The guys is almost 80 73, he’s an old man.
He’s been very successful in his tenure, carried out great anti-corruption campaigns, overseen a pivot to green energy, helmed China as it has retaken its place in the sun.
At the same time there’s a lot of foreign policy stuff that leaves some wanting. There’s still cliques of liberals (as far as I understand, which is very little, which is why I ask) that are working towards something very different (I hear Shanghai is really bad?) not to mention some impending economic doom, according to some China posters here.
Whatever the case is, Xi has been monumental and at the forefront of a great wave of change. One must Imagine he has planned for his retirement, moved things around to ensure some of His Guys are in good positions to take over.
Or maybe not?
So what happens when he goes away? Who is likely to take his spot? What will happen on the world stage?
The failure of the USA will put a limit on the power and appeal of the liberal factions.
People will push further for the socialism that helped them.
I’m not so convinced. Liberalism is seductive like a religion. The truth doesn’t matter to liberals nor the appeal of liberalism I think. It whispers in your ear begging you to dance. For some amount of people facts, logic, reasoning don’t really matter, it’s about emotions and the feel of a thing so these are vulnerable to emotional appeals and propaganda.
Many Chinese may also not see it as socialism that helped them but some special Chinese nationalism or believe their people are superior, that they accomplished it in-spite of socialism not because of it. Never under-estimate the human ability for self-deception.
Care should be taken. Given Xi was chosen in the first place there is good reason to be hopeful about the CPC’s abilities but danger continues to lurk.
Have you seen Chinese people speak of racial exeptionalism?
Chinese media phrasing things in terms of “see how our system has made us so successful” and “this system is why we are doing so much better”.
Not “We’re better because we’re Chinese”.
Not to insult you, but not listening to “facts, logic, reasoning” seems to me to describe yourself. I say this because you are applying the world of politics you know and are familiar with - outside of it’s context.
The world you know is one of racial supremacism, ethnonarcissism, idealism, lack of dialectical materialism.
Are we describing China? Is this how they teach people to think in China? If it is, then what is Chinese socialism?
Do you believe that China is a socialist country? Do you believe that China is a communist country?
Oh please.
There are people in China who are Chinese nationalists. Not necessarily along some sort of racialized supremacist lines as in the US but who are less communists and more nationalists and who in a hypothetical where a US blockade and missteps led to economic problems and suffering might easily turn on the party just as soon because the economic headwinds have changed and they no longer see the party as benefiting them. And there are a ton of fair weather communists who are so because it’s the path of least resistance and because they were educated in such. Such people at times get into various levels of leadership and such people at times also take the path of least resistance in engaging in corruption and taking money as we have seen.
To assert Chinese people are somehow special and the ‘white-brain-pan’ is the only one that can possibly be vulnerable to the siren song of liberalism is itself a racially reductive and problematic take. There are traitors within China including within the CPC as there were within the USSR and the party there. China has taken steps with lessons learned from the fall of the USSR to attempt to address many of these problems and that is good but given the amount of corruption Xi had to root out, the existence of liberal cliques, etc there are inevitably as part of China’s opening up necessary playing with fire economic liberalization and penetration by foreign capital (to secure that capital) those who feel a certain way and have not been necessarily purged but who fester, tolerated so as to not scare off foreign capital and economic partnership and only reigned in as Jack Ma was if they openly go too far against the party. This however says nothing to what some of these traitors may privately think but be smart enough not to give voice to at present. Rot starts small with little concessions. Kruschev did not set out to destroy communism or the USSR and there is more than one way to fell a tree.
What I am saying is it is the mandate of the party, the vanguard to maintain vigilance. To not grow slack, to not assume liberalism can be so easily extinguished as you do. It is a weed and it must be plucked and it must be understood it can sprout up time and again from apparently cleared soil and that the vigilance here will need to be a longer one.
Importantly the USA has not yet failed. It is the strongest empire in history with a lot of cultural hegemony still built in around the globe and seeped into a lot of thinking in ways people don’t even realize. It will likely be decades before the danger lessens significantly as that is how long it will take assume the Iran war really does bring US power and image low (a Suez Crisis moment) for this all to really fully manifest in the illusion and its remnants falling away. In that time China will almost certainly transition to a new leader. Like an injured scorpion it isn’t wise to count it out but be more cautious than ever in its death throes. Future generations next century may live free of this watchful vigilance if we are successful. But we owe it to all who have struggled not to presume too much too soon. Until the enemy is buried and long dead and discredited the risk remains and so must worry and watchfulness.
Great points all around.
Now that we are looking at an additional condition, let’s game it out?
How do economic headwinds change?
Scenario 1: War and global supply chain issues (the current problem)
In this situation we are seeing Chinese people look at the US as the source of the trouble.
War and fear makes people more conservative. They want to preserve the status quo and prevent loss. People rally around existing institutions.
Not to give any weight to horseshoe theory, but in China that would mean people digging their heels in for the communist system.
This last point is a conclusion on my part based on what science exists on human behaviour. If someone in China disputes this, let me know.
Scenario 2: Chinese government liberalizes.
This would create a circular argument, because the we would need the liberalization of the government to cause the circumstances that can bring about the liberalization of the government.
Is that something that can be seen occurring at the moment in China?
“At the moment” is a non-sequitur.
Xi Jinping isn’t dead yet. He is 73.
Average life expectancy in China is 79 years. We should adjust this number, since he is not the average person. I would suggest +1 Standard Deviation (SD) - but I can’t find that.
Absent of other information we are looking at.
At the rate things are going, where the world is looking to China rather than the US, where the world is turning away from the US, where we have a midterm election this year, where we have a full election 2 years from now, where Trump faces jail upon losing, where MAGA talks up a civil war, etc - do you think Chinese liberals are going to have an easy time promoting US-style politics?
Power faces many dynamics, and the global trend is away from liberalism.
You make some really good points, but I couldn’t help but laugh at:
The administration would still have that as a fear.
It’s part of the reason why Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Hunter.
But no one would go after Joe Biden hinself. It is literally baked into executive privilege as defined by the Supreme Court.
You have to understand, we struggle to bring even basic law enforcement officers to justice here in the states, the executive branch is both de-jure and de-facto off-limits, especially once they are out of office. If Nixon, Obama or H.W. Bush (or hell basically any sitting president in the last 130 years) didn’t serve a single day in jail, there is 0% chance that Donald Trump will. He is the Republican Party now and everyone knows it. To arrest him post-presidency is literally to incite civil war, and liberals are far too big on civility to invite that kind of strife.
Trump will issue blanket pardons to his family (well maybe not Eric or Don Jr.) and cronies, but he does not need to issue one for himself, because he is already covered.
As you speak to our ignorance of the Chinese system and ways of thinking, I implore you to understand your own ignorance in terms of how the American system operates, part of the reason it has stood for so long is because the elite political class are completely insulated from all consequences of their governance. They do not truely hold each other accountable, therefore there is no real elite infighting that causes the normal kind of cracks that could be exploited. They are ruthless and cynical, but only to those outside of their class, and in their class, only in so far as it is about internal jockeying for positions.
Just to be clear, I am Iranian and not Chinese.
I am not ignorant on this and I agree with your assessments.
Right. The various bourgeois factions protect each other from the consequences of corruption. The factions they represent (financials, big tech, military, big tech, agri, meat, ziolobby, retail, etc) don’t want a war amongst the politicians that can hurt their interests. The factions pay both parties.
The factions want a controlled political landscape to reduce risk and increase profits. Politicians from one party arresting another for representing factional interests isn’t possible*, because the other party is also getting paid by the same people - and was brought into power by the same people.
The hypothesis here is that if you personally went out and successfully got elected, that they might arrest you - because you wouldn’t fall within that dynamic.
But this dynamic doesn’t eliminate risk. There is no honour amongst thieves. People can push the envelope in their attempt to fuck over other politicians.
There is a limited number of seats. Not everyone gets in. Elections do happen, but everyone recognizes you need money and connections for favourable media and advertising. You need the sponsorship of a faction to make it. If you refuse the money of an organization, they will try to fuck you. If you refuse all the factions, they all try to fuck you.
It’s a completely bought and paid for election system, with conspiracies occurring within the electoral structure to illegally purge candidates who actually want to improve things.
But once you show that you are on team bourgeois and can rally votes - the money starts coming in. As they make bets on who wins.
So we have an inherent dynamic of competition and an inherit dynamic of cooperation.
*Trump and his team cannot be certain that the dynamic of cooperation will prevail over the dynamic of comptetition. Especially with how he set things up.
In the event of a loss in the elections, because of the stakes, they would be willing to take serious risks. We already saw this happen with January 6th.
This will happen again.
The very real risk of jail motivates more erratic behaviour, which undermines US political stability, which gives China more things to contrast itself with.
So I argue that my original statement is correct.
My apologies on the misidentification of your nationality, you simply speak of American politics like many Chinese people I know.
I completely, and absolutely, disagree.
You are completely mistaken on the nature of January 6th, with your revolutionary vision clouding your judgement and the appearance of events.
We do not know how to wage a real revolution, reactionary or otherwise, in this country. We have all been taught incorrectly, mostly from our spectator nature of color revolutions. We only know reformist politics, and spectacular actions, with no in-between. January 6th was a spectacular action, with no chance of actually accomplishing anything substantial. And the reforms came from the state and federal court appointments that Trump did.
Due to this, I am firmly of the opinion that we, at most, will experience the same “Will they, won’t they” cycle that we did after the first term, however, there is no way in hell Trump will spend a single day in prison.
Trump has capitulated to the only real, sustained power in Washington, the National Security/Military Industrial Complex. Therefore, he will be just fine.
I meant I’m not Chinese, as in I am not an authority figure commenting on my own culture. I believed I accidentally misled you, not that you made a mistake on that part.
That doesn’t mean his administration won’t be concerned about the potential for prosecution or about losing the elections and try to suspend them.
They want to cover their bases. My point is that covering their bases undermines the stability of the USA.
Mostly, it is clear that the full liberalized economic model (ala Japan, South Korea, and Singapore) that was the model that the IMF supposedly based their financial progress against, is clearly flawed (in that it doesn’t take into account the sheer amount of free money that was pumped into those economies to get them started, and that they are clearly slowing down or at a stand-still while China is continuing to accelerate, in spite of similar population demographics).
The success of several different versions of Socialism with __ characteristics is extremely compelling.
To be fair, the economy of Japan slowed down in large part due to the Plaza Accords handicapping economic development