Every Breath You Take by Ian Williams

Author:Ian Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

A few months before Wolf Warrior 2 was released, Xi Jinping travelled to the Swiss ski resort of Davos to join the global political and business elite at the World Economic Forum. There wasn’t a wolf in sight; instead he donned the mantle of a friendly old St Bernard, so beloved of the Alps – gentle, loyal and affectionate towards the struggling cause of globalisation.

‘Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room,’ Xi said. ‘Wind and rain may be kept outside, but so is light and air.’48 Participants applauded loudly, welcoming his apparent commitment to open markets, while commentators hailed Xi as the new champion of free trade. It was of course laughable nonsense – as was much of the reaction to it. China’s economy is the very antithesis of an open market. From protectionism to intellectual property theft, Beijing has prospered by gaming the system, but the speech was more interesting for what it said about Xi’s bid for global leadership.

It was a stark demonstration of how the story of China’s rise is also the story of America’s retreat. You had to admire Xi’s chutzpah; moving effortlessly into ground vacated by the absent Donald Trump. It was raw opportunism, a bid to present himself as a more reliable economic and trade partner than Trump’s America – as the defender of the international rules-based system. In practice, away from that elite gathering, he was actively seeking to replace that system with China’s own model of economic and political development. But his audience for the most part lapped it up. Perhaps they were being polite, or just naïve. Maybe it was wishful thinking, indulging Beijing, taking Xi at face value in the hope that he might get there eventually – the sort of thinking that has characterised much of Western policy towards China over the last four decades.

In trying to understand what drives and motivates Xi we have looked elsewhere in this book at the hotchpotch of ideas that constitute his world view – drawing from Mao, Marxism and Chinese tradition, to good old-fashioned nationalism and xenophobia, and all assembled in a manner that serves to justify his own accumulation of power. He feels that China’s time has come, that by virtue of its economic clout and military might, it can now throw its considerable weight around, consigning to the dustbin Deng Xiaoping’s mantra to ‘coolly observe, calmly deal with things, hold your position, hide your capacities, bide your time, accomplish things where possible’.49

A few months after the Davos gathering, Xi told the Communist Party’s 19th National Congress that ‘China’s national standing has risen like never before,’ that the country had ‘stood up, grown rich and is becoming strong’. It was a very different vision to the one he had peddled at Davos. The wolf was back: ‘It means that the path, the theory, the system, and the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics have kept developing, blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. It

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