Xi Jinping presents himself as the modern Mao with a friendlier face. He wants to be seen as a great visionary, leading his Chinese Communist Party into a century of prosperity and global dominance.
But Xi has some problems.
For one, the Chinese people are increasingly choosing the free market and the pursuit of individual happiness over worship of Xi’s communist heaven. For another, they aren’t having enough children. That complicates things for a regime that needs workers and utterly loyal entrepreneurs if it is to rule the world. Now, Xi has another problem: He’s caught China in a maze of energy shortages, foreign tensions, and dishonest carbon emissions pledges.
Front and center are the escalating power cuts afflicting northern China. As the cold winter approaches, millions of citizens and thousands of businesses have been affected by power outages. Goldman Sachs has decreased its China economic growth estimate, also assessing that up to 44% of Chinese industry has been affected. Put simply, this is a big crisis without an easy solution.
On the one hand, Xi cannot afford to damage the party’s credibility in the eyes of an increasingly frustrated population. This means he’s almost certain to relax restrictions on coal usage. But while that option might address the power shortages, it jeopardizes Xi’s already unreliable commitments to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
Xi uses carbon emission commitments as leverage to earn European Union and U.S. favor in other areas. Contradicting his green cooperation rhetoric, Xi situates its climate policy within a nakedly transactional framework. He’s had some success. As Philip Wegmann reported this week, U.S. climate czar John Kerry is lobbying against congressional action to counter Xi’s Uyghur genocide. Considering, however, that its relationships with the EU face dramatically increased scrutiny, China’s power shortages could hardly have come at a worse time.
Beijing’s best solution would be to use already extracted Australian coal that is sitting at Chinese ports, undelivered, a hostage of China’s trade coercion campaign against Australia. But Xi won’t do that. He cannot afford to back down against Australia and risk being seen as weak. AUKUS has arrived, after all.
Xi was sitting pretty a few years ago, enjoying a supplicant international community and seemingly unstoppable growth. Now lost in a geopolitical maze of his own making, Xi’s world is looking less rosy.
