Xi's China Dream - its appeal and dangers | The Straits Times
"China's ambitions are vast. There is nothing unusual about a big country having big ambitions. What is important is the nature of those ambitions and their implications. That is crucial for small countries on China's periphery. Reading China's ambitions wrongly could be disastrous for them.
Opaque though China may be in other respects, there should not be any difficulty reading China's ambitions right. China has been quite transparent about its ambitions.
Beijing's goals are explicit in the ethnonationalist narrative of "humiliation", "rejuvenation" and realising the "China Dream" by which the Communist Party legitimises its monopoly of power and right to rule China.
At its core, the China Dream is the recovery of the real or imagined place that China occupied before the Industrial Revolution and the tribulations that began with the Opium Wars that brought China down low.
Some version of this narrative has been used by Chinese reformers since the late Qing Dynasty. Mr Xi has used it more insistently than any of his predecessors and claimed that the party under his leadership has been more successful than any previous ruler in reversing the humiliations that China has endured since the 19th century.
The China Dream is a powerful narrative because, although one can quibble over details, in its broad outline it is largely true. China's re-emergence as a major global and regional actor is an undeniable economic and geopolitical fact. In Mr Xi's version, the China Dream is intended to appeal not just to the Communist Party's supporters and People's Republic of China (PRC) citizens, but also to "all Chinese".
When Mr Xi says "all Chinese", he exploits the ambiguity of the several meanings of the term "Chinese" in the Chinese language to claim the loyalty of the race or nation defined ethnically not just territorially for his version of the China Dream. In effect, he is claiming that "all Chinese" should understand their interests in terms of China's interests, at least on issues that are of importance to China.
Internally, this narrative has been a success with most PRC citizens, at least those who are Han. Externally, it does resonate to some degree with the ethnic sentimentality of many overseas Chinese, including some Singaporeans. But "all Chinese" would certainly not agree with the role Mr Xi's China allots to them in his dream, particularly many in Hong Kong and almost all in Taiwan. In South-east Asia, where the overseas Chinese have not always been a welcome minority, it has sometimes placed them in an invidious position.
Some features of China's ambitions bear close analysis of their implications. To state my conclusion up front, while China's re-emergence as a major regional and global actor is undeniable, Beijing is nevertheless unlikely to realise its ambitions in their entirety because its ambitions contain certain internal contradictions which it will find hard to overcome.
The China Dream is an essentially revanchist narrative. Broadly, it is about the recovery of what was lost. What is to be recovered is not just physical as in territory, but perhaps more essentially and deeply, status and the sense of self that arises from the place that China believes it once occupied internationally. Of course, the world has changed and China has changed, and the dreams are not just nostalgic. They have been modified in accordance with these changes. They are global and not just regional. This is exemplified by Mr Xi's signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The BRI is still more a collection of projects wrapped up in a slogan than a coherent strategy. As its difficulties became evident, China has become less stridently triumphant about the BRI. But Mr Xi has embedded the BRI in the party's Constitution and it will not be abandoned. And practical or not, one cannot deny the grandeur of the dream.
Implicit in this revanchist- ethnonationalist narrative is the idea that all that happened to China in the 19th century and first half of the 20th century were aberrations from the normal order of things and therefore China's "rejuvenation" and the realisation of the China Dream are the restoration of the natural order. Professor Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University has even claimed that China's rise was "granted by nature".
It is this narrative that underpins China's extravagant claims in the East and South China seas. These are not claims that can be settled by diplomatic compromises or legal adjudication because they are presented as the righting of historical injustices and the restoration of the natural order of things.
China is, of course, as pragmatic as any other state when its interests dictate it should be pragmatic. The greatest historical injustice inflicted on China in terms of loss of territory was the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 by which China ceded huge swathes of territory in Siberia and the Far East to Czarist Russia. No less a personage than Mao Zedong once described this as a bill yet to be presented. But that did not prevent China settling its border disputes with Russia in 1999.
It is the very insignificance of the rocks, reefs and tiny artificial islands in the East and South China seas that makes it possible for China to posture for the edification of its own people without too much risk of getting into a major conflict...
It seems evident that Chinese claims in the East and South China seas and the artificial islands it has created serve an important domestic purpose that is as, or perhaps even more, important as any geopolitical or strategic reason. In a war with the US, those artificial islands would be vaporised in the first half hour.
China's territorial dispute with India in the Himalayas is also linked to domestic concerns: control of Tibet and Xinjiang, those vast non-Han areas whose status as part of China prior to the Qing Dynasty is debatable and are a constant source of insecurity. China, as the empire it then was, was based on an entirely different idea of territoriality than China as the nation-state it became after contact with the West.
China's foremost priority - the most core of all its core interests - is domestic: the preservation of internal stability and CPC rule. Since the 19th century, the legitimacy of every Chinese government - imperial, republican or communist - has depended on its ability to defend China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. In this respect, external ambitions merge with internal imperatives into a seamless whole.
For the last 30 years, the CPC's compact with the Chinese people was straightforward. In essence: I will improve your lives in return for obedience. The price was to tolerate inequality - some getting rich before others, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping. Most Chinese were happy with the deal.
But inequality had grown too stark and had possibly become destabilising. At the same time, the limits of China's growth model of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s were being reached. The need to de-risk key sectors, notably property and some areas of technology, could no longer be postponed...
What will be the new drivers of growth and will they be compatible with tighter party control and ideological discipline? Will the Chinese people accept this new compact?...
China's dynastic tradition thus melds into the historical inevitability of Marxist dialectical materialism. Whatever I, Xi Jinping, choose to do - whether you understand it or not; whether you like it or not - will inexorably lead to this outcome that all right-thinking Chinese anywhere must welcome...
As growth slows, the CPC is going to rely much more on this revanchist-ethnonationalist narrative in the coming years.
It is now clear that China miscalculated in prematurely abandoning Deng's sage approach of "hiding strength and biding time". From this flowed two other mistakes: believing that the decline of the US and the West generally was absolute and not just relative. This in turn led China into a foolish "no limits" partnership with President Vladimir Putin's Russia, the only major country that shares Mr Xi's distrust and contempt for the West.
These mistakes have led to a significant counter-reaction. Nobody is ever going to refuse to deal with China. But many surveys have shown that while China's importance and influence are widely acknowledged, it is not particularly trusted...
It was not so much the brilliance of American diplomacy but the failure of Chinese diplomacy that created the Quad and Aukus. The real architect of the emerging Indo-Pacific security architecture that China now decries as Cold War relics was Mr Xi.
The imperative to behave assertively, even aggressively, in situations where it is not in China's interests to be overly assertive, or even when it is counter-productive, is well-nigh hard-wired into the CPC's revanchist-ethnonationalist narrative.
That narrative also makes the correction of mistakes fraught with political risk. I don't want to exaggerate the point, but the CPC is as much prisoner as master of the narrative it both uses and fears...
It is only a step from the Chinese people criticising other countries for being so dim-witted or recalcitrant as to try to thwart the China Dream, to criticising the CPC for not being resolute enough in its response to those who oppose the China Dream. This could lead the CPC down some paths it does not really want to go, particularly on Taiwan."
