The Party has a party … but clouds threaten rain on China’s parade
After 70 years, communist China has outlived its foremost supporter and sponsor, the Soviet Union, due to a careful transition to state-controlled capitalism that has largely alleviated poverty and brought material comforts to its 1.4 billion people. The pomp and circumstance of the anniversary celebrations certainly made for stunning visuals and reaffirmed the Communist Party’s role as “guardians of the revolution.” However, China faces unprecedented challenges that no carefully choreographed parades of advanced weaponry, slogans and symbols of national unity can erase.
China’s rise is a referendum on the dominant Western-style democratic capitalism, which makes a reckoning of sorts inevitable. Is China really intent on usurping Western hegemony? If so, it is an existential threat that necessitates either isolation or forced conformity. Alternatively, if China is merely “copying” the choicest parts of the West, that would lay the groundwork for closer cooperation and stronger economic ties, predicated on further liberal reforms, open markets and a reversal of authoritarian tendencies.
Unfortunately, the challenges Beijing faces are likely to trigger the usual response of fear, coercion and consolidation of power instead of reforms, conciliation or rapprochement, which it views as capitulating to the West, and therefore defeatist. One of the foremost priorities of President Xi Jinping’s era is a reaffirmation of the Communist Party’s professed values, eliminating contradictions and dissent in the pursuit of One China. It is inspired by a fixation with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, a fate Beijing is determined to avoid.
The obsession with setting a Chinese identity apart from the rest of the world is also a trademark of Xi, whose name is now spoken in the same breath as Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese communist state. The Oct. 1 celebrations came at an opportune moment for his leadership, affording a brief respite from external pressures and mounting domestic challenges.
Meanwhile, however, stormclouds threaten rain on that parade.
An intractable trade war with the US has taken its toll; the economy has slowed and many foreign companies have quit China or are strongly considering it. Public opinion has turned negative in most of Western Europe and across the Asia-Pacific region, not helped by Beijing’s aggressive posture in the South China Seas.
In the developing world, China is welcomed as an alternative to engagements with the West, which often come with burdensome requests. However, Chinese “easy money” also comes at a high price, not just in interest payments but when recipient nations neglect issues of governance, sustainability and the rule of law. China’s commodity-backed loans also wrest control of resources from poorer nations.
Domestically, Xi’s totalitarian tendencies are likely to upend the limited liberalism of the 2000s, but maintaining a stranglehold on all aspects of the state is costly. Beijing spends more to maintain internal stability than it does on defense — and judging by the array of weaponry on display in the anniversary parade, that figure is astronomically high. Meanwhile, a counter-narrative continues to develop in Hong Kong, as protests swell and anti-Beijing sentiments escalate. Beijing has no easy options there. Capitulating to Hong Kong’s demands would be a defeat, and contradictory to the One China ideals, but turning Hong Kong into a police state would not bode well for external relations, particularly with the West, whose perceptions, and the policies they set, still have an outsize influence on Beijing’s own policy determinations. There is another headache in Xinjiang, where millions of Uighurs are subject to mass surveillance and involuntary detention. Beijing has now been accused harvesting organs of Uighur Muslims killed in concentration camps that are now referred to as “organ banks.” The few reports that trickle out betray a regime that is all too comfortable with brutal oppression of ethnic minorities.
The centenary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding is in 2021. By then, there is a good chance America will have chosen a pro-trade president and protest fatigue will have de-escalated tension in Hong Kong. However, the trade war and growing anti-Beijing sentiment should give pause to the party’s deliberations on where China should be in 2050 and beyond. It has a tendency to eschew careful transitions and reforms, but they are necessary to ensure the People’s Republic does not suffer shocks that could easily lead to Hong Kong-style defiance.
It is wise to learn from the fall of the USSR, but it would be wiser still to ensure that China does not suffer through another Tiananmen Square massacre.