Figuratively and literally, Chinese President Xi Jinping is feeling the heat.
Looking toward his coronation for a third term as Chinese Communist Party general secretary later this year, Xi wants to show that he’s winning at home and abroad. Time is of the essence. Securing his third term, the leader may also receive a new honorific that sees him ordained as the new Mao Zedong, China’s leader of destiny for the 21st century.
Xi’s real-world destiny is on increasingly shaky ground.
First off, there’s the foreign policy front.
The recent trip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to Taiwan has further undermined China’s effort to intimidate that island democracy and its foreign supporters. Visiting Taiwan in rejection of Chinese threats to the contrary, Pelosi has made Xi look unsure. Xi has been forced to escalate in response, even as he would prefer to focus on other concerns. A G-7 condemnation of China’s ensuing military exercises around Taiwan appears to have shocked and alarmed Beijing, evincing a growing lack of respect for China’s claims that Taiwan entails a solely internal problem. Making matters worse, Beijing’s threat to withhold cooperation on climate change as a response to Pelosi’s visit has only underlined Xi’s lack of genuine sincerity.
This week only brought more bad news on the foreign policy front.
The United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery found that it is “reasonable to conclude” that China is using the Uyghur people for forced labor. This is a significant embarrassment for Xi, who has long denied his genocide against the Uyghurs as a U.S.-invented conspiracy. Moreover, he hoped that the U.N. would provide a reliable and credible diplomatic backstop against escalating U.S.-led efforts to align world powers against China’s human rights abuses. Evincing Beijing’s concern over the U.N. announcement, a Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman offered a splurge of furious hyperbole on Wednesday.
The U.N. rapporteur, the spokesman said, “chooses to believe in lies and disinformation about Xinjiang spread by the United States and some other Western countries and anti-China forces, abuse his authority, blatantly violate the code of conduct of the special procedure, malignly smear and denigrate China and serve as a political tool for anti-China forces. … Their scheme will never succeed.” The spokesman said the rapporteur must “immediately change course, respect plain facts … stop using lies to stoke confrontation and create division, stop politicizing and instrumentalizing human rights issues, and stop serving certain countries’ political scheme to suppress and contain China by abusing the U.N. platform.”
Phew.
China’s simultaneous announcement on Wednesday that it will join a major Russian military exercise is also likely to court controversy in Europe. After all, Beijing’s enjoining that exercise lends political support to Moscow as it wages a war on the European nation of Ukraine. Not something that is likely to make many Europeans happy.
Xi is also feeling the heat on the domestic front.
A heat wave is causing havoc on already stretched power supplies, frying crops and forcing a suspension of major industrial operations.
Xi’s signature “zero-COVID” policy is also under new fire. International businesses are frustrated by the Chinese Communist Party’s refusal to do what the rest of the world is doing and learn to live with COVID-19. For foreigners and Chinese alike, the specter of recurrent lockdowns and associated shortages of sanitary products, food, and medicine has become extremely tiresome. Of critical concern to the regime, the Chinese are increasingly willing to protest lockdown measures and the party officials who enforce them. Take the video of Shanghai shoppers resisting a snap lockdown at an Ikea store this week. Even if the legions of party censors can restrain news of these protests, they prove that the party’s “we serve the people” narrative isn’t always winning hearts and minds.
Then there’s the economy. Beset by sluggish growth and international investor skepticism, Xi’s economy is facing tough headwinds. Unemployment rates for graduates are rising, risking fueling frustration on the part of the educated and aspirational classes — rarely a good thing for an authoritarian regime.
Reflecting this concern, Xi and his deputy Li Keqiang are spending this week visiting industry and calling for new developments to bolster the economy. What Xi will not do, however, is abandon his delusional belief that central planning can best deliver economic gains. The only benefit of this strategy rests in its enabling of the Chinese intelligence apparatus’ voracious theft of foreign intellectual property. But as China’s cataclysmic demographic crisis worsens, the party will have an ever-increasing need for an economy that can sustain high growth and productivity rates. Unfortunately for Xi, it’s not happening.
A miserable summer indeed.
