Xi's latest power moves: Ten of the week’s top China politics reads -- China Boss update 6.18.21
update
The Week’s Top China Politics Reads
From an attempt to understand how Beijing will respond to the impending power vacuum left by the US in Afghanistan to a revelation detailing why President Xi is co-opting Big Tech’s data - a lot of great PRC political analysis was posted last week. My picks for the ten best reads are below, saving my favorite for last. ;)
The graveyard of empires calls to China (Editorial Board, Financial Times)
Read if you like learning about China’s history, geopolitics, and the Belt and Road Initiative.
FT:
Afghanistan is not known as the graveyard of empires for nothing. Alexander the Great, the British empire, the Soviet Union and now mighty America, all have been humbled in their attempts to conquer this fierce country. Now China, the world’s nascent superpower, risks falling into the same trap before it has even properly begun its own neo-imperial project.
. . . Early this month, foreign ministers from China, Afghanistan and Pakistan met to discuss security arrangements following the US pullout from the country. China has also courted the Taliban and has even held out the offer of infrastructure and rebuilding projects to the group. Beijing is hoping to extend its grand Belt and Road infrastructure construction project from its main branch in Pakistan up into Afghanistan and is optimistic this can help provide stability to the war-torn country.
Arrests, secrets, and crop failures: What's going on with China? (Micheal Condon, ABC News Australia)
Read if you like learning about China’s cover-ups, food security issues, and how PRC propaganda distorts information about market prices.
Condon, ABC News:
Nick Crundall, a senior strategist from the Australian firm Market Check, thinks the Chinese authorities probably want to allay domestic fears about supply and limit the amount they will have to pay for imported grains.
"They don't want the whole world to know that they need grain and they are in a bit of strife so they very closely regulate the information that is released," he said.
Speculation about problems with the crops in China can be a huge driver for world prices but it also has implications domestically for the government.
"It creates all sorts of food inflation problems and them having to pay more for imported grain," Mr Crundall said.
"So the Chinese are very strict on going out there telling the world there are no issues."
The Chinese Communist Party won’t last forever (Minxin Pei, ASPI )
Read if you like learning about China’s authoritarianism, as well as the CCP’s history and prospects for its future.
Pei, ASPI:
These days, the front page of the People’s Daily newspaper is filled with coverage of Xi’s activities and personal edicts. The abridged history of the CCP, recently released to mark the party’s centennial, devotes a quarter of its content to Xi’s eight years in power, while giving only half as much space to Deng Xiaoping, the CCP’s true savior.
Economically, China has yet to embrace *juche fully. But the CCP’s new five-year plan projects a vision of technological self-sufficiency and economic security centred on domestic growth. Although the party has a reasonable excuse—America’s strategy of economic and technological decoupling leaves it no alternative—few Western democracies will want to remain economically coupled with a country that sees North Korea as its future political model.
When China’s leaders toast the CCP’s centennial, they should ask whether the party is on the right track. If it isn’t, the CCP’s upcoming milestone may be its last.
*Learn more about the North Korean political concept of juche here.
The Chinese entrepreneur who challenged the state and was locked up (Yuan Yang and Christian Shepherd, Financial Times)
Read if you like learning about Xi Jinping’s Machiavellian crackdown on business tycoons and entrepreneurs.
Yang and Shepherd, FT:
Sun, 67, was arrested after his company called on the state-owned farm to give back land that had been appropriated in 1963. The local villagers say they handed over ownership of their farms to the state for free in return for support to cope with a famine. Dawu Group has collected petitions stamped with the red fingerprints of the octogenarians who claim the terms of the agreement were never met.
Sun was charged with a multitude of crimes, ranging from “picking quarrels” — an offence often levied at activists — to misuse of land rights. His sons, daughter-in-law, wife, group executives and the heads of the company’s subsidiaries were also arrested.
China Repackages Its History in Support of Xi’s National Vision (Chun Han Wong and Keith Zhai, Wall Street Journal)
Read if you like learning about China’s attempts to “rewrite the past” with Xi’s latest propaganda drive.
Wong and Zhai, WSJ:
Modern lore has it that Mao Zedong’s eldest son, who was killed in a United Nations airstrike during the Korean War, had given away his position by firing up a stove to make egg fried rice.
That story didn’t sit right with the Chinese Academy of History, launched two years ago by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to counter negative views of the ruling Communist Party’s past.
In November, on the 70th anniversary of Mao Anying’s death, the academy served up another version. Citing what it said were declassified telegrams and eyewitness accounts, the academy said in a social-media post that Mao was killed after enemy forces detected radio transmissions from his commander’s headquarters.
“These rumormongers have tied up Mao Anying with egg fried rice, gravely dwarfing the heroic image of Mao Anying’s brave sacrifice,” said the post, which has attracted about 1.9 million views. “Their hearts are vicious.” The academy attributed the egg fried rice story to the 2003 edition of a Chinese military officer’s memoir. It didn’t mention the book was published by the Chinese military’s official press.
The Soviet Origins of Xi’s Xinjiang Policy (Christopher Vassallo, The Diplomat)
Read if you like learning about President’s Xi’s intense paranoia of a Soviet-style collapse and his Xinjiang policy.
Vassallo, The Diplomat:
Ever since the Soviet Union unceremoniously imploded and dissolved, China’s leaders have parsed the collapse for lessons to inform strategy and mistakes to avoid repeating. Over the course of a year of research, I have examined the powerful sway the Soviet analogy has had on Chinese leaders in the 30 years since. Tracking the Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of the lessons of this collapse has revealed the preoccupations of CCP leadership in crucial periods of crisis and change.
One finding struck me: Chinese narratives about the Soviet collapse have been marshalled to justify the escalating horrors of ethnic assimilation in Xinjiang. Xi’s reading of Soviet history will not dissuade him from cultural genocide in Xinjiang. It will only steel his belief in the urgency of the endeavor.
'Wolf warrior' in sheep's clothing: Xi Jinping's latest ideological war (Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han, The Hill)
Read if you like learning about China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy,” soft power competition with the U.S., and CCP propaganda and disinformation.
Thayer and Han, The Hill:
In our view, Xi has realized China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” backfired. Even though he started and encouraged the narrative, he now holds that China must create a “likable and friendly” apparatus to make its misinformation more believable and assist the coverup of China’s crimes against humanity. Instead of defanging his warrior wolves, Xi will ask them to put on sheep’s clothing to artfully control the spin of China’s story. The party’s must extensively spread communist ideology and the dictatorial model of governance, and convince the rest of the world to believe the so-called “Chinese solutions.”
Xi has ordered party chiefs to take more initiative to carry out this task. Party schools must make international propaganda capacity-building an important part of their curriculum, and universities must provide necessary researchers and talent for this modern-day political warfare. The CCP has no interest in engaging in meaningful dialogue with the United States; instead, it seeks to offer a discourse system to replace or minimize America’s soft power.
How Xi’s China came to resemble Tsarist Russia (Jamil Anderlini, Financial Times)
Read if you like learning about CCP history, political comparisons, and China’s systemic elitism.
Anderlini, FT:
The very first line of the Chinese Communist party’s constitution declares it is “the vanguard of the Chinese working class”. The document mentions “revolution” eight times, while the accompanying constitution for the People’s Republic declares it a “socialist state . . . led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants”.
But according to its own statistics and the IMF, China is one of the most unequal places on earth, with far worse inequality than most capitalist societies. Today, barely 35 per cent of the party’s 92m members are classed as blue-collar workers or peasants — less than the proportion categorised as bureaucrats, managers or professionals.
In reality, the last ruling Communist party of a major country has morphed into a conservative reactionary party bent on preserving the power of state capitalist elites and advancing a distinctly 19th century form of ethno-nationalist imperialism.
Biden fears what 'best friends' Xi and Putin could do together (Nahal Toosi, Politico)
Read if you like learning about the dynamics of China’s relationship with Russia and how the two countries’ “increasing military and technological cooperation” are worrying officials in the Biden Administration.
Toosi, Politico:
Twenty years after signing the “Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation,” the Chinese-Russian relationship has achieved new heights and is poised to reach a “larger scale, broader field, and deeper level,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a video message to a think tank forum, according to a readout from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
In his video speech to the forum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared, according to a Russian readout, that “Moscow and Beijing are consistent supporters of the formation of a more just, democratic and therefore stable polycentric system of world order.”
Hyperbole? To some degree, yes. Hypocrisy? On some fronts, for sure. But to the Biden administration, such lovey-dovey rhetoric between Moscow and Beijing cannot be ignored.
In fact, U.S. wariness over the Russia-China relationship has grown to the point where high-level American strategists are weighing how to factor it in as they try to orient U.S. foreign policy to focus more on a rising China. President Joe Biden is expected to discuss Moscow’s ties to Beijing during his Wednesday meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called his “best friend.”
China’s New Power Play: More Control of Tech Companies’ Troves of Data (Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal)
Read if you like learning about the political motives behind President Xi's crackdown on Big Tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent.
Wei, WSJ:
The complex new web of laws and regulations around sharing digital records is being driven by the huge growth in data held by China’s tech giants—and a belief that the government should be able to access it. The efforts are also part of Mr. Xi’s quest to rein in the increasingly powerful tech sector, which has pushed back on some of Beijing’s previous data-sharing efforts. The most recent law, passed Thursday, will make it harder for companies to resist such requests.
China’s leaders worry that the country’s tech giants could be using their extensive personal and corporate digital records to build alternative power centers in the one-party state. That concern led Mr. Xi to halt a planned initial public offering by Jack Ma’s financial-technology behemoth Ant Group Co. late last year.
. . . Behind China’s moves is a growing sense among leaders that data accumulated by the private sector should in essence be considered a national asset, which can be tapped or restricted according to the state’s needs, according to the people involved in policy-making.
Those needs include managing financial risks, tracking virus outbreaks, supporting state economic priorities or conducting surveillance of criminals and political opponents.
Officials also worry companies could share data with foreign business partners, undermining national security.
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It’s steaming hot here in Belgium and we just doled out some big bucks for a mobile air conditioning unit, lol. Hope you're enjoying the weather wherever you are. Enjoy your weekend.