The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party begins on Sunday. Congress meets in this way only every five years. In all likelihood, the 2,300 delegates will cement Xi Jinping’s sole rule – perhaps even for life.
When Xi Jinping was made General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the People’s Republic in 2012, the world linked this personality with the hope of further opening up the country, which until then had been governed by authoritarian rule. Within the CP, Xi had been singled out as a compromise candidate: he had worked his way up in the party. He wasn’t noticed as exceptionally talented. Due to his family connections within the apparatus, however, he was considered solid. He was able to successfully convert his actions into political capital.
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But Xi Jinping was never a reformer. His father Xi Zhongxun was a well-known apparatchik in Mao’s time, so his son Jinping grew up privileged in Beijing as a so-called “princeling”. However, Xi’s father fell out of favor with Mao, which led to banishment to the countryside and hard physical labor. Xi’s character and political beliefs were formed during this period. The abuse he endured for his father’s fall made him a 150 percent communist. He wanted to show everyone that, unlike his father, he believed in the promises of Marxism-Leninism.
After Mao’s death, Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated and became prefect of Shenzhen, then a sleepy little town that was vested with special administrative region rights. Market-economy capitalism was used in these zones. China’s rise to become a globally relevant economic nation is therefore not due to the pure doctrine of communism, but to the successfully transferred models of the class enemy. Today, Shenzhen is the important hub of the Chinese digital economy.
Xi has turned China back into a state capitalist country. Whole industries are shut down when they no longer suit Xi Jinping. In every company there are members of the KP and control the fate of the company. It’s getting ideological again. “Xi Jinping’s Thoughts” must be studied everywhere, three tomes full of communist theory. Xi believes this is the only way China can rise to the top of the world. For him, it is communist ideology, the communist party, and he, as the leader of that party, that personifies China. The “rejuvenation of the nation” is Xi’s concern, which means a re-ideologization that comes along in a totalitarian surveillance state. Xi speaks of a “Chinese dream” which, unlike in the USA, is not synonymous with the promise of freedom and human rights. Rather, he enthuses about a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
When Xi says that China is the “best democracy in the world,” he is using a trick on his subjects: Totalitarian leaders like him have drummed into the people that democracy means “obedience to authority.” In this sense, Chinese would say that they do indeed live in a democracy. The West, the truly liberal nations, are therefore Xi’s number one enemy. He always reminds his people of the colonial era and speaks of a “century of humiliation” that this age was for China.
Red Alert: How China’s aggressive foreign policy in the Pacific is leading to a global war
Xi uses other ideological props intended to represent his rule in continuity with five millennia of Chinese history. He sees himself, in the spirit of the imperial era and the teachings of Confucius, as a “son of heaven” who has received a “heavenly” mandate to rule. The ideology that “everything under heaven” should be controlled by China also dates back to the imperial period. In the past, however, this meant China alone.
For Xi, on the other hand, it means the whole world today. In the first years of his rule, he militarized the People’s Republic and prepared it for imperialist raids: Today, he has illegally militarized the western Pacific, Xi has started border disputes with all his neighbors, and he threatens the free and democratic Taiwan.
Even against his own population, Xi only acts with reprisals. Anyone who doesn’t suit him is imprisoned, whether it’s an entrepreneur, athlete or actor. Xi also has people kidnapped abroad and imprisoned in China. Gone is the image of the nice “Uncle Xi” that he cultivated in the early years of his rule.
When Xi Jinping is proclaimed president again at the 20th party congress, he will break completely with the reform period that lasted from 1976 to 2012. Deng Xiao-ping has been suppressed in public discourse for years, and the two successors Jiang Zeming and Hu Jintao play no role anyway. Xi is the new Mao and for this he presents himself as a leader in a way that must be reminiscent of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini in Europe. As he lets the military and police swear to him and serve him, the military parades that show him in the center, he governs the People’s Republic today with a “fascism with Chinese characteristics”.
Under Xi, Tibet and Xinjiang were transformed into totalitarian provinces, the people there are disenfranchised, their cultural monuments are being destroyed. In Xinjiang, one million people are also being held in camps, women are being systematically made sterile, so that the Muslim Uyghurs can no longer produce offspring. Xi will be followed by a “century of shame” in China, because those who commit genocide have no hope of being equal, good members of the international community.
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
In the coming years, perhaps decades, of his rule, Xi’s policies will become even more totalitarian. But there are protests in China. Shortly before the start of the party congress, unknown dissidents unfurled a protest poster at a busy intersection. They received a lot of support online for their demand “Down with Xi Jinping” before the censorship authorities intervened. Until there is a revolt from China against the cruel rule of the CP, the free world must learn to come to terms with the China Xis. In Washington, Paris and Berlin, Xi Jinping was completely underestimated in 2012. This mistake should not be repeated.
