នៅអាយុមួយរយឆ្នាំបក្សកុម្មុយនិស្តចិនគឺជាម្ចាស់ជើងឯកពិភពលោកផ្តាច់ការនិងងាយរងគ្រោះ

It must be said this bluntly: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which turns one hundred this week, represents history’s most successful authoritarians.

So, why does Chinese President Xi Jinping seem so uneasy?

It is a time when no obvious challenges to his authority are emerging, and China has never enjoyed such international reach, economic strength, or military might. Yet in a marked departure from his predecessors, Xi has been in a rush to tighten the screws on dissent, to expand technological surveillance of his people, to assert new controls over private business, and to vastly strengthen his party’s prerogatives and power.

It is this contradiction between China’s head-spinning authoritarian accomplishments and Xi’s head-scratching nervousness about the future that is most worth watching as the systemic contest of our times unfolds.

Arrayed across from each other in these global sweepstakes for the future are the ruthless, technology-empowered efficiency of autocratic capitalism and the enduring (though dangerously challenged) attractions of democratic capitalism with its magnetic charms of individual rights and freedoms.

It is the question of our times whether these two systems, as represented by China and the United States, can agree to a set of terms that allows them to peacefully compete and sometimes even cooperate. Even if they do, one system or the other will emerge ascendant as the dominant rules-setter for an evolving global order. One or the other is also likely to emerge as the more successful provider for citizens’ needs.

While the fragility of democratic societies has been on full display in recent years, most dramatically on January 6 during the riot and violent attack on the US Capitol, it may be the less transparent challenges to Xi’s ambitions that are more decisive.

History’s lessons for Xi’s future trajectory

“No other dictatorship,” it writes, “has been able to transform itself from a famine-racked disaster, as China was under Mao Zedong, into the world’s second-largest economy, whose cutting-edge technology and infrastructure put America’s creaking roads and railways to shame.”

At the same time under Xi, adds the Economist, “The bureaucracy, army and police have undergone purges of deviant and corrupt officials. Big business is being brought into line. Mr Xi has rebuilt the party at the grassroots, creating a network of neighbourhood spies and injecting cadres into private firms to watch over them. Not since Mao’s day has society been so tightly controlled.”

History suggests something has got to give if Xi continues to sharpen his repression at home and assertiveness abroad.

As Jude Blanchette writes in Foreign Affairs: “His belief that the CCP must guide the economy and that Beijing should rein in the private sector will constrain the country’s future economic growth. His demand that party cadres adhere to ideological orthodoxy and demonstrate personal loyalty to him will undermine the governance system’s flexibility and competency. His emphasis on an expansive definition of national security will steer the country in a more inward and paranoid direction. His unleashing of ‘Wolf Warrior’ nationalism will produce a more aggressive and isolated China.”

Yet recent history also shows that the CCP has demonstrated a ruthless resilience, brutal efficiency, and ideological dexterity that has confounded its critics time and again and has allowed it to navigate Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 with its estimated death toll of up to twenty million, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 that China spawned and then slayed, and so much more.

Not long after he came to power, Xi abandoned the studied patience of his immediate predecessors who had acted in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping’s guiding philosophy, “hide your strength, bide your time,” in their approach to world affairs. As they did so, the CCP’s power over society also waned.

Xi’s narrow window to achieve a win for authoritarianism

Xi’s dramatic decision to change internally and externally was a result of his own conviction that the United States and Western democracies were in relative decline.

Xi’s worldview was colored by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist party between 1988 and 1992, a lesson that drives almost everything he does regarding his own communist party, and also by his own struggle for power.

Back in 2018, he reflected on how it was possible for the Soviet party to collapse with its twenty million members when with two million members it had defeated Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

“Why?” he asked. “Because its ideals and beliefs had evaporated.” He derided Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of “so-called glasnost,” which allowed criticism of the Soviet party line. The implication was clear: There would be no such openness under Xi.

Though he’s said less about the experience of his own rise to power in 2012, when the party was facing its biggest political scandal in a generation, he could only have come away from it having learned how perilous infighting and corruption could be to holding the CCP together. His consolidation of power ultimately involved the disciplining of 1.5 million officials by 2018.

One can only understand his rush now to crush all possibility of internal dissent and seize all opportunity of international gain as the keen reading of his own political lifeline, measured against the emergence of the Biden administration with its efforts to reverse Western democratic decline and allied disarray.

Xi likely has a window of only about a decade before his country’s demographic decline, its structural economic downturn, and inevitable domestic upheavals threaten to reduce the historic possibility currently presented to him by his country’s technological advance, its geopolitical gains, and his own current hold on power.

This man in a hurry sees an inflection point to be seized, but only if he acts with a quick, decisive purposefulness and, where necessary, ruthlessness.

And under Xi, China isn’t only sprinting to seize a window of opportunity. Xi, Blanchette writes, at the same time has put China “in a race to determine if its many strengths can outstrip the pathologies that Xi himself has introduced into the system.”

In short, the test is whether authoritarianism’s most compelling success story can overcome its fundamental failings.

Atlantic Council