At a news conference held by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on May 30, office spokesman An Fengshan (安峰山) responded to the term “Taiwan leavers” or “Taiwanese defectors,” which was coined on the BBC’s Chinese-language Web site to describe Taiwanese who study or work in China, or become Chinese citizens.
Among his remarks, An came up with the idea that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are entering a period of competition over governmental systems and human resources.
On July 13, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had an official meeting in Beijing with former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) in the latter’s capacity as former chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Xi used the occasion to further develop the discourse about competing systems.
Speaking in Washington on July 30, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed the US’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific region.
Beijing-based academics have also chimed in on the topic, saying that competition is arising between development models, political systems and values.
Not long ago, communist China’s system was strictly one of a centralized autocratic government with a planned economy, but now it seeks to challenge nations that have democratic governments and free economies.
China’s confidence about growing stronger is largely based on its past economic achievements.
Some academics in the field of international relations see China’s model of development as a kind of political meritocracy under collective leadership, which they view as an effective form of governance that presents an alternative to Western democracy.
According to this model’s value system, democratic nations have inefficient systems in which populism runs rampant. This theory’s adherents firmly believe that the CCP’s control over national resources will ensure good governance for the whole country.
China is proud of its economic development, but its growth has largely relied on continuously expanding domestic investment and credit. Meanwhile, it has overlooked questions of industrial structure, urban versus rural development, environmental protection and intellectual property rights.
China today is still an assembly and processing economy that is not good at invention and creation.
It has been accused of stealing intellectual property and forcing foreign-invested businesses to transfer their technologies to China.
In 2014, China reached a per capita income of 11,000 international dollars, the level at which developing economies tend to get stuck in a “middle-income trap.” Since then, China has faced a “new normal” of slower economic growth.
China also faces a debt crisis as its total debt is now more than three times its GDP. Up to now, there has never been a case of an authoritarian country successfully transitioning out of the middle-income trap without adopting a democratic political system.
To maintain its “performance legitimacy” as justification for ruling China, the CCP has attempted to make some changes to the political system and turn it into a form of “flexible authoritarianism.”
Under former Chinese presidents Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), there was a high degree of consensus about “political reform,” and in 2010, then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) went so far as to say that “the people’s wishes for and needs for democracy and freedom are irresistible.”
However, Xi became CCP general secretary in 2012 and president in 2013, and since then China has stopped talking about “political reform.”
Furthermore, in 2013 the CCP Central Committee issued the Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere, known as “Document No. 9,” which strictly forbids promoting “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” “civil society,” “neoliberalism” (ie, a free economy) and “the West’s idea of journalism,” and does not allow any questioning of the official ideology known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Xi firmly believes in the superiority of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Since gaining monopoly control of the state machinery, he has clamped down on civil society, and freedoms of speech and assembly; suppressed dissidents and human rights advocates; and used Orwellian means, such as big data and artificial intelligence, to enforce social control and suppress the public’s demands for democracy and freedom. All this amounts to the greatest oppression that Chinese have suffered since the 1989 Democracy Movement was crushed in Tiananmen Square.
In recent years, “mass incidents,” meaning protests, riots and other kinds of unrest, have become more frequent, with more than 10,000 such incidents each year.
The system of collective leadership formerly adopted by the CCP has been replaced by leadership “with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core.”
Former Chinese president Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) soft authoritarianism has turned into Xi’s hard authoritarianism, and the limited democratic and liberal political reforms that were allowed under Jiang and Hu have given way to Xi’s repressive rule and “iron will.”
Perhaps all that remains of the CCP regime’s so-called development model, system and values is an administrative, commandist, centralized, extractive, arbitrary and autocratic system of government.
Chinese official spokespeople and hired hack academics talk with great satisfaction about China’s “values,” but no other country, except perhaps North Korea’s Kim dynasty regime, would want to follow them.
A political system without freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law has absolutely no attraction for those who have grown up in democratic countries like Taiwan.
As for its “development model,” it is neither fair nor just, and is riddled with corruption. How could China ever hope to persuade other governments to copy or learn from it?
Masao Sun is a former diplomat.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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