Communist party rule (though Xingping doesn’t say this) is that this was the last famine.)

This very careful reaching back to Mao and, also, to Deng Xiaoping, the seminal leader of the reform movement, is in large part a response to the fall of the Russian Communist party.

Xi and the Chinese Communist party believe the USSR fell mostly because they stopped believing in their own ideology and their own history. The Communist party theoretically had the power to hold the USSR and Warsaw Pact together, but simply refused to use the Red Army and the KGB to do so.

Gorbachev was a communist believer, sure, but he repudiated most of what had been done in the past. A smart reformer, instead, Jingping seems to believe, but makes the necessary reforms without repudiating the past.

Equally, they do not repudiate Marxism. It brings a bit of a smile to the face of a Westerner, but the Chinese Communist Party is absolutely firm on the claim that what they are doing is still Marxism. It is Socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it is aiming towards a goal of full socialism. That will probably take many generations, but that’s the goal, and they are making progress.

So to Xi, he is the heir of Deng. Mao, Marx, and all the Communist leaders of China’s past. The party is doing things differently, yes, but strategy and tactics evolve, even as the goal (communist utopia) does not.

This is a near religious goal, as the translator notes:

One of the most striking aspects of this speech is the language Xi Jinping invokes: Party members must have “faith” (xìnyǎng) in the eventual victory of socialism; proper communists must be “devout” (qiánchéng) in their work; and Party members must be prepared to “sacrifice” (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood, for revolutionary “ideals that reach higher than heaven” (gémìng lǐxiǎng gāo yú tiān).

Religions are special cases of ideology: a subset. All successful ideologies, especially hegemonic ones, must create true believers. When they stop believing, they stop being willing to enforce the ideology (and all ideologies, including ours, democracy and capitalism require enforcement). When they stop being willing to enforce their ideology, it will die.

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So here, again, Xi is seeking to shore up the Chinese Communist Party. For it to continue to rule, it must not repudiate the past, nor its own ideology. Party members must truly believe and be willing to do whatever it takes to move the Party towards its goals, even if that means blood or death.

So I suggest readers take a moment and pop over and read the speech in full. It’s long, yes, but this is the leader of the world’s second most powerful state, the country that is threatening America’s hegemonic rule. What and how he thinks, and what the Chinese Communist Party believes, matters.

And one thing they think is that they’re not going to make the same mistakes their Russian communist brethren made.

If you wonder why America has become so hostile to China, it comes down to this.

Back in the 80s, Japan looked like a threat. If fizzled, in large part due to some mismanagement, but the truth is it was never really a threat, because it didn’t have the population to be one, and while highly technologically advanced, it wasn’t a generation ahead of the US, or likely to make that leap.

China already has a first world population that is larger than America’s. Oh, they earn a little less, but they still qualify as “rich” by global standards.

Technologically it is not as advanced, but it’s catching up. The furor over Huawei 5G is because Huawei has the lead in that technology, and so many countries are going with their technology. China produces far more engineers and scientists than America, and they are growing in competence.

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The most important region in the world for electronics manufacturing is Shenzhen. Oh Silicon Valley still matters for design and software, but for actually building things, Shenzen is where it’s at. And they’re catching up in design and software.

Back in the late 19th century, when America became the largest economy, Brits consoled themselves that they were still creating most of the new inventions (and the Germans were inventing a lot of the rest).

It didn’t last. The inventiveness moved to where the factories were.

So China is a real, credible, threat. For most of the last 2,000 years it’s been the world’s most advanced region, with the largest economy. (Before that it tended to be India, and before that it was usually the Tigris-Euphrates region.)

The last two-hundred years, in which China wasn’t the world’s greatest, most advanced economy, are an aberration. Europeans industrialized, and industrialization was an order of magnitude more powerful than agricultural civilizations.

That period is over. China is industrialized, has information tech, and so on.

There are two great threats to the rise of Chinese hegemony. The first is a population time bomb, even worse than the Japanese. All of that “one child policy” is about to come back and bite hard. The Chinese, however, know that, and it is why they are trying to make gains now, in the South China Sea and with the Belt and Road Initiative. They recognize they have a window, and that they must use it.

The second is climate change and ecological collapse. China will be hit hard. The south is subject to both heat and rainfall problems; the Chinese have vastly overused their aquifers, and climate change in general is going to hit their food production hard.

The first threat is serious, the second one may be existential. But the other great powers are facing these threats, in various forms as well.

For now, America is freaking out over China because China is actually a threat to American hegemony. It’s that simple.

What is also true is that, historically, this leads to war more often than not.

In the West, we have not lived in rich states for over two generations.

This statement will strike most readers as nonsense, and should, but it’s true.

We think of ourselves as rich because we have a lot of consumer goods. Cars, electronic devices, and so on.

But the states we live in–the governments–have been poor. Their money is tied down and large projects do not get mobilized–things like the moon shots, interstate highways, and so on.

Our states are poor. Their ideology, with a few exceptions (smaller countries, all) is to let the rich get richer and have the rich spend money. So instead of NASA leading a huge space program, we have a variety of private companies like SpaceX building technology which a rich state would have created 20 years ago.

China doesn’t think this way. Chinese citizens may not be as rich as the average westerner (though there are plenty of rich Chinese as every world-class city that allows foreigners to buy its real-estate has found out, much to the sorrow of its ordinary citizens), but the state is rich, and the state and the companies it controls and influences are rich.

Most of our companies are not driven by the bottom line. Rather, they are driven by how much money they can create for those who control them. This is often not the case for Chinese companies.

Case in point: The global shipping industry is in grave trouble. Who is buying up those shipping companies in trouble? China. And they’re also buying up control of ports all over the world. China has majority control over many European ports, but no outsiders have majority control over any Chinese ports.

These are strategic assets. With control of shipping and ports, China is sure to be always able to move products and commodities wherever it wants, and its navy also has places to dock.

This simple strategy was understood for centuries. Countries went far out of their way to create large merchant marines, to protect ports and to retain control of them. Some assets are worth more than their market price in a slump, because everything else relies on them when things go bad. (Imagine Britain and the US without strong merchant marines in WWII.)

This is the way China thinks: They are buying up vast quantities of northern land in preparation for global warming, creating entire new waterways, deciding to build entire green cities.

China’s state is rich. The Chinese companies the state considers important are rich. They can do big things because China recognizes that those big things will matter in ten or twenty or forty years.

Chinese leadership still thinks strategically, and they can afford to do so.

Whether this will continue to be the case is unclear. The next generation of Chinese leadership will draw heavily on the princelings, who have never known real adversity. The economy is still suffering from the mercantalist trap, and widespread corruption and lack of a quality ethic causes huge issues. Aquifers are being drained ferociously, and climate change will hit China hard.

But unlike most of the rest of the world, China is actually trying to tackle problems, to think decades ahead, to plan, and to do big important things.

Some of what China considers important, I don’t like–for example, its expansion of a truly oppressive surveillance citizen which will include a public score for every citizen. However, this doesn’t change the fact that China does big things, good, bad, or flawed, while we watch approaching catastrophes and gently hum to ourselves, then check our phones.

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