All eyes will be on Beijing this weekend when the Chinese Communist Party’s national congress begins on Sunday.
Xi Jinping has spent the decade consolidating strength as general secretary and cultivating ideological devotion as the core of the party. He will almost certainly make his reign bigger after the week-long event ends, and he faces opportunities and difficult situations ahead.
The XIX CPC Central Committee, formed in 2017 when Xi began his term as leader, held its seventh and final meeting on Wednesday to approve Oct. 16 as the date for the 20th National Congress, where observers expect adjustments of the workers’ body into the most sensible of the party leadership, with Xi most likely to install more unwavering apparatchiks.
In the era since the CCP held its last rally in two decades, China largely abolished ceremonial presidential term limits, adapted to former President Donald Trump’s industrial war, battled COVID-19, and faced a government replacement in the United States.
Meanwhile, Xi has exerted repression on Xinjiang, the officially autonomous territory in northwest China; quashed dissent in Hong Kong; and declared the eradication of absolute poverty as a vital step in the country’s rise to the state of marvelous strength.
In 2020, after the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19 on the foreign system, Xi saw the functionality of his government as evidence of a successful government.
But he also made a resolve to link the pandemic to the CCP’s political legitimacy and its own non-public legacy, requiring a campaign-style defense of Beijing’s public fitness policies in the months leading up to the party congress.
China’s decision to choose to temporarily and strictly lock down countries sparked emotions in the West bordering on envy, as countries scrambled to find public health answers at the start of the pandemic. The effects were an incredibly low official case count and a death toll that many would help the country enter a post-COVID era.
However, in early 2022 it became clear that Beijing’s strategy and, in particular, its strong ideological drivers, would remain.
In 2022, there were tighter instant lockdowns as part of China’s “dynamic covid zero” policy to curb outbreaks, a zero tolerance that inevitably hit the domestic economy hard and made the industry even more difficult with foreign corporations and delegations.
When it comes to Taiwan, China’s leaders have maintained an equally hard line, characterized by intense party-centered nationalism that instills in the public confidence that only the CCP can triumph over Western containment and advise the country toward greatness.
China’s war games last August will be remembered as the moment when it set foot in Taiwan’s future, which, in the eyes of the Chinese, can pass in no other direction than subsumption under its rule.
Beijing is in no hurry; The CPC Central Committee said Wednesday that the party has demonstrated its ability to deter Taiwan’s independence and will therefore prioritize domestic political issues while maintaining “strategic determination” over the factor of China’s core interests.
This progressive stance would possibly appeal to sections of the Chinese public who love their leader’s trust, but it is not without setbacks. The Taiwanese public’s trust in Xi, as in much of the West, has declined dramatically over the past five years. due to the assertive tone.
Beijing’s discussions of the fighting “leave little room for constructive communication,” said Crystal Tu, a research assistant at the National Security and Defense Research Institute, Taiwan’s military’s main think tank. The two governments have few meaningful discussions and few communication crises.
The government is expanding its defense budget in 2023 and is poised to increase the recruitment of service-age men, in a bid to deter adventurism in the Taiwan Strait.
Meanwhile, Beijing will influence the Taiwanese public through its government. a fixed image. “
Nadège Rolland, a senior researcher at the National Bureau of Asian Research, describes China’s biggest foreign policy shift until the 2008 currency crisis, the aftermath of which saw Japan overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.
“Beijing’s assessment of China’s strength and confidence in its upward trajectory led to a more assertive stance,” as an abandonment of the strategic patience practiced through former leaders, Rolland told Newsweek.
“This initial assessment has not fundamentally replaced. On the contrary, it was reaffirmed under Xi Jinping,” he said. “What it expresses is the Chinese leaders’ assessment of an imminent power substitution, of historic magnitude, that will see the rise of China, while the West declines.
“COVID-19 would possibly have thrown a wrench to Beijing’s work, especially economically, but it has not fundamentally altered any of its grand strategic calculations: there can be no reversal or degradation to achieve the wonderful rejuvenation of the nation,” Rolland said. Said.
Evidence of Beijing’s goal of regaining its position in the middle of the foreign stage, Rolland said, can be uncovered in its efforts to become a champion of the global South as it insulates itself from the effects of disengagement from the West, as well as Xi Jinping. a plan to reshape the postwar security order in favor of China.
“These are symptoms of leadership giving up its ambitions,” Rolland said.
The road is arduous and consists of addressing and managing the long term of its maximum relationship with the United States. Beijing and Washington are in a wide-ranging rivalry that has placed relations at a crossroads and a possible collision course over irreconcilable national interests. .
On issues like Taiwan, the two capitals have long been at odds over each other’s positions, yet they are now stuck in a “classic security dilemma,” with neither side willing or backing down, said Adrian Ang, a researcher and U. S. program coordinator. UU. de the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
“In the short term, the biggest challenge for China is to cope with the immediate slowdown in the economy due to a combination of Beijing’s restrictive COVID policies, chain issues, and the implosion of the housing bubble and construction,” Ang told Newsweek.
“In the medium to long term, China also faces demographic and economic demand situations related to population aging and whether it can escape the ‘middle-income trap,’ whether it can become rich before it gets older,” Ang said.
“All of the above problems will affect the Chinese economy and China’s longer trajectory of relative strength vis-à-vis the United States. America’s relative decline is not inevitable, nor is China’s inexorable rise,” he said. .
“Now there is a danger of overcorrecting and seeing China as irreversible or terminal and going into decline. A more realistic picture is that the U. S. is not in the U. S. The US and China face internal and interchangeable pressures.
“The question is how successful each is in solving those disruptions and whether they will cooperate on transboundary and transnational disruptions like climate change,” Ang said.
China sees Xi’s assertive turn, his confidence in the decline of the U. S. as a shift to the U. S. and China. The intensity of its “unlimited” association with Vladimir Putin, especially since the war in Ukraine, are among its most costly mistakes.
But the next five years in power of the Chinese president may be only the genuine test of whether Beijing has emerged stronger, after Trump and after COVID.
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