Xi Jinping stood before a Democratic Life Meeting of his cadres in May 2014. The gathering in Lankao County, a six-hour drive south of Beijing, has historically been an exercise in self-reflection in a country not usually known for debate.
Those gathered were there to privately criticise the party and each other. Xi had become President by 2952 votes to one just a year earlier and had begun re-orienting China's dour and deferential administration into one that within less than a decade would take on the world.
"It must be clearly understood that the greatest national condition of China is the leadership of the Communist Party of China," Xi said, before ticking off China's push through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, three decades of reform and economic growth. "From one victory to another victory, from one success to another success, what else can shake our beliefs?''
Six years after the Lankao meeting, Xi is President for life and his belief remains steadfast. China is now engaged in simultaneous diplomatic, military and trade disputes across Europe, Asia, America and Australia.
At the centre of all these disputes is a China with territorial, technological and economic ambitions that are starting to match the size of its population and the weight of its history, what Xi has called the end of its 200-year eclipse and the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". It is no coincidence that excerpts from the Lankao speech and a dozen others were published on Wednesday in Qiushi, the Communist Party's main theoretical journal.
The world is bracing for more escalations that no longer come by the year or the month.
In one 48-hour period this week, Beijing traded tit-for-tat sanctions with Washington, slammed primaries held by Hong Kong pro-democracy parties as illegal, accused Britain of being a US lackey for banning its flagship telecommunications provider Huawei, confronted the economic fallout from a border dispute with India and warned its citizens they could have their property seized in Australia as diplomatic relations between the two countries evaporate.
A rising China now faces a world that is determined to constrain it. Where will it end?
"Maybe a military confrontation in the South China Sea or Taiwan, or a drastic decoupling of the US and China causing great havoc to the world economy," Jia Qingguo, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conferencee, says from Beijing.
The Professor of International Studies at Peking University accuses Washington of fuelling anti-China sentiment, arguing it is electorally convenient for US President Donald Trump to generate a crisis ahead of the November election amid the fallout from his administration's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US lobbied strongly for Britain to follow Australia and ban Huawei over national security concerns and led international condemnation of Hong Kong before pushing two US Navy aircraft carriers into the South China Sea last week.
US Attorney-General William Barr then accused Hollywood, Disney, Google and Apple of "collaborating" with the Chinese government by censoring films and being "all too willing" to work with Beijing.
The dispute ventured into the absurd on Wednesday when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo posted a photo of Mercer, his dog, playing "with her favourite toys", including Winnie the Pooh, a nickname for Xi that is censored in China.
Jia argues robust support from Washington has emboldened India, which is now pushing back against China's incursions on a disputed border between the two nuclear-armed nations. India's Ministry of Information has banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat, after a groundswell of public anger over the deaths of 20 soldiers in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese forces in the Himalayas in June.
"Why does India all of a sudden take such a tough position? I think one of the reasons is they see they have the backing of the Trump administration," Jia says. "They think they can do it, but it's very dangerous."
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this week the US had made an "ill-informed strategic miscalculation" that was fraught with emotions and "McCarthyist bigotry".
“It seems as if every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student co-operation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda,” he said.
Jia warns this tit-for-tat approach could see China withdraw from the rules-based international order. "If the US wants to make China the enemy, why should China not engage in an arms race?
"People are very upset," he says. "I don't think China can change people's minds. I think a crisis will."
Jia's assessment of a US-led blockade is not shared by the Morrison government, Britain or increasingly, members of the European Union, which have come to their own conclusions on China's more assertive diplomacy, despite up to 53 countries including Cambodia, Pakistan and Syria backing China's position at the United Nations.
Germany has taken a keen interest in Australia's fraying diplomatic relationship with Beijing, according to sources in Canberra, as Europe hardens its position on China in response to its crackdown on Hong Kong, the historically liberal territory that for more than a century functioned as a conduit between East and West.
Berlin, which has long maintained a China principle of "change through trade" is now leading calls for the European Union to "take a strong stand".
It is grappling with its own debate over Huawei after Britain banned the Shenzhen giant from its 5G network this week over concerns its technology could be used to spy on its citizens.
More than any other company, Huawei and its fellow Chinese globetrotter ByteDance, owner of TikTok, face the dilemma of China's engagement with the world.
They oscillate between two spheres, two systems of government and two enormous markets. TikTok has more than 1.6 million users in Australia alone and 2 billion worldwide. It has an equally popular Chinese version called Douyin, which has publicised crackdowns on protesters in Hong Kong and suspended users for speaking Cantonese, the form of Chinese used in the city.
In Washington, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is investigating if the millions of videos uploaded to TikTok daily could give the Chinese government access to a vast facial recognition database.
The same backdoor security threat posed by Chinese multinationals and their state-linked companies is driving the fear of Huawei and its role in the most important global technology in a generation - the 5G network that will connect most of our lives to the internet.
Simon Lacey, the former vice-president of trade facilitation and market access for Huawei Technologies in China, is now a senior lecturer in international trade at the University of Adelaide. Last week he acknowledged Huawei's inherent contradiction.
"In China, it had to demonstrate unwavering loyalty to the goals of the Communist Party leadership. Outside China, it had to argue that it had little or nothing to do with the Chinese state," he said in a piece first published in The Conversation.
"The limited space it has to operate is becoming increasingly narrow, to the point where in many markets it is no longer able to appear to be both."
Xu Xiaonian, an honorary professor at the China Europe International Business School, says he has seen the Chinese government take an increasingly assertive role in business in the past few years "as the state advances where the private sector retreats".
"We would hope that we can stop that trend and reverse it," Xu told the Lowy Institute this week. "I don’t see any sign of the policies moving in that direction, which is very unfortunate."
Huang Yiping, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the People's Bank of China, says China has been a main beneficiary of the globalisation process, but partial decoupling of its economy from the US is probably the best it can hope for.
"My own recommendation, and that of most Chinese economists, is that China should continue with an open-door policy," says the professor of economics at Peking University. "There is still a large rest-of-the-world but the problem is even this rest-of-the-world is becoming much more uncertain."
Xu doesn't agree that confrontation between the two superpowers is inevitable.
"It is possible to avoid that confrontation. In history we have a precedent. Germany under Otto von Bismarck successfully avoided confrontation with France and the UK. Why today we cannot do that?"
This is true but the analogy has a problem. Germany's first chancellor also annexed Alsace-Lorraine. Two decades after his reign the world would be at war.
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