How China's Xi Jinping has misread history

Chinese emperors are all-powerful until the moment they are toppled

Few are more assiduous students of history than China’s Communist Party rulers. In the quest to restore China to its place as the Middle Kingdom the party leadership has explored every twist in the rise and fall of the world’s great powers. All the more surprising then that Xi Jinping has so badly misread the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A decade or so ago, when Chinese policymakers were still permitted to engage in moderately open debate with westerners, I attended a conference at Beijing’s Central Party School. Xi was still waiting in the wings, but his preoccupations were already making their mark. The new fashion - it seemed to verge on an obsession - was with dissecting the collapse of the Soviet empire. One of the young students who accompany foreigners at such events told me that close study of the writings and film archives from the period was mandatory. They were intended as a salutary reminder of Mikhail Gorbachev’s fatal misjudgement.

The mistake, this version of history had it, was to combine glasnost towards the west with political reform (perestroika) at home. By offering Soviet citizens a measure of political freedom, Gorbachev unleashed forces that the party could not control. The Kremlin’s grip on the national discourse was broken. Popular grievances led inexorably to demands for democracy - to a fundamental challenge to the system of communist party rule.

Xi took the lesson to heart since assuming power in 2013. If his rule has a defining characteristic it is the crushing of all opposition and the ruthless centralisation of power. The restoration of Maoist discipline has reached well beyond anti–corruption drives and purges of potential rivals.

Pluralism in all its forms has been stamped out. Technology has been deployed to monitor discussion and debate in every corner of Chinese life. To question the leadership is to threaten the party. And the party in China is the state. Policymakers who once engaged with western visitors have taken the cue. Those relatively free exchanges have been replaced by exhaustive recitations of the thoughts of Xi.

As for the history, there is indeed a debate to be had about Gorbachev’s handling of political liberalisation. Reform, it could be said, raised expectations that could not be met,  creating in turn stronger protests. Perestroika though did not bring down the Soviet Union. The system was moribund long before Gorbachev took over. Soviet communism failed because the state-directed allocation of economic resources could not generate prosperity to match that of the west’s market-led system. Soviet citizens had only to glance over the Berlin Wall to see the difference. 

Xi’s predecessor’s seemed to understand this - hence the market-friendly reforms that fuelled the economic boom that followed Deng Xiaoping’s initial opening to the west. The bargain  - economic freedom alongside political authoritarianism - was one that the Chinese people were content to accept while the economy was growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent.

Xi has overturned that bargain. Political repression has been accompanied by the return of state control of the economy. Entrepreneurs have been elbowed aside, risk-taking goes unrewarded The annual growth rate has halved to 5 per cent - now described by leading Chinese economists as the new “normal”. And the legacy of the one-child policy is a population ageing much faster than in any other economy at a comparable stage of development. 

None of this is to say that China is heading for economic slump. Equally, to glance at the broken property sector and note the absence of significant consumer demand is to wonder whether 5 per cent might be an overly optimistic growth target. Beijing seems to assume that exports can fill the gap, but this at a time when the west is “de-risking” its trade with China. 

Westerners do not always get it right. Many (myself included) have been too quick in the past to assume an immutable link between higher prosperity and demands for greater political freedom The assumption that rising middle classes in autocratic states will inevitably press for democracy has been shown to underestimate the force of nationalism, the premium placed on order and security, and the technological tools now available to repressive regimes.

Nor is China the Soviet Union. Yet it is hard to imagine that a combination of slower growth, youth unemployment of 15 per cent plus and tighter and tighter state intrusion into the everyday lives of citizens is a recipe for China’s long-term political stability. Before the fall of the Soviet Union it was sometimes said in the British Foreign Office that the Soviet system was at once economically unsustainable and destined to endure indefinitely.  Doesn’t history also remind us that Chinese emperors are all-powerful until the moment they are toppled?