What I always remember about Xi is something the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yee wrote—that he had only met two people in his life who never let anyone else influence their emotions: Nelson Mandela and Xi Jingping.
Xi took over the CCP at a time it was completely ridden with corruption, to the point where regular citizens regularly mocked and complained about it. There were major factions, centering around the two previous leaders and the party had lost much of its ideological orientation. Citizens were happy with economic progress, but there was a sense that there was too much inequality, young people couldn’t afford homes and there was flirting with western ideas of democracy.
China has had three great CCP leaders. The first was Mao, and despite his bad reputation in the West the fact is that Mao massively improved primary education, dropped the mortality rate thru the floor, increased Chinese lifespans, and one famine aside, made sure everyone was fed. Mao tilled the ground, making China’s later rapid modernization possible, using essentially the same model as Japan: start with primary education, then secondary and concentrate on improvements in health.
Mao’s party was very ideological. Deng changed that. The Dengist paradigm was “modernize as fast as possible and be pragmatic: whatever works, works.” This was very successful, but it lead to corruption, to the formation of power centers outside the party, especially among the very rich non-party members and to the formation of cliques within the party. It also gutted the party’s ideology.
In addition Deng’s method of modernization was export driven (this is reasonable, almost everyone did it this way) and had left China very dependent on external trade, especially with America, its primary geopolitical foe.
Xi set a bunch of goals, as part of Xi Jingping Thought:
- Get rid of most of the corruption;
- Break the factions and center the party around him;
- Create an ideological party with unanimity on goals and how to achieve them;
- Break power centers outside the party;
- Spread the wealth to more people and make everyone at least moderately prosperous;
- Listen more to the people;
- Make it so that China is no longer vulnerable to foreign trade disruptions;
- Make China the world leader in technology and science;
- Orient China’s trade towards the developing world more than to the West;
- Place China in a position to rewrite the world’s economic system;
- Strengthen the army and make sure it is loyal to the party.
The bottom line here is that Xi has accomplished most of his goals and those he has yet to accomplish, like #10, are well underway. China is the world’s tech leader, the factions are broken, all corruption isn’t gone but its way down, billionaires are dropping like flies; the housing market has become cheaper and the government is taking it over and plans to build most housing going forwards, the party is unified in what it does and how it does to a remarkable degree, and America’s trade war is not a threat to China, but an opportunity to increase China’s world influence.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Xi is probably the world’s most successful leader: he leads the most powerful economic nation in the world and he’s accomplished almost all the goals he set for himself. China’s response to Trump’s tariffs “this is stupid, but OK, bring it on” is just the latest sign of China’s strength and Xi success. More and more nations come to China with their problems: when Saudi Arabia and Iran wanted to make peace, China brokered the talks. English was not spoken.
Trump and almost all Western leaders are incompetent fools in comparison, who have overseen the decline of their nations, losing the tech and science lead, losing 1st place in trade to China, losing first place in industrial capacity to China and losing their proxy war against Russia to China, without whom Russia could not have withstood western sanctions.
Xi is the world’s most important leader, only Trump comes close, and Trump is important because he’s accelerating the end of the America Empire: because he’s a fool and and an idiot.
Xi sets goals, figures out how to achieve them, and does so. Trump and most Western leaders flail around, doing nothing but speeding up their countries decline and minting more rich people.
It isn’t even a competition any more, it’s a rout.
Ventzu
The CPC under Mao set the foundations, overcoming all odds to overturn a century of humiliation, and setting the path to raising all of China up in terms of literacy and healthcare.
Deng Xiaoping was fortunate in that he presided at a time of US detente and profited from it.
Xi inherited the foundations that Mao had built, and to his credit has stuck to the principles of the CPC.
The declaration of the end of western hegemony and its rules based order was rivetingly made in Alaska in 2022, to anyone who paid attention. The nail in the coffin is Gaza.
Adam Eran
One quibble: Jung Chang’s biography of Mao says his misguided agricultural thinking cost 70 million dead. Granted Ms. Chang is not exactly a fan of Mao, and may have twisted things, but that “one famine” you mention was a mighty one.
Ian Welsh
Estimates for the famine are all over the place. But to put it in perspective Amartya Sen claimed that as many Indians died every years as died in Mao’s Great Famine. It was a big fuck up, but it didn’t derail China’s rise. 70 million is at the very high end of estimates, which go as low as 12 million and have an average in the 40s.
Oakchair
Trump and almost all Western leaders are incompetent fools in comparison,
—–
“To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” –Napoleon
Imagine leaders born on third base, pampered, worshipped and given a narrative about how they’re were morally and intellectually superior.
They grew up in a rich society were they could do pretty much whatever they wanted without consequence because of their wealth and power.
Now imagine leaders whose parents was classified as heretics. They grew up poor struggling for food, medicine and security. In early life their siblings died and in their early adulthood they started working in the trenches so to speak.
“Privilege becomes arrogance. Arrogance promotes injustice. The seeds of ruin blossom.” –Dune
Curt Kastens
I think that those 10 or 12 goals that you listed are very reasonable. And if XI has made progress on them he is certainly a skilled politician and leader, But sometimes between 2030 and 2040 these achievements are all likely to unravel. And sometime between 2040 and 2050 they will all be literally dust in the wind.
Alan Sutton
Thanks Ian for a bit of context on the current situation in China. You never get that in the MSM. When you look at what China is doing objectively then read some Western media reports on it you get a useful lesson on just how shallow and useless that media is.
Similarly, when you compare Trump, Starmer etc with the Chinese leadership the full impact of the degradation of Western political culture is laid bare.
Astrid
An under mentioned aspect of the famine is that since Mao broke with the USSR in the late 1950s and the Western block was also in direct opposition to China, China couldn’t buy grain on the world market to help relieve the famine. Canadian (and I think Australian) willingness to sell PRC grain and break from this consensus is still positively remembered by the Chinese elderly to this day.
While Mao made serious mistakes in the implementation of the Great Leap Forward, those who parished were also victims of Western capitalism. In the modern world where food resources are globalized and currently still not in absolute deficiency, famine is always a political decision by somebody.
Gaianne
Modern World History in twelve paragraphs!
Thank you!
–Gaianne
miss jennings
Ian, do you know if Xi and China have any plans to leave the ‘imperial’ US-based CHIPS system? They are fully integrated within it as I write, with no sign whatsoever of leaving:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_House_Interbank_Payments_System
https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/CHIPS
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_Commercial_Bank_of_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Merchants_Bank
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Communications%5D
miss jennings
Ian, as someone who has consistently spoken of the horrors of a consumer-based existence both on the environment and the psyche, do you agree with this recent statement from the Chinese government:
‘Facing the continuous compression of US trade space due to high tariffs, we must increasingly treat expanding domestic demand as a long-term strategy, striving to make consumption the main driving force and ballast for economic growth, leveraging the advantages of our super-large market…’
https://sinocism.com/p/april-7-peoples-daily-on-responses?publication_id=2&post_id=160712236&isFreemail=true&r=mjsd&triedRedirect=true
[This is not an apologia for the US!]
Thank you for continuing to inform us.
Ian Welsh
China’s doing a great job of playing the current game. The current game is, however, stupid. Moving to a consumption society is what capitalism requires, it’s not what’s good for the world or humanity.
Jan Wiklund
Just a minor addition: The Japanese model China copied (which was itself a copy of the German/American model of the 19th century) included much more than elementary education. It also included support for any business that promised to use superior technology. The government promotors of the parcticers of that model knew very well that there was where profits lay. The whole idea was to climb the value chain, quit everything that was easy and do whatever required high skill.
Chinese economist Yi Wen (also active at Fed at St Louis) thinks the Great Leap Forward was the birth of the Chinese industrial miracle. The “backyard furnaces”, so despised by Western commentators, proved to be a wonderful engineering school, creator of a hundred thousand surviving businesses (plus a million that didn’t survive). These businesses industrialized China in the same way as primitive ironworks was the background to the Swedish industrial miracle about 1880-1914. They created a technical environment and inventive engineers that wanted to do more rewarding things than iron. See Yi Wen’s The making of an economic superpower, 2015, and his (together with George Fortier: The visible hand: The role of government in China’s long-awaited industrial revolution, 2016
Ian Welsh
Yes, I’m very familiar with the Japanese model but since it is an aside to the thrust of this article I didn’t go into it in detail. China copied most of it at various points, which doesn’t mean it’s all that they did.
someofparts
Nothing to add, just feel lucky to be able to come here and get a first class education.
GrimJim
The Chinese figured out, unlike the Soviets, that to attain a proper Socialist socio-economic system you needed to go through all of the pre-requisite socio-economic systems, including proper Capitalism.
The Soviets tried to jumpstart Socialism and bypass Capitalism entirely by taking Agrarian Russia and Central Europe and kickstarting it with mere Industrialization, which was not going to work. They then added to that the Lenin Doctrine’s reinterpretation of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” modified by the Stalin Corollary (“I’m the dictator”), which combined with other factors to lead Soviet Communism to the trash heap of history.
The Chinese have so far done very well with keeping an even keel and moving their society through the process. They have to remain vigilant, however, to ensure that they do not lose course during Capitalism and end up in a Post-Capitalist Financialized Oligarchy, like the West. This is why they have to regularly prune their billionaire class.
I think they are also well aware of the major issue with Marxism, in that it is no less poisoned by the concept of the utopian eschaton than Christianity, and that there is truly no “end of history,” Marxist or otherwise. If any culture is prepared to deal with the reality that civilization is a series of evolutions and revolutions, with no end but merely an eternal dialectic, it is Chinese culture, as their history of dynastic continuities and dis-continuities works very well with that reality.
Jessica
The achievements of China under communist party rule are impressive and historical. Comparison with the Soviet Union may be unfair to the Soviets. China never faced the kind of isolation and hostility (Nazi invasion) that the Soviet Union faced.
China also had the Soviet Union as a model for some things that worked and some things that did not.
The Soviets never had the kind of opportunity that the neoliberal West handed China. China still deserves to the studied for how they made use of that opportunity.
Whether or not they will be able to make the transition from an export-dependent economy to one centered on domestic demand remains to be seen. None of the other East Asian economies that used this model has succeeded yet.
The Japanese model seems to have copied some elements from the rebels of the Taiping Civil War, which ended less than a decade before the Meiji Restoration. An alternative history novel in which the Taipings succeeded in seizing power could be quite interesting.
(Quite far afield now, but it has been suggested that faced with two possible opportunities for intervention, the US Civil War and the Taiping Civil War, the British Empire would not have been able to stop itself from intervening in at least one.)
different clue
China faced a measure of hostility from the Empire of Japan (Hirohito), surely.