Cult of Personality

Xi Jinping, Hogging Spotlight, Elbows Communist Titan Aside

By Steven Lee Myers

In a painting touring museums across China, Xi Jinping is front and center while a statue of Deng Xiaoping is a distant image.

SHENZHEN, China — Shortly after taking over as China’s leader, Xi Jinping made a pilgrimage to lay a wreath at a large bronze monument to one of his predecessors, the man credited with ushering in the country’s new era of capitalist prosperity 40 years ago, Deng Xiaoping.
Xi’s gesture here in the southern city of Shenzhen was hardly remarkable. 

Deng is second only to Mao in the pantheon of Communist China’s founding fathers, and his influence and popularity lingered long after his death in 1997. 

Every Chinese leader since has sought to position himself as heir to Deng’s legacy.
Xi, though, now appears to be taking a different approach.
A large painting of his visit to the monument is touring museums across China ahead of the December anniversary of the Communist Party leadership meeting that Deng used to inaugurate the country’s “reform and opening up.” 

In it, Xi stands front and center, while Deng’s statue is a distant image receding into a golden sunset.
It is the latest example of what some observers see as a concerted effort to elevate Xi’s role in the party’s official history, largely at Deng’s expense — a propaganda shift that could have a profound impact on Chinese politics and policymaking.

Xi has been the focus of a lavish, highly choreographed multimedia campaign that is a throwback to Mao’s cult of personality.

Xi has not sought to erase Deng entirely. 

He traveled to southern China last month on a visit with deliberate echoes of Deng’s famous 1992 tour of the region, for example. 

Deng’s stature has been diminished, however, as Xi has centralized power and enhanced his own image with a lavish, highly choreographed multimedia campaign that critics have derided as a throwback to Mao’s cult of personality.
“Xi certainly isn’t content to operate in Deng’s shadow,” said Julian B. Gewirtz, a scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, adding that Xi wanted to “establish a distinctive political system with himself at the center.”
Mr. Gewirtz noted that Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, owed their positions and political legitimacy to Deng. 

Xi, by contrast, rose to national prominence only after Deng’s death and is the first Chinese leader to take power without having been elevated by Deng into the party’s top ranks.
Still, Deng’s legacy represents both a challenge to and a potential constraint on Xi — a historical yardstick by which he is being measured, and a source of tradition that others in the party can use to limit Xi’s options.
In many ways, Xi has favored policies that depart from Deng’s agenda. 

In addition to self-aggrandizing propaganda, which Deng eschewed, Xi has pressed a more assertive foreign policy that openly challenges the United States, worked to limit Western influence on Chinese society and sought to shield Chinese companies from foreign competition.

Xi has relegated his predecessors, including Hu Jintao, left, and Jiang Zemin, right, to transitional roles in the party’s official history.

Xi has also removed constitutional term limits on the presidency, prompting many Chinese to quote Deng’s warning from 1980 that “tenure for life” could only corrupt party leaders — a dig at Xi that was censored as quickly as it appeared online.
More recently, a speech by Deng’s influential son, Deng Pufang, at the annual congress of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation in September has attracted attention because portions of it were viewed as an oblique critique of Xi’s far-reaching ambitions.
“We must always maintain a pragmatic attitude and a clear mind,” said Deng, who was paralyzed in an attack during the Cultural Revolution and serves as chairman of the federation. 

“We should be neither overconfident nor belittle ourselves.”
Xi has consolidated his position as China’s supreme leader and appears to face no significant political rival. 

After a summer of discontent over the threat of a protracted trade war with the United States and pushback against the infrastructure investments at the heart of his Belt and Road Initiative, Xi has reasserted his place atop the political system.
The coming anniversary of the reforms associated with Deng remains fraught for Xi, however, because the nation’s direction under his leadership continues to draw unfavorable comparisons to Deng’s “hide your strength, bide your time” approach — at least among some liberal-minded analysts and officials.

Deng Xiaoping, shown here on his famous 1992 tour of southern China, has been second only to Mao in the Chinese Communist pantheon.

The party celebrated the 30th anniversary with great fanfare in 2008, but official plans to commemorate the 40th anniversary this year have been scaled back considerably, according to a veteran journalist with a state news outlet. 

“Once you dredge up these matters, it’s very easy to lose control and set off new debate,” the journalist said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
During Xi’s visit to southern China last month, he noted the coming anniversary, attended an exhibition devoted to it and vowed to continue the economic transition that Deng began, but did not mention Deng — at least in the remarks chronicled by the state news media.
Inevitably, many compared the trip to the famous “southern tour” in 1992 that Deng used to steer the nation back toward market-oriented policies and out of the diplomatic isolation and economic retrenchment that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“Xi Jinping has been pickpocketing policies from the Deng era,” Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian scholar of China, wrote this summer. 

“He does so while diminishing the man hailed for decades as the ‘Architect of Reform and the Opening Door Policies.’ At the same, he crucially overrides aspects of Deng’s legacy that might limit his afflatus and sense of mission.”
Mr. Barmé, in an interview, said Xi was eager to position himself as “the greater unifier after Mao,” relegating Deng and the leaders who followed him to an era of economic transition leading to a new era of strength that only he can achieve. 

Tellingly, Xi’s trip included a visit to China’s southern military command, where he urged commanders “to strengthen the mission” and focus on “preparations for fighting a war.”

Xi visited this statue of Deng in Shenzhen soon after taking power but has departed from Deng’s agenda.

The painting of Xi visiting the monument to Deng is part of an exhibition that first appeared in Beijing and then in the southern province of Guangdong. 

It covers the 40 years of “reform and opening up,” but Deng appears clearly in only one painting — seated, smoking a cigarette and listening to a lecture by the party secretary of Guangdong, Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun.
“We all know that Deng Xiaoping is, of course, the helmsman, a very great figure, but many people don’t know that Comrade Xi Zhongxun is also being studied by a lot of people nowadays,” said Fan Bo, an artist who was commissioned to create a portrait of the elder Xi for the exhibition.
It shows Xi’s father, his pants rolled up, bathed in a ray of light through the clouds, speaking with workers on the site of Shenzhen’s first special economic zone. 

Fan titled the painting “First Steps.”
“It’s an objective restoration of the historical fact,” he said.
Others are pushing back against efforts to diminish Deng’s legacy.
“Chinese society today is a result of Deng’s reform and opening up,” wrote Sheng Hong, the director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, in a recent essay. 

“There is a countercurrent at the moment. However, it should not be very difficult to resist the countercurrent and maintain Deng’s vision for further reform and opening up.”
On Monday, Sheng said on Twitter that he was told not to attend a conference at Harvard devoted to the anniversary and Deng’s legacy on the grounds that it would “endanger national security.”

China’s Great Leap Backward

For decades, the country managed to avoid most problems suffered by dictatorships. Now Xi Jinping’s personal power play risks undermining everything that made China exceptional.
BY JONATHAN TEPPERMAN

In the last 40 years, China has racked up a long list of remarkable accomplishments. 

What made these achievements all the more striking is that the Chinese government accomplished them while remaining politically repressive—something that historical precedent and political theory suggest is very, very difficult. 

The miraculous quality of China’s achievements makes what is happening in the country today especially tragic—and alarming. 

Under the guise of fighting corruption, Xi Jinping is methodically dismantling virtually every one of the reforms that made China’s spectacular growth possible over the last four decades. 

In the place of a flawed but highly successful system, he is erecting a colossal cult of personality focused on him alone, concentrating more power in his hands than has any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
In the short term, Xi’s efforts may make China seem less corrupt and more stable. 

But by destroying many of the mechanisms that made the Chinese miracle possible, Xi risks reversing those gains and turning China into just another police state (think a gigantic, more open version of North Korea): inefficient, ineffective, brittle, and bellicose. 

And that should worry not just China’s 1.4 billion citizens but the rest of us as well.

Members of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966. 

To understand what makes Xi’s personal empire-building campaign so dangerous, it helps to first understand what made China exceptional for so long. 

Throughout modern history, most tyrannies and one-party states have shared a few basic traits. 

Power is held by a very small number of individuals. 

To maintain their power, those individuals repress dissent and rule by intimidation. 

Because bureaucrats and citizens live in fear, they compete to flatter their bosses. 

Nobody tells the truth, especially when it could make them or their leaders look bad. 

As a result, cloistered tyrants—their egos bloated by constant, obsequious praise—find themselves increasingly cut off from reality and the rest of the world (think Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, or Robert Mugabe) and end up ruling by whim and instinct with little sense of what’s actually happening in their own countries. 

The impact of this ignorance on domestic and foreign policy is disastrous.
For 35 years or so—from the time Mao died and Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms in the late 1970s until Xi assumed power in 2012—China avoided many of these pitfalls and defied the law of political averages by building what scholars have called an “adaptive authoritarian” regime. 

While remaining nominally communist, the country embraced many forms of market capitalism and a number of other liberalizing reforms. 

Of course, the old system remained highly repressive (remember Tiananmen Square) and was far from perfect in many other ways. 

It did, however, allow the Chinese government to function in an unusually effective fashion and avoid many of the pathologies suffered by other authoritarian regimes. 

Censorship never disappeared, for example, but party members could disagree and debate ideas, and internal reports could be surprisingly blunt.
No longer. 

Today, Xi is systematically undermining virtually every feature that made China so distinct and helped it work so well in the past. 

His efforts may boost his own power and prestige in the short term and reduce some forms of corruption. 

On balance, however, Xi’s campaign will have disastrous long-term consequences for his country and the world.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the system Deng created was the way it distributed power among various leaders. 

Rather than let one person exercise supreme authority, as do most dictatorships, Deng divided power among the Communist Party’s general secretary (who also gets the title of president), the premier, and the Politburo.
Deng hoped this system would ensure that no one person could ever again exercise the kind of control Mao had—since his unchecked power had led to vast abuses and mistakes, such as the Great Leap Forward (during which an estimated 45 million people perished) and the Cultural Revolution (during which Deng himself was purged and his son was tortured so severely he was left paralyzed). As Minxin Pei, a China expert at Claremont McKenna College, explains, the collective leadership model Deng designed helped weed out bad ideas and promote good ones by emphasizing careful deliberation and discouraging risk-taking.
Since assuming power in 2012, Xi has worked to dismantle China’s collective leadership system in several ways. 

First, in the name of fighting corruption—an important goal and one China badly needs—he has purged a vast number of officials whose real crime, in Xi’s view, was failing to show sufficient loyalty to the paramount leader. 

Meng Hongwei, the Interpol chief who China abruptly detained two weeks ago, is just the latest, high-profile case; his story is hardly unusual.

Staff look at an image of disgraced politician Bo Xilai at the Intermediate People’s Court after he was sentenced to life in prison on Sept. 22, 2013, in the country’s highest-profile trial in decades. 

In the last six years, a staggering 1.34 million officials have been targeted, and more than 170 leaders at the minister or deputy minister level have been fired (and most were imprisoned). 

Meng’s plight, like that of Bo Xilai—the powerful Chongqing party boss brought down in 2012—shows that no one is immune from Xi’s purges. 

Indeed, more members of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee have been disciplined since 2012 than in the entire period dating back to the Communist Revolution.
Not content to merely eliminate any competition, Xi has also consolidated his power by abandoning the term limits on his job and by refusing to name a successor, as his predecessors did halfway through their tenures. 

He’s also had “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in China’s constitution (an honor shared by only Mao and Deng); assumed direct control of the armed forces; and made himself “chairman of everything” by creating a large number of working groups on policies ranging from finance to Taiwan to cybersecurity—all of which report directly to him.
A second important feature of the old system was that bureaucrats at every level could expect to be rewarded for good performance. 

This wasn’t quite a meritocracy, and the system included a fair degree of corruption and patronage. But both of those features actually served the common good in one key way: If an official performed well, he or she could expect a cut of the proceeds and steady promotion. 

Xi, by contrast, has “replaced this incentive-based system with one based on fear,” as Pei puts it. 

And there are two big problems with this shift. 

First, it has warped officials’ priorities, from showing results to showing loyalty. 

The second problem, according to Alexander Gabuev, a China specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, is that “when fear is all you have, bureaucrats become too frightened to do anything without explicit orders from the top. So the whole bureaucracy becomes passive. Nothing gets done.”

Another related asset of the old system was the way it encouraged local governments—at the village, county, and provincial levels—to experiment with new initiatives, from building free markets four decades ago to allowing private land ownership more recently. 

Such experimentation turned China into a country with hundreds of policy laboratories, enabling it to test different solutions to various problems in safe, quiet, and low-stakes ways before deciding whether to scale them up. 

This system helped Beijing avoid the kind of absurdities and disastrous mistakes it had made under Mao—such as when, during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, central planners insisted that farmers in Tibet plant wheat, despite the fact that the arid, mountainous region was utterly unsuited to the crop.
Of course, Beijing had to tolerate a certain level of autonomy in order to allow local officials to try new things. 

Xi, by contrast, seems to view such independent thinking as an intolerable threat. 

At his behest, the government has begun discouraging small-scale pilot programs. 

Sebastian Heilmann of Germany’s Trier University estimates that the number of provincial experiments fell from 500 in 2010 to about 70 in 2016, and the tally has probably dropped even lower since then. 

In their place, policies are once again being dictated from the top, with little concern for local conditions.
One last example: Just as China’s tech industry is notorious for stealing and applying foreign innovations, Chinese officials long did something similar on the policy level, carefully studying what worked in other countries and then applying the lessons at home. (The best example of this process, of course, was the construction of China’s free markets themselves, which drew on models from Japan, Taiwan, and the United states.) 

Like Deng’s other innovations, Xi has curtailed this practice as well, by making it much harder for government officials to interact with foreigners. 

In 2014, authorities began confiscating bureaucrats’ passports. 

Like so many of the government’s other recent restrictions, this move has been justified in the name of combatting corruption—the idea, ostensibly, is to prevent dirty officials from fleeing the country. 

But the fact that the policy has recently been extended all the way down to elementary school teachers and reinforced by other, related strictures—officials now must apply for permission to attend foreign meetings and conferences and account for their time abroad on an hour-by-hour basis—reveals that the real priority is limiting contact with outsiders and their ideas.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping inspects troops in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2015. 

What does Xi’s crackdown mean for his country’s future and for the rest of us? 

While one should always be careful about betting against China, it’s hard to avoid the grim conclusion that Xi’s China is rapidly becoming a lot less exceptional and a lot more like a typical police state.
On the domestic level, Beijing’s policymaking is already becoming less agile and adept. 

Examples of this more rigid approach, and its downsides, aren’t hard to find. 

Consider last winter, when the government decided to force an abrupt nationwide switch from the use of coal to gas in heating systems. 

It sounded like a smart move for a country as polluted as China. 

But the edict was enforced suddenly across the country, with no exceptions. 

Thus in China’s frigid north, many coal-burning furnaces were ripped out before new gas ones could be installed—leaving entire towns without heat and forcing villagers to burn corn cobs to survive.
If China continues down its current course, expect many more cases where even well-intentioned policies are implemented in a rash and clumsy way, leading to still more harmful consequences. 

Since personalized dictatorships are necessarily bad at admitting fault—for nothing can be permitted to damage the myth of the omnipotent leader—China will also likely become less adept at correcting mistakes once it makes them. 

Or at confronting the underlying problems that are dragging down its economy, such as an overreliance on bloated and inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which have only grown bigger and more powerful since Xi took office; dangerously high debt levels, especially among local governments; and a tendency to react to every downturn by pumping more cash into the system, especially for unnecessary infrastructure projects. 

In fact, China is not only unlikely to address any of these shortcomings; it’s likely to compound them. That is just what it did on Oct. 7, when the People’s Bank of China announced yet another costly stimulus program: a $175 billion plan to shore up small and medium-sized businesses.
With each new budget-busting move, and in the absence of reform, the odds that China will experience a seriously destabilizing economic crisis—which China bears such as Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, have been predicting for years—keep rising. 

“The big question is whether one of the ticking time bombs—bad debt, overheated property markets, oversized SOEs—will explode,” Gabuev says. 

“Because of Xi’s concentration of power, no one will give him advance warning if one of these bombs is about to go off. And because he doesn’t actually understand macroeconomics very well, and everyone is afraid to contradict the emperor, there’s a huge risk that he’ll mismanage it when it does.” 

Indeed, the government’s response to any instability is likely to be ugly. 

As Schell explains, “Xi has really put China at enormous risk. And because his only tool is repression, if things go wrong we’re likely to see even more crackdowns.”
Such predictions should worry everyone. 

China is the world’s largest economy by some measures, so if it melts down, the entire planet will pay the price. 

But the history of other autocracies, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim’s North Korea, suggests that Xi’s relentless power play could produce even worse consequences. 

Since taking power, Xi has charted a far more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors, alienating virtually every neighbor and the United States by pushing China’s claims in the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan, and using the military to assert Beijing’s claims to disputed islands.
Should China’s economic problems worsen, Xi could try to ratchet up tensions on any of these fronts in order to distract his citizens from the crisis at home. 

That temptation will prove especially strong if U.S. President Donald Trump keeps poking China by intensifying the trade war and publicly denouncing it.
And things could get scarier still, Pei warns, if China’s economic problems spin out of control completely. 

In that case, the Chinese state could collapse—a typical occurrence among typical dictatorships when faced with economic shocks, external threats (especially a defeat in war), or popular unrest—but one that, given China’s size, could have cataclysmic consequences if it happened there.
Which is why the rest of us should hope that China somehow finds a way to defy political gravity once again and remain an exception to all the rules—despite Xi’s ongoing efforts to make it normal in the worst sense of the word.

Rogue Nation

Xi Sets China on a Collision Course With History
By MAX FISHER

Xi Jinping, front row center, at the closing ceremony of the Party Congress in Beijing last year. 

There was always something different about China’s version of authoritarianism.
For decades, as other regimes collapsed or curdled into dysfunctional pretend democracies, China’s held strong, even prospered.
Yes, China’s Communist Party has been vigorous in suppressing dissent and crushing potential challenges.
But some argue that it has survived in part by developing unusually strong institutions, bound by strict rules and norms.
Two of the most important have been collective leadership — rule by consensus rather than strongman — and term limits.
When the Communist Party announced this week that it would end presidential term limits, allowing Xi Jinping to hold office indefinitely, it shattered those norms.
It may also have accelerated what many scholars believe is China’s collision course with the forces of history it has so long managed to evade.
That history suggests that Beijing’s leaders are on what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once called a “fool’s errand”: trying to uphold a system of government that cannot survive in the modern era.
But Xi, by shifting toward a strongman style of rule, is doubling down on the idea that China is different and can refashion an authoritarianism for this age.
If he succeeds, he will not only have secured his own future and extended the future of China’s Communist Party, he may also establish a new model for authoritarianism to thrive worldwide.

The Harder Kind of Dictatorship
If Xi stays in office for life, as many now expect, that will only formalize a process he has undertaken for years: stripping power away from China’s institutions and accumulating it for himself.
It helps to mentally divide dictatorships into two categories: institutional and personalist.
The first operates through committees, bureaucracies and something like consensus.
The second runs through a single charismatic leader.
China, once an almost Socratic ideal of the first model, is increasingly a hybrid of both.
Xi has made himself “the dominant actor in financial regulation and environmental policy” as well as economic policy, according to a paper by Barry Naughton, a China scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

Xi in Beijing, in October.

Xi has also led sweeping anti-corruption campaigns that have disproportionately purged members of rival political factions, strengthening himself but undermining China’s consensus-driven approach.
This version of authoritarianism is harder to maintain, according to research by Erica Frantz, a scholar of authoritarianism at Michigan State University.
“In general, personalization is not a good development,” Ms. Frantz said.
The downsides are often subtle.
Domestic politics tend to be more volatile, governing more erratic and foreign policy more aggressive, studies find.
But the clearest risk comes with succession.
“There’s a question I like to ask Russia specialists: ‘If Putin has a heart attack tomorrow, what happens?’” said Milan Svolik, a Yale University political scientist.
“Nobody knows.”
“In China, up until now, the answer to that had been very clear,” he said.
A dead leader would have left behind a set of widely agreed rules for what was to be done and there would be a political consensus on how to do it.
“This change seems to disrupt that,” Mr. Svolik said.
Xi, by defying the norms of succession, has shown that any rule could be broken. 
“The key norm, once that’s out, it seems like everything’s an option,” Mr. Svolik said.
Factional purges risk shifting political norms from consensus to zero-sum, and sometimes life-or-death, infighting.
And Xi is undermining the institutionalism that made China’s authoritarianism unusually resilient. Collective leadership and orderly succession, both put in place after Mao Zedong’s disastrous tenure, have allowed for relatively effective and stable governing.
Ken Opalo, a Georgetown University political scientist, wrote after China’s announcement that orderly transitions were “perhaps the most important indicator of political development.”
Lifelong presidencies, he said, “freeze specific groups of elites out of power. And remove incentives for those in power to be accountable and innovate.”

What Makes Authoritarian Legitimacy
In 2005, Bruce Gilley, a political scientist, wrestled with one of the most important questions for any government — is it viewed by its citizens as legitimate? — into a numerical score, determined by sophisticated measurements of how those citizens behave.
China, his study found, enjoyed higher legitimacy than many democracies and every other non-democracy besides Azerbaijan.
He credited economic growth, nationalist sentiment and collective leadership.
But when Mr. Gilley revisited his metrics in 2012, he found that China’s score had plummeted.
His data showed the leading edge of a force long thought to doom China’s system.
Known as “modernization theory,” it says that once citizens reach a certain level of wealth, they will demand things like public accountability, free expression and a role in government.
Authoritarian states, unable to meet these demands, either transition to democracy or collapse amid unrest.
This challenge, overcome by no other modern authoritarian regime except those wealthy enough to buy off their citizens, requires new sources of legitimacy.
Economic growth is slowing.
Nationalism, though once effective at rallying support, is increasingly difficult to control and prone to backfiring. 
Citizen demands are growing.
So China is instead promoting “ideology and collective social values” that equate the government with Chinese culture, according to research by the China scholar Heike Holbig and Mr. Gilley. Patriotic songs and school textbooks have proliferated. 
So have mentions of “Xi Jinping Thought,” now an official ideology.
Xi’s personalization of power seems to borrow from both old-style strongmen and the new-style populists rising among the world’s democracies.
But, in this way, it is a high-risk and partial solution to China’s needs.
A cult of personality can do for a few years or perhaps decades, but not more.

‘Accountability Without Democracy’
China is experimenting with a form of authoritarianism that, if successful, could close the seemingly unbridgeable gap between what its citizens demand and what it can deliver.
Authoritarian governments are, by definition, unaccountable.
But some towns and small cities in China are opening limited, controlled channels of public participation.
For example, a program called “Mayor’s Mailboxes” allows citizens to voice demands or complaints, and rewards officials who comply.
The program, one study found, significantly improved the quality of governing and citizens’ happiness with the state.
No one would call these towns democratic.
But it felt enough like democracy to satisfy some.
This sort of innovation began with local communities that expressed their will through limited but persistent dissent and protest.
Lily L. Tsai, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar, termed it “accountability without democracy.”
Now, some officials are adapting this once-resisted trend into deliberate practice.
Their goal is not to bring about liberalization but to resist it — to “siphon off popular discontent without destabilizing the system as a whole,” the China scholars Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton write in a new book on governing in China.
Most Chinese, Beijing seems to hope, will accept authoritarian rule if it delivers at least some of the benefits promised by democracy: moderately good government, somewhat responsive officials and free speech within sharp bounds.
Citizens who demand more face censorship and oppression that are the harshest in the world.
That new sort of system could do more than overcome China’s conflict with the forces of history.
It could provide a model of authoritarianism to thrive globally, showing, Ms. Shue and Ms. Thornton write, “how non-democracies may not only survive but succeed over time.”
But Xi’s power grab, by undermining institutions and promoting all-or-nothing factionalism, risks making that sort of innovation riskier and more difficult.
When leaders consolidate power for themselves, Ms. Frantz said, “over time their ability to get a good read on the country’s political climate diminishes.”
Such complications are why Thomas Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist, wrote on Twitter, “I’m no China expert, but centralizing power in the hands of one leader sounds like the most typical thing that a decaying authoritarian state would do.”

Sina Delenda Est: The Necessary War

Admiral Harry Harris warns US must prepare for war with China
By Ben Doherty

Harry Harris says China’s military might could soon rival US power across almost every domain, and warned of possibility of war.

The navy admiral nominated to be the next US ambassador to Australia has told Congress America must prepare for the possibility of war with China, and said it would rely on Australia to help uphold the international rules-based system in the Asia-Pacific.
In an excoriating assessment of China’s increasingly muscular posture in the region, Harry Harris said Beijing’s “intent is crystal clear” to dominate the South China Sea and that its military might could soon rival American power “across almost every domain”.
Harris, soon to retire as the head of US Pacific Command in Hawaii, told the House armed services committee, the US and its allies should be wary of Beijing’s military expansionism in the region, and condemned China’s foreign influence operations, predatory economic behaviour and coercion of regional neighbours.
“China’s intent is crystal clear. We ignore it at our peril,” he said. 

“I’m concerned China will now work to undermine the international rules-based order.”

Admiral Harry Harris is named US ambassador to Australia

Harris also warned of a “cult of personality” developing around Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Harris praised Australia as one of America’s staunchest allies in the Asia-Pacific region, noting existing military cooperation at air force bases in the Northern Territory, joint naval exercises and the regular rotation of 1,500 marines through Darwin.
“Australia is one of the keys to a rules-based international order,” Harris said. 

“I look to my Australian counterparts for their assistance, I admire their leadership in the battlefield and in the corridors of power in the world.
“They are a key ally of the United States and they have been with us in every major conflict since world war one.”
Harris, the Yokosuka-born son of an American naval officer and a Japanese mother, has been nominated by President Donald Trump as the next ambassador to Australia. 

His appointment must be confirmed by the Senate.
Australia has been without a US ambassador since John Berry departed in September 2016.
Harris said he was alarmed by China’s construction of military bases on seven disputed islands in the South China Sea that neighbouring countries lay territorial claims to.
In 2016, the permanent court of arbitration in The Hague, sided with the Philippines in the dispute it brought, saying there was no legal basis for China’s claim of historic sovereignty over waters within the so-called nine-dash line in the sea.
Regardless, Chinese military build-up continues in the sea.
“China’s impressive military build-up could soon challenge the United States across almost every domain,” Harris said.
In a separate answer, he said of the risk of conflict with China: “as far as the idea of deterrence and winning wars, I’m a military guy. And I think it’s important you must plan and resource to win a war at the same time you work to prevent it.”
“At the end of the day the ability to wage war is important or you become a paper tiger. I’m hopeful that it won’t come to a conflict with China, but we must all be prepared for that if it should come to that.”
Should Harris be confirmed as the next ambassador to Australia, his position would present a challenge for Canberra, as it seeks to navigate an increasingly delicate diplomatic and economic relationship with Beijing.
Ties were severely strained last year after a backlash against China’s influence on and infiltration of Australia’s political system, highlighted by the resignation of Labor senator Sam Dastyari over accepting cash from Chinese businessmen for private debts and his position, at odds with his party, on the South China Sea. 

The Australian government has proposed new espionage laws and tightening of rules around foreign donations to political parties.
China is Australia’s largest trading partner, but the US is its primary defence and security ally, and Australia has been a vocal defender of the US alliance network over issues such as the nuclear weapons ban treaty, which the US opposes.
The Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who has previously met Harris in Hawaii, has publicly welcomed his nomination. 

“Great to see Admiral Harry Harris nominated by [Donald Trump] as US ambassador to Australia. Look forward to seeing you in Canberra, Harry,” Turnbull said on Twitter on February 10.
Turnbull will meet with Trump in Washington next week. 

It is not known when Harris’s confirmation hearing will take place.

Sina Delenda Est

How China became emboldened and embittered -- and how its leaders' desire for global domination may lead to a conflict with America
By MAX HASTINGS

With the busy lives that everybody leads and one eye on the clock for when Tesco shuts, you might have failed to notice that Beijing has this week been hosting the 19th Congress of the Communist Party.
Some 2,300 unswervingly loyal apparatchiks have gathered to cheer to the rafters Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.
Those last few words may cause some people to demand: but what about Donald Trump?
It is true that the leader of the United States commands a much larger nuclear arsenal, and that his country is still richer and stronger than China. 

But Trump — thank goodness — is a moron.

America remains the world’s largest democracy: its system of checks and balances is (sort of) working.
In China, by contrast, there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights. 

Xi wields almost absolute authority, amid ever more draconian restrictions on dissent and free speech, even within the Party hierarchy. 

‘China needs heroes,’ he has written, ‘such as Mao Tse-tung’.

In China there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights.

He thus celebrates a predecessor whom almost everybody recognises as the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, even ahead of Adolf Hitler.
The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability. 

The only institution that retains any influence is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
While Xi talks to the world (without being much believed) about his desire for China to be a good neighbour, part of the fellowship of nations — his commanders become ever more hawkish.
Hundreds of billions are poured into armies, fleets, missile forces, with the defence budget rising by 10 per cent last year. 

The country has established its first overseas military base, in the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and now boasts a navy that sails the Red Sea and the Baltic.
Some 60,000 people are employed in military cyber-operations of scary sophistication: four years ago, 140 attacks on U.S. institutions were traced to a single PLA unit in Shanghai. 

The Chinese own a formidable satellite-killer capability, which could inflict critical damage on American communications.
Chinese people seem ready to applaud their armed forces’ new activism: their big movie hit of 2017 has been Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier mowing down his country’s enemies abroad, on a more lavish scale than does Britain’s James Bond.
Here is the Heavenly Kingdom, among the oldest and greatest civilisations on earth, seeking to reassert long-lost might and majesty. 

Young Chinese are taught that their ancestors possessed a 'civilised', literate culture five centuries before Julius Caesar invaded Britain. 

The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability.

Today, the Chinese reason: why should we continue to follow the dictates and to swallow the "insults" of the West?
The U.S. Navy still claims dominance of the Pacific, as it has done since 1945. 

Both Washington and Tokyo question China’s right to extend its frontiers in the South and East China Seas.
Above all, the West resists Beijing’s insistence on reclaiming Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists established a bastion under American protection after they lost the Civil War to Mao in 1949.
The Chinese refer to their ‘century of humiliation’ which began with the Opium Wars, during which in 1860 an Anglo-French army pillaged one of their greatest artistic masterpieces, the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing.
This symbolic climax of ‘Western barbarianism’ stands close to the head of a catalogue of historic grievances that feeds China’s modern sense of victimisation, and which it is determined to repair.
The mounting tensions between China and the U.S. and its allies could lead to conflict in the decade or two ahead.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, declares in his new work, The Future Of War, that armed conflict between great powers is almost certain to continue ‘wherever there is a combination of an intensive dispute and available forms of violence... at first it may bear little resemblance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into something bigger’.
Freedman means, of course, that a new great power clash is likely to start with an escalating, yet invisible and noiseless, cyber-exchange, which could deliver a pre-emptive strike against the enemy’s high-tech weapons systems, or even more broadly its civil infrastructure, for instance electricity grids and telecoms networks.
In 1991, an American expert on security and cyber-warfare wrote a futuristic novel suggesting the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ surprise assault. 

This has since become technologically more plausible.
Almost no nation — perhaps not even North Korea — is eager to launch a nuclear first strike, justifying annihilatory retaliation. 

But many Americans, in and out of uniform, are apprehensive about the danger of a cyberwar first strike.
Both Chinese and U.S. commanders fear that failure to knock out the other’s high-tech information and weapons-guidance systems early in a confrontation could fatally weaken the loser if hostilities heated up.

Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments. 

Consider the effect if, for instance, a Chinese cyber-thrust disabled the catapults on a U.S. aircraft carrier: a £12 billion platform would suddenly become impotent.
Christopher Coker urges the peril of reprising 1914, when Austria and Germany precipitated a huge conflagration because they started out with illusions that they risked only a small one, with Serbia.
This is a comparison I made myself a few years ago to a delegation of Chinese military men visiting London, who asked if I saw comparisons with 1914, about which I had just published a book. 

I suggested that the huge irony of what happened a century ago was that if Germany had not gone to war, it could have achieved dominance of Europe within a generation through its industrial and technological superiority.
Surely nothing at stake in the South China Sea or with Taiwan, I said to the Chinese, is worth risking all that you have achieved by peaceful means? 

A Chinese officer, obviously unconvinced, responded: ‘But we have claims!’
In my own travels in China, I have often been impressed by how much real popular feeling exists, albeit stoked by propaganda, about the separation of Taiwan.

Xi, his personal power strengthened by this week’s 19th Congress, may start throwing his weight around in ways that could generate a crisis — for instance, setting a time limit for the return of Taiwan to Beijing’s control.

In the South China Sea, there are constant tensions and potential flashpoints between the Chinese building new bases in previously acknowledged international or Japanese waters, and American warships and planes asserting rights of navigation.
There is a real prospect of Japan not merely rearming but seeking nuclear weapons in response to the threat posed by North Korea, which Beijing is unwilling to defuse. 

China is morbidly fearful of regime collapse in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, followed by Korean unification and a U.S.-South Korean army on its Yalu river border.
Christopher Coker argues that China, like Russia, is psychologically crippled by its own firewalls against open debate, and thus finds it extraordinarily difficult to relate to other nations, or to see things from others’ points of view.
Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments.
Beijing sees things through a narrow nationalistic prism which makes it hard for its leadership to guess how an antagonist might act in a confrontation. 

None of the academics I cite above suggests a major war is inevitable. 

Some argue that Chinese ambitions are more economic than globally strategic; that the country’s internal difficulties and resource shortages — especially of water — will constrain its growth and keep Xi too busy at home to gamble disastrously abroad.

Yet the combination of Donald Trump’s isolationism alongside Xi’s unconstrained dictatorship, poses grave dangers to stability and peace.
We should not underrate the risk that a Chinese general or admiral might lash out on his own initiative or overplay his hand by firing on U.S. warships or aircraft.
In the recent past, there have been episodes in which China’s commanders have taken dangerous and provocative actions without reference to Beijing — for instance, launching a new satellite weapon or testing a stealth aircraft with great fanfare while a U.S. defence secretary was in town.
Again and again, escalation has been averted by wise caution on the part of the Americans.
Statesmanship, which requires steady diplomacy and constant horse-trading, is indispensable to keep us safe. 

Yet this is becoming ever harder to come by when China is flexing its muscles.
On one side, we see a rising power impelled by a centuries-old sense of grievance; on the other, the U.S., with a sense of global entitlement no longer compatible with the aspirations and might of others.
In 1910, Brigadier Henry Wilson, commandant of the British Army’s staff college, told his students there was likely to be a big European war. 

One of his audience remonstrated, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could make such a thing happen.
Wilson guffawed derisively: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is what you are going to get.’
So the world did. 

And could again.

Academic Prostitution

Cambridge University Press faces boycott over China censorship

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Cambridge University Press was urged to refuse censorship requests for not only its China Quarterly journal but also any other topics or publications. 

Cambridge University Press must reject China’s “disturbing” censorship demands or face a potential boycott of its publications, academics have warned.
In a petition published on Monday, academics from around the world denounced China’s attempts to “export its censorship on topics that do not fit its preferred narrative”.
The appeal came after it emerged that Cambridge University Press (CUP), the world’s oldest publishing house, had complied with a Chinese instruction to block online access to more than 300 politically sensitive articles from its highly respected China Quarterly journal. 

The blacklisted articles covered topics including Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre and the cult of personality some claim is emerging around Xi Jinping.
The petition attacked CUP’s move and urged it “to refuse the censorship request not just for the China Quarterly but on any other topics, journals or publication that have been requested by the Chinese government”.
“If Cambridge University Press acquiesces to the demands of the Chinese government, we as academics and universities reserve the right to pursue other actions including boycotts of Cambridge University Press and related journals,” it added.
The author of the petition, Peking University economics professor Christopher Balding, said he hoped it would serve as an alert to how China had dramatically stepped up its efforts to stifle free thinking since Xi became its top leader in 2012and began a severe crackdown on academia and civil society. 

“I think this is an increasing problem that really needs to be addressed much more forcefully by the international academic community,” he said.
Balding complained that while it was fashionable for academics and publishers to attack US president Donald Trump, they were far more cautious about criticising Xi’s authoritarian regime for fear of reprisals. 

“Standing up to the Chinese government involves definite costs. It is not an easy thing to do. There will be potentially punitive measures taken against you. But if it is a principle that is right in the UK and if it is right in the US, then it should also be right in China. And there will be times when you have to accept costs associated with principles.”
Another signatory, Griffith University anthropologist David Schak, said he believed Cambridge University Press had sullied its centuries-old reputation by bowing to China’s demands. 

“Cambridge seems to be the one who is now censoring rather than China, even though they are doing it at the request of China ... They have soiled their copy book.”
Schak added: “It makes you wonder what they are in the business of doing ... I thought university presses were there to publish good research.”
“They are acceding to China whereas [they should have said]: ‘What you do, we can’t stop you from doing that but we are not going to do that ourselves.’ You put the onus entirely back on the Chinese government rather than cooperating with them.”

Suzanne Pepper, a Hong Kong-based writer whose piece on politics in the former colony was among the blocked China Quarterly articles, said she expected censorship from China’s rulers but not from CUP. 

“It makes them complicit, accomplices in the fine art of censorship, which we are all supposed to deplore,” she said.
Chinese intellectuals also lamented the attempt to limit their access to foreign research. 

“This whole case makes me feel extremely disappointed,” Li Jingrui, a Chinese novelist, wrote on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. 

In an oblique reference to China’s one-party state, she added: “I’m left with the feeling that there is absolutely no escape since every single breath on Earth belongs to the king.”