“Secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and strive for the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era”
Not exactly my idea of a crowd pleaser but it was met with rapturous applause. The consequences of not applauding were no doubt a lot more unpleasant than what happens if you manage to cheerful about listening with rapt attention to every nugget of wisdom.
That is the bad side of communism with Chinese characteristics. There is a lack of freedom that penetrates into every aspect of society. Speak out against the glorious leader and if you are lucky if all that happens to you is that your career and your affluent lifestyle are over. Do so forcefully enough at the wrong time in the wrong place and you will be shipped off to a prison camp where you risk starving to death. More executions happened in China last year than anywhere else on the planet and the courts aren’t exactly open transparent and fair. If I was caught writing this inside China the consequences would not be pleasant and you’d be in every bit as much trouble if you were caught reading it.
These things matter and cannot be ignored. For all their weaknesses the freedoms available in Western democracies matter. Our predecessors had to fight hard enough to get them and we owe it to them to fight to preserve and expand those freedoms.
Yet for all my criticisms of his dictatorship it has to be said that I found much of what Xi Jinping had to say was a breath of fresh air. Almost literally. He committed China to putting huge resources behind environmental improvements. The smogs which pollute every city in China and are killing 20% of its citizens prematurely are going to be tackled. The heavy industrial plants burning dirty coal are to be cleaned up. Transport is to become electrified at a really purposeful pace. Trees are to be planted. Rivers cleaned up, air purified and an awful lot less carbon is going to be pumped out despite the economy growing at well over 5% a year.
There are massive difficulties in trying to do this in a system riddled with corruption and where the state and the private sector have a long track record of working together to trash the environment if it suits the interests of a few powerful men. But things are actually happening on the ground. I spoke last week to a businessman who travels regularly to China. A decade or so back he had visited the Shenzhen economic zone. It was a barbarous place where it was easy to see the damage being done in the rush to industrialise at any price. This time he reported seeing the city of the future and a nice place to live.
The Chinese government are intelligently combining the use of markets and private enterprise along with state planning and that combination is enabling them to achieve amazing things at real pace. Whilst many British economists will tell you that an economy can only be successful if it is one of extreme free markets utterly free of state control. They ignore the obvious example of China. There the state has chosen to guide and direct private enterprise whilst leaving it significant freedoms. The result is that in 30 years a mixed economy has taken China from being a poor and backward country dependent on foreign help to being the most advanced and forward looking economy on the planet and the place where you go if you want to understand the future.
That future is going to be Green. The resources of Chinese state planning and Chinese enterprise are being put behind a massive programme to take their economy away from fossil fuels and run great swathes of it on sustainable energy. That is an example we should be following. Instead the UK government has just written a pathetically weak ‘Clean Growth Strategy’. It provides an example of how pious and muddled statements backed up by a lack of meaningful resources can leave a country wallowing in the old ways of doing things whilst much of the rest of the world surges forward.
But it is not enough to set good clear policy intent and have a strong leadership committed to funding it. It also matters that the system you set up doesn’t get bogged down by corruption and lack of renewal. Which is why it matters so much that the Chinese communist party daren’t test out its popularity with its own voters. Run a dictatorship for long enough and you risk the Mugabe problem. When the glorious leader is making good decisions all goes well. When the glorious leader is simply interested in clinging onto power and needs to be got rid of then a bunch of sycophants who benefit from his rule are highly likely to prop him up and concentrate on intimidating opposition rather than on telling the leader he is wrong.
Dictatorships can be very purposeful – for a while. They then have a very bad habit of turning very sour indeed. So it is not good news that China intends to invest more in its military. It is not good news that it isn’t acting to reign in North Korea and create stability on its own borders and for the rest of us. Above all it isn’t good news that the leadership isn’t brave enough to put its current high level of internal popularity to the test and begin a process of opening up the regime to constant renewal via free speech and free elections starting at local levels.
At the start of his period in office Mao’s communists were so rooted in the people that their troops were able to march thousands of miles across China and gain strength and support from the areas they passed through. At the end he was ordering young girls he’d spotted to be brought to his bedroom. The consequence was that Deng Xiaoping had to dump much of Mao’s over centralised control. Deng went down in history as doing huge amounts for the overall welfare of his people whereas Mao is remembered for a giant famine and horrible oppression.
With policies like those announced by President Xi we ought to be looking forward to seeing China heading for a prosperous and sustainable future that will be inspirational. Yet with an attitude towards free and fair criticism and open-minded debate like his there remains a serious prospect that corrupt yes men and arrogant officials could still succeed in undermining the entire project.
We badly need China to allow a lot more free discussion and to allow ordinary people to kick corrupt officials out of office every bit as much as we badly need Western democracies to take on the environmental challenge with the same sense of purpose as the Chinese President.