What Can We Learn from Xi: Market Reforms, State Projects, and the Censorship of the People’s Republic of China
“The threat environment is always changing, and we are updating our policies today to make sure we’re addressing the challenges posed by the P.R.C. while we continue our outreach and coordination with allies and partners,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Before the October sanctions, the US government had already banned sales of certain tech products to specific Chinese companies, such as Huawei. It also ordered top chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to halt their shipments to China.
“It is an aggressive approach by the U.S. government to start to really impair the capability of China to indigenously develop certain of these critical technologies,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at Center for a New American Security, a think tank.
The most serious challenge to U.S. global leadership can be seen in China but it also provides Americans with a chance to learn from failures in a completely different system. I asked a group of scholars what lessons they should remember from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here’s a summary of what they told me.
Mr. Xi, who is expected to secure a groundbreaking third term when the Communist Party congress concludes this week, made just three references to market reforms in his nearly two-hour speech and omitted more than a dozen others from a longer, written version. He promised to create a larger role for socialism and the public sector and extolled state projects in spaceflight and super computers, despite his focus on issues of national security and corruption.
The message was established when he talked about markets. He lauded “socialist market economic reform,” while also arguing that China’s economy should “give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation.”
They included a professor at the party’s top academy who helped train thousands of high-ranking cadres. An economist who would win China’s top economics prize for 2012. A young historian planning to teach a class about contemporary Chinese history, including sensitive periods like the Cultural Revolution.
Poised to secure a groundbreaking third term when the Communist Party congress concludes this week, Xi defended his hard-line reign in a sweeping speech and insisted that the party must remain united under his rule against an increasingly hostile West.
An American scholar’s perspective on Chinese government data: 10 years of authoritarianism and crimes against human rights in Xinjiang
The Chinese government said it was delaying the release of economic data that had been expected to show continued lackluster performance.
One person was paying close attention to a scholar. He was happy when he heard that Xi would be the party’s general secretary.
“He sounded so excited. He said it’s going to change. Things are going to get better,'” says the scholar’s daughter, Jewher Ilham, who lives in the United States.
But the past decade in China has been marked by new levels of authoritarianism — and nowhere has it been clearer than in the country’s western region of Xinjiang.
One of the Uyghur people is named Ilham Tohti, he’s 53 this month. He made a name for himself as an outspoken activist for Uyghur rights and the Uyghur language and culture.
About a million people would eventually be stopped by the authorities. The U.S. has referred to it as genocide. The United Nations’ top human rights official said in a recent report that they may have been crimes against humanity. China denies that it has done anything wrong.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1127852397/china-xi-jinping-10-years-perspectives
Xi’s Ten-Years’-Perspectives: How he and his neighbors confront the reality of China’s Communist Party
It was a time when the party was in dire need of restoring its reputation and could lose its moral authority because of it’s corruption. It was the job of Xi to clean up and reestablish the Communist Party’s dominance across the board.
It’s a cost. The impact on the economy has been huge, with heightened uncertainty smothering consumer confidence and rendering business planning all but impossible.
Vis and his neighbors — who were effectively imprisoned in their compound — drafted a statement of protest. He recorded it and they played it in public for all to hear.
The lockdown started in early spring. Since it was lifted in June, Vis has pieced his yoga business back together for the most part. But he says it left a scar on everyone.
“If it happened once, it could happen a second time,” Vis says. In China you’ll be afraid of coiled rope if you get bitten by a snake.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1127852397/china-xi-jinping-10-years-perspectives
The Children of Revolutionaries and the Successes of China in Running the Hong Kong Democracy and Pro-Democracy Movements
It is hard to gauge public opinion in China. Independent polling on politics is banned, and speaking out against the Communist Party can get you thrown in jail. Many people say they like the idea of Xi being the leader of the country and that he is doing a good job.
During the Cultural Revolution,Zhang was sent to the northwestern Chinese countryside to work in a place whereXi worked as a youth in that turbulent era. Zhang says he’s known about Xi since then — and liked his style.
Zhang believes Xi understands the plight of the country’s poor because of his experience in the Cultural Revolution, and has been able to take action that his predecessors could not because he is what is known as a “princeling” — the child of revolutionaries. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a guerrilla fighter in the civil war and later a vice premier.
The situation in Hong Kong is an example. The people of the colony had a vibrant pro-democracy movement, and they also enjoyed freedom of speech.
In 2014, street protests erupted in the city in what became known as the “Umbrella Movement” — openly calling for the right to directly elect the city’s leaders.
There was fresh demonstrations five years after the proposed law was introduced. Kwong — who was getting her master’s degree in Germany — flew home to join them.
In 2020, Beijing took a step that would change everything — imposing a sweeping National Security Law on Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s democracy movement was destroyed by the arrests that followed.
Xi has not blinked. At the opening session of the party congress in Beijing on Sunday, he said the “one country, two systems” model for running Hong Kong is a “great innovation” and that China has successfully overcome “grave challenges to its national security” in the territory.
In 1997 the territory was promised that it would be able to maintain its system and manage its own affairs with high degree of autonomy. Critics say China has reneged on that promise.
“Basically, my life has, like, gone to pieces because of Xi Jinping,” she said. “I lost my home. Many of my friends have passed away. And I’ll never set foot in Hong Kong again.”
There were just four people with very different ideas of how to live. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, it is impossible to capture the national mood.
Xi has ramped up China’s ambitions for reducing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. He talked about those goals in grandiose language this week. We must act on the principle of lucid waters and mountains being valuable assets. But he has also allied himself with a leader whose actions are threatening to throw the global climate fight in reverse: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
This summer, China sweltered through more than two months of record-high temperatures, the country’s most prolonged heat wave since modern records began in 1961. The River dried to a trickle. Factories halted production to reduce the burden on power grids. The government’s chief forecaster, Chen Lijuan, told a Communist Party news outlet that the extreme highs could become a “new normal.”
Xi Jinping is expected to break longstanding tradition in the coming days and secure a third term as China’s president, putting the country on a new course that could increase tensions with the U.S.
“He is able to focus on his foreign strategy and vision of rejuvenation of the Chinese nation more now that he has a foreign strategy,” Sun said. “That inevitably will lead to a contest for influence and leadership with the United States, and that will lead to even more.”
Sun said she expected some of the political loyalists of the president to be given roles in national security and foreign policy in order to implement his vision.
There are people within the government that do not think China’s policies are good for the U.S.
According to the director of research at the Asia-Pacific Initiative at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, there are likely to be disagreements between the US and China over Taiwan and technology in the future.
China’s strategy toward Taiwan has not fundamentally changed, Li said, but “there’s a perception that Beijing is more and more focused on no longer just deterring independence … but rather, compelling reunification.”
The U.S.’ actions such as Nancy Pelosi’s high-level congressional visits have led to something of a catch-22 situation, Li said.
There’s a lot of distrust between the U.S. and China, and there is a back and forth between the U.S. and China as to how to respond to each other.
The tech industry has become a bigger priority for the country as the country moves towards the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by the 100th birthday of the Chinese republic in 2049.
With this in mind, China has increased its research and innovation capacity, and that has caused people in the U.S. to talk about the difference between China and the US when it comes to technology.
That’s led to what Li said is essentially an impasse. But that doesn’t mean progress can’t happen, only that achieving it will test both countries in the years to come.
A Chinese State Council Resolution to “Comprehensive Containment in the Development of an Open-Source Chip Design Architecture” against the U.S.
The country’s commerce ministry filed a formal complaint against the United States with the WTO on Monday, according to a statement. The two countries are both members of the trade body, which can resolve disputes.
The ministry said that filing a lawsuit at the WTO is to resolve China’s concerns through legal means and is necessary for its legitimate rights and interests.
The commerce ministry blasted the US move as threatening global supply chain stability and called it “a typical practice of trade protectionism.” The complaint is the first action China has taken at the global trade body against the US chip sanctions.
The US pressured its security partners to comply with chip related curbs on China. Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said on Monday that Washington had spoken with its partners including Japan and the Netherlands to tighten chip-related exports to China, according to Reuters.
The Chinese government set up an industry alliance of companies and research institutions in November last year after the United States imposed an export ban on the Chinese telecoms giant. The group’s focus is on developing Risc-V, an open-source chip design architecture that has increasingly become a rival to Softbank
(SFTBF)’s Arm, the current global leader. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is among the members of the consortium.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — China is proposing to vastly restructure its science, technology and finance regulators as part of an ambitious, ongoing effort to outcompete geopolitical rivals while also tamping down risk at home.
The reorganization attempts to modernize the Science and Technology Ministry and will create a new, consolidated financial regulator as well as a data regulator.
The changes were proposed by the State Council, akin to China’s cabinet, during annual legislative and political meetings where Chinese leader Xi Jinping is also expected to formally confirm his third term as president.
The annual meetings this year have been meant to promote the country’s self-reliance in technology areas after the United States imposed export sanctions on certain Chinese tech products.
In a rare and direct rebuke, the U.S. was said to have implemented “comprehensive containment”, which had brought “unprecedented severe challenges” to the country’s development.
China’s Data Security and Privacy Problem: Predictions for the upcoming Science and Technology Minister’s Report on Finance Restructuring in the State Council
A State Council document laying out the proposed changes to the Science and Technology Ministry had few details about their implementation. The proposal also urges China to improve its patents and intellectual property system.
These changes, released by the State Council on Tuesday, still need to be officially approved this Friday by the National People’s Congress, though the legislative body’s delegates seldom cast dissenting votes.
The country will set up a national data bureau to specifically deal with data privacy and data storage issues, a responsibility previously taken on by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). “A new regulatory body for data makes perfect sense,” said Kendra Schaefer, a Beijing-based partner at consultancy Trivium China. “[CAC] was neither designed nor equipped to handle data security, particularly cross-border data security.”
The current banking and insurance watchdogs would be merged into one body to expand the number of provincial branches under the central bank.
Under Xi, China has stepped up regulatory oversight of banking and consumer finance. Finance regulators quashed a public offering of financial technology company Ant Financial and put it under investigation for flouting banking standards. Property prices and sale went down because of regulators cutting off lending to indebted property companies. After three years of costly COVID-19 controls, China is also struggling to manage ballooning local government debts.
Xiao Jie, secretary-general of the State Council, said that the finance restructuring proposals will address the long standing contradictions and problems in financial areas.