The Great Hall of the People in Beijing was the scene of a vote to remove the two-term presidential limit. I looked up at the huge red star ceiling that was over the Chinese Communist Party delegates. Two European diplomats were gossiping.
It is clear that the magnitude of what was transpiring in that auditorium 4 12 years ago was too much for us to comprehend. Beijing has led a campaign of imprisonment and indoctrination of its Uighur Muslim minority. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia was supported by China, which parroted Putin's excuses regarding NATO expansion. The man in the blue tie sitting below me was the architect of all this tumult and he was the leader of China for the rest of his life.
The emperor will be crowned on October 16. The start of his third leadership term will be marked by the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which will be held in the same building. It ends the institutionalization of political power around the party that shepherded China's economic miracle and centers it on a single individual in a cult of personality. The most powerful leader in modern history is at the age of 69.
China's president is the most powerful person in the world.
It is an apotheosis that threatens the stability. China's autocracy has been preached as a new option for other countries who want to speed up their development. All those who depend on China's $18.7 trillion economy will be at risk from the worsening rivalry between the two countries.
China is the top trading partner to more than 120 countries. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been locked down, factories have been shuttered and container ships have been left outside ports as a result of the zero-COVID policy.
It is also stoking resentment abroad. The World Bank expects global growth to be 2.5% this year, down from 5.6% in the previous year. The heads of the FBI and Britain's MI5 stated in July that Beijing was the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security. There have been border skirmishes with India, economic warfare with Australia, and standoffs with Vietnam, the Philippines, and the US. Confidence in China may never recover from the announcement of a "no limits" partnership with Putin just weeks before his invasion of Ukrainian. Jon M. Huntsman is a former US ambassador to both China and Russia. Their dislike of the U.S brings them together.
The column talks about how Ukraine turned the tide against Russia.
The new Cold War could be even more devastating due to economic interdependence. For the first time in human history, the global economy has been decided by one man. Professor Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, says that the future is bright for the leader of the free world.
The idea that the U.S.-led engagement sparked by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 70s has been a failure has been galvanized by China reverting to Mao-era absolutes. That wouldn't be right. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty as a result of China's rise to the top of the trading world.
Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency in 2016 changed the relationship between the two countries. Many Democrats were against the trade tariffs and Trump's racist rhetoric, but now they are all in agreement on his campaign against China. President Joe Biden has framed both his domestic and foreign agenda as a battle between democracies and autocracies, and he believes that within a decade China will own America.
It's time to stop pretending that political families aren't off limits.
It is marked today. The number of Americans who have a negative view of China has gone up in the last few years. Chinese graduate students and visiting scholars are not allowed to stay in the US for more than one year. Chinese students are not allowed to work on emerging technologies. Business groups fought back when the U.S. security agencies tried to limit technology transfers to China. They no longer support engagement because they are tired of regulatory shake downs.
They are pushing other nations to join their blocs. The world's growth was the lowest in a decade before the Pandemic. China and the U.S. together account for over 40% of the global economy, but zero-COVID and geopolitics are forcing governments to invest heavily in bringing production chains home or to a friendlier place. Thailand's former Prime Minister says that Southeast Asian countries are under pressure to side with the U.S. There is a real risk for all the other countries in the world to feel that we are reverting to two camps.
Security is worried by the diplomatic freeze. Retaking control of Taiwan, which was politically split from the mainland in 1949 following China's civil war, is a "historic mission" and vows to "shatter" any move towards formal independence for the island of 23 million. In a speech to mark the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, President XI said that Chinese people would never allow a foreign force to bully, oppress or subjugate them. Anyone who tries to do that will have their head bashed against the Great Wall of steel.
Military drills, the severing of commercial ties, and an ongoing suspension of communication with the US were some of the consequences of Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. The Prime Minister of Singapore said in August that a storm was gathering. The U.S.-China relationship is getting worse. In September, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved $4.5 billion in military aid to Taiwan, while Biden promised to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.
China has a zero- carbon policy.
The purges that led to his rise should not be underestimated. There is no off-ramp, opposition, or checks and balances in the regime he commands. Cheng Li, a senior fellow specializing in elite Chinese politics, says any speculation of a power struggle is groundless.
It had an inauspicious start. He was accepted into the CCP upon his 10th application after being rejected seven times by the communist youth league. The Cultural Revolution was a frenzied campaign to eliminate counter-revolutionary elements and the father of his son was a revolutionary comrade. At the age of 15, after his father fell out with Mao, he was sent down to a cave dwelling. After a few months, unable to stand the squalor of rural life, he escaped to Beijing and was arrested and sent back. He was sent to a work camp to dig trenches and only returned to the capital after seven years. The President's pilgrimage site is called Liangjiahe, and it's where ambitious people must go to get promoted.
After Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated his father, he played a key role instilling market reforms in the south. After earning a chemical-engineering degree at Beijing's Tsinghua University, he worked for the military for a short time before moving to China's dusty provinces. China's future President led a five-strong county-level delegation to learn modern farming techniques. Terry Branstad, the U.S. ambassador to China who was the governor of Iowa at the time, said that Xi was shy. In southern Fujian province, he was tasked with attracting foreign investment to help fuel China's export- powered economic revival. It was here in 1987 that he married his second wife. In 2002 he was promoted to a leadership role. He expressed amazement that his level of education was so low when he was asked about meeting the president. Following a corruption scandal, the boss of the party in the city was demoted. With his ascension to Vice President a year later, Xi looked destined for the top job but had to fend off a late challenge from another princeling rival, Bo Xilai, who had built a populist following as the crime-breaking boss of the central city of Chongqing Party elders were suspicious of Bo because he sidestepped the party apparatus to appeal directly to the people.
He was out of the public eye for two weeks just as he was about to take the presidency. There were rumors of a coup. According to most analysts, a standoff occurred where the party elders were told to either back him or find someone else. They made a choice based on fear. Bo, already arrested for corruption, was sentenced to jail.
Before he became the leader of the free world, the common perception was that he was bland. His warmth toward the U.S.suggested good times for bilateral relations.
In retrospect, the circumstances of Xi's rise seem to have made it clear to him that the country was at risk of falling apart. If that were the case, China would be different today. Yuen Yuen Ang is a political scientist at the University of Michigan Deng stopped short of an independent legislature and judiciary in his reforms because he thought they were a hitch on efficiency. The result was that the corrupt became more powerful. The experience with Bo showed that the party was in danger of collapsing.
In Oxford this summer, exiled Chinese tycoon Desmond Shum said that when Xi came to power, everyone in Beijing tried to assess him. He is not a smart person, has no talent, and things will continue as before.
Shum had a hard time learning. He fled China with his son in 2015, even though his ex- wife was not so lucky. She disappeared from her office in the Genesis Beijing building in September of last year. A phone call from Shum's ex-wife confirmed that she had been taken away by the state. It's not clear why, but some think it's related to connections with high-level officials deemed undesirable by the president. His purges were ruthless. Shum is the author of Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China. He has an ideal state of China, but he doesn't tell the world.
Chinese leaders have launched anti corruption purges before. His campaign concerned not only bribes and escort but also political thought and fealty. Tsang says that the anti corruption campaign was a drive to remove people who weren't loyal to the leader. There was a change in Chinese governance. Deng codified the separation of party and state to handle policy and implementation in China. Both have evolved into one. In order to make sure that he is committed to his political thought, the first thing that Xi did in the new year was to change the criteria for evaluating leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
Susan Shirk, a deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Bill Clinton and author of Overreach: How China De, says that in the past, everyone took for granted that the Chinese leadership was going to make adjustments to keep the economy going. They are damaging their own economic development.
Relations between China and the rest of the world are not going well. Since Deng launched his market-led reform and opening of the 1980s, the deal was that theCCP could hold the levers of power in return for improving the lives of the common people. From 1978 to 2012 the GDP per capita increased by 400%. The GDP fell in the second quarter of 2022, with youth unemployment at an all time high.
The official overreach is to be blamed. In order to clip the wings of tech firms acting as quasibanks or monopolies, regulators wiped out the value of Chinese tech firms by decimating investor confidence. Despite the questionable viability of projects, over $1 trillion has poured into the Belt and Road Initiative. According to the New York City–based Rhodium Group, some $52 billion of Chinese loans had to be restructured in the next two years. A real estate bubble that accounts for a quarter of national GDP and 70% of household wealth is at risk due to a regulatory squeeze on lending to property developers. A lot of Chinese are boycotting mortgage payments. The officials were tasked with reducing the cost of raising children made after-school classes illegal.
The handling of COVID-19 by China is the worst. In the spring of this year, more than 20 million people were locked up in their homes, some for over five months, in order to prevent them from getting the disease. Entire apartment blocks were forcefully taken to squalid central quark facilities because of a single case. Mothers were separated from babies, family pets were beaten to death in the street, and an unknown number of people died from rooftops. Not enough attention was given to getting vaccines into arms because of the fact that only Chinese jabs have been approved.
China's property crisis is threatening to drag down its steel industry.
In a video that went viral in early April, an elderly Shanghai resident appeared to speak for the entire city during a lengthy evisceration of da bai, or "big whites," as hazmat-suited public health officials are called. He said that he needed to apply science to what he was doing. Are you trying to do something different? You're just making problems. The atmosphere of terror has been created by everyone. Fear, frustration, and helplessness are what is found in China today.
The question is whether the personnel shuffles at the congress will lead to a shift from meritocracy toocracy. The Politburo Standing Committee, the nation's top political body, has the political heft to temper his excesses when necessary. The consequences for Chinese governance could be dire if three of the most senior members are forced out early. The president will surprise people from time to time. A lot of people underestimated him a decade ago. I don't know if he will keep adapting.
There won't be a lot of distraction in the Great Hall of the People. Journalists and diplomats have to watch the proceedings remotely because invitations are very limited. Dissent to the emperor will be a thing of the past among the party crowd. The party will appear unified. Nobody could say whether it was a blue tie or a birthday suit.
Reporting by Simmone Shah/ New York.
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