Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. November 11, 2021 Where Xi's China Is Heading The Chinese Communist Party has paved the way for President Xi Jinping to continue his rule into a third term, adopting a resolution that places Xi alongside Mao Zedong in modern China's history and praises him, in lofty terms, as embodying an important phase in its arc. The party says Xi's vision is essential—but what is that vision, exactly?
In the West, much attention is given to China's economic ascendance, growing international assertiveness, and tension with the US over Taiwan. But in China, Xi's vision has entailed sweeping controls aimed at remaking the country's economy and society.
"[W]e are deep into the 'shou' (tightening) phase of the latest 'fang-shou cycle' (放收, loosening and tightening cycle) in Chinese politics, with no end in sight," Xibai Xu recently wrote for ChinaFile, in a roundup of expert commentaries. The trend "started in 2013 with the crackdown on civil society, feminists, artists, and foreign influence, and has contributed to the emergence of a highly nationalistic, patriarchal, socially conservative, and austere social atmosphere." It has continued, Xu writes, in "what analysts lump together as a 'regulatory crackdown'"—but what is really a broad agenda aimed at the Communist Party's "biggest concerns: reducing inequality, protecting state/regime security, and maintaining tight control over ideology and culture."
Regulation of tech firms, for instance, may look like governmental beef with a particular sector. The erasure of one of China's biggest movie stars from the Internet may seem like a mere flexing of social control. But as Xu and others have noted, those moves have accompanied real-estate regulations, an attempt to curtail online gaming, and efforts to tone down China's intense "996" (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days of the week) work culture. All of that, analysts have written, is aimed at reshaping Chinese society.
As for the goal, in a long essay in the magazine Palladium last month, N.S. Lyons argued it's about halting China's transformation into the worst aspects of the US, as seen by the latter's critics. In social and economic terms, Lyons writes, China has become as "thoroughly liberalized" as America, and Xi's domestic agenda of "common prosperity" is a heavy-handed effort to stop a perceived slide toward inequality and social disintegration. Europe's Newest Migrant Crisis Deepens The migration crisis on the Poland–Belarus border continues to worsen, as Frederik Pleitgen, Claudia Otto, and Tamara Qiblawi report for CNN. Poland has refused entry to migrants camped there, while the European Union has accused Belarus of manufacturing the crisis by importing migrants from the Middle East and encouraging them to cross illegally into EU territory, ostensibly to poke Europe after it levied sanctions over Belarus's alleged human-rights abuses at home. (Belarus's government denies those claims.) As Christina Hebel writes for Der Spiegel, if this is indeed a geopolitical stunt, migrants are the ones suffering and dying as a result of it. 'De Klerk the Pragmatist' After the death of F.W. de Klerk—South Africa's last White, apartheid-era leader—Marc Lacey's New York Times obituary traces de Klerk's push for apartheid's end, noting he made the ultimately successful argument in practical rather than moral terms.
At The Conversation, Christi van der Westhuizen writes that "[f]ew recent historical figures in South Africa provoke more divergent views." Though he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, it was "de Klerk the pragmatist" who helped usher the end of apartheid, van der Westhuizen writes—pointing to the pressure of international sanctions, the loss of apartheid's "hold on Afrikaner intelligentsia," and de Klerk and his negotiating team being "swept along by the momentum of events" toward an embrace of liberal-democratic ideas. Has Russia Reached a New Peak of Repression? "According to Memorial, a human-rights group, Russia has more than twice as many political prisoners than at the end of the Soviet era," The Economist writes, outlining domestic political repression under President Vladimir Putin, its likely continuance, and its dependence on perceived conflict with the West.
"For Mr Putin, repression does not have a reverse gear," the magazine writes. "He will not be able to restore the prosperity that helped buoy his ratings during his first decade in power. … Hence the logic of confrontation. Soviet rulers waged the cold war from atop the ideology of communism. Russia's securocrats assert that traditional values of family, culture and history are being corrupted by the liberal and licentious West and that only they can defend them. Fighting back against the West lets the Kremlin portray all those who oppose it—journalists, human-rights lawyers and activists—as foreign agents. In this way, Mr Putin's regime depends on anti-Western ideology for its politics just as it depends on oil and gas for its prosperity." |
