Beware about pushing the bear into rolling the dice

Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Japan in June. Picture: AP.

Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, has so far succeeded in turning every challenge China faces into a way to reinforce his rule.

He has been able to spin even the protests in Hong Kong and the trade war with Donald Trump into a narrative that plays to his advantage where, for him, it counts — at home in China.

Reluctant to undertake the market-oriented reforms that many have long urged as essential to boost business productivity, he is now able to shift the blame to America instead for the slowing of China’s economy, its continuing crippling debt, and the shift of factories to cheaper neighbours.

He has also been able to finesse the protests in Hong Kong into further justification for his centralisation and personalisation of power.

He never fully embraced the “one country, two systems” formula that Deng Xiaoping devised to secure the return of Hong Kong in negotiations with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.

Xi’s key “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, now enshrined in the state and Communist Party constitutions, stresses China’s transformation from the old era of Deng, who effectively cut deals with groups including farmers and Hong Kongers to secure their support.

Xi is not a dealmaker. He is a ruler. He disdains the company of the Hong Kong tycoons whose acquaintance Deng relished. Today’s leader demonstrated his distaste for that great southern city when two years ago he inspected a parade of the People’s Liberation Army garrison forces. Xi is also, as a devout Marxist, a materialist. Hong Kongers should be fully satisfied with the prosperous lifestyle allocated them by the party, he might insist, instead of chasing democratic dreams that will always evaporate.

Some in China have always resented the privileged position of Hong Kongers, with their independent courts and media, free movement of goods and capital, global connections, and degree of self-rule. The occasional outbreaks of hostility from Hong Kong towards mainland tourists perceived as uncouth has underlined this resentment.

The message that China’s mainstream media and online world is now delivering is clear: see what happens when China’s “sacred” unity is fractured, when people are allowed to run their own regional affairs, when their media and online worlds are allowed to run unconstrained, when students disrespect authority. See what happens when too-trusting young people are not adequately protected against the “black hand” of the US, eager as ever to revisit on this fragment of China the century of foreign humiliation from which the party has otherwise long spared the nation.

Parents, Xi wants them to ask themselves, would you like to see your kids permitted — incited, even — to turn mainland cities like Changsha or Shenyang into the kind of battleground you now see on the streets of Hong Kong? Even Trump denigrates such protests as “riots”.

Thanks be to Xi, our country is calm, they are advised. Quieter, even, than for decades — because thanks to the “cyber sovereignty” created by Xi, the result of the intimate co-operation between our security services and our great new tech giants, no disruptive plotting is possible.

This opportunity to spin events — in the eyes of the rest of China — Beijing’s way, won’t work much longer, however, if the protests persist, or step up.

At a further stage in the fraying of Hong Kong, the People’s Armed Police will be deployed to augment or replace the Hong Kong police in a step that has doubtless already been decided in the Chinese leaders’ compound of Zhongnanhai. The PAP has been expensively equipped and trained, since the Tiananmen killings of 1989, to put down such domestic “mass events” instead of the People’s Liberation Army, which resists further tarnishing of its domestic image.

As this happened, Xi would doubtless also step in to seize control of Hong Kong’s internet.

Xi would face the Western damnation that would follow, with equanimity. He has succeeded in gaining China the backing it seeks elsewhere by weaponising China’s economic heft. Even China’s confining of a million Muslims in Xinjiang “re-education” camps has recently been supported by key Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and the Gulf states.

Placing Hong Kong under more direct rule would make it easy to clean out, as Xi might see it, unsalubrious entrepreneurial refugees from the mainland, such as billionaire Xiao Jianhua. In 2017 China kidnapped him from Hong Kong’s Four Seasons apartments, since his Tomorrow Group appeared to have become dangerously enmeshed with leading Communist Party families.

Hong Kong would then transition into what the late Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew said was always in store: becoming “just another Chinese city”. Xi might prefer that.

In politics, timing is everything, of course. And to date, luck has always swung behind Xi, boosting his inclination to roll the dice boldly.

A couple of events might give him cause to pause: the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic on October 1, and the elections in Taiwan on January 11.

He won’t want to take the shine off the celebrations as China’s communists look to overtake the lifespan of the Soviet Union, nor to frighten Taiwanese voters into the arms of the hated Democratic Progressive Party.

But Xi is a true believer, lacking self-doubt, and his constitutional changes have assured him of power as long as he continues to exercise it fully whenever he feels China’s destiny and unity come under threat. He’ll put the party first every time, and do whatever it takes to keep it — and him — in control of its own destiny.

Until, one day, his luck and his momentum start to run out. And the most likely place for that to happen is in China’s troubled borderlands, of which Hong Kong is the natural capital.

Rowan Callick is an author of books about Hong Kong and China, and has been a foreign correspondent in both, including twice for The Australian.