I had blogged earlier why Xi Jinping's tenure may be a turning point in China's stability and prosperity. The fundamental premise is that his centralisation has closed down (completely or at least partially) all the traditional safety valves that allowed a calibrated play of differing opinions and ideas, competition among different vested interests within the party, circulation of power and so on, all so important and inevitable in a massive country with a multi-level governance system.
Reading this and this, there is another danger associated with such centralisation. It shuts down any circulation of honest feedback as followers compete to follow the diktats of Xi. Sample this,
For the last three years even China’s state-run banks have been trying to extricate themselves from spending more on the initiative. Yet despite these problems, the initiative expands to new countries and continents. Why this is happening is clear enough—no other foreign policy program is associated personally with Xi like this one is. Xi’s apotheosis to permanent leadership at the 19th Party Congress this spring meant that his signature foreign-policy initiative also had to be elevated—and so it was, written directly into the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Now to attack the Belt and Road Initiative is to attack the legitimacy of the party itself. The Belt and Road Initiative is evidence that the party’s once responsive policymaking system is breaking down. The rest of the world must recognize that BRI persists only because it is the favored brainchild of an authoritarian leader living in an echo chamber.
... and this,
Effective statesmanship is difficult when statesmen cannot get an accurate read of how things are playing out on the ground... The trade war is another symptom of the Party's inner crisis. The most spectacular thing about the trade war is how surprised the Party was that it happened at all. Zhongnanhai was caught flat footed by a conflict whose contours were clear months before the first shots were fired. They have needlessly bumbled and stumbled since, handing gifts to their rivals in Washington that need not have been given. The trade war ads placed in the Des Moines Register back in September are the perfect example. The advertisements targeted a President known for personalizing even tepid attacks on his program, were oblivious to a media landscape that had long defined election interference as the most explosive issue in American politics, and were published just after the administration's China skeptics were signalling they had finally devised a strategy to counter rising Chinese influence. Everything about these advertisements betray terrible judgement. This was obvious before they were published. Anyone who understood just an inkling about American political culture would have known how foolish it was to go ahead with that ad campaign. It still happened.
In the Communist Party of China there is a disconnect between the people who have the power to shape events on the ground and the people who understand how things actually stand on the ground. This disconnect has many sources: the obvious one, which I focus on in the column, is the deification of Xi Jinping. General Secretary Xi's rise to godhood means that criticism of his policies (especially the policies upgraded to the label "Xi Jinping Thought") is equated with betrayal of the Party itself. Xi's great anti-corruption campaign is another likely culprit. Anti-corruption means no flamboyant expenses; no flamboyant expenses means fewer government salaried academics, think tankers, and officials traveling to places like the United States. Anti-corruption also means fear. Hundreds of thousands of officials have been jailed or sacked. In an environment where everyone's job is on the line, there is little incentive to be the bold truth teller in the room. To succeed in today's Party, you keep your head down.
And this is the real danger for outsiders,
I do not mind if the Party leadership miscalculates on the economic front; the more reasons they give western firms to get out of China, the better shape we are in. My worries lie in the military domain. The People's Liberation Army has been ruthlessly gutted by Xi's campaigns. Were Secretary Xi to overestimate the capabilities of the armed forces under his command, which PLA leader is in a position to talk him back to reality? Things did not turn out well for the last general who tried to tell hard truths to the Party's 'core leader.' May the next general to attempt this feat secure a happier fate than he.
This assumes great significance given the very successful approach of "crossing the river by feeling the stones", one where calibrated dissonance and feedback was important, and where experimentation and deviation from the national norm was tolerated, and underpinned the country's remarkable stability and progress over the past four decades.
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