Friday’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and US President Barack Obama during the former’s visit to the US was the third time the two leaders met. The minute Xi’s airplane landed in Seattle, his country’s “rise” officially entered its next phase.
Xi has something his predecessor, former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), did not have: an international outlook. Neither is he slavishly bound to ideology, as was Hu’s direct predecessor, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民). Xi was able to hold a massive military parade less than three weeks ago to show the leaders of the Western world what they could be letting themselves in for, and then got straight on an airplane bound for the US, the bastion of democracy, to address China’s problem of the lack of a free market. How can Taiwan not prepare itself in the face of a Chinese leader this adaptable to the necessities of the moment?
Most leaders will resort to foreign relations to dissipate problems they are experiencing at home, and Xi is no exception. He is negotiating a bilateral investment treaty with the US, which will also facilitate further economic reform at home, deregulating property rights, trimming state enterprise monopolies, and leaving exchange rates and interest rates to the mercy of the market. With the recent stock market turmoil in China and the slowdown in economic growth, Xi can trade on his visit to the US and use it to precipitate change at home and show that his leadership is effective.
Xi is continuing to promote the idea of a “new model of great-power relations” between the US and China, in the hopes of highlighting cooperation between the two nations to de-emphasize the stress points that exist between them: Alleged attacks from Chinese hackers, problems in the South China Sea and the unequal treatment that US companies are receiving in China.
To placate the US, Xi seems committed to carrying out market reforms. If China wants to go the way of capitalism, it has to be all out, as if the US and China were both essentially standing on the same side, or that the authoritarian regime in China has room for democratic government and capitalism.
Few could deny that Xi’s foreign relations tactics are persuasive: Using China’s economic clout to gently convince the US to accustom itself to a non-democratic alternative, with the greatest factors uniting the two being the market, big corporations, and trade.
However, there remains one thing about Xi’s US policy that some in Washington are having difficulty understanding or buying.
The main contradiction in Xi’s narrative lies in the fact that the markets will never be entirely free while authoritarian regimes refuse to steer their political systems toward free elections and a multi-party system. Neither is the Chinese government a system capable of self-regulation, just as big corporations cannot be expected to regulate themselves. Just like corporations need consumers to rein them in, governments need an electorate to provide oversight.
In the US, it is not only the Republican Party that is suspicious of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and it is not alone to bundle “capitalism” and “democratic politics” in a single package: The Democratic Party, too, believes that this pairing lays the very foundations on which the US was established.
What Xi imagines himself leading is a rather unconventional marriage of capitalism and authoritarian governance. With this, he hopes to forge a coherent, great China. However, the US sees the situation differently and wants to see a China in which the politics are more in line with the economics.
If China and the US continue along in this vein, is it possible that Taiwan could be traded away?
There is reason for optimism on this matter. The more the US and China grapple and come together on the economic level, the more China becomes entangled in the global financial system, which will gradually create investors within China. The CCP will only maintain its legitimacy if it allows investors to live in peace. At the same time, investors will be accompanied by the birth of an expanding middle class, who will drive China’s capitalism to its ultimate conclusion, that is, to lead it on the path toward more power in the hands of the populace, and perhaps even outright democracy. Also, a China that wants to make money is unlikely to go toe-to-toe with a free, pluralistic Taiwan. It is also possible that this is the “unspeakable secret” that Xi is keeping to himself, and that he will end up being like former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Albert Shihyi Chiu is an associate professor of political science at Tunghai University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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