{"id":49536,"date":"2019-08-02T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T20:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=49536"},"modified":"2019-08-01T18:40:39","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T08:40:39","slug":"bad-enemies-and-good-enemies-the-slow-march-of-political-dissent-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/bad-enemies-and-good-enemies-the-slow-march-of-political-dissent-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bad enemies\u2019 and \u2018good enemies\u2019: the slow march of political dissent in China"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The backlash abroad against Xi Jinping\u2019s China, at least in developed nations, has spread rapidly in the last year. Some smaller countries, like Australia and Canada, feel patronised and bullied. Neighbours worry they are being marginalised.<\/p>\n

Advanced industrial nations, especially Germany and South Korea, see China coming at them like an unstoppable train. The US, for decades the world\u2019s lone superpower, is confronted by a once-in-a-lifetime challenge from Beijing. All of these phenomena, once bubbling under the surface, have burst into clear view during Xi\u2019s time in office.<\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s opaque internal politics makes judgements about domestic Chinese politics more difficult, but there can be little doubt that a backlash is underway at home as well. That\u2019s not to say that Xi\u2019s position is in any way threatened. But an effort to track Xi\u2019s fortunes at home is crucial to weighing his options abroad.<\/p>\n

As a leader, Xi is unique in post-revolutionary party politics in not having any identifiable rival or successor domestically, largely because he has ensured that none have been allowed to emerge. But Xi has earned himself an array of what we might called \u2018bad enemies\u2019 and \u2018good enemies\u2019 since taking office in late 2012. They range from the once rich and powerful families he destroyed in his anti-corruption campaign, all the way to the small-r reformers angered by his illiberal rollback of the incremental institutional advances of the reform period.<\/p>\n

Forced to lay low initially because of the dangers of challenging him outright, Xi\u2019s critics at home have begun to find their voice over the past 12 months. They have been outspoken mainly on economic policy, but the deeper undercurrents of their criticisms are unmistakeable. The sons of former top leaders, revered scholars who had guided China\u2019s economic miracle, frustrated private entrepreneurs and academics furious about Xi\u2019s unrelenting hard line\u2014all have complained in multiple public forums, in speeches, in online postings, and in widely circulated essays at home and offshore, about Xi\u2019s policies and style.<\/p>\n

\u2018Something strange is happening in Xi Jinping\u2019s China\u2019, wrote Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books<\/em>. In what was supposed to be the \u2018perfect dictatorship\u2019, the country was witnessing \u2018the most serious critique of the system in more than a decade, led by people inside China who are choosing to speak out now, during the most sensitive season of the most sensitive year in decades\u2019.<\/p>\n

The exact number of \u2018tigers\u2019 toppled by Xi\u2019s anti-corruption campaign\u2014in other words, officials who were once part of the designated elite whose jobs had to be cleared through the party\u2019s central personnel system\u2014isn\u2019t easy to calculate. The best estimates put it around 300 to 400, including scores of generals. The officials who have been prosecuted and jailed include members of the politburo, ministers, vice-ministers, the heads of state-owned enterprises, provincial party leaders and governors, and mayors.<\/p>\n

In each of those cases, the investigations don\u2019t just hit the individual official who has been targeted and detained. Literally, hundreds of thousands of people who are tied into and rely on that single person for their income are effectively swept up with them. Their livelihoods, and all that they have invested in clawing their way through the system, can evaporate with the stroke of a pen. Some members of the patronage networks are often arrested themselves.<\/p>\n

Xi has made enemies of them all. As one prominent foreign businessman in Beijing told me: \u2018Xi has destroyed millions of people in the elite who now all hold a personal grudge against him. These people are not a bunch of uneducated peasants from the sticks in Henan. They had skin in the game.\u2019<\/p>\n

Victor Shih, a US China specialist, was doubtless right when he said that the threshold for some kind of \u2018intra-party uprising\u2019 against Xi remains very high. \u2018He would need to commit a catastrophic mistake that jeopardizes the continual rule of the Party for his potential enemies within the Party to rise up against him\u2019, Shih told the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the idea that Xi is \u2018president for life\u2019, as he is often referred to in the wake of the 2018 abolition of term limits, will in all likelihood be proved wrong.<\/p>\n

From mid-2018, Xi was already facing a public backlash on economic policy, the area in which it has always been safest for Chinese to speak out. Xi has a legion of critics on foreign policy as well, who believe he has overreached and left the way open for the US and others to bind together on issues ranging from trade and technology to military and strategic influence in East Asia.<\/p>\n

Most scholars have delivered their critiques in private, or in carefully coded language. Deng Xiaoping\u2019s son, Deng Pufang, though, was explicit in a speech late last year to a disabilities forum which was leaked to the Hong Kong media. He urged China\u2019s leadership to \u2018know its place\u2019 in the world and concentrate on its problems at home.<\/p>\n

Finally, the abolition of term limits summed up the rage that many influential officials and scholars felt about their country\u2019s leader. In one decision, Xi confirmed his critics\u2019 view that he was an unrepentant autocrat willing to take China backwards in the service of his agenda.<\/p>\n

Just as it\u2019s difficult to anticipate where any challenge will come from, it\u2019s equally hard to see how Xi\u2019s supremacy in domestic politics can be sustained. Factors which remain out of Xi\u2019s control will weigh against him. China\u2019s slowing economy and rapidly declining demographics can obviously be leveraged to argue in favour of maintaining tight authoritarian controls. But they are much more likely to work against Xi in future. The same goes for China\u2019s tightening fiscal situation.<\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s ability to throw money at every problem, like bailing out cash-strapped local governments, will only get harder. In other words, by the time of the next party congress, due in late 2022, the issue of succession should return with a vengeance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The backlash abroad against Xi Jinping\u2019s China, at least in developed nations, has spread rapidly in the last year. Some smaller countries, like Australia and Canada, feel patronised and bullied. 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