Xi Jinping by Richard McGregor

Author:Richard McGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144968
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Foreign CEOs, too, have come under pressure to give the Party a larger role in their firms. Again, this is not a trend that started with Xi. Walmart, which famously won’t allow unions in its US stores, has had party cells in its companies in China since at least 2006, and CCP-controlled unions even earlier. Under Xi, however, emboldened officials have pushed foreign firms harder to accommodate the Party and give its representatives a role in business decisions. Companies as diverse as the cosmetics giant L’Oréal to Walt Disney and Dow Chemicals in China now all have party committees and display the hammer and sickle on their premises. Executives from one European company were quoted as saying that party representatives had demanded to be brought into the executive committee and have the business pay their expenses.80 Like Chinese entrepreneurs, foreign businessmen and women are trying to outrun ‘the bear’, not always with success. But the Party’s persistent efforts to colonise the private sector have stoked a backlash of their own.

In late 2017, the EU business chamber in China formally complained about party organisations trying to extend their influence in their member companies, something they said would undermine the authority of their boards. ‘A fundamental change of this nature … would have serious consequences for the independent decision-making ability of these [joint venture] companies,’ the chamber said in a statement.81 The chamber’s argument, that an extension of the Party’s functions had no legal basis, was met with indifference locally, at least in public utterances. ‘When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ said Chen Fengying, an expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a foreign policy think tank. ‘Foreign investors should respect local rules and regulations in China.’82

On one level, Xi has been untroubled by the backlash over his treatment of entrepreneurs. The idea that the private sector is being overly politicised is upside down, according to his world view. Business leaders should ‘strengthen self-study, self-education and self-improvement,’ he said in 2016. ‘They should not feel uncomfortable with this requirement. The communist party has similar and stricter requirements on its leaders.’83

Later, in 2018, when the economy started to slow and the trade war was ramping up, Xi was much more pragmatic and solicitous. In November that year, he invited a select group of entrepreneurs, including Tencent’s Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma), for a meeting in the Great Hall of the People. He wanted to reassure them that they were ‘all part of our family’. At the same time, a surfeit of stories appeared in the official media urging banks to lend private firms more money.

Not all entrepreneurs were buying the new line. One businessman, Chen Tianyong, posted a lengthy rant on social media, which he titled ‘An Entrepreneur’s Farewell Admonition’, explaining why he had left China. ‘China’s economy is like a giant ship heading to the precipice,’ he wrote in a posting that was later taken down. ‘Without fundamental changes, it’s inevitable that the ship will be wrecked and the passengers will die.

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