[Epoch Times, October 17, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Song Tang comprehensive report) At the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the 69-year-old Xi Jinping is expected to be re-elected for a third term, but compared with ten years, the CCP faces challenges The bigger dilemma of the past few decades.
Successive CCP leaders have sought to weaken the United States, ensure the security of the CCP regime and ideology, and use the U.S.-led international order to develop its own economy while tightening control over the domestic population and competition with the United States. This conflict has become increasingly apparent as the Chinese economy increasingly integrates into the international community.
Observers pointed out that in his speech at the 20th Congress, Xi focused entirely on his obsession with security, seeking to eliminate all ideological and geopolitical challenges that pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, away from the economic development that has been emphasized in the past.
“The Party Leads Everything” China’s Economic Depression
In the era of Deng Xiaoping, in order to protect the party and save China’s economy on the verge of collapse, Deng Xiaoping formulated the policy of reform and opening up, giving the Chinese more economic freedom. But in Xi Jinping’s first decade, discovering that unchecked market forces could seriously threaten the party’s long-term leadership, he abandoned many of Deng Xiaoping’s economic principles.
The Financial Times reported that there is growing evidence that since taking power in 2012, Xi Jinping has insisted that “the party leads everything” and that the party has increasingly dominated the economy and civil society, making it harder for China to change in the future. , not to mention reversing destructive decisions.
The CCP has revived once dormant grassroots party organizations and established party branches in private and foreign companies. The CCP has tightened control over the media, education, religion and culture, stifled civil society, and cracked down on protest movements in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
The CCP’s control of the economy, especially the dynamic private sector, while tightly regulating the real estate sector, has brought the two most important growth engines of the Chinese economy to a standstill. Both policies are part of Xi Jinping’s broader agenda of “common prosperity”.
Lance Gore, a China expert at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute, believes Xi is leading China in the “wrong direction”, saying: “How much space do you give the market and grassroots officials, how much freedom do you allow individuals to have, these Even more fundamental than a policy issue. Over time, the consequences will manifest.”
“Xi Jinping’s centralization of power has created many problems,” said an academic and government policy adviser in Beijing. On the surface, Xi Jinping and the central government have the final say on everything, but how can one leader control 1.4 billion people? You can’t spy on what everyone is doing and thinking.”
“Xi Jinping has a tense relationship with the US,” Guo Liangping said. “I don’t know how much innovation China can have when you compete with the US at the highest level. You don’t have that kind of dynamism and creativity.”
In 2018, when the Sino-US trade war started, the CCP imposed retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products such as wheat and soybeans in the United States. Xi Jinping was determined to strengthen China’s food security. Under his orders, many fish ponds, orchards, and nurseries were destroyed and used for rice cultivation. and wheat.
A rural entrepreneur in Hubei province told the Financial Times he laid off 20 workers this year after authorities told him to turn his nursery into a paddy field. “Eight of them lived in poverty when I hired them. Now, because of the CCP’s food security actions, they are poor again,” he said.
A county-level official in Zhejiang province said he had no choice but to implement the government’s food security policy. This spring, the official and his colleagues destroyed the water bamboo seedlings of local farmers, promising to compensate them for less than 10 percent of expected profits.
A flower farmer in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province said that the influence of CCP leaders is greater than the weather. “Since ancient times, Chinese farmers have depended on the sky for food.” The flower farmer said that this year he was forced to empty his 600-mu tree and plant nursery and switch to rice. . “Our biggest risk right now is government policy, you never know when your farm or nursery, backed by policy a few years ago, will become illegal,” he said.
Compared with the 19th National Congress, Xi Jinping’s speech at the 20th National Congress has a significant change, and no longer emphasizes economic development and economic reform. Instead, the words “security” and “national security” appeared 50 times in the report.
The “Financial Times” analyzed that there are few signs that Xi Jinping wants to change his mind, which means that he may continue to go further and further on the basis of possible major policy mistakes.
Clearing Policy
Some experts point out that the CCP’s zero-clearing policy has many similarities with the one-child policy implemented by the CCP in 1979. Both are brutally and arbitrarily executed by grass-roots officials, exercising unfettered power in their fields. Both policies proved disastrous for the economy, and both belonged to one-size-fits-all social control.
Similar to the one-child policy, the zero-out policy has spawned a vast and lucrative agency of testing and quarantine centers.
“Despite the excessive impact of the policy, it is difficult for the government to take back the policy because of the huge bureaucracy created to enforce it,” Wang Feng, a sociologist and China expert at the University of California, Irvine, told the Financial Times.
The CCP’s insistence on the zero policy shows that Beijing prioritizes politics over science and manages the party’s image, rather than public health, as the goal of zero support. And Xi Jinping’s stance of zeroing out regardless of the cost also shows that the CCP can sacrifice economic development for political and social control.
At the opening of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 16, Xi Jinping made a high degree of defense for the “clearing policy” in his speech. He emphasized that because of “adherence to dynamic clearing and unswerving”, “people’s lives and health have been protected to the greatest extent”. “Significant positive results have been achieved in economic and social development”.
The BBC reported that Xi Jinping’s speech did not in any way acknowledge the social and economic pain caused by the “zero policy”. Lockdowns, mass nucleic acid testing, health code scanning, quarantines, travel restrictions will all continue for the foreseeable future.
Although some CCP officials have reservations about the zero-clearing policy, it has not sparked a strong political backlash within the CCP. Especially given the intensity of Xi Jinping’s long-running anti-corruption campaign, CCP officials are concerned about the consequences of antagonizing top leaders, and they are wary of undermining the party’s grip on power that is the ultimate source of privilege for them and their families Assure.
The CCP’s extreme “zero policy” has sparked more and more boycotts in China. Just a few days before the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, some protesters hung two “anti-Party banners” on the Sitong Bridge in Beijing. Among them, “No nucleic acid to eat, no blockade to be free” reflects the true psychology of many people in China. . Pictures and videos of the protests quickly went viral on the Chinese internet, with people calling the protesters “warriors” and online censors quickly censoring and blocking speech.
“Chinese Dream” becomes “moisturizing” to go abroad
Xi Jinping also brought up the “China Dream,” but Richard McGregor, a senior researcher at the Lowy Institute in Australia, told CNN, “Xi Jinping leads the party, the party leads China, and China (the CCP) leads the world. It’s basically the plan (of the Chinese dream).”
For pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and the Muslim minority in Xinjiang, the “China Dream” is their nightmare. Countless human rights lawyers, activists, journalists, professors and businessmen across the country are also suffering in prisons, or silenced in fear.
For ordinary Chinese, the luster of the “Chinese Dream” is gradually fading. Young people who choose to “lie down” in the face of enormous pressure, depositors who have lost their life savings in rural banks, and home buyers who refuse to pay mortgages on unfinished houses , as well as business owners, laid-off workers and residents who have been left without a livelihood by the CCP’s ruthless zero policy. Some of them may have supported Xi and his vision before, but are now paying the price for his policies.
“Run” has become a buzzword in China, who advocate immigration to escape a dark future doomed under Communist Party rule. The CCP has repeatedly boasted that the east is rising and the west is falling, but more and more people are “running”, which shows that many Chinese people have lost confidence in the CCP regime.
In the face of the US technology war, the CCP is powerless to fight back
Technology will drive modern economic growth, but China has faced U.S. tariffs, financial sanctions and trade restrictions since 2017, culminating in a sweeping order by the U.S. government on Oct. 7 limiting Beijing’s access to artificial intelligence, supercomputing and high-end chips in other fields.
At the 20th National Congress on Sunday, Xi Jinping vowed to “resolutely win the tough battle for key core technologies.” He promised to accelerate innovation in key areas of “technological self-reliance” and said “the launch of a number of strategic, overall and long-term major national projects will be accelerated.”
In many ways, Xi’s defiant tone masks the problems facing China’s economy. China is facing one of its most challenging times in decades, as zero-pollution policies and a real estate crackdown put pre-pandemic 5% growth out of reach. Market analysts don’t think Xi’s speech will change this short-term outlook.
Despite spending tens of billions of dollars, in addition to failing to make a major breakthrough in chip technology, China faces its slowest economic growth in more than four decades, excluding the 2020 recession caused by the outbreak. Restrictive containment policies have cut off tourists and hurt spending, while youth unemployment has hit record highs. The housing crisis has also sparked a wave of boycotts against mortgages.
The international environment is getting worse
In the past few decades, successive leaders of the CCP have clearly defined the United States as the main threat to the CCP and made the United States the focus of the CCP’s grand strategy.
Rush Doshi, director of China affairs at the White House National Security Council, said that Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “keeping a low profile” is a “strategic approach” to reduce the risk of U.S. containment and provide conditions for the CCP’s independent development. But after the 2008 global financial crisis, the CCP launched a bolder plan to seek to establish its regional hegemony in Asia. After 2016, the CCP adjusted its strategy to overtake the United States in the competition for global leadership as its ultimate goal.
Beijing has also repeatedly warned against the “infiltration” of Western values such as democracy, press freedom and judicial independence. Xi has eliminated foreign NGOs, churches, Western films and textbooks, all seen as tools of foreign influence.
Abroad, the CCP implements the Wolf Warrior foreign policy, openly competes with the U.S. for global influence, and uses its economic power to gain geopolitical influence, making U.S.-China relations at their lowest point since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Views of China have become increasingly negative in many advanced economies during Xi Jinping’s decade in power, and in some countries, unfavorable views have reached record highs in recent years.
Beijing’s sweeping claims to sovereignty also pit many of its neighbors in the region. China has built and militarized islands in the South China Sea, sparking military tensions over a disputed island chain with Japan and a bloody border clash with India. The CCP has also stepped up its military intimidation against Taiwan in an attempt to unilaterally change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, triggering vigilance and condemnation from the United States, Britain, Japan, Australia, and Europe and the United States.
Even in continental Europe, ties between China and the European Union have fractured over the past two years as Beijing struggles to economically strangle Lithuania in retaliation for deepening ties with Taiwan.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in May that China under the CCP was “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.”
The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China is underway, and Xi Jinping is expected to receive an unprecedented third term in power comparable to that of Mao Zedong. But Xi Jinping presides over an increasingly aggressive and expansive one-party state powered by four decades of economic development. From the black box of communism to thorny economic issues, from public grievances caused by comprehensive internal control, to external enemies, Xi Jinping’s third term is far more severe than the second term.
Responsible editor: Lin Yan#