Even Xi not immune from politics of corona

If China’s economy cannot recapture its mojo, all bets are off. Xi Jinping will be unable to weaponise a weak economy

Chinese President Xi Jinping has gone on the attack, doubling down at home and abroad.

Xi Jinping has his mojo back. Since his seeming struggle to respond coherently to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan at the start of the year, China’s paramount leader appears to sense he is back on top of the world, that the future is in his hands. He has regained his political equilibrium and reverted to his regular stance in facing such challenges — he has gone on the attack, doubling down at home and abroad.

His career has been marked by an ever-increasing readiness to take risks, driven by the good luck that also has attended it to date.

Within China a gradual emergence from lockdown, a tricky task for Western countries, is made easier because the People’s Republic, across its 70 years, has always been in a degree of lockdown — these days virtual as well as offline — with the 91 million Communist Party members read­ily available as community enforcers.

Beijing’s aggressive new diplomacy, its Belt and Road strategy and above all the weaponising of its economic clout to win over political leaders across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and, increasingly, Europe — as well as many multinational corporations whose heads gather annually at Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum — appear to have cemented China’s global power.

This diminishes the apparent need for prioritising co-operative relations with Western nations such as Australia.

A new essay by veteran Hong Kong commentator Lee Yee, referring to the arrests of the city’s 15 most respected pro-democracy activists last weekend, has just been translated by leading Australian China expert Geremie Barme for his China Heritage website.

In it, Lee says “taking into account the Sino-US trade war, the response to the Wuhan influenza crisis and this present round of repression in Hong Kong, the PRC has effectively signalled its split with the West”.

Calls by Canberra and other Western powers to subject China to an “international investigation” of the origins of COVID-19 are doomed to fail since it consistently opposes what it calls interference in its domestic affairs.

In 2016, Beijing shrugged aside the highly condemnatory verdict on its incorporation of the South China Sea by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, a UN-appointed tribunal that adjudicates such maritime boundary disputes, in this case with The Philippines.

China, which had refused to participate in the proceedings, responded by calling the verdict “a piece of paper that is destined to come to naught … a pack of lies”.

Beijing holds veto power or controls the support of a majority of states in any credible agency that may be invited to investigate the pandemic — the World Health Organisation, especially.

Meanwhile, Xi’s attention is also turning towards the postponed meeting of the national parliament, the next five-year plan and resolution of especially troubling issues in consolidating Beijing’s grip on the vast areas beyond its Han heartland.

The enormous, persistent protests in Hong Kong last year and the landslide election win by the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan in January underlined, for Xi, the importance of subduing the turbulent borderlands of the People’s Republic of China.

China remains a centrally controlled, imperial-style power. Uniquely in the world for a nation of its size, it has never been a federation. It has a single time zone: Beijing’s.

Officials running regions, including Wuhan, are expected to be sufficiently attentive to the speeches and instructions of the central leadership that they will know without needing to ask: “What would Xi do?”

The chronic failure of appropriate governance early in the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan pointed to incompetence, inability or unwillingness to respond adequately to central party direction, to fear of being blamed for the outbreak or, worse, to following directions from Beijing to suppress information.

Control of communications has been tightened since then, so the answers to such governance questions may never be known. The party chiefs of Wuhan and Hubei, the province containing Wuhan, were sacked and silenced.

The model party chief is Chen Quanguo, credited with tackling successfully the rebellious Tibetans during his five-year stint. Tibet is now viewed by the People’s Republic as pacified — although the Communist Party’s insistence on identifying the successor to the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 84, would likely trigger widespread antipathy there.

In 2016, Chen became a leader in praising Xi as the “core” of the party. The Tibet delegates to the National People’s Congress that year all wore badges with Xi’s photo.

Chen then was shifted to the vast northwestern region of Xinjiang following a couple of violent incidents involving Uighurs, the Muslim indigenous population.

It was revealed in internal party documents leaked to The New York Times a few months ago that Xi himself had said earlier that “absolutely no mercy” should be shown to “splitists” or religious extremists in Xinjiang and that an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” was required, using the “organs of dictatorship”.

Chen was cited in the documents as instructing: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

Last year, when 27 countries including Australia signed a letter expressing concern about China’s controversial “re-education” meas­ures in Xinjiang — including a million people confined in camps, many separated from their children — Beijing gained the backing of 37 other nations, including many with Muslim majorities.

Xi may be sensing that Xinjiang is now also pacified. Next up for “stability maintenance”: Hong Kong.

He helped trigger the 2014 “umbrella movement” protests by students there by issuing a white paper insisting that Hong Kongers could choose leaders only from a shortlist agreed by Beijing, and categorising Hong Kong’s independent judges as “administrators” for whom “loving the country (China) is the basic political requirement”.

Xi appears to be losing patience with the “two systems” conceded for 50 years under the old era of Deng Xiaoping. The party has renewed its push for a national security law bringing the city closer to the “one country”, which was withdrawn after huge protests in 2003.

A few weeks ago, Xi upgraded the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and replaced its head with Xia Baolong, a trusted ally who worked alongside him for four years when he was party secretary in Zhejiang province. He also installed as Beijing’s chief representative in Hong Kong Luo Huining, a figure with considerable clout having been party head in two provinces.

The party’s Central Organisation Department has told such senior cadres: “We must be warriors who dare to struggle, who are good at struggles.”

Now, under cover of pandemic restrictions, Hong Kong’s authorities have charged the most credible leaders there — including 81-year-old Democratic Party founder Martin Lee, publisher Jimmy Lai and barrister Margaret Ng — with organising a protest last August without gaining the required approval.

This appears to be aimed at disorienting the democrats before legislative elections in November to prevent a repeat of last year’s rout of pro-Beijing local council candidates.

John Minford, emeritus professor of Chinese Studies at the Australian National University, says: “It is tragic that the Chinese Communist Party’s shortsighted and brutal attitude towards Hong Kong should now stoop so low as to target some of the older and most venerated members of Hong Kong society. It reveals their complete inability to understand the dynamic spirit of this uniquely Chinese place.”

Prominent Hong Kong activist Catrina Ko told Canada’s National Post despairingly after the arrests: “The enemy is advancing. We are losing, at a rate that the international community is not keeping up with as a counterforce. And it’s going to keep getting worse.”

The final and most challenging target is Taiwan — now globally celebrated for its non-lockdown conquest of coronavirus — of which Xi says that its separation from the PRC “cannot be passed on from generation to generation”. Its incorporation is “a must for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation in the New Era”, widely viewed as his anticipated claim to historic fame.

But distinguished French China expert Jean-Pierre Cabestan says “this unprecedented planet-wide health crisis has intensified the new cold war between the two great powers. While it has hurt the US’s prestige, it is far from having demonstrated China’s ability to lead.”

And if China’s economy cannot recapture its own mojo, all bets are off. Xi will be unable to weaponise internationally — or, more worryingly, at home — a weak economy.

Rowan Callick, twice a China correspondent for The Australian, is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asian Institute.