Xi Jinping’s Achilles Heel Is Not Political, but Economic.
However strong his power, he will be judged by the economic results.
Xi Jinping is not the man we think he is. We often imagine him obsessed with the idea of surpassing the United States, riveted by growth figures, and obsessed with the success of his industrial champions. I often think this, but some elements cast doubt on my mind, and should also cast doubt on yours.
The way Xi Jinping has evolved during his ten years of rule, and even more so in the last few months, reveals him in a different light: that of a communist mandarin who puts the interests of the party well before those of the country, and the control of the population well before its prosperity.
Beyond the sham election that will open the doors to a third term at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the man is following in the footsteps of Stalin and Mao by offering himself the possibility of governing until his death. He may have made many enemies within the system, but with the new technologies, he has means of surveillance and repression that the dictators of the time could not even imagine.
The hope that the reformists would gain the upper hand has evaporated in China. Despite his disastrous management of Covid, everything suggests that Xi Jinping will emerge from this 20th Congress even stronger.
In the absence of challengers, however, he faces a major challenge that will make this decade much more difficult than the last: that of maintaining sufficient growth to finance his international ambitions and de-Westernize the world.
Xi Jinping's Achilles heel is not political, it is economic!
Paranoid, the president does not seem to know how to do anything but bully those who succeed, from Tencent to Alibaba through Didi. The crisis of confidence is such that many Chinese women are no longer having children, in a kind of revolution that does not say its name. The population is aging, and there are fewer and fewer people working, threatening the Chinese social model.
As for the massive investments that artificially fuel growth, they have propelled public and private debt to unsustainable levels. As a result, Xi Jinping, who had hoped to maintain high levels of growth during his new term, now faces the specter of a slowdown.
China will experience its slowest growth in forty years this year, the IMF warned in mid-October 2022. After Vladimir Putin, who has already been in power for 23 years, the Chinese president is now putting a damper on those who think that economic prosperity and autocracy go hand in hand.
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