Thoughts in China - Autumn 2023

In much of the Western press these days, the Chinese government is depicted as hell bent on global domination. However, on a recent trip to Beijing, I gleaned a different impression: the leadership appears consumed by domestic concerns and especially economic development. At the same time, China is supremely confident that it has the tools to overcome its current challenges.

I was part of what counts as a rather rare thing these days: an American delegation invited to China. We were there to discuss the sorry state of Sino-US relations and help revive informal, people-to-people exchanges. A week of discussions with academics, think-tankers, companies and officials included major points of conflict such as trade tariffs, technology competition, and Taiwan and the possibility of cooperation around climate change or fentanyl smuggling. Even highly sensitive issues such as the Uyghurs and Covid’s origins were raised.

But what most caught my attention from the China side was both the ongoing focus on its massive domestic development challenges and the great confidence in a governance model primed to tackle these issues. This belief contrasted with the US’s lack of faith in its own system of government and also highlighted the shattered assumption behind American China policy: that economic growth would eventually produce political liberalisation.

Western commentators have consistently underestimated Beijing’s emphasis on domestic development. At one of our sessions, convened in rural China, two academics outlined the sheer scale of the problems which Beijing still faces in terms of rural poverty and the huge inequality experienced by a migrant labour force hundreds of millions strong. One official recommended the Party’s history as the best guide to its future, and that in this we would recognise that development still dominates the agenda. A senior former diplomat mused on the theme of Sino-US competition and China’s domestic problems and suggested that the only contest that really counts is one of governance. If China cannot get that right then nothing else matters. This focus gives the CCP great clarity of purpose and, for the rest of us, might cast China’s rise in less alarming light.

On reflection, such emphasis on economic development has drawn into sharper relief what we were told about governance. The Chinese take their ideas about this very seriously. At first glance, our visit to the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress seemed ripe for satire, particularly the video we were shown extolling “new achievements in democracy” and the “happy and harmonious people”. But the apparently careful and systematic formulation and implementation of legislation on issues like domestic recycling and disabled access in the city intrigued me. One legislator explained how the opinions of the “masses” were collected via “local contact points”. This was not simple propaganda trying to obfuscate the lack of democracy but rather to argue for an alternative, and possibly superior, form of governance. Xi’s China calls all this “whole process democracy” but it owes a lot to the modified Leninism of Mao’s day when the Party deliberately sought out the views of the population, the “mass line”, to inform policy. Nor was this the only time our delegation saw this model being highlighted. A media company told us how, during the Covid emergency, they fed insights about the public mood back to officials. And one academic explicitly argued China had a more effective governing style than the US.

It struck me that the Party’s reassertion of control over the economy, and indeed wider society, which we have observed in recent years, reflects Beijing’s consistent prioritisation of development rather than that political stability now trumps economic growth. An apparent paradox must be confronted here. China does and will continue to produce ideas that benefit humankind, but, jarringly, the Party system survives. One economist talked us through an index he developed to measure the sustainability of cities which was being deployed worldwide, a welcome contribution to the climate crisis. But at another session the bubbly pragmatism and progressive tone of a series of fluent, young, female journalists could not prevail over the suffocating impact of a single, dour man who entered late and sat dead centre, legs spread. He concluded the event himself by rolling out the official line about the Chinese media having every right to celebrate Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”, as media in the US extols its own “American Dream”. Party authority asserted itself.

Two conclusions spring from this. Firstly, the resilience of Party control challenges America’s longstanding assumption, based on its faith in capitalist democracy, that support for China’s economic growth was justified because inevitably that will facilitate political liberalisation. Some of our interlocutors firmly pointed out that America had long sought to change China in this way, while since the post-Mao era the reverse had never been true.

Second, the reassertion of Party control over the economy is not viewed in China as being done at the cost of economic efficiency, which is the prevailing view in the western media. Instead, the Party is seen as the sine qua non of sustainable growth in the long term. The Party looks at China’s economic miracle of the last forty years and confidently tells itself that the decisive factor was the political stability which it itself guaranteed. The economic inefficiencies and imbalances that have built up in this period are deemed to be the result of too little Party, not too much. To guide China through a challenging period of necessary economic transformation towards a ‘good growth’ model, relying less on investment in property and infrastructure and environmental degradation, the Party believes it needs to get more involved. Some analysts refer to this as Xiconomics. One diplomatic counterpart insisted Beijing’s three main goals were a better life for the Chinese, a better world, and a better Party; the latter being the key to the first two. Sino-US relations, among other things, is now a contest over the validity of that claim.