Could China Find Itself at War in President Xi's Third Term?

The Background That Brought the Communists to Power

It is rumored that in the early 1800s Napoleon said, "Let China sleep, if it wakes up it will shake the world". China literally means 'the center country'. With thousands of years of consolidated cultural and economic supremacy, emperors and bureaucracies considered China to be the center of the world and all other regions outside as 'barbaric'. As such, civilized China had convinced itself that there was nothing in the outside world to benefit it. Therefore, it had no interest in what was going on in the outside world. 

Europeans (mostly British merchants), who for centuries had been allowed to trade in the ports authorized by China, provided they followed the rules set by the empire, were seen by the Chinese as barbarians who needed the products of superior Chinese culture. The British were mainly buying tea, porcelain and silk from China and were not successful in selling textiles to China, which had begun to be produced in abundance with the industrial revolution. In the end, the British traders, who got the Chinese addicted to opium, eventually succeeded in turning the balance of trade in their favor and making the Chinese addicted to opium. When the Chinese imperial authorities realized that beyond the economy, the growing addiction to opium was destroying social order and public health in the country, China realized that it needed to 'wake up' to the outside world. When China attempted to ban the use of opium, the British Empire, realizing that its interests would be jeopardized, declared war on China, and the British Army, with the superiority that the industrial revolution had given British weapons technology, easily defeated the Chinese. China saw up close that something had changed in the barbarian world. Seeing that the Chinese lacked the strength to resist the British, states such as Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the USA swooped on China like vultures. The firepower of Greater Europe had turned China into a semi-colony. The period of defeat and destruction that lasted for more than 100 years starting from the 1840s, which the Chinese call the "century of shame", left behind an economically backward country. 

The Mao Years

The economy of China, the center of the world, accounted for 35% of the world economy in the 1820s, but only 5% in the 1950s, at the beginning of the Mao era. The only industrial facilities China had were those left over from the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. These were facilities in ports opened to foreigners, notably Shanghai, and state-owned defense industry facilities in the interior of the country. Chinese industrial production in these facilities accounted for 2.5% of total production. In fact, agricultural products accounted for 64% of the Chinese economy at that time.

The mixed economy, the five-year development plans with the state bureaucracy at the center, the removal of private ownership of land and means of production in agriculture, the 'great leap forward' (late 1950s) based on productivity, and the 'Cultural Revolution' (late 1960s) aimed at rooting socialism and completely abolishing the bourgeoisie, which caused both development and turmoil in the country, came to an end with Mao's death in 1976. Industrial production had reached 48% in the Chinese economy inherited from Mao. Although Chinese industry could not compete with the world in quality and efficiency, it was capable of producing a wide range of industrial products, from atomic bombs to automobiles. Everything China produced was seen by the public as an expression of a deeply wounded sense of Chinese nationalism. As Mao put it: "Our nation will never again be a nation humiliated (by the West). We have risen up."

Deng Reforms and China-specific Growth Model

After a two-year transition period, Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978 and became the leader who laid the foundations of a truly modern China. Deng established a new economic model called 'authoritarian capitalism' based on Chinese social structure and socialism. Unlike the Mao era, the only ideology that mattered under Deng was China's economic growth. 

Deng Xiaoping, who is considered the 'father of reforms', never became the official leader of his country as he never became the head of the Chinese Communist Party. However, within the scope of the reforms he initiated as the de facto leader of the country between 1978 and 1992, the transformation in the field of economy was also carried to diplomacy. Both economic and diplomatic relations between China and the US were improved.

Deng did not want China to become a federal state. He took centralization as a basis. The strong government structure was ensured to maintain its central position as an authority commanding from the center to the provinces to do whatever was necessary to grow the economy. China's communist leaders liberalized the economy and wanted the country to develop rapidly, but they also maintained a one-party communist political system. Although ostensibly a free market economy, behind the scenes the state has never relinquished control over major economic activities (banking, investment and exchange rates). In particular, full financial control was aimed at keeping the yuan undervalued against the dollar and thus maintaining an export-oriented economic model. 

Deng created special economic zones to encourage foreign investment. China's investment incentives and cheap labor attracted Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital to China. Production of textiles, clothing, footwear and electronic goods increased rapidly. Thus, the Chinese economy began to rise on the back of a dynamic export-oriented industry, modern cities were built, and a growing middle class became the engine of production. In this period, when globalization, which transformed the world into a single market, gained momentum, China firmly embraced the slogan of "don't fight - make money". Thus, 'peaceful' China was able to make inroads in all sectors of industry and soon became the factory of the world that few countries could compete with. Today, this factory consumes 60% of the world's iron production and 50% of its copper and aluminum production. The Chinese economy, which was comparable in size to the Turkish economy in the 1980s, has grown by an average of 10 percent every year. Today's China is the world's largest exporter and the second largest importer after the United States. 

The Standing Committee, which makes strategic decisions in every field in China, which maintains the communist model of governance, consists of 9 members (later 7) including the chairman. The fact that all of these members are elected by members of the Chinese Communist Party on the basis of merit has always been meticulously adhered to and has been quite successful. For example, when the world's economies faltered during the 2008 global crisis, China was able to weather the downturn with ease thanks to the sound economic decisions made by this powerful and competent committee based on common sense. In addition, the fact that the country's financial system was closed to the world and under state control played an important role as a component of China's growth model. Today, however, it is increasingly acting as a drag on the economy's development. China's decades of very rapid growth have been characterized by widespread corruption, widening gaps between rural and urban life, massive income inequality and huge environmental problems.

The organization of the state in China revolves around the Communist Party, which has about 90 million members. The Party is at the center of the governance system. The government, the legislative bodies, the judiciary in the main, function as extensions of the Party. Ostensibly, elections are held every 5 years to elect a total of 3,000 members of the National People's Congress, which is responsible for legislation. According to the constitution, it has the power to oversee the government, make laws and elect the head of state and other top officials. The people's congress works two weeks a year. The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, which is elected from within the People's Congress, carries out the routine functions of the Congress.

Xi Jinping's Restructuring Era and China's Future

The National Congress meets every five years. This year, 2,300 delegates attended the 20th National Congress. They elected from among themselves the 203-member Central Committee, the 24-member Politburo, and the 7-member Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top decision-making body. The outgoing President Xi Jinping was re-elected as the chairman of this committee and as the General Secretary of the Party, remaining at the helm of the country for a third five-year term.

Elected in 2012 for the first time as president, Xi Jinping was a seasoned statesman, having previously served on the Standing Committee under former President Hu Jintao. His predecessor Hu had built the economy and the military and made China an economic powerhouse. 

Xi came to power at the peak of China's growth wave and at what seemed to be the dawn of China's military power. Xi was expected to transform China into an economic, military and global power.

In the first years of his presidency, Xi brought tens of thousands of corrupt government officials, including generals and ministers, to justice. At the same time, he took positive steps to increase the role of markets in the national economy and make structural improvements to the economy. Xi, who has been in full power for the past 10 years of his presidency, is signaling that the next five years of his presidency could see him move to a phase where he will focus more on security and military activities alongside the economy. Xi has ensured that all of those elected to the new Politburo Standing Committee are close to him.

Xi Jinping is well aware of the major problems that will prevent China from achieving wealthy nation status. At the 20th Congress, he chose to purify his party rather than present a plan to solve them. However, I believe that China's ambitious international policies under Xi's leadership will continue unchanged. Since Xi, who has in a sense purged the opposition in the country, will henceforth be solely responsible for every successful or unsuccessful step in the country, it is understood that he will continue to steer the country's policies together with the 7-member Politburo standing committee consisting of his own men. 

The direction of political developments in the country is shaped by the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party has effective and strong control over the media and the armed forces. For this reason, it was decided that the military, which was previously subordinate to the Party, will now serve under the president during the third term of the 69-year-old Xi. The basic principle of "the party controls the armed forces", which the Party has cherished since the Mao era, has now been virtually abolished by Xi. Having established his dominance over the party, Xi has also succeeded in binding the military to him. He also got himself elected as the chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission.

Conclusion

On the day of the end of the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Australia and Japan signed a defense treaty explicitly targeting China and Russia. Last June, Australia, the UK, Japan, New Zealand, Japan, New Zealand and the US established the Blue Pacific Partnership to counter China's actions in the South Pacific, and in September 2021, the US, Australia and the UK established AUKUS, the so-called NATO of the East.

Faced with the headwinds of declining economic growth and growing international hostility, Xi is probably well aware that his third term will be much more challenging than the first two, which is why he centered his speech to Congress on the theme of China's security. Traditionally, China has historically operated under the fiction that it is a great country and that China is the center of the world. The anger against foreign powers, which it sees as holding China back, fuels and fuels the people. It is known that in Beijing's eyes, Japan is the most prominent and the biggest criminal foreign agent, with the United States ranking second. I think that China, which has the world's largest economy and the second most powerful army, will want to move in a more nationalistic and aggressive direction in the next five years under the leadership of Xi, who has now become a one-man government, compared to the previous 10 years, and will focus on realizing China's territorial claims in the South China Sea and realizing a peaceful integration with Taiwan, and in this respect, it will have more bilateral problems with the neighboring countries surrounding it, especially the US.

References:

Michael G. Roskin ve Nicholas O. Berry, Uluslararası İlişkilerin Yeni Dünyası, Adres Yayınları, (Çeviren Özlem Şimşek), 1. Baskı, Ankara, 2014

Fatih Oktay, Çin Yeni Büyük Güç ve Değişen Dünya Dengeleri, Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 4. Basım, İstanbul, 2020

June Teufel Dreyer, The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress: What Happened…and Didn’t, Foreign Policy Research Institute, October 25, 2022, https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/10/the-chinese-communist-partys-20th-party-congress-what-happenedand-didnt/