Opinion

What China’s Xi did not say

December 19, 2018

China’s President Xi Jinping this week delivered a speech to mark 40 years since one of his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping, introduced the economic reforms that have since turned the country into an economic superpower. In many ways, the speech was remarkable for what it did not say.

Xi did, however, make two unexpected references to the economic and social disaster of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which he admitted had brought China to “the brink of collapse”.

But thereafter, Xi went on at some length to present to Communist party leaders in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People a series of unremarkable comments, which did not mention any of the expected further market reforms. He insisted that despite the country’s remarkable economic achievements, China would “never seek global hegemony”. His audience probably smiled quietly at this. They share with most of the 1.3 billion population an intense pride in China’s leap to superpower status, growing in four decades to become the world’s second largest economy. That pride also extends to the modernization of the military, the expansion of the navy with aircraft carriers, the wide-ranging re-equipment of the People’s Liberation Army and, of course, the occupation and militarization of reefs far off in areas of the China Sea, which, in defiance of international rulings, Beijing insists demarcate its territorial waters.

Nor did Xi make any reference to the current serious confrontation with the Trump administration over trade and US claims that China continues to protect its domestic markets while demanding free access under the globalized World Trade Organization rules that it otherwise so eagerly embraces.

Xi also did not take the opportunity to crow a little that for much of the last 40 years, as an astonished world looked on at China’s extraordinary economic growth, outside analysts were constantly predicting a financial implosion and collapse thanks to mountains of internal debt. That collapse has not yet happened, in no small measure thanks to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” which has meant that the Communist Party has maintained absolute control over the financial as well as the political levers of power.

While he insisted that China was devoted to international peace, Xi also made the point that the country had become sufficiently powerful that no one could “dictate” to it any more. This may have seemed a slightly odd statement. But the Chinese have long memories. This was almost certainly an allusion to the humiliating nineteenth century Western-led occupation of large areas of the country and to, for instance, the British insistence that Beijing not prevent the opium imports from British-ruled India, despite the socially shattering effect of widespread addiction.

And because his speech was primarily a celebration of economic achievement, Xi sidestepped the issue of China’s minorities, specifically the treatment of the Muslim population of Xinjiang where hundreds of thousands of local Uighurs have been rounded up and incarcerated in so-called re-education camps. Beijing appears to be duplicating the methods it used in Tibet by sending large flows of ethnic Han Chinese settlers to colonize the nominally autonomous province. However, unlike the luckless Tibetans, Xinjiang’s Uighurs are part of the vast Muslim Ummah, whose members are looking on at Beijing’s behavior with anger and despair every bit as great as that felt for the fate of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya community at the hands of genocidal fanatics.


December 19, 2018
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