The World According to Xi by Brown Kerry;

Author:Brown, Kerry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

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XI JINPING AND GLOBAL CHINA

The disciplined, renovated, newly motivated Communist Party under Xi Jinping, with its comprehensive approach and its mission to fulfil a great vision, is also a global party, albeit using a notion of globalisation increasingly with Chinese characteristics. Soon after coming to power, Xi convened a Politburo meeting in which he asked his colleagues to tell the China story better. Leaders felt that there was too little real understanding of China’s intentions and that there were too many negative assumptions being made about the country by the outside world. Xi himself was aware that criticisms had been increasing during the Hu era, accusing the Party of having a silent leadership which was unwilling, or unable, to say what the world’s second-largest economy wanted – or, more importantly, to rebut some of the wilder claims being made about its intentions. In the US, ‘China Threat’ narratives started to take hold. Chinese investment became problematic because it was suspected of masking overt political intentions. Confucius Institutes, set up in more than 500 foreign university campuses worldwide, became lightning rods for suspicion about China’s intentions, with accusations made that they existed to promote benign, non-critical views of the country and were part of the work of the United Front, the department in the Party mandated to maintain linkages with overseas Chinese communities and other forces in society, and to promote the Party’s vision as unified and acting in the interests of everyone.

Xi himself has become the chief diplomat in this effort to tell the China story. He has also sponsored an upgrade of international relations. In the Hu era, the foreign minister was usually one of the least prominent figures in the Party. (One prominent political figure in the UK even said to me, around 2011, ‘When Henry Kissinger goes to Beijing, he now regards the head of their foreign ministry simply as the person who comes to open his car door as he goes in to see someone who actually matters!’) Under Xi, Wang Yi currently holds the position and sits on the 350-strong Central Committee, but he is not even a member of the full Politburo, let alone the Standing Committee. State Councillor Yang Jiechi is the highest-ranked politician with oversight of international affairs – but did not sit on the full Politburo until 2017.

That has all changed now, with Yang being granted a place among the top 24. More relevantly, Wang Huning, who formerly worked as an academic in Shanghai and is a specialist in international relations with a background in the French language and the study of different notions of sovereignty, was one of the new promotions to the Standing Committee. Someone with no administrative experience to speak of (he has never been Party Secretary of a province, nor run a ministry), his greatest talent has been his ability to translate the ideas of Chinese political leaders over three generations from the time of Jiang into pithy slogans, and then to give these some theoretical basis and justification.

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