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It has been a long journey to reach this moment …
- In 1972, Nixon traveled to China
- In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the first international orchestra to perform in China
- In 1974, I began to study Mandarin at college
- In 1976, Mao died (and the Cultural Revolution with him)
- In 1978, Deng and the CCP began experimenting with economic reforms
- In 1979, Carter normalized relations
- In 1980, I traveled to the mainland for the first time
- 1n 1982, at its 12th National Party Congress, China adopted economic reforms as its priority policy
Just this past week — forty years later at its 20th Party Congress — China under Xi has formally abandoned economic growth as its top priority for national development (along with the international partnerships on which that growth depended for trade, investment, access to capital markets and innovation) and prioritized instead “security” (with all the ideological baggage which that entails in Xi’s worldview).
Put simply, Xi has just crossed the Rubicon …
I wrote on Monday in Ideologues Meet Markets that I would share my considered view on the implications of the just concluded 20th National Party Congress after a few days of rumination and reflection. I am doing so now. Xi has just crossed the Rubicon. His move not only upends a forty-year trajectory of the most dynamic economic growth ever witnessed in the world, it threatens — more ominously — the foundations of the post-WWII international order and the unprecedented seventy-year run of (relative) peace the world has enjoyed at the global level.
An extremely well observed account of what this moment means is contained in the political economist Yuen Yuen Ang’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times. I reproduce below that piece in its entirety:
China’s Era of Reform Has Officially Ended
By Yuen Yuen Ang
Forty-four years ago, Deng Xiaoping kicked off the period of “reform and opening up” that transformed China from a poor, autarkic nation into an emerging global power.
President Xi Jinping officially ended that era last week. He emerged from the Chinese Communist Party’s congress in Beijing with unchallenged authority and plans for China that revolve around his obsession with control and security — even if that means harming the economy.
It’s a momentous change in outlook.
Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for China’s spectacular economic achievements had two main components. The first was a collective leadership arrangement within the Communist Party. Deng rejected Western-style democracy, but China’s tumultuous decades under Mao Zedong had taught him that one-man rule is dangerous. He and the party introduced partial checks and balances into politics at the highest level, including term limits. The second component was a single-minded pursuit of economic growth that, Deng famously declared, would be China’s “hard principle.” Officials throughout China dove headlong into promoting growth at all costs — bringing prosperity but also corruption, inequality and heavy industrial pollution.
Last week in Beijing, Mr. Xi dismantled those foundations. He ensured that he would remain paramount leader of China for a third term — if not for life — and packed the party’s leadership with loyalists while heavily prioritizing national security over the pursuit of economic growth.
In his speech to the party congress at the Great Hall of the People on Oct. 16, he mentioned “security” significantly more often than “economy,” a major break with precedent. He went further, declaring unambiguously, “National security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation, and social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.”
In Chinese politics, small changes in wording can herald big shifts in ideology and policy. If there were any remaining doubts about Mr. Xi’s intentions, he dispelled them by vowing that China would stick to its zero-Covid policy, “without wavering.” His government’s approach to the pandemic, a public health policy in name, is in reality the most powerful security tool devised by the Communist Party, restricting access to the country and controlling who can go where, underpinned by tracking apps that citizens and visitors must have on their smartphones.
For observers long accustomed to Deng’s growth-first ethos, Mr. Xi’s policy choice is mind-boggling. The Covid controls are angering citizens, crippling China’s economy, decimating domestic consumption, disrupting manufacturing and logistics, and repelling foreign and local investors alike.
Why is the most powerful Chinese leader in decades so obsessed with security and domestic control that he would sacrifice the economy? The answer lies in an array of domestic and foreign challenges, some worsened by Mr. Xi’s own policy choices.
Politically, he probably fears the proverbial knife in the back after making enemies through a decade-long anti-corruption campaign in which thousands of officials — possibly including potential political rivals — were punished and is doubling down on repression out of his instinct for self-preservation.
On the economic front, he faces smoldering crises, including an economy that is slowing sharply, a property sector meltdown and record-breaking youth unemployment. These problems have been exacerbated by the Covid controls and by Mr. Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign — a strategy for narrowing inequality and addressing monopolistic behavior by big tech firms and other private companies, which was punctuated by an abrupt and sweeping regulatory crackdown last year that has alarmed investors. The market backlash was intense: Within months, more than a trillion dollars in value at many of China’s most innovative companies evaporated.
On foreign policy, Mr. Xi has projected an ambition to challenge American primacy. The Trump administration’s chaotic handling of the pandemic prompted Mr. Xi to boast that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” But his triumphalism was premature. China is far from an even match with the United States in economic, military or technological power. And while American democracy is in crisis, the United States remains strong, a true superpower and a free country able to criticize and renew itself. Mr. Xi criticizes the West for seeking to contain China, but his hubris and aggressive approach helped bring about this threat.
To be sure, Mr. Xi does not intend to completely abandon the capitalist success that rejuvenated China and brought global respect and influence. And to his credit, he has confronted serious problems that his predecessors swept under the rug, particularly corruption and economic inequality. His vision of a powerful China, respected on the global stage, is warranted given his country’s size and economic clout.
But addressing China’s myriad problems will require measured steps that Mr. Xi seems disinclined to take. Putting out fires in China’s economy must begin with relaxing Covid restrictions and importing more effective vaccines, something that his government has prevented. These won’t be miracle cures, but they are necessary first steps that will go a long way toward alleviating stress on China’s people and reassuring investors that his leadership team has not lost all sense.
Mr. Xi has plunged China into a vicious cycle: A hubristic and authoritarian leader, unaccountable to society and unchallenged even by his own advisers, makes poor policy choices, which add to his problems, exacerbating his fears of a revolt and leading to more repression.
The consequences of his decision to emphasize security over economic vibrancy will be global. China is the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest trading partner of dozens of countries. A prolonged economic slowdown in China will increase the risk of a global recession, with many countries sharing the pain. In the long run, there may be winners as China’s waning competitiveness hastens a shift in global supply chains to other emerging economies. But if China turns inward, it will lose. Chinese tech companies are already expanding overseas to compensate for a restrictive home environment.
China’s great capitalist revolution under Deng and his successors is now history. So is Mr. Xi’s first 10 years in office, when there was at least a minimal layer of checks on his power from moderate, non-loyalist officials. China under Mao and the former Soviet Union proved that absolute dictatorships fail miserably at making nations prosperous and strong. They bring only impoverishment and false security. Mr. Xi is likely to relearn those lessons in the coming years.
Yuen Yuen Ang (@yuenyuenang) is a political economist and the author of “Chinaʼs Gilded Age” and “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.”
I’ll give my wrap on the conclusion of the 20th Party Congress in Beijing later in the week after some further digestion and rumination.
Meanwhile, here’s a graphic putting today’s market reaction to Xi’s consolidation of power into some context. Entirely different timelines and denouements but same implacable forces at work …
As we await Sunday’s introduction of the official lineup for the 25-person Politburo, the 7-person Standing Committee, and the putative Premier and the President for the next five years, what has already become clear is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has gone all in on Xi Jinping. While the field might possibly look somewhat different at the next Party Congress, the broad contours for the global picture for the coming five years are becoming clear. The bold brushstrokes were drawn by Xi during his nearly two-hour speech delivered last Sunday. Since then, there have been ample signs of what’s to come. The team being assembled around Xi will be made up of apprentices filling in with finer brush strokes for Xi, not near-peers willing to argue for painting a different landscape.
So what are the big takeaways from the Congress so far for the global community to consider?
- “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is the goal for the CCP and Xi alike. There’s no daylight between Xi Jinping and the Party on this point. China wants back at the center of the world.
- Zero-COVID policy can only change marginally. It bears the weight of Xi’s claim that “Chinese-style democracy” is superior to traditional Western-style democracy. Look, fewer people died, right?
- Whatever the economic headwinds, the ship of state will stay “secure” and on-course as long as Xi is at the helm. (Translation: state security and ideology to be prioritized over Deng’s economic reforms)
- Taiwan’s incorporation into China — which, post-Hong Kong, is now only feasible by outright coercion or military force — is the sine qua non of the full achievement of China’s great rejuvenation
And what are some key things that we’ll be watching in this this space in the weeks and months ahead to gauge Xi’s and the CCP’s success in making progress toward this vision:
- Fall-out from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (neither of which were mentioned once in Xi’s speech)
- Performance of China’s economy in light of Covid lockdowns, real estate sector implosion, regulatory crackdown on tech firms, and the drag of Belt & Road Initiative debt burdens
- Push-back from the U.S. and Europe, from non-aligned nations and the developing world, and from China’s own citizens as Xi pushes dictatorship with Chinese characteristics as his “new choice for humanity.”
- And, most crucially from my individual perspective, the “tech-tonic” shocks upending global economies as competition over microchip innovation, production and supply continues to ramp up
The Fat Lady won’t be singing in Beijing until Sunday but we know who’s in the lead after three innings. In the deciding game of this once-every-five year series, the Emperor For Life team currently holds a three-to-nothing lead over the Court of Rivals team.
Who scored? As reported by Josh Chin in today’s Wall Street Journal (see below), Ding Xuexiang, Xi’s Chief of Staff, and Li Qiang, party boss in Shanghai, are both being widely mooted in Beijing as favorites to land Standing Committee appointments. Both are “Xi’s men.” Given the nature of the National Congress process, a candidate whose name is being touted loudly at this stage of the process is almost guaranteed to be formally anointed come Sunday. Additionally, the fact that Li Qiang’s name is being advanced as the likely Premier to replace Li Keqiang means another run based on the scoring system set up in my Chutes and Ladders post last Friday. So, after three innings, score three for the Emperor For LIfe team.
The third name being picked in today’s reporting by Josh Chin is Li Xi, the top party official in Guangdong Province. This player is harder to score in the sense that Guangdong is the province most committed to international trade and investment and Xi has been actively narrowing that space. For instance, during his nearly two hour speech during the opening of the Congress on Sunday, Xi mentioned “security” (read, “surveillance”, “lack of consumer data protection” and “insecurity for private investors”) more than sixty time while giving lip-service to market forces only three ties. Of course, Xi may be bringing Li Xi on board precisely to keep Guangdong on a tight leash but there’s at least some possibility that Li Xi could represent a balancing perspective representing power blocs more committed to maintenance of international trade linkages, if not economic liberalization. We’ll score Li Xi as a Court of Rivals batter who was stranded on second without scoring. After three innings, no runs in for Court of Rivals team.
Final comment: The score may only be 3-0, but the game is shaping up as a total rout by Team Emperor For Life.
Stay tuned for further updates as we get to the later innings. For now, take a look at Josh Chin’s fine reporting below from today’s Wall Street Journal.
China’s Xi Jinping Likely to Pack Party Leadership With Allies in Show of Strength
Shanghai party chief is a front-runner for premier, people close to party leaders say, despite outrage over Covid-19 lockdown
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is preparing to name loyalists to top positions in the Communist Party hierarchy, according to people close to party leaders, in a move that would strengthen his hand as he confronts mounting challenges at home and abroad—from a sluggish domestic economy to Western resistance to Beijing’s ambitions on the world stage.
One of the allies Mr. Xi aims to promote is Li Qiang, currently the top party official in Shanghai, the people said. Earlier this year, Mr. Li shouldered blame for a weekslong Covid-19 lockdown during which tens of millions of residents in the country’s financial center struggled to access food and medical care.
Mr. Li is likely to be elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body, according to the people, who say the 63-year-old is also considered a leading contender to be named premier at China’s annual legislative gathering next spring.
China’s premier has traditionally assumed responsibility for the country’s economy, which has been battered in recent months by Mr. Xi’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19, a dramatic downturn in the property market and a regulatory crackdown that has created uncertainty for business.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics postponed the release of third-quarter gross-domestic-product data on Monday, a day before it was set to be published. An official at the statistics bureau cited unspecified work arrangements as the reason for the delay.
Others likely to join the Standing Committee include Mr. Xi’s chief of staff, Ding Xuexiang, and the top party official in Guangdong province, Li Xi, who once worked as a secretary to a veteran of the Communist revolution with close ties to Mr. Xi’s family.
The people close to party leaders cautioned that final deliberations on the makeup of the Standing Committee won’t be revealed until Sunday when the party elite is due to complete the membership of its top decision-making bodies for the next term.
China’s State Council Information Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The makeup of the next Standing Committee and the identity of the next premier have been the subject of intense speculation among Chinese politics watchers ahead of this week’s twice-a-decade party congress in Beijing, where Mr. Xi is poised to break with recent precedent and claim a third term as party leader.
While Mr. Xi seems assured of securing another five years in power, growing public frustration over his management of Covid-19 and the economy has provided ammunition to potential rivals trying to check his power by ensuring his allies don’t monopolize senior appointments.
If Mr. Xi gets his way, despite the pushback, he would surround himself with like-minded officials and upend succession norms that the party had honed over recent decades to prevent a return to Mao-style dictatorship. This might make it easier for Mr. Xi to pursue his priorities, but it also raises the stakes should that agenda fail, political analysts said.
“The risk of things going wrong and him getting the blame is much greater,” said Ryan Manuel, managing director of Bilby, a Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence firm that analyzes Chinese government documents.
With more allies holding key positions, Mr. Xi, who turns 70 next year, may start to delegate some of his authority to his trusted lieutenants as he gets more advanced in age, some of the people said. He has fewer political opponents to worry about, having neutralized many of them with anticorruption purges and cut off retired party elders from meddling in politics, they said.
A promotion for Li Qiang would mark a surprising political comeback. He appeared to be given extra leeway in handling a local Covid-19 outbreak in Shanghai in February, but infections spread out of control. A wave of online anger over the ensuing lockdown spilled over into physical clashes with officials, prompting several analysts to predict Mr. Li had lost his chance at making the Standing Committee.
China’s current premier, Li Keqiang, is due to step down next spring after completing two five-year terms—the maximum allowed under China’s constitution. He has occasionally contradicted Mr. Xi and pressured the Chinese leader to dial back policies seen as hurting growth. Political analysts nevertheless consider him one of China’s least influential premiers, whose sway over the economy dissipated as Mr. Xi centralized decision-making in his own hands.
Li Qiang, Li Xi and Li Keqiang aren’t related.
Analysts say other candidates to succeed Li Keqiang include Wang Yang, the head of China’s top government advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and Hu Chunhua, currently the youngest among the country’s four vice premiers. In recent decades, Chinese premiers had prior experience as vice premier, a criterion that both Messrs. Wang and Hu satisfy.
Some foreign officials and academics have regarded Messrs. Wang and Hu as standard bearers for liberal-minded overhauls that favor market principles. Both are seen as being outside Mr. Xi’s orbit, having been brought along by other political patrons, though both have publicly backed the Chinese leader’s policies. The people close to party leaders said Mr. Hu may fall short of making the Standing Committee.
Among likely new members of the Standing Committee, Li Xi, Guangdong’s party chief since 2017, could step up as the next chief of the party’s top anticorruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the people said.
Mr. Ding, the 60-year-old aide to Mr. Xi, is positioned to be named executive vice premier early next year, according to the people.
Top party theorist Wang Huning and anticorruption czar Zhao Leji are likely to join Mr. Xi as the only members of the current Standing Committee to get another term, though both are likely to be given new responsibilities, the people said.
He Lifeng, the top official at China’s state economic-planning agency and a friend of Mr. Xi since the 1980s, is likely to assume control over economic and financial policy, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. In this role, Mr. He would succeed Vice Premier Liu He, who has been Mr. Xi’s top economic adviser and his point man in trade talks with Washington.
The people close to party leaders and political analysts say Mr. Xi isn’t expected to elevate any potential successors to the Standing Committee, as doing so would undermine his own authority as paramount leader.
Both Li Qiang and Li Xi are too close to Mr. Xi in age to be considered viable successors. While Mr. Ding is younger, he has never served as a regional party boss—an experience long considered an unwritten prerequisite for candidates seeking China’s top political office.
Many in the business community see Li Qiang as a relatively liberal party leader who prefers discussing commercial deals to politics. In the early 2000s, he served as the top commerce official in the coastal province of Zhejiang, home to what would become major private companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. He was later promoted to party secretary of Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang that became a thriving entrepreneurial hub after China opened up its economy in the late 1970s.
After Mr. Xi became party leader in 2012, Mr. Li took top jobs in the relatively affluent regions of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, before he was elevated to Shanghai party boss in 2017.
If Mr. Xi can make Li Qiang premier, he would be able to consolidate control over the formulation of economic and social policy, said Chen Gang, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. “China’s reform and opening will continue, but the pace will slow down. Zero-Covid policy will continue, and Li may rely on stimulus policies to boost the economy,” he predicted.
Write to Josh Chin at Josh.Chin@wsj.com
Kevin Rudd, global president of the Asia Society and former Prime Minister of Australia, knows China well. He wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that:”The 20th Congress, which gets under way Oct. 16th will be different (from other Congresses since the opening of the 1982 reform era). There’s only one appointment that matters now: Xi Jinping, China’s Chairman of Everything. The delegates will reappoint Mr. Xi to a third five-year term as general secretary by a vote of 2,296 to 0.”
I don’t disagree with the main point that Kevin Rudd is making here but there is also a more nuanced view that is important to bring to bear. Wednesday’s post set the table for this more nuanced view. That perspective involves understanding the seven appointments which will be announced on Sunday to the Standing Committee under Xi. The crux of the issue is whether those seven appointments represents a line-up of Xi loyalists — in which case Rudd’s take is spot on — or whether there are appointments enfranchising power-bases at odds with Xi’s direction and indicating that the Party wants some checks on Xi’s untrammeled authority.
Here’s my cheat-sheet to reading next week’s Standing Committee appointments in light of this question:
Chutes & Ladders: 20th CPP National Congress Edition
So what to watch for?
(Scenario 1) Signs that the CCP is totally bought into Xi being Chairman of Everything
— Premier Li Keqiang (aged 67 and therefore normatively eligible for another term) is gone
— No one in their early 50s joins the Standing Committee (showing Xi doesn’t want heir apparent)
— Chen Min’er, a Xi loyalist and champion of Xi’s war on poverty, is appointed
— Ding Xuexiang, a Xi loyalist and Xi policy enforcer, is appointed
(Scenario 2) Signs that the CCP wants some checks on Xi’s untrammeled exercise of power
— He Lifeng, an internationally-friendly protégé of retiring economic czar Liu He, is appointed
— Hu Chunhua, who like Xi had a stellar early career but hasn’t been close with him since, is appointed
— Li Hongzhong, party boss of Tianjin and not “a dyed-in-the-wool” Xi man, is appointed
— Li Xi, party boss of independently minded Guangdong province, is appointed
Finally, keep an eye on Chen Quanguo, party boss of Xinjiang in charge of Uyghur “reeducation,” and Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office and the political dimension of the Taiwan reunification project. Whether their stars shine brightly or dim will also give an indication of the degree of CCP support for Xi’s hardline policies on these two fronts.
So that’s the scorecard I recommend you follow. We’ll circle back next week and tally up the score after the Standing Committee line-up has been brought out, in rank order, onto the main stage of the 20th National Party Congress.
With the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) kicking off this coming Sunday, it’s useful to step back from the game of handicapping short-term odds and to take for a moment a longer-term perspective. We can return to anticipating the likely ‘chutes and ladders’ of 20th National Congress outcomes later this week: the (near-certain) likelihood of Xi Jinping securing a third term as President, unprecedented in the post-Mao era, and an examination of the ascendent and dimming stars of various Standing Committee incumbents and candidates and what that portends for the next five years. For now, it’s useful to step back and evaluate how it came to be — and what it means for China’s future — that Xi stands on the threshold of entering the CCP pantheon with near-totalitarian power. The key question to consider is whether Xi managed to bend the CCP and the country to his will or whether Xi’s rise reflects what the CCP has willed for China’s future.
The two best authorities on this question are Elizabeth Economy (The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State [2018] and The World According to China [2022]) and Kerry Brown (Xi: A Study in Power [2022]). Informed by their insights, I will attempt a super-summary of the forty-years which have led up to Sunday’s moment in history and then tackle that key question.
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The market reforms which the CCP started experimenting with behind the curtain in 1978 and which it then publicly introduced in 1982 had an extraordinary run of success in elevating China’s economy. This occurred first under Deng Xiaoping’s informal leadership from 1982 through 1997 and then continued, in somewhat overlapping fashion with Deng’s tutelage, under the more regularized leadership of, first, Jiang Zemin (1993-2003) and then, starting in 2003, Hu Jintao. By 2007, post-WTO economic reforms were coming on stream, more far-reaching liberalizations were on the horizon, and a new system of divided authority and orderly succession in the Standing Committee was taking shape. (Under this system, the posts of President and Premier as well as the seven (usually) Standing Committee slots could not be held by any one person for more than two five-year slots. If at the time of a National Congress, occurring every five years, a one-term incumbent was 67 years old or less, he (virtually always a ‘he’) would be eligible according to the “seven up, eight down” rule to serve another five year term. If he was 68 or older, however, he would be obliged to step down.)
In 2007, Western observers, myself included, could be forgiven for thinking that China was on a development path in line with Western values and the post-WWII world order. But starting with the Financial Crisis and then, over the next fifteen years, this alignment started to diverge. Progressively, in step with Xi’s anointment as President in 2012 following his leadership struggle with Bo Xilai and his subsequent consolidation of power through his signature “Tigers & Flies” anti-corruption campaign, Xi started positioning his “Rejuvenated” China as deserving equal political stature on the world stage with the United States and equal, if not superior, stature to the West in matters of values and culture. His triumphalist speech at the 2017 National Congress made this claim explicitly and emphatically for all the world to hear. The Belt & Road Initiative and the Zero-COVID policy became Xi’s monumental stages — internationally and domestically — for playing this claim out for all the word to see.
Despite serious setbacks in 2022 with an imploding real estate market and a diminished tech sector, with COVID lockdowns and social discontent, and with the embarassment which his “friend without limits” has caused Xi personally in Ukraine, Xi looks set to enter the CCP pantheon this Sunday to be installed on a pedestal he has made for himself — higher than Deng Xiaoping’s and not lower than Mao Zedong’s.
This enthronement could not have been scripted by one man. The near absolute consolidation of power in the hands of one person could not be the work of one person unless there were far more evidence of resistance and rebellion in the ranks of other CCP power-brokers whose oxen had been gored. As this incisive opinion piece by Kerry Brown in yesterday’s New York Times persuasively argues, Xi’s leadership ethos is the CCP’s ethos and Xi’s laser-focus on making China “strong, respected and feared” will remain as strong even when Xi leaves the stage. It will remain for as long as the CCP can keep the lights on and the stage lit.
Over 10 years, Xi Jinping has methodically amassed power. Beginning with an unprecedented consolidation of military support, Xi then launched his ‘Tigers and Flies’ campaign, sidelining his political rivals along with officials accused of corruption. Over many years he patiently laid the groundwork to elevate Xi Jinping Thought to match the official stature of Mao Zedong Thought, and edge out Deng Xiaoping Thought, in the CCP’s ideological pantheon. He then overturned international commitments regarding Hong Kong, and brought that free-wheeling and Westernized city to heel with the introduction of a new security law. At the last 19th Party Congress in 2017, Xi tossed aside Deng’s “hide-and-abide” (韜光養晦、有所作為) approach to international relations and gave a triumphalist speech, announcing that China had not only arrived on the world stage but that it deserved central position on that stage. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, Xi used sharp-elbow tactics to block scientific investigation into its origins in China and ordered sweeping zero-Covid lockdowns to highlight his government’s ability to take more effective action than was possible for democratic governments in the US and the West. The Winter Olympics were meant to be Xi’s star-turn to demonstrate — more to the Chinese people than to international audiences (many of whom undertook diplomatic boycotts of the Games because of oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other issues) — that he was a flawless and unrivalled champion. He even went so far as to claim that the authoritarian system he presided over represented a superior form of democracy to Western liberal democracy.
Along this path to unrivalled power in China, Xi first jettisoned the system of collective rule by the Standing Committee of the Politburo which Deng had put in place to guard against recurrence of unbridled rule by any one individual, epitomized by the last years of Mao’s rule. Longer term, Xi’s aim in amassing power has been to discard the limit of a president to two five-year terms, another safeguard Deng put in place and which he himself observed.
The announcement of leadership for the next five-year term will happen at the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in Beijing this autumn. At that meeting, Xi is widely expected to be named for a precedent-shattering third term. This will mark a historic high-point for Xi. His systematic consolidation of power has been designed, in part, to create an air of inevitability about this outcome. While his selection is still overwhelmingly likely, a number of significant fissures have appeared in recent weeks which crack this façade of total control.
ZERO-COVID
While undoubtedly successful in limiting the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the first two years of the pandemic, Xi’s Zero-Covid policy has created a raft of problems for China more recently, most notably during the highly-transmissible omicron phase. While incidences of infection, hospitalization and death have been dropping worldwide, they have been surging in China, with the number of confirmed cases more than quadrupling from mid-February to mid-March of this year. Elderly citizens are especially at risk due to their low rates of vaccination and hospitals have already become overwhelmed, due in part to the low number of hospital beds on a per capita basis in China. While it can be argued that the Zero-Covid policy ‘bought time’ for the development of vaccines, Xi’s championing of the locally developed Sinovac vaccine and his refusal to permit the use of more clinically-effective vaccines developed in the West, has blunted that advantage somewhat since the Sinovac vaccine is notably less effective against the omicron variant. The Zero-Covid policy has also meant that there is practically zero immunity in the Chinese population as a result of exposure to the virus as it becomes endemic worldwide. If SARS-COV-2 can be compared to a flame, China’s population is like a vast field of tinder. Finally, the economic and social costs have become glaringly apparent with the lockdown of an entire province, Jilin, in the northeast and the of Shenzhen and Dongguan – China’s two largest manufacturing hubs for information and communications technology (ICT) — in the south.
While Xi will, with considerable justification, continue to claim credit for his “triumph” over the coronavirus, China is by no means out of the pandemic woods and the setbacks of the last month make his strident claims ring more hollow, both internationally and domestically.
REAL ESTATE
In September last year, Chinese real-estate development firms began to feel the severe discomfort of a massive hang-over following years of real-estate speculation partying. The problems were most evident in real-estate giant Evergrande but soon spread to a host of other significant players in the field such as Fantasia, Modern Land, China Property Group and Xinyuan Real Estate Group. At the institutional level, the problems hitting the $5 trillion sector were the result of a unique PRC nexus of aggressive real estate development, lax banking, and local government incentive structures. More simply, the problems resulted from “unrestrained borrowing, expansion as an end-in-itself, and corruption.”
While the PRC Government claimed this week that the real-estate free-fall has been “stabilized,” pricing data from real estate developers across the country continue to show sharp deterioration. Also this week, Evergrande announced a further delay in sharing its plan for restructuring and for paying back bonds and other financial obligations. The government has strong reason to put on a brave face while throwing up a curtain of opacity around the problem. Property-related industries account for more than 30% of China’s economic output. Continued problems in the sector could drag China’s growth below the optimistic, post-pandemic official target of 5% growth, a minimum level which must be maintained in the years ahead for China to escape the ‘middle income trap.’ More immediately, it risks alienating an important swath of the urban public, 80% of whose household wealth is tied up in real estate and who see their property values plummeting. (A particularly aggrieved segment of this population are buyers who have paid up front to the developers, as is common in China, for a property not yet built and for which construction has halted indefinitely while values continue to slide).
While Xi has voiced loud promises to not let the bottom fall out of this sector and to support homeowners currently caught in the fallout, there is little evidence on the ground of these promises translating into reality. Meanwhile, the situation risks alienating the public and sowing dissent among officials.
‘COMMON PROSPERITY’
As measured by the Gini coefficient, China ranked fourth in the world in 2022 for greatest wealth disparity and inequality (after South Africa, Namibia and Sri Lanka). While Deng Xiaoping had announced famously in the late 1980s that “to get rich is glorious” and to “let some get rich first,” the extreme degree of inequality persisting in China four decades later is a source of growing social and political concern. The heady days of 10% growth have long ago disappeared and Chinese who thought they would be boarding on a later rail-car in the national train of prosperity now worry that the train may have departed, stranding them on the platform.
To counter this source of social unease, Xi unveiled with great fanfare in 2021 a policy of ‘Common Prosperity.” Writ large, this policy was meant to cement Xi’s place — side-by-side with Mao and with Deng slightly in the background – in China’s pantheon of modern heroes. In this telling, Mao was the one who roused China to throw off its ‘Sick Man of Asia’ bondage to foreign imperialists and to stand up. Deng contrived a transitional stage of capitalist-style wealth-creation for enough Chinese that China could attain wealth and power (富权). It was left to Xi to complete this project of national rejuvenation, by reinstituting a Marxist “Common Prosperity’ for all Chinese and returning China to the center of the world stage.
Without getting into either the ideological weeds (such as Xi’s ‘Dual Circulation’ strategy) or deep into the tangle of economic measures (e.g., restrictions on overseas listings by Chinese companies, user-data and other controls put on Chinese Big Tech firms, clampdown on student test-prep and video game commercial sectors, etc) which Xi embraced in 2021 to advance his Common Prosperity agenda, the general effect was felt quickly and keenly in the form of abrupt economic slowdown. In the first quarter of this year, the Common Prosperity program has been ‘walked back’ by numerous party officials who have emphasized that it represents a historic project more than an immediate project. Premier Li Keqiang, in his lengthy speech to 3,000 deputies at the opening of the National People’s Congress earlier in the month, mentioned Common Prosperity only one time. For educated Chinese — who have been skillfully parsing official pronouncements closely ever since the Cultural Revolution for clues about where the country is headed — this lack of visibility and endorsement for Xi Jinping’s signature program represents a remarkable degree of push-back for Xi by top-level leaders.
UKRAINE
Chris Buckley’s report in last Friday’s New York Times traces the contours of what is potentially the most damaging crack to appear in Xi’s carefully-crafted, monolithic façade of power and control. The article details the war of words that has erupted on the Chinese internet following the warning delivered by a respected scholar and politically-connected insider, Hu Wei, to the effect that China “risked becoming a pariah if it didn’t denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” As was covered in last week’s post and as continues to play out this week, Chinese officials have contorted themselves by claiming to be neutral and wanting peace while following Putin’s lead in not calling the ‘special military operation’ either a war or an invasion, in not objecting to Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and in amplifying Kremlin disinformation about U.S. bio-military labs in Ukraine.
As argued last week, this has the potential to grow into a strategic blunder for China with significant geopolitical fall-out. It may affect not only Xi’s ambitions to retake Taiwan – the last territorial piece in his China Rejuvenation plan – but to bear long term costs for China as a rising power in the Indo-Pacific region and for its standing in the world at large.
None of this is to suggest that Xi will not get his third term as President this fall. It is only to say that the carefully-cultivated blooms of infallibility and inevitability are now off the XJP rose.
Xi has been in power for less than half of Putin’s tenure (18 years as President and 4 years as the power behind the throne for Medvedev) but there are doubtless people in Zhongnanhai wondering to themselves, post-Putin’s invasion, whether Deng didn’t get it right with his moves to limit the untrammeled exercise of power by an individual leader.
On February 4th, at the conclusion of their day-long summit in Beijing, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping declared that the friendship between Russia and China “has no limits.” That same day, the Beijing Winter Olympics officially began, ending a little more than two weeks later on February 20th. On February 24th, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
There has been extensive analysis of the three major miscalculations Putin has made up to this point: (1) his overestimation of the readiness and effectiveness of his military machine; (2) his underestimation of the resilience and fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people; and (3) the speed and scale with which NATO and EU countries, along with many others, have come together to sanction Russia and to support Ukraine (in all ways short of direct military involvement on, or in the air above, Ukrainian territory). It is too early to tell whether a fourth major miscalculation may have to do with Putin’s misplaced faith in the degree of economic, financial and trade support which China would provide Russia to backfill against these sanctions).
But what about Xi Jinping? What is his calculus for advancing (his interpretation of) China’s interests through this crisis? And what miscalculations has he appeared to have made so far?
Xi’s first miscalculation was immediate and damaging. He is known to have had some discussion with Putin on Feb. 4th about the imminent “special operation” in Ukraine. It is not clear whether Putin lied to him or Xi simply failed to ask the right questions to take Putin’s measure. In either case, Xi Jinping is known to have been caught by surprise and ‘perturbed’ by the scale, duration and ruthlessness of Putin’s “special operation.” As described in my February 4th post “Four Seismic U.S.-China-Russia Shifts,” Putin’s move forced Xi, unexpectedly and very publicly, to choose between his new-found friendship without limits and adherence to China’s mantra-like stated policy of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations, as enunciated in 1954 in Zhou Enlai’s Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence (and championed explicitly with regard to Ukraine’s territorial integrity following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014)
Evidence of Xi’s miscalculation of Putin’s intentions in Ukraine became apparent in the initially hesitant and fence-sitting response by the PRC officials during the first two weeks of the crisis. On the one hand, Chinese officials refused to refer to the invasion publicly with any term other than Putin’s Orwellian “special operation” terminology; pivoted reliably to blaming the crisis on NATO rather than Russia aggression; blocked a series of actions from being taken against Russia in the U.N. Security Council; amplified Russian disinformation about the U.S. operating bio-military labs in Ukraine (a play out of the FSK, formerly KGB, playbook which suggests that Putin is contemplating the use of bio- or chemical weapons and is ready to throw sand in the world’s eyes by blaming the U.S. and/or NATO for their eventual use); and has even embedded Chinese journalists with Russian military units on the ground in Ukraine. On the other, China says its the friend of both Ukraine and Russia; talks about the need for the cessation of violence; offers publicly to mediate between the two sides while not actually taking any steps toward a mediation effort); and repeats the mantra of its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as if Putin’s actions in Ukraine were taking place in some parallel universe.
There have been other related miscalculatiions. For instance, the PRC Government has been repeatedly caught off balance by the Biden Administration’s aggressive use of classified U.S. intelligence findings, with his Administration quickly de-classifying key reports and pushing the information out into the public sphere, both domestically and internationally. This began with President Biden’s sharing in real-time with the world the U.S. intelligence community’s pre-invasion assessments that Putin had made the decision to invade. This very public use of previously hush-hush intelligence findings marks a clear break from past White House precedent and has also been aimed at China in recent weeks: first, in divulging the fact that Xi Jinping had prior knowledge of the invasion from his Feb. 4th meeting with Putin and that Xi had, in fact, asked Putin to hold off on initiating that military operation until after the conclusion of the Beijing Winter Olympics; and, second, in disclosing publicly on the eve of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s March 14th meeting with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi the fact that Beijing had received requests from Moscow for military and economic assistance to aid its war effort. These and other revelations have punctured China’s contrived public posture and shown that, behind the peaceful resolution rhetoric and thin veil of neutrality in the conflict, the reality is that China is not sitting on the fence but has indeed been coming down on Russia’s side.
The initial confusion in China’s response and now the growing evidence of China’s support, up to a point, for Russia were probably to be expected : under-the-table support for Putin was inevitable given the top-down nature of Chinese government decision-making and the personal investment which Xi had made in Putin and Russia just weeks earlier. Just as powerfully through, China wants to keep some fig-leaf semblance of its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence policy because its repudiation would roil China’s international relations, among others, with its Belt & Road Initiative partner countries. Equally, it does not want to run afoul of the trip wire of U.S.-led financial and economic sanctions by aiding Russia overtly with military aid, financial relief or with trade in sanctioned commodities like microchips, especially following the stern warning delivered by Secretary Blinken earlier this week.
Over the last week, there are signs that the Beijing leadership is trying to “elevate” its initial indecision and aloofness into what it believes can be a long-term winning strategy for coming out ahead of the West when flames die out and the dust settles from the Ukraine conflagration. The Zhongnanhai thesis is that it is not worldwide supporters of post-WWII liberal democracy that are rallying to support Ukraine as much as it is a “civilizational” struggle between a Russian identity promulgated by Putin and a Western identity and set of values represented primarily by the U.S. and Europe. The thinking goes that, if China stands back from this clash, it can pick up the pieces and emerge stronger than either of the two depleted civilizational antagonists. This accords with Xi Jinping’s decade-long championing of the rejuvenation, and even superiority, of Han identity and the Chinese model. In Xi’s thinking, this policy of studious and disciplined aloofness — limited to cheering on Russia with “dog-whistle” encouragement and forms of back-channel support it can get away with while seizing opportunities to denigrate the West to his domestic audience and to countries in Central Asia, the Pacific, and Africa — has two clear advantages: (1) it avoids any risk for Xi in decisively backing ‘a loser’ in Putin, an outcome already sealed in his international pariah status and increasingly likely on the battlefield even if Kiev is taken and the war shifts to an insurgency; and (2) it gives Xi space to attend to the many immediate challenges facing him in the run-up to the critical Party Congress this fall where he is bidding for a third, controversial term as President. Those challenges include: a sharp fall-off in economic performance (brought on in part by excesses of his own Common Prosperity policy introduced over the past year; rapidly rising Covid case-counts and lock-downs in Shenzhen and Donguan in the south, in Shanghai and in Jilin to the northeast; and the recent hardening of attitudes toward China throughout much of the world as ably analyzed by Elizabeth Economy in The World According to China and in her Jan/Feb 2022 article in Foreign Affairs.
The jury is out but I submit that this policy of official aloofness may well prove to be Xi Jinping’s biggest and longest-lasting miscalculation with regard to Ukraine. Xi may think in ethno-nationalist terms, but much of the world’s response is underpinned by non-Western allies such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore who have benefitted from, and are committed to upholding, the post-WWII order based on national sovereignity and the rule of law. In fact, it is Taiwan which represents and symbolizes the fullest repudiation of Xi’s thesis. Absent some mis-adventure by North Korea (which is a disturbing possibility) or a premature move by Xi to extinguish the symbol Taiwan represents (which I consider very unlikely in the near-term), Xi’s official ‘aloofness’ and sub-rosa support for Putin will be remembered by the world in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. There are times when a person, or a nation, must choose sides. Not choosing sides in such situations is, in fact, a choice that is noticed and remembered. Pretending not to choose sides while actually backing the ‘wrong side’ is morally repugnant. There is not a middle way.
In July 1989, I was at my desk at the U.S. Consulate General Shanghai when I received a call notifying me that a small group of senior officials from the Shanghai Municipal Government would be coming for a meeting that afternoon. I was asked to make sure that the newly-arrived Consul General — Pat Wardlaw who had just replaced my first Consul General Charlie Sylvester earlier in the month — join the meeting.
A couple of things about this. First, you’ll note that a meeting wasn’t actually requested and that none of us were asked about our availability in the afternoon. We were instead informed that the group of government officials would be coming and we were simply expected to be available when they arrived. Second, anyone who has worked in China will notice something quite extraordinary about this phone call. We were not summoned, as is typically the case with Chinese government officials, to go meet with them at their offices. They were coming to us. This would be the only time in my working career in China when Chinese government officials came to us rather than vice versa.
A word of context. This phone call took place in the latter half of July, a month and a half after the June 4th Tiananmen incident. Roughly a week before June 4th, my wife Grace and I had left Shanghai on a one-month Home Leave, traveling first for one week vacation with my sister’s family on Kauai and then expecting to spend the remainder of our time in Philadelphia with family and with me traveling to Washington DC on consultations. As we transited San Francisco International Airport on June 4th to catch our onward flight to Philadelphia, there was a palpable tension in the air and we soon saw the near-identical banner headlines about Tiananmen in a row of vending machines along the terminal wall as we made our way to Passport Control.
I never got my homeleave or consultations in Washington. Secretary of State Jim Baker was determined to have his thumb on the pulse of decision-making by McDonnell-Douglas, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-cola and the other top U.S. investments in Shanghai. He knew it wouldn’t be reliable to just count on what he heard from the CEOs at U.S. headquarters. He wanted to know the calculus of decision-making that was taking place on the ground by the Shanghai-based executives in charge of the major U.S. investments in Shanghai. Having just landed in Philadelphia, I was given one-day to help Grace (early in her pregnancy with our older son Todd) get settled in and was instructed to then turn around and fly back to Shanghai to start providing anything I could learn from my business contacts in Shanghai in a series of classified cables.
So back to the July meeting. The Consulate guard (not a Marine because no U.S. military presence was allowed in China at that time) notified me that the government officials had arrived. I escorted the group of four or five officials into the ground-floor meeting room where a handful of my Consulate colleagues were waiting. One of the officials was just barely managing to carry a big armful of long paper rolls. They did not wait to be seated and didn’t begin with any pleasantries. The senior official simply took the first roll of paper handed to him, unrolled it on the conference room table and announced “This will be the new Pudong. We want you to report about Pudong to your government. We want Americans to invest and help develop it. They will make a lot of money.”
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Today’s post falls into the TEA Collaboratives’ A-Series of content dealing with PRC government planning Ambitions. Over the weeks and months ahead, I will have a chance to share insights developed through the Masters-level course (IMPA 608) which I taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring semester of 2019 and 2020. The focus of that course, based on Mandarin language research, is the forty-year trajectory of China’s macro-development planning vision and execution. Domestically, the trajectory of that storyline begins with Shenzhen in the early 1980s, continues smoothly through Pudong throughout the 1990s before encountering turbulence in Tianjin in the 2000s. Following 2012, the first stage of this macro-development model gets jettisoned and the second stage ignites with the twin megalopolis projects — the Consolidated Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Project (‘Jing-Jin-Ji’ or 京津冀) in the northeast and the Guangdong-Hong-Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Project in the southeast. Simultaneous with the unveiling and cranking up of this pair of Version 2 domestic macro-development projects over the last decade, China has also been systematically extending its macro-development model to its 139 international partners through the Belt & Road Initiative.
I look forward to sharing the insights gleaned from this multi-year, instructor-and-student knowledge co-creation effort in the TEA Collaborative’s A-series blogposts on Fridays over the remainder of the year. Understanding the vision and values driving the momentum of this forty-years macro-development effort helps chart where China is headed in the future. I hope this small, personal anecdote about Pudong’s emergence into China’s macro-development planning process serves as an apt way to kick off our Macro-Dev series.
Bear with me. I’m going to kick off today’s post with a snapshot about how we organize the blog’s content week by week in order to set the stage for then revealing the slight wrinkle with today’s post. Boring. Hang in there, though … there’s a good reason.
The TEA Collaborative produces three blog-posts per week: on Mondays (aspirationally, at least) we put out a tech-related post which takes care of the T in our name; on Wednesdays (ditto) an energy/environment post which covers the letter E; and on Fridays (ditto) an A post for Ambitions (by which we mean the effort to chronicle the seventy-year undertaking by the government of the People’s Republic of China to leverage their huge population, along with other assets, to confront the world with a new, ambitious model of change at vast scale and speed).
So as not to get trapped into rigidity, we have also been planning all along to fold occasionally a so-called X-factor post into this T-E-A formula. X-series posts will generally be the contribution of an invited guest blogger who is an acknowledged Xpert (sorry, couldn’t resist) in the broad field of U.S.-China relations.
Today’s post turns out to be a bit of a hybrid between A and X. Originally, we were lining up an X-series post which I thought might appear today but, for various reasons, that expert will need to hold off her appearance until September. Since I did not myself have anything particularly cogent prepped for Ambitions as a fall-back, I went through much of the day yesterday mentally open, in equal measure, to either inspiration or dumb luck. Dumb luck won the day.
As a result, I am able to present here both a fortuitous hybrid — content that actually does fit the A-Series perspective but happens to be delivered by a different X-series expert. (The wrinkle is that the X-series expert is not yet aware that he is filling in this way. I’ve written him today to explain and to get his blessing. Having gotten to know him in a sense after listening to more than 100 hours of his podcast series, I’m pretty sure he’ll go for it. If not, though, I’ll have to pull this from the blogsite. So, you might want to read fast.)
OK, here we go …
In our T(ech) post from last week, Fiddling Around with U.S.-China Tech, I asserted: “there was undoubtedly a measure of optimistic naïveté in the West in assuming China’s willingness to dutifully assume the role of a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the post-WWII world order. If the Chinese had conceived of their nation as only having been born in 1949, assuming the mantle of responsible Pax Americana stakeholder might have fit more comfortably. As it was, Chinese conceived the People’s Republic of China as the heir to a Chinese polity which had been the dominant economy in the world for sixteen of the previous eighteen centuries. They weren’t predisposed to simply adopting some newcomer’s rules and norms as to how China should conduct itself on the world stage.”
Today’s post is going to put meat on the bones of that assertion. In order to do so, I will turn to Mike Duncan — creator, author and narrator of the magisterial History of Rome podcast series. On the occasion of the 100th episode of his series, Mike took listeners’ questions. For the remainder of this post, I am going to take his answers to two questions from that podcast, reverse the order in which he answered them, and share his erudition here to shine a bright light on the two component parts of my assertion: first, why would the Chinese not naturally think of themselves as heirs to something very special which pre-dated 1949 by quite a few years; and, second, why would the Chinese not naturally have some skepticism about falling in line with a new-fangled U.S.-led world order dating back to 1949.
Except for the headings, the following two points of text are entirely drawn from the 100th episode of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast.
- China Has More Historical Continuity Than The Roman Empire (And That’s Saying Something)
Question:
What, if any, relationship existed between ancient Rome and China?
Answer:
The majority of the contact between Rome and China was indirect, but the two great bookends of the world certainly knew that the other existed. The Han Dynasty, which persists in one form or another from about 200 BC to 220 AD was rising at the same time as the Romans, and as Rome headed East, the Han headed West. And it was during this period that the links became more overt. With the stabilizing hand of the Han in place the famous Silk Road was able to knit itself together, carrying silk and other Oriental treasures from China all the way to Antioch, and from there to Rome, while, among other things, Roman glasswork made their way back to the Chinese.
In 97 AD a Chinese embassy was sent West to try to make contact with the kingdom of the Da Qin, which is what the Han called Rome. But apparently they were stopped short in Mesopotamia after the Parthians explained that the difficult crossing to Rome would take another two years at least. This bald faced lie was meant to keep the two poles of the lucrative trade routes, which Parthia controlled, from ever meeting and working out a way to bypass the Parthian middlemen.
In 166, though, a Roman embassy was sent east and was able to make contact with the Chinese emperor. Debate still swirls about how the Romans got there, whether by sea or overland, but a meeting definitely occurred and the Romans offered up all kinds of gifts from the West, including a book of Greco-Roman astronomy. Nothing concrete seems to have followed the meeting though, and thereafter the two sides continued to simply trade with one another indirectly via the Silk Road or by the sea routes around India.
For the remainder of the Empire, Chinese silk remained a highly sought after luxury item in Rome, and was a major point of contention, both for old school conservatives who found how revealing the fabric was disturbing, and proto economists who worried about how much gold was disappearing east for nothing but a few scraps of cloth.
2. What’s the Enculturated Chinese Attitude Towards a ‘Pax Americana’ Dating Back to 1949?
Question:
“One of the earliest topics that was brought up is the purported similarities between ancient Rome and the US. What are the main similarities and differences between ancient Rome and the present and historical US?”
Answer:
Well, let’s go through the obvious list. The United States kicked out a monarch, founded a republic wildly skewed in favor of a rich aristocracy (that was self-consciously modeled on Roman institutions), dealt with violent upheavals as the lower social classes attempted to capture some power for themselves, expanded aggressively on their own continent before accidentally capturing overseas territories, and is now utterly dominant militarily, politically and economically. What else do you need to know?
Throw in the fact that if you believe the Soviet Union was Carthage and that the Cold War is our equivalent of the Punic Wars, then you can even locate us within the larger timeline right around the rise of the Gracchi brothers and, hey, look, Tea Parties.
Except that one thing that’s really been driven home to me lately is that while you can find these superficial similarities, there are much deeper differences. Every powerful nation follows its own trajectory, for its own particular reasons, towards own particular end, though usually at the height of each one’s power, they claim that they are the rebirth of the Roman empire.
For me, the biggest difference between America and Rome is that compared to Rome, the United States is a baby and could be very well proved to be merely a flash in the pan. The Roman Empire became the dominant state in the Mediterranean around 200 BC and remained as such in one form or another until the fall of Constantinople in the 1450s. I mean, we are talking about a nearly 2000 year period where you simply cannot talk about anything that occurred in North Africa, Europe, or the Middle East without talking about Rome. America, by contrast, was a pretty decent regional power for about a century, a pretty major world power for about 75 years after that, and has been living with the kind of unipolar prestige Rome enjoyed for centuries for about the last 20 years.
If the United States of America is still around in 3010, I think maybe then we can start talking about comparisons to Rome. Until then, things happen, nations rise and fall, and borders shift. I’m not saying America can’t dominate the world for a millennia. I’m just saying that it’s an awful lot to ask of anyone.
Rome was all about longevity and stability, and that is a test that no one in the West has been able to pass since.
My Personal Postscript
We live in a polarized time. Many people who I encounter in the blogosphere will be inclined to take this post as evidence that I am somehow an apologist for the PRC. Let me set the record straight on that possible perception:
- My entire professional life has been dedicated to supporting U.S. Government institutions (e.g., the U.S. Foreign Service), U.S. Government programs (e.g,. the U.S.-China EcoPartnership program) and U.S.-led People-to-People cooperative programs such as The Philadelphia Orchestra’s engagement with China
- Above and beyond my professional involvements, I personally believe that America’s multi-cultural, future-oriented perspective is the world’s best path forward, at least as far as I have so far encountered
- I do not believe in historical determinism. There is nothing about either Rome’s or China’s longevity which I find instructive for understanding their futures, except for the single fact that the people who grow up in that cultural tradition feel it in their bones
- But, as I took pains to lay out in my Where I Stand post, I will never shy from seeking to understand, take into account, and respect my counterpart’s reality when grappling with a shared problem so that solutions which work for “my side” will also work for theirs. Those are the solutions that stick.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 