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China’s leader is a risk-taker. How far will he go in confronting America?

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AS DONALD TRUMP assembles his foreign-policy team, many of his picks display a common characteristic: they are strident China hawks. Those seeking a tougher approach towards America’s rival range from Mike Waltz, Mr Trump’s proposed national security adviser, to Marco Rubio, his nominee for secretary of state. Part of their job will be to grasp how relations have changed in the four years since the last Trump administration, a period in which the Chinese economy has sagged, tensions around Taiwan and in the South China Sea have grown, and the war in Ukraine has further divided the world’s biggest powers. When weighing up the risks Xi Jinping is prepared to take in his competition with America, new calculations are needed. Forming them must involve studying what motivates China’s leader.

A valuable tool is the vast body of literature purporting to have been written by Mr Xi. The number of volumes bearing his name, explaining his views on China’s main concerns at home and abroad, far exceeds that of books by Mr Trump or Mr Putin—or, indeed, previous Chinese leaders (see chart). According to an estimate by the China Media Project, he published 120 volumes in the first decade of his rule. This year at least nine have been added to the pile (“Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Discourses on Natural Resources Work” is hot off the presses this month).

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These books are tedious, but they are also important. They reflect the ideology that guides the party and show how Mr Xi is trying to reshape it to justify his distinctive approach to ruling the country and projecting Chinese power. In 2017, during Mr Trump’s first term, “Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping” by François Bougon, a French journalist, became the first critical book-length study of what is commonly known as “Xi Jinping Thought”. Mr Bougon argued that Mr Xi “manoeuvres, tinkers, and seeks his balance” between conflicting ideological forces in China. “There is no indication that he is the author of a coherent doctrine of his own.”

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Analysts now have much more of Mr Xi’s thought to sift through. Among global statesmen, Kevin Rudd is rare in having undertaken this task. Mr Rudd was Australia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2010, when Mr Xi was China’s heir apparent, and again in 2013, after Mr Xi became leader. In a recent book, “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World”, Mr Rudd, who is now his country’s ambassador to America, says “the outline of Xi’s brave new world is now hiding in plain sight for us all.” His bibliography lists well over 50 of Mr Xi’s books. More than a quarter were published after Mr Trump left the White House.

In Mr Rudd’s telling, ideology is the main impulse behind Mr Xi’s actions. China’s leader sees powerful historical forces leading to the decline of the West and the ineluctable rise of the East. The process can be hastened by a disciplined Communist Party that understands the dialectical process. In his pursuit of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049, when the party marks the centenary of its rule, a defining objective is “reunification” with Taiwan. Like his predecessors, Mr Xi does not rule out the use of force.

Mr Xi has steered China towards what Mr Rudd calls Marxist Nationalism. In other words, he has purged the party and strengthened its control, shifted economic policy away from market forces towards greater central planning, and embarked on a more bellicose foreign policy. In Mr Rudd’s view, Mr Xi would want to take Taiwan—ideally without a war—by the end of his fourth term in 2032. “The only thing that would prevent him would be effective and credible US, Taiwanese, and allied military deterrence—and Xi’s belief that there was a real risk of China losing any such engagement,” writes Mr Rudd.

Therein lies the rub. Who knows how Mr Xi would weigh up the risks? By surrounding himself with yes-men, he may have made it more difficult for dissenting views to percolate upwards. And Mr Xi is certainly a risk-taker. His purges of high-level officials, ostensibly for corruption, are a sign of that (millions must be quietly fuming at him). So are his displays of military muscle around Taiwan and shoals claimed by the Philippines. In both places a small clash could escalate. Even if Mr Xi’s behaviour so far has not been as reckless as Mr Putin’s, it may become more so.

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Risk v endure

Yet Mr Xi’s writings (or those of his ghostwriters, overseen by Wang Huning, his chief ideologue and author of a gloomy book on the United States called “America against America”) are also laced with anxiety about threats to the party. He often urges officials to learn lessons from the Soviet Union’s collapse. In another book published this year, “The Political Thought of Xi Jinping”, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London argue that Mr Xi’s ideology is mostly a cover. It is less about socialism and more about strengthening the party’s power. If the authors are right, it may suggest that Mr Xi’s focus is on preventing collapse. He would reckon that losing a war could trigger a regime-threatening backlash at home.

Indeed, it is far from clear that Mr Xi is really a Maoist or Marxist. Mao called for endless class struggle against bureaucratic elites and “capitalist roaders”. Mr Xi’s writings stress the need for stability. He has no truck even with protests by nationalists—there have been no large ones during his rule, unlike in preceding years.

In his handling of the economy, Mr Xi has scared entrepreneurs with his left-leaning talk. His “common prosperity” campaign, launched in 2021, raised the spectre of big new redistributive schemes. That effort coincided with a regulatory crackdown on large tech firms which smacked to some of an ideologically driven assault on the titans of private enterprise. But in the past year or two Mr Xi has been struggling to revive the economy. This has involved treating private firms with a softer touch and promoting high-tech manufacturing. It is hard to spot much in the way of socialism in his efforts. Some economists argue that more spending on welfare would help the economy by encouraging people to save less and spend more, but Mr Xi criticises doling out money for such purposes.

Two strands of Mr Xi’s thinking are far less in doubt to those who have studied him. One is his Leninism, meaning his emphasis on the party as an instrument of control. He blames the Soviet collapse on ideological laxity. He wants his officials to parrot well-worn doctrinal lines, rather than debate them.

The other strand is Mr Xi’s chest-thumping nationalism. The message conveyed by his works contrasts with that of Deng Xiaoping, who said China should “hide its capabilities and bide its time”. Mr Xi says China must move to the “centre of the global stage”. Some of Mr Trump’s picks for senior jobs believe this means more than a mere desire for great-power status (China has that already). “They are seeking to supplant us and they are seeking to replace democracy and capitalism with their one-party-form-of-rule techno-state,” said Mr Waltz last year.

Mr Xi is careful to avoid such language, but Mr Tsang and Ms Cheung agree that he wants global leadership. This is not “about taking over from the United States as the global hegemon, with all the baggage of US leadership”, they say. “It is also not about overtly overturning the liberal international order. The ultimate goal is to capture or ‘modernise and transform’ the international order into one that fits in with Xi’s thoughts.” That, clearly, would be a chilling world for democracy.

Yet for all the words Mr Xi has published, it is possible to misread them. “I sometimes worry that the sheer volume of Xi’s musings obfuscates more than it illuminates,” says Jonathan Czin, a former analyst of China at the CIA. “In China’s system, Xi is in effect both pope and emperor—responsible for ruling, as well as promulgating ideological justifications that read like an obscurantist theological treatise from the Middle Ages.”

As America and China struggle to make sense of each other during the new Trump era, misinterpretations will abound. That will make a fraught relationship all the more dangerous. ■

Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world.

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Xi JinpingChinaUnited States.css-2x8c4j{margin:0.875rem 0;}.css-2x8c4j .e12sz0jx0+*{margin-top:0.875rem;}.el1rg701+.css-2x8c4j{margin-top:0;}.css-1aogxph{color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-20);font-family:var(–mb-typeface-sans);font-size:var(–mb-typestyle-label-2-size);font-variant:var(–mb-typestyle-label-2-figures);line-height:var(–mb-typestyle-label-2-leading);}.css-1aogxph s,.css-1aogxph del{-webkit-text-decoration:line-through;text-decoration:line-through;text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;}.css-1aogxph b{font-weight:var(–mb-font-weight-semibold);}.css-1aogxph i{font-style:italic;}.css-1aogxph sup{font-feature-settings:’sups’ 1;}.css-1aogxph sub{font-feature-settings:’subs’ 1;}.css-1aogxph u{text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;}.css-1aogxph a{color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-20);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;text-underline-offset:0.1875rem;}.css-1aogxph a:hover,.css-1aogxph a:focus,.css-1aogxph a:active{text-decoration-thickness:var(–mb-spacing-3xs);}.css-1aogxph a:hover{color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-30);}.css-1aogxph a:hover span{text-decoration-color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-30);}.css-1aogxph a:focus{background-color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-90);color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-5);text-decoration-color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-5);outline:none;}.css-1aogxph a:active{background-color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-90);color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-30);text-decoration-color:var(–mb-colour-base-chicago-30);}

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Inside the head of Xi Jinping”

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China

November 23rd 2024

• →Helping America’s hawks get inside the head of Xi Jinping
• →Trump, trade and feeding China’s pigs
• →Snuffing out the flame of freedom in Hong Kong

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From the November 23rd 2024 edition

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Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com