By Andrew KP Leung (International and Independent China Strategist. Chairman and CEO, Andrew Leung International Consultants and Investments Limited).
President Xi Jinping’s Third Term has been on the cards since the presidential term limit was amended in China’s Constitution in March 2018.
At the latest “Two Sessions” in Beijing (the annual plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress, the national legislature) and of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (the national political advisory body), Xi secured full votes for his Third Term and key appointments in the Politburo, the State Council, the Central Committee, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and the Military Commission, consolidating his position as China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong.
How does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) work?
To sustain legitimacy, the CCP has long become a highly competitive meritocracy. To make it to the top, all cadres start from the bottom, usually villages and towns, competing through ranks and responsibilities, as Xi himself had experienced.
Leaders rising to Beijing and provincial levels have long proven track records of delivering stability, growth, and people’s support.
To get things done, Party secretaries and top leaders wield considerable power. But no one is omnipotent. All, Xi included, rely on a well-established network of expert groups, internal brainstorming, public hearings, and social media feedback before final decisions.
There is a comprehensive performance appraisal system (CCP Organization Department) with efficient channels for central inspections as well as for public grievances to reach to top leaders in Beijing.
There are many channels of consensus-building through formal meetings, brainstorming or informal exchanges well before a final vote for endorsing an agreed outcome. What is more, a history of national humiliation and political turmoil has long hard-wired the CCP and its cadres into a united quest for the China Dream of national renaissance.
This is defined as the “Two Centenaries” – (i) to achieve a moderately well-off nation by 2021, the CCP’s centenary and (ii) to become a strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country by 2049, the People’s Republic of China’s centenary.
CCP track record
When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the population size and economy of both India and China were roughly similar.
China’s GDP has grown to the second largest in the world, about four times the size of India’s. It has become the world’s largest manufacturer and trader at the heart of the global supply and value chain. 158 countries have China as the largest trading partner, compared with 58 for the United States.
Clearly, the CCP model works for China, though not meant to be copied by other countries, as China repeatedly stresses.
China 3.0
The current Two Sessions represent nothing less than a new chapter in advancing “China 3.0”, a term coined by Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies on 28 October, 2021.
Under Chairman Mao Zedong’s “China 1.0”, “China stood up”. Under Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s “China 2.0”, some people were allowed to “get rich first”. China 3.0 is President Xi’s sprint towards the two centenary “China Dream” goals of national renaissance.
The first centenary goal of becoming a moderately well-off nation has already been achieved. What remains for Xi’s Third Term is the second centenary goal – becoming a “strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country” by 2049, as reaffirmed by a constitutional oath-taking ceremony at the Two Sessions.
Xi’s confidants
Li Qiang, formerly Shanghai’s Party chief and President Xi’s chief of staff in Zhejiang Province, has become the new Premier. Li has decades of track-record as an innovative pro-market, pro-growth achiever, including commitment to better business environment, openness to foreign investments, embracing the new economy and unleashing entrepreneurship.
Similar criterion of selecting the best is followed in the 205-member Central Committee, the 24-member Politburo and the top leadership. They include a large proportion of highly-educated and experienced individuals, many with doctoral degrees, representing varied fields including finance, nuclear sciences, aeronautics, precision engineering, ecology, and minority affairs.
Perceived China’s “aggressiveness”
From India’s perspective, China seems to be building a “string of pearls” to contain India, including South China Sea assets and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Bilateral relationship has plunged into a nadir following serial armed border conflicts along the “Line of Actual Control”, which has remained differently-defined from either country’s perspective.
In the South China Sea, China is perceived to be turning occupied rocks into airstrips with military fortifications as well as allegedly violating neighboring countries’ territorial claims.
Many commentators are nostalgic about Deng Xiaoping’s era of “hide and bide”, when China appeared much less assertive, hiding its light under the bushel, so to speak. But as China’s size, scope and reach have grown to be like “a million-pound panda”, “hide and bide” no longer works when neighbors and competitors become scared of its very gravitas.
This “China Scare” has been exacerbated by pervasive Western anti-China narratives in TV and printed media. It has also played into the hands of American politics, where “China-bating” has become a regular bipartisan sport.
China has to defend its territorial integrity along the India-China border. In the South China Sea, China is surrounded by America’s military assets in the First Island Chain centered on Okinawa and the Second Island Chain centered on Guam, together with the Malacca Strait chokepoint controlled by the US Seventh Fleet.
The South China Sea is China’s vital sea lane of communication through which transits China’s lifeblood of maritime trade and critical commodity imports. China has to build adequate defenses in the interest of national security.
China perceives its actions as purely defensive. In any case, China has little reason to make India an adversary, let alone an enemy, its biggest threat being America’s epochal anti-China hostility.
US-China relations
China has neither the full capacity nor the ambition to rule the world, considering America’s global leadership underpinned by hundreds of military bases across the globe. However, emerging from a “century of national humiliation” under the thumb of Western colonists, China wants to reclaim its rightful place in the sun as a respected world power, mindful of its historical status as one of the world’s greatest civilizations for millennia.
With a DNA of “exceptionalism”, American political parties across the aisle do not tolerate a sharing of power with its existential “pacing challenger”, insisting on China playing by US-led rules. The United States is doubling down on a no-holds-barred pushback, including economic and technological decoupling, to stifle China’s remarkable rise.
President Xi advocates the Chinese philosophy of “harmony despite differences”. However, balance can be elusive as John Mearsheimer foretells in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)
Taiwan
The United States appears to be playing the “Taiwan card” to provoke and derail China, replicating the “Ukraine card” of weakening, if not toppling, Russia.
President Xi has warned that Taiwan represents China’s number one redline, on which China has prepared militarily for all eventualities.
Contrary to war-mongering rhetoric, the Two Sessions have re-emphasized the importance of peaceful unification, enshrined in three serial national White Papers on Taiwan. This is to be achieved through people-to-people and cultural exchanges and deepening trust-building measures. Over a million Taiwanese and their families already live and work on the Mainland. It is instructive that despite famed “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher’s initial reluctance, the former British colony of Hong Kong eventually returned peacefully to the Motherland under One Country Two Systems.
A new world order in the offing
The Two Sessions set great store on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free-trade bloc, representing a third of global GDP and a third of world population, a dynamo for an emerging “Asian Century”. Along with the Arab world, it constitutes a key part of the “global South” of emerging economies, most having China as the largest trading partner.
By 2035, emerging economies’ share of global GDP will have risen to 61%, using purchasing-power-parity measurements, according to New York- based Conference Board’s Global Economic Outlook of February 2023.
US-led decoupling notwithstanding, the above dynamics will consolidate China’s global economic centrality, not to mention China’s monopoly of some 80% of the world’s critical rare earth reserves and specialized processing capacities.
The United States repeats the rhetoric of not seeking confrontation with China, on the one hand hoping for needed Chinese cooperation on climate change and North Korea while on the other hand, stabbing China in the back.
President Xi has made plain that double-standards and two-faced overtures won’t work, contrasting China’s holistic culture with the West’s oftentimes transactional behavior.
Xi’s “Brave New World”
With America’s semiconductor strangle-hold, rapidly-aging demographics, a much-slower economy, and a hostile external environment, speculation is rife whether China can ever overcome the middle-income trap, let alone surpass the United States as the largest economy in the foreseeable future.
Such flawed pessimism is largely borne of a fixation on the past and an inability to read the future.
According to findings dated 2 March 2023 of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)’s Critical Technology Tracker, China is establishing a stunning lead in 37 out of 44 high-impact emerging technology domains, spanning defense, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas.
China’s technological advance is supported by an expected annual turnout of some 7.7 million STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates by 2025, outnumbering the US’s by more than three to one excluding international students. China’s success in building its own Tiangong space station from scratch speaks volumes about its self-reliant scientific and technological capabilities.
Responding to graying demographics, China is embracing the “fourth and fifth industrial revolutions” with a vengeance. Factory robotics, fully-mechanized extensive farmland, staff-less automated supermarkets, hotels, even restaurants, are becoming commonplace with a cashless society created by real-time smart-phone payment systems.
Enhanced productivity is also driven by linking all of China’s dynamic city clusters with the world’s largest high-speed train network, set to almost double to 70,000 km by 2035, with ultra-modern trains gliding smoothly at 250 km an hour or faster, helping to double the nation’s consuming middle-class to 800 million by 2035. Hence, the Two Sessions have emphasized rebalancing towards domestic consumption.
According to a CGTN news report dated 27 February 2023, Horgos port, a border port in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, handled over 1,000 China-Europe freight trains in just two months in 2023, a sign that export to Europe is picking up fast, albeit not yet to former levels.
Instead of fixation on GDP, China is embracing quality growth. The elevation of ecological experts to senior positions along with the creation of a new “environmental resources sector” in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) speak volumes about the nation’s quest for “ecological civilization”, harking back to the Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature.
Contrary to overhyped perceptions that China has grown too rich to be considered a developing country, more than 40% of China’s 1.4 billion population still live on less than US$5 a day, many without pension or medical insurance, 800 million people already lifted out of abject poverty in recent years notwithstanding. Hence, President’s Xi’s clarion call for “Common Prosperity”.
Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China is meeting the developing world’s critical infrastructural needs for trains, highways, power plants, schools, and hospitals, areas where Western commercial lenders often fear to tread.
China- demonizing rhetoric notwithstanding, many countries in the “Global South” welcome China’s non-intrusive and economically-beneficial partnership, cementing China’s growing international gravitas.
As the world’s largest energy customer, China recently scored a historic diplomatic success in brokering a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, long-time hostile rivals, winning greater stability in the Middle East and cementing China’s growing gravitas in the region.
This game-changing breakthrough underlines President Xi’s worldview of building a global “community of common destiny” for all, supported by a “Global Security Initiative”.
Conclusion
China has neither desire nor capabilities to supplant the United States as world hegemon. Emerging from a century of humiliation, however, China is intent to regain its rightful place in the sun.
Against strong domestic and external headwinds, President Xi’s concentration of power is needed to steer the nation towards realizing the China Dream by mid-century.
China’s growing gravitas is seen to threaten the United States’ global hegemony, feeding into the so-called “Thucydides Trap” of Great Power rivalry prone to war, “guardrails” notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, a changing new world order is emerging where developing countries no longer easily succumb to America’s beck and call, typified by a rising China confident of its capabilities and historical mission.
Great wisdom and restraint are demanded of all sides in managing these changing epochal dynamics lest unintended consequences spiral out of control.
Xi’s Third Term as President is meant to steer China through these choppy waters to safety and prosperity, as well as to help shape a better world for all nations and mankind.
The author is an independent international strategist of China; he previously served as director general of social welfare and Hong Kong’s official representative for the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, and Switzerland.
(The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights)
The article was first published in “The Global ANALYST”