Xi Jinping Wants to Turn China Into a Fortress to Conquer World Leadership by 2049.
A fortress built on 4 pillars. The clash with America will be merciless in the years to come.
The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China ended with the consecration of the absolute power of Xi Jinping, now General Secretary for life and supported by six loyal members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. The concentration of all power in Xi Jinping's hands is inseparable from his plan to transform China into a fortress to conquer world leadership by 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic.
The goal is to build a post-Western world, governed by power relations, from which freedom and human rights will be banished. Marxist ideology and imperialism will overshadow the economy.
The fortress is primarily economic. While China's “Forty Glorious Years” were driven by globalization, Beijing now gives top priority to security. The COVID-19 epidemic and the endless confinements are thus used to prepare the population to resist Western sanctions and a conflict with the United States.
The fortress is also commercial, monetary, and financial. The Chinese market is closing to foreign companies, especially in the automobile - thanks to the domination of national manufacturers in the electric vehicle - and aeronautics. At the same time, Beijing is pursuing a strategy of de-dollarizing its foreign trade with Russia, but also with the Middle East.
The fortress is also political and ideological. The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to a strengthening of the CCP's control over society and individuals through the establishment of a digital Big Brother, but also the limitation of travel and the prohibition of foreign travel. The ideological hardening around Xi Jinping's thought, self-proclaimed “Marxism of contemporary China and the 21st century,” and the return in force of the cult of personality go hand in hand with the reinforcement of the totalitarian nature of the regime.
The fortress is, finally, military and strategic, organized around the rivalry with the United States and the construction of a world order structured by imperial zones of influence. Hence the forced modernization of the armed forces and the strengthening of the nuclear arsenal. Hence the rise of threats against Taiwan, whose independence has been written into the Constitution and whose blockade and invasion was simulated last summer. Hence the strategic partnership with Vladimir Putin's Russia and the support given to the invasion of Ukraine. Hence the promotion of an international of autocrats and the pursuit of the encirclement of the West by seeking an alliance with the global South.
The strategy of fortress China is part of a logic of confrontation with the West, which fully assumes the risk of an armed confrontation with the United States.
The sacrifice of growth and the closure of borders destabilize the political contract with the middle classes, which is now based solely on hypernationalism. The search for autarky is inseparable from a warlike logic, which is embodied in Xi Jinping's permanent reference to combat.
In the long term, the transformation of China into a fortress can only lead to its decline, as it has regularly done in its history. In the short term, it creates a major threat to political freedom. In the face of China's hardening totalitarianism and imperial ambitions, the United States has defined and is implementing a clear containment strategy, which is one of the few points of convergence between Democrats and Republicans.
This American strategy against China should find its extension in the creation of a council of Atlantic and Pacific democracies to contain Chinese expansionism and to recreate a link between the West and the South, notably around the management of global warming.
But Europe is the weak link in the face of Beijing.
This is due to the blindness of Germany, which is repeating the mistakes it made with Russia by seeking to preserve its exports to China at all costs, which are at the heart of its mercantilist model. Olaf Scholz's visit to Beijing, against the backdrop of increased German investment in China and the acquisition of a 25% stake in a container terminal in the port of Hamburg by the state-owned Cosco, is a policy of appeasement doomed to failure, which Churchill defined in these terms: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.”
Some reading
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