"About four decades ago, Chinese
Communist Party officials scoured the world for best
practices, which they cautiously piloted to create the economic
miracle that their country showcases today. These days, though, the Communist
Party champions Chinese solutions, and not just for China but also for the rest
of the world. Xi Jinping, who just received an unusual third term at the helm
of the world’s most populous country, embodies a far more confident China that
has begun to portray itself as an alternative to the West.
Creating a Chinese version of the
World Bank, Mr. Xi inaugurated the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank. Instead of the American dream, he speaks of the “Chinese dream,” which describes
the collective pride that people feel when they overcome a century of disorder
and colonial humiliation to reclaim their status as a great power. Gaining
control over territories viewed as lost, including Taiwan, is considered key to
the Chinese dream. So is ensuring that China, not the United States, calls the
shots in Asia and beyond. Mr. Xi launched China’s first aircraft carrier and
its first foreign military base, in Djibouti.
While Mr. Xi’s China undoubtedly
presents the most serious challenge to U.S. global leadership in my lifetime,
it also gives Americans a chance to learn from the successes and failures of a
radically different system. I asked half a dozen scholars who study China what
lessons Americans should draw from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here’s a summary of
what they told me.
‘Invisible Infrastructure’ Is the
Most Important Kind
In the absence of elections,
Communist Party officials in China rise up the ranks based on how well they
deliver on the party’s priorities, at least in theory. For years, the top
priority was economic growth. Local officials plowed money into the highways,
ports and power plants that manufacturers needed, turning China into the
world’s factory.
Under Mr. Xi, government priorities have shifted toward self-sufficiency and the use of
industrial robots, something that Chinese leaders believe is critical to
escaping the middle-income trap,
in which a country can no longer compete in low-wage manufacturing because of
rising wages but has not yet made the leap to the value-added products of
high-income countries.
But too much top-down planning can
backfire. Ya-Wen Lei, a sociologist at Harvard who studies the impact of
state policy on the spread of advanced technology in China, told me
that some Chinese companies purchased robots that don’t work well and
exaggerated their success to get government subsidies and curry favor with
politicians. Directives from party officials with little expertise in robotics
fetishize machines beyond their actual usefulness.
“Many manufacturers don’t want or
need the government to give them guidance on technology,” she told me. Some
corporate managers complained that government subsidies often flowed to
politically connected firms and were wasted, while others grumbled that
government directives were unpredictable and ill informed.
What many Chinese businesses wanted
most, she said, was “invisible infrastructure”: a predictable judicial system,
fair access to bank credit and land, and regulations that are applied without
regard to political connections. Her findings, reported in detail in “The Gilded Cage: Techno-State
Capitalism in China,” which will be published next fall, suggest
that Beijing’s pronouncements about amazing technological advancement should be
viewed with a touch of skepticism.
There’s No ‘Economic Miracle’ for
Farmers
Mr. Xi had a privileged childhood as
the son of a top Communist Party official. But the Cultural Revolution
shattered that sheltered life; he was sent to a remote village for seven years,
where he did hard labor and slept in a hillside cave home. As a result,
he can claim a familiarity with rural people and rural problems that few world
leaders can even imagine.
One of Mr. Xi’s most celebrated
campaigns has been a vow to stamp out extreme poverty, a tacit acknowledgment
that China’s economic miracle has left hundreds of millions of rural farmers
behind. Only 30 percent of working
Chinese adults have high school diplomas, although 80 percent of
young people are getting them now, according to Scott Rozelle, a co-author of
“Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise.”
Those unskilled laborers — who will
increasingly be replaced by robots, according to China’s grand strategy —
present an economic challenge and a threat to political stability. Premier Li
Keqiang, who was once considered a rival to President Xi, announced in 2020
that more than 600 million Chinese people scrape by on the equivalent of $140
per month.
Last year, Mr. Xi declared “complete victory”
in eradicating extreme poverty in China,
but skepticism about his success abounds.
Some experts on China report that
local officials gave out cash to rural families — one-time payments that got
them temporarily over the poverty line — instead of initiating badly needed
structural reforms.
“Rural Chinese in many ways are like
the lowest class in a policy-driven caste system,” Mr. Rozelle told me.
Nevertheless, even a flawed program to address rural poverty is better than no
program at all.
Beware of the Personality Cult
When Mr. Xi took became leader of
the Communist Party in 2012, China was plagued by rampant corruption and
eye-popping inequality flaunted by the country’s billionaire class. Leaked U.S.
diplomatic cables described Mr. Xi as having been genuinely disgusted by the
unbridled greed among the elite. He set out to save his rudderless Communist
Party by cracking down on graft and bringing wayward nouveaux riches back into
the fold by recruiting them as party members. He ordered chief executives to
contribute more toward “common prosperity” and showed what could happen to
those who didn’t toe the party line. (Jack Ma, China’s Bill Gates, appears to
have been forced to give up control of his company and has all but disappeared from
public life.)
But Mr. Xi’s crackdown went too far.
Increasingly, foreign investors and Chinese entrepreneurs are fleeing.
Coupled with a draconian zero-Covid strategy, Mr. Xi’s policies have sent the
economy into a tailspin.
More worrisome still is the return
of an atmosphere of fear and sycophancy not seen since Chairman Mao’s time. A businessman who was critical of Mr. Xi was
sent to prison for 18 years. The era of relative openness to
intellectual debate and foreign ideas appears to have come to an end.
Term limits and prohibitions on
cults of personality, put in place to avoid another despot like Mao, have gone
out the window so Mr. Xi can have more time in power. Mr. Xi has been called a
modern-day emperor, the chairman of everything and the
most powerful man in the world. The fate of China’s 1.4 billion people once
again rests on one man.
No doubt Mr. Xi believes that he is doing the right thing
for his people, that China needs an unwavering leader to become the strongest
and most powerful version of itself.
But that’s not how it works,
according to Yuhua Wang, a political scientist at Harvard who is author of the
book “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China,” released this month.
Mr. Wang studied 2,000 years of Chinese history and discovered, somewhat
counterintuitively, that China’s central government has always been the weakest
under its longest-serving rulers.
Emperors, he explains, have always
stayed in power by weakening the elites who might have overthrown them — the
very people who are capable of building a strong and competent government.
“One can argue that he has good
intentions,” Mr. Wang told me of Mr. Xi. But the tactics he has used to
maintain power — crushing critics, micromanaging businesses, whipping up
nationalist fervor and walling China off from the world — may end up weakening
China in the end.
The tale of an autocratic leader who
hangs on to power while promising national greatness is a cautionary, if
familiar, one for people everywhere, not just in China.”
