CCP turns 100: Xi and Mao + Opening up and surveillance + Ideologue on the wrong track

Dear reader,

A day for celebration? Today, on July 1, the Communist Party of China celebrates its centennial. It has thus lasted longer than any comparable organization; the Communist Party of the Soviet Union survived only 79 years. The Chinese Communist Party has thus proven that socialist systems can also be long-lived and not just cause hardship but also, in the best of cases, are capable of bringing prosperity and cosmopolitanism to the world.

But these 100 years are of course not the shining history that today’s propaganda campaign wants you to believe. From its rise to power in 1949 to the reform era starting in 1978, it has rarely made people’s lives better but more often than not changed it for the worse. Other countries, which also have been battered by war, had already reached their economic miracles during this period. The CCP’s rule, on the other hand, began not only with lost years but even with human and economic regressions.

Our first article on this great anniversary is dedicated to the period of China’s gradual opening to the world since the early 1980s. Frank Sieren sheds light on another topic of great tension which defines Chinese politics today: A struggle between opening and surveillance. Modern China allows its citizens to freely travel and invites investors into the country – a crucial difference from the Soviet Union. But the resulting contrasts are all the more perplexing. A free market, but unfree citizens. Socialism, but rampant egoism and high innovation without an open society.

And we conclude today’s briefing with a portrayal of a person who warns against this mixture of influences: Cai Xia, once a leader of the Communist Party’s inner circle. A staunch communist who has now defected to the USA. Cai observes the increasing totalitarianism and a fundamentally aggressive stance in Chinese politics with great concern. She believes that her homeland is no longer on the right path.

All this reveals how many issues the CCP is actually currently facing. Behind the beautiful facade of the celebrations, those in power are fully aware of these predicaments and are working on solutions, as we have pointed out in our articles on the CCP anniversary. On Thursday, we’ll tell you about the splendor the Party has displayed for its anniversary. And, of course, we’ll continue to keep you updated on the latest political developments.

Your
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk

A new daily dilemma: a country between openness and surveillance

By

Frank Sieren

Chinese people think in long historical dimensions, dynasties to be precise. The Chinese are also traditionally convinced that dynasties come and go in waves. After 160 years of bankruptcies, misfortunes, and mishaps between 1820 and 1980, a new period of prosperity is dawning. Now that China has largely completed its catch-up to modernization and they are able to manufacture top-quality cars and smartphones themselves, they have begun to return to the old innovative times. After all, China – a nation since around 200 BC – looks back at a long history of great innovative periods.

China’s Communist Party (CCP), founded 100 years ago, is seen as the driving force of the current dynasty, based on an ideology that was imported from the West in times of need and which always causes problems when it comes to keeping up with reality.

However, this reality shows every day because the CCP, unlike the Soviet Union at the time, allows its citizens to travel. This lets you compare for yourself which system is functioning better. The second difference: China’s CP cadres have understood perfectly well in their attempts that despite different ideological starting dispositions, the market economy is a central element and prosperity is necessary to guarantee the survival of the party. And the third difference: Competition between the West and China – some are already talking about a new Cold War – is also taking place within the country. Western companies also produce in China for the Chinese market and Chinese companies feel this pressure every day. After all, customers have the freedom of choice of which product to buy. Even Chinese citizens who don’t travel – and they still make up the majority – notice these differences. Back in the day, this would have been unthinkable in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries.

The pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping

China and the CCP owe these decisive differences above all to the reformer Deng Xiaoping, who, after the death of Mao Zedong at the end of the 1970s, demanded something unthinkable – at least in the eyes of the traditional cadres: China must allow itself to be helped by foreigners, by capitalists, imperialists – whatever they were called from the Chinese perspective at the time. A pragmatic insight but also a bitter one for proud China, which for centuries, had been self-sufficient as the “Middle Kingdom”.

This is how Shenzhen, China’s first special economic zone, came into being in 1980: Since then, the CCP ideologues have been forced to follow international reality. And to this day, they struggle with it. The party, with its more than 90 million members, is exposed to international competitive pressure. It is forced into a constant trial and error between political control and the free market economy. A new dilemma every day with 1,41 billion people.

From this, under the rule of state and party leader Xi Jinping, this seemingly contradictory mixture has emerged that now characterizes China on the Party’s 100th founding anniversary. With, on one hand, a relatively free-market economy with prosperity, groundbreaking innovations, and by now an efficient fight against corruption, and on the other, censorship, surveillance, persecution of political dissidents and a stipulating legal system, both of which are accompanied by a re-ideologization. The more open the economy becomes, it seems, the narrower the ideological corridor through which civil society is squeezed.

Marx only helps to a limited extent

The more pragmatism takes hold, the louder the ideologues have to shout that they still matter. And the louder they shout, the more wooden their gestures seem in a consumer-driven, diverse daily life. This is probably not a sustainable path of development in this combination. And that is why the CCP is not celebrating a carefree birthday even though it can be proud of many of the things it has achieved, most above all in the fight against poverty.

Balancing the books is not getting any easier because behind trial and error lies a profound question that the party will probably have to concern itself with in decades to come: How to create a framework of values for a huge, booming, market-economy country? Marx is of only limited help. Although, in an attempt to find an intersection between theory and practice, the leadership invented a “Chinese-Style Socialism”, the concept has not really taken root in people’s minds.

For the time being, only one thing is clear: Those who follow the trial and error method have at least the chance that the social system will modify itself accordingly. On the other hand, those who believe they have tried it long enough and now have a grasp on it forfeit their chance and find themselves in an ideologic dead end.

Much more than through political ideas, the party’s actions are shaped by the pain of two historical developments. China first lost touch with technological developments in the 19th century; a short time later, it lost political control as well. The empire, which had lastest for many centuries, ended because China’s elite, out of a mix of arrogance and lethargy, reminiscent of today’s West, missed out on the industrial revolution in Europe. China became economically weak and began to run out of money. Politicians could no longer get a grip on major flood disasters.

People became poorer and revolted. Great uprisings followed. Western colonial powers seized their port cities, and in the early 20th century, the empire eventually collapsed. Then came Mao. He managed to reunite the nation but refused to acknowledge that China was too weak to catch up with the West on its own. His brutal campaigns cost millions of lives. All this chaos, the weakening empire, the colonial period, the civil war of the republic, Mao’s escapades, and the bloody suppression of the freedom movement in 1989, the Chinese don’t want to live through it again. They strive for innovation, diversity, and competition but also want leadership, order, and stability.

One side of this development fascinates the West, the other side disturbs us. And in both directions, one finds exaggerations. Almost blind faith in technology and the excessive harassment of civil society, the censorship, the restrictions on the humanities, and human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, cannot be reconciled with our values.

A balanced mix of freedom and order

The West is dismayed above all because of its firm belief that freedom and innovation are inseparable. China seems to be undermining this notion. But perhaps the jury is still out. The important thing is that we in the West should recognize that there is a third element: order. Innovation comes from a balanced mix of freedom and order. Too much order stifles freedom and thus progress. While too much freedom births chaos. Based on historical experience, it is unlikely that the CCP will permanently stifle progress through excessive political control. An assessment of how much control is possible without stifling innovation, on the other hand, is ever-present. The goal of communist leadership is not to become more liberal. It strives to become more successful, and success is composed of a combination of social satisfaction and economic prosperity.

There is no master plan for this because both factors are constantly changing. For example, part of the emerging middle class is becoming more environmentally conscious. In some regions, social satisfaction is still merely about having enough to eat; in others, it is already about more consumer opportunities, better education, and health care. In Shenzhen, citizens’ initiatives against new waste incineration plants exist, which also receive more rights from the state, while the young migrant workers in factories a few kilometers away demand that factory operators comply with the minimum wage. Priorities vary and change according to the level of development. China thus has the problem of inconsistency of value systems in its own country, which is also becoming increasingly notable at a global level – and should therefore also play an ever greater role in the dialogue with the West. The two decisive questions are:

Which human rights must be granted first, if not all of them are is possible at the same time?

And: What obligations accompany these rights?

This is what the party will have to grapple with in the coming decades. And the more diverse China becomes, the more difficult the answers will become. It is not just about the well-being of the Chinese but also about the party’s retention of power. And these are only two sides of the same coin at best.

EU Parliament calls for closer coordination with NATO

Next week, the European Parliament will counsel on closer coordination between the EU and NATO in response to China’s growing rise in power. The “growing influence, as well as the increasing offensive stance”, must be countered with “a coordinated transatlantic strategy“, according to a draft debated by parliamentarians at Monday’s plenary session in Strasbourg. It is to be put to the vote in the course of next week. In it, MEPs also wish to express “serious concern about the policies of th/e organs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and “aggressive policies and actions in the South China Sea”. The People’s Republic had entered into a systemic competition with the transatlantic partnership as an “authoritarian regime”.

The report by the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee also calls for a “close monitoring of China’s activities in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT), in particular with regard to its ‘Digital Silk Road’ initiative, in order not to create dependencies on infrastructure facilities”. MEPs stressed in the draft, that both the EU and NATO need to coordinate their actions more closely to “defend critical infrastructure and telecommunications networks against foreign interference”. Equipment manufactured in China must be phased out.

Cooperation between the EU and the defense alliance is essential to “counter the quest for technological dominance and the malicious use of technology by adversaries such as China and Russia.” The draft also advocates greater involvement of the People’s Republic in arms control. NATO had, for the first time, described China as a “systemic challenge” at its summit in Brussels in mid-June (China.Table reported) and also called for closer coordination with the EU. ari

WHO declares China malaria-free

Within a few months, China has largely brought COVID-19 under control. Now the People’s Republic has apparently also won the battle against the infectious disease malaria. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday officially classified the world’s most populous country as malaria-free. “We congratulate the people of China on ridding the country of malaria,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced in a statement. He further stated that “with its hard-earned success, China has joined the growing number of countries that are showing the world that a future without malaria is feasible.”

China is not the first country to have finally achieved this success. According to the WHO, around 40 other countries have been awarded a corresponding certificate. However, China is the first country in the western Pacific region to achieve this breakthrough in 30 years. According to the WHO, the People’s Republic began dispensing medicine to prevent the disease in high-risk areas decades ago. Mosquito breeding areas have also been systematically reduced, and people, especially in southern China, have been extensively informed not to place containers of standing water out in the open. In addition, insect repellents, as well as protective nets, had been made widely available. As recent as the 1940s, China still reported about 30 million malaria cases each year. In the past four years, there has not been a single recorded new infection in the country.

According to WHO estimates, nearly 230 million people contract the mosquito-borne disease every year. Around 400,000 people die from it every year – more than 265,000 of them are children. In April last year, the WHO announced its intention to eradicate the deadly infectious disease in 25 countries worldwide by 2025. flee

Fewer bank loans for coal-fired power abroad

According to a report by Bloomberg, China informed a group of environmental organizations that its largest bank has dropped its plans to finance a three-billion-dollar coal-fired power plant in Zimbabwe. In the report, energy analyst Lauri Myllyvirta stated the decision was “significant” and, to his knowledge, “the first time a Chinese bank has proactively exited a coal-fired power project“. Within the last two decades, China’s state-owned development banks alone have invested more than $50 billion in coal projects abroad.

Now the tide seems to be slowly turning. For the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) a “climate traffic light” has been proposed to help with the compliance of sustainability goals (as reported by China.Table). Since 2017, 4.5 times more coal projects overseas with Chinese support have been abandoned or put on hold than have come to fruition, according to an analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). Nonetheless, a large number of coal-fired power plants are still “in the pipeline”, as reported by CREA. nib

Syngenta seeks stock market listing in Shanghai

China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina) plans to float its Syngenta subsidiary on the Shanghai stock exchange sooner than previously planned. As the news agency Reuters has learned the agrochemical company wants to publish its stock exchange prospectus in the coming days and start trading before the end of the year. In an interview at the beginning of the month with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS), Syngenta CEO Erik Fyrwald had already expressed the hope that the initial listing could be completed before the end of the year. Now the company has apparently already submitted all the necessary documents to the Star Market technology exchange.

In 2015, Syngenta, a Swiss company, was acquired by ChemChina for the hefty sum of $43 billion. The company produces genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and other agricultural products. China’s current priority is to modernize food production to safely feed its large population.

Up until 2017, Syngenta was already listed in Zurich, London, and New York. After ChemChina acquired 98 percent of the shares, the company delisted. By returning to trading – this time on a Chinese tech exchange – ChemChina could recoup a portion of the high acquisition price. The valuation is said to be ¥65 billion or about €8.5 billion. fin

Price for parcels from China increases

Dues to new rules for cross-border online trade between the EU and third countries, prices for parcel shipments to the EU may rise. As of July 1, shipments of goods from outside the EU are no longer exempt from import VAT. Previously they were exempt as long as the value of the goods did not exceed €22. In the future, the respective VAT rate of the EU destination will apply to every parcel arriving in the EU. Additionally, as of July 1, the threshold of €10,000 in total for the EU to incur VAT will drop.

This means that traders within the EU should no longer be at a disadvantage compared to those outside of the EU. Until now, e-commerce wholesalers such as Amazon and Alibaba were able to deliver their goods directly to private customers in Europe via their platforms and thus avoid VAT. In practice, from July 1, every package from a non-EU country will have to be declared digitally and will go through customs. The service fee will be charged to customers by the transport companies and amounts to €6 for Deutsche Post/DHL.

The exemption limit of €45 for private gifts remains unchanged.

To facilitate the filing of taxes, traders from third countries such as China, the US, and the UK are able to register through the new EU VAT system IOSS (Import-One-Stop-Shop). As long as the value of goods purchased outside the EU does not exceed €150, no additional fees are charged at customs. niw

Cai Xia – ideologist and defector

It is certainly not a congratulatory letter that Cai Xia has formulated for the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party. On the contrary, the retired lecturer at the Central Party University in Beijing has recently switched sides, spatially and ideologically, and is lashing out against the leadership of the People’s Republic of China in a 28-page paper for the Hoover Institute, a conservative US think tank at Stanford University.

Cai explicitly warns Americans, and thus also their allies in Europe, against “wishful thinking” that today’s China is to be integrated into the global community in an obligatory manner. Four decades of diplomatic bridge-building have “merely entrenched a Chinese leadership that is inherently hostile to the US. Under President Xi Jinping, China no longer sees integration as meaningful,” Cai writes in the paper, titled “Insider’s Perspective”, which was first quoted by The Wall Street Journal.

“Wishful thinking about incorporating (China) must be replaced by clear defenses to protect the United States from CCP aggression,” writes the jurist, who recommends greater pressure on China “because the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than the US assumes”. The CCP would certainly fear US power. The Party maintains a powerful appearance to the outside world but is ruptured by contradictions and self-doubt. “The CCP has the ambition of a hungry dragon, but within it hides a paper tiger,” Cai writes.

False hope in Xi Jinping as a reformer

Her statements are of special significance because Cai herself trained the country’s best cadres at the party school for 15 years before retiring in 2012. Cai graduated from the institution in 1988 with a law degree. The party school is also known as the brain of the CCP. For Cai Xia, the fact that she is now emerging as a dissident is the temporary end of a development she has taken during Xi Jinping’s tenure so far. As a member of the 2nd Red Generation of those sons and daughters of the country’s revolutionaries, she was regarded throughout her professional life as a committed and convinced ideologist in the spirit of the party.

Yet the increasingly totalitarian traits China has taken on, as well as its growing aggression as an economic power have made Cai lose faith that her homeland remains on the right track. In early 2020, she traveled to the US and never returned. Partly because COVID-19 made it difficult for her to return to China, and partly because she began to publicly express her criticism of the party and Xi. In June 2020, she referred to Xi Jinping as a mafia boss. A short time later, Cai was expelled from the party.

She had high hopes for Xi. In an article published in the political magazine Foreign Affairs a few months ago, she wrote: “When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, I was full of hope for China.” She said she had enough historical understanding “to conclude that it was time for China to open up its political system.” The country was in dire need of reform after a decade of stagnation. And she believed Xi to be the right man for the job. However, she was wrong, as she says today. grz

Pater patriae

By Stefan Baron

According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, 82 percent of Chinese people have confidence in their government. None of the other 27 countries surveyed even comes close to this figure.

All over the globe, socialism has failed, except in China. The explanations for this usually boil down to Beijing playing unfair. And indeed, China has not been squeamish in its choice of means in its race to catch up with the West. Nevertheless, it falls far short of the mark to attribute its brilliant rise primarily to intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and the denial of a level playing field for all, so-called reciprocity. In its “ideological blindness” and conviction that democracies are always and everywhere superior to other systems, the West has “underestimated” China, according to political scientists and ex-diplomat Kishore Mahbubani.

The reason for this is mainly to be found in a lack of understanding of Chinese history, culture, and way of thinking. While the West likes to view things in binary terms, in either-or categories such as right or wrong, good or evil, black or white, and in dichotomies such as theory and practice, subject and object, individual and community, the Chinese only know shades of grey. For them, opposites form a unity. In their thinking, the conflicting forces of yin and yang represent the law of motion of the entire universe. Chinese thinking knows neither one truth nor multiple truths that are valid indefinitely, but only relative and situational ones instead. This is why China’s system of government and economy cannot be simply labeled as communist, socialist, dictatorial, or totalitarian. It is a hybrid, similar to Chinese culture as a whole.

Unlike Communist Parties in other countries, the Chinese Communist Party has consistently adapted socialism to the country’s practical, concrete, situational, non-linear, and holistic tradition of thought, proving to be highly flexible, experimental, and adaptive. The Chinese style of governance, according to China scholars Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, understands politics as a “process of constant change and conflict management, trial and error, and ad hoc adaptation”. China’s ruling party does not regard Marxism as an unalterable development doctrine, but above all as a dialectical method of inquiry that allows only practice on the ground as a criterion for truth.

For a long time now, the CCP can no longer be described as a workers’ and farmers’ party. The so-called “class background” now plays almost no role at all anymore. Its nearly 92 million members come from all strata of the people. Among them are also numerous intellectuals and entrepreneurs as well as a number of billionaires. Only the most successful in their respective fields are admitted. Their average age is well below that of the population as a whole. A third of the approximately two million new members each year have an academic degree. About three-quarters of the students admitted to the party in recent years have come from the country’s top universities. Such members are not a flock of sheep; they want careers – but they also want a say in things. And there is no better way to do this than in the CCP.

Contrary to what is usually assumed, China is being led less and less by dogmatic ideologues of the kind we grew to know from the former Eastern bloc, and more and more by well-trained technocrats who have proven themselves in a wide variety of positions. They act pragmatic, focused on success and problem solving, all according to the famous motto of Deng Xiaoping: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. Their ultimate goal is not communism. China’s income and wealth disparities are enormous; to this day China does not even have an inheritance tax. “The only thing we care about is good conditions for our development” is how Deng once described the CCP’s strategic focus.

This has never changed. According to China’s state and Party leader Xi Jinping: “Since its founding, the Party has never changed its original desire to fulfill the historic mission of the great renewal of the Chinese nation.” Zhonguo talking about, the “renaissance of China”, in a sense a “Middle Kingdom 2.0,” a China that has put the humiliation by foreign powers in the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century behind it once and for all and regained a global standing, economically, politically as well as culturally that it had enjoyed for thousands of years before – this is the “Chinese Dream”. The overwhelming majority of the population shares this dream and trusts the CCP to make it a reality.

Many in the West think this can only be the result of brainwashing and/or fear of speaking freely. B ut a representative, long-term study published in July 2020, led by politics professor Tony Saich, director of the Ash Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, paints a different picture. Saich had Chinese people survey their satisfaction with their government in eight waves from 2003 to 2016. In the process, more than 31,000 urban and rural residents were surveyed face-to-face by Kennedy School interviewers, rather than online or over the phone. In other words, the government’s ability to monitor the respondents’ statements and thus influence them in its own way was at least severely limited compared to regular survey methods. The result of the study: Chinese people attested to the increasing competence and efficiency of their country’s state institutions at all levels, but above all of the central government. Between 2003 and 2016, satisfaction with the government in Beijing rose from over 86 to 93 percent. Harvard researchers consequently attested the communist leadership a “lasting resilience through earned legitimacy”.

The vast majority of Chinese honor the progress that the current system of government has brought them. And not only because of relief from abject poverty, a general increase in material well-being, but also because of significantly increased life expectancy, better health care, and schooling, and last but not least, more personal freedoms beyond politics than ever before in Chinese history; such as the freedom to choose one’s residence and workplace, to choose one’s spouse, to travel abroad as well as studying there, and more. “The majority of Chinese seem to be comfortable with policies that value order and stability over freedom and political participation,” said Wang Gungwu, arguably one of the most distinguished living Chinese historians. “They believe their country needs this at the current state and are upset at being repeatedly criticized as politically unfree and backward.” Freedom and human rights as such do not exist for the Chinese anyway, only different freedoms and rights. And these are not valued equally by all people at all times and in all situations. While one person values being able to vote for the government and openly criticize it more, another person values a life without material worries more highly.

China’s political system has always been based on the paternalistic family model of Confucian doctrine. The word “state” in Chinese consists of the components “country” and “family”. It is therefore something like the family of all families, and the head of state is the father of the family, Pater patriae. As long as the latter duly fulfills his duty of care towards the people, their loyalty is certain. In the eyes of the majority of the Chinese, the ruling CCP has so far evidently taken this duty sufficiently to heart and has therefore been able to remain in power until today. The party’s autocracy seems to have no alternative for the foreseeable future. However, this is by no means true forever. Relative and situational Chinese thinking speaks against it. The West would, however, be well-advised not to influence developments. It would only delay it.

Stefan Baron is co-author of the book “The Chinese – Psychogram of a World Power”. His new book “Ami go home – a remeasurement of the world”, which focuses on Europe’s role in the emerging Cold War 2.0 between the USA and China, was recently published.

A sea of red flags instead of demonstrations in Hong Kong: A year ago there were civil protests – this year a Beijing patriot is waving the flag of the People’s Republic. On July 1, the Special Administrative Region also commemorates the handover of the former British Crown Colony to China.

CHINA.TABLE EDITORIAL OFFICE

Amelie
Richter

Marcel
Grzanna

Fabian
Peltsch

Julia
Fiedler

Angela
Köckritz

Jörn
Petring