Why is Beijing retreating into bunker, turning back to world?
China reacted to the news of the American government’s diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s Winter Olympics with predictable fury — a foreign ministry spokesman described it as a “naked political provocation”. He then added that US officials had jumped the gun because they had not even been invited. That seemed like a bit of added petulance, but it is entirely in keeping with China’s growing mood of self-isolation -- a mood that is beginning to have some bizarre and dangerous consequences.
The Communist Party of China has always been a paranoid organisation, with a deep suspicion towards the outside world, but President Xi Jinping has taken this to new heights. Western policymakers are alarmed. Richard Moore, MI6’s new head, alluded to this in a speech last month when he warned: “Beijing believes its own propaganda about Western frailties and underestimates Washington’s resolve. The risk of Chinese miscalculation through overconfidence is real.”
He didn’t explicitly name Taiwan, but the risks of China’s bunker mentality for the island are evident. Last month alone, the Chinese government was twice forced to deny that it is about to go to war over Taiwan. The rumours ricocheted around Chinese social media after the commerce ministry urged citizens to stockpile rice, noodles, vegetables and other essentials for the winter, and then again after reports that the military was re-enlisting former soldiers. The government insisted the stockpiling guidance was a Covid-19 precaution and flatly denied the reports of re-enlistment. These rumours are a symptom of the country increasingly turning in on itself.
Why is China turning its back on the world? The immediate reason is Covid-19. China’s border has been virtually sealed for nearly two years, and there is little sign of it reopening any time soon. Foreign visitors are largely banned, and most people in China have not been allowed to travel overseas. President Xi has not left the country since a visit to Myanmar in January 2020. China has maintained a “zero tolerance” approach to the pandemic. Local outbreaks are tackled with severe lockdowns which are enforced by claustrophobic surveillance. Lanzhou, a city of four million people, was locked down in October after six cases were detected. Over 30,000 visitors were locked inside Shanghai’s Disneyland after a single customer tested positive. They all had to undergo tests before being allowed to leave.
Xi Jinping has become a prisoner of his own triumphalist rhetoric. The CPC has presented the containment of Covid-19 as evidence of the superiority of the China’s authoritarian political system. But Xi doesn’t dare to let his guard down.
Foreigners are leaving China in droves. In the past decade, the number of expatriates in Shanghai, China’s financial centre, fell by 20 per cent to around 1,63,000. The decline in Beijing was even steeper, falling by 40 per cent to about 63,000.
While Covid-19 has accelerated the exodus, the broader reason is that China is becoming a less hospitable place for foreigners. Some of this is down to the business environment -- tax policies have become harsher, and the party is now armed with new laws which empower it to take out through the front door what it used to steal from the back -- but it is also a result of a growing and narrow-minded nationalism that is hostile to foreign ideas.
China’s inward turn suits Xi’s immediate purposes. National self-reliance, particularly in technology, has become a party mantra, as has a desire to inoculate the population against dangerous foreign influences. The months ahead are also crucial to his consolidation of absolute power in China. The groundwork has been laid. A 12,000word homage ahead of the CPC’s central committee meeting last month, described Xi as “a man of determination and action, a man of profound thoughts and feelings, a man who inherited a legacy but dares to innovate and a man who has forward-looking vision and is committed to working tirelessly”.
The party gathering passed a resolution on history, a power grab that elevated Xi’s status to the level of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. A party congress to be held in late 2022 will effectively allow him to remain in power for life.
During the two years that Xi has sealed China off from the world, the world has grown far more wary of China. There are multiple reasons for this, ranging from repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, to Beijing’s initial coverup of Covid19, to the economic bullying of Australia. A Pew Research Centre survey found that unfavourable views of China are at record highs in most countries since polling on this topic began more than a decade ago.
The West’s increasingly cautious view of China has in turn fuelled CPC paranoia. This does not bode well for attempts by Joe Biden to engage Xi in talks on nuclear weapons, following China’s testing of a hypersonic weapon and assessments that China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal. Beijing has consistently rejected conversations about arms control. There is no nuclear hotline, and none of the protocols or depth of mutual knowledge that existed during the last Cold War.
Xi is now engaged in a significant reversal of “reform and opening up”, the approach that has mostly characterised Chinese policy to the world since Deng Xiaoping. The barriers erected to keep out Covid-19 are the embodiment of a wider and growing mentality. China is retreating into a dangerous bunker of Xi’s making.