Let’s start with the story of an incredibly disappearing summit.
Every August, the leadership
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) converges to the town of Beidaihe, a
seaside resort some two hours away from Beijing, to discuss serious policies
that then coalesce into key planning strategies to be approved at the CCP Central
Committee plenary session in October.
The
Beidaihe ritual was established by none other than Great Helmsman Mao, who
loved the town where, not by accident, Emperor Qin, the unifier of China in the
3rd century B.C., kept a palace.
2020 being, so far, a
notorious Year of Living Dangerously, it’s no surprise that in the end Beidaihe
was nowhere to be seen. Yet Beidaihe’s invisibility does not mean it did not
happen.
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Exhibit 1 was the fact that
Premier Li Keqiang simply disappeared from public view for nearly two weeks –
after President Xi chaired a crucial Politburo gathering in late July
where what was laid out was no less than China’s whole development strategy for
the next 15 years.
Li Keqiang resurfaced by
chairing a special session of the all-powerful State Council, just as the CCP’s
top ideologue, Wang Huning – who happens to be number 5 in the Politburo –
showed up as the special guest at a meeting of the All China Youth Federation.
What’s even more intriguing
is that side by side with Wang, one would find Ding Xuexiang, none other than
President Xi’s chief of staff, as well as three other Politburo members.
In this “now you see them,
now you don’t” variation, the fact that they all showed up in unison after an
absence of nearly two weeks led sharp Chinese observers to conclude that
Beidaihe in fact had taken place. Even if no visible signs of political action
by the seaside had been detected. The semi-official spin is that no get-together
happened at Beidaihe because of Covid-19.
Yet it’s Exhibit 2 that may
clinch the deal for good. The by now famous end of July Politburo meeting
chaired by Xi in fact sealed the Central Committee plenary session in October. Translation: the contours of the
strategic road map ahead had already been approved by consensus. There was no
need to retreat to Beidaihe for further discussions.
Trial
balloons or official policy?
The
plot thickens when one takes into a series of trial balloons that started to
float a few days ago in select Chinese media. Here are some of the key points.
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1. On the trade war front, Beijing won’t shut down US businesses
already operating in China. But companies which want to enter the market in
finance, information technology, healthcare and education services will not be
approved.
2. Beijing won’t dump all its
overwhelming mass of US Treasuries in one go, but – as it already happens –
divestment will accelerate. Last year, that amounted to $100 billion. Up to the
end of 2020, that could reach $300 billion.
3. The internationalization
of the yuan, also predictably, will be accelerated. That will include
configuring the final parameters for clearing US dollars through the CHIPS
Chinese system – foreseeing the incandescent possibility Beijing might be cut
off from SWIFT by the Trump administration or whoever will be in power at the
White House after January 2021.
4. On what is largely
interpreted across China as the “full spectrum war” front, mostly Hybrid War,
the PLA has been put into Stage 3 alert – and all leaves are canceled for the
rest of 2020. There will be a concerted drive to increase all-round defense
spending to 4% of GDP and accelerate the development of nuclear weapons.
Details are bound to emerge during the Central Committee meeting in October.
5. The overall emphasis is on
a very Chinese spirit of self-reliance, and building what can be defined as a
national economic “dual circulation” system: the consolidation of the Eurasian
integration project running in parallel to a global yuan settlement mechanism.
Inbuilt in this drive is what has been
described as “to firmly abandon all illusions about the United States and
conduct war mobilization with our people. We shall vigorously promote the war
to resist US aggression (…) We will use a war mindset to steer the national
economy (…) Prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the US.
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It’s unclear as it stands if these are only trial balloons
disseminated across Chinese public opinion or decisions reached at the
“invisible” Beidaihe. So all eyes will be on what kind of language this
alarming configuration will be packaged when the Central Committee presents its
strategic planning in October. Significantly, that will happen only a few weeks
before the US election.
It’s all about continuity
All of the above somewhat
mirrors a recent debate in Amsterdam on what constitutes the Chinese “threat”
to the West. Here are the key points.
1. China constantly
reinforces its hybrid economic model – which is an absolute rarity, globally:
neither totally publicly owned nor a market economy.
2. The level of patriotism is
staggering: once the Chinese face a foreign enemy, 1.4 billion people act as
one.
3. National mechanisms have
tremendous force: absolutely nothing blocks the full use of China’s financial,
material and manpower resources once a policy is set.
4. China has set up the most
comprehensive, back to back industrial system on the planet, without foreign
interference if need be (well, there’s always the matter of semiconductors to
Huawei to be solved).
China
plans not only in years, but in decades. Five year plans are complemented by
ten year plans and as the meeting chaired by Xi showed, 15 year plans. The Belt
and Road Initiative (BRI) is in fact a nearly 40-year plan, designed in 2013 to
be completed in 2049.
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And continuity is the name of the game – when one thinks that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first
developed in 1949 and then expanded by Zhou Enlai at the Bandung conference in
1955 are set in stone as China’s foreign policy guidelines.
The Qiao
collective, an independent group that advances the role of qiao (“bridge”)
by the strategically important huaqiao
(“overseas Chinese”) is on point when they note that Beijing never proclaimed a
Chinese model as a solution to global problems. What they extol is Chinese
solutions to specific Chinese conditions.
A forceful point is also made
that historical materialism is incompatible with capitalist liberal democracy
forcing austerity and regime change on national systems, shaping them towards
preconceived models.
That always comes back to the
core of the CCP foreign policy: each nation must chart a course fit for its
national conditions.
And that reveals the full contours of what can be reasonably described
as a Centralized Meritocracy with Confucian, Socialist Characteristics: a
different civilization paradigm that the “indispensable nation” still refuses
to accept, and certainly won’t abolish by practicing Hybrid War.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Copyright © Asia Times
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/no_author/everything-going-according-to-plan-in-china/
