It must be tough, being a dictator, when your diktats are ignored, thwarted and scorned. Vladimir Putin is a sad case in point. He ordered the glorious reintegration of Ukraine into his imaginary Russian empire. What he got was an existential crisis that he couldn’t control.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, is another paramount leader with dictatorship issues. Xi presumes to exercise supreme control, channelling Mao Zedong like a card-carrying Communist party Zeus – yet repeatedly messes up. Xi’s signature tune could be the chorus to Moby’s Extreme Ways: “Then it fell apart ... Like it always does.”
One example: Xi’s misjudged “no limits” pre-Ukraine invasion pact with Putin has turned out to be an embarrassing, friends-without-benefits own goal. Another example: his unleashing of confrontational “wolf warrior” diplomacy against the west, which has produced a huge anti-China backlash.
Putin and Xi: a Laurel and Hardy duo for the modern age – except it’s no joke. Both have much to answer for, or would in any open society. If either man were subject to genuine democratic scrutiny or free elections, he’d be booted out without a second thought – then put on trial.
Putin has remade Russia in his image: lawless, vilified, distrusted. Flailing Xi’s offence, if anything, is worse. He’s endangering the Chinese “miracle” – decades of big post-Deng Xiaoping, post-Tiananmen economic and social advances – in a messianic drive to wield unchecked personal power.
Xi hopelessly mishandled the Covid pandemic, ordered draconian lockdowns, then U-turned without a blush. That hasn’t rescued China’s damaged economy, its private tech companies already hobbled by Xi’s control-freak insistence on party oversight and direction.
Xi demands oversight everywhere. His chronic disregard for basic human rights and freedoms is not confined to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet. Does he really not understand how such egregious abuses scar China’s international reputation and inhibit citizens’ aspirations?
In 10 years, he has turned public and private life in China’s cities into an oppressive, 24-hour surveillance nightmare where the state, a new Leviathan with Chinese characteristics, preys on individuals. Why? Ostensibly to make China great again. In reality, to keep himself and the party in power. Rule by fear has consequences. China’s exports and imports, domestic retail sales, private and foreign investment, youth employment and GDP are all cratering. China’s property market is a destabilising, bottomless hole of debt. Consumer and business confidence is shot.
“Financial markets, and probably even the Chinese government itself, have overlooked the severity of these weaknesses, which will likely drag down growth for several years. Call it a case of ‘economic long Covid’,” wrote the American economist Adam Posen. “The condition is systemic, and the only reliable cure – credibly assuring ordinary Chinese people and companies that there are limits on the government’s intrusion into economic life – cannot be delivered.”
The reason why, as diagnosed by Posen, is Xi’s plunge into authoritarianism.
Not all these problems can be laid at Xi’s door, but perhaps they should be. Being in charge of everything means being blamed for everything. Like hardline communists through history, Xi does not trust the people. Like purged party cadres, they must be coerced and controlled. So it’s on him.
When senior generals, appointed by Xi, are suddenly fired for no stated reason – as happened last month – and his loudmouthed protege Qin Gang is sacked as foreign minister amid a murky scandal, doubts about Xi’s overall authority and judgment intensify.
Despite his declared intention to build a new China-led world order, Xi has blithely alienated friends, neighbours and key trading partners. Last week’s naval clash with the Philippines was but the latest of many instances of Chinese bullying in and around the South China Sea.
It was reckless because it needlessly antagonised an important regional country. It was dangerous because it sucked in Manila’s main ally, the US, thereby threatening larger-scale confrontation. Beijing’s unceasing provocations of Taiwan could be similarly consequential.
Yet it’s unclear whether supposedly all-powerful Xi authorised or even knew in advance about his coastguards’ action in confronting Philippine forces. Similar questions surround the aggressive actions of the Chinese military on the Indian border. Is this deliberate policy? Who’s actually in charge?
Xi’s mania for conformity and uniformity at home, plus his hostile outward stance – espionage plots, intellectual property theft, exploitative debt diplomacy, hollow “peacemaking” in Israel-Palestine (while ignoring Myanmar and North Korea), tacit support for Putin’s war – all contributes to the west’s perception of China as menace and threat as well as legitimate competitor.
The US, the EU, Britain, Germany – all have recently hardened their defence and security doctrines and commercial postures. Latest example: US president Joe Biden’s new raft of measures to prohibit private investment in China in security-sensitive new tech such as AI.
Beijing says it’s all part of a US-led anti China campaign. But such measures hurt the west, too. Nobody wins. Truth is, a surprisingly insecure, misguided but apparently unchallengeable Xi has brought all this down on China’s head through his dictator’s determination to dominate.
How does this end? Xi is doing a good job of ruining, or at least derailing, China’s smooth development as a major economy and influential world power. All those anxious western politicians and thinktankers should calm down. Xi is China’s worst enemy. Let him get on with it. Danger is, as he sinks into ever greater difficulty, Xi (like Putin) may lash out – over Taiwan, a disputed reef, the succession to the Dalai Lama, a Himalayan hill or some other symbolic cause. China was “a ticking time bomb”, Biden warned last week. “They have got some problems. That’s not good, because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.”
How ironic is the prospect of China resorting to 19th-century imperialist-nationalist, western-style jingoism to distract attention from Xi’s domestic blundering. In the Indo-Pacific, gunboat diplomacy is back. But it’s not Lord Palmerston to blame this time. It’s Lord Xi.
