Chinese President Xi Jinping strikes new tone of truculence, confrontation

This was a bare knuckle speech from the leader of a bare knuckle party. Xi Jinping’s message was plain: tremble and obey. We should pay close attention to his words.

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech during the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Picture: Reuters

Xi Jinping’s speech is as historic as it is disturbing, as memorable as it is menacing, as epoch-marking as it is grandiloquent.

This is a new tone for the Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party general secretary in an international context — a tone of truculence and confrontation.

In content, the speech is a contemporary mix of communist ideology and nationalist paranoia.

“Through tenacious struggle, the party and the people showed the world that the Chinese people had stood up and the time when the Chinese nation could be bullied and abused by others is gone forever.”

A captious critic, sidetracked by facts, might note that no-one has attempted to bully the Chinese nation in many, many decades. But being immensely powerful is never a reason for a dictatorship to jettison the tone and psychology of injury and outrage.

Chinese diplomats have been speaking in alarming tones for some time now — the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy.

But Xi, who is not only the head of government and chief executive of China, but in a sense its pope of China, has generally employed a loftier, more statesmanlike register.

Only a few weeks ago there were widespread reports of remarks by Xi calling for China to project a softer, cuddlier image, to tell its story more sympathetically and win more international friends.

Members of a People's Liberation Army band stand together at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the CCP. Picture: Getty Images

There was widespread speculation that this might lead to a softening of the wolf warrior style.

Not any more. This was a bare knuckle speech from the leader of a bare knuckle political party. The message was plain: tremble and obey.

Xi was trenchant on Taiwan. He didn’t threaten imminent military action, but he tried to severely limit Taiwan’s space, its room for manoeuvre. This puts him in direct opposition to Taiwan, but also to Washington, which is determined to preserve, indeed enlarge, Taiwan’s international space.

Xi wants to strangle Taiwan psychologically and diplomatic­ally, and compel it into negotiation towards some version of unification.

But the people of Taiwan have no interest at all in unifying with a Leninist political system on the mainland which is increasingly showing signs of Stalinism.

Xi was remarkably unabashed in invoking China’s size and power as a reason for nations — presumably such as Australia — not to oppose it. He said nations risked confronting China’s “wall of steel” which was made by “1.4 billion people”.

This is pretty unsubtle. Beijing will mobilise and deploy all the constituent elements of its national power — population size, economic strength and above all military might — to achieve its goals.

No leader of a major nation anywhere in the world more frequently invokes military power, the need for his nation’s military to be ready to fight, and the danger of anyone opposing his nation’s military, than does Xi.

Xi’s speech should serve as a startling and profound wake-up call for Australia.

Our national defence effort is woefully inadequate and concentrated heavily on capabilities which can have no relevance to maritime conflict. The few relevant major platforms we are developing are caught in the perennial Defence narrative — “a hundred of years of solitude” — and do not come online until mid-way through next decade.

The senior echelons of our defence establishment are caught in a deadly paradigm paralysis, born of complacency, an almost narcotic institutional inertia, intellectual narrowness and a complete failure to internalise the new dynamics of the international system.

The atmospherics and tone of the Chinese Communist Party’s big birthday bash was Soviet era Cold War pomp and updated Maoist rhetoric.

Many of Xi’s formulations consciously echoed Mao, the Great Helmsman. The historic difference is that China is now vastly more powerful than ever it was under Mao. China under Mao had an economy in monetary terms smaller than Australia’s.

The great Czech writer Milan Kundera once called communism “the kingdom of kitsch”.

Xi is a major figure in global history. We should pay the closest attention to his words.