BUT DON’T BE FOOLED, CHINA IS A WOUNDED BEHEMOTH
As a nuclear-capable missile designed to evade Us defences rumbled past the cheering crowds, the message from Beijing yesterday could scarcely have been clearer.
It was a special anniversary for China’s 1.4 billion people, with the capital centre stage for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.
Fifteen thousand military personnel marching in lockstep, 580 pieces of high- tech ground weaponry, drones and low-flying fighter jets all featured.
The Dongfeng 41, a nuclear-capable missile, was unveiled; analysts said the weapon could strike America in 30 minutes. Even more sophisticated armaments are likely to have been kept undercover.
‘No force can shake the foundation of this great nation,’ said a triumphal President Xi Jinping, wearing a grey suit in homage to his predecessor Chairman Mao Zedong.
The state-run press agency claimed more than 100,000 civilians took part in yesterday’s fanfare, which also included a huge fireworks display.
Factories pumping out noxious fumes into the city’s polluted atmosphere were closed. Worshippers at state- approved churches were instructed to pray for the motherland and sing the national anthem.
Even pigeon fanciers had reportedly been told to keep their birds caged so nothing unpleasant fell from skies on to the heads of the jubilant masses.
The meticulously planned anniversary was designed to showcase China’s emergence as the world’s secondbiggest economy and the dominant power in Asia – the roar of the dragon.
More than this, China is an ever-rising military force; no longer just a feisty competitor to the West, but a potential adversary, too.
And yet, as we look at – and sometimes worry about – China today, we should not take everything we are told about it at face value.
THE conventional view is that by 2030 it will be the largest economy in the world. But that is a myth. President Xi’s China may be more brittle than the narrative that it peddles, and to which many in the West naively subscribe or have an interest in supporting.
Internally and externally, it faces new and sometimes serious threats on a multitude of fronts.
In China, anniversaries are held with the sole purpose of recording the successes and cementing the legitimacy of the Communist Party, while ‘tragedies’ such as the death of tens of millions in the famine following the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, or the many killed in the Tiananmen square protests in 1989 – are airbrushed away.
The Communist Party is central to China and has always relied ultimately on brute force to hold the country together.
All reliable predictions suggest slower economic growth lies ahead. An even bigger surprise may be a precipitous fall in its currency, the yuan, meaning GDP may be little different in a decade from today.
This week the Communist Party is taking pride in lifting millions out of poverty and illiteracy. But the party has not been a crane or a hoist.
What it did, in effect, was get out of the way and allow China to experiment with markets, prices, private ownership and property rights.
YET China has developed an increasing addiction to debt to pay for its growth. The drive to reform, and introduce markets more widely, has faltered.
At the same time, under Xi’s leadership, China has embraced tight party discipline while dissent has been suppressed.
A million Muslim residents of the western province of Xinjiang have been sent to detention camps for ‘re-education’. Over a million party members have been imprisoned in Xi’s anti- corruption campaign, which has been pursued relentlessly against opponents.
Increasingly, mass video surveillance powered by artificial intelligence is being used to enforce Party rule.
Leading academics and intellectuals castigate Xi’s abandonment of presidential term limits, which in theory now allow him to remain president for life.
And then consider that China is the fastest-ageing country on Earth. Over the next 22 years, it will age as rapidly as most Western countries have done over the past 50-75 years.
China, as many have forecast, will get old before it gets rich.
so Xi’s regime faces a number of serious domestic challenges. But what of foreign ones?
No single external event is more important in China today than the evolving trade war against Donald Trump’s America.
While on the surface it is about the trade in soya beans, aircraft and manufactured goods, deep down it is about China’s technology and industrial policies, the struggle for
dominance in commerce and the military, and ultimately about standards, beliefs and values.
That is why the trade war has escalated recently from mere tariffs on exported goods to foreign investment, and the mutual targeting of companies, such as the telecoms tech giant Huawei – which has been controversially involved in the creation of a 5G network in the UK – that may risk national security.
This is a major structural conflict. No one should expect it to go away soon.
Then, of course, there is Hong Kong, where protests have been continuing since June and where Hong Kong’s government, effectively chosen by Beijing, has been unable so far to quell them.
Beijing may already have been persuaded to accelerate the demise of the ‘one country, two systems’ slogan used to reassure Britain and Hong Kong citizens when London handed back power to the region in 1997.
As the Party celebrates this week, it can look back at aspects of the past 70 years with pride.
And yet it should look, too, with concern at events coalescing inside and outside the country that threaten the two things it cherishes most – total control and stability.
Luckily, the rain held off yesterday. The coming decade, however, promises economic and political storms that no number of missiles can defeat.
George Magnus is a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy.