Xi Jinping is turning Chinese policy to assert more Chinese Communist Party control over China. A CCP that Xi is gripping more tightly. Xi is in a hurry as many of China's rulers have been.
This review of "new" Chinas leading up to the current era of renewed emphasis on Red Communist leveling is fascinating:
Today, Xi Jinping’s watchword is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It is important to note that new in these cases never refers to the same thing; each is a new new.
The tragedy of CCP policies in China can be seen as arising from excessive zeal for shortcuts. More successful East Asian transitions to the modern world, such as those in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, have done better by going step-by-step. Impatient for global preeminence, the CCP has rushed ahead several times and crashed. The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, which followed Mao’s plans for “surpassing Britain and catching up with America,” ended in the starvation of 30 million or more people. Cultural Revolution demands such as “make revolution in the depths of your soul” and “love Chairman Mao more than your parents” were intended as magical paths to a new human nature that China would exemplify for the world, but in fact they were a body blow to Chinese culture whose consequences have lasted until today. Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy, intended in the late 1970s to jump-start a modern economy, led by the late 2010s to problems in labor supply and elder support sufficiently severe as to require abrupt reversals.
Xi Jinping’s recent flights of fancy suggest the same pattern.
Will Xi succeed or fail in a different manner?
In the short run, the most frightening possible outcomes for the Xi juggernaut are two: that it will fly or that it will crash. Successful flight would be bad news for the Chinese people and for the people of the world. No one needs a model of technofascism that, with its facial recognition software and DNA registration, goes beyond what even Orwell imagined. On the other hand, a crash would also be bad news, at least for a time. It would bring chaos and likely bloodshed. One of the major accomplishments of the decades-long CCP rule is that it has obliterated all structures in society that might replace it. Whatever happens, I see no grounds for optimism in the short run.
Also, isn't it interesting that China's rulers have been consistently impatient despite the constant Western insistence that the Chinese are inherently long-term planners? I've never believed that myth.
But if China crashes in a Red-line overload, it will be a much stronger and influential China that teeters and threatens the world with its reaction to a CCP realization that the New Era is the same as the old failed eras.
Adjust your pucker factor for interesting times.
UPDATE: I know I've posted this article before, but it is useful here. Being in a hurry does not negate the imbalances that are now shaking China's drive to dominate the world.
China will be much stronger after its decades of surging economic growth. But China may find it got old before it got rich. That will curtail their hopes of surpassing America in power.
China had best hope that India doesn't take China's role in the global economy.
