Under the forceful leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), a new China is emerging — a more assertive and aggressive one. Tensions are building again. Its neighbors are the most exposed, as is seen in China’s expansion and base building in the South China Sea.
The two decades between former Chinese president Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and Xi were the golden years for the People’s Republic of China. The economy grew ferociously, the nation was at peace and there was hope of liberalization.
“The more we bring China into the world, the more the world will bring freedom to China,” then-US president Bill Clinton said.
It was also a period of gray, technocratic, collective leadership, which served China well.
Now it is all different. Economic growth has slowed to a trickle and China has turned to aggression in its neighborhood. Rather than political liberalization, there are ever tighter controls. Instead of collective leadership, there is one-person rule in the hands of the new leader.
The Chinese party-state is exceptionally dependent on its leadership. It was former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) absolute power that caused the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It was thanks to Deng’s authority that China could turn to economic reform.
However, these two leaders, although both strong, were radically different. Mao was ideological, while Deng was pragmatic. While Mao’s ideology spelled disaster, Deng’s pragmatism was productive and prevailed during the golden years.
Since Xi became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he has gathered all the reins of power into his own hands. Systematically, step by step, relentlessly he has concentrated power — politically, economically, militarily — from the nation toward Beijing, and from Beijing toward the party and himself. He has boosted his own authority with a veneer of a personality cult, having himself anointed “core leader.”
He is also reverting to ideology. The party-state needs legitimacy. Being less able to rely on economic growth, it becomes more dependent on ideology. Xi admonishes cadres to “embrace the spirit of Mao Zedong” and to “make work in the ideological sphere a high priority in your daily agenda.” The gray leaders boasted of economic prowess. The new one peppers his speeches with ideology and discipline.
Ideology is a dangerous force. Political leaders make their own ideologies, but when they take hold, they become the prisoners of their own creation. Ideologies explain history and destiny in a way that seems truthful to all who are entrapped in them. They become belief systems and make people, both leaders and the led, believers.
The destructive force of ideology has been seen in Hitlerism, Stalinism and Maoism. The belief in ideological truths justifies the most brutal of means. When powerful leaders turn to ideology, there is always danger and others must pay attention.
Xi’s ideology is not Marxism, which is no longer credible. He is looking to Chinese history and to its constant theme of national greatness. That is the tradition he has condensed into his slogan of the “Chinese dream.”
Xi launched the Chinese dream in November 2012 against the backdrop of the National Rejuvenation exhibition at the National Museum of China in the capital and in front of the new CCP Standing Committee. He spoke about Chinese rejuvenation as “the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in recent times” and of how “each person’s future and destiny is closely linked with the future and destiny of the nation.”
That is the stuff of ideology. Xi is reviving a vision of nationalism, strength and glory that has resonance in Chinese imagination and tradition. In this narrative, nation is everything and people — “each person” — are secondary.
The Chinese dream quickly became the story that all who need or wish to display loyalty pay lip service to. It is everywhere in official policy documents, and on official and quasi-official Web sites. It is the crescendo with which Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) has concluded reports to the Chinese National People’s Congress. It was even the heading for this year’s aggressively patriotic New Year’s gala on national television.
Ideology is never innocent. Flirting with it is to release forces that could get out of control. A state under one-person ideological leadership is fundamentally different from one under pragmatic and collective leadership. An ideology that puts a nation ahead of its people is ultra-dangerous.
A big and powerful country, a strong state and an ambitious and shrewd leader — that adds up to a force to be reckoned with. A big and powerful country, a strong state, an ambitious and shrewd leader and an aggressive ideology — that adds up to a force to be feared.
Stein Ringen, a Norwegian political scientist, is a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford.
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