Last week’s UN General Assembly reflected a number of emerging trends – the miring of public life in older democracies (US and the UK) in banality and controversy, and the flourishing of climate change as a mainstream political issue, are just two.
These trends are part of the fracturing of the old-world order, and pointers as to where the new order may lie. Underlying each of them is the contentious issue of how political debate is conducted.
One striking statement at the UN was President Trump’s remark that ‘The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots’. Practically, coming from the leader of the world’s superpower it is another nail in the coffin of globalization, in addition to being an embarrassing conflation of the meaning of nationalism with patriotism.
One of the ironies in Trump’s many grand statements is the way they echo in China. In fact, China is well ahead of Trump in conceiving of how to put the ‘country ahead of the global’. A memorable example was the 2017 World Economic Forum when the Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a speech that claimed the mantle of globalization for China (from the USA).
The curious aspect of this is that while China is a large spigot in the world economy, it is one of the least globalized countries in the world (it ranks in the bottom quarter of nations according to my own measure of globalization). In his own way, Trump is reacting to this, but his crude view of China does not do justice to its history nor the amplitude of its ambition.
Well before MAGA (Make America Great Again) Xi Jinping coined the term ‘China Dream’ in a speech when visiting the National Museum of China in November 2012, having taken the office of general secretary of the Communist Party. The 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic which occurs next Tuesday 1st October, will bring this into sharper focus.
China’s view of itself in the future, or the Chinese Dream, is colored by past generations of economic and cultural greatness. Recall that at the time of the Founding Fathers, the United States was but an emerging, even frontier economy and that at that time China accounted for nearly 40 percent of the world economy. By 1950, 150 years later, America made up a third of world economy, and China’s share had shrunk to 10 percent.
Given this backdrop China wants to elevate itself to a position of economic power (perhaps regional dominance) and of policy power in Asia with its own regionally relevant rule-based order so that it is, at the very least, not subject to the domination of Western countries and institutions (the film Amazing China, to be found on Youtube,gives a sense of this and of what is ahead).
China’s rise over the past thirty years has not been given enough credit by commentators and politicians in the West. Few of them are really curious about Chinese history and the Chinese approach to economics, politics and society. Mike Pence’s speech to the Hudson Institute last October was a sign of this, and one of the great challenges China will face in coming years is the realization in Washington and Brussels that China is pulling level with them in some domains.
Looking ahead, the great risk for China is that the ‘Dream’ runs out of momentum, economically in that growth slows, and politically in that people in China question a model that exchanges liberty for stability. The underlying risk is that not having experienced a formal recession in close to twenty years there is a great deal of inefficient capacity built up in China and that a downturn will expose this. If it does, rising unemployment will create a new political challenge for the all-powerful Xi Jinping.
In this respect, the manner in which China manages the protests in Hong Kong will provide a clue as to how the Communist Party will manage emerging political challenges. A physical, confrontational approach will open up many risks – political contagion, sanctions on the Hong Kong economy and a loss of soft power. A more drawn out approach that contests the legitimacy of the ‘two systems’ and that penalizes locals in Hong Kong by slowing the local economy may well dampen the crisis from a Chinese perspective. It must then confront the tenor of elections in Taiwan in early 2020.
Political volatility is thought to be the preserve of the West. One of the great surprises of the early 2020’s may be the way it spreads across emerging countries, with China as no exception.
Have a great week ahead,
Mike
The Levelling 