The fear of Beijing’s shopping spree was great. Given the Covid pandemic, people from Lisbon to Brussels and Berlin to Nicosia feared that China could now go on a bargain hunt for ailing companies from the key industries of the European Union. An electricity supplier here, a producer of important industrial metals there, and perhaps an airport to boot. But this does not prove to be true.
As a study by the Berlin research institute Merics and the Rhodium Group shows, Chinese direct investments in Europe declined last year. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains the reasons behind the decline in investment. In addition to waning interest from the People’s Republic, defensive mechanisms of the EU also play a decisive role in the trend.
On the other hand, the number of used EV batteries is increasing instead of decreasing. As the market in China is booming, more and more of the worn-out lithium-ion batteries are also accumulating – but where to put them? The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is now taking manufacturers to task even more, as Frank Sieren reports. They should pay more attention to recycling.
China’s economy is losing its appetite for corporate shopping in the EU. Chinese investment in the EU fell again in the first quarter of the current year, according to a study by research institute Merics together with Rhodium Group. According to the study, Europe attracted only €700 million from China from January to March. It was twice as much in the same quarter last year, despite Covid. In 2019, investments in the first quarter even reached more than €8 billion, twelve times the current value. The decline is against the trend. Globally, mergers and acquisitions are booming – but Chinese direct investment in Europe is at a ten-year low.
According to the latest version of the annual study “Chinese FDI in Europe“, even in the outlook, the researchers do not expect a return to the high cash flows of the past. “The wind blows in the face of Chinese investors.” They cite tighter capital controls by the Beijing government as the main reason. Despite the rapid recovery from the Covid crisis, many restrictions and quotas remain in place. For example, the cap on foreign investment under the QDII (Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors) 2021 program has risen only minimally.
Beijing no longer seems to think big buying sprees in other markets are a good idea as it did in 2016 when Chinese investment in the EU amounted to more than €50 billion. Last year, it was only €6.8 billion. The observation that state-owned enterprises have recently been particularly reluctant to invest abroad fits the interpretation of a small political realignment.
The Merics experts also derive the forecast of further declining takeover activity from the political climate. More and more European countries show skepticism towards China. The Merics study points to the mutual exchange of blows with sanctions and the temporary failure of the CAI. Since the conflicts are far from over, the investment climate could continue to suffer as a result.
In October 2020, the EU’s FDI screening framework also came into force. The EU wants to remain an open and attractive location for investors. But where strategic interests such as defense or energy supply are affected, member states should be able to intervene. They can make takeovers subject to review and, if necessary, prohibit them. In the short term, the framework creates a certain degree of uncertainty, write the authors of the Merics study.
Some current examples show how investment monitoring already has an effect. Last autumn, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) wanted to take over the medium-sized company ISMT from North Rhine-Westphalia. The latter owns patents for radar systems and 5G technology. Economy Minister Peter Altmaier prohibited the takeover. The reason given was that the deal posed “real and serious risks” to Germany’s security.
Another example of a blocked takeover was provided by the case of the metal specialist PPM Pure Metals from Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony. The company supplies high-purity metals to the defense industry, among others, and was thus considered strategically crucial for the German armed forces. The company was on the verge of insolvency when the Chinese competitor Vital Materials wanted to take over and save PPM. The Ministry of Defense prohibited the takeover. In the meantime, several PPM locations had to close. At the end of the year, approval was granted after all, and Vital Materials was able to take over at least one site in Lower Saxony.
Such months-long approval procedures create a bad atmosphere. But in the long term, the establishment of standards for permitted and non-permitted takeovers can also create legal certainty, Merics experts believe. But this requires “transparent and consistently applied rules”. The final approval of the sale of Vossloh’s locomotive division to China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) has already restored some confidence.
The new study also provides an overview of the markets particularly popular with Chinese investors. Over the past two decades, Germany has attracted the highest level of investment among the current EU countries, with just under €25 billion. In second and third place come Italy and France. However, they are all surpassed by the UK, which has received €52 billion in Chinese capital over this period. Over the past ten years, however, Germany has been the most popular investment destination, with a share of 30 percent.
If you approach the Forbidden City from the south via the large Tiananmen Square, you will already see the famous portrait of Mao Zedong from a distance. It still adorns the famous gate to the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace. The same picture also hangs in millions of farmers’ rooms and administrative buildings. Although the dictator terrified China for many years and was probably responsible for more than 50 million deaths, many Chinese still idolize him as their savior who once freed them from the big landowners. But Mao’s devotional objects are also popular among the urban middle class. In trendy Beijing shops, iPhone cases with Mao images are on sale. Such reverence is not paid to the great reformer Deng Xiaoping.
Yet Deng, who guided the fate of the giant empire after Mao’s death from the late 1970s onwards, has had a much greater impact on today’s China than his predecessor. Concerning the understanding of the state, economic policy, and China’s society today. And even if the current state and party leader Xi Jinping, with his revival of red campaigns and his own personality cult, obviously sees himself more in the tradition of Mao than in that of the reformer Deng – anyone who wants to understand today’s China should look at the era under Deng Xiaoping.
One of Deng’s most remarkable achievements is that he succeeded in transforming a communist state, at least in name, that endures to this day. Deng managed to preserve the communist power apparatus built by Mao while at the same time finding a modern form of government that has endured to this day despite the failure of real socialism in other parts of the world. Gucci and Prada under the hammer and sickle – in every way, these concepts contradict each other. Nevertheless, Deng got away with it.
For Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party was never more than an instrument for dominating China. As long as Mao was in power, class struggle and collectivization were inevitable accessories to which Deng had to submit. Once he had control in his own hands, he watered down these concepts to the point where they no longer mattered.
Certainly, without Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese CP would have met a fate similar to that of communism in the countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. But Deng succeeded in pushing these issues into the background and creating a system in which socialism and capitalism do not work against each other but seem to complement each other. When former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt remarked to him in 1984 that he was not a communist at all but a Confucian, Deng replied, “So what?”
In the economic world, Deng’s name is associated with the greatest increase in prosperity that has occurred in human history. No state leader before him has contributed in such a way and laid the foundations for lifting so many people out of poverty within a short period. With the opening of China initiated by him, he also accelerated the worldwide globalization process like no other. Today, it is impossible to imagine the world economy without China and the People’s Republic without the rest of the world.
He never had a master plan but followed the motto: “Crossing the river by touching the stones.“ He relied on experiments. What worked, was continued. If something went wrong, it was discarded. For him, the mistakes he made were not a sin but important experiences. In this way, Deng created the conditions for the giant empire to embark on a de-ideologized search for its own path. China neither rigidly adhered to the communist model in the sense of Marx or Mao. Nor did the People’s Republic follow the advice of Western industrialized countries. China was spared the shock therapies from which the former Eastern bloc countries had not recovered even after a decade.
But his approach also had its downsides. The social question was never at the forefront for Deng. On the contrary: With his saying “Let some people get rich first!”, he accepted the growing gap between rich and poor as a side effect. Right after the US, there is no country today with so many super-rich, while several hundred million people still live on little more than $5 a day, despite successes in fighting poverty.
At the same time, Deng’s de-ideologization has brought a political arbitrariness with it that has driven the entire Chinese society into a deep value crisis. Young people, in particular, complain today of a complete lack of orientation. This spiritual emptiness has a concrete effect on everyday life: The disabled, the sick and the elderly have a miserable existence between the glittering facades of Shanghai and Shenzhen, with no one showing them any mercy. Time and again, reports make the headlines that children are run over by cars on busy streets while no one rushes to help. There is a lack of solidarity everywhere.
And the CP is leading the way. It is true that, with more than 90 million members, it is bigger than even in Mao times. But today, most people join for career reasons. Only those who are members have a good chance of promotion in an authority or a state enterprise. The communist idea no longer plays a role. And the state leadership today is also made up of cadres who occupy high party or government posts to line their own pockets. The rampant corruption, which probably peaked before the change of government to Xi in 2013 and provided him with legitimacy for his crackdown that continues to this day, began under Deng. As he put it, “If you open a window, you have to expect some flies to come in.”
Deng Xiaoping was a “reformer”. But he was never a democrat. He lacked any connection to this concept of the state – he owed his rise in the party solely to his eagerness to assert himself in hard-fought power struggles. Free elections, which would have challenged the CP’s monopoly on power, were out of the question for him. And anyone who dared to criticize the system was threatened with repression. This culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre. It was his decision to bring in tanks and violently shoot down the peaceful protest of tens of thousands of students.
Defending their power at all costs – even by force – is something that even today’s leadership would not shy away from. Always in the name of stability.
Human beings approaching 100 normally think about death. But political parties celebrating their centennial, as the Communist Party of China (CPC) will on July 1, are obsessed with immortality. Such optimism seems odd for parties that rule dictatorships, because their longevity record does not inspire confidence. The fact that no other such party in modern times has survived for a century should give China’s leaders cause for worry, not celebration.
One obvious reason for the relatively short lifespan of communist or authoritarian parties is that party-dominated modern dictatorships, unlike democracies, emerged only in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union, the first such dictatorship, was founded in 1922. The Kuomintang (KMT) in China, a quasi-Leninist party, gained nominal control of the country in 1927. The Nazis did not come to power in Germany until 1933. Nearly all of the world’s communist regimes were established after World War II.
But there is a more fundamental explanation than historical coincidence. The political environment in which dictatorial parties operate implies an existence that is far more Hobbesian – “nasty, brutish, and short” – than that of their democratic counterparts.
One sure way for dictatorial parties to die is to wage a war and lose, a fate that befell the Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. But most exit power in a far less dramatic (or traumatic) fashion.
In non-communist regimes, long-standing and forward-looking ruling parties, such as the KMT in Taiwan and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), saw the writing on the wall and initiated democratizing reforms before they lost all legitimacy. Although these parties were eventually voted out of office, they remained politically viable and subsequently returned to power by winning competitive elections (in Taiwan in 2008 and Mexico in 2012).
In contrast, communist regimes trying to appease their populations through limited democratic reforms have all ended up collapsing. In the former Soviet bloc, liberalizing measures in the 1980s quickly triggered revolutions that swept the communists – and the Soviet Union itself – into the dustbin of history.
The CPC does not want to dwell on that history during its upcoming centennial festivities. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his colleagues obviously want to project an image of confidence and optimism. But political bravado is no substitute for a survival strategy, and once the CPC rules out reform as too dangerous, its available options are extremely limited.
Before Xi came to power in 2012, some Chinese leaders looked to Singapore’s model. The People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the city-state without interruption since 1959, seems to have it all: a near-total monopoly of power, competent governance, superior economic performance, and dependable popular support. But the more the CPC looked – and it dispatched tens of thousands of officials to Singapore to study it – the less it wanted to become a giant version of the PAP. China’s communists certainly wanted to have the PAP’s hold on power, but they did not want to adopt the same methods and institutions that help maintain the PAP’s supremacy
Of all the institutional ingredients that have made the PAP’s dominance special, the CPC least likes Singapore’s legalized opposition parties, relatively clean elections, and rule of law. Chinese leaders understand that these institutions, vital to the PAP’s success, would fatally weaken the CPC’s political monopoly if introduced in China.
That is perhaps why the Singapore model has lost its luster in the Xi era, whereas the North Korean model – totalitarian political repression, a cult of the supreme leader, and juche (economic self-reliance) – has grown more appealing. True, China has not yet become a giant North Korea, but a number of trends over the last eight years have moved the country in that direction.
Politically, the rule of fear has returned, not only for ordinary people, but also for the CPC’s elites, as Xi has reinstated purges under the guise of a perpetual anti-corruption campaign. Censorship is at its highest level in the post-Mao era, and Xi’s regime has all but eliminated space for civil society, including NGOs. The authorities have even reined in China’s freewheeling private entrepreneurs with regulatory crackdowns, criminal prosecution, and confiscation of wealth.
And Xi has assiduously nurtured a personality cult. These days, the front page of the People’s Daily newspaper is filled with coverage of Xi’s activities and personal edicts. The abridged history of the CPC, recently released to mark the party’s centennial, devotes a quarter of its content to Xi’s eight years in power, while giving only half as much space to Deng Xiaoping, the CPC’s true savior.
Economically, China has yet to embrace juche fully. But the CPC’s new Five-Year Plan projects a vision of technological self-sufficiency and economic security centered on domestic growth. Although the party has a reasonable excuse – America’s strategy of economic and technological decoupling leaves it no alternative – few Western democracies will want to remain economically coupled with a country that sees North Korea as its future political model.
When China’s leaders toast the CPC’s centennial, they should ask whether the party is on the right track. If it is not, the CPC’s upcoming milestone may be its last.
Minxin Pei, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
www.project-syndicate.org
On the way to the celestial palace: Today in the early morning hours, the People’s Republic launched its first manned mission to the new space station “Tiangong”. The rocket of the type Long March 2-F brings the three Taikonauts, Tang Hongbo, Nie Haisheng, and Liu Boming (from left to right), in the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft to the space station, which is still under construction. There they are to spend three months in the station’s core module. China’s last manned space mission to date was almost five years ago.
The fear of Beijing’s shopping spree was great. Given the Covid pandemic, people from Lisbon to Brussels and Berlin to Nicosia feared that China could now go on a bargain hunt for ailing companies from the key industries of the European Union. An electricity supplier here, a producer of important industrial metals there, and perhaps an airport to boot. But this does not prove to be true.
As a study by the Berlin research institute Merics and the Rhodium Group shows, Chinese direct investments in Europe declined last year. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains the reasons behind the decline in investment. In addition to waning interest from the People’s Republic, defensive mechanisms of the EU also play a decisive role in the trend.
On the other hand, the number of used EV batteries is increasing instead of decreasing. As the market in China is booming, more and more of the worn-out lithium-ion batteries are also accumulating – but where to put them? The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is now taking manufacturers to task even more, as Frank Sieren reports. They should pay more attention to recycling.
China’s economy is losing its appetite for corporate shopping in the EU. Chinese investment in the EU fell again in the first quarter of the current year, according to a study by research institute Merics together with Rhodium Group. According to the study, Europe attracted only €700 million from China from January to March. It was twice as much in the same quarter last year, despite Covid. In 2019, investments in the first quarter even reached more than €8 billion, twelve times the current value. The decline is against the trend. Globally, mergers and acquisitions are booming – but Chinese direct investment in Europe is at a ten-year low.
According to the latest version of the annual study “Chinese FDI in Europe“, even in the outlook, the researchers do not expect a return to the high cash flows of the past. “The wind blows in the face of Chinese investors.” They cite tighter capital controls by the Beijing government as the main reason. Despite the rapid recovery from the Covid crisis, many restrictions and quotas remain in place. For example, the cap on foreign investment under the QDII (Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors) 2021 program has risen only minimally.
Beijing no longer seems to think big buying sprees in other markets are a good idea as it did in 2016 when Chinese investment in the EU amounted to more than €50 billion. Last year, it was only €6.8 billion. The observation that state-owned enterprises have recently been particularly reluctant to invest abroad fits the interpretation of a small political realignment.
The Merics experts also derive the forecast of further declining takeover activity from the political climate. More and more European countries show skepticism towards China. The Merics study points to the mutual exchange of blows with sanctions and the temporary failure of the CAI. Since the conflicts are far from over, the investment climate could continue to suffer as a result.
In October 2020, the EU’s FDI screening framework also came into force. The EU wants to remain an open and attractive location for investors. But where strategic interests such as defense or energy supply are affected, member states should be able to intervene. They can make takeovers subject to review and, if necessary, prohibit them. In the short term, the framework creates a certain degree of uncertainty, write the authors of the Merics study.
Some current examples show how investment monitoring already has an effect. Last autumn, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) wanted to take over the medium-sized company ISMT from North Rhine-Westphalia. The latter owns patents for radar systems and 5G technology. Economy Minister Peter Altmaier prohibited the takeover. The reason given was that the deal posed “real and serious risks” to Germany’s security.
Another example of a blocked takeover was provided by the case of the metal specialist PPM Pure Metals from Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony. The company supplies high-purity metals to the defense industry, among others, and was thus considered strategically crucial for the German armed forces. The company was on the verge of insolvency when the Chinese competitor Vital Materials wanted to take over and save PPM. The Ministry of Defense prohibited the takeover. In the meantime, several PPM locations had to close. At the end of the year, approval was granted after all, and Vital Materials was able to take over at least one site in Lower Saxony.
Such months-long approval procedures create a bad atmosphere. But in the long term, the establishment of standards for permitted and non-permitted takeovers can also create legal certainty, Merics experts believe. But this requires “transparent and consistently applied rules”. The final approval of the sale of Vossloh’s locomotive division to China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) has already restored some confidence.
The new study also provides an overview of the markets particularly popular with Chinese investors. Over the past two decades, Germany has attracted the highest level of investment among the current EU countries, with just under €25 billion. In second and third place come Italy and France. However, they are all surpassed by the UK, which has received €52 billion in Chinese capital over this period. Over the past ten years, however, Germany has been the most popular investment destination, with a share of 30 percent.
If you approach the Forbidden City from the south via the large Tiananmen Square, you will already see the famous portrait of Mao Zedong from a distance. It still adorns the famous gate to the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace. The same picture also hangs in millions of farmers’ rooms and administrative buildings. Although the dictator terrified China for many years and was probably responsible for more than 50 million deaths, many Chinese still idolize him as their savior who once freed them from the big landowners. But Mao’s devotional objects are also popular among the urban middle class. In trendy Beijing shops, iPhone cases with Mao images are on sale. Such reverence is not paid to the great reformer Deng Xiaoping.
Yet Deng, who guided the fate of the giant empire after Mao’s death from the late 1970s onwards, has had a much greater impact on today’s China than his predecessor. Concerning the understanding of the state, economic policy, and China’s society today. And even if the current state and party leader Xi Jinping, with his revival of red campaigns and his own personality cult, obviously sees himself more in the tradition of Mao than in that of the reformer Deng – anyone who wants to understand today’s China should look at the era under Deng Xiaoping.
One of Deng’s most remarkable achievements is that he succeeded in transforming a communist state, at least in name, that endures to this day. Deng managed to preserve the communist power apparatus built by Mao while at the same time finding a modern form of government that has endured to this day despite the failure of real socialism in other parts of the world. Gucci and Prada under the hammer and sickle – in every way, these concepts contradict each other. Nevertheless, Deng got away with it.
For Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party was never more than an instrument for dominating China. As long as Mao was in power, class struggle and collectivization were inevitable accessories to which Deng had to submit. Once he had control in his own hands, he watered down these concepts to the point where they no longer mattered.
Certainly, without Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese CP would have met a fate similar to that of communism in the countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. But Deng succeeded in pushing these issues into the background and creating a system in which socialism and capitalism do not work against each other but seem to complement each other. When former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt remarked to him in 1984 that he was not a communist at all but a Confucian, Deng replied, “So what?”
In the economic world, Deng’s name is associated with the greatest increase in prosperity that has occurred in human history. No state leader before him has contributed in such a way and laid the foundations for lifting so many people out of poverty within a short period. With the opening of China initiated by him, he also accelerated the worldwide globalization process like no other. Today, it is impossible to imagine the world economy without China and the People’s Republic without the rest of the world.
He never had a master plan but followed the motto: “Crossing the river by touching the stones.“ He relied on experiments. What worked, was continued. If something went wrong, it was discarded. For him, the mistakes he made were not a sin but important experiences. In this way, Deng created the conditions for the giant empire to embark on a de-ideologized search for its own path. China neither rigidly adhered to the communist model in the sense of Marx or Mao. Nor did the People’s Republic follow the advice of Western industrialized countries. China was spared the shock therapies from which the former Eastern bloc countries had not recovered even after a decade.
But his approach also had its downsides. The social question was never at the forefront for Deng. On the contrary: With his saying “Let some people get rich first!”, he accepted the growing gap between rich and poor as a side effect. Right after the US, there is no country today with so many super-rich, while several hundred million people still live on little more than $5 a day, despite successes in fighting poverty.
At the same time, Deng’s de-ideologization has brought a political arbitrariness with it that has driven the entire Chinese society into a deep value crisis. Young people, in particular, complain today of a complete lack of orientation. This spiritual emptiness has a concrete effect on everyday life: The disabled, the sick and the elderly have a miserable existence between the glittering facades of Shanghai and Shenzhen, with no one showing them any mercy. Time and again, reports make the headlines that children are run over by cars on busy streets while no one rushes to help. There is a lack of solidarity everywhere.
And the CP is leading the way. It is true that, with more than 90 million members, it is bigger than even in Mao times. But today, most people join for career reasons. Only those who are members have a good chance of promotion in an authority or a state enterprise. The communist idea no longer plays a role. And the state leadership today is also made up of cadres who occupy high party or government posts to line their own pockets. The rampant corruption, which probably peaked before the change of government to Xi in 2013 and provided him with legitimacy for his crackdown that continues to this day, began under Deng. As he put it, “If you open a window, you have to expect some flies to come in.”
Deng Xiaoping was a “reformer”. But he was never a democrat. He lacked any connection to this concept of the state – he owed his rise in the party solely to his eagerness to assert himself in hard-fought power struggles. Free elections, which would have challenged the CP’s monopoly on power, were out of the question for him. And anyone who dared to criticize the system was threatened with repression. This culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre. It was his decision to bring in tanks and violently shoot down the peaceful protest of tens of thousands of students.
Defending their power at all costs – even by force – is something that even today’s leadership would not shy away from. Always in the name of stability.
Human beings approaching 100 normally think about death. But political parties celebrating their centennial, as the Communist Party of China (CPC) will on July 1, are obsessed with immortality. Such optimism seems odd for parties that rule dictatorships, because their longevity record does not inspire confidence. The fact that no other such party in modern times has survived for a century should give China’s leaders cause for worry, not celebration.
One obvious reason for the relatively short lifespan of communist or authoritarian parties is that party-dominated modern dictatorships, unlike democracies, emerged only in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union, the first such dictatorship, was founded in 1922. The Kuomintang (KMT) in China, a quasi-Leninist party, gained nominal control of the country in 1927. The Nazis did not come to power in Germany until 1933. Nearly all of the world’s communist regimes were established after World War II.
But there is a more fundamental explanation than historical coincidence. The political environment in which dictatorial parties operate implies an existence that is far more Hobbesian – “nasty, brutish, and short” – than that of their democratic counterparts.
One sure way for dictatorial parties to die is to wage a war and lose, a fate that befell the Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. But most exit power in a far less dramatic (or traumatic) fashion.
In non-communist regimes, long-standing and forward-looking ruling parties, such as the KMT in Taiwan and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), saw the writing on the wall and initiated democratizing reforms before they lost all legitimacy. Although these parties were eventually voted out of office, they remained politically viable and subsequently returned to power by winning competitive elections (in Taiwan in 2008 and Mexico in 2012).
In contrast, communist regimes trying to appease their populations through limited democratic reforms have all ended up collapsing. In the former Soviet bloc, liberalizing measures in the 1980s quickly triggered revolutions that swept the communists – and the Soviet Union itself – into the dustbin of history.
The CPC does not want to dwell on that history during its upcoming centennial festivities. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his colleagues obviously want to project an image of confidence and optimism. But political bravado is no substitute for a survival strategy, and once the CPC rules out reform as too dangerous, its available options are extremely limited.
Before Xi came to power in 2012, some Chinese leaders looked to Singapore’s model. The People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the city-state without interruption since 1959, seems to have it all: a near-total monopoly of power, competent governance, superior economic performance, and dependable popular support. But the more the CPC looked – and it dispatched tens of thousands of officials to Singapore to study it – the less it wanted to become a giant version of the PAP. China’s communists certainly wanted to have the PAP’s hold on power, but they did not want to adopt the same methods and institutions that help maintain the PAP’s supremacy
Of all the institutional ingredients that have made the PAP’s dominance special, the CPC least likes Singapore’s legalized opposition parties, relatively clean elections, and rule of law. Chinese leaders understand that these institutions, vital to the PAP’s success, would fatally weaken the CPC’s political monopoly if introduced in China.
That is perhaps why the Singapore model has lost its luster in the Xi era, whereas the North Korean model – totalitarian political repression, a cult of the supreme leader, and juche (economic self-reliance) – has grown more appealing. True, China has not yet become a giant North Korea, but a number of trends over the last eight years have moved the country in that direction.
Politically, the rule of fear has returned, not only for ordinary people, but also for the CPC’s elites, as Xi has reinstated purges under the guise of a perpetual anti-corruption campaign. Censorship is at its highest level in the post-Mao era, and Xi’s regime has all but eliminated space for civil society, including NGOs. The authorities have even reined in China’s freewheeling private entrepreneurs with regulatory crackdowns, criminal prosecution, and confiscation of wealth.
And Xi has assiduously nurtured a personality cult. These days, the front page of the People’s Daily newspaper is filled with coverage of Xi’s activities and personal edicts. The abridged history of the CPC, recently released to mark the party’s centennial, devotes a quarter of its content to Xi’s eight years in power, while giving only half as much space to Deng Xiaoping, the CPC’s true savior.
Economically, China has yet to embrace juche fully. But the CPC’s new Five-Year Plan projects a vision of technological self-sufficiency and economic security centered on domestic growth. Although the party has a reasonable excuse – America’s strategy of economic and technological decoupling leaves it no alternative – few Western democracies will want to remain economically coupled with a country that sees North Korea as its future political model.
When China’s leaders toast the CPC’s centennial, they should ask whether the party is on the right track. If it is not, the CPC’s upcoming milestone may be its last.
Minxin Pei, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
www.project-syndicate.org
On the way to the celestial palace: Today in the early morning hours, the People’s Republic launched its first manned mission to the new space station “Tiangong”. The rocket of the type Long March 2-F brings the three Taikonauts, Tang Hongbo, Nie Haisheng, and Liu Boming (from left to right), in the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft to the space station, which is still under construction. There they are to spend three months in the station’s core module. China’s last manned space mission to date was almost five years ago.
