Merkel’s twilight coincides with anniversary of Berlin Wall’s fall

Thursday’s German National Day has special significance given its coincidence with the upcoming 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, this year’s event also came at another key moment in the nation’s post-Cold War history with Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship now in its twilight phase after her around a decade and a half in office.

Merkel has long been the most important political leader in continental Europe having been head of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 2000 to 2018, and chancellor since 2005. Indeed, in the era of Donald Trump, she has had solid claims to being the most influential leader in the Western world too, with the potential exception of Emmanuel Macron.

To put Merkel’s achievements into wider international perspective, three U.S. presidents (George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump), four French presidents (Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Hollande and Macron), and five U.K. prime ministers (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson) have already served during her long tenure.

ANN ARBOR — Since Chinese President Xi Jinping launched his sweeping anti-corruption campaign in 2012, more than 1.5 million officials, including some of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top leaders, have been disciplined. Among them is Ji Jianye, the former leader of Nanjing and Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province.

Disgraced, Ji is now remembered only for his bribes and scandals. Yet, prior to his downfall, he was famous for his iron-fisted competence. “In Yangzhou,” reads one local media report in Southern Weekend, “most people agree that Ji is the leader who has made the greatest contributions to the city since 1949.”

Portrayals of China’s political system are sharply divided. One camp describes China as a Confucian-style meritocracy where officials are selected, as Daniel A. Bell of Shandong University puts it, “in accordance with ability and virtue” through a top-down process, rather than by elections. According to Bell, meritocracy presents an alternative — even a challenge — to democracy. He recommends that the Chinese government export this model abroad.

The second camp comprises naysayers such as Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College and author Gordon G. Chang, who have insisted for decades that the CPC is decaying from corruption and will soon collapse. In dire terms, Pei describes

And Merkel has also already exceeded the previous record of Margaret Thatcher as Europe’s longest serving female leader which was 11 years.

Yet, the irony is that at the same time Merkel is such a pivotal figure on the international stage, with Germany the anchor country in the EU, she is facing mounting challenges on multiple fronts. This includes defending the integrity of the EU, and also preserving the wider Western postwar order that she and so many compatriots in Germany so value.

On the EU front, Merkel has played a major role in the last decade in seeking to stabilize the Brussels-based club from the Greek debt crisis through to the immigration challenges which saw her country taking in around 1 million refugees and migrants in 2015 alone.

With the EU remaining fragile, the regime as filled with “looting, debauchery, and utter lawlessness.”

In fact, neither view is correct. Corruption and competence do not just coexist within China’s political system; they can be mutually reinforcing. Ji is a case in point. Through massive demolition and urban-renewal projects, he rapidly transformed Yangzhou into an award-winning tourist destination, and over the course of his career has earned the nickname “Mayor Bulldozer.” Under his leadership, the city’s GDP surpassed the provincial average for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, Ji’s long-time cronies made a fortune during his tenure. In exchange for lavish gifts, bribes, and company shares, Ji awarded their businesses near-monopoly access to government construction and renovation projects. One of these companies, Gold Mantis, saw its profits grow fifteenfold in just six years. The more Ji pushed for growth, the more spoils he produced.

This paradox is not limited to Ji. In a forthcoming book, “China’s Gilded Age,” my study of 331 CPC city-level secretaries’ careers, I find that 40 percent of those who have fallen to corruption charges were promoted within five years, or even just a few months prior to, their downfall.

To be sure, champions of Chinese meritocracy, like venture capitalist Eric X. Li, acknowledge the existence of patronage and corruption, but argue that “merit remains the fundamental driver.” Yet corruption is more of a feature of the system than a bug. there are also ongoing Brexit negotiations which will come to a head again soon with the prospect that the United Kingdom could leave with “no-deal.”

Beyond Brexit, the gathering storm clouds highlight the fragility of the political situation across the continent as shown not just by the weakening of Merkel’s own government; but also the growing populist surge in Eastern Europe. This reflects the rise of anti-EU, nationalist sentiment across the continent. And while Brexit exemplifies this, the problem is by no means limited to the United Kingdom as countries from Italy to Poland show.

And if these issues were not big enough for Merkel, another challenge is the new geopolitical reality that has witnessed an increasing assertive Russia, and instability in the Middle East and Africa, which has driven the migration problems impacting Europe. And intensifying this is uncertainty from Washington with Trump previously calling for more Brexits across the continent.

Merkel’s own style and values have frequently collided with those of Trump, who relishes his role as disruptor of the established Western order that she embodies. While the This should come as no surprise.

The CPC controls valuable resources — from land and financing to procurement contracts — and individual CPC leaders can and do command immense personal power. Hence, CPC leaders find themselves constantly inundated with requests for favors, many of which are accompanied by graft.

Moreover, any political meritocracy faces the problem of who should guard the guardians. Li describes the Party’s appointment-making body, the Organization Department, as a “human resources engine that would be the envy of some of the most successful corporations.”

Yet, if anything, this office is even more corruptible than others, precisely because it controls appointments and promotions. Lo and behold, in 2018, 68 officials at the Central Organization Department were punished for corruption.

Naysayers, meanwhile, err in the opposite direction, magnifying stories of Chinese corruption while ignoring corrupt officials’ effectiveness in promoting growth and delivering social welfare. Bo Xilai, the former party boss of Chongqing who was dramatically ousted in 2012, is the most striking example. Although he flagrantly abused his power, Bo turned around his landlocked municipality’s fortunes, and delivered public goods and affordable housing to tens of millions of poor residents. White House has asserted that Germany is “a bedrock of the transatlantic relationship and the NATO alliance,” bilateral relations are unquestionably cooler in recent years.

So the personal animosity between Trump and Merkel has seen bilateral

What both camps fail to grasp is the symbiotic relationship between corruption and performance in China’s fiercely competitive political system. For political elites whose formal pay is low, cronyism not only finances lavish consumption but also helps advance their careers.

Wealthy cronies donate to public works, mobilize business networks to invest in state construction schemes, and help politicians complete their signature projects, which improve both a city’s physical image and the leader’s track record.

Like a supersized game of WhacA-Mole, Xi’s crusade against corruption has netted a staggering number of officials, and is still ongoing. But the campaign ignores a crucial reality: politicians’ performance is dependent on sponsorships from corporate cronies and political patronage. Nor has the spate of arrests reduced the power of the state over the economy, which is the root cause of corruption. On the contrary, Xi has ratcheted up state intervention to a level not seen in years.

Paradoxes define China’s political economy. China is ruled by a communist party yet it is capitalist. The regime has a meritocracy yet it is also corrupt. Understanding China requires that we grasp such seeming contradictions, which will persist well into the next decade. relations much chillier with several issues becoming thornier in the bilateral relationship, including trade and defense spending.

On trade, Trump has called Germany “very bad” because of its significant trade surplus — with exports larger than imports — and the president has particularly singled out the nation’s car exports which he has threatened to put tariffs on.

A second sore centers around Germany’s failure to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense spending, a key NATO goal. Indeed, the country spent “only” 1.13 percent of GDP in 2017.

Yet, the tensions between Germany and the United States are a microcosm of broader tensions within the Western alliance which Merkel cares so deeply about.

Since she became head of the CDU, there have been a series of intra-Western disagreements over issues from the Middle East, including the Iraq War opposed in 2003 by Germany; through to the rise of China with some European powers and the United States having disagreements over the best way to engage the rising super power.

Yet, despite occasional discord, Germany and key Western nations generally continued to agree, until the Trump presidency, around a broad range of issues such as international trade; backing for a Middle Eastern peace process between Israel and the Palestinians along Oslo principles; plus strong support for the international rules-based system and the supranational organizations that make this work.

Yet today, more of these key principles are being disrupted if not outright undermined by Trump’s agenda.

The ongoing battle that Merkel is fighting with Trump matters not just to Germany therefore, but also Europe and the world at large, given that she — alongside Macron — has emerged as perhaps the most authoritative defender of the liberal international order in her period in office.

Indeed, she and the French president, alongside Trump, currently embody more than any other democratic leaders the present “fight” in international relations between the liberal center ground, and an apparently rising populist tide, and which will continue to play out into the 2020s.