By Andrew K.P. Leung (International and Independent China Strategist. Chairman and CEO, Andrew Leung International Consultants and Investments Limited)
China’s Party Congress has the West working itself up into a crescendo of Xi-blackening and Sinophobia.
President Xi Jinping has stacked the Politburo Standing Committee and other top echelons with his loyalists. Securing an unprecedented third term as President, he has appointed no “heir apparent”, breaking precedents, ostensibly to prolong his reign perhaps for life. In any case, he is already regarded as China’s most powerful supreme leader since Chairman Mao. Dissent seems totally suppressed as the leading lights of the more moderate Communist Youth League (CYL) “faction” such as Li Keqiang 李克强, Wang Yang 汪洋, and Hu Chunwah 胡春华 have all fallen by the wayside, without reaching the long-established age limit of 68.
In addition, the Constitution has now been amended to include anti-Taiwan independence safeguards, possibly implying looming invasion of the island.
To round off this alarming saga, ex-President Hu Jintao was seen being unceremoniously ushered away during Congress proceedings as if to signify a public nail in the coffin of the CYL.
But are all these fears real? What does President Xi actually want? What direction is China now heading?
To answer these momentous questions, it is necessary to debunk some persistent myths.
The 24-member Politburo and the 205-member Central Committee see a large proportion of highly-educated and experienced individuals, many with doctorate degrees, representing a wide field including finance, nuclear sciences, aeronautics, precision engineering, ecology and minority affairs. They can’t be lumped into a catch-all of Xi-sycophants as portrayed in Western media. (1)
No, ex-President Hu was not frogged-marched out of the Party proceedings. A fuller version of the video clip (2) clearly shows a frail, elderly Hu, known for his mild and reserved manners, being offered gentle escort assistance to exit the venue for some medical respite following brief cordial greetings with President Xi and Li Keqiang. Any major differences would already have been ironed out and resolved behind the scene long before this epochal Party Congress. In any case, secure in his ascendance, why should President Xi need to precipitate such a spectacle at the eleventh hour for the world to see?
No, China is not fixated on invading Taiwan anytime soon. Immediately following the ill-conceived Pelosi visit, Beijing published a third White Paper on Taiwan, stressing priority for peaceful unification. At the same time, a highly-coordinated, obviously prefabricated all-theatre military exercise was immediately launched, demonstrating Beijing’s military capability to blockade the island if push comes to shove. The ball now is firmly in the court of Taiwan and the United States, not to continue pushing the One China Policy envelope to breaking point.
However, unification by 2049 at the latest remains a key part of the China Dream repeatedly articulated by President Xi. As Taiwan and the US seem bent on turning the island into an anti-China military “porcupine”, we are likely to see a quickening momentum of economic and other pressures for early negotiations for peaceful unification.
About a million Taiwanese live and work on their businesses on the Mainland. More Taiwanese may eventually come to realize that peaceful unification on terms even more generous than for Hong Kong may not be the end of the world.
Even if becoming the world’s largest economy by early 2030’s, China does not want, nor does it have the full global capacity, to supplant the United States as world hegemon, militarily, monetarily, and diplomatically.
At the 18th Party Congress in 2012, President Xi referred to China’s three existential traps — the “Tacitus Trap” (3) of potential mistrust, the “Thucydides Trap” of superpower rivalry, and the “Middle Income Trap” before becoming a moderately well-off nation. In 2017, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye added a fourth — “The Kindleberger Trap” (4) of lacking capacity for global governance.
The entirely of the 2022 Party Congress is about taking the well-being of the Chinese people to a higher plain, building a more advanced socialist nation by 2035 and a “wealthier, stronger, more democratic, more civilized, more harmonious and more ecologically beautiful nation by 2049”, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China.
President Xi stresses that the Party’s legitimacy depends entirely on the people, defined as all peoples across all sectors. This contrasts with tilting towards vested interests and voters for the winning political party in Western adversarial democracies. No wonder Harvard Kennedy School’s recent Ash Center Study Report (5) finds that the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) ranks as the most supported government by its people, multiple rankings above the United States.
However, even if China’s successful developmental experience may be shared by some developing nations, China’s ideology is not about to be embraced by many countries in preference to the West’s popular liberal and democratic model.
No, China is no longer destroying the environment. Still the world’s largest carbon emitter in aggregate terms, China’s per capita emission is only a fraction compared with advanced democracies. What is more, China is now leading the world in renewable capacities, including solar, hydro and wind energies. American electric car giant Tesla has turned China into the world’s largest electric car market.
Neo-McCarthyism is driving America’s strategy of decoupling from China on all fronts, especially critical technologies. Maximizing such decoupling appears more and more counter-productive. According to a Forbes report (6) in December 2021, indiscriminate trade and immigration decoupling from China have backfired, hurting American businesses’ profitability and innovative talent pool, and pushing China to become more self-reliant and attractive as an investment destination. A comparable example is China’s exclusion from the US-led International Space Station from the very start. China is now successfully building its space station entirely on its own, stressing magnanimously its future openness to all nations. (7).
Anti-China decoupling is also exacerbating an American society-wide inflationary spiral, thanks to Ukraine war’s energy and food disruptions, resulting in interest rate hikes harmful to the global economy including America’s own, not to mention hurting President Biden’s mid-term election chances.
No, China is not reaching its peak and becoming desperately aggressive, as Hal Brands and Michael Beckley claim in Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, W.W. Norton, 2022 (8). In face of worsening demographics, many Chinese factories have been fully automated with robotics and digital remote control systems. Large tracts of America-styled farmland see fully mechanized tractors and giant harvesters. More staff-less stores, supermarkets and hotels are appearing on the scene. In addition, mankind’s largest and fastest urbanization drive is afoot, with urban centers over 200,000 inhabitants being connected by the world’s largest high-speed train network of 35,000 km (more than the rest of the world combined), doubling to 70,000 km by 2035. This will drive productivity increases and double China’s consuming middle class to 800 million citizens.
An August 2021 report (9) by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) projects that by 2025, Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) PhD graduates annually, outnumbering U.S. counterparts more than three-to-one excluding international students, well-positioned for the 21st century Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by 5G, Big Data, digitization, and Internet of Things.
China’s “Common Prosperity” drive is no Robin Hood. The Party Congress makes plain that China is no longer fixated on sheer GDP growth, opting instead for balanced, quality growth, creating a more level-playing field for small businesses, bringing about more fulfilling jobs and the good life for everyone, and a more inclusive, innovative, and dynamic society with higher productivity and a better environment.
Indeed, the Party Congress extends “Common Prosperity” to the vision of a more inclusive, cooperative world under the United Nations Charter, where each nation, big or small, is able to follow its own development path and ideology, free from interference or coercion by stronger nations. With its own impressive economic track record lifting 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, Beijing does not subscribe to a single CocaCola formula of democracy, or to a simplistic mantra turning healthy competition between nations into an all-out-war between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”.
Clearly, China and the CPC are being seriously misread, misjudged and misrepresented. With a rapidly-rising China deeply intertwined in the world’s dynamics, this false premise is distorting the United States’ and its Western allies’ every move, military, political, economic, financial, technological, diplomatic and geopolitical, rattling world peace and stability.
As hegemon for global stability, it’s long overdue for the United States to gain a much deeper understanding of China’s and its people’s aspirations and to come up with a more balanced modus vivendi for the world’s two largest economies to co-exist, compete healthily and work together for a better world.
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1. 中国共产党第二十届中央领导机构 – 中共二十届中央领导机构成员简历–时政–人民网 (people.com.cn) 中国共产党第二十届中央委员 中国共产党第二十届中央委员会 – 维基百科，自由的百科全书 (wikipedia.org) (accessed on 26 October 2022)
2. Moments before Hu Jintao was escorted out of Party Congress @CNA – (31) 【新版曝光】胡錦濤被架出去之前的畫面，转自CNA｜【Newer】Moments before Hu Jintao was escorted out of Party Congress @CNA – YouTube (accessed on 26 October 2022)
3. The 20th Party Congress Of CCP: Exploring the Possibility Of China Falling into the Tacitus Trap, The Geopolitics (TGP) – 12 October 2022 – The 20th Party Congress Of CCP: Exploring the Possibility Of China Falling into the Tacitus Trap – The Geopolitics (accessed on 27 Octoer, 2022)
4. The Kindleberger Trap, Professor Joseph Nye, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, 9 January, 2017 The Kindleberger Trap | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (accessed on 27 October, 2022)
5. Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinions through Time, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, July 2020 final_policy_brief_2021_edits.pdf (harvard.edu) (accessed on 26 October, 2022)
6. U.S. Trade And Immigration Policies Toward China Have Backfired, Stuart Anderson, Forbes, 8 December, 2021- U.S. Trade And Immigration Policies Toward China Have Backfired (forbes.com) (accessed on 26 October, 2022)
7. China invites all UN countries to use its future space station, CBC News of Canada, 31 May, 2018 China invites all UN countries to use its future space station | CBC News (accessed on 26 October, 2022)
8. Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, W.W. Norton & Co., August 2022 – Free delivery worldwide on all books from Book Depository (accessed on 26 October 2022)
9. China is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD Growth, Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Georgetown University, August 2021 – China is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD Growth (georgetown.edu) (accessed on 26 October, 2022)
Author: Andrew K.P. Leung (International and Independent China Strategist. Chairman and CEO, Andrew Leung International Consultants and Investments Limited)
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).