– During Xi’s period, China has acquired more economic and military power compared to other countries than ever before in modern history. So says senior adviser at the Department of Defense Studies (IFS) Jo Inge Bekkevold. Xi has had full control over the direction of the party congress in Beijing. For Xi, the congress has had one goal. To secure a third term as China’s supreme leader. Xi Jinping has ruled China for ten years. Now he wants to get the party congress to give him another five-year term. Photo: Mark Schiefelbein / AP Five new years with Xi is far more than a mere continuation. Countries as far apart as Vietnam and Norway will be forced to formulate a new foreign policy. news has asked six analysts what Xi’s leadership means for China and for the world. The six see China from different corners of the globe: Moscow, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Warsaw, Oslo and Nairobi. – Xi is more ambitious and confident than his predecessors. Something that shows in his foreign policy. He does not shy away from cult worship of his own person. In the post-Mao era, this has been banned in China. The management style is micromanagement. He wants to be chairman of “all committees”, says Bich Tran. Bich Tran is a young Vietnamese researcher associated with the Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. Another China Bich Tran emphasizes that Xi is gathering power in his own person at a time when both China has become an economic superpower. – Xi Jinping is often compared to Mao Zedong. There is a big difference. China under Mao’s rule was a poor developing country and completely different from China under Xi’s rule. This means that Xi’s foreign policy has far greater consequences for the world than Mao’s policy. After Mao’s death in 1976, it has been a basic rule that a president and a prime minister sit for only two terms, each of five years. Xi Jinping is now putting that rule aside. Mao and Xi Jinping are two of the most powerful leaders in modern China. In a souvenir shop in Beijing, tourists find versions of both. Photo: GREG BAKER / AFP – Xi is likely to rule for another 10 years, until the 22nd Party Congress in 2032. He could further worsen relations between China and the US and with US allies in the EU and Asia. That’s what Willy Lam says. He is a professor at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and among the most outspoken and high-profile followers of Chinese politics. Polish political scientist Marcin Kaczmarski shares Lam’s views on Xi and the West. He believes Xi can move in the same direction as Putin. – Many predicted when Putin was re-elected in 2012 that he would tone down his anti-Western rhetoric and be more cooperative. We saw the opposite, even before the invasion of Crimea, says Marcin Kaczmarski. He is head of the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw and is an expert on both Russia and China. The Polish political scientist Marcin Kaczmarski believes that Xi Jinping will continue as China’s president for many more years. Photo: private A wall forged by 1.4 billion Chinese Under Xi, China has officially abolished poverty in the country. The military and especially the navy have been heavily equipped. The country has quite literally made technological quantum leaps. Reunification with Taiwan – if necessary by force – has been moved higher up the agenda. The rhetoric about breaking America’s global dominance has become far tougher. – There is one key word in particular that describes Xi Jinping’s leadership in the last decade; power. – Xi has strengthened the Communist Party’s position, placed great emphasis on anti-corruption campaigns, and instilled a sense of pride in the population linked to China’s emergence as a great power, says Jo Inge Bekkevold. Sun Lijun was formerly the vice minister of public security, but on September 23 he was sentenced to death. He was accused of leading a criminal gang made up of public servants. Photo: AP On 1 July last year, the Communist Party marked its own 100th anniversary at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. – We will never allow any foreign power to bully, oppress or subject us to their rule. Anyone who tries will be crushed by a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese. Xi Jinping addresses the audience when the Communist Party of China celebrated 100 years in July 2021. Photo: WANG ZHAO / AFP The words are from Xi Jinping. In front of him stood 70,000 attendees. At no point during their leader’s speech did people cheer louder. Xi has set the goal that by 2049 China will be reborn as a powerful nation in all areas. The challenges are many: Global price growth, energy crisis and competition for food and raw materials China’s continued covid-19 restrictions Russia’s war in Ukraine Unfinished technology and trade war between the US and China. Xi creates enormous expectations and cultivates nationalism at home in China. Xi knows well that the drop is high. – Xi’s two biggest challenges in the next few years will be, firstly, to maintain sustainable growth in the Chinese economy, and secondly, to avoid an escalation of the superpower rivalry with the USA, says Jo Inge Bekkevold. A new empire of roads and railways China is challenging the world order as defined by the US and the West. The world is not the same as it was after World War II and the end of the Cold War. Nowhere is this easier to see than Africa. – I don’t think most people in Africa are particularly concerned with Xi, but with what the country of China will offer them in the years to come. That’s what Dan Banik says. He is professor of political science at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He is also the editor and host of the podcast In Pursuit of Development. When news contacts him, he is on his way back from a research stay in Kenya. Dan Banik is professor of political science at the University of Oslo. He says China is investing heavily in building roads and railways in many African countries. Photo: private China has given many countries that felt forgotten and their needs ignored an alternative. They now have a negotiating card in the face of the West. An important tool for China’s foreign ambitions is the Belt and Road Initiative. Abbreviated BRI and also called the New Silk Road. In August, the new road opened between the center of the Kenyan capital Nairobi and the airport. China has spent 668 million dollars on the project, according to the South China Morning Post. The toll booth at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi in Kenya has a distinctly Chinese feel. The road has been planned, financed and built by the Chinese. The new road is part of China’s Belt and Road initiative. The aim is to develop extensive trade routes in the world that will ensure the transport of goods from China. In neighboring countries, across the whole of Central Asia and all the way to Europe, China is building railways. In Africa and Latin America, China is building ports, airports, roads, high-speed trains, power plants, factories, housing, new city centers, mobile networks and government quarters. The African Union is an attempt to create something similar to the EU for Africa. The headquarters in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia was built by China. – It will be interesting to see if the West decides to offer increased funding to build infrastructure in Africa. For the time being, it does not look as if Western firms are able to match Chinese firms on price and quick completion of projects, says Banik. Obstacles in the tracks The Ukraine war complicates China’s relationship with Europe. It also forces China to change its own plans. A train line from Chengdu in western China to Lodz in Poland is now less lucrative because it goes through Russia. – New railway lines may be laid further south in Europe to avoid the route through Russia. It could lead to changed relations between China, Bulgaria, Romania and other Balkan countries. There could be more Chinese activity in South-East Europe, says Marcin Kaczmarski. – Eastern and Central Europe are far down on China’s priority list going forward. Xi has stuck to the “borderless friendship” between China and Russia that they declared just before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics and just over two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. New balance Russia is important to Xi and China because they both seek political partners who stand up to “the US’s attempt to impose its values and a Western democracy on others”. – China will continue to be attractive to those countries that see their “raison d’etre” or the reason they exist at all in anti-Western thinking. That’s what Nadezhda Arbatova says. She heads the department for European studies at IMEO, a think tank based in Moscow. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in September in Uzbekistan. Both presidents want to provide a counterweight to the United States. Photo: Sergei Bobylev / AP IMEO collaborates with both national and regional Russian authorities and aims for their independent analyzes to provide a basis for political decisions. – A stronger and authoritarian China with imperialist tendencies, an ambitious foreign policy and complex domestic political problems will pose a security threat to the West and China’s neighbours, says Arbatova. Willy Lam predicts a China that, in its search for friends, will instead be left more alone. – Xi’s efforts to form an axis of “authoritarian” states including Russia, Kazakhstan, Central Asian states, Iran, Pakistan and even North Korea could contribute to China being isolated by both the US and EU countries. The same will happen in relations with Asian countries with border disputes with Beijing. Xi and Biden have not met physically as presidents. But both have been vice-presidents and met in the US in 2012. Photo: Damian Dovarganes / AP Vietnam and China disagree about borders in the sea and about oil and gas resources. Both countries are ruled by communist parties. Vietnam’s communist guerrilla Vietcong fought against American soldiers throughout the 1960s and 70s. Now, however, Vietnam’s leaders may feel that the US is a better alternative than China. – Under Xi, it is unlikely that the tension between China and the US will decrease. This will undermine the wishes of countries in the Pacific region not to choose sides. China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea has intensified anti-China sentiment in the Vietnamese population. It will continue to push Vietnam closer to the US, says Tran Bich. What is felt at close range in Vietnam will also be felt in Norwegian politics. – Xi’s next term will increasingly be characterized by China’s superpower rivalry with the United States. With the USA as our most important security policy guarantor, Norway naturally falls on the USA’s side in this rivalry, says Jo Inge Bekkevold. Norway may be forced to be more cautious. – Norwegian China policy in the next few years will therefore essentially be about finding a new balance between integration and cooperation with China on the one hand and shielding from Chinese influence on the other, says Bekkevold.
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Xi challenges the world as we know it – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
