15

Xi Jinping’s China in the 2020s: The Politics of the Twentieth Party Congress

So where does all this leave Chinese politics at the dawn of this “decade of living dangerously”? As we have seen in previous chapters, understanding the changing contours of Xi Jinping’s worldview is important—including how these differ from those of his predecessors—particularly as Xi pushes Chinese politics, economics, and society to the left while taking Chinese nationalism further to the right, thereby politically turbocharging China’s new assertiveness in the world at large. It has also been important to understand how America, under both the Trump and Biden presidencies, have read the Xi phenomenon so far—and how they have responded to it—causing the US body politic to conclude that Xi Jinping’s China represents the single largest threat to American global and regional power since the Cold War.

But before we try to map the dangerous shoals of the coming decade, including how they could play out and what could credibly be done to avoid crisis, conflict, and war, it is important to take stock of where Chinese politics stands right now, at the dawn of the decade. It is particularly important to delve inside the opaque world of internal party politics in the lead-up to the Twentieth Party Congress scheduled for late 2022. The reason for this is straightforward: the politics of the Politburo, the Central Committee, the military, security, and intelligence apparatus—and, to some extent, the distilled opinions of China’s elder statesmen—will shape the outcome of the congress on three consequential questions. Will Xi Jinping secure reappointment for a record third term through to 2027? If so, what does that mean for him continuing as China’s paramount leader beyond 2027? Will his future powers be increasingly untrammeled as a result?

My argument, based on the evidence to date, is that the answer to all three of these questions is, with some caveats, yes.

Xi, the Master Politician

Xi Jinping’s political modus operandi, when confronted with a challenge—either foreign or domestic—is to double down: to either crash through or crash. Unlike most of his recent predecessors, Xi is a calculated, albeit not a reckless, risk taker. His critical skill is to identify a political or policy vacuum and to fill it before others do. He is a master tactician in building political momentum across the cumbersome internal machinery of the CCP by deploying key personnel to critical positions; mobilizing the party’s propaganda apparatus; and anchoring his worldview in a single, all-encompassing ideological framework in order to convince the party and the country that they are critical parts of a historical, righteous, and “correct” cause. Xi is also his own master class in internal party politics, possessing a ruthlessness not seen since Mao in dealing with political opponents. For these reasons, there is no credible competitor of comparable political stature left standing in the inner sanctums of Chinese party politics—or, at least, none that we know of.

Xi has broken the norms of post–Cultural Revolution politics. After that disaster, party elites, led by Deng Xiaoping, agreed that there would be no more political purges of the type that Mao had specialized in for more than thirty years. Leaders would be jailed only for rank corruption, not for political crimes. Under Xi, more senior Chinese leaders have been imprisoned than under the rest of his post-Mao predecessors combined. But in doing so, Xi has been careful to use his party-wide anticorruption campaign to bring his adversaries down on the grounds of financial impropriety rather than politics alone (although, over time, he has more directly hinted at the existence of “antiparty cliques” that needed—and still need—to be dealt with). The anticorruption campaign he launched in 2013 has rumbled on for more than eight years, with hundreds of thousands of party cadres at all levels formally investigated and punished. But in case his opponents had concluded it had run its course, Xi recently doubled down again. In 2020, he launched a formal party rectification campaign of the type Mao used at his guerrilla base in Yan’an during the Anti-Japanese War in 1942. This was when Mao physically eliminated or politically purged thousands of party cadres suspected of being disloyal to him. It is not coincidental that this particular campaign is being conducted by Xi’s closest political supporters in the two years leading right up to the Twentieth Party Congress. In the bloody history of the CCP, rectification campaigns certainly focus the mind. And Xi Jinping plays for keeps.

However, it is important to understand that the reason Xi continues to resort to these harsh measures is because he is acutely aware that the radical changes he has brought about in China’s overall political and policy direction have earned him a powerful group of enemies. Each of the leaders who has been purged has an extensive network of friends, family, and supporters. Although Xi has, in the main, been meticulous in taking out his enemies’ protégés and camp followers or intimidating them into silence, or at least inertia, they nonetheless make up an informal network of the politically alienated. These have been joined by the ranks of disaffected officers from within the PLA. Large-scale purges, radical restructuring, and massive troop reductions in the PLA, conducted without providing adequate pensions, have also left a large legion of deeply alienated former military personnel. Furthermore, within the political, judicial, and intelligence apparatus of the party, Xi has long suspected active opposition to his power and position. For example, the purges within the Ministry of Public Security alone have been forensic. The MPS is just one of a number of agencies within the so-called legal and political affairs machinery that became the explicit target of Xi’s most recent rectification campaign. Similarly, Xi’s early decision to bring the People’s Armed Police under direct party control (rather than having it continue to sit under the administrative apparatus of the state council) reflects his legitimate paranoia about this paramilitary force being deployed against him—as was reportedly almost the case just prior to him taking over the party leadership in 2012, when he faced down powerful internal rivals, such as Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang. Finally, there are the former party leaders themselves—including the ancients Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji and the rapidly aging Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao—whose collective disdain for Xi’s continuing repudiation of their policy legacy is evident from a number of sources. However, the problem with all these groups is that there is no single figure around whom political resistance could effectively coalesce. From time to time, the current vice president of the People’s Republic, Wang Qishan, is mentioned, given his continuing stature in the party and signs of his recent political estrangement from Xi. There has also been some recent evidence of estrangement between Wang (once Xi’s trusted companion but now rarely in public view) and Xi, including the purging of Wang’s former aide Dong Hong. But were Wang to even begin contemplating a move against Xi, it would be career terminating in the extreme.

For any political opposition to effectively mobilize against Xi Jinping’s reappointment in late 2022, there would need to be a series of catalytic and catastrophic events. These events could take a number of different forms. The most credible would be any self-inflicted economic crisis, decline, or even financial collapse. The party has only relatively recently rebuilt its domestic credibility and political legitimacy in China following the country’s near economic collapse of the Great Leap Forward and, later, the Culture Revolution. That’s because in the decades after 1978, the party finally lifted people’s living standards in what had long been an impoverished socialist paradise. To undo the unspoken social contract between party and people (i.e., political control in exchange for economic prosperity) in any way would rebound badly on Xi.

Second, natural calamities (including pandemics) also have the potential to destabilize the party’s leadership (as they have throughout Chinese history, in which disasters were commonly taken to mean leaders had lost the “mandate of heaven”). This is why the internal politics of China became particularly intense in the first half of 2020 following the eruption of COVID-19 in Wuhan and the leadership’s initially tepid response. It also underscores the party’s acute response to any foreign attacks regarding the Chinese origins of the virus for fear this would become part of the country’s internal discourse, in addition to an international loss of face. In Xi’s case in particular, the critique was that because of his feared status as an unforgiving and dictatorial leader, senior provincial officials hid the news of the pandemic from Beijing in its early and most critical weeks, hoping to contain it locally rather than following long-agreed protocols mandating immediate national and global notification.

A third cataclysmic event would be a military defeat, large or small, at the hands of either the United States or Japan. Xi’s national political narrative about “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” carries with it the assumption that China would prevail in any direct contest. This has been furthered by Xi’s decision to militarize his presidency (wearing battle fatigues, undertaking frequent troop reviews, and his constant public references to China’s ever-growing comprehensive national power) to the extent that an inability to win an outright victory in any armed confrontation with the US or its allies would be politically lethal. It would be doubly so if this occurred in any scenario over Taiwan, which Xi has vowed to return to Beijing’s control as part of the China Dream.

Xi has therefore adopted a generally cautious approach to these significant strategic risks, in contrast to his approach to tactical politics, where he has (as noted earlier) been much more agile and audacious. In the case of the pandemic, he quashed all domestic dissent and adopted a zero-tolerance strategy toward the virus itself—all the while deploying the party’s propaganda apparatus to ensure that any international criticism is aggressively rebutted through his global team of wolf warrior diplomats, even seeking to sow doubt as to whether the virus actually originated in China in the first place. On potential military crises, as noted in previous chapters, Xi may be forward leaning in dealing with US and Japanese naval and air incursions into what he describes as Chinese territory. But he is unlikely to allow any incidents to escalate to a point of no return—unless convinced that there is no risk that Chinese forces would not prevail or that the domestic political cost of blinking and backing down is simply too great.

Xi’s real political vulnerability lies with the economy. As noted in previous chapters, the economy is not his policy strong suit. He has limited feel for financial markets or the complexities of macroeconomic management. Therefore, his recent major adjustments to China’s domestic economic growth model outlined in chapter 6, including the reemphasis of the state over the market, and his new restrictions on the Chinese private sector pose a real political danger to his leadership if growth, employment, or living standards were to stall. This, in my judgment, is Xi’s greatest liability, particularly given that his critics in the party leadership elite have previously championed a different economic policy strategy for China’s future.

Xi Jinping’s efforts to secure long-term control over the party have not been limited to coercive means. His efforts have also been directed at developing a personality cult elevating himself as the “indispensable core leader” in the eyes of the party’s mass membership and the wider Chinese public. He has been accorded symbolically significant new titles, including leader (lingxiu) and the helmsman piloting the country’s future—both designations previously reserved for Mao alone. But, most spectacularly, Xi has also become the author of the entire body of an eponymous Xi Jinping Thought that—after only a single term in office—has been incorporated into both the party and state constitutions. An official assessment of history, passed at party’s Sixth Plenum in November 2021, declared its “decisive significance,” codifying Xi Jinping Thought as the pliable new ideological orthodoxy for the party during this new era that has officially replaced the previous decades defined by Deng Xiaoping. Xi Jinping Thought is designed to navigate the party and the country along a new course that will deal with the “imbalances,” “inadequacies,” and “inequalities” of that previous era of unrestrained capitalist growth. Indeed, Xi Jinping Thought is specifically designed to provide a theoretical justification for Xi’s reorientation of political, economic, and social policy in a new pro-party state interventionist direction across the board. Xi Jinping Thought has also extended its reach into foreign and military policy guidance, where it lays out the new path for China to follow in assuming its newfound great power status, along with new principles and frameworks (already discussed in chapter 13) for a new, more Sino-centric international order.

For those seeking to locate any particular theoretical coherence across the many tomes of Xi Jinping Thought that have emerged so far or any new interpretation of twenty-first-century Marxism, that is not the point. Xi Jinping Thought has been designed to be politically elastic: to expand and contract to absorb new political and policy developments as they arise and, as a result, ideologically legitimize them by attaching the Xi Jinping Thought mantra to them. That is not to say that Xi Jinping Thought is devoid of substantive content. But it is largely limited to three core propositions: (1) Chinese ideological orthodoxy is to be an amalgam of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese tradition, and Chinese nationalism—with the precise weighting of the amalgam to be defined by the party leadership from time to time depending on the need. (2) This orthodoxy embraces the current move toward the left on politics and the economy and to the right on nationalism. (3) Beyond intellectual cognition and moral legitimization, this new ideology legitimizes struggle as a necessary means of practical action for realizing progress, both at home and abroad. Importantly, struggle, in the Chinese Communist political vernacular, can take many forms—including both nonviolent and violent.

For all these reasons, Xi’s domestic political position as he approaches the Twentieth Party Congress in late 2022 is relatively robust. There is no apparent challenger. He would also fear that if he did step down, he would become powerless in the face of the many he had purged or marginalized, who would then seek revenge. Furthermore, Xi’s party-rectification movement has reduced any would-be opponents to a state of anxiety, terror, and, above all, silence. Moreover, since 2013, he has placed key supporters in critical positions across the entire party and military apparatus. The likelihood of a large-scale destabilizing internal or external event is therefore limited, although we should always keep a close weather eye on what could flow politically from the economy’s performance in the future during 2022. Most importantly, Xi has seized the “commanding heights” of the party ideologically, which in the CCP remains critically important as a means of handling normative discourse across its ninety-five million members. Here, Xi has become (like Mao) the party’s “ideologist in chief”—so much so that there is a Xi Jinping Thought textbook available for compulsory study for every school student, printed under the snappy subtitle Happiness Only Comes Through Struggle.

But should Marxism-Leninism falter in its capacity to offer a convincing narrative for explaining the significant changes he has already introduced and, more importantly, should the economy fail, Xi could still harness the ancient alchemy of Chinese nationalism as the ultimate legitimizing force behind his leadership. Xi’s public language is littered with his concerns with both black swan and gray rhino events, reflecting his deep preoccupation with those forces that could bring him down. But at this stage, it would take a combination of both swans and rhinos for him to fail being reappointed as paramount leader at the 2022 Party Congress. It is a separate question what his official designation might be after that occurs, including whether, for example, he resumes Mao’s old title of party chairman. But based on what we know, his material power is likely to continue to hold up into the future. It would, therefore, be prudent for American presidents to assume that Xi will be their opponent for much, and likely all, of the decade ahead, barring, of course, an early natural demise.

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Economy During the 2020s

As noted throughout this book, the possibility of economic failure represents the most pressing political threat hanging over Xi Jinping’s head in the critical decade ahead—the decade likely to determine the future balance of power between China and the United States. Xi’s most recent gambit to pivot to public on the economy is fundamentally a political one. All the primary elements of Xi’s New Development Concept (as described in chapter 6) are meant to strengthen both his and the party’s grip on power. These include the focus on common prosperity by reducing income inequality, achieving national technological self-reliance, and, most importantly, embracing state leadership over the market at most levels of the economy. In Xi’s vision, this will simultaneously win over the people to his side, reduce China’s vulnerability to external pressures, and provide a robust new driver for the sustainable growth of China’s “real economy” far into the future. This is, however, highly optimistic. Casting aside the proven growth engine of China’s recent economic transformation—the private sector—in favor of more centralized control of the economy risks stunting China’s growth momentum at the most critical time. Indeed, private fixed capital investment is already lagging, reflecting declining levels of private-sector confidence.

Already, China’s economic growth is slowing. While Chinese GDP posted a strong 18.3 percent early recovery from the pandemic in the first quarter of 2021, growth slowed to 7.9 percent in the second quarter and then only 4.9 percent in the third—well below expectations. Additionally, industrial production growth fell to 8.9 percent in the second quarter and then only 3.1 percent in the third, marking a significant drop from the 24.5 percent logged in the first. The slowdown signaled a halt to a hoped-for V-shaped recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and hinted at the underlying structural challenges lying beneath China’s economic growth prospects for the decade ahead.

Much of China’s economic growth during 2021 was powered by the long-standing growth drivers of net exports, manufacturing, and government investment. Exports, however, are unlikely to persist as a major growth driver because of disruptions related to the pandemic, the US-China trade war, and global supply chains. Indeed, much of the growth in 2020 came on the back of industrial production, driven in large part by policy-driven public-sector investment. Despite this, much of Xi’s strategy for future growth hangs on domestic consumption, innovation, and productivity growth. But in each of these areas, major policy problems loom that, on balance, are likely to impede growth rather than enhance it.

Under Xi’s new development model, domestic consumer demand is also meant to drive much of China’s economic growth for the coming decade. But while private consumption has proven to be relatively resilient so far, it is still limited by the country’s culture of high household saving rates. In general, the future outlook for China’s consumer demand is problematic. With the income and spending gap between China’s rich and poor widening significantly during the pandemic, it is far from certain that China’s overall consumption growth can maintain previous momentum. What consumer spending growth there has been is expected to moderate once pent-up demand from the pandemic dissipates. And while e-commerce has seen relatively strong growth during the pandemic and immediate postpandemic period, this is precisely the sector where Xi’s antimonopoly campaign is cracking down hard with as yet unknown consequences for growth. Consumer demand is also likely to be undermined by persistent problems with unemployment. As of the time of writing, the latest official unemployment figures show that China’s surveyed urban unemployment rate stood at around 5 percent. While this is not high (though some analysts speculate the real rate is much higher), it covers up more specific concerns—namely, the unemployment rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, which even on the official numbers rose to 13.8 percent in July 2021. Xi’s crackdown on China’s private sector, which provides for about 90 percent of new employment growth, will only dim their employment prospects even further.

Xi has also focused on state-led innovation through initiatives such as the “Made in China 2025” policy and its various successor policies. But with China’s access to foreign technologies becoming increasingly constrained because of geopolitical tensions, this is becoming an increasingly difficult prospect. Beijing has since launched massive state research, development, and innovation funds across ten priority industry sectors of the future (led by semiconductors)—treating these investments as large-scale venture-capital funds with equally massive anticipated losses—but also with some expectation that major breakthroughs will still occur. It remains to be seen whether this Beijing variation of the Chinese military and industrial complex will succeed, like its American antecedents in the 1950s, or whether it will only exacerbate China’s existing inefficiencies in allocation of capital.

However, it is in overall productivity growth where China’s economy is weakest and faces the greatest challenge in Xi Jinping’s new economic era. Since 2008, China’s total factor productivity (TFP) has grown by just 1.1 percent annually, less than a third the rate of the previous three decades, according to the World Bank. During the 2009–2018 period following the global financial crisis, aggregate labor productivity in China weakened to 7.4 percent per year, down from 9.0 percent in the 1999–2008 period before the crisis. Moreover, of all the sectors that have experienced slowdowns in the past few years, it has been the services sector—precisely the sector Xi is counting on powering the economy—that has been hit the hardest, with productivity falling from 8.1 percent to 4.6 percent over the last decade. That downward trend has persisted as the overall pace of reform has slowed. Comparatively, China’s economy does not yet come close to measuring up against the economies of other advanced countries. China’s economy is still only 30 percent as productive as the US, Japanese, or German economies. Most economists’ evaluation of the reasons for this is clear: the continued size, influence, and unproductive investment of the state sector. While the IMF evaluates productivity at Chinese state-owned enterprises to be only about 80 percent that of private firms, state firms enjoy preferential access to capital from banks. Prior to 2015, Xi pledged to kill off zombie SOEs that were kept alive only by state funds. That effort has slowed considerably, reinforced by Xi’s resolve under the new development concept to not only sustain but also expand the state-owned sector. This is bad news for long-term productivity growth. By contrast, economists argue that major state-sector reform to clean out low-productivity firms could more than double annual productivity growth over the next five years, from 0.6 percent to about 1.4 percent. This 0.8 percent improvement would also lift overall GDP growth by the same level (e.g., from the IMF’s 5.7 percent projection for 2022 to 6.5 percent). Xi, however, shows little interest in moving in this direction.

These various trends came to a head in the second half of 2021, when Evergrande Group, a Chinese property behemoth with $300 billion in debts, began defaulting on bond payments. It was followed by other smaller property developers who also began to default. With an estimated 41 percent of China’s approximately $45 trillion in banking-sector assets exposed in one way or another to the property market, this immediately raised fears that China might experience its Lehman Brothers moment, triggering a broader financial crisis. At time of writing it appears that the Evergrande problem is likely to be resolved by Beijing through an orderly distribution of its assets to a mix of private and state buyers, and most analysts are confident that, as the IMF put it, “China has the tools and the policy space to prevent this turning into a systemic crisis.” But avoiding this immediate crisis will not solve the significant longer-term problem facing Xi. As of the end of 2020, the property sector represented approximately 29 percent of Chinese GDP, 41 percent of all Chinese bank loans, and 78 percent of the wealth invested by urban Chinese. Yet China’s obsessive focus on growth powered by investment into infrastructure and property, along with slow progress on deleveraging, meant that in 2020, there was already enough empty property in China to house more than ninety million people—more than the entire population of Germany—according to an estimate by the Rhodium Group. Evergrande therefore effectively marked the end of the Chinese economy’s ability to continue running primarily on the same investment-led model. Instead, a reckoning in the vast property sector, managed or otherwise, is likely to become a significant further drag on China’s GDP growth, just as Xi’s pivot away from the private sector presents deep uncertainties about the efficiency and effectiveness of China’s future economic performance.

For all these reasons, while China is likely to reach its year-end target of 6 percent economic growth in 2021, the era of high growth in China is over. Even ahead of Xi’s crackdown on the private sector and the Evergrande crisis, a consensus had emerged among global economists that China’s economic growth will probably slow to around 4 percent by 2025. This forecast deceleration also reflects China’s aging population, declining workforce, weak productivity growth, a negative trade environment, and high levels of official debt. Added to this is the as yet unknown impact of Xi’s macro pivot to public across the overall political economy at the potential expense of China’s hitherto remarkable culture of private-sector dynamism. Private-sector investment, both domestic and from foreign sources, is likely to slow further—stranded in a period of great uncertainty between Xi’s common prosperity campaign at home and the threat of US-China decoupling abroad.

For years, economists have warned that only increases in total factor productivity can ultimately save China from the middle-income trap and that this increase can only come from an economy with less state involvement, not more. The next decade is likely to determine once and for all whether this hard-won collective wisdom proves still to be true—or whether China really is sui generis in the future efficacy of its new, but still unfolding, economic model. If Xi Jinping is fully aware of the economic policy gamble he is taking by changing the model in the midst of unfolding geopolitical risk, it may induce a level of caution about adding further risks to his overall strategic calculus. But if he is unaware, which may be the case because of his reported intolerance of official doubt, caution, and negativity, compounded by his lack of familiarity with the technical granularity of the economic policy brief, then China may embark on a decade of growing international assertiveness at a time when its domestic economy is weakening.

Xi Jinping and the Imposition of New Social Controls

Even if we accept that Xi’s position is likely to be secure within Chinese elite politics through the 2020s, what about broader Chinese society? Are there social movements brewing that could cause his leadership to be derailed, or at least change course? This is even harder to predict because the data is more difficult to come by. There are, nonetheless, a number of social trends unfolding across China that need to be watched carefully. Party leaders recall that no one—either within China or among professional China watchers abroad—predicted the Tiananmen protests of 1989. The party, of course, now monitors social developments carefully. It does so through a number of different mechanisms—including opinion poll research, social attitude surveys, the infamous social credit score system, and government algorithmic control. It became adept at identifying any negative trends that might disrupt political stability or otherwise threaten the continued rule of the party and, where necessary, at intervening quickly to either prevent or disrupt those trends.

One growing problem the party has recently confronted is the emerging social movement that has grown active around environmental protection, including on air quality, land contamination, and water pollution as well as food-quality standards. In the case of air pollution, what was noteworthy was Xi Jinping’s early intervention to change policy course once he concluded that popular discontent was gaining momentum, including demands for governmental action. This became particularly acute with air-quality standards in China’s major cities (most particularly Beijing) as more and more people became concerned for their physical well-being and that of their children. Rather than simply suppressing this popular movement, Xi’s response was to signal policy change. Despite this, however, the party has maintained close monitoring and surveillance of any environmental NGOs with any predisposition to develop a policy agenda outside the authority structures of the CCP. Nonetheless, the party’s actions to date on environmental sustainability reflect Xi’s desire to remain ahead of this particular curve rather than behind it—let alone being consumed by a deepening social movement that escapes his control altogether.

The second area where Xi Jinping faces real challenges, as noted previously, lies with China’s private entrepreneurial class. The movement to suppress China’s billionaire elite (most dramatically through his common prosperity campaign) has been popular across mainstream Chinese society, given that even Premier Li Keqiang admitted that as many as six hundred million Chinese are still surviving on salaries of less than 1,000 yuan ($155 dollars) per month. At the same time, Xi’s crackdown on wealth has sent a chilling message across the Chinese private sector. The reality Xi has confronted is that, given the lack of secure, well-paying positions available in traditional jobs, such as with SOEs, it is common for China’s university graduates to seek employment in China’s gig economy and, in time, set up their own small businesses. The open question is whether the actions taken now against China’s most successful entrepreneurs (until recently held up as exemplars for young Chinese seeking to get ahead) will generate a much wider reaction from across China’s vast entrepreneurial class. There are also particular provinces (for example, Zhejiang) where historically there has been a limited state-owned economic sector and private firms have been dominant in the overall economic structure. Therefore, what may appear to be a politically sensible course of action from Beijing’s position of reducing social inequality may end up generating an equal and opposite reaction from China’s existing and emerging entrepreneurial class across the provinces.

A third important area of real, emerging social opposition is religion. This applies not only to the practice of Islam in Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, and other parts of the country but also in particular to the practice of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity (as discussed in chapters 2 and 4). Xi has initiated a wide range of new repressive measures to bring religious observance under much more direct state control. Xi’s much-publicized bulldozing of unauthorized church structures in Zhejiang’s cities of Wenzhou and Ningbo became symbolic of a much wider repression of religious institutions, which has met with often fierce resistance by church groups across the country. This has been compounded by the arrest of a large number of Protestant pastors operating outside the framework of the Chinese patriotic church. The overall number of Christians, by some estimates, rivals the number of members of the party itself—nearing one hundred million. For these reasons, Xi Jinping is likely to continue his hard-line repressive approach. What remains to be seen is the extent to which this, in turn, generates a broader social movement, demanding more fundamental political and policy change while increasingly directing its wrath at Xi himself as the architect of these recent oppressive religious policy changes.

Xi has also introduced China’s first national NGO law, explicitly designed to bring both foreign-funded and domestic NGOs under much tighter control by both the party and the security apparatus. Xi has indicated his deep concern about the capacity of NGOs to act as agents of influence of foreign powers seeking to subvert the domestic political rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Given the absolute centrality of the party to Xi’s overall vision for the future of Chinese politics, it is a vision that offers limited room for future NGO activities in China. Prior to Xi becoming leader and passing China’s NGO law, there were more than seven thousand foreign NGOs and as many as one million domestic NGOs and social organizations spread across the country and engaged in every form of philanthropic activity. The fact that much of this activity has been brought to a shuddering halt will—as a matter of course—also add to this growing league of the politically disaffected.

A similar repressive approach has occurred across Chinese universities, where there has been a determined effort to reduce academic freedom. There has been not only a reemphasis on courses on Marxist-Leninist ideology but also new restrictions on what subjects can be taught and the curriculum material than can be relied on. More fundamentally, academics—particularly those who are foreign trained—have become the subject of much greater classroom surveillance and, in some cases, dismissal if any element of party or political orthodoxy is challenged in the classroom. While academics themselves don’t represent a political challenge to Xi, he and his colleagues are acutely conscious that the universities gave rise to the protest movements of 1989. Once again, the open question is what reactions will emerge across China’s university campuses given these most recent changes.

Parallel to these efforts, the party’s propaganda department has moved to rein in unauthorized media activities across China. Local newspapers, which had sprung up as independent “champions of truth,” have been quietly—and in some cases noisily—closed down. State-owned media has also been subjected to new restrictions on adhering to political and party orthodoxy in reporting, analysis, and opinion. Xi (from the publicly released transcripts of the speeches to the party’s propaganda work conferences) has indicated that a Western-style media, along with NGOs and undisciplined academics, represents a fundamental threat to the authority of the CCP. However, what remains unknown is the extent to which this form of media repression will result in a countermovement against his administration and encourage even more creative searches for alternative sources of information. The problem for Xi’s party is that despite his efforts to create a firewall between Chinese students and the internet, those students—and others—remain innovative in their abilities to break through the firewall and secure information from sources from around the world.

Another group to feel the brunt of Xi Jinping’s increasingly repressive policies has been the legal profession. An infamous case early in Xi’s rule saw hundreds of activist defense lawyers arrested and, in many cases, sentenced to prison because of their vigorous campaigns in support of criminal law reform and broader constitutional reform in China. In fact, Xi has taken a leading role in opposing efforts from the legal profession and the academic community supporting new forms of constitutionalism that would have the effect of making the party subordinate to the state constitution and to China’s national parliament. This movement had gained considerable momentum over the twenty-three years of Jiang Zemin’s and Hu Jintao’s rule. Once again, however, Xi has brought this to an abrupt stop. All debate on constitutional reform has been banned. And the party has decreed that the only legal reform that is necessary is to ensure that the courts, the People’s Procuratorate system, and defense lawyers are all subject to the will of the party. The capacity of the legal profession to constitute a general movement for a change within the CCP—or against Xi Jinping’s personal leadership—would appear to be remote. But Xi’s crackdown within the legal system after decades of incremental reform nevertheless builds collective resentment on the part of an articulate and activist profession.

Finally, Xi Jinping’s regime has adopted a new policy toward young people that could produce a much more widespread unintended reaction. Recent restrictions on the amount of gaming time permitted for school-age children have given rise to massive negative reaction from young people across the internet. This has accentuated the generational divide between Xi’s generation of party elders and younger Chinese, who have very different ideas about how they like to spend their spare time. Chinese millennials have become digital natives (albeit within China’s generally restrictive system), and gaming in China has become even more popular than in most countries in the West. That does not mean that Chinese gamers are all closet nascent liberal reformers. Quite the reverse: the nature of games played often appeals directly to the crudest nationalist sentiments. But making young people the enemy by banning one of the few creative outlets available to students in a highly stressful and competitive school examination system is perhaps not the wisest of moves. Furthermore, attacks by officials from the Xi administration on young men of the rising generation being “insufficiently manly” and, in some cases, “downright sissy” is also treading on dangerous ground. This has been reinforced by reports that have emerged of a quiet crackdown on China’s LGBT community—or at least new restrictions on their organizing of public events on Chinese university campuses and on the internet. And all this at a time when primers on Xi Jinping Thought are appearing across the school and university systems, encouraging China’s youth to emulate the revolutionary achievements of their forebears.

None of these repressive measures individually is going to result in Xi Jinping being brought down. However, in the event of some other catalytic event—particularly in relationship to the economy, natural disasters, or national security—the fact that so many different social groupings across China are disaffected from Xi Jinping’s chosen political direction could become problematic for the regime. Indeed, they could coalesce around a single major event or a series of events that catches the regime by surprise. That is why Xi, an acute observer of social developments, will be relying not only on rolling social attitudes surveys but also on the surveillance reports of his vast security intelligence apparatus to monitor any emerging threats from one or a number of these movements. Given Xi’s history, he is also likely to be tactically agile in adopting forceful measures early in order to decapitate any such movement before it can become a real problem.

Xi Jinping’s Nationalism

For these reasons, the balance of probabilities suggests that Xi Jinping will be reappointed comfortably in late 2022. At the same time, we would be foolish to ignore the political headwinds that are still being generated: among the political class who have been disenfranchised, in the economy as a result of Xi’s new pressure on the Chinese private sector, and among young people and in a latent civil society due to his crackdown against a large number of social movements that he is determined to bring back under tighter party control. As noted above, Xi’s political methodology for dealing with such headwinds is to push back hard against them, threatening the introduction of even more intense restrictions coupled with individual retribution against those whom the system happily calls troublemakers.

However, there is another significant quiver to Xi Jinping’s bow in dealing with political and social unrest around him: his ability to call on the deep reserves of Chinese nationalism to reconsolidate his political position by harnessing populist opinion to his cause. Indeed, nationalism is becoming a core pillar of both the party’s and Xi’s personal political legitimacy and has become a central focus of the party’s vast propaganda apparatus. Nationalism therefore becomes a dangerous additive to the already dangerous decade that lies ahead. So as we think about the China of the 2020s, beyond the internal dynamics of the 2022 Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s reelection, the fluctuations in its economy, and the greater controls imposed on Chinese society, we also need to understand that Xi’s China will be increasingly nationalist. This will also have profound implications for how Beijing navigates its already complex external relationships, particularly with the United States.

Nationalism in recent Chinese history has often proven to be a double-edged sword. The party sometimes authorized the expression of nationalist public opinion to send messages to foreign governments by arguing that “we Chinese have to manage domestic political opinion too.” At the same time, it has sometimes proven difficult to put the nationalist genie back into the bottle after having released it. This problem has become progressively larger under Xi Jinping, as nationalist appeals have moved from the margins to the center of the Chinese propaganda apparatus across the board. Pride in China’s national achievements is redolent across every news bulletin: not just Olympic achievements but also the international space race, the size of the Chinese economy, and the new capabilities of the Chinese military, to name just a few. All of these have become cause célèbre for officially endorsed nationalist celebrations.

It is, of course, difficult to measure the extent to which nationalist sentiment in 2022 will be stronger than it has been in previous years in China. Although their methodology is a point of academic debate, some social attitude surveys find a strengthening of national sentiment over time in China, especially among young people. But whatever the real feelings of average Chinese citizens might be, we can safely conclude that the party constantly makes greater recourse to nationalist themes as a conscious political and propaganda tool, and it would not be doing so if it did not work in enhancing the party’s legitimacy. This new emphasis on nationalism has resulted from clear directions from Xi at the party’s central propaganda work conferences, which state that the party’s central mission is to cause the people to be proud of its achievements and to conclude that China could only have become wealthy and strong under the CCP’s leadership. Furthermore, associating the country’s strength with Xi’s personal leadership becomes an effective means of further consolidating Xi’s political position—particularly at a time when other parts of Xi’s political, economic, and social projects may be encountering resistance.

Of course, the principal foil against which national sentiment is deployed in China is the United States. Japan has performed that function historically—particularly given Japanese atrocities against China in World War II. But since the Korean War, and more recently since the implosion in US-China relations under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States has become acceptable cannon fodder within China’s nationalist debate. At one level, Chinese nationalist positions reinforce some of the analysis put forward by the party, claiming that American national power is, by and large, spent. Chinese news coverage in recent years has focused on the dysfunctionality of the American democracy, the inability to contain COVID-19 (especially under the Trump administration), and other recent manifestations of declining American power, including the fall of Kabul in August 2021. In the Chinese nationalist take, all of these are indicative of the overall decline of the West, which is China’s accepted political code language to refer to the decline of the United States. This line of substantive analysis and public presentation by the Chinese propaganda apparatus is likely to continue into the future, although with varying degrees of intensity to accommodate the political circumstances of the time. But in doing so, the regime’s principal audience is domestic, and its principal objective is its political legitimacy.

If we accept that official nationalism will be allowed to wax and wane as needed in Xi Jinping’s China, the question arises whether Chinese nationalism will also become a more potent force in pushing the party toward more hard-line policy positions toward the United States that the party would not normally take. There is no evidence that this has happened in the past. This is because the official bureaucratic class in China has historically been strong enough to resist any such domestic political impulse. But China’s traditional foreign policy establishment is weaker than ever before, as the locus of international policy decision-making (as with all areas of policy) has been progressively relocated to the party center and Xi’s powerful personal office. Therefore, nationalist sentiment as a tool of domestic political legitimacy building is also likely to play a larger role in strategic decision-making—often in defiance of classical foreign policy logic—than has been the case in the past. It is perhaps too crude to say that Chinese foreign policy is simply becoming the prosecution of Chinese domestic politics by other means. But there is increasing resonance in that proposition on the critical question of the foreign policy consequences of the party’s continued quest for domestic political legitimacy through increasingly atavistic appeals to underlying nationalist sentiment, representing a new dynamic in Chinese foreign policy formulation.

As argued previously, three fundamental sources of political legitimacy remain for the CCP: Marxist-Leninist ideology, economic prosperity, and Chinese nationalism (the latter also incorporating selective extractions from the Chinese classical tradition). If all three work together seamlessly, the party’s overall legitimacy will be high. But the truth is, despite the party’s concerted efforts, they don’t. First, however powerful a tool Marxism-Leninism may be as a legitimizing and disciplining force within the party, such ideology will not of itself provide a sufficiently legitimizing force within the broader body politic to comfortably sustain either the party’s or the leader’s long-term political standing. Second, if, for whatever reason, economic prosperity falters during the decade ahead, Xi would have no alternative but to revert to the coercive instruments of party power to maintain political and social control. Third, if both the ideological and economic underpinnings of party legitimacy become unstuck, nationalism, if effectively harnessed, could potentially become the most important legitimizing force in Chinese politics for the future. Furthermore, from the regime’s perspective, it could reduce (but not remove) the need for purely coercive measures to maintain effective political control.

For these reasons, if Xi or the broader CCP leadership were to come under serious domestic pressure as a result of a failing economy, compounded by a failing ideology that had led Xi toward decisions that brought about that economic decline in the first place (through a return to greater party control), nationalism would become the only political card left to play in the party’s legitimacy pack. We do not know if the Chinese economy is going to falter. On the balance of probabilities and given the historical experience of Xi’s economic team in dealing with previous crises (in both 2008 and 2015), they will likely manage their way through. But contending with a leader as politically powerful and as ideologically determined as Xi Jinping under such circumstances may become more problematic than in the past. And the nationalist card would always be there for him to play.

These, then, are the dynamics that present themselves for the decade ahead. Nationalism is likely to add a new and potentially more volatile dynamic in the way that Chinese political elites respond to the United States in the future. Chinese foreign policy will therefore not be as rational in American eyes as it has been in the past (i.e., in rational pursuit of what the West would define as China’s abiding national interests). And it may not be as predictable as in the past. Chinese nationalism, therefore, looms as a new and potentially dangerous wild card for the wider management of the US-China relationship during the 2020s.

Conclusion

As we look forward through the 2020s, Xi Jinping—barring an act of nature—will likely be with us as China’s paramount leader throughout 2027 and probably beyond. It is also likely that, despite political opposition, uncertainties with the economy, and a range of potentially problematic social movements, Xi will continue to prevail by using the tools of ideological and coercive control. Failing that, Chinese nationalism remains a potent propaganda tool to be used to bolster Xi’s hold on political power.

As we have already seen, however, nationalism already looms as an emerging new problem in the overall management of the US-China relationship. For example, it was to this nationalist audience that China’s most senior foreign policy advisor, Yang Jiechi, addressed his public remarks during his meeting with Biden administration officials in Anchorage in March 2021. Yang’s fiery lecture to Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not designed for an American audience. It was designed for a Chinese domestic audience. More specifically, it was designed to deal with the nationalist dynamic that has been enlivened in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping.

It remains to examine how all the factors we have examined so far in this book come together in the real-world geopolitical dynamics of US-China relations during the 2020s. This means integrating their complex history, their deep perceptions of each other’s politics and foreign policy, Xi Jinping’s transformation of the CCP’s official worldview, Washington’s strategic responses to Xi so far, and the likely state of Chinese politics and the economy in the decade ahead. The next chapter outlines a number of specific scenarios that provide us with a framework for understanding which way the decade might unfold. This is followed by a final chapter dealing with the practical challenge that faces us all: given the increasing risk of crisis and armed conflict between China and the United States, how we can best devise a joint strategic framework (of what I term managed strategic competition) between the two countries that is capable of reducing the possibility of a catastrophic war.