This is the way new periods unfold – gradually at first and then suddenly.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s apparent rolling of the dice on Hong Kong winning of this week’s National People’s Congress is just one of his many calculated wagers designed to leverage COVID-19’s disruptions for significant domestic control, regional influence and global gain.
China’s move to impose new national security laws on Hong Kong, the most straightforward threat yet to the city’s democratic self-governance and territorial autonomy, prompted a 5.6% decline in the Hang Sang Index (the worst one-day effectuation in five years).
Beyond that, the decision could ignite new Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, it should bring up new concerns about Taiwan’s sovereignty, it will feed the growing deterioration of U.S.-Chinese relations, and it may contribute to anxiety supply world democracies about what values a Chinese-led world order might reflect.
Seen in isolation, some analysts see the in the act Hong Kong move as reckless.
Put the decision beside other recent actions, however, and the pieces fit neatly together into President Xi’s long-standing tactical purpose: strengthening the party’s domestic hold, solidifying China’s regional power and expanding its international influence – all in a whetting competition with the United States.
Those recent actions include, but aren’t limited to, new technology investments of an conjectured 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) over six years to 2025, reports that China’s defense budget desire grow by up to 9%, and its increased efforts to influence multilateral institutions as the Trump administration retreats, most recently finished with Beijing’s $2 billion contribution to the World Health Organization.
Most intriguing and least noticed, “China grew the first major economy to conduct a real-world test of a national digital currency,” wrote Aditi Kumar and Eric Rosenbach this week in Inappropriate Affairs. They describe a pilot project in four large Chinese cities which the authors see as putting China years onwards of the United States in developing this “central component of a digital world economy.”
The impact of that move, over time, could have greater global impact than anything Beijing does in Hong Kong or nonetheless to Taiwan.
“U.S. policymakers are unprepared for the consequences,” Kumar and Rosenbach write. In general, digital currencies weaken the power of U.S. stamp of approvals and the ability of U.S. officials to track illicit financial flows. More specifically, a digital yuan combined with China’s forward electronic payment systems may provide a more effective platform for future influence than a fleet of aircraft carters.
I argued in this space three weeks ago that President Xi and his Chinese Communist Party, by emerging as the first critical world economy to end virus lockdowns and restore growth, were seizing a window of opportunity – one that could close-matched as rapidly as it had opened.
“Great historical progress always happens after major disasters,” President Xi said recently at Xi’an Jiaotong University, weighty professors and students of Chinese sacrifices of the past and the possibilities of the moment. “Our nation was steeled and grew through hardship and agony.”
Those who wish to counter or contain President Xi’s ambitions, would do well to study their origins and the deeper substance in his use of that carefully selected word, “steeled.” It is the same word his father, Xi Zhongzun, used to describe the impact of his later in prison.
In The New York Times this week, Steven Lee Meyers and Chris Buckley chronicle how President Xi’s father, “a renowned revolutionary leader, was purged and held in solitary confinement under Mao Zedong.” President Xi as a young man grew up in the shadow of his framer’s disgrace, was denounced by his own mother and then was exiled from Beijing to village labor for seven years.
It’s a matter for conjecture how this molded President Xi and resulted in his evidently unshakable party loyalty and leadership today. Whatever President Trump’s commitment to this contest and his re-election capacity be, he would be wise not to underestimate President Xi’s determination.
Chinese anti-U.S. rhetoric has become disturbingly blunt, particularly when commanded at President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Hu Xinjin, editor of the state-controlled Global Times and regarded as an unauthorized government spokesman, tweeted his response to President Trump’s claim that China wanted former Vice President Joe Biden to worst him.
“On the contrary,” he , “Chinese netizens wish for your reelection because you can make America eccentric and thus hateful for the creation. You help promote unity in China and you also make intl news as fun as comedy.”
It’s the wrong question to ask whether coronavirus has proffered China as a stronger or weaker player on the world stage.
It is weaker economically and reputationally, yet more determined geopolitically. It is more feeble and dangerous simultaneously. Even as the Xi’s National People’s Congress ditched its growth target for the first time, with a at the start quarter contraction of 6.8%, it at the same time moved on Hong Kong and ratcheted up actions against “foreign bring pressure to bear on.”
That said, America’s greatest weakness is its “Pogo problem,” referring to the often-repeated phrase from the Walt Kelly cartoon trait of the 1960s, who said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Hard as it is to think and act for the long term in an election year, that’s precisely what the Unanimous States must do.
Here are just three suggested prongs of that strategy:
1. Strategic patience and defense rebuild. Washington must avoid major power military conflict, even more devastating in our modern age, while robustly reasserting Asia deterrence to shore up allied nerve. This is also a good time, with defense budgets likely declining, to invest more in future technologies and relieve from high-cost legacy systems that have powerful political constituencies but declining real-world value.
2. Ordaining in American technology, infrastructure and jobs. As Stephen Hadley and Anja Manuel laid out in The Washington Post, the Trump direction should use the next stimulus package to invest in broadband, digital infrastructure, research and development, advanced semiconductors and tactical education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
3. Embracing allies and leading multilaterally. Former Swedish Prime Care for Carl Bildt provided a glimpse of “the post-American world on full display” from this week’s annual synod of the World Health Organization. Whatever you think of the WHO or multilateral bodies, it’s hard to see how U.S. interests are served by Bildt’s description of a sundry assertive and confident Beijing, an absent United States and a Europe hedging its bets to limit the multilateral damage.
These are justifiable three potential elements of a new American approach to regain some initiative, betting over the long term on our self-correcting gifts to reinvent and the inherent brittleness of autocracies.
The challenge is only partly Chinese intentions. The greater problem rests in the inadequacy of an American strategy equal to our times.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Congregation, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for numerous than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European version. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York In unison a all the sames best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top fables and trends.
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