Three days before the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th National Congress, two large protest banners were unfurled on a bridge in Beijing.
“We want food, not PCR tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves,” one banner read.
The other called on people to “go on strike at school and work, remove the traitorous dictator [Chinese President] Xi Jinping (習近平).”
These words, short and to the point, hit the nail on Xi’s head. The international community is paying attention to whether these remarks are a sign of the collapse of the CCP’s power.
As the public seethes with discontent and seeks change, Xi’s “new era” faces many tough challenges, such as the US-China trade and technology dispute, the fallout of his “zero COVID-19” policy, the country’s economic downturn, external expansion and foreign conflicts. His future is sure to be rocky.
Xi’s nightmare would be that his “Chinese dream” of “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” shatters, and China becomes a global pariah.
Since China’s “reform and opening up” policy launched in the late 1970s, its economy has rapidly flourished, but growth has slowed in the past two decades. After Xi took over, it has slowed even further.
The CCP has insisted on a “zero COVID-19” policy to end the pandemic and locked down almost half of the country in the name of prevention and control of the disease, resulting in restricted economic activity, sluggish domestic demand and weakening export demand. The downward economic trend is set to continue.
The World Bank estimates that China’s GDP growth this year could significantly slow to 2.8 percent. The IMF is also not optimistic about China’s economic outlook and has sharply lowered the country’s growth forecast to 3.2 percent this year and 4.4 percent next year, which would both be lower than the annual results of the past four decades.
According to China-based GROW Investment Group chief economist Hong Hao (洪灝), China’s economy is doomed to “grow extremely slowly” for the next decade, and an annual growth rate of 2 percent would be very optimistic. Bloomberg Economics also said that a growth rate above 5 percent over the next decade would be out of reach.
There are several reasons that China’s economy is flailing. First, no economy can maintain a high growth rate for four decades. The fundamental laws of economics also apply to China.
In addition to the economic factors, China has another constraint — its rulers.
China’s economic growth began with the “reform and opening up” policy introduced in 1978 by then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), which was a great success over the past four decades.
Today, Xi is attempting to match the founding father of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong (毛澤東), in his obsession with prioritizing ideology over economics. Xi is on his way to recovering the “original inspiration of socialism” — the return to fundamentalist socialism to rule the country.
However, Mao, who excelled at instigating class struggle, initiated many political campaigns, exhausted the country’s resources and left China a poor communist state, both economically and culturally.
Despite Xi being a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, as part of the “second red generation,” or children of the founding generation of communist leaders, he has taken Mao as a role model to defend the legacy of his predecessors and attempted to reverse Deng’s reforms.
Xi sought inspiration from the worst possible person, and the result is obvious. As the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) expression goes, it is like asking the devil to collect a prescription for you.
Xi’s economic policies essentially discard the driving forces of China’s period of economic development. Many private enterprises in China have become industrial giants in recent years. Although national policies play a part in their development, the ability of private enterprises to innovate cannot be ignored, as it plays a significant role in driving China’s economy.
However, Xi took a backward step by suppressing the development of private enterprises and fostering disproportionately large, inefficient and state-owned ones, stifling innovation.
China is now a major economy, yet its reluctance to fall in line with international rules and regulations continues, as it seeks to take advantage of rival nations.
The US-China trade dispute has extended into the realm of technology, with the US determined to ban imports of equipment with advanced chips and preventing engineers from working for Chinese companies, a complete decoupling of the two countries’ tech sectors ensued.
Xi fatally overestimates China’s strength. He is convinced that China can surpass the UK and catch up with the US by trying to fabricate domestic consumption and develop semiconductor chips itself. He does not realize that China depends on the US for its technology, or that as soon as it decouples from the US’ economy, China would struggle to become a technological superpower.
China’s economic obstacles go beyond US-China tensions and heavy-handed state intervention in the market: the “zero COVID-19” policy is a major bottleneck.
While the rest of the world is moving toward coexistence with the virus, China is existing on an entirely different planet — where society has become so insulated that the economic damage and the severity of social control being inflicted are difficult for China’s public to understand.
With the fatality rate of the virus massively reduced, the cost of curbing its spread is vastly more than opening up, yet Xi maintains control of the populace in the name of a “dynamic zero COVID-19” campaign.
The international community has little optimism about the Chinese economy, and less still about the prospect of Xi’s continued grip on power. His creation of a digital authoritarianism with an ambition to spread it overseas presents China as an evil empire that needs to be resisted.
China’s pandemic response allows the CCP to use public health as an excuse to restrict and monitor the public’s movement. “Zero COVID-19” is not about ridding the country of the virus, it aims to prevent Chinese from being infected with the anti-CCP political virus.
Xi exploits the monitoring of digital platforms to maintain control over information, ensuring that Chinese cannot use the Internet to criticize and protest against the party. The expansion of mobile payments has also been used to control the public’s flow of money.
Social credits are a way to appraise the public’s behavior in line with the party’s values, overseeing all aspects of people’s lives, including financial transactions, education, employment and even public transport use — all in the interest of subverting the public to state control.
The pillars of Xi’s authoritarian system shows the world the true nature of Xi’s pernicious empire.
Translated by Sylvia Hsu and Paul Cooper
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