Chinese President Xi Jinping pulled few punches in his three-hour address to the Communist Party congress in Beijing. China was already a global power, he said, and this century it could expect to take center-stage in world affairs. In a speech brimming with the confidence of a leader who feels himself strongly in control, Xi insisted that China’s political model - “socialism with Chinese characteristics” - would not change and added that it could be “a new choice for other countries”.
There is little doubt that delegates will choose Xi to remain in charge. His first five years have arguably been the most effective of all Chinese Communist Party leaders. His anti-corruption drive has seen the purging of more than a million officials, from the lowest to the very highest. He has also made far-reaching changes to the military. The top cadres of the People’s Liberation Army have been cleared of elderly generals and replaced by younger more professional officers. This new blood has been matched by heavy spending on equipment including a radically enlarged navy. Last year the country acquired its first aircraft carrier. A second is now under construction.
Three decades of rapid economic expansion have earned China a dominant role as a global manufacturer. Although its factories continue to churn out common or garden goods for world markets, its high technology sector is racing ahead. For instance, the country is a leading producer of electric vehicles and a pioneer in battery storage research.
All confident outside predictions that Chinese banks and companies were on the verge of collapse under the unsustainable weight of debt have proven plain wrong. There were failures and market wobbles, but the Communist Party’s financial controls have allowed Beijing to avoid any catastrophic meltdown.
China spent millennia shutting itself off from the outside world while it developed a highly sophisticated and advanced society. Its emergence late last century as a global player clearly threatens to destroy the hegemony of the Europeans and the Americans, the latter still entirely unprepared to play second fiddle to anyone else on the world stage. China’s extraordinary growth has thus far been achieved entirely peacefully. It has not, like the Europeans and Americans, won itself fresh markets through military means. As the axis of geopolitical power shifts toward Beijing, the key issue will be if it can continue to be achieved purely on the basis of peaceful commerce.
However, perhaps the people who listened most intently to Xi’s speech were the Indians. Lacking the discipline, organization and the authoritarian government of China, it looks as if it will be no contest between the economies of the world’s two most populous nations. India currently looks very much the junior partner. But Xi would do well to remember that this is going to be an Asian, not just a Chinese century. The growth of India’s economic power is important to China and not just in terms of markets. The two countries need to complement each other, rather in the way that the United States and Europe have worked together. The Europeans and Americans have had their differences but their mutual dedication to prosperity has yielded huge dividends for both.
Perhaps President Xi could begin his next five years in power by going out of his way to end the border rivalries that have always disfigured relations between Beijing and Delhi.
