Xi Jinping's path to absolute power in a party that distances itself from Deng Xiaoping's reformist legacy may be transforming China into a more hermetic society unknown to the West.
The West has always had trouble understanding China. The possibility that history is today in a phase of transition towards a world dominated by this Asian country fuels that fear of what is unknown. Fear, but also trauma. Because one thing is a change of powers between great Western powers, like the one that took place in the first third of the 20th century between Great Britain and the United States, and quite another that global hegemony moves to Asia.
History illustrates that mutual ignorance. During the colonial era, Britain was never able to subordinate Asia. The British empire forced its way through coercion, never consent. The economist Giovanni Arrighi has explained that it was a domination without hegemony. The Europeans did not try to adapt to the power structures they had subjugated.
But what is really unique about that chapter of colonial history is that during British rule, China remained a large and cohesive empire. As a political unit, it survived the most critical moments of its decline and submission to foreign powers.
Chinese nationalism called that period (1839-1949) the Century of Humiliation. But the truth is that both they and the rest of the Asian countries showed a great ability to absorb the teachings of the dominators whom they despised. They built their national liberation policies with the rights and freedoms that Westerners handled in an abstract way. They appropriated the economic teachings that came from the West. But the "Chinese miracle", the result of the opportunity that globalization offered them, was not a dictate of the Westerners. Unlike post-Soviet Russia, China went its own way.
Perhaps because of this distance, there is no consensus on the future that awaits China. There are those who think that China's conversion into the next world power is irreversible and inevitable. And there are also those who believe that this will never happen.
For the former, China is on the verge of winning the scientific race. They believe that Asians have adopted at work the values that the West has lost. And they praise the ability of the Chinese technocracy to guarantee uninterrupted growth for forty years. His reference is Den Xiaoping, the leader who liberalized the country in 1979. It will never be known whether that small and discreet man knew exactly what he was doing or was an adaptation artist. A wise man "when testing the stones while crossing the river".
Those who consider China a fiasco cling to the balance sheet of covid. They are suspicious of the official figures on infections and deaths. And they think that the stubbornness in the policy of zero containment of covid is not due to Xi Jinping's stubbornness, but because they are very aware that they do not have good health technology (something evident in the case of vaccines). In this group of skeptics we must include the historian Frank Dikkotter (author of the recent China after Mao) for whom the technocrats in Beijing are more bureaucratic and more corrupt than we think and have less knowledge of economics than we think.
When in 1972 Henry Kissinger organized the meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong to prevent Beijing from orbiting around Moscow, China opened a window to the outside world that aroused the interest of the academic world in the country. It was through these contacts that China, and the decisions made by its leaders, began to become understandable to the West.
But that window may have closed. The entry of the United States and China into a new "cold war" makes it difficult today to get the diagnoses right. The political class in Washington has turned Beijing into its adversary in the world, and this has made the work of specialists more difficult. Today it is difficult to guess from the analyzes of the situation on both sides, how much reality there is and how much will to reaffirm the initial prejudices.
To this "blackout" about what is happening in China, the one who has been secretary general of the party for ten years has collaborated enthusiastically. Xi Jinping has behaved in this regard as the anti-Deng. The collegiate direction of government is a distant memory. In a decade, it has put an end to the mechanisms enabled by the reformist leader to avoid the cult of personality, which caused so many errors and calamities in the direction of the country. Which is serious at a time when the economy is not doing well. He has used anti-corruption campaigns to crack down on his opponents in the party and in the military. The absence of clues about who can succeed him leads us to think that the man wishes to perpetuate himself until the end of his days.
Since his arrival, Xi has emulated Mao in mannerisms and dress. The worst thing that could happen to China is that, as the Great Helmsman did, he now puts ideology ahead of the country's needs.
