 "Five reasons why Xi Jinping’s third term as Chinese President isn’t bad news for India")
A wolf is a wolf, howsoever well disguised it is in a sheep’s clothing. The same can be said about the communist leadership of China since its spectacular rise to power in 1949. There is very little that separated Mao Tse-tung from Xi Jinping — they shared similar values on world domination, hatred for democracies, and distrust for India and the United States. Where they differed was their modus operandi.
Mao, being a “monster” and a “madman” that he was, as Frank Dikötter describes him in his book The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57, unleashed a series of cataclysmic events within China that led to the death of about 70 million people, surpassing both Hitler and Stalin in terms of death and destruction. Deng Xiaoping, in contrast, was suave and sophisticated, but he would not mind using tanks to crush protests, as he did during t Tiananmen Square in 1989, but in peacetime he would pretend to be a capitalist who exhorted people to get rich and prosperous. Interestingly, as Jung Chang and Jon Halliday expose in their “atom bomb of a book”, as the Time magazine describes Mao: The Unknown Story, how Mao while hailing farmers publicly detested them on a personal level.
On Friday, 9 March 2023, as Xi Jinping became China’s President for the record third time, placing him in the league of Mao, whom he imitates and emulates, the world is watching the developments in Beijing with a sense of unease and anxiety. The concern surrounding his third term is palpable, given Xi’s confrontationist stand vis-à-vis Taiwan, India and the US. But a closer look at the policies of Chinese leadership since 1949 suggests there is hardly any divergence in their long-term goals, it’s just that Xi Jinping has now decided to officially say goodbye to Deng’s philosophy: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Xi doesn’t mind displaying China’s brute strength. And given the fact that his presidency has come at a time when China faces major headwinds, from slowing growth to a troubled real estate sector, he is often forced to take up an ultra-nationalistic posturing.
So, is Xi’s presidency bad news for the World, especially India? As the article suggests, nothing can be further from the truth.
Xi Jinping is no heretic in Chinese communist pantheon
If one blindly follows the overall global narrative, one would believe that Xi Jinping has distorted and disrupted the traditional Chinese policy. The truth is the current Chinese President has only made public what his predecessors would do in silence. While Xi is trying to emulate and outdo Mao, his predecessors pursued the Deng philosophy. But looked closely, Mao’s China and Deng’s China were fundamentally one and the same. Just their optics differed. While Mao’s style was aggressive, hyper-nationalistic, though he was equally shrewd in exploiting the deep ideological divide in the West, the Deng style was subtle and persuasive — but scratch the surface and the same communist characteristics would emerge.
Former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale writes in his latest book, After Tiananmen: The Rise of China (2022), how Deng’s protégé, Jiang Zemin, won over the US during his eight-day charm offensive in 1997, while at the same time strengthening China’s economic and military arsenals. Bill Clinton was so taken in by the Chinese President’s charm that he wrote in his memoirs, My Life, how he was “impressed with Jiang’s political skills, his desire to integrate China into the world community and the economic growth that had accelerated under his leadership”.
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More ShortsIt was during those three decades, from Mao’s death to Xi’s rise, that China laid the foundation for a strong military. “Under the stewardship of general secretaries Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, China managed to build the modern military force that has allowed Xi Jinping to challenge the Americans for regional hegemony today,” writes Gokhale in After Tiananmen.
A belligerent China unites the world, howsoever divided it is
A vocal enemy is better than a silent one. This makes sense when one compares Xi with his predecessors. The current Chinese leadership is no different in its larger objectives; just the style of functioning differs. Xi’s China is confident enough not to hide its strength and bide its time. It believes China’s time under the sun has already arrived.
Given the economic strength of China, there’s a strong tendency in the West to give the Dragon a free pass if it follows lip service. It is partly due to short-term economic gains that the West-China relationship provides. It is also due to a strong army of academic-administrative Trojan Horses that China has created in the West. In the 1940s, it was Edgar Snow’s projection of Mao and his men as “agrarian reformers keen to learn from democracy” that saved the day for Chinese communists during the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army.
Even in the 1990s, the Americans continued to fool themselves into believing, with obvious Chinese deception, that a market economy would invariably result in free societies in China, but just the opposite occurred. All this happened because the Chinese leadership before the arrival of Xi Jinping publicly proclaimed the idea of China’s “peaceful rise” even when the opposite was true. But with Xi’s belligerent posturing, it would be difficult for the West to do business as usual with China.
Beijing desperately needed Deng 2.0, what it got was Mao 2.0
When an enemy takes a wrong turn, one should always encourage him to tread that path. Today, as the Chinese economy is losing its steam, its real estate is in real mess and the much ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to an the New Silk Road, is faltering, China desperately needed a leader shaped in Deng’s mould; instead, it has got someone who admires and imitates Mao. If Xi’s China, just like Mao’s, is turning inwards and getting brazenly aggressive and hyper-nationalistic, shouldn’t this be a cause of relief for India?
Though many Chinese watchers may not support the following assessment, this writer seems to agree with Frank Dikötter’s analysis that China is much weaker economically than it appears from the outside. And its path to economic recovery may not be that easy. The problem is intrinsically rooted in the very nature of communist ethos, governance and economy. As Xiang Songzou, a professor of economics at the People’s University in Beijing and erstwhile deputy director of the People’s Bank of China, stated in his 2019 article in AsiaNews: “Basically China’s economy is all built on speculation, and everything is over-leveraged.”
China, in fact, is a victim of its own hype. As James Palmer puts it quite succinctly, “Nobody knows anything about China: Including the Chinese government.” Dikotter explains this in China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower: “Every piece of information is unreliable, partial or distorted. We do not know the true size of the economy, since no local government will report accurate numbers, and we do not know the extent of bad loans, since the banks conceal these. Every good researcher has the Socratic paradox in mind: I know what I don’t know. But where China is concerned, we don’t even know what we don’t know.” In this economically volatile and uncertain scenario, all China needed was Deng 2.0. What it has got, in Xi Jinping, is Mao 2.0.
Xi Jinping’s presence will keep India awake on its borders
The problem with a democracy, especially the one with a long civilisational history, is that it is often lackadaisical in dealing with its national security. Everything moves in a slow, leisurely manner. A sense of urgency is sorely missing.
It’s the nature of the Xi Jinping dispensation that would keep India on guard. Xi is today more dangerous than Mao at his lunatic peak. Mao, for instance, had Zhou En-lai to sober him and his hawkish international diplomacy, but Xi has none. He is a one-man army. He is an emperor with no advisers. As Jude Blanchette and Evan S Medeiros write in The Washington Quarterly, former Presidents “Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao had strong partnerships with their respective premiers (Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao), thus giving the State Council significant authority over setting economic policy. Xi, on the other hand, has sidelined premier Li Keqiang and positioned himself at the centre of nearly all key policy discussions.”
With Mao as his role model, it’s hardly a surprise to see Xi unleashing a Galwan, a Tawang or a Doklam one after another. In fact, since 2012, China has indulged four-times in salami-slicing along the largely un-demarcated India-China border. Post-Galwan, the threat perception has increased multifold. Given that India organised a Quad meeting almost simultaneously with the G20 ministerial meetings suggests that India understands the Chinese threat and its magnitude.
An assertive China forces the West to look towards India
India’s relationship with the West is quite interesting. The US and its European allies, while acknowledging India’s democratic credentials, are well aware of the fact that if allowed to grow unfettered, Delhi will soon propel out of the West’s orbit of influence. The West is no doubt concerned about China’s rise, but it is equally uneasy with India’s rise. One can gauge the West’s discomfort not through the statements of the Western heads of state, but the way the mainstream media, the academia and the entrenched bureaucracy of those countries react to the India Story. Unfortunately, the writings hailing from the West largely paint India dark, invariably clubbing it with the worst of dictators and autocrats.
The Western consensus, it seems, is that India can’t be allowed to grow that fast. For, if it does, it can easily move towards attaining its $10 trillion dream by the end of this decade, and in that case India would become too big for China to swallow and the Dragon might go in for some sort of rapprochement with Delhi. That’s a nightmarish scenario for the West, as India may in that case not need the American help at all. That would be the end of Pax Americana, and global power would shift decisively to the East and the South — to Asia.
Xi’s presence in China forces the US-led West to tolerate, if not accept, the unfettered rise of India. There cannot be a better deal for India, geopolitically and geo-strategically. But as is the case, each opportunity comes with a challenge: The Xi challenge for India is that it has to remain vigilant to its security and national integrity.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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