China’s new age of swagger and paranoia
Should the world admire or fear China’s model of governance? Since this column was launched in September 2018 that question has become more urgent, as Xi Jinping declares it time for China to “move closer to the centre stage” of world affairs.
Today’s China welcomes other countries to follow its “pathway to modernisation”. Mr Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, calls his one-party model efficient, equitable and dignified. In case foreigners miss his coded message—that competent government, equality and order matter more than freedoms—officials boast of “two major miracles” that shaped China’s rise, namely “fast economic development and long-term social stability”.
During six and a half years in Beijing, your columnist has watched China’s swagger divide the world. Most importantly, Sino-American relations have collapsed, raising the prospect of a globe divided into rival camps, even as other countries insist that they have no desire to pick sides. Wary but profitable coexistence has turned into a contest for primacy in the 21st century.
That confrontation is more alarming because logic guides each side. American leaders have solid grounds for alarm. By its actions and words, Mr Xi’s China reveals an ambition to be so powerful by mid-century that no other country on Earth will dare to thwart or defy it. To achieve that status, China is bent on reshaping the world order from within, using its heft in such forums as the United Nations to challenge, redefine or discredit any norms and rules that might curb its rise.
For their part, Chinese officials and scholars have every reason to fear and resent the new bipartisan consensus in Washington. They are right to suspect that American leaders (from both main parties) are trying to slow or block their country’s progress in any field of endeavour—whether technological, economic or geopolitical—that might imperil American national security. Chaguan has heard senior American officials frame this strategy as a simple question: why would we let American cash or American technology strengthen China’s military or national-security apparatus?
That approach is, of course, intolerable to China. Your columnist has not forgotten the metaphor offered by a leading Chinese scholar over dinner in Beijing. America is only willing to let China become a “fat cat”, producing harmless consumer goods, he ventured. But, he added, “it is natural for a country to want to become strong, like a tiger”. Put bluntly, China and America are two giant powers with mutually incompatible ambitions.
To many Chinese officials, scholars and citizens, their country has never been so impressive. At the same time, China feels criticised as never before by America and other liberal democracies. China has not changed, runs a frequent complaint in Beijing, it merely grew successful and strong. Clearly a querulous, declining West is too racist to tolerate an Asian power as a peer competitor.
The latest global opinion survey by the Pew Research Centre finds just one rich country, Singapore, where most adults approve of China. But views of China are much warmer in low- and middle-income countries, notably in Africa and South-East Asia. Ambassadors from the global south call China’s emergence from deep poverty an inspiration. They thank China for offering the world new markets, investments and infrastructure, without the “colonial-style” lectures beloved of Western powers.
Some of those same envoys grow impatient when they hear European or American counterparts criticise China’s iron-fisted treatment of ethnic minorities, or condemn China’s defend-Russia-blame-America approach to the war in Ukraine. What about American rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chaguan has heard Latin American and Middle Eastern ambassadors ask? What about America’s arming of Israel in Gaza? Beneath such questions lie real resentments that China stands ready to exploit. During the depths of the pandemic, Chaguan was summoned to a government guesthouse for a one-on-one conversation with a senior Chinese official. Western countries talking about universal values are like colonial-era missionaries telling other countries which god to pray to, was the official’s message.
Because the world is divided in its perceptions of China, that has fuelled another dynamic. Over the past six years, Chinese leaders have become increasingly unwilling to accept foreign scrutiny of their country. Not long ago, Chinese reformers quoted foreign critics to help them push for change. Now the reformers do not dare. In Mr Xi’s China, even constructive foreign criticism is called a ploy to hold China down.
Your lonely columnist
The siege mentality of China’s rulers goes beyond a dislike of foreigners with complaints. Mr Xi has told diplomats, scholars and state media to be more confident, and to defend China with home-grown measures of success. In today’s China it is unpatriotic even to engage with foreign arguments about what makes for good governance, wise economic management or the rule of law.
Reporting from China has become a shockingly lonely business. Too many foreign correspondents, notably from America, have been expelled or pushed out by harassment. When others left voluntarily, their news organisations struggled to obtain new visas. The Trump administration bears blame for expelling scores of Chinese reporters, giving officials in Beijing a perfect excuse to retaliate. But the numbers are stark. During Chaguan’s current posting, the New York Times went from ten foreign correspondents in mainland China to two at present, the Wall Street Journal from 15 to three, and the Washington Post from two to zero.
Chinese anger at foreign criticism has its roots in an argument about legitimacy. As long as China’s economy was roaring ahead, and each year saw its cities fill with gleaming new skyscrapers and high-speed-train stations, Communist Party bosses could claim “performance legitimacy”, to use the jargon of political scientists.
To be clear, China’s modernisation is worth boasting about. China has not just become wealthier. Newly paved roads have saved mountain villages from being cut off by heavy rains. In every rural county, highway tunnels and bridges have reduced journey times by hours. Urban landscapes have been transformed. Air and water pollution have declined dramatically. Across China on a typical evening, newly built parks and cleaned-up rivers attract strolling families or pensioners who gather to play Chinese chess or practise tai-chi. Cities are more orderly and street crime rarer. Ask middle-aged Chinese whether they have better lives than their parents, and they answer yes almost in unison. Others note the weakening of cruel traditions, such as the migrant worker in Chongqing who recalled that, in the hometown of his youth, women could dine only after their male guests had eaten their fill.
As China’s economy slows, however, the Chinese public’s mood has soured. The party has duly adjusted its claims to rule. To those arguments about performance, leaders have added assertions that China has the ideal political system. These claims emphasise the country’s second self-styled miracle, namely its stability. American democracy is in a “disastrous state”, officials say. They accuse Western politicians of heeding voters only at election time. They call China a “whole-process people’s democracy”, in which technocrats (purportedly kept honest by internal discipline and the unending anti-corruption campaigns of the Xi era) tirelessly study and address the needs of the many, not the few.
China is not a democracy. It is, at best, a country run in the interests of the majority, as defined by an order-obsessed party. Covid-19 tested this utilitarian model to breaking-point. The pandemic was days old when Chaguan caught an almost-empty flight to Henan province in January 2020. His taxi passed villages closed by fresh barricades of earth, guarded by old men with red armbands. At last he reached Weiji, the final village before Hubei, a province of 58m people sealed to the world after the disease first emerged in its capital, Wuhan. Asked whether they supported strict pandemic controls, villagers scolded your columnist. “Chinese people really listen to the government” and will put the common good ahead of their self-interest, said one man. “It’s different from you Western countries.”
Hundreds of millions of Chinese proved that villager right, staying at home for weeks, often without pay, to break covid’s chains of transmission. Given China’s weak health system, their sacrifices saved untold lives. Over the next two years, simple arithmetic explained public tolerance of zero-covid controls. At any given moment, the system imposed pain on those unfortunates who lived in locked-down areas, or who had been hauled off to quarantine camps. But most Chinese, most of the time, felt safe.
Then the highly contagious Omicron variant reached China. Ever larger numbers faced lockdowns, including Shanghai’s 24m residents. In late 2022 protests broke out across an exhausted country. Abruptly, controls collapsed. A million or more died, many of them unvaccinated old people. The precise toll is secret.
Returning to Henan in January 2023, this columnist found hospitals that lacked painkillers and met doctors banned from recording covid as a cause of death. The system was to blame. Throughout 2022 scientists had urged leaders to vaccinate the old, stockpile drugs and prepare an exit from zero-covid. Alas, Mr Xi’s policy could not be questioned, or order jeopardised, ahead of a party congress in October at which he was handed a third term.
China’s version of utilitarian rule offers no protections to individuals who fall on the wrong side of the majority-minority line. Worse, that line can move without warning. In Xinjiang Chaguan saw mosques closed or demolished after religious rules were tightened. He reported on a sterilisation campaign imposed on Uyghur women after 2017, when their high birth rates were declared a threat. In Guangdong he wrote about female workers whose bosses cheated them of pension contributions. An algorithm spotted the women’s online talk of petitioning the authorities. Police raided their dormitory, humiliating them with strip searches. Though legal, their petition plans challenged social stability.
China’s crushing of Hong Kong’s freedoms, after anti-government protests in 2019, follows a majoritarian logic. Mainland officials scorned the idea that a territory of 7.5m people could imagine it had the right to defy a motherland of 1.4bn. They accused the cia of planning the demonstrations. The truth is sadder: there was no plan. Chaguan met youngsters who could not explain how confronting China would end well, but who wanted to protest while they could.
Most alarming, leaders increasingly emphasise one last form of legitimacy, which brooks no appeal at all. This is a claim to rule based on “5,000 years of unbroken Chinese civilisation”, synthesised with a dose of Marxism. Under Mr Xi, the party presents itself as the “faithful inheritor” of all that is virtuous and wise in Chinese history. “The fact that Chinese civilisation is highly consistent is the fundamental reason why the Chinese nation must follow its own path,” Mr Xi has declared. And because Chinese civilisation is unusually uniform, Mr Xi adds, different ethnic groups must be integrated and the nation unified: code for imposing the majority-Han culture on all, and for taking back Taiwan.
A new host at the teahouse
Nothing worries Chaguan more than this ethno-nationalist drive. China is declaring its own citizens traitors if they question the party’s model of governance, and is calling all foreign scrutiny a form of attack. More than ever, pluralism is seen as a security threat. When feminists, environmentalists or religious teachers are detained, they are questioned about contacts with foreigners and treated as potential spies. If this inward turn continues, it may give some admiring countries pause. China is willing to be praised and copied, but not doubted in any way. This is not a magnanimous moment in its history. The future may be still darker.
This reporter has written 220 Chaguan columns, from all but one mainland province and region (a permit to visit Tibet was not forthcoming). That access to China’s people, from packed sleeper trains to the halls of power in Beijing, was a privilege and a necessity. When his successor receives a resident press visa, the Chaguan column will return.