Arnaud Bertrand’s review of the Volume 5 of Xi Jinping’s Governance of China, published by China’s Beijing Review.
Every time I read anything from Xi Jinping’s speeches, I get a bit despondent because a national leader talking like a normal, modest and humble human being is unheard of in the western world and its satellites. Here for example we get empty platitudes or demagoguery,
The idea of mutual cooperation is alien to us
A lot of good passages here that deserve to be highlighted. For example:
“we successfully toppled the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the people as the masters. This triumph secured our nation’s independence and liberated our people, creating the essential social conditions for China’s drive for modernization.”
“Following the founding of the PRC, our Party continued to lead the people in carrying out socialist revolution—dismantling the feudal system that had persisted for thousands of years and establishing socialism as the country’s basic system. This transformation represented the most comprehensive and profound social change in Chinese history”
today “only slightly more than 20 countries around the world, with a combined population of about one billion, have achieved modernization.”
China with 1.4 billion people is uplifting and modernizing a population greater than the entire Western developed world combined.
one of the key objectives of China’s modernization, as opposed to “Western modernization,” is “common prosperity.” In his words: “the biggest problems with Western modernization are that it is capital-centered rather than people-centered and that it seeks to maximize capital gains rather than serve the interests of the people.”
modernizing without common prosperity “create[s] a huge gap between the rich and the poor and [leads] to severe polarization,” which he says is the reason why “some developing countries [that] have approached the developed country threshold” ultimately “[fell] into the middle-income trap and became mired in prolonged stagnation.”
“an important cause of the Western predicament today is their failure to check greed, which is the nature of capital, and their failure to resolve their deep-seated problems of rampant materialism and spiritual impoverishment.”
The most direct attack here against the Western system and it’s pretty explicitly anti-capitalist.
Chinese modernization will be achieved through peaceful development, not through the “bloody crimes such as war, slavery, colonization and plunder” that, as he puts it, characterized Western modernization and which China itself “suffered” from.
Self-reliance without opening up is the Ming Dynasty mistake. Opening up without self-reliance is colonization by another name.
This is a conception of governance that has no real equivalent in Western political thought, where unresolved tensions are seen as problems to fix, not forces to harmonize. In our view of the world, there must always be a right and a wrong, a good and a bad: Rarely do we imagine that wisdom might lie in understanding that if we destroy “wrong” we simultaneously lose the tension that gave “right” its meaning in the first place.
In other words the CPC takes a dialectical view on governance.
“Our Party has been governing China for decades and the country has enjoyed a prolonged period of peace. In the absence of existential threats and rigorous challenges in a harsh environment, a number of Party members and officials begin to lose their enterprising spirit, wallowing in comfort and indulging in pleasure instead. As a result, they may become demoralized, and succumb to confusion and even panic when faced with the numerous new challenges presented by the great struggle.”
the Four Risks, an official, standing diagnosis of the four ways the Party is most likely to destroy itself. They are: lack of drive, incompetence, disengagement from the people and inaction and corruption.
I feel like there is some subtext here criticizing the internal degeneration of the CPSU that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
the objective of “full and rigorous internal governance,” notably to guard against the Four Risks, is “not to exert rigid control over Party members, instill fear and apprehension or intimidate members into inaction.” He emphasizes the need for pragmatism in this regard, codified in a framework called the Three Distinctions that separates honest mistakes made while experimenting, reforming or operating without precedent from deliberate violations committed for personal gain.
So yes, do purges, but keep it reasonable, otherwise you risk losing dynamism.
he lists oversight by “other political parties, the judiciary, the public, and the media” as part of the system of self-reform, all part of a “constructive and mutually reinforcing interaction between supervision by self and by others.”
This raises what are perhaps the most troubling questions of all for Western readers. Where is our doctrine of self-reform? Where is our institutional vocabulary for naming the diseases Xi names: complacency, incompetence, disengagement from the people? We hold elections. But elections are a mechanism for choosing who governs, not for ensuring that governance is any good.
And that’s not going to change until the system breaks down entirely.
And some more of his, in the context the west missunderstanding China (related to this article):
But the starting point of understanding anyone - a person, a culture, a civilization - has to be listening to what they actually say, not deciding in advance that it’s all a performance. You can be critical after you’ve listened. You can’t be critical instead of listening. Otherwise you end up in exactly the situation we’re currently in with China: in perpetual surprise at everything they do, because - guess what - they don’t act upon our caricature of them but, like all of us, upon their own self-understanding.
…
For instance, in the 1970s, game theorist Anatol Rapoport wrote (anatolrapoport.net/2023…) that “a pre-requisite in a genuine debate is a complete understanding by each of the opponents of the other’s position. The criterion for such understanding must be not one’s own feeling that one has understood the other’s position but the other’s feeling that his position has been completely understood.”
Of which the latter is something everyone should try to emulate if trying to engage in actual fruitful discussion.
Unfortunately that goes entirely against the ingrained chauvinism and supremacism of the West. “We don’t need to make an effort to understand others who are not like us because they are wrong and they are beneath us.”
There is also this pervasive attitude that understanding is tantamount to approval. For example in Germany, they disparagingly label anyone trying to explain the Russian position in the Ukraine war, or just in general with regards to the West, as “Putinversteher” = “Putin Understanders”. Which, by the very fact that this term is so widely accepted as a perjorative in Germany, means that a lot of people fundamentally believe that to understand the other side is sinful and a betrayal of your own.
The only “approved” way of interpreting what the other side says and does is through the a-priori assumption that it is fundamentally nefarious in intent. This also extends to our view of China. We are axiomatically good, they are axiomatically evil, and nuance is heresy.
I call this liberal fundamentalism, it’s liberalism as a religion taken to fanatical levels.
