No-one dictates to us, defiant Xi warns
President Xi struck a note of defiance towards the United States and warned against any measures that could subvert party rule in a speech yesterday to mark China’s 40 years of economic reforms.
Xi said that his country would not be lectured by other nations. He referred to China’s growth over the decades and said that given the nation’s achievements ‘‘no-one is in a position to dictate to the Chinese people’’.
The commemoration of the 40-year milestone comes at a time when Xi, 65, is moving away from the era started by the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of economic reforms who championed social tolerance and sought a degree of political liberalisation.
Deng’s policies in the late seventies and eighties marked a historic change of direction after Mao’s one-man rule. Xi has rolled back changes made under Deng by abandoning collective leadership and scrapping presidential term limits, measures introduced to save China from another Mao.
Emboldened by economic success, Xi believes that China should assert itself in foreign policy. Deng, however, felt that the country should not become deeply involved in international affairs.
Xi has rolled out a massive overseas infrastructure and investment project known as the belt and road initiative to expand China’s footprint, turning atolls and islets in the South China Sea into forts and fuelling tensions in the region. Yesterday, he said that China would play a larger global role and ‘‘proactively join the reforms and building of the global order’’.
At home he has been clamping down on dissent, ordering religious institutions to fly national flags and their followers to swear allegiance to the party. Anyone who disobeys risks imprisonment.
Any political or economic reforms that could undermine party rule were out of the question. ‘‘What should be reformed and can be reformed, we would resolutely do it; what should not be reformed or could not be reformed, we would resolutely not do it,’’ Xi said.
Glaringly absent were former leaders who had been faithful followers of Deng’s policies. In a break from party tradition, neither the former presidents Jiang Zemin, 92, and Hu Jintao, 75, nor the former premiers Zhu Rongji, 90, and Wen Jiabao, 76, turned up to hear Xi’s speech in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
The president urged selfreliance at a time when China is becoming increasingly embroiled in a trade row with the US.
‘‘We must hold our fate in our own hands,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s no sacred textbook, and there is no master who can lecture China.
‘‘The achievements of the past 40 years did not fall from the sky. They were not handed to us as gifts or alms, but it was the hard work, wisdom and courage by everyone in the party and in the country that made them possible,’’ Xi said.
He said that China had achieved industrialisation in 40 years, rather than the hundreds it took the West. ‘‘The impossible became possible in the hands of the Chinese people.’’
For his people, Mr Xi promised a brighter future, where China will stand tall as a world power, but warned that the journey would be arduous. –