China, Ukraine and Iran

China: Xi Jinping’s Historic Mission?

20th CCP Congress: Continuity NOT Change

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is staying the course. He kicked off the Twentieth Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress where he is expected to be granted an unprecedented third five-year term as the all-powerful party general secretary.

In a nearly two-hour speech, he emphasized national security above all issues facing the country.

Xi doubled down on his ‘Zero-Covid’ policy and held out the prospect of forceful “reunification” with Taiwan.

The Taiwan Question

Tensions in the Taiwan Strait have been soaring in recent months – particularly following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s untimely and ill-conceived visit. However, The Atlantic Council’s Shirley Martey Hargis assesses that Xi, by using familiar rhetoric around protecting the One China Principle and castigating “outside forces” seeking to influence the island, “is not signaling any greater sense of urgency over Taiwan,” adding: “There is no imminent threat from China to take Taiwan militarily.”

Xi is keenly aware of Taiwan’s growing global acclaim for its handling of Covid-19 and “mastery” of semi-conductor production, Hargis notes.

“Xi wants to temper those accomplishments as much as possible to keep other powers from aligning with Taiwan”, she says.

Thus, “it is wise to keep a close eye on more than just military movements: Watch cyberspace and China’s daily “opinion warfare against Taiwan.”

Economic Dimension

China’s once-roaring economic growth has hit a snag, but Dexter Tiff Roberts from the Atlantic Council says Xi’s long-winded speech signals that “economic priorities for China look broadly unchanged, with no major shifts in direction.”

That’s bad news for China’s economy, former IMF official Jeremy Mark tells us, because Xi did not give his comrades a way out of the doldrums of the past two years.

- “He gave no ground on the zero-Covid policies that have squelched domestic consumption and destroyed small businesses,” Mark says.

- “There was no mention of soaring youth unemployment, which hovers near 20 percent in China’s cities…

- “And he offered no hint of concerted policies that could ease the country’s deep property downturn and prevent that crisis from damaging the banking system.”

Ignoring those goals, Mark adds, will undermine Xi’s own goals of more “domestic demand-driven growth and higher, technologydriven productivity,” not to mention his attempt to close the gap between China’s haves and have-nots: “It will be hard to divide the economic pie more

evenly if it’s not growing.”

Technology Gap

Kit Conklin, a former national security official, point’s to Xi’s calls to “resolutely win key core technology battles” and “modernize military weapons.” These comments indicate the Chinese leader’s belief “that science and technology innovation is a key enabler for China’s broader political objectives, including economic growth, military moderation, and Taiwan reunification,” according to Conklin’s assessment. However, Roberts notes that those technology goals are “facing tremendous pressure from US-led sanctions,” which is part of the reason why Xi is making security at home and abroad an issue “of paramount importance”.

External Parameters

“Beijing continues to be deeply concerned about its fractured relations with the world,” Roberts adds.

“As Xi stated in his speech, while China’s global power has increased, it is also facing an unstable international environment and must be prepared for ‘strong winds and high waves and even dangerous storms.“

Xi did not utter a word on the ongoing Ukraine conflict. He like India’s Narendra Modi – illustrated by the abstention in the UNGA voting -- find themselves completely apart from the overwhelming world support for Ukraine.

It does seem that Xi’s domestic and international travails are of his own making. To use the language of chess, Xi has checkmated himself!

Xi’s Ideology

The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd suggests in an insightful Foreign Affairs essay that Xi is notable for his ideological bent.

China opened and liberalized its economy under Deng Xiaoping beginning in the 1970s, moving from doctrinaire Communism to State Capitalism, but Rudd casts Xi as seeking to reverse that trend, reviving Marxism-Leninism with a nationalist touch or Socialism with Chinese characteristics.

“Xi has pushed [China’s] politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left, and foreign policy to the nationalist right,” Rudd writes.

“He has reasserted the influence and control [the CCP] exerts over all domains of public policy and private life, reinvigorated stateowned enterprises, and placed new restrictions on the private sector.

Meanwhile, he has stoked nationalism by pursuing an increasingly assertive foreign policy, turbocharged by a Marxistinspired belief that history is irreversibly on China’s side and that a world anchored in Chinese power would produce a more just international order. In short, Xi’s rise has meant nothing less than the return of Ideological Man.”

Obstacles in Xi’s Way

However, Xi faces headwinds as he proceeds on that historical quest – including, notably, a “Zero Covid” policy that hangs over China’s economy.

Yanzhong Huang, in another Foreign Affairs essay, questions whether Xi will be able to reopen China, given how wedded he and party leadership are to the policy of suppressing small coronavirus outbreaks with large lockdowns. Nikkei Asia staff writers call Zero-Covid “the closest thing to a legacy as he tries to equate his thin slate of accomplishments over the past decade to those of former leaders Mao [Zedong] and

Deng Xiaoping.”

Zhu Ning, in a Nikkei Asia oped writes that “Zero Covid” isn’t the only source of all China’s economic problems, pointing to regulatory crackdowns on the tech sector and expensive city housing that puts pressure on young couples.

Ukraine Under Renewed Attack

David vs. Goliath

Ukraine is capable of winning its defensive war against Russia outright, former Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk argues at Foreign Affairs.

“Ukraine’s repeat successes are not coincidental,” Zagarodnyuk writes. “The country’s military has structural advantages over its Russian adversary” that “are unlikely to dissipate” and could underwrite the future ground gains and effect an eventual morale collapse among Russian troops Zagorodnyuk anticipates. In an Atlantic essay, Veronika Melkozerova writes of a President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion – and clear contempt for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity – has solidified Ukrainians’ cultural and linguistic identity, as Melkozerova tells it.

“We have seen our supposedly superior brothers killing civilians, ruining our cities and stealing our washing machines,” Melkozerova writes. “More and more of my fellow citizens have come to realize that embracing our Ukrainian identity is a matter of survival.”

Putin’s Arrogant Posture

In the meantime, it seems Russia’s dictator-in-chief Putin is doubling down in the sharply deteriorating situation following his speech to the nation on September 21 and the audacious Ukrainian attack on the highly symbolic, but strategic Kerch Strait Bridge – linking Russia proper with the 2014 illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula.

Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is of the opinion that Putin has set in motion a dangerous escalatory spiral:

By launching military mobilization and annexing four Ukrainian oblasts [larger districts or provinces], Putin is signaling that he is ready to do whatever it takes to win the war, including resorting to tactical nuclear weapons, warns Tatiana Stanovaya in Foreign Affairs.

The vital question is whether Russian elites and even average citizens [hundreds of thousands of whom have voted with their feet], who generally do not view the war as an existential issue, are prepared to stick with him until the bitter end – even nuclear annihilation.

In an essay for Foreign Affairs, Andrei Kolesnikov argues that Putin’s willingness to turn millions of Russian men into cannon fodder suggests that he willfully forgets that the biggest threat to his regime is likely to emerge from ordinary Russians, not the country’s longbeleaguered political opposition [the leaders of which have either been ‘liquidated’, imprisoned or are in exile].

Writing for the New York Times, Alexander Baunov describes how the mood within the elite is increasingly fatalistic about Putin’s game plan for escalating the war, including his nuclear saber-rattling.

Iran: Autumn of Discontent

Can/Will Iran’s Protesters

Prevail?

Protests have unfolded on a large scale in the clerical-dictatorial Islamic State of Iran, but the Economist of London writes that a violent government crackdown could shift momentum.

“If this series of revolts is to grow into a full-scale revolution, new ingredients will have to be poured into the cauldron,” the respected newsmagazine writes. “So far, the main institutions of the [autocratic] Islamic state underpinned by the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps/ IRGC ]…have stood firm. But if the students keep going, if businessmen start to wobble and if cracks were to appear in the army, the revolt could enter a new phase.”

Writing in a Sydney Morning Herald op-ed, Tehran-based author and activist Saeb Karimi sees the protest movement gaining support.

Kian Tajbakhsh, in a September essay in the journal Public Seminar assessed: “As with all inflection points in authoritarian systems, it is hard to predict the outcome of the inevitable cycle of revolt and repression. Given past experience, it seems highly likely that the regime will prevail in the short term. But if so, the [regime] will have to govern a seething dissatisfied population of tens of millions.”

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar [Associate Professor of International Affairs at Texas A & M University] in a hard-hitting and incisive essay in Foreign Affairs [October 12], attributes the eruption of the crisis to the folly of Iran’s hard-liners. The very repressive regime had left citizens with no other option but to revolt.

Iran is, of course, no stranger to mass protests. However, the demonstrations sparked by the brutal killing in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-old Kurdish woman detained by the so-called morality police, signals a tipping point.

Prof. Tabaar writes that Iranian women [and lately even school girls] have shown extraordinary courage and a willingness to resist security forces in every corner of the public sphere. He predicts that this augurs the beginning of protracted protests throughout the country.

“Iranian politics have been defined by the tensions between the elected government, under the president, and the parallel state and its associated institutions, under the supreme leader.

In effect, there rages a battle between the state and society. Tabaar underlines that the Islamic Republic’s repression has been a thousand times worse than that under monarchic dispensation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the current electrified situation, in the absence of free and fair electoral channels, the political landscape is highly polarized between those who warn that the monolithic regime is risking the disintegration of the country, and those who insist that only a rigid, fossilized system can prevail.

Both sides raise the specter of state collapse but a civilizational one as well, the implosion of an ancient nation.

As before, the regime may conjure up the phantom of an external threat, or even undertake a virulent foreign adventure in order to suppress the ongoing domestic challenges.