The Red Emperor : Is Xi Jinping seeking to build Fascism with Chinese characteristics ?

Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream’

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s tenure has already been marked by high ambition and aggression, including territorial and maritime expansionism. Xi’s vision, the ‘Chinese dream’, is to make China the world’s leading power by 2049, the centenary of Communist rule.

But Xi – who has just crowned himself China’s new emperor and elevated his favourite ‘yes’ men to the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, may be biting off more than he can chew. His third term is likely to take a toll on China’s economy and international standing while leading the country to a major war over Taiwan.

Xi’s decade-long reign has already turned China into a wrathful, expansionist power that pursues ‘wolf warrior’ tactics and debt-trap diplomacy, and flouts international law at will. Two successive US administrations have described as genocide and crimes against humanity Xi’s Xinjiang gulag, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi period. About a million Muslims continue to languish in Xi’s gulag, without Xi or China facing tangible Western sanctions.

The International costs of Xi’s increasing authoritarianism are apparent from the devastating consequences of the China-originating Covid-19 pandemic, which officially has killed more than 6.5 million people worldwide. Nearly three years on, the world still does not know whether Covid-19 began as a natural spillover from wildlife or was triggered by the accidental leak of a lab-enhanced virus in Wuhan city. What is apparent though, is that Xi’s regime lied about the initial spread of the disease, hid evidence of human-to-human transmission, and silenced doctors who sought to warn about the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

More ominously, a massive cover-up in China to obscure the genesis of the virus suggests the world may never know the truth. Beijing has refused to cooperate with international investigations, characterising them as ‘origin-tracing terrorism’, and instead peddled conspiracy theories.

Xi, meanwhile, has accelerated national production of nuclear warheads so rapidly that the Pentagon, in just one year, revised up its estimate of the number of such weapons China will deploy by 2030 from 400 to more than 1,000. China has already fielded its first operational hypersonic-weapons system and ‘intends to increase the peacetime readiness of its nuclear forces by moving to a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture with an expanded silo-based force’, according to a Pentagon report. The unprecedented speed and scale of the nuclear build-up is linked to Xi’s international expansionism, including seeking China’s global primacy by 2049.

But thanks to Xi’s actions, China’s global image has been badly dented, forcing the country to increasingly rely on its coercive power. A 2021 global survey found that unfavourable views of China were at or near historic highs in most advanced economies.

Yet, instead of undertaking a course correction, Xi is doubling down on his scofflaw actions, as underscored by China’s stepped-up bullying of Taiwan. After Beijing’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayan borderlands with India, Nepal and Bhutan, Taiwan is likely to be Xi’s next target.

It speaks for itself that, even before Xi secured a precedent-defying third term as the country’s leader, his record in power was drawing comparisons to the past century’s most brutal rulers.

For example, Robert O’Brien, National Security Advisor to the then-US President Donald Trump, last year equated Xi to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Some others have compared Xi to Adolf Hitler, even coining the nickname ‘Xitler’.

Xi, for his part, has cultivated a Mao Zedong-style personality cult and embarked on completing the expansionist agenda that Communist China’s founder left unfinished. Indeed, Xi has sought to model himself on Mao, the 20th Century’s top butcher.

Like Mao Zedong Thought, Xi Jinping Thought has been enshrined in China’s Constitution and made the central doctrine guiding the Communist Party. Also like Mao, Xi is now reverently referred to as renmin lingxiu, or ‘People’s Leader’.

China’s new Mao, while ideologically committed to classical Marxism-Leninism, as his speech at the opening of the Party Congress underscored, is apparently seeking to build fascism with Chinese characteristics.

A critical element of Xi’s strategy to realise the Chinese dream has been the ‘One Belt, One Road’ project, renamed as the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, under which China has considerably invested in infrastructure projects abroad, with the goal of bringing countries firmly into China’s orbit. What Xi has called ‘The project of the century’ has no parallel in modern history. The BRI is more than 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan, America’s post-World War II initiative to aid the reconstruction of Western Europe’s devastated economies.

Although the BRI has of late faced increasingly strong headwinds over partner countries’ debt-trap concerns, compelling Beijing to scale back the initiative, its significant and lasting impact should not be underestimated. The BRI, however, also remains a symbol of China’s imperial overreach, with Xi stretching the country’s resources to help advance his aggressive foreign policy.

Xi’s strategic overreach in international relations actually mirrors his domestic overreach, including imposing mass lockdowns and quarantines as part of a zero-Covid policy that has exacted major economic and social costs. Xi’s domestic overreach has extended to tightening the reins on the private sector, including the tech industry, as China increasingly becomes a state-driven economy that prioritises politics and national security over growth. Although China’s economic rise was driven by its embrace of a free market, Xi’s speech at the Party Congress emphasised Marxism more than markets.

According to a Chinese proverb, ‘To feed the ambition in your heart is like carrying a tiger under your arm’. The further Xi pushes his Neoimperial agenda, the more likely it is to bite him.

What Xi’s third term could bring

Surrounded by a closed circle of ‘yes’ men who will be competing among themselves to show how loyal they are, the President will likely be told only what he would like to hear. As the American writer Walter Lippmann once warned, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much”.

Xi’s centralisation of authority means he will have a freer hand to speed up China’s rise as a military and technological superpower, while crushing all dissent at home and accelerating the Sinicisation of ethnic minorities, especially Tibetans and Uighurs. With his unchecked power, Xi can now do whatever he wants.

So, unlike in the past when he could blame others for mistakes, Xi will find it more difficult to palm off responsibility for problems. After all, Xi reigns supreme and unchallenged, without any heir apparent.

Xi left little doubt that he wants China to become a world power second to none, including by reducing its reliance on Western know-how and emerging as a leading technology power in its own right.

Xi’s unbridled authority, however, does not augur well for international security and China’s own future. In fact, in a forewarning that Xi could lead China into a war, the customary phrase ‘peace and development remains the theme of the era’ was absent from his speech to the Party Congress. Instead, Xi darkly warned of ‘dangerous storms’ on the horizon.

Domestic politics in any country, including in a leading Democracy like the US, has a bearing on its foreign policy. This is especially so in the case of the world’s largest autocracy, China. Under Xi, China has discarded Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, ‘Hide your strength, bide your time’. Instead, China has increasingly taken pride in baring its claws. This trend is likely to become even more pronounced in Xi’s third term. At home, Xi’s surveillance state will likely grow by leaps and bounds. Already, China’s unrivalled surveillance, censorship and propaganda systems can control or construct a narrative. But Xi is set to further expand his Orwellian surveillance state while cultivating a climate of fear.

In fact, to stamp out dissent, Xi’s regime has been whipping up ultra-nationalism by blending the digital tools of surveillance with the political tactics of the Cultural Revolution, which claimed more than a million lives. No less ominously, China’s repression and surveillance at home is a corollary of its aggressive revisionism abroad, which is largely concentrated against its neighbours.

More repression and more heavy-handedness at home are likely to be accompanied by a more aggressive military posture and a more forceful international agenda. Xi seems to believe that Chinese money can buy international acquiescence to China’s playing by its own rules, including aggressively pursuing an expansionist agenda.

With its ‘two steps forward, one step back’ strategy, the Xi-led China will keep progressing toward its ambitious goals. Its territorial and maritime expansionism also mirrors that strategy. One can expect China to remain defiant in the face of international criticism of its renegade behaviour and actions.

– Prof. Brahma Chellaney, Geostrategist (Courtesy : Excerpts from an article in the ‘openthemagazine.com’, 28.10.2022)

One can expect China to remain defiant in the face of international criticism of its renegade behaviour and actions !