Dream of the Red Emperor: The Worldview of Xi Jinping and Wang Huning

In 1991 a young professor of politics at Fudan University published an obscure pamphlet reflecting on his experiences as a visiting scholar in the United States for 6 months in the autumn of 1988. The text, America against America, was a thorough and coruscating polemic about a society he saw as deeply ill with decadence. For the author, American society was plagued by a particular set of Western ailments closely linked to its excessive economic, political and social liberalism. These included social atomisation, consumerist decadence reflected in obesity rates, vast inequality, homelessness, broken families, prolific substance abuse, a total breakdown of law and order and a general cultural malaise of meaninglessness, individualism and historical nihilism. Wang Huning, close aide to Xi Jinping and consecutive member of China’s Politburo Standing Committee is part of a new class of grey eminences, parallelingRussia’s Vladislav Surkov and India’s Sanjeev Sanyal, court ideologues with grand views of history, elaborate plans to reshape their respective countries and shadowy influences on the decision making of the era’s new class of strongmen. A long-time dean of Fudan University’s law school, Wang joined the politburo in 1995 and joined the standing committee in 2017, exercising enormous influence on Xi ’s policy shift towards control and social engineering, greater repression and surveillance, closedness and a determined effort to prevent cultural westernisation and its accompanying ills at the expense of potential economic growth.

The emancipatory democratic momentum that swept the world in 1989 climaxed not just with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR but also with an enormous protest in the spring of that year in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Twenty days of student crowds demanding the introduction of democracy watched by the world on TV news culminated in a remorseless massacre by the army, immortalised by the sombre photos of a lone protestor staring down a convoy of tanks on a central highway. The China of the 1990s and early 21st century saw dramatic transformations almost unprecedented in human history as a hermitic communist superstate transformed itself into the workshop of the world for an age of American led global capitalism. The Pax Americana embraced an unrepentant Chinese ruling class, ushering them into the international community and its key organisations and culminating in a much sanitised coronation of “Chimerica” via the hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The prosaic apparatchiks of China’s presidency, Jiang Jiemin and Hu Jintao, proved themselves practical and shrewd statesmen, teasing at the prospect of greater reforms and opening up China to investors, multinationals and tourists while keeping low personal and national profiles and doing much to mollify any Yellow Peril and Red Terror hysteria in the western political classes.

Many commentators went on to conclude that China was “not really a communist country anymore”, or even more naively prophesised the flowering of the world’s largest police state into a liberal democracy unable to resist the liberalising power of markets on authoritarian systems. The election of Xi Jinping in 2013 as president came as a surprise to some but almost nobody could have predicted the lengths he would go to reverse China’s era of reform and the direction he would take China’s national image and ambitions. The now president for life has implemented a pervasive Panopticon social credit system, humiliated rivals and celebrity business tycoons, reasserted the role of the state in guiding economic policy and launched ambitious campaigns of social improvement aimed at maintaining a sense of discipline, nationalism and responsibility among the Chinese population while using the pandemic to install a vast apparatus of social control. The recent Party Congress which saw the public defenestration of his predecessor and a total consolidation of Xi’s authority seems only to confirm this triumph of a hardline faction whose views were shaped and articulated by the writings of Wang.

The pillars of this worldview are a deep suspicion of the Western World, a determination to avoid (or prevent the worsening of) the corrupting effects of economic and political liberalism as a country gets richer, a belief in the need for greater state penetration of society and top-down centralised control to avert decadence. Unlike his more pragmatic predecessors focused on delivering growth at any cost, Xi’s vision is deeply ideological and its resultant trends include geopolitical antagonism, economic closedness and greater domestic totalitarianism. For Wang , Western societies are in a process of slow degeneration and only profound state-led social engineering can save China from the same fate. For him Chinese society fundamentally derives its strength from its collectivism and the effective exercise of executive authority and pervasive bureaucratic power. The western model is fraught with weaknesses, a recipe for social decay and cultural sickness as well as economic and military decline.

Curiously it is not the lessons of China’s history that Xi and his allies have been keen to learn but those of a Western World in perceived decline and the failed history of those who wished to challenge its hegemony, namely Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union. Many a Chinese dynasty has been ruined by megalomaniacal emperors, excessive totalitarianism and centralisation, the erosion of impartial judicial institutions and property rights, military adventurism and a xenophobic retreat from the world yet it is the mistakes of other nations which inform the policies of Xi’s China.

The lessons of history for the CCP ruling clique are clear and so are their preferred historical metaphors. First off, the rapid modernisation of Meiji era Japan and its subsequent mimicking of European imperialism followed by Pearl Harbour, confining it perennially to a subordinate status as an honorary member of a western world order through the trauma of two atom bombs and military capitulation and occupation. The exponential rise of America as a military and industrial giant in the late 19th and early 20th century through dogged policies of ruthless protectionism, cynical isolationism and unmitigated exploitation of natural resources serves as another model. The USA of 1877 to 1945 provides also a useful rhetorical weapon. During this period occurred the hyper-exploitation of its workforce, despoliation of its environment, repression of minorities, cynical attitude to international responsibilities, extreme protectionism and bullying of its neighbors. This serves as a useful rebuke against the sententious senior superpower keen to lecture its junior on human rights and humanitarian duty. Crucial too is the collapse of the Soviet Union because of both Brezhnev era economic scleroticism and Gorbachev’s pusillanimousness. For Deng and now Xi, a refusal to adopt market reforms followed by a loss of ability to crush dissent are serious vulnerabilities. The subsequent humiliation and impoverishment of 1990s Russia only served to reaffirm the decision to send in the tanks in the spring of 1989, and Xi is keen not to lose the capacity for draconian repression.Finally, of course, China’s own “Century of Humiliation”, with its villains of predatory western powers and weak, backward Qing officials. This narrative, drummed into school children from a young age, of victimisation and a resurgent destiny is not just a propaganda tool, but a shibboleth of the ruling ideology, with wounded pride and paranoia a major factor in the party’s decision making on the world stage. The Developed World fears and envies a powerful China and seeks to divide, dismember and contain it.

Chinese economic policy since the 1990s has been based on a mercurial combination of mercantilist industrial policy, Kennedyesque Research & Development spending, military Keynesianism, Fordist assembly lines and a construction craze in real estate and infrastructure. This manufacturing-oriented export strategy has in the last five years given way to a more to an internally focused “Dual-Circulation” policy with room for greater state control and emphasis on a vast integrated internal market. This original strategy involved welcoming Western investment and companies to root their supply chains in China’s lax regulatory environment while giving them access to the internal Chinese consumer market. China’s size as a market and workforce offset concerns about its opaque political and judicial system while this opacity allowed it to massage investor confidence with fabricated statistics on its economic performance. Economic liberalisation allowed for a nimble and dynamic private sector, domestic competition, important foreign capital and a successful industrial learning process whereby China jumped in a generation from exporting cheap low-quality goods designed by western companies to selling their own quaternary industry goods to the developed world. Taking successful advantage of a deliberate and generous American trade deficit, the state through tariffs, subsidies, regulatory favours, state investment, and currency manipulation has helped Chinese firms dominate the export market and develop their own corporate and industrial infrastructure without letting the private sector dilute the central power and authority of the Communist party. China’s debt-fueled real estate bubble threatens to cause serious future peril for its economy but has left the country with a grand infrastructure network to service a robust internal market, providing protection in the advent of aggressive western decoupling. China’s transition now underway from hyper-integrated export economy to industrial fortress with an emphasis on state control, strategic priorities and self-sufficiency is crucial to Wang and Xi’s vision.

Xi’s view of markets is however wholly unromantic. Although not the democratising elixir many veteran Cold Warriors and evangelical Fukuyamans had believed they were, for the president they represent a pernicious albeit necessary source of decadence and social dissolution and are to be tightly reigned in. This has included the limiting of video game usage, the banning of “effeminate” male celebrities and arbitrary controls on large sectors of its consumer economy due to their social effects. The rhetorical shift from the emphasis on the glory of“getting rich” to an era of “Common Prosperity” makes this clear. For Wang and Xi the greater peril is not a slowing economy but the spread of a corrupting decadence as a newly enriched China transitions from an industrial economy of discipline, patriotic martial values and socially conservative structures to a post-industrial consumer economy of atomised individuals. Such decadence threatens not only a cultural transformation China’s rulers regard as alien and enfeebling but also one that threatens their hold on power.

Whether Xi’s enlargement of the state, social credit system and new economic policy will succeed in arresting this process, strengthening his personal control while not derailing China’s rise, remains to be seen. Yet any hopes for a convergence towards western norms is now surely dead. Western modernity is no longer just an inappropriate alternative to Chinese history, it is a grave morality tale.

Image courtesy of _ASC1889 via Flickr, © 2015, no rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.