In the 10 years of his rule in China, Xi Jinping has sought to instill confidence in the population, telling Chinese that the country is doing very well compared to the chaotic West.
Xi has been telling the younger generation that China can finally face the world on an equal footing.
“The country is not so backward anymore,” he said last year.
“The East is on the rise and the West is on the decline,” Xi declared, at a time when the US and other Western countries appeared to be mired in high Covid rates, racial tensions and other problems.
Xi has been telling 1.4 billion Chinese that they should be proud of the country’s culture, its system of governance and its great-power future. All of this added up to his characteristic political philosophy, sometimes described as “the doctrine of trust”.
Much of this pride is justified, but the sentiment also fuels arrogance. It offers Xi a rationale for dismantling the open-ended policies that helped China emerge from the international isolation and abject poverty it lived in under former communist leader Mao Tse-tung. It has also encouraged extreme nationalists who trumpet Chinese superiority and who are now, after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, urged Beijing to engage in a military confrontation with the island.
The raucous speech of these nationalists reveals how low they hold US power and how easily they believe that China would win a dispute against the Americans. This is making more moderate nationalists uncomfortable, raising fears that Beijing may feel compelled to act tough.
That kind of nationalist sentiment and stance raises the risk of war, especially as China establishes a new status quo with Taiwan, having announced on Tuesday that it will continue to conduct military air and sea exercises around the democratic island.
In the context of the US-China rivalry, this tendency towards overconfidence can also become a weakness for Beijing, preventing it from seeing its own difficulties. This could be a blessing for the US, if they can do what it takes.
The Chinese people, not the government, have every reason to feel pride and confidence in their achievements over the past four decades. They created some of the most successful companies in the world, turned their country into a manufacturing colossus and the world’s largest consumer market for cars, smartphones and many luxury brands. They built skyscrapers, subways, highways and bullet trains, some of the best in the world.
The US, on the other hand, has appeared to be mired in its many internal problems and often too paralyzed to solve its problems.
Before the pandemic, I got used to seeing Chinese returning from trips to the US and telling me how they found the country to be backward, ragged and not impressive.
Some of them refused to ride the subway in New York, saying it was dirty, smelly and full of service interruptions. They were shocked by the lack of public transportation in Los Angeles and the poor condition of the roads in Silicon Valley. They didn’t understand why wealthy San Francisco was full of homeless people. They were deeply disturbed by gun violence and the failure of laws to control it.
Most of these people were not nationalists. They were highly educated elites, who had grown up in poverty, benefited from China’s opening up, and had seen the US as an ideal. The US left them both dazzled and disappointed.
But for many other Chinese, especially younger ones, the idea of an East rising and a West falling is an accepted fact. News programs and social media are full of this dogma, which is taught in political science classes on Xi’s orders.
Yan Xuetong, a professor of international studies at Tsinghua University, leans toward nationalist thinking. At a conference in Beijing in January, he said that China’s university students need to learn more about the world. They often take a binary view, thinking that “only China is fair and innocent, while all other countries, especially Western ones, are ‘wicked’, and that Westerners obligatorily hate China.” According to him, students “generally have a very strong feeling of superiority and trust” in international relations and often “see other countries as inferior”.
Chinese political propaganda has always sought to highlight China’s achievements and the West’s failures. On December 30, 1958, as China was beginning to experience the Great Famine that would lead to millions of people dying from starvation, the front page of the People’s Daily announced that the country was succeeding in its industrial and agricultural production. In the international news section, reports on socialist countries such as North Korea followed a celebratory tone, while articles on the capitalist West dealt only with its economic and political problems.
I grew up reading a newspaper column entitled “Socialism is good. Capitalism is bad.” Every week, millions of young readers like me consumed biased stories about an American girl who was starving or a North Korean boy who was living a happy life. We believed in these stories until the moment when China opened up to the world, when we understood that our socialist country was extremely poor.
This changed to some extent in the 1900s and 2000s, when the Chinese Communist Party allowed some investigative reporting and public criticism online. But under Xi, everything about China exudes “positive energy”, including economic forecasts, while the West, particularly the US, is increasingly portrayed as evil or in decline.
In 2018, eager to attribute the country’s successes to the party, state broadcaster Chinese Central Television (CCTV) aired a documentary titled “Amazing China.” In a section on advances in poverty eradication, the film showed Xi sitting among farmers, talking about how their income had multiplied by 20 in 20 years.
“Who else could have done that?” he asked. “Only the Communist Party could have done it. Only our socialist system could have done it. It couldn’t have been done anywhere else.”
But capitalist countries like Japan and South Korea underwent similar economic transformations decades earlier.
Over the past two years, many news articles and theoretical essays in the state press have contrasted China’s orderly governance with the “chaotic West”, citing the US’s mishandling of the pandemic, its widespread protests against racism and the many shootings. committed in the country.
When the US and some other Western countries struggled in their response to Covid, state media and many Chinese social media influencers urged them to “copy China’s homework”.
Wang Jisi, a professor of international studies at Peking University and an expert on US-China relations, complained in July at a peace forum that CCTV’s flagship news program aired at least two reports about the entire US. night and that both were negative.
“It’s either about another shooting or another case of racial tensions or the inadequate response to the pandemic,” he commented. “Why can’t we talk about what happens in Africa or Latin America and not always talk about the bad things that happen in the US?”
This year, in an interview with an academic journal, Wang sought to correct the idea that the US is in decline. He argued that while America’s international position suffered a relative decline between 1995 and 2011, its share of global GDP rose in the decade following 2011. He said there is not enough evidence to conclude that the US economy is in irreversible decline, although recognized that US soft power has waned.
For China, the danger of believing its own false political propaganda is that the country fails to pay attention to its own problems while exaggerating America’s weaknesses.
The Communist Party’s aversion to the truth and its obsession with control are having the opposite effect. Xi’s Covid zero policy, which relies on lockdowns and mass testing, is hurting the Chinese economy tremendously. But since no criticism is allowed, the country is largely moving forward with tight restrictions as much of the world returns to normal.
