A congress of the Communist Party of China only happens every five years, and it starts this weekend. Tension is correspondingly high. At the center of attention: Xi Jinping. The CP Congress is his show. Reason enough to take a closer look at his personality. Michael Radunski describes him as a clever strategist who long presented himself as an inconspicuous compromise candidate before he systematically seized power. That is why a majority of China observers underestimated him and even applauded him as a liberal reformer. The shock was all the greater after he sent the party back to its authoritarian past.
The ruthless politician Xi also puts Germany to the test. When it comes to China’s global aspirations, Xi wants to return to China’s distant past as a global power. However, he by no means follows the historical blueprint. In actual history, the Middle Kingdom has long isolated itself without any international ambitions. Xi, on the other hand, is bent on gaining global influence. And Germany does not do well with aggressive partners. It would rather focus on trade instead, a field in which it is more experienced than in power politics.
Meanwhile, things are not looking so bad between national economies, as the latest move by the VW Group also shows. It plans to invest billions in a joint venture with AI specialist Horizon Robotics. By acquiring existing digital knowledge, the company wants to avoid a disaster in its software division. It lacks skilled employees. We take a look at what VW’s new partner is all about.
When Xi Jinping was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, hopes were high: Xi would lead China into a new era as a great reformer. Journalists who reported from the CP Congress in Beijing at the time could literally smell the smell of reform and change.
Even the New York Times was downright euphoric: “The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison.” At least that was the prediction of Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof on January 5, 2013.
But things would turn out differently. Mao Zedong is once again more popular in China than at any point since his death. Liu Xiaobo died miserably in prison. But that is not all: Instead of economic and civic change, Xi Jinping introduced an iron-fisted leadership style. Xi is far from being a reformer. Rather, he is a restorer – of the party and its central role in society, and of China and its role in the world.
How could people be so fundamentally mistaken about this man? And what is driving China’s leader to even allow himself to be granted a third term at the upcoming party congress?
According to the official history of the Communist Party, the key to Xi Jinping’s career lies in Liangjiahe, a small, inconspicuous village in the loess mountains of central China’s Shaanxi province. It was 1969, the Cultural Revolution raged across the country, and Mao Zedong sent millions of students out into the barren countryside to experience the poor and deprived lives of peasants firsthand. One of them was the then 16-year-old Xi Jinping, son of disgraced party stalwart Xi Zhongxun.
Xi’s father was a revolutionary from the very start. He had fought for the communist revolution alongside Mao Zedong not far from Liangjiahe in the mountains of Yan’an and had subsequently risen to the position of vice premier. Xi Jinping is thus a 太子 (tàizǐ) – a princeling, as the sons of that first CP generation are called. This came with all kinds of privileges: He grew up in the shade of the Forbidden City, attended the city’s elite schools, which only the children of high-ranking party cadres and military officers were allowed to attend. While the Cultural Revolution raged across the country, Xi lived in a perfect world.
All that came to an abrupt end in 1969. Mao accused Xi Senior of conspiracy, and the family fell from grace. Xi Junior was mobbed and forced to publicly denounce his father. His older half-sister even committed suicide. Xi did not go to Liangjiahe voluntarily; he was banished.
Official CP mythology tells us that this was the place where Xi transformed himself from a privileged princeling into a man of the people. Xi himself once said, “Many of my fundamental ideas and qualities were formed in Yan’an. Before, I was used to eating fine rice. There, it was coarse grains. But soon I learned to swallow them.”
Things soon improved for Xi’s father. He was rehabilitated and founded China’s first special economic zone in a small fishing village called Shenzhen. Today, Shenzhen has a population of around twelve million and is considered the center of China’s high-tech industry. The special economic zone had its own, more liberal rules. It was a reform project.
After these experiences, political observers believed they knew Xi Jinping. Two conclusions seemed obvious. First, for all the atrocities against him, his father, and his family, Xi Jinping must have loathed the CP. Second, Xi would surely follow in his father’s footsteps and, as a reformer, modernize not only Shenzhen but all of China. Both turned out to be false.
Xi Jinping is on a mission. He still was a princeling, and as the legitimate heir to the revolutionary achievements, he believed he had the right to lead China. However, he had to be careful. He “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red,” a source close to him is quoted as saying in a secret 2009 US embassy report. And indeed. Despite everything the party had done to him, Xi submitted a total of eight membership applications in the years that followed – before finally being accepted into the Youth League. Xi joined the Communist Party and began to map out a career plan that would take him to the top. He was not going to destroy the system, but to seize it from within and then rule it from above.
Experience taught him that in order to get to the top, he had to keep a low profile and remain inconspicuous for as long as possible. It almost seems as if Xi based his personal career on a famous maxim by Deng Xiaoping. “Hide your strength, bide your time.”
Accordingly, Xi long appeared determined and far-sighted, but inconspicuous. As secretary to the minister of defense, he forged contacts with the military; in the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, he appeared pro-business and streamlined the bureaucracy. Xi kept such a low profile as a functionary that he was best known to the public as the husband of Peng Liyuan: One of China’s most famous singers of so-called red songs such as “People from Our Village” (父老乡亲) or “In the Field of Hope” (在希望的田野上). Peng was a star in China – and Xi Jinping was Peng’s husband.
And Xi’s success was not just a private one. At the time, the CCP saw bitter trench warfare between various factions. Jiang Zemin, for example, had officially stepped down, but was still pulling the strings in the background. That is why Xi Jinping came into the spotlight when it came to finding a suitable candidate for the party leadership. Many considered him to be solid, moderate and staid. In short, he was a candidate who would not hurt anyone.
Xi thus fitted perfectly into a time when the party still praised collective leadership and shared responsibility to prevent arbitrary decisions by a sole leader. Today, it is likely that the Chinese censors would interpret such an idea as insubordinate criticism and delete it instantly.
Then, in 2012, his time came. But shortly before he was appointed general secretary of the CP, Xi Jinping suddenly vanished without a trace; even appointments with the then US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, had been canceled. Speculation ranged from health problems to attempted assassination.
But Chris Johnson, a former China analyst for the CIA, told The Economist magazine that Xi faced a test of power: The party leaders must have been surprised by Xi’s hunger for power and tried to contain it shortly before the party congress. Xi, however, was all too aware that time was short and put his card on the table by threatening that they should quickly find someone else for the job.
The party yielded, and Xi was named general secretary a few weeks later at the 18th party congress – and at the same time made it clear who would be at the head of the party and the state in the future. Xi not only wanted to be the first among equals, but simply the first.
Accordingly, he immediately began to turn the CP inside out – and tailor it entirely to his needs. With the help of an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, he purged the ranks of the party and security forces. Thousands of cadres were arrested and convicted – starting at the lowest village levels and going almost all the way to the top to Zhou Yongkang, a member of the CP Standing Committee. Certainly, there are different groups and factions, divergent interests and views within the CP. But at present, Xi Jinping has brought them all in line. His own line.
He also had dissent in civil society crushed, human rights activists arrested, and made it impossible for NGOs to operate. In Xinjiang, millions of Uyghurs are put into detainment camps, while in Hong Kong, constitutional freedoms are being radically curtailed.
And Xi’s days of restraint in foreign policy have also come to an end: He ordered sandbanks in the South China Sea to be converted into military bases, threats against Taiwan to become harsher, and military drills to increase. Not to mention China’s “pro-Russian neutrality” in the Ukraine war.
By now, everyone must have realized that Xi is neither the reformer yearned for by the West nor the collective leader the party rulers wanted. Xi is a tough power politician who ruthlessly pursues his goals.
Many see Xi at his zenith. But the zenith is always followed by the first step of decline. And indeed, Xi’s problems are daunting: The astonishing economic upswing has stalled. Economic growth is essential for Xi, however, because success legitimizes CP rule. Moreover, Xi has completely lost his way with his strict zero-Covid policy. What were considered necessary restrictions at the start of the pandemic have long since caused frustration and resentment among the population.
But Xi sees himself as a man with a mission. To understand him, you have to consider the experiences and humiliations of his youth. And even if the days in the cold clay caves of Liangjiahe have since become glorified and exaggerated by party propaganda, they are essential for understanding the Chinese leader.
Internally, chaos like that of the Cultural Revolution must never happen again. The collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the color revolutions in the Arab countries serve as a reminder to him. Society must stand on a firm ideological foundation. That is why Xi developed the ideas of the “Chinese Dream” (中国梦; Zhōngguó mèng) and “China’s national rejuvenation” (中华民族伟大复兴; Zhōnghuámínzú Wěidà Fùxīng). To achieve them, he believes that absolute control will be required – over all areas: from the economy to culture, from public streets and squares to people’s homes and smartphones. He believes that he must retain control, otherwise, everything will fall apart.
And Xi also has big plans for foreign policy. His narrative here is “profound changes unseen in a century” (百年未有之大变局; Bǎinián wèi yǒu zhī dà biànjú). Xi wants to lead China back to its rightful place: the top. In this sense, “Zhongguo” should perhaps no longer be translated as Middle Kingdom, but as “navel of the world”.
To ensure that these challenging visions become reality, a skilled leader is undoubtedly needed. Xi Jinping trusts only one to accomplish this: Xi Jinping.
According to media reports, Volkswagen’s software division Cariad will join forces with a major domestic player in China for artificial intelligence and automated driving. To this end, the Group wants to invest up to €2 billion in a joint venture with the AI company Horizon Robotics from Beijing. The German Manager Magazin reported on plans to this effect. According to group sources, the move would be a key building block in the digitalization and China strategy of Europe’s largest car group. A formal decision is still pending.
Horizon Robotics would definitely be a logical and highly capable partner. It is already well-known in the VW Group: Audi already worked on projects with the company to outfit self-driving cars. Horizon Robotics is also a partner of other players in the automotive industry, including Continental. Last year, they announced a joint venture with the Chinese company.
The Audi example already shows how the tech world currently divides itself: While the premium brand cooperates with the US company Nvidia for Western markets, it put out feelers to Horizon Robotics in China. In the future, the Western models will presumably run primarily with American or European hardware and software, and China models with Chinese technology. A consequence of geopolitical divide and rising mutual distrust coupled with protectionist industrial policies.
Horizon Robotics’ technical capabilities are easily on par with US competitors. “Our mission is to create a world-leading artificial intelligence platform,” said company founder and CEO Yu Kai. Yu headed the machine learning institute of IT company Baidu before he founded his own company with some friends.
Horizon develops chips designed with brain-like structures, i.e. neural networks. These can detect and interpret patterns and situations. This ability is invaluable to numerous industries including cars, aviation, security and robotics. Horizon starts with the automotive market, but plans to bring autonomous functions to many other areas in the future.
The logic of Horizon’s software does not simply capture what they see in a pixel pattern. To some degree, they understand what they see and assign the parts of the image to the appropriate sense. A cyclist is recognized as such, as is a building, the crosswalk, or a mother with a stroller. Neural networks are responsible for this. They automatically learn about the world from countless case studies. After their training, they recognize patterns much more reliably than inflexibly programmed algorithms.
But the power of Horizon chips does not end there. Based on this knowledge, they also offer predictions about what will happen in the next few seconds. The yellow traffic light will jump to red (it was previously green), the cyclist will be one meter to the left (he is coming from the right) and the mother with a stroller will probably stop (the traffic light shows red for her). The chip then supplies the onboard computer with this processed data about the possible future traffic situation, which it then uses to decide on the next driving maneuver. The priority, of course, is to warn of hazards, especially collisions.
Our brain works in exactly the same way when driving a car: It uses its knowledge of the world to try and predict what will happen in the next few moments. This is how we know whether we can step on the gas a bit to drive through, or better slow down because the stroller will get in the way of the cyclist, which then could get in our way. Without this ability, fluid autonomous driving in urban traffic would be impossible. Cars would have to fumble from situation to situation at a snail’s pace if we did not dare to make predictions.
For Volkswagen, joining forces with one of the important Chinese AI players means a renewed, albeit moderate, correction of its strategy. In the People’s Republic, VW has already been working with domestic suppliers for a long time in vehicle production and, for some time now, also in the production of battery cells. The joint venture would realize announcements to also build up local expertise in the business with its own software and electronics systems and to become more independent of suppliers.
VW lost market share in China in the last two years, partly due to the chip crisis. The supply of semiconductors picks up again, according to the group’s assessment. Overall, however, things are not going according to plan at Cariad, and the software subsidiary has so far been left to its own devices when it comes to digitization. In June, it was revealed that McKinsey’s management consultants gave Cariad a crushing verdict: The company’s organization does not function, its decision-making structure does not yield the desired results, and as a result, the new software architecture is repeatedly delayed.
Worldwide, there is also a shortage of software engineers. Competitors are poaching skilled employees from each other, and the market for IT specialists remains a zero-sum game where prices are the only thing that goes up. And the thousands of developers that Cariad alone would need to pull itself out of the crisis simply are not there. Therefore, it makes much more sense to ally with local, existing expertise. Matthias Wulf/Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
At the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this month, Xi Jinping will almost certainly be confirmed for a third term as the Party’s general secretary and China’s president. With that, he will become China’s longest-serving paramount leader since Mao Zedong, and the rules and norms that are supposed to govern the CPC regime will be shattered.
Those rules and norms were put in place largely by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who took power in 1978. Deng knew firsthand the damage the Party’s ideological fanaticism could do. During the Cultural Revolution, one of his sons was paralyzed by rampaging Red Guards. Deng himself was stripped of his official positions and sent to work at a factory in a remote province for four years – one of three times he was purged from government during his long revolutionary career.
To ensure that China would never again be gripped by such terror, Deng – with the support of other veteran revolutionaries who had survived the Cultural Revolution – restored collective leadership and imposed age and term limits for most senior CPC positions. In the decades that followed, China’s top leaders served no more than two terms, and Politburo members respected an implicit age limit of 68.
But Xi has exposed just how fragile Deng’s “rules-based system” really was. In fact, for all the hoopla about Deng’s accomplishments, his record on reining in the CPC regime is mixed, at best, not least because his own commitment to the rules was not nearly as robust as one might expect.
In practice, Deng disdained collective leadership and formal procedures. He seldom held Politburo Standing Committee meetings, because he wanted to deny his main rival, a staunch conservative opposed to economic reform, a platform to challenge his policy. Instead, he exercised leadership through private meetings with supporters.
Moreover, in dealing with leaders sympathetic to pro-democracy forces, Deng frequently violated the procedures and norms he had established. His dismissal of two liberal CPC chiefs – Hu Yaobang in 1986 and Zhao Ziyang (who refused Deng’s order to implement martial law during the Tiananmen crisis) in 1989 – defied the Party’s bylaws.
At the same time, Deng sometimes avoided introducing a rule at all, if doing so could undermine his political interests. Most notably, he – together with other aging CPC leaders – did not impose age or term limits on Politburo members. Even if they could not hold formal government posts indefinitely, they would never lose their decision-making authority.
Likewise, Deng enacted no formal rules governing who could chair the Central Military Commission. This enabled him to continue to do so after he had resigned from his other posts. Following that precedent, Jiang Zemin did the same in 2002. As for Xi, while he had to go through the motions of getting the presidential term limit removed from the constitution in 2018, he benefited from the fact that the CPC has not imposed an official term limit on its general secretary.
There is nothing shocking about China’s struggles to uphold rules and norms. Even mature democracies like the United States face such challenges, as Donald Trump’s presidency clearly showed. But should formal constitutional checks and balances fail, democracies can at least count on a free press, civil society, and opposition parties to push back, as they did against Trump.
In dictatorships, rules and norms are far more fragile, as there are no credible constitutional or political enforcement mechanisms, and autocrats can easily politicize institutions, such as constitutional courts, turning such bodies into rubber stamps. And there are no secondary enforcement mechanisms. China has no free press or organized opposition. If a rule becomes inconvenient – as the constitutional limit on presidential terms did for Xi – it can easily be changed.
While trampling institutional rules and norms may benefit autocratic rulers, it is not necessarily good for their regimes. The CPC’s experience under Mao is a case in point. Unencumbered by any institutional constraints, Mao engaged in ceaseless purges and led the Party from one disaster to another, leaving behind a regime that was ideologically exhausted and economically bankrupt.
Deng understood that a rules-based system was essential to avoid repeating that disastrous experience. But his conviction could not overcome his self-interest, and the institutional edifice he built in the 1980s turned out to be little more than a house of cards. Xi’s confirmation this month is merely the breeze triggering its inevitable collapse.
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, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
Workplace for the press: The media center for the CP Congress, which begins on Sunday, has already opened. Here, domestic and foreign media representatives have access only with special accreditations. In 2017, there was a record number of reporters, according to official figures: Around 3,000 media professionals, including around 1,800 international journalists, were accredited for the 19th Party Congress. This time, fewer foreign journalists have announced their attendance.
A congress of the Communist Party of China only happens every five years, and it starts this weekend. Tension is correspondingly high. At the center of attention: Xi Jinping. The CP Congress is his show. Reason enough to take a closer look at his personality. Michael Radunski describes him as a clever strategist who long presented himself as an inconspicuous compromise candidate before he systematically seized power. That is why a majority of China observers underestimated him and even applauded him as a liberal reformer. The shock was all the greater after he sent the party back to its authoritarian past.
The ruthless politician Xi also puts Germany to the test. When it comes to China’s global aspirations, Xi wants to return to China’s distant past as a global power. However, he by no means follows the historical blueprint. In actual history, the Middle Kingdom has long isolated itself without any international ambitions. Xi, on the other hand, is bent on gaining global influence. And Germany does not do well with aggressive partners. It would rather focus on trade instead, a field in which it is more experienced than in power politics.
Meanwhile, things are not looking so bad between national economies, as the latest move by the VW Group also shows. It plans to invest billions in a joint venture with AI specialist Horizon Robotics. By acquiring existing digital knowledge, the company wants to avoid a disaster in its software division. It lacks skilled employees. We take a look at what VW’s new partner is all about.
When Xi Jinping was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, hopes were high: Xi would lead China into a new era as a great reformer. Journalists who reported from the CP Congress in Beijing at the time could literally smell the smell of reform and change.
Even the New York Times was downright euphoric: “The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison.” At least that was the prediction of Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof on January 5, 2013.
But things would turn out differently. Mao Zedong is once again more popular in China than at any point since his death. Liu Xiaobo died miserably in prison. But that is not all: Instead of economic and civic change, Xi Jinping introduced an iron-fisted leadership style. Xi is far from being a reformer. Rather, he is a restorer – of the party and its central role in society, and of China and its role in the world.
How could people be so fundamentally mistaken about this man? And what is driving China’s leader to even allow himself to be granted a third term at the upcoming party congress?
According to the official history of the Communist Party, the key to Xi Jinping’s career lies in Liangjiahe, a small, inconspicuous village in the loess mountains of central China’s Shaanxi province. It was 1969, the Cultural Revolution raged across the country, and Mao Zedong sent millions of students out into the barren countryside to experience the poor and deprived lives of peasants firsthand. One of them was the then 16-year-old Xi Jinping, son of disgraced party stalwart Xi Zhongxun.
Xi’s father was a revolutionary from the very start. He had fought for the communist revolution alongside Mao Zedong not far from Liangjiahe in the mountains of Yan’an and had subsequently risen to the position of vice premier. Xi Jinping is thus a 太子 (tàizǐ) – a princeling, as the sons of that first CP generation are called. This came with all kinds of privileges: He grew up in the shade of the Forbidden City, attended the city’s elite schools, which only the children of high-ranking party cadres and military officers were allowed to attend. While the Cultural Revolution raged across the country, Xi lived in a perfect world.
All that came to an abrupt end in 1969. Mao accused Xi Senior of conspiracy, and the family fell from grace. Xi Junior was mobbed and forced to publicly denounce his father. His older half-sister even committed suicide. Xi did not go to Liangjiahe voluntarily; he was banished.
Official CP mythology tells us that this was the place where Xi transformed himself from a privileged princeling into a man of the people. Xi himself once said, “Many of my fundamental ideas and qualities were formed in Yan’an. Before, I was used to eating fine rice. There, it was coarse grains. But soon I learned to swallow them.”
Things soon improved for Xi’s father. He was rehabilitated and founded China’s first special economic zone in a small fishing village called Shenzhen. Today, Shenzhen has a population of around twelve million and is considered the center of China’s high-tech industry. The special economic zone had its own, more liberal rules. It was a reform project.
After these experiences, political observers believed they knew Xi Jinping. Two conclusions seemed obvious. First, for all the atrocities against him, his father, and his family, Xi Jinping must have loathed the CP. Second, Xi would surely follow in his father’s footsteps and, as a reformer, modernize not only Shenzhen but all of China. Both turned out to be false.
Xi Jinping is on a mission. He still was a princeling, and as the legitimate heir to the revolutionary achievements, he believed he had the right to lead China. However, he had to be careful. He “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red,” a source close to him is quoted as saying in a secret 2009 US embassy report. And indeed. Despite everything the party had done to him, Xi submitted a total of eight membership applications in the years that followed – before finally being accepted into the Youth League. Xi joined the Communist Party and began to map out a career plan that would take him to the top. He was not going to destroy the system, but to seize it from within and then rule it from above.
Experience taught him that in order to get to the top, he had to keep a low profile and remain inconspicuous for as long as possible. It almost seems as if Xi based his personal career on a famous maxim by Deng Xiaoping. “Hide your strength, bide your time.”
Accordingly, Xi long appeared determined and far-sighted, but inconspicuous. As secretary to the minister of defense, he forged contacts with the military; in the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, he appeared pro-business and streamlined the bureaucracy. Xi kept such a low profile as a functionary that he was best known to the public as the husband of Peng Liyuan: One of China’s most famous singers of so-called red songs such as “People from Our Village” (父老乡亲) or “In the Field of Hope” (在希望的田野上). Peng was a star in China – and Xi Jinping was Peng’s husband.
And Xi’s success was not just a private one. At the time, the CCP saw bitter trench warfare between various factions. Jiang Zemin, for example, had officially stepped down, but was still pulling the strings in the background. That is why Xi Jinping came into the spotlight when it came to finding a suitable candidate for the party leadership. Many considered him to be solid, moderate and staid. In short, he was a candidate who would not hurt anyone.
Xi thus fitted perfectly into a time when the party still praised collective leadership and shared responsibility to prevent arbitrary decisions by a sole leader. Today, it is likely that the Chinese censors would interpret such an idea as insubordinate criticism and delete it instantly.
Then, in 2012, his time came. But shortly before he was appointed general secretary of the CP, Xi Jinping suddenly vanished without a trace; even appointments with the then US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, had been canceled. Speculation ranged from health problems to attempted assassination.
But Chris Johnson, a former China analyst for the CIA, told The Economist magazine that Xi faced a test of power: The party leaders must have been surprised by Xi’s hunger for power and tried to contain it shortly before the party congress. Xi, however, was all too aware that time was short and put his card on the table by threatening that they should quickly find someone else for the job.
The party yielded, and Xi was named general secretary a few weeks later at the 18th party congress – and at the same time made it clear who would be at the head of the party and the state in the future. Xi not only wanted to be the first among equals, but simply the first.
Accordingly, he immediately began to turn the CP inside out – and tailor it entirely to his needs. With the help of an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, he purged the ranks of the party and security forces. Thousands of cadres were arrested and convicted – starting at the lowest village levels and going almost all the way to the top to Zhou Yongkang, a member of the CP Standing Committee. Certainly, there are different groups and factions, divergent interests and views within the CP. But at present, Xi Jinping has brought them all in line. His own line.
He also had dissent in civil society crushed, human rights activists arrested, and made it impossible for NGOs to operate. In Xinjiang, millions of Uyghurs are put into detainment camps, while in Hong Kong, constitutional freedoms are being radically curtailed.
And Xi’s days of restraint in foreign policy have also come to an end: He ordered sandbanks in the South China Sea to be converted into military bases, threats against Taiwan to become harsher, and military drills to increase. Not to mention China’s “pro-Russian neutrality” in the Ukraine war.
By now, everyone must have realized that Xi is neither the reformer yearned for by the West nor the collective leader the party rulers wanted. Xi is a tough power politician who ruthlessly pursues his goals.
Many see Xi at his zenith. But the zenith is always followed by the first step of decline. And indeed, Xi’s problems are daunting: The astonishing economic upswing has stalled. Economic growth is essential for Xi, however, because success legitimizes CP rule. Moreover, Xi has completely lost his way with his strict zero-Covid policy. What were considered necessary restrictions at the start of the pandemic have long since caused frustration and resentment among the population.
But Xi sees himself as a man with a mission. To understand him, you have to consider the experiences and humiliations of his youth. And even if the days in the cold clay caves of Liangjiahe have since become glorified and exaggerated by party propaganda, they are essential for understanding the Chinese leader.
Internally, chaos like that of the Cultural Revolution must never happen again. The collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the color revolutions in the Arab countries serve as a reminder to him. Society must stand on a firm ideological foundation. That is why Xi developed the ideas of the “Chinese Dream” (中国梦; Zhōngguó mèng) and “China’s national rejuvenation” (中华民族伟大复兴; Zhōnghuámínzú Wěidà Fùxīng). To achieve them, he believes that absolute control will be required – over all areas: from the economy to culture, from public streets and squares to people’s homes and smartphones. He believes that he must retain control, otherwise, everything will fall apart.
And Xi also has big plans for foreign policy. His narrative here is “profound changes unseen in a century” (百年未有之大变局; Bǎinián wèi yǒu zhī dà biànjú). Xi wants to lead China back to its rightful place: the top. In this sense, “Zhongguo” should perhaps no longer be translated as Middle Kingdom, but as “navel of the world”.
To ensure that these challenging visions become reality, a skilled leader is undoubtedly needed. Xi Jinping trusts only one to accomplish this: Xi Jinping.
According to media reports, Volkswagen’s software division Cariad will join forces with a major domestic player in China for artificial intelligence and automated driving. To this end, the Group wants to invest up to €2 billion in a joint venture with the AI company Horizon Robotics from Beijing. The German Manager Magazin reported on plans to this effect. According to group sources, the move would be a key building block in the digitalization and China strategy of Europe’s largest car group. A formal decision is still pending.
Horizon Robotics would definitely be a logical and highly capable partner. It is already well-known in the VW Group: Audi already worked on projects with the company to outfit self-driving cars. Horizon Robotics is also a partner of other players in the automotive industry, including Continental. Last year, they announced a joint venture with the Chinese company.
The Audi example already shows how the tech world currently divides itself: While the premium brand cooperates with the US company Nvidia for Western markets, it put out feelers to Horizon Robotics in China. In the future, the Western models will presumably run primarily with American or European hardware and software, and China models with Chinese technology. A consequence of geopolitical divide and rising mutual distrust coupled with protectionist industrial policies.
Horizon Robotics’ technical capabilities are easily on par with US competitors. “Our mission is to create a world-leading artificial intelligence platform,” said company founder and CEO Yu Kai. Yu headed the machine learning institute of IT company Baidu before he founded his own company with some friends.
Horizon develops chips designed with brain-like structures, i.e. neural networks. These can detect and interpret patterns and situations. This ability is invaluable to numerous industries including cars, aviation, security and robotics. Horizon starts with the automotive market, but plans to bring autonomous functions to many other areas in the future.
The logic of Horizon’s software does not simply capture what they see in a pixel pattern. To some degree, they understand what they see and assign the parts of the image to the appropriate sense. A cyclist is recognized as such, as is a building, the crosswalk, or a mother with a stroller. Neural networks are responsible for this. They automatically learn about the world from countless case studies. After their training, they recognize patterns much more reliably than inflexibly programmed algorithms.
But the power of Horizon chips does not end there. Based on this knowledge, they also offer predictions about what will happen in the next few seconds. The yellow traffic light will jump to red (it was previously green), the cyclist will be one meter to the left (he is coming from the right) and the mother with a stroller will probably stop (the traffic light shows red for her). The chip then supplies the onboard computer with this processed data about the possible future traffic situation, which it then uses to decide on the next driving maneuver. The priority, of course, is to warn of hazards, especially collisions.
Our brain works in exactly the same way when driving a car: It uses its knowledge of the world to try and predict what will happen in the next few moments. This is how we know whether we can step on the gas a bit to drive through, or better slow down because the stroller will get in the way of the cyclist, which then could get in our way. Without this ability, fluid autonomous driving in urban traffic would be impossible. Cars would have to fumble from situation to situation at a snail’s pace if we did not dare to make predictions.
For Volkswagen, joining forces with one of the important Chinese AI players means a renewed, albeit moderate, correction of its strategy. In the People’s Republic, VW has already been working with domestic suppliers for a long time in vehicle production and, for some time now, also in the production of battery cells. The joint venture would realize announcements to also build up local expertise in the business with its own software and electronics systems and to become more independent of suppliers.
VW lost market share in China in the last two years, partly due to the chip crisis. The supply of semiconductors picks up again, according to the group’s assessment. Overall, however, things are not going according to plan at Cariad, and the software subsidiary has so far been left to its own devices when it comes to digitization. In June, it was revealed that McKinsey’s management consultants gave Cariad a crushing verdict: The company’s organization does not function, its decision-making structure does not yield the desired results, and as a result, the new software architecture is repeatedly delayed.
Worldwide, there is also a shortage of software engineers. Competitors are poaching skilled employees from each other, and the market for IT specialists remains a zero-sum game where prices are the only thing that goes up. And the thousands of developers that Cariad alone would need to pull itself out of the crisis simply are not there. Therefore, it makes much more sense to ally with local, existing expertise. Matthias Wulf/Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
At the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this month, Xi Jinping will almost certainly be confirmed for a third term as the Party’s general secretary and China’s president. With that, he will become China’s longest-serving paramount leader since Mao Zedong, and the rules and norms that are supposed to govern the CPC regime will be shattered.
Those rules and norms were put in place largely by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who took power in 1978. Deng knew firsthand the damage the Party’s ideological fanaticism could do. During the Cultural Revolution, one of his sons was paralyzed by rampaging Red Guards. Deng himself was stripped of his official positions and sent to work at a factory in a remote province for four years – one of three times he was purged from government during his long revolutionary career.
To ensure that China would never again be gripped by such terror, Deng – with the support of other veteran revolutionaries who had survived the Cultural Revolution – restored collective leadership and imposed age and term limits for most senior CPC positions. In the decades that followed, China’s top leaders served no more than two terms, and Politburo members respected an implicit age limit of 68.
But Xi has exposed just how fragile Deng’s “rules-based system” really was. In fact, for all the hoopla about Deng’s accomplishments, his record on reining in the CPC regime is mixed, at best, not least because his own commitment to the rules was not nearly as robust as one might expect.
In practice, Deng disdained collective leadership and formal procedures. He seldom held Politburo Standing Committee meetings, because he wanted to deny his main rival, a staunch conservative opposed to economic reform, a platform to challenge his policy. Instead, he exercised leadership through private meetings with supporters.
Moreover, in dealing with leaders sympathetic to pro-democracy forces, Deng frequently violated the procedures and norms he had established. His dismissal of two liberal CPC chiefs – Hu Yaobang in 1986 and Zhao Ziyang (who refused Deng’s order to implement martial law during the Tiananmen crisis) in 1989 – defied the Party’s bylaws.
At the same time, Deng sometimes avoided introducing a rule at all, if doing so could undermine his political interests. Most notably, he – together with other aging CPC leaders – did not impose age or term limits on Politburo members. Even if they could not hold formal government posts indefinitely, they would never lose their decision-making authority.
Likewise, Deng enacted no formal rules governing who could chair the Central Military Commission. This enabled him to continue to do so after he had resigned from his other posts. Following that precedent, Jiang Zemin did the same in 2002. As for Xi, while he had to go through the motions of getting the presidential term limit removed from the constitution in 2018, he benefited from the fact that the CPC has not imposed an official term limit on its general secretary.
There is nothing shocking about China’s struggles to uphold rules and norms. Even mature democracies like the United States face such challenges, as Donald Trump’s presidency clearly showed. But should formal constitutional checks and balances fail, democracies can at least count on a free press, civil society, and opposition parties to push back, as they did against Trump.
In dictatorships, rules and norms are far more fragile, as there are no credible constitutional or political enforcement mechanisms, and autocrats can easily politicize institutions, such as constitutional courts, turning such bodies into rubber stamps. And there are no secondary enforcement mechanisms. China has no free press or organized opposition. If a rule becomes inconvenient – as the constitutional limit on presidential terms did for Xi – it can easily be changed.
While trampling institutional rules and norms may benefit autocratic rulers, it is not necessarily good for their regimes. The CPC’s experience under Mao is a case in point. Unencumbered by any institutional constraints, Mao engaged in ceaseless purges and led the Party from one disaster to another, leaving behind a regime that was ideologically exhausted and economically bankrupt.
Deng understood that a rules-based system was essential to avoid repeating that disastrous experience. But his conviction could not overcome his self-interest, and the institutional edifice he built in the 1980s turned out to be little more than a house of cards. Xi’s confirmation this month is merely the breeze triggering its inevitable collapse.
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, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
Workplace for the press: The media center for the CP Congress, which begins on Sunday, has already opened. Here, domestic and foreign media representatives have access only with special accreditations. In 2017, there was a record number of reporters, according to official figures: Around 3,000 media professionals, including around 1,800 international journalists, were accredited for the 19th Party Congress. This time, fewer foreign journalists have announced their attendance.
