Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and . . . Xi Jinping?
Five years ago, China’s Communist Party bestowed on Xi the title of “core” leader, placing the president on the trajectory to reach the level of strongmen Mao and Deng. If Xi delivers an expected resolution Thursday that grants him official, total and indefinite rule without term limit, it will further prove his towering authority over party leadership — and give him momentum to storm into next year ready to tackle China’s biggest challenges, internal and external.
Don’t discount China’s internal problems. Its barbaric one-child (now three-child) policy, which required state-enforced infanticide, has snuffed out economic dynamism, with the population suffering a paucity of women and working-age people generally. And while Beijing has stamped out COVID-19 for now, the wily virus almost certainly spawned in a Wuhan lab is nearly guaranteed to have yet-to-be-discovered variants.
The Chinese population is restless. And so Xi has used his growing power to enact ever-more extreme measures to subjugate those less than servile to him and the party. He’s been purging opponents and disappearing dissenters. He’s been cracking down on Christians, stripping crosses from their churches and sentencing pastors to prison for years on trumped-up charges. In Xinjiang, he oversees a genocide of Uighur Muslims. In Tibet, Xi’s henchmen violently crack down on peaceful demonstrators.
Xi has created the world’s most technically advanced surveillance state to monitor everyday citizens. CCP leadership must approve all academic and scientific work related to such sensitive issues as COVID’s origins and vaccines before publication. Those who speak out on subjects that embarrass the CCP — like the government’s behavior in the pandemic’s outbreak, which seems to have been intended to maximize the exportation of the virus while inhumanely containing it inside its borders — have been imprisoned, disappeared and even have died under mysterious circumstances.
Meanwhile, Xi has poured cash into an advanced military, heavily focusing on its nuclear-weapons force by expanding warhead-production capacity and the number and diversity of delivery systems. He has observed the US unwillingness to invest in the kinds of nuclear weapons that would optimize deterrence — thanks to our allergy to even the thought of a nuclear exchange — using it to his advantage in a way our military strategists are only beginning to realize.
He has churned out ships, making China’s navy the world’s largest. He has also flexed his military might by demonstrating advanced capabilities in space and flying missiles whose combined speed and maneuverability make them untrackable by current US radar and sensor architecture.
The purpose here is to carry out his supreme objective, to supplant the United States of America as the world’s leading superpower. He does not compartmentalize the military domain from commerce or climate-change challenges, unlike the Biden administration’s naïve leaders. Xi will bend the Americans’ prioritization of these issues to his will and for his purposes.
The most likely military flashpoint would be over Taiwan, an island whose 23 million people see themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and have voted against Xi’s unification fever dreams. Taiwan is distinct, flourishing, self-governing and, for all intents and purposes, a nation much more akin to a Western nation-state than one in the likeness of Chinese Leninism. Its mere existence is an indictment of Xi’s Chinese Communist vision, which is why Xi wants to absorb it as he did Hong Kong.
In addition to a principled solidarity with the Taiwanese people, America has a geopolitically crucial interest in Taiwan’s security. Should China seize Taiwan, Xi will be able to cut off America from the region, giving critical allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia good reason to give up on our security commitments. What then? The end of the American Peace will be complete and with it our ability to set our own course.
If Americans want to decide for themselves how they want to live and not buckle to terms acceptable to the Zhongnanhai, we must take Xi’s rise and his mission deadly seriously. We surely have our own domestic challenges, but Xi fully intends to exploit them. It’s imperative to understand his potent capabilities as he consolidates yet more power.
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