China’s warning
In a speech to
mark 40 years of China’s reform and opening up policy, President Xi Jinping
delivered a warning that no one could dictate to his country, a reassertion of
China’s confidence in its strength founded on its miraculous economic
development. Observers interpret the warning as aimed principally at the US
that increasingly under President Donald Trump is attempting to mount a stern
challenge to the second largest economy after its own and a rising world power.
Reinforcing staying the course on the economic reforms launched by China under
Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, Xi Jinping disappointed those hoping for a
peaceful evolution of China after embracing capitalism towards a bourgeois
democracy by vowing to retain its one-party system under Communist Party rule. He
went on to reiterate that China posed no threat to any country but would not be
pushed around. It must be conceded that China’s patient peaceful recovery of
Hong Kong and Macao from colonial rule and absence of serious conflict (except
perhaps with neighbouring countries in the South China Sea) with any major
world power is part of China’s approach to developing itself peacefully and
without any aggressive intent abroad. Historically China saw itself as the
Middle Kingdom or centre of the world and the Communist Party is committed to restoring
it to pre-eminent status, which Xi Jinping underlined by saying his country is
increasingly approaching the centre of the world stage. China’s reforms have
pulled some 700 million of its people out of poverty in a relatively brief
period, reducing poverty among the rural population from 97.5 percent 40 years
ago to 3.1 percent today. While the western countries’ opening up their
economies to China may have been predicated on thereby binding China
politically to their vision of bourgeois democracy, this has failed to
transpire. China quashed the Tiananmen Square protests demanding greater
political liberalisation in 1989 but opened the ruling Communist Party’s doors
to some of the highest number of billionaires in the world. It is China’s rapid
economic development that has allowed it to acquire sufficient military muscle
to deter any aggressor, a painful memory in Chinese history’s period of
humiliation from the 19th century on till liberation in 1949. However,
just as China has repeatedly stressed it has no aggressive intentions abroad,
Xi Jinping once again asserted that China in turn opposes hegemonism and power
politics.
China’s rapid
economic rise over the last 40 years through opening its doors to capitalism
under Communist Party rule reinforces the potential slumbering in the lap of
capitalist development for pre-capitalist societies such as China’s. Of course
from double-digit growth in the early years of the opening up to 6.9 percent last
year and an expected 6.5 percent this year does pose some problems. Such rapid
development almost inevitably was accompanied by class and regional inequality.
While the US-led west may have watched for such differences to weaken if not overthrow
the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, the Chinese rulers have planned for
and tackled such issues in an incremental manner that has prevented unrest. The
implied (and sometimes stated) social contract between the one-party state and
its citizens rests on an ‘exchange’ of material prosperity in return for acquiescence
in the Communist Party’s hegemony. China has some time ago reached the point of
its export-led, state-of-the-art technological revolution where the export of
capital becomes not just possible but a necessary component of maintaining high
rates of growth. Hence the Belt and Road Initiative of which CPEC is a part,
which promises not just connectivity to boost mutual trade but also is aimed at
addressing its internal regional variations in economic development (CPEC will
serve relatively backward Xinjiang in this respect). Whether China’s unique
hybrid experiment of capitalist engagement with a globalised economic system
under Communist Party rule will manage to avoid the historical path of
confrontation between older world powers and a new rising one remains to be
seen, as does the end result of a unique experiment with contradictions at the
heart of the goals of unfettered capitalist wealth creation and the social
equality that is the leit motif of communist ideology.
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