In China, Xi Risks Overconfidence That Could Stoke Taiwan Tensions

During his decade of rule in China, Xi Jinping has tried to instill confidence in his people, telling them that China is doing very well compared to the chaotic West.

He told the younger generation that China can finally see the world as an equal. Said last year.

“The East is rising and the West is declining,” he declared, as the United States and other Western nations appeared to be plagued by high Covid infection rates, racial tensions and other problems.

President Xi tells China’s 1.4 billion people that they are proud of its culture, its system of governance and its future as a great power.doctrine of trust“

Much of that pride is well placed, but it also creates cockiness. This justifies Mr. Xi to unleash the open-door policy that helped China emerge from international isolation and extreme poverty under Mao. It has also bolstered extreme nationalists who are asserting Chinese supremacy and pushing for a military confrontation with Taiwan after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Their harsh rhetoric shows how they don’t think about American power and how easily they think China will win the great power race with America. It offends more moderate nationalists and raises concerns that the Chinese government will be forced to take tough action.

Such attitudes and nationalist sentiment increase the risk of war, especially as China has established a new status quo with Taiwan and announced on Tuesday that it would continue air and sea drills around the island’s democracy.

And in the context of the US-China conflict, this tendency to overconfidence could become a weakness for Beijing, turning a blind eye to its own challenges. If we can act together, it could be a blessing for America.

It is no wonder that the Chinese people, not the government, are proud and confident in the achievements of the past 40 years.

They lifted themselves out of poverty to create some of the most successful companies on the planet. They have made their country a manufacturing giant and the largest consumer market for cars, smartphones and many luxury brands. They built new skyscrapers, subways, highways, high-speed trains, some of the best in the world.

Meanwhile, the United States is embroiled in so many domestic problems that it seems too paralyzed to solve them.

Before the pandemic, I was used to Chinese people returning from trips to the US and telling me how backward, shabby, and overwhelmed they were.

Some of them refused to use the New York subway system, saying it was dirty, smelly and riddled with service chaos. I was appalled at the poor highway conditions. They didn’t understand why wealthy San Francisco was plagued with homelessness. They were greatly troubled by gun violence and the lack of laws to regulate it.

Most of those people were not nationalists. They were an educated elite, raised in poverty, benefited from China’s opening up, and viewed the United States as an ideal. The United States frightened them and disappointed them.

But for many other Chinese, especially the younger generation, the idea of ​​the East rising and the West declining is an accepted fact. News programs and social media are flooded with such dogmas and political science classes. prompt Mr. Xi, teach it.

Yang Xuetong, a professor of international studies at Tsinghua University and a fan of nationalism, Said At a conference in Beijing in January, he said that Chinese university students need to learn more about the world. , Especially the Western countries are ‘evil’, and the Western countries must hate China.” Students typically have a “very strong sense of superiority and confidence” in international relations and often “treat other countries in a disrespectful manner,” he said.

“They use ‘wishful thinking’ in international affairs, believing that it will be very easy for China to achieve its foreign policy objectives,” Professor Yang said. He also added that he tends to believe conspiracy theories and other unsubstantiated opinions he sees online.

Many young people criticized him and accused him of contempt.

Chinese propaganda has always tried to emphasize China’s achievements and the West’s failures. On December 30, 1958, when China plunged into a great famine and millions starved to death, People’s Daily It reported that the country was successful in industrial and agricultural production. In the international news section, articles on socialist countries such as Vietnam and North Korea were celebratory, while articles on capitalist Western countries were mostly about economic and political predicament.

I say, “Socialism is good. I was reading a biased article. We believed them until China opened up and we realized that our socialist country was poor.

Things changed somewhat in the 1990s and 2000s as the Chinese Communist Party allowed some investigative reporting and public criticism online. But under Mr. Xi, while everything about China, including its economic forecasts, exudes “positive energy,” the West, especially the United States, is portrayed as increasingly evil or declining.

China Central Television, the state broadcaster, is eager to get the party to recognize China’s success, saying:amazing chinaIn the section on poverty eradication achievements, the film showed Mr. Xi sitting among farmers and talking about how his income increased 20-fold in 20 years.

“Who else could have done this?” he asked rhetorically. “Only the Communist Party could do this. Only our socialist system could do this. It wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else.”

But capitalist countries like Japan and South Korea experienced similar economic transformations decades ago.

Over the past two years, many state news reports and theoretical essay He contrasted China’s orderly rule with the “messy West,” citing the U.S.’s mishandling of the pandemic, widespread protests against racism, and numerous mass shootings. As the United States and several other Western countries struggled with their Covid response, state media and many Chinese social media influencers called them “copy chinese homework“

Wang Jisi, a professor of international studies at Peking University and a leading authority on US-China relations, said: complained “They’re either about the U.S. having another mass shooting, another instance of racial tension, or its messy response to a pandemic,” he said. Why can’t we talk about what’s happening in Latin America and what’s wrong with America?”

In an interview with an academic journal earlier this year, Mr. Wang tried to correct the notion that the United States is in decline. He argued that the United States’ relative international position declined between 1995 and 2011, but that its share of world production rose in the decade after 2011. US soft power has declined.

For China, the danger of drinking its own propaganda, Kool-Aid, is to stop looking at its own problems while exaggerating America’s weaknesses.

The Communist Party’s aversion to truth and its obsession with control are backfiring. Xi Jinping’s zero-coronavirus policy, which relies on mass testing and lockdowns, has hit China’s economy hard. But criticism is not allowed, so while much of the world is in the process of returning to normal, the country is following strict regulations.

Despite its problems, the American democratic system still seems to work, and its checks and balances have allowed different views to triumph and new strategic approaches to emerge. I’m here. The 2020 presidential election is one example, with the Democratic Party back in power. So does Kansas’ vote to keep abortion rights protected in the constitution after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Congress recently passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which helps global semiconductor makers set up operations in the country to better compete with China. And President Biden’s administration is better at working with allies than his predecessor.

“When people stop queuing in front of the US consulate to get visas, the US will decline,” said professor Wang.