By Kerry Brown
How to explain the Party’s contradictory moves toward reform and regression?
Over the last three years, we’ve seen an intensifying conundrums in Xi Jinping’s style of politics. Even as reform is being lauded from the rooftops and made into something approaching a signature theme of this leadership, there is another, parallel track involving more retrogressive ideas and actions.
Hybrid ownership of state enterprises is being allowed (at least on paper), and the market is being given a role in the Chinese economy it has never had. But at the same time, China is beating up on its neighbors and slamming rights lawyers (and other people broadly characterized as dissidents) into jail or house detention. For all the innovation of an entity like the Chinese-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, there is the regression of cases like the imprisonment of veteran female journalist Gao Yu, a case which prompted the respected Freedom House in New York last week to raise concerns over her health and well-being.
We can speculate about the ostensibly contradictory positions the Party under Xi is taking — liberal in some areas, hardline in others. It seems to lack a core narrative that we can latch onto. Some have linked the two trends to the personal story of Xi’s rising power and sense of increasing autonomy, “He’s always been impetuous,” an analyst commented to me in May, “but now he’s impetuous with impunity.” Others see the cause in China’s rising sense of power and the Party’s feeling of being vindicated in its assertion of influence because of the collapse of moral and political authority of the U.S.-led west.
A catch-all explanation would make life easier for outside observers. But everyone should know by now that when a continent masquerades as a straight-forward nation-state (which is, in effect, what China has been doing in modern times), simple explanations are more often than not the enemy of true understanding. China is a dynamic place. Personalizing its politics by laying everything at the door of Xi’s ambition is like putting old wine in new skin – that sort of explanatory framework worked in the Mao Zedong era, but barely relates to a China that now has the Internet, a partially modernized economy, and a geopolitical reach it simply lacked in Mao’s time.
Read the full story at The Diplomat