DIANA FU AND EMILE DIRKS
China’s Illiberal Turn
When Xi Jinping came to the helm of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, leading commentators hoped he would usher in a new era of political liberalization. Among those was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who in January 2013 predicted that under Xi, “Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison.” Kristof admitted he could be wrong. He was wise to include that caveat.
In 2017, Liu Xiaobo died while on medical parole, still under state custody while on his death bed. And far from being removed from his mausoleum in Beijing, Mao Zedong has found a worthy successor in Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades. Like Mao, Xi has promoted a cult of personality. Xi’s airbrushed face has been imprinted on everything from billboards to ornamental gold plates. Books of his collected speeches are required reading for Party members. Initially, state propaganda anointed him as “Papa Xi” (Xi Dada), a humble man of the people. By 2020, a Maoist moniker was applied: “the People’s Leader” (renmin lingxiu). But the clearest sign of Xi’s strongman ambitions came in March 2018, when the National People’s Congress voted to revise the constitution and remove term limits on the office of the presidency. The move, which paved the way for Xi to stay in power following the end of his second term in 2023, was one more step away from collective leadership towards personalistic rule.
Under Xi’s watch, the Chinese party-state has implemented dramatic social reforms while increasing the reach of the security state. And with “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” written into China’s constitution in 2018, the party-state is increasingly indistinguishable from the man himself. How did tightening political controls under President Hu Jintao accelerate into a new era of authoritarian rule under Xi? This is the subject of this chapter.
Reforms under Xi Jinping
In 2012, Xi took over a country in need of reform. Despite years of high economic growth under his predecessors, China faced numerous internal problems. Among the most pressing: declining birth rates, growing social inequality, and persistent rural poverty. In his two terms in office, Xi has tackled these challenges, with mixed results.
One of the earliest targets of reform was China’s one child policy. First implemented in 1979 as a population control measure, the policy limited couples to a single child, with some exceptions for rural and ethnic minority citizens. Over four decades, this policy—often coercively enforced—contributed to declining birth rates and an aging population. In 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned that China’s population would peak at 1.44 billion in 2029, followed by “unstoppable decline.” Seeking to address this, the Xi administration began to phase out the policy before officially replacing it with the two-child policy in 2016 and a three-child policy in 2021. Officials hoped the move would reverse China’s demographic decline. However, the anticipated baby boom has not occurred. The expenses of raising a second child, combined with the fear of employment discrimination against expectant mothers, convinced many women that one child was enough. As a result, the 2019 birth rate fell to the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Beyond reforming national birth policies, the Xi administration also tackled an equally challenging problem: the legal status of China’s rural migrants. For decades, the Chinese government sought to control internal migration through the household registration (hukou) system. Under this system, rural residents could move to urban areas to work. However, neither they nor their family members enjoyed equal access to social services. These controls prevented the growth of large urban slums, but also created a permanent subaltern class locked out of many of the benefits of urban life. The growing calls for hukou reform were not only motivated by concern for the right of migrants to urban education and healthcare services, but also by economic considerations. Economists advised that granting housing rights to former migrants would deepen domestic consumption and build China’s middle class.
In 2015, the Xi administration announced its ambitious hukou reform plan: relaxing or cancelling urban residence requirements for rural migrants. Many migrants have seized the opportunity to take up legal residency in small- and medium-sized cities. How many have done so, however, is disputed. The Chinese government claims urban residence permits were given to 100 million migrants between 2016 and 2020. Other estimates suggest only half this number were handed out. In either case, strict limits on internal migration remain, especially in first-tier cities. In Beijing, a point-based system was introduced, permitting only migrants under retirement age and without criminal records to settle down. In Shanghai, the children of lower-scoring applicants are prevented from attending top schools in the city center. This stratified system has also been accompanied by more repressive measures. Following a November 2017 fire that killed nineteen people in a migrant community in Beijing, police began a program of mass evictions that left tens of thousands homeless. Authorities justified the destruction of the migrant worker shantytowns in the name of public health and sanitation. But many saw it as a reminder of the persistent social and legal discrimination China’s migrant workers continue to face.
Outside of China’s metropolises, Xi’s administration pursued a major campaign to end rural poverty by the end of 2020. Launched in 2013, this campaign built upon the successes of his predecessors: between 1979 and 2015, the Chinese government estimates that 800 million Chinese citizens were lifted out of poverty. By some accounts, Xi’s poverty eradication goal has been met. All 832 counties that had been identified by the government in 2014 as impoverished have been lifted out of extreme poverty. It also doubled as a propaganda tour for Xi, who regularly appeared on television chatting to peasants and inspecting crops. Local officials, never hesitant to congratulate themselves, decorated newly constructed homes with slogans praising the Party and photographs of Xi. Yet the campaign also reinforced central government control over these cadres, with the State Council’s Poverty Alleviation Office conducting annual inspections to ensure that officials are not pocketing poverty alleviation funds.
These anti-graft measures are only one part of a massive anti-corruption campaign launched by the People’s Leader against both Party insiders and outsiders. Corruption has long been the bane of the party-state. Despite periodic crackdowns, decades of economic growth in the post-Mao era produced ever greater and more flagrant graft. The public seethed at the lavish dinners, gold watches, imported cars, and luxury handbags of Party cadres. For some critics, the problem was structural: as long as the Party was above the law, it would never be free of corruption. For Xi Jinping, however, the problem was spiritual. Years of economic growth had softened the moral fiber of Party members and the Party had lost its ideological bearings. Without decisive action, the crisis at the heart of the Party would undermine the socialist system itself.
Hence, in November of 2012, Xi Jinping launched the largest campaign against corruption in decades. Hundreds of thousands of Party members have been targeted, including both low-level “flies” and high-level “tigers.” Among those nabbed have been former “domestic security czar” Zhou Yongkang, two vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, the Party Secretary of Chongqing and Politburo member Sun Zhengcai, and the former head of the Cyberspace Administration Lu Wei. Even the first Chinese citizen to lead Interpol, Meng Hongwei, was “disappeared” and eventually convicted on corruption charges. Other targets included the People’s Liberation Army, with thousands of its officers investigated.
The campaign has also expanded beyond China’s borders. Led by the Ministry of Public Security, Operation Fox Hunt and Operation Sky Net have repatriated hundreds of Chinese officials. Foreign intelligence services have expressed concern at Chinese agents covertly operating in their borders. In response, the Chinese government has presented its actions as part of a global fight against graft and as upholding the UN’s Convention Against Corruption. The Chinese public has largely applauded these moves. Tallies of corrupt officials caught, charged, and convicted are regularly reported in the Chinese press. A popular 2017 television drama, In the Name of the People, about anti-corruption efforts in a fictitious Chinese province, was even financed by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
Xi’s expansive anti-corruption campaign, however, has also flouted the rule of law. In the beginning, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection targeted only Party cadres, holding them for months without charge through the shuanggui (double designation) system. By 2018, the National Supervisory Commission expanded the campaign to target non-Party members, including state employees, which includes everyone from the State Council down to school teachers. Ranking above the Supreme People’s Court and the People’s Procuratorate, the National Supervisory Commission can detain suspects for six months without access to a lawyer. In the subsequent trial, guilt is almost always assured. Government critics have also been targeted, including property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 2020 on corruption charges following his publication of a scathing public letter criticizing Xi’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. Such moves are in keeping with the increasing centralization of power under Xi. Critics suspect that Xi has used the cover of fighting corruption to target his political rivals. Without institutional checks on the power of the Party, the long-term success of anti-corruption efforts ultimately rests on the moral rectitude of Party members, or on their fear of Xi.
Those Who have Been Sacrificed
Xi Jinping’s rule has not only been characterized by social reforms and Party rectification. Alongside these moves, he has also extended the reach of the party-state’s security apparatus. Upon assuming office, Xi wasted no time in initiating campaigns against targeted populations, from rights activists to ethnic minorities. State repression, of course, pre-dated Xi. But more so than his predecessors, Xi’s administration has moved pre-emptively against groups the Party views as latent threats to social stability. Aided by new forms of surveillance and control, the result has been a chilling clamp-down on civil society.
Among the first targets were a handful of labor activists working to promote the legal rights of China’s 260 million migrant workers. During the Hu Jintao era, these activists and their informal labor organizations were tolerated, so long as they contained the scale of their activism. However, this tacit agreement ended during Xi Jinping’s first term in office. Before, these organizations had largely promoted individual rather than collective action—“mobilizing without the masses.” In 2013, however, a number began supporting worker strikes in South China. In December 2015, the party-state launched an unprecedented crackdown of labor organizations in Guangdong Province, arresting at least twenty-five staff members from five different organizations and charging three—including the director of the province’s largest labor NGO—with embezzlement and “organizing a crowd to disrupt social order.”
This crackdown was only the beginning. Three years later, when a group of university students attempted to organize in solidarity with striking factory workers in Shenzhen, they were arrested. This crackdown was particularly notable due to the students belonging to Marxist student groups. Congregating in the southern city of Huizhou in support of their proletarian comrades, the students chanted the Internationale and carried portraits of Mao Zedong. Their actions symbolically aligned them with the Communist Party’s own origins in organizing workers and peasants. Their crime, however, was translating their interpretation of Marxism into contentious action. Authorities swiftly cracked down on this student–worker alliance by disappearing student leaders and compelling the parents to dissuade their children from further activism. Detained student leaders were made to confess to their supposed crimes on videos later shown to other university students. Between the 2015 crackdown on labor activists and the 2018 repression of Marxist students, the Xi administration uprooted entire networks of grassroots labor organizations that had taken years to build.
Labor activists were not the only ones targeted. Beginning in July 2015, more than 200 rights lawyers and legal aides were rounded up in the largest mass detainment of legal practitioners in China since the 1990s. Several lawyers were charged with inciting subversion of state power, a serious charge reserved for people accused of challenging the party-state’s rule. Using amendments to China’s Criminal Procedure Law, police held suspects under residential surveillance for up to six months without formal changes or access to legal counsel. In what has become a routine feature of state repression under Xi, authorities created a spectacle of these arrests by compelling some detainees to issue public confessions on television. Part and parcel with the Chinese government’s long-standing criminalization of dissent, these confessions are reminiscent of the public shaming of counter-revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution, and criminals during the “strike hard” anti-crime campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s.
Arguably, none have felt the sting of deepening state control more than some of the country’s religious communities. In a speech at the Communist Party’s 2015 National Conference on Religious Work, Xi Jinping set the tone for state religious policy under his watch. Religious groups were to “sinicize” and align themselves with China’s socialist system and the party-state. In turn, the Party would deepen direct management over religious affairs. Legislation embodying these changes followed, with regulations released in 2018 and 2020 requiring religious organizations to seek government approval for all activities and leadership changes. In addition, religious groups were instructed to help implement Party policies. Whereas previously, religious groups were to keep out of politics, they were now expected to be the handmaidens of the party-state.
This closer relationship with religious communities worked to the benefit of many Daoist, Buddhist and folk religious organizations, seen by authorities as promoting “traditional” values. For other religious communities, it meant tightened state controls, tinged by Xi’s preoccupation with national security. Under Xi, the party-state is increasingly suspicious of unmonitored religious activity among Muslims and Christians. While both faiths have been features of Chinese spiritual life for centuries, authorities have subjected many Muslim and Christian communities to increasing surveillance due to their suspected links with their fellow faithful overseas. Such fears are not new. Even before Xi, China’s Christian house churches were alternately tolerated and repressed. Under Xi, these trends have accelerated, with local authorities across China removing crucifixes from church steeples and domes, and minarets from mosques, all in an effort to demonstrate party-state power over these faiths.
These religious controls reached their grim peak in Xinjiang, where a campaign of mass state repression and surveillance has devastated the lives of the region’s Muslims since 2017. In hundreds of re-education camps across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim Chinese citizens without charge. Describing them as “vocational training” centers, the Chinese government claims these centers provide job training and Chinese language and cultural education for Muslims at risk of religious radicalization. Yet leaked government documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times suggest the reasons for detention are more mundane. Their reports show that people can be detained for growing a beard or wearing a head covering; communicating with Muslim relatives overseas; violating government birth policies; “excessive” praying. Reports of abuse and forced labor within and outside these camps are numerous and credible.
Meanwhile, authorities across Xinjiang have demolished Islamic cemeteries and surveilled mosques. Internal checkpoints dot Xinjiang, while biometric data, like fingerprints, facial scans, and DNA samples of Xinjiang residents, are hoovered up by state authorities. Communications with relatives outside the country are monitored. And for those released from re-education, regular visits by government minders allow the state to peer into their private lives. The Chinese government has dismissed criticisms of these actions. A 2020 Economist special issue on the plight of Uyghurs inspired the Chinese embassy in London to write a letter to defend its actions as part of the global fight against terrorism. The Chinese government has long justified settler-colonialism in Xinjiang as a pacifying and civilizing mission, while the United States’ post-9/11 war on terror gave China a cover for their own anti-Muslim policies. And despite growing international attention, in a September 2020 speech Xi Jinping declared that the policies in Xinjiang are “completely correct.” Meanwhile, Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, the architect of the current campaign of repression, retains his seat on the Politburo.
Elsewhere, the Xi administration is recalibrating decades of preferential policies for ethnic minorities. Under China’s constitution, the Chinese government promises to grant the right to limited autonomy within areas where ethnic minority peoples are concentrated. Members of China’s fifty-five non-Han ethnic minorities are partially exempted from birth policy restrictions, while minority students are given bonus marks on their national college exams (the gaokao). While some Han Chinese complain these preferential policies are unfair, their grumbling ignores persistent inequalities. Many ethnic minority areas remain among the poorest places in China, despite receiving major government investments. And while making up roughly 8 percent of China’s population, Han Chinese officials continue to dominate leadership positions in ethnic minority areas of the country.
For Party hardliners, a failure to fully assimilate ethnic minorities into Han society could send China down the same path of national disintegration as the Soviet Union. Following unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009, some scholars and officials began discussing abandoning decades of ethnic minority policies. These proposed “second generation” ethnic policies would end the preferential treatment of ethnic minority people and instead encourage a melting pot approach to Chinese citizenship. There are signs Xi is siding with this view. Since coming to power, Xi has promoted deepening identification with a common Chinese identity centered around patriotism, a common Mandarin Chinese language, and adherence to China’s socialist system. Such views seem to point towards an assimilationist approach to ethnic minority policy.
The most marked indication of this shift is in language education. The Chinese constitution enshrines the right of ethnic minority peoples to use and develop their native languages. Since the 2000s, authorities have begun promoting “bilingual education” in certain minority areas, allowing students to receive instruction in both indigenous languages and Mandarin Chinese. Yet in Tibet, where until recently primary school students were taught solely in Tibetan, authorities have begun pressuring teachers to use Mandarin Chinese as the primary language of instruction. Such moves—already rolled out in other provinces—are seen by some as a step towards the slow erasure of the unique linguistic identities of China’s ethnic minorities. Some communities have pushed back. In August and September 2020, parents and students took to the streets of Inner Mongolia to protest a bilingual education program that would replace Mongolian with Mandarin Chinese in key elementary school classes. These protests were quickly suppressed and participants cowed into silence.
Hong Kong: A Lost Beacon
The Xi administration has also fundamentally altered politics in another of its frontier regions—Hong Kong. When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, China agreed to grant the Special Administrative Region limited political autonomy. Under the principle of “one country, two systems,” Beijing would manage the defense and foreign affairs of Hong Kong. In return, Hong Kong would retain its quasi-democratic political system, free press, and independent judiciary, while its residents would enjoy political freedoms not granted to Mainland Chinese citizens.
The territory’s special status, however, was always precarious and subject to the will of Beijing. Beijing’s efforts to erode the territory’s autonomy were met with fierce resistance by Hong Kongers, who prized their political freedoms. In 2012, the proposed addition of material seen as pro-Communist Party into Hong Kong’s public-school curriculum triggered massive protests against this perceived encroachment on academic freedom. Two years later, in 2014, protesters again took to the streets in what became known as the Umbrella Movement. Carrying yellow umbrellas to shield themselves from police pepper spray and tear gas, protestors occupied the city’s central business district in an ultimately fruitless effort to compel the government to implement direct elections for the city’s leader, the Chief Executive. The idea that Hong Kong deserved greater autonomy from Beijing gained wide public support. At times, such demonstrations took on nativist tones. Public opprobrium was often directed at the city’s Mainland Chinese residents, unfairly blamed for the Special Administrative Region’s rising inequality and soaring housing prices.
Against this backdrop, an extradition agreement between Hong Kong and Mainland China, proposed in February 2019, was greeted with widespread anger. Under the agreement, Hong Kong residents charged with serious offenses could be extradited to Mainland China to face trial in its judicial system. This extradition proposal came in the wake of the 2015 kidnapping and detention by Chinese security agents of five Hong Kong booksellers who had distributed books on taboo political topics. As the Beijing-backed Hong Kong government pushed forward with the bill, protests spread. Within months, popular resistance had grown into the largest uprising in Hong Kong’s history, with millions taking to the streets to protest in the summer of 2019.
The massive protests initially seemed to yield results. In July of 2019, Chief Executive Carrie Lam suspended the much-derided extradition bill. By then, state violence had inflamed public opinion. Police routinely assaulted protesters, passersby, and journalists. In response to the police’s water cannons, rubber bullets, and batons, protesters responded by vandalizing government facilities. Under the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time,” the movement demanded Lam’s resignation, universal suffrage, and an apology for police violence. Lam categorically refused. For many, her refusal to give into protestors’ demands highlighted their belief that she was a puppet of Beijing, rather than an autonomous Chief Executive.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s propaganda apparatus kicked into gear. Initially, China’s central government refrained from acknowledging the depth of public anger in Hong Kong. Yet as resistance escalated in the summer and fall of 2019, state media began to frame the movement as the work of dangerous radicals. Mainland media portrayed meetings between Hong Kong activists and foreign government officials as evidence that radicals were fomenting a “color revolution” intent on dividing Hong Kong from China.
In June 2020, a year after the massive protests against the extradition bill gained traction in Hong Kong, the Chinese government responded with the imposition of a new National Security Law. Passed by China’s National People’s Congress without public consultation or input by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, the Law criminalizes secession, subversion, sedition, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. While none of these offenses are clearly defined, all carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. Moreover, under Article 38, even offenses committed outside of Hong Kong by non-Chinese citizens are open to prosecution. Foreigners who espouse support for Hong Kong’s protest movement could be prosecuted under the Law upon entering the Special Administrative Region.
Beijing claims the National Security Law will not impact the majority of Hong Kong’s residents and is meant to punish only a small handful of radicals threatening national security. In the words of a deputy director of the central Chinese government office for Hong Kong, the law would be “a sharp sword hanging high over their heads that will serve as a deterrent against external forces meddling in Hong Kong.” Yet the Law’s effect on civil society has been immediate and chilling. Pro-democracy organizations have been disbanded and leading activists have been arrested or fled overseas. In January 2021, more than fifty activists and lawmakers were arrested under the Law for taking part in primaries for Hong Kong’s opposition Democratic Party in July of the previous year. Teachers have been warned against lecturing on topics that could contravene the Law. In response, Hong Kong protesters have largely abandoned mass protests in favor of smaller acts of public defiance, such as holding up blank pieces of paper in lieu of banners to decry the imposition of state censorship. As in Xinjiang, the Chinese government saw unrest on its periphery in starkly Manichean terms: either order would be restored or the nation would succumb to chaos. Beijing chose the former, at a high cost to the people of Hong Kong.
COVID-19 and the Threat of Chaos
If Xi Jinping’s rule has been characterized by his pre-occupation with maintaining order, no challenge proved as defining as the COVID-19 pandemic. First reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province in December 2019, in a matter of months the novel coronavirus had spread across the globe. National governments worried about the virus’s impact on public health and its attendant social and economic effects. For the Chinese government, the epidemic represented another threat: that of chaos. In China, an unchecked viral outbreak could throw into question the political legitimacy of the Communist Party, China’s sole ruling party.
When doctors in Wuhan first identified a novel coronavirus spreading among the public in late 2019, local authorities cowed them into silence. As rumors of the illness began to circulate online, censors deleted posts and suspended social media accounts. Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the whistleblowers who had first revealed the outbreak, was muffled by local authorities who accused him of “rumor mongering.” Quickly, however, the cover up became untenable as the virus spread in Hubei and beyond. Public anger, especially in the wake of Dr. Li’s death in February 2020, incited the government to action.
That month, Xi Jinping declared an all-out people’s war on the virus. Facing the greatest public health crisis in a generation, the party-state moved swiftly to mobilize state and society. Authorities ordered Wuhan and other cities in Hubei into lockdown and urged citizens to report neighbors suspected of breaking quarantine. Tech companies worked with municipal governments to implement tracking apps for people at risk of contracting the virus. Wuhan built entire emergency hospitals for COVID patients in mere days. Citizen journalists who attempted to report openly about earlier government failures were disappeared and, in some cases, given harsh prison sentences.
By the summer of 2020, the domestic spread of COVID-19 had been largely brought under control. The cost had been high: more than 4,000 had lost their lives. Yet beyond China, other countries experienced rising case counts that dwarfed anything China had faced. In the United States alone, thousands were dying every week. The Chinese government touted its own success in combatting the virus. Among many Chinese citizens, there was a sense that the government’s response to the outbreak, however initially inept and subsequently harsh, had saved China from the fate of many democratic states. In the eyes of many Chinese citizens the utter failure of the administration of US President Donald Trump to deal effectively with the pandemic, coupled with its Sino-phobic language around the virus, made the Chinese government’s approach appear even more enlightened. Rather than undermining the legitimacy of the Communist Party, the party-state’s response to the pandemic seemingly buttressed state power.
Wolf Warriors: China’s Advance on the World Stage
On the world stage, deepening authoritarianism at home also unleashed a more bellicose foreign policy abroad. In the Hu era, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had followed Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, “keep a low profile and bide your time.” Issued during China’s emergence from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, Deng’s advice was sage. But by the turn of the twenty-first century, China’s place on the world stage had shifted. Many Chinese felt the country had risen from its “one hundred years of humiliation” and felt that the country’s Foreign Ministry lacked the backbone to defend a strong China’s interests abroad. In a memo sent to diplomats in 2019, Xi reportedly urged Chinese diplomats to develop their “fighting spirit.”
Enter a new breed of Chinese diplomat: the wolf warriors. The name derives from the 2017 Chinese blockbuster “Wolf Warrior 2,” which featured a Chinese special forces soldier (a Chinese “Rambo”) fighting Western mercenaries in Africa. China’s wolf-warrior diplomats, unlike their staid predecessors, publicly defend China’s interests without equivocation, as did China’s ambassador to Sweden who in 2019 infamously remarked “we treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” Such pugilistic rhetoric was once found only in the pages of the state tabloid Global Times. Now under this new brand of diplomacy, Chinese diplomats have taken to Twitter to defend their country’s interests without politesse. Their efforts have also been fueled by China’s rivalry with the United States. Explicit anti-China rhetoric from President Donald Trump’s administration, accompanied by the Sino–US trade war, fueled nationalist sentiments in China and in turn spurred further undiplomatic language.
This wolf-warrior approach, however, also caused a decline in China’s global reputation. China now spoke to governments in Europe and North America in hectoring tones it had previously reserved for smaller states. As a result, a 2020 Pew survey found record levels of public hostility towards China in fourteen developed economies. American public opinion towards China reached a fifteen-year low in the summer of 2020, with 73 percent of respondents harboring negative attitudes towards China. In China, public views of the United States were also increasingly bleak. While foreign attitudes soured towards China, domestic support for Xi Jinping soared in the aftermath of the government’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy abroad, coupled with strong-man rule at home, appeared to garner significant support among much of the Chinese populace.
China: A Tech Competitor
China’s global presence has not only been set by its Foreign Ministry. Increasingly, China is known worldwide for its rapid technological rise. For many outside the country, this ascent was unanticipated. As recently as the mid-2010s, Western observers commonly remarked that China could not innovate. At the time, China was seen as the factory of the world, manufacturing everything from toys and textiles to Apple computers and Samsung smartphones. China’s export-based economy was driven by sales of these manufactured goods, not by domestically designed high-tech products.
Yet, a state-subsidized technological revolution catapulted China to the place of a world competitor in high-tech. A mixture of industrial policy, protectionism, and a large domestic market helped propel China’s rise as a potential tech superpower. Some of these measures resemble economic policies implemented earlier by countries like Japan and South Korea, including an aggressive push to domestically produce the components needed for high-tech manufacturing. State support also catapulted the development of China’s high-tech sector. Platforms like Baidu and Weibo were able to flourish in large part because the Chinese government blocked foreign competitors like Google and Twitter. Under Xi, these trends have continued. Through extensive state support for public and private research and development, China became a world leader in supercomputing and artificial intelligence. Alibaba’s e-commerce sites and social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat are used by hundreds of millions in China and worldwide. So pervasive are the fruits of China’s tech boom that it is now impossible to imagine the country without the omnipresence of mobile payment systems and social media apps like WeChat. These technologies have also connected China’s rural hinterland to its cities.
China’s rise as a technological competitor to the United States stirred suspicion among some foreign governments. Underlying these concerns was the Party’s close relationship with tech companies and a belief that these firms would, if pressured, hand over user data—including that of dissidents and critics—to the Chinese government. Such worries do not exist in a vacuum: Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of massive US government surveillance efforts, and the growing power of tech giants like Facebook and Amazon, animated fierce debate in countries worldwide. The links between China’s tech sector and the party-state added a deeper resonance to these concerns. Some of China’s leading tech companies created the tools of surveillance and social control instrumental to the Chinese government’s campaign of anti-Muslim repression in Xinjiang.
As the Trump administration’s hardline policies on China increased, so too did the targeting of Chinese tech companies. Between 2019 and 2020, dozens of Chinese firms were placed on a Department of Commerce’s blacklist due to the supposed threat they posed to US national security. One particular company stood out: telecommunications giant Huawei. Throughout the 2010s, the company, led by Party member and billionaire Ren Zhengfei, had expanded its global reach. By the middle of the decade, it was competing in North America and European markets to build 5G telecommunications infrastructure. The United States claimed that working with Huawei would be tantamount to placing telecommunications security in the hands of the Chinese state—conveniently ignoring that in the early 2010s the US’s own National Security Agency had attempted to create backdoors in telecommunications networks maintained by Huawei. US pressure led to Huawei being effectively shut out of constructing 5G networks in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In the face of this pushback, Huawei has retained the Chinese government’s unflappable support.
The rise of China as a tech superpower has been facilitated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi Jinping’s landmark project. Announced in 2013, the Belt and Road is presented as a successor to the Silk Road, the name given to trade routes which, beginning in the Han Dynasty (206 bce—220 ce), connected what is now China to Central Asia and Europe. The expansive trade routes under the BRI encompass an economic “belt” running through Central Asia to Europe and a maritime “road” winding around the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. As of 2020, more than sixty countries, accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population, have signed onto the initiative, making the BRI a global project of staggering scale. Chinese companies, many of them state-owned enterprises, have helped build networks of railways, highways, and pipelines which connected China to neighboring countries, such as the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor launched in 2015. The hope was that these vast networks would bolster China’s trade and expand the international use of the Chinese currency, the Renminbi. In addition to infrastructure, China also plans to build special economic zones along the BRI, modeled after its own zones in southern China, which catapulted the country’s economic reforms in the 1980s.
A technological dimension of the BRI has also emerged. This “Digital Silk Road,” announced by Beijing in 2015, encourages Chinese companies to export technological infrastructure, including 5G, cloud services, and digital surveillance tools. Major Chinese companies have found eager buyers around the world. Huawei’s “safe city” products, which include facial and license plate recognition cameras and social media monitoring, have been sold to cities in dozens of countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. And despite the ire of the US government and human rights campaigners, dozens of countries along China’s Belt and Road Initiative have purchased Chinese surveillance equipment. Such deals have played the dual role of helping to grow these companies and expand China’s global footprint as a tech superpower.
Conclusion: A Dominant China
China’s turn to authoritarianism under Xi Jinping has been unsettling. Under his rule, domestic repression has deepened and some pundits predict that China and the United States are heading towards a new cold war. Was this inevitable? In retrospect, Nicholas Kristof’s rosy assessment of Xi Jinping appears naive. But if we return to early 2013, his optimism was not unfounded. Hu Jintao’s rule was characterized by growing social inequality, party corruption, and public detachment from the country’s socialist creed. But it had also witnessed a flowering of Chinese civil society, and the country’s growing middle class was increasingly connected to the global community. Hu may not have ushered in a Chinese perestroika. Perhaps, though, he could have laid the groundwork for Xi Jinping, the first president to be born after 1949, to push forward with even bolder political reforms.
Yet Hu was hardly a liberal. Under his rule, the Chinese government jailed dissidents like Liu Xiaobo, blocked foreign websites, arrested journalists, and furthered repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. Rather than reversing course, Xi accelerated these trends as part of his drive to realize “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” To this end, he drew on many of the tools of repression inherited from his predecessor. What differed between Hu and Xi was not the latter’s willingness to use coercion to maintain the authority of the party-state. Rather, it was Xi’s expansion of the party-state’s repressive reach. And as under Hu, the victims of Xi’s repression are the country’s most vulnerable citizens and the party-state’s most vocal critics.
Kristof’s prediction of Xi as a potential reformer, while wrong, is illustrative. Political forecasting is a fool’s errand, especially when the political system in question is as complex as China’s. What shape Chinese politics will take under Xi’s continuing rule or that of his unnamed successor is unclear. Should he serve as core leader beyond his second term, Xi Jinping may enforce a degree of policy and ideological continuity that buttresses the power of the party-state. It is also possible that Xi’s increasingly autocratic rule will become one of his greatest weaknesses as it closes off dissenting viewpoints. Perhaps the only certainty is that under Xi Jinping, Mao’s body will continue to rest by Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace…
1 This chapter draws partially on Fu, D. and Distelhorst, G. (2018). “Grassroots Participation and Repression under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.” The China Journal, Vol. 79, (January), 100–22.