Xi Jinping

You are currently browsing articles tagged Xi Jinping.

“No Sane American Leader Would Choose Confrontation With China”

November 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpgun-1

James Fallows wrote these words for the Atlantic just prior to the American election: “What if China is going bad?” Now that we know the U.S. has headed boldly in that direction, the question becomes more pressing.

The journalist is moving forward the “Thucydides Trap” argument made by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who believes insurgent powers and entrenched ones are apt to engage in war despite how little sense such clashes make. Now that the world’s greatest superpower has installed a sociopath in the Oval Office and China’s Xi Jinping works through his own “small hands” complex by ratcheting up authoritarianism, who knows where the tensions will lead?

An excerpt:

The paradoxical combination of insecurity and aggressiveness is hardly confined to China. The United States has all too many examples in its own politics. But this paradox on a national-strategic scale for China matched what many people told me about Xi himself as a leader: The more uncertain he feels about China’s diplomatic and economic position in the world, and the more grumbling he hears about his ongoing crackdown, the more “decisively” he is likely to act. “Xi is a weak man who wants to look strong,” a foreign businessman who has worked in China for many years told me. “He is the son of a famous father [Xi Zhongxun, who fought alongside Mao as a guerrilla and became an important Communist leader] and wants to prove he is worthy of the name. As we’ve seen in other cultures, this can be a dangerous mix.” Ten years ago, when I visited a defense-oriented think tank in Beijing, I was startled to see a gigantic wall map showing U.S.-affiliated encampments and weapons on every Chinese frontier except the one bordering Russia. I came to understand that the graphic prominence of the U.S. military reflected a fairly widespread suspicion that the United States wishes China ill, is threatened by its rise, and does not want to see China succeed. Almost no one I spoke with recently, however, foresaw a realistic danger of a shooting war between China and the United States or any of its allies—including the frequently discussed scenario of an unintentional naval or aerial encounter in the South China Sea. Through the past few years, in fact, U.S. military officials, led by the Navy, have engaged their People’s Liberation Army counterparts in meetings, conferences, and exercises, precisely to lessen the risk of war by miscalculation. “Naval forces are actually pretty good at de-escalating and steering out of one another’s way,” a senior U.S. Navy officer told me.

The concern about a more internationally aggressive China involves not a reprise of the Soviet Union during the tensest Cold War years but rather a much bigger version of today’s Russia. That is: an impediment rather than an asset in many of the economic and strategic projects the United States would like to advance. An example of kleptocracy and personalized rule. A power that sometimes seems to define its interests by leaning toward whatever will be troublesome for the United States. An actual adversary, not just a difficult partner. China is challenging in many ways now, and increasingly repressive, but things could get worse. And all of this is separate from the effect on China’s own people, and on the limits it is placing on its academic, scientific, commercial, and cultural achievements by cutting itself off from the world.

What is to be done? The next president will face a quandary often called the “Thucydides Trap.” This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.

No sane American leader would choose confrontation with China.•

Tags: , ,

“The Party Has Mobilized Its Unique And Extensive Network Of Surveillance, Security, And Secret Police”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

maosurveillance

During the 1930s, a surprising number of American captains of industry looked longingly at Mussolini’s Italy and even Hitler’s Germany. What they thought they saw was indomitable power. How can we compete with well-coordinated Fascism and totalitarianism, they churlishly asked, with our impudent U.S. laborers? They’ll eat our lunch.

Although Mussolini met with the business end of a meat hook and Hitler died a bunker-based suicide, modern China has aroused those feelings of jealousy all over again in some of our current pouty plutocrats. There is some cause for envy. It’s awe-inspiring what that nation has done in short order, with its headlong dive through the Industrial Age and into the Digital one. Tens of millions have been lifted from abject poverty through mass, manic urbanization, though the day-to-day costs have been steep. It’s striking, though, that while the world’s highest cancer rates and the planet’s worst air pollution receive plenty of attention, the new money has seemingly papered over how sick the larger system is. Authoritarianism is still antithetical to human nature.

Xi Jinping’s current tough-on-crime crusade, aided by cutting-edge sensors and algorithms, is more a political purge than a righteous reckoning for the corrupt. It’s Mao married to modern technology.

The opening of “Crackdown in China,” Orville Schell’s excellent NYRB article:

“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.

As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political “relaxation” and “tightening.” China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform agenda and its foreign relations.

At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.1 But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views.

To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life.•

Tags: ,

“Through Playing Football, We Hope To Become Stronger”

June 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In America, our Mark Cubans buy sports franchises for fun and ego and access to all sorts of things. In China, a wealthy video-game magnate like Zhu Jun buys a football team and expensive players and coaches for all those reasons, but for a sense of nationalism as well. The following are a couple of brief passages from an interview the owner of the Shanghai Shenhua did with Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times, which reveals a larger picture of a China that hopes to import what it needs for now while nurturing generations who will be able to create these things for themselves in the future.

••••••••••

“‘Football is a game every man loves,’ he says. ‘Through playing football, we hope to become stronger. China is becoming richer nowadays but, from my point of view, China is rich rather than strong. The country is lacking resistance. But football is a game full of resistance.’

What kind of resistance, I wonder? ‘Conflict,’ he replies. ‘China is not strong because people never say ‘No’. Tradition makes them restrain themselves rather than being open. What I am doing is to prove we can actually do everything, no matter whether the general public understands us or not.'”

••••••••••

“If the hope is that world-class players such as [Didier] Drogba and [Nicolas] Anelka can help create a world-class football nation to rival China’s status in the global economy – or for that matter, in ping-pong – it will not be easy. A mere 2,000 years after a game suspiciously like football was invented in China, the world’s most populous country has yet to make its presence felt in the world’s most popular sport.

The Chinese love to watch football; when the country qualified for its first and only World Cup tournament to date, in 2002, a reported 170m new television sets were bought to follow the team’s progress. But Chinese state media has quoted football officials as saying that only 100,000 children, in this land of 1.3bn, are playing any form of organised football, partly the result of high levels of corruption in the past.

The country’s presumed next ruler, Xi Jinping, recently outlined his plan for the Chinese game: first qualify for another World Cup; then host a World Cup; then win one. Part of Zhu’s vision, it seems, is that ‘Chinese football needs idols. Good young players will only be attracted when we make achievements.’”

Tags: , , , ,