China’s President Xi: Crossing the Rubicon

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Picture: https://pixabay.com/photos/huangpu-river-pudong-shanghai-china-5501210/

“… die Chinese allesvreter (the Chinese gourmand) …” – Breyten Breytenbach, Filosofie Kafee, LitNet, 2022

“China – the West’s most productive partner in globalisation has mutated into something much nastier and more dangerous ….” – Martyn van der Weyer, The Spectator, 29 October 2022

“If all one billion of us undertake multi-party elections, we will certainly run into a full-scale civil war. Taking precedence over all China’s problems is stability.” – Deng Xiaoping, leader of China, 1989. Michael Wood, The story of China.

“At the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased/ And the epitaph drear: “A fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East” – Rudyard Kipling, “The Naulahka”

I have always been a bit of a romantic about China, that ancient civilisation. The Middle Kingdom has exercised a mystical grip on my imagination ever since my father, a South African pilot during the Korean War, brought back an armful of souvenirs of paintings of landscapes and cascading waterfalls done on silk, in the “naif” style of that part of the world. Chinese lanterns enchanted me, and still do. I grew up reading all those wonderful novels by Pearl Buck, who lived in China as a daughter of missionaries and learned Mandarin before English, who was caught up in the violent civil war of the Warlord Era in the 1920s, and whose book recreating the lives of ordinary Chinese people, The good earth, won her the Nobel Prize; it sold millions of copies and influenced a generation in the West. 

Pearl Buck was also one of the few Westerners to predict presciently that China would someday become a superpower. Her compatriots in America, however, were much more interested in all those black and white movies where Chinese settings were mainstream. Dr Fu Manchu, the epitome of the sinister side of all things Chinese, was a gift to Hollywood thrillers. Great films have been made about China since; and indeed, in China itself, despite censorship, critically acclaimed films have continued to be made. 

In later years, looking at China through the prism of an interest in Africa, I was fascinated to discover that the Chinese were pottering around our East African coastline in 1407, 50 years before the Portuguese arrived. There is now an entire literature around the voyages of the early Ming period, especially the seven legendary voyages of that great admiral, Cheng Ho – or Zheng He, as he is alternatively spelled – Grand Eunuch of the Three Treasures, down the coast of East Africa, distributing gifts of Ming pottery and carting back giraffes and the like – the germ of a trade network. It is thought by some scholars that the admiral sailed as far as the Cape, mapping the coastline, and that his men penetrated the interior as far as Great Zimbabwe, where precious artefacts dating from the era have been found buried beneath the brooding, great walls. Further reading is suggested at the end of this article.

The point of Zheng He’s voyages – which ended when, for reasons of obscure internal politics, the Chinese turned their back on trade abroad and burned their ships – is that the revival of Chinese trade with the world as a result of globalisation, pulls a golden thread from the Chinese courts of the 15th century to the present time, where China has come to dominate trade with Africa, worth some 200 billion dollars today. Paradoxically, apartheid South Africa was an inadvertent catalyst in this process, when newly independent southern African states, such as Zambia, wished to curtail their dependency on the Durban and Richards Bay harbours.

This was in the early 1960s, when Mao Zedong’s communist China supported revolutionary liberation governments and movements in Africa in a big way. China built the Tanzam Railway to bypass the apartheid ports. The line ran from the copper-producing areas of Zambia to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Western countries were unwilling to support the project, and Mao seized his moment. China has continued expanding into Africa ever since building huge infrastructure projects.

In the Mao era, many Westerners were still willing to give China the benefit of the doubt, despite the “Great Helmsman’s” excesses. After all, he had unified mainland China, after much political division over centuries, and improvements were made, inter alia in the rights of women, education and health. But this also came at great cost – the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine cost the lives of millions, while uncontrolled industrial expansion has simply obliterated nature in many areas.

Mao died in 1976 and was replaced in time by Deng Xiaoping, the great “reformer” who gave hope to the world that China was willing to embrace a market economy, wished to sell their products abroad, and would therefore see their best interest as cooperating with the West. As China then did, indeed, during the Deng years, become relatively wealthy and produce a middle class, there were also hopes that this would lead to greater internal democracy. The United States and Europe turned this vision into policy and encouraged open trade with China.

Hopes deferred, alas

These hopes have, more’s the pity, progressively been dashed ever since the suppression of student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the years since, it has become clear that China was not yet ready to embrace pluralistic democracy, and has in addition been rattled by the collapse of the USSR in neighbouring Russia.

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These hopes have, more’s the pity, progressively been dashed ever since the suppression of student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the years since, it has become clear that China was not yet ready to embrace pluralistic democracy, and has in addition been rattled by the collapse of the USSR in neighbouring Russia.
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But then, rather unexpectedly, we entered the period of Xi Jinping ten years ago. Once again, optimism that China could yet reform and embrace democracy ran high. Initially, Xi seemed to be the man to make the transition. He visited the UK and quaffed ale in a pub with British PM David Cameron. He said all the right things, made all the right noises. The brutal putting down of protestors at Tiananmen looked like yesteryear’s China.

China joined the World Trade Organization, subscribing to the globalised world’s rules-based trading system. Former British prime minister Tony Blair was so enthused, he predicted there was now in China an “unstoppable momentum towards democracy”.

But then, in the last few years, it has gone completely pear-shaped. Why? I am indebted to the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, for an answer to this question, which has bothered many.

Patten explains in his just published Diaries (see bibliography) that Xi Jinping felt threatened by “the attempts of the aggressive and talented Bo Xilai to elbow his way to the top of the party with the support of Zhou Yongkang who combined both power and patronage in the energy sector and in the security field”. The upshot has been that far from embracing a new world of freedom for China, Xi Jinping, recognising an existential threat when he saw one, explicitly ordered his government to conduct an “intense struggle” against liberal democracy. The enemy, the threat to China, was itemised: Western constitutional democracy; the allegation that human rights were universally applicable and valid; the concept of civil society; the West’s idea of journalism and open historical enquiry.

Patten says that from this moment onwards, a crackdown began across society – the concentration camps, forced abortions and sterilisation in Xinjiang, crackdowns on faith groups like Muslims, Buddhists and Christians, stamping out free enquiry at universities, greater control of the internet – all were in the crosshairs. Moreover, those who polish the cult of Xi, present the great man as someone almost superhuman, with the wisdom of Solomon and the eloquence of Lincoln. This cult, says Patten, boils down to three positions: first, grievance-infused nationalism; second, the notion that the Communist Party embodies all that is best in China’s history and culture; and third, obeying Xi at all times and everywhere – to discover what the Communist Party under Xi favours, you need to attempt to penetrate the vacuous waffle of “Xi Jinping thought”, (now) turned into a series of brainwashing books for students and children of all ages.

Patten says this is a form of bloviation: “The art of speaking as long as the occasion warrants and saying nothing. This is ‘Xi Jinping thought’.”

Paraphrasing US ambassador George Kennan’s famous 1946 comment on Russia that “[o]ur respective views of reality are simply incompatible”, Patten sums up the essence of the West’s relationship with Xi’s China:

Our views of the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang and Buddhists in Tibet are incompatible with those of Beijing’s leaders. Our views of the trade in body parts are incompatible. Our views on forced labour are incompatible. Our views on freedom of religion and freedom of expression are incompatible. Our views on military threats to Taiwan and even India are incompatible. Our views on Hong Kong are certainly incompatible.

The Chinese gourmand

Die Chinese allesvreter. This gourmand description of the Chinese “persona” by Breyten Breytenbach is a pretty good description of China’s “colonial” policy on Africa. But this is exactly what the West also did for so many years – extract raw minerals from Africa with cheap African labour, ship it back to the West and produce goods from the raw material employing their own people. It’s precisely what China has been doing, too. Approximately five million Chinese also now live in Africa – maybe more, no one knows for certain – with hundreds of Chinese companies up and down the continent. The Chinese have also been willing to advance money for infrastructure projects that the West won’t, with the project as security. If the country can’t pay, then title is transferred to the lender. The great thing for many African countries is that China sets no pre-conditions relating to human rights and the like for these loans and projects. There is little due diligence Western-style. The Chinese are avid for raw materials from Africa and are not too fussy how they source it. They’ll undercut all other bidders on projects as well, generally bringing in their own people to do the work and not hiring jobless locals.

To a large extent, globalisation has allowed the West to piggyback on this old production model that served them so well in colonial days. Cheap energy from Russia and products made with cheap labour from China have been the norm. But this party is now coming to an end, given the war in Ukraine, the end of energy from Russia and the rise of Xi Jinping effectively to dictator for life. The West may be forced to boycott cheap imports from China, depending on what happens next.

Gourmands are not particular about how and what they eat, so long as there is plenty of it, and with his new rubber-stamped iron grip on China, Xi’s response to the Chinese property collapse, stock market sell-off and high-tech trade war with the US, as well as the negative consequences of the ongoing draconian COVID crackdown, is harsher autocracy at home and abroad – a threat especially for Taiwan, key producer of computer chips for the West. China is greedy for these little gizmos, now that Biden has embarked on an openly hostile trade relationship with Beijing, cutting China off from crucial technology. Last month’s US senate report suggesting that COVID did, after all, “leak” from a laboratory “gain of function” experiment in Wuhan, and never originated in the wild, is not helpful for improved relations, either.

Will Xi annex Taiwan, as Putin did parts of Ukraine? Such speculation is now rife, with a group of eight European lawmakers, some on Beijing’s “black list”, visiting Taiwan this month on a fact-finding mission, after Xi repeated his ambition to “reunify” Taiwan by force if necessary. Members of the group are reported as saying they are alert to similarities between Ukraine and Taiwan.

Reaction from Brussels to Xi’s elevation to the new Eastern Napoleon has also been swift. EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, explained:

China is now a rival to the EU. When we say China is our rival, that means our systems are in rivalry. And the Chinese are trying to explain to the world that their system is much better. Because, maybe, although Chinese citizens are not going to be choosing their head of government, they are promised food, heat and social services.

He went on to say that in democracies, where people can choose their governments, material conditions don’t always automatically improve alongside that choice. But in China, Xi is making the trains run on time, Mussolini-style. The Western system may not have as much appeal to poorer countries as we think.

The EU’s about-turn on China follows its U-turn on Russia earlier this year. Borrell said EU prosperity had been based on China and Russia – energy and markets. But no longer. Access to both countries will now become difficult for political reasons, and economic development for the EU in the future will require a major restructuring of the European economy.

The adjustment will be tough and is already leading to tensions within the bloc, with Germany’s leader, Herr Scholz, deciding to go it alone and take a party of German businessmen to China this month to meet President Xi. This independent stance by Berlin, following on Germany’s unilateral subsidising of domestic energy prices without consulting her European partners, has deeply upset President Macron of France, who insists the EU must act in harness on these issues and not go it alone.

Meanwhile, the EU’s digital chief, Margrethe Vestager, is bluntly outspoken about the China menace:

We have had a hard awakening into the era of weaponised interdependence. Some say we were naive. I do not think so. We now see the stark limits of a production model based on cheap Russian energy and cheap Chinese labour. … [The EU] wanted to bridge the digital divide in developing and emerging countries in a way that upholds fundamental rights. China is the threat in this regard … many developing countries are presented with cheap digital infrastructure which comes at a grim cost in terms of surveillance, stifling of freedoms and personal data extraction. We have seen countries where the faces of the entire population have been given away in exchange for technology … the autocratic model of digitalisation is spreading fast.

Last week, Denmark also published a security report singling out China and Russia as the two threats facing the country and the EU, warning that the Danish military must be prepared to confront Russia in Europe, and may even have to move east at some point to deal with Chinese threats to freedom of navigation operations in the Indo-Pacific.

Such outspoken fighting talk is very rare coming from an EU member, but it shows the way the wind is blowing, and more importantly how quickly the hopes that China may reform itself in the direction of a liberal democracy have been dashed.

Other events the past few weeks have also highlighted the new-found “tiger diplomacy” confidence of China; in the United Kingdom, Chinese consular staff, in breach of diplomatic protocol, physically attacked an anti-Xi demonstrator in broad daylight in Manchester and appeared unapologetic about it.

In Holland, the Dutch foreign ministry announced that it is investigating reports that China has set up illegal “police stations” that allegedly monitor dissidents. The “police stations” claim to offer diplomatic assistance to Chinese nationals, but have not been registered with the Dutch government.

Spain, meanwhile, said that there are believed to be 36 such “police stations” operating in the EU, their purpose being to intimidate and monitor the activities of Chinese, legally resident in European countries.

In the UK, there is a call for the Chinese Confucian Institutes at various UK universities to be closed down, while incorporating Chinese telephone technology like Huawei into UK communications infrastructure is verboten.

And so it goes; the drumbeat to a new world order begins.

What the Europeans and Americans are telling us is that the scene seems set for China, in years to come, to become the dominant threat of what we know as the “rules-based” system, where the terms of international trade and adjudication of disputes lie within the ambit of such organisations as the World Trade Organization, the International Labour Organization and other similar bodies. China might leave these bodies altogether. With Xi’s latest incarnation, the die looks cast – Alea iacta est, the phrase attributed to Julius Caesar as he led his army across the Rubicon River.

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We know all about such moments in South Africa. Just when it seemed reform was at hand – real reform – the Groot Krokodil, PW Botha, waved his finger at the world in 1985 and said back off, and crossed the Rubicon.
But crossing the Rubicon, as always, carries risks. PW Botha lasted a few years more, Julius Caesar had his Ides of March moment not long after – and Xi Jinping?
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We know all about such moments in South Africa. Just when it seemed reform was at hand – real reform – the Groot Krokodil, PW Botha, waved his finger at the world in 1985 and said back off, and crossed the Rubicon.

But crossing the Rubicon, as always, carries risks. PW Botha lasted a few years more, Julius Caesar had his Ides of March moment not long after – and Xi Jinping? He may have overreached himself as well, wishing to divert attention away from a collapsing economy and a resentful population, by a foreign military adventure. Taiwan beckons. Clearly, the Americans and the Australians are also coming to this conclusion; how else to explain the relocation of US nuclear-capable B52 long-range bombers to northern Queensland this month?

Next year, in 2023, South Africa assumes the Chair of the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), putting Pretoria in a position to build on Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” initiative, which, at enormous cost, has been connecting China with central Asia and Europe. In fact, the first freight trains carrying containers directly from western China, recently reached the UK. In time, the system will reduce sea traffic in the northern hemisphere, with positive environmental consequences. However, Belt and Road maritime routes have also recently been added to Indian Ocean destinations, including Africa, reprising the great Chinese sea voyages of the 15th century. Perhaps Pretoria might mark its election to the BRICS office by naming this new maritime route the Zheng He Road, in honour of the great admiral, whose memory will certainly continue to inspire romantics everywhere.

Bibliography

Note: All quotes in this article can be sourced to the following books:

The Hong Kong Diaries by Chris Patten, Allen Lane, 2022

The story of China – a portrait of a civilisation and its people by Michael Wood, Simon and Schuster, 2020

Burying the bones – Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling, Profile Books, 2010

Old Africa rediscovered by Basil Davidson, Victor Gollancz, 1960 

Science and civilisation in China, Volume 6, by Dr Joseph Needham (advance copy quoted from by Basil Davidson)

Africa – altered states by Richard Dowden, Portobello Books, London, 2014

Hidden hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, One World, 2020

Various recent press sources, including Politico, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Atlantic Council

Also read:

Die belangrikheid van kritieke infrastruktuur in China se Afrikastrategie

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