The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

China’s Great Wall and the Englishman who has dedicated his life to preserving it. By Thomas Bird

Briton William Lindesay, who has dedicated his life to preserving the Great Wall, in China.

William Lindesay has run the length of the wall, documented its destruction and discovered a new dynasty of builders
After three decades of wall-based research and adventures in China, he and his sons have turned their attention to Mongolia.
Wall to wall: I was born in 1956, in Wallasey, England. If you take a ferry across the Mersey, as the song goes, you’re there. Significantly, the ferry goes past Liverpool’s Shanghai Bund-like waterfront to a place with “wall” in its name, so perhaps I was destined for China.

I was schooled at St Aidan’s where the headmaster, Reverend J.P. Macmillan, or “Maccie” as he was known to us, maintained an unconventional approach to teaching. Every week we’d go on excursions, visiting churches, castles or farms. This engendered an appreciation of learning by experience – fieldwork, essentially.

We were also taught subjects without boundaries: history, geography and science were fused into one, which has helped me take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the Great Wall. Maccie always told us to have three books by our bedsides, a Bible, a prayer book and an atlas. I first saw the wall marked as a symbol in my bedside atlas. I must have been 11 when I told my class that I was going to China to see the Great Wall.

Egyptian detour: After visiting the British Museum to see the Tutankhamen exhibition, in 1972, I got an early taste for Egyptology. At university in Liverpool, however, I chose to study geography and geology. I graduated in 1979 and managed to get a job in an oilfield in the Gulf of Suez. We did a 28 days on and off schedule.

Lindesay as a child with trophies won on a school sport’s day, in 1967. Photo: courtesy of William Lindesay

When the oil rig workers went home, I explored the monuments of Egypt, where I was eventually adopted by two American archaeologists. They loved what they did, whereas most of the oil rig workers hated their job. This made me imagine a life where I could do what I love and make a living.

Run, Lindesay, run: One of my early passions was running. I used to clean up on sports day. My two brothers and I got caught up in the marathon fever of the mid-1980s. In 1984, my brother Nick suggested we go on a “real” cross-country run along Hadrian’s Wall (across northern England).

We ran England’s Roman great wall from end to end over a long weekend. It was tough but a great experience. It was during a break that Nick suddenly said to me, “Hey Will, you should go to China and do the same on the Great Wall …” I had all but forgotten my boyhood dream. Why not, I thought? Mao was dead. Deng was opening up China. I had no loves or loans to hold me back.

Try, try again: 1986 was a disaster. During my first attempt to run the Great Wall, I got lost, contracted dysentery and got a stress fracture in the foot. I was also arrested for trespassing in closed areas.

In 1987, I returned to China for my second attempt and planned things better. I covered 2,470km of the route. It was a huge physical challenge as well as a protracted political battle: I was stopped by the police nine times for trespassing. In Shaanxi province, I was arrested twice in the same week in the same county. They deported me.
I went to Hong Kong, changed my passport and returned. But a whirlwind romance kept me upbeat about China. In the course of being deported, I exchanged a few words with a girl in my hotel in Beijing. On my return, I knocked at her office door and invited her to dinner. It was love at first sight for me.

Lindesay and Wu Qi, in Xian, in 1992. Photo: courtesy William Lindesay

Wu Qi refused my first proposal saying I was a foreigner and marrying was almost impossible. The second time, she said she liked me but her parents wouldn’t agree to it. The third time, she said, “Let’s try.” My achievements in 1987 – the first foot traverse of the wall by a foreigner and a cracking wife – were by the skin of my teeth. Wu Qi and I married in Xian in 1988 and my first book, Alone on the Great Wall, was published in 1989.

Going wild: After a stint in the UK, we returned to China in 1990 and I took a job teaching in Xian. I retraced 1,200km of the epic sections of the Long March in 1990 and 1991, which resulted in my second book, Marching with Mao: A Biographical Journey (1993). But I yearned to get back to the wall.

I eventually got a job at the China Daily in Beijing and bought a bicycle so I could visit the wall every weekend. Qi had our first son, Jimmy, in 1994, but I was spending so much time at the wall we were often apart. So in 1998 we bought a derelict farmhouse beside the wall and Qi organised local workers to do it up.

We began our WildWall Weekends in 1999. When we had our second son, Tommy, in 2000, I thought it was high time I spent all my time doing what I loved – only things related to the Great Wall. I left my copy-editing job and WildWall Weekends became my full-time job.

Running on the Great Wall, in 1987. Photo: courtesy of William Lindesay

Wall guard: Around the turn of the millennium,

littering was becoming a problem
. I called up the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel (in Beijing) to ask if they could sponsor a litter clean-up. We took 117 people to the Jinshanling section, including 10 journalists. The following week, the event hit the headlines.

With the cuttings, I went to see Peng Changxin, director of the State Bureau of Cultural Relics. He told me there was no need for specific laws to protect the wall beyond the rebuilt tourist sites because most of it was inaccessible. I realised the Great Wall was an outdoor museum without a curator. I saw it as an historical landscape, transformed from defence to wilderness. I deemed its surroundings to be as important as its length.

The wall had been built from materials sourced or made nearby. Villages close by were part of its cultural landscape – many had buildings made of Great Wall bricks. Villagers had valuable oral histories to tell. So I invented the term “Wilderness Wall”, which I abbreviated to Wild Wall in 1994 to highlight its plight, and differentiate it from the “tourist wall”, which was rebuilt and displayed the Unesco brass plaque. It was the wall that had been claimed by nature since its abandonment in 1644 I was intent on saving.

The other William: William Geil traversed the wall (on horseback and foot) in 1908. Through his photos I realised Geil had seen a much more complete wall than I had in 1987. In 2003, I decided to spend a few weeks every spring and autumn looking for Geil’s locations and photographing them.

What it showed me was often heartbreaking. Towers had been reduced to rubble, pristine “wallscapes” had been encroached upon by tacky developments. I became determined to ensure a better future by getting enough pictures together to show how the Great Wall had changed. I aimed to inspire its protection; to arouse the national consciousness. The Beijing government provided space for an exhibition at the Capital Museum in 2007.

Flying the wall: In summer 2015, my sons, Jimmy and Tommy, asked for a drone. I’d always dreamed of seeing the wall from the air and their first flight convinced me flying should be the theme of our summer 2016 road trip along the wall to celebrate the 30th anniversary of my arrival in China.

When I realised I’d be 60 that year I decided we would try to fit in all my favourite, mainly wild places, for 60 days. The footage was produced as a 90-minute package screened on BBC Four. People can hardly believe the documentary was the work of two lads, aged 21 and 16.

Beyond heaven’s domain: I was aware my Great Wall studies had been one-sided, given that it is the product of a two-sided conflict between the nomadic northerners and the Chinese. Sometime around 2003, an old friend, Graham Taylor, brought me a gift from Mongolia: an atlas of Genghis Khan. I noticed a symbol named in the legend as the Wall of Genghis Khan.

Lindesay and his youngest son, Tommy, practise archery near their Beijing home with traditional Mongolian bows. Photo: courtesy of William Lindesay

In 2011, I was introduced to a Mongolian geographer who had seen Khan’s wall in the southern province of Omnogovi, and he agreed to lead me into the middle of the Gobi Desert. We found the wall near the border and had ministerial permission to research there.

My findings, backed by radiocarbon dating, proved the wall there was built between 1040 and 1160, almost certainly by the Tangut people of the Xixia or Western Xia, a border regime that was attacked by Khan’s cavalry for 20 years, until his death in 1227. The Western Xia had not previously been considered a wall building dynasty but my findings provided convincing scientific evidence they built a wall to fend off Mongolian attacks.

Two more expeditions to the Great Wall outside China followed, with my sons assisting me in the field, measuring, filming, droning and camping. We’ve all become quite taken with Mongolia, from archery to Mongolian “salad” (assorted offal). It has reshaped my understanding of the wall.

The coronavirus pandemic is the breakthrough Xi Jinping has been waiting for. And he’s making his move.By Terry Glavin

Chinese President Xi Jinping visits an industrial park, which produces high-end auto parts and molds, in Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province, March 29
The Chinese state is committing vast resources to a hybrid strategy of intensified propaganda and information control in lockstep with an aggressive Russian-style disinformation effort.

The plague that broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan last December has now spread to the four corners of the earth, and its coming ravages can only be glimpsed in the limited forecasting capacities of epidemiology. It’s a science that relies on predictive analytics and models that can be skewed by any number of confounding variables, so there’s little certainty about what’s in store for us all.

As the geopolitical upheavals set off by the pandemic shudder with a force without precedent since the Second World War, some things, however, are clear and plain. China’s most draconian lockdowns have been lifted. Beijing is claiming victory over the plague. And the Chinese Communist Party is seizing what its senior officials are calling the “opportunity” of the pandemic to realize the party’s long-game objective of fully eclipsing North America and Europe in the global order.

Battered by the worst first-quarter economic performance since 1976, the Chinese economy is now being shifted into hyperdrive. Production is already back on track to achieve Beijing’s goal of making 2020 the year the country’s annual Gross Domestic Product doubles in size from 2010 to $13.1 trillion. But Beijing isn’t just doubling down on its usual methods, which involve constraining access to China’s growing markets while securing technological and global supply-chain dominance in critical trade sectors, and otherwise resorting to crude foreign-policy strong-arm tactics to get its way.

What’s new is that the Chinese state is committing vast resources to a hybrid strategy of intensified propaganda and information control in lockstep with an aggressive Russian-style disinformation effort. Aimed almost entirely at western audiences, the effort takes its cues from several Kremlin-backed operations, most obviously the barrage of fabricated “news” unleashed on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Experts in the field say Beijing isn’t just selling a “narrative” anymore. The new strategy is intended to spread chaos and confusion and incite mistrust of governments in democratic countries. According to an analysis undertaken by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Beijing is adopting “increasingly aggressive tactics and techniques” and rapidly ramping up its messaging on social media platforms, often cross-pollinating with Russian and Iranian disinformation efforts and amplifying conspiracy theories from fringe third-party websites.

“China’s more confrontational posture on COVID-19 represents a clear departure from its past behavior,” the ASD analysis concludes. “We have been able to see, in near-real time, Chinese state-backed media and government interlocutors borrowing a page from the Russian playbook in an attempt to influence global public opinion.”

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the breakthrough Xi Jinping, China’s all-powerful paramount leader, has been waiting for. And he’s making his move.

While the Chinese government’s internal statistics are routinely questioned by outside analysts, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology credibly reports that roughly 75 per cent of small and medium-sized businesses across the country have already resumed production. According to MIIT deputy minister Xin Guobin, even Hubei province, which had been hit hardest by the COVID-19 outbreak, is already back up and running. Roughly 95 percent of companies with annual industrial revenues of at least $4 million have resumed production.

Meanwhile, most of the world’s advanced economies are being sequestered in a state of suspended animation that is expected to last at least several months, or until a vaccine for the COVID-19 disease is developed, which is expected to take at least a year.

The world’s liberal democracies are scrambling to “plank the curve”—a necessary public-health strategy to flatten and drive down the rate of infections so that hospitals are not overwhelmed to the point of collapse. In order to enforce and maintain the social and physical isolation the curve-planking strategy requires, most western governments are devoting hitherto unimaginable resources to the building of economic life-support systems.

The House of Commons has authorized $107 billion in emergency aid and economic stimulus, and cabinet has been granted the authority to borrow up to $350 billion to cope with the pandemic. The White House signed off on a US$2 trillion relief bill. France has committed €350 billion ($547 billion) in direct relief, tax refunds and bank loan guarantees. The United Kingdom’s bailouts, wage guarantees and tax deferrals rack up to £458 billion ($812 billion).

According to an analysis by Horizon Advisory, a consultancy that investigates Chinese policy on behalf of corporations, investors and government agencies in the U.S., China’s central planners are taking every advantage of the democratic world’s predicament. “Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems,” the Horizon Advisory analysts conclude.

“Beijing used the opening presented by the 2008 economic downturn to reach parity; to position itself as an alternative world leader. In COVID-19, Beijing sees the chance to win.”

With a GDP still at least 25 percent larger than China’s, the United States is still the world’s preeminent superpower, but the COVID-19 crisis “accelerates the process” that Beijing has put in place to overtake the U.S.—it will allow China “to claim market share across the globe and across strategic sectors as the rest of the world shuts down.”

A key focus of Beijing’s strategy for global dominance is an information technology infrastructure that is already being exported around the world, mostly through Huawei Technologies, China’s “national champion” telecom giant.

So far the “Five Eyes” security partnership of the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada has mostly resisted Beijing’s moves to assert dominance in fifth-generation (5G) technology infrastructure. But just barely. The U.S., Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei from their 5G internet connectivity systems and the U.K. has tentatively decided to allow Huawei to take up only a third of its 5G outer edges. But Canada remains paralyzed.

A decision was supposed to be forthcoming from Ottawa before the last federal election. But Beijing’s hostage-diplomacy imprisonment of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, to punish Canada for acting on a U.S. extradition warrant and detaining Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, has left Ottawa fearful of Beijing’s wrath.

And now, Beijing is planning an end-run around the “Five Eyes” alliance altogether.

China’s Communist Party leadership and Huawei have teamed up to effectively take over the architecture of the global internet with a proposal to the International Telecommunications Union, one of four major UN agencies that China now controls. Backed by Russia, and with support anticipated from several African countries that have benefited from Huawei’s largesse, the Huawei plan is co-sponsored by two of China’s state-owned telecom corporations and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The proposed new system would be more centralized, top-down and readily controlled by authoritarian UN member states, according to an analysis prepared for NATO by the cyber security company Oxford Information Labs. Obtained by the Financial Times, the analysis warns that the Huawei plan poses grave threats to national security and raises human-rights implications for all internet users. Beijing hopes to push the restructuring through at the ITU, currently headed up by Chinese telecommunications engineer Houlin Zhao, by November.

In the meantime, Beijing is relying on its multi-pronged, multimedia propaganda and disinformation campaign to achieve two immediate purposes. The first is to dismiss, deny and deflect away from the irrefutable evidence of the Communist Party’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. The second is to portray China, in contrast to Donald Trump’s divided and dysfunctional United States, as the world’s saviour, rushing to the rescue of plague-afflicted countries with expertise, money and medical equipment.

It has been widely reported that on March 12, Zhao Lijian, a senior spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, began circulating an insinuation that the U.S. military somehow smuggled the coronavirus into Wuhan. In subsequent posts, Zhao directed his Twitter followers to Montreal’s Centre for Research on Globalization—a crank website notorious for trafficking in outlandish “anti-imperialist” conspiracy theories—which had been circulating the claim. The ministry’s senior spokesperson, Hua Chunying, followed suit, as did several Chinese “news” organizations and diplomats.

But less widely noticed is the origin of President Trump’s scandalously reckless claim during a February 26 press briefing that COVID-19 is comparable to the common flu, and “we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.” This is the deadliest piece of disinformation about the coronavirus in circulation. It was given its earliest boost on February 3 at a formal press briefing in Beijing convened by the Chinese foreign ministry’s Hua Chunying.

Hua made the claim that day in the course of praising Canada for allowing flights from China to continue arriving at Canadian airports. Hua singled out Health Minister Patty Hadju for breaking with the U.S., which had shut down air traffic from China the day before, as had several other countries. “Canada believes the ban of entry has no basis, which is a sharp contrast to the U.S. behaviours,” Hua said, citing statistics intended to illustrate that “the U.S. flu” was far more lethal than COVID-19.

Trump repeated what might have been the single most devastating piece of disinformation on coronavirus: that it is comparable to the common flu (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

On Feb. 6, Hua continued to downplay the presence of a lethal virus in Wuhan, claiming that “the current pneumonia outbreak in China” was nowhere near as serious as the “seasonal influenza in the U.S.,” and that travel bans were unnecessary, and opposed by the World Health Organization. The travel bans had “sowed panic among the public” and “gravely disrupted normal personnel exchanges, international cooperation and order of the international market of air transportation.”

It was in these first two weeks of February—when China was still circulating disinformation to the effect that COVID-19 was comparable to the seasonal flu—that Canada dug in its heels, insisting that there was no cause to stop incoming fights from China. For being so agreeable, Health Minister Patty Hadju and Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne were treated to a flurry of flattering commentary in the Chinese state media and in Beijing’s official foreign ministry statements.

The role of the World Health Organization in recirculating Being’s self-exculpating propaganda has come under particular scrutiny. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has lavished praise on Beijing’s handling of the outbreak, going out of his way to support Xi Jinping’s insistence that any precautionary travel restrictions would be an unacceptable encumbrance to China’s economy. John Mackenzie, a member of the WHO’s emergency committee, has called China’s conduct—its delays, its suppression of data—”reprehensible.”

The WHO’s disinformation deference to Beijing went to such absurd extremes that its own official guidance against resorting to traditional herbal remedies to treat COVID-19 was quietly ditched to assuage Xi Jinping, who had been instructing Chinese health officials to speed up tests of drugs that combine Chinese traditional herbal medicine with “western” medicine. The Chinese version of the WHO’s list of ineffective remedies was amended to cut references to traditional medicine, while the English version remained intact – and later, reference to traditional medicine was struck from the English list as well. An online petition calling on Tedros to resign has gathered 702,498 signatures.

Canada also went to some extremes. In a Xinhua news service account of his February 14 meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference, Champagne is quoted as saying that Canada would stand firmly with the Chinese people in the fight against “the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic,” and this: “Unlike some other countries, Canada has never stopped normal exchanges with China and opposes any discriminatory practice.”

In return, Wang Yi praised Canada’s “rational, calm and scientific attitude” and promised better days to come in the fractured Canada-China diplomatic relationship. “China is willing to take this opportunity to enhance communication with the Canadian side and jointly solve existing bilateral problems so as to bring China-Canada relations and cooperation in various fields back onto the track for sound and stable development at an early date,” Wang pledged.

Early on, Champagne was upbeat about Beijing’s polite tone. There was some “healthy diplomacy” in play, Champagne said. Canada was raising the matter of Kovrig and Spavor, and China was raising the business about Meng Wanzhou. “At least it allows us to talk more often.”

Nothing has come of it. Canada had served Beijing’s propaganda purposes. Canada attempted to impose effective screening measures at Canada’s airports, but they consisted mostly of requesting voluntary declarations from travellers about where they were coming from and how they were feeling, and having Canadian Border Services Agency keep an eye out for anyone who looked ill. Canada did not join 80 other countries in banning travel from China until a blanket ban on almost all foreign arrivals was imposed March 16.

But while Champagne and Wang were exchanging pleasantries, a massive new propaganda machine involving at least 10,000 Twitter accounts kicked into gear. Most of them are fake. Many of them are hacked accounts. All of them have ties to the Chinese government. And all of them are devoted to spreading the word about Beijing’s gallant struggle with the coronavirus, and Beijing’s generosity and solidarity with all those countries that had been waiting in vain for leadership from Trump’s America.

The machine was brought to light last week in a lengthy investigation undertaken by the independent American journalists’ consortium ProPublica. The machine had been assembled last year to do Beijing’s propaganda bidding during the mass uprising in Hong Kong, but on January 29, the network shifted its focus to propaganda and disinformation about COVID-19.

It was the Wall Street Journal that first reported the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. That was January 7, two days before Chinese authorities publicly confirmed it. An estimated five million people left Wuhan after the virus first appeared in December, and before Wuhan was locked down January 23.

China revoked the press credentials of three Wall Street Journal reporters on February 19, on the pretext that the Communist Party leadership had taken offence at an opinion essay the newspaper had published. A month later, Beijing announced that it was revoking the credentials of journalists with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times—the largest expulsion of foreign journalists since the days of Mao Zedong. The pretext was the Trump administration’s payroll cap on four Chinese state-owned media platforms in the U.S., reducing their staff from 160 to 100.

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders Organization has documented 452 cases of citizen journalists punished for “spreading rumours” about the coronavirus. The CHRD reports that by February 21, the feared Ministry of Public Security had handled 5,511 cases involving “fabricating and deliberately disseminating false and harmful information.”

During an hour-long interview on the program “Fox & Friends” on Monday, President Trump said he wasn’t at all worried about the Chinese, Russian and Iranian disinformation circulating in the United States. “Every country does it. They do it, and we do it. And we call them different things. . . Hey, every country does it.”

Ottawa doesn’t seem to worry much, either. The job of paying attention to “online disinformation in the Canadian context” falls to Dominic LeBlanc, president of the Privy Council. LeBlanc is supposed to be working with Bardish Chagger, Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, to keep an eye on things. The file is apparently dormant.

Canadians are now moving through a wholly unfamiliar landscape. We may be stumbling headlong into an uncharted realm of social breakdown and mass graves. We could be destined for something else, somewhere dark and foreboding, where Xi Jinping calls all the shots. Or we might be traversing an excruciating social and economic terra incognita towards some eventual semblance of normalcy.

China’s Coming Upheaval Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping By Minxin Pei

Chinese President Xi Jinping talks with villagers in Huzhou, China, about the coronavirus, March 2020Ju Peng Xinhua / eyevine / Redux

Over the past few years, the United States’ approach to China has taken a hard-line turn, with the balance between cooperation and competition in the U.S.-Chinese relationship tilting sharply toward the latter. Most American policymakers and commentators consider this confrontational new strategy a response to China’s growing assertiveness, embodied especially in the controversial figure of Chinese President Xi Jinping. But ultimately, this ongoing tension—particularly with the added pressures of the new coronavirus outbreak and an economic downturn—is likely to expose the brittleness and insecurity that lie beneath the surface of Xi’s, and Beijing’s, assertions of solidity and strength.

The United States has limited means of influencing China’s closed political system, but the diplomatic, economic, and military pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing will put Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) he leads under enormous strain. Indeed, a prolonged period of strategic confrontation with the United States, such as the one China is currently experiencing, will create conditions that are conducive to dramatic changes.

As tension between the United States and China has grown, there has been vociferous debate about the similarities and, perhaps more important, the differences between U.S.-Chinese competition now and U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Whatever the limitations of the analogy, Chinese leaders have put considerable thought into the lessons of the Cold War and of the Soviet collapse. Ironically, Beijing may nevertheless be repeating some of the most consequential mistakes of the Soviet regime.

During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change.

A PAPER TIGER

Since taking power in 2012, Xi has replaced collective leadership with strongman rule. Before Xi, the regime consistently displayed a high degree of ideological flexibility and political pragmatism. It avoided errors by relying on a consensus-based decision-making process that incorporated views from rival factions and accommodated their dueling interests. The CCP also avoided conflicts abroad by staying out of contentious disputes, such as those in the Middle East, and refraining from activities that could encroach on the United States’ vital national interests. At home, China’s ruling elites maintained peace by sharing the spoils of governance. Such a regime was by no means perfect. Corruption was pervasive, and the government often delayed critical decisions and missed valuable opportunities. But the regime that preceded Xi’s centralization had one distinct advantage: a built-in propensity for pragmatism and caution.

In the last seven years, that system has been dismantled and replaced by a qualitatively different regime—one marked by a high degree of ideological rigidity, punitive policies toward ethnic minorities and political dissenters at home, and an impulsive foreign policy embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure program with dubious economic potential that has aroused intense suspicion in the West. The centralization of power under Xi has created new fragilities and has exposed the party to greater risks. If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy.

A BRI-built train traveling from Nairobi to Mombasa, January 2020Baz Ratner / Reuters

Under Xi, correcting policy mistakes has proved to be difficult, since reversing decisions made personally by the strongman would undercut his image of infallibility. (It is easier politically to reverse bad decisions made under collective leadership, because a group, not an individual, takes the blame.) Xi’s demand for loyalty has also stifled debate and deterred dissent within the CCP. For these reasons, the party lacks the flexibility needed to avoid and reverse future missteps in its confrontation with the United States. The result is likely to be growing disunity within the regime. Some party leaders will no doubt recognize the risks and grow increasingly alarmed that Xi has needlessly endangered the party’s standing. The damage to Xi’s authority caused by further missteps would also embolden his rivals, especially Premier Li Keqiang and the Politburo members Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua, all of whom have close ties to former President Hu Jintao. Of course, it is nearly impossible to remove a strongman in a one-party regime because of his tight control over the military and the security forces. But creeping discord would at the very least feed Xi’s insecurity and paranoia, further eroding his ability to chart a steady course.

A strongman who has suffered setbacks—as Mao Zedong did after the Great Leap Forward, a modernization program that centralized food production, leading to some 30 million deaths by famine in the early 1960s—naturally fears that his rivals will seize the opportunity to conspire against him. To preempt such threats, the strongman typically resorts to purges, which Mao did four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward by launching the Cultural Revolution, a movement intended to eliminate “bourgeois elements” in society and in the government. In the years ahead, Xi may come to rely on purges more than he already does, further heightening tensions and distrust among the ruling elites.

LEAN TIMES AHEAD

A key component of Washington’s strategic confrontation with Beijing is economic “decoupling,” a significant reduction of the extensive commercial ties that the United States and China have built over the last four decades. Those advocating decoupling—such as U.S. President Donald Trump, who launched a trade war with China in 2018—believe that by cutting China off from the United States’ vast market and sophisticated technology, Washington can greatly reduce the potential growth of China’s power. In spite of the truce in the trade war following the interim deal that Trump struck with Xi in January 2020, U.S.-Chinese economic decoupling is almost certain to continue in the coming years regardless of who is in the White House, because reducing the United States’ economic dependence on China and constraining the growth of China’s power are now bipartisan aims.

Since the Chinese economy today is less dependent on exports as an engine of growth—exports in 2018 accounted for 19.5 percent of GDP, down from 32.6 percent in 2008—decoupling may not depress China’s economic growth as much as its proponents have hoped. But it will certainly have a net negative impact on the Chinese economy, one that may be amplified by the country’s domestic economic slowdown, which is itself the product of a ballooning debt, the exhaustion of investment-driven growth, and a rapidly aging population. The slowdown may be further exacerbated by Beijing’s attempt to shore up near-term growth with unsustainable policies, such as increased bank lending and investment in wasteful infrastructure projects.

As the economy weakens, the CCP may have to contend with the erosion of popular support resulting from a falling or stagnant standard of living. In the post-Mao era, the CCP has relied heavily on economic overperformance to sustain its legitimacy. Indeed, the generations born after the Cultural Revolution have experienced steadily rising living standards. A prolonged period of mediocre economic performance—say, a few years in which the growth rate hovers around three or four percent, the historical mean for developing countries—could severely reduce the level of popular support for the CCP, as ordinary Chinese grapple with rising unemployment and an inadequate social safety net.

In such an adverse economic environment, signs of social unrest, such as riots, mass protests, and strikes, will become more common. The deepest threat to the regime’s stability will come from the Chinese middle class. Well-educated and ambitious college graduates will find it difficult to obtain desirable jobs in the coming years because of China’s anemic economic performance. As their standard of living stalls, middle-class Chinese may turn against the party. This won’t be obvious at first: the Chinese middle class has traditionally shied away from politics. But even if members of the middle class do not participate in anti-regime protests, they may well express their discontent indirectly, in demonstrations over such issues as environmental protection, public health, education, and food safety. The Chinese middle class could also vote with its feet by emigrating abroad in large numbers.

An economic slowdown would also disrupt the CCP’s patronage structure, the perks and favors that the government provides to cronies and collaborators. In the recent past, a booming economy provided the government with abundant revenue—total revenue in absolute terms tripled between 2008 and 2018—providing the resources the CCP needed to secure the loyalty of midlevel apparatchiks, senior provincial leaders, and the managers of state-owned enterprises. As the Chinese economic miracle falters, the party will find it harder to provide the privileges and material comforts that such officials have come to expect. Party elites will also need to compete harder among themselves to get approval and funding for their pet projects. Dissatisfaction among the elites may spiral if Xi’s prized priorities, such as the BRI, continue to receive preferential treatment and everyone else must economize.

Finally, in the event of a dramatic slowdown, the Chinese government will most likely find itself confronting greater resistance in the country’s restive periphery, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, which contain China’s most vocal ethnic minorities, and in Hong Kong, which was British territory until 1997 and retains a different system of governance with far more civil liberties. To be sure, escalating tensions in China’s periphery will not bring the CCP down. But they can be costly distractions. Should the party resort to overly harsh responses to assert its control, as is likely to be the case, the country will incur international criticism and harsh new sanctions. The escalation of human rights violations in China would also help push Europe closer to the United States, thus facilitating the formation of a broad anti-China coalition, which Beijing has been desperately trying to prevent.

Although middle-class discontent, ethnic resistance, and pro-democracy protests won’t force Xi out of power, such pervasive malaise would undoubtedly further erode his authority and cast doubts on his capacity to govern effectively. Economic weakness and elite demoralization could then push Beijing over the edge, leading the CCP toward calamity.

BEATING THE DRUMS OF NATIONALISM

In theory, the CCP should be capable of avoiding or mitigating the damage from an economic slowdown. An effective strategy would incorporate some of the valuable lessons Xi’s predecessors learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow continued to provide significant aid to Cuba, Vietnam, and several vassal states in Eastern Europe well into the Soviet Union’s twilight years. The regime also pursued a costly military intervention in Afghanistan and funded proxies in Angola and Southeast Asia. To avoid those kinds of mistakes, Beijing should prioritize the conservation of its limited financial resources to sustain the open-ended great-power conflict. In particular, China should retrench from its expansionist projects, above all the BRI, and other foreign assistance programs, such as the grants and concessional loans it has provided to Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, and several developing countries in Africa. Beijing might incur considerable short-term costs—namely, the loss of prestige and goodwill—but over the long term, China would avoid the perils of imperial overreach and preserve enough funds to recapitalize its banking system, which has been exhausted by excessive lending in the last decade.

Beijing should also build stronger ties with U.S. allies to prevent Washington from recruiting them into a broad anti-China coalition. To do so, the regime will have to offer enormous economic, diplomatic, military, and political concessions, such as opening the Chinese market to Japan, South Korea, and Europe; ensuring the protection of intellectual property; making significant improvements in human rights; and abandoning certain territorial claims. Xi’s government has already taken steps to repair ties with Japan. But to truly court U.S. allies and avert a slowdown, either Xi or his successors will need to go further, undertaking market-oriented reforms to offset the economic losses caused by decoupling. The large-scale privatization of state-owned enterprises is a good place to start. These inefficient behemoths control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP. The efficiency gains that would be unleashed by reining in the state’s direct role in the economy would be more than enough to compensate for the loss of the U.S. market. The economist Nicholas Lardy has estimated that genuine economic reforms, in particular those targeting state-owned enterprises, could boost China’s annual GDP growth by as much as two percentage points in the coming decade.

Xi will probably beat the drums of Chinese nationalism to counter the United States.

Unfortunately, Xi is unlikely to embrace this strategy. After all, it runs against his deeply held ideological views. Most of China’s recent foreign and security policy initiatives bear his personal imprint. Curtailing or abandoning them would be seen as an admission of failure. As a result, the CCP might be limited to tactical adjustments: promoting public-private partnerships in the economy, deregulating certain sectors, or reducing government spending. Such steps would represent an improvement but would probably neither raise sufficient revenue nor appeal strongly enough to U.S. allies to decisively alter the course of the U.S.-Chinese confrontation.

Instead, Xi will probably beat the drums of Chinese nationalism to counter the United States. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—which shook the party to its core and resulted in a government crackdown on dissent—the CCP has ceaselessly exploited nationalist sentiment to shore up its legitimacy. In the event of decoupling and an economic slowdown, the party will likely ramp up those efforts. This should not be hard at first: most Chinese are convinced that the United States started the current conflict to thwart China’s rise. But ironically, fanning the flames of nationalism could eventually make it harder for the party to switch to a more flexible strategy, since taking a vigorous anti-American stance will lock in conflict and constrain Beijing’s policy options.

The party would then have to turn to social control and political repression. Thanks to its vast and effective security apparatus, the party should have little difficulty suppressing internal challenges to its authority. But repression would be costly. Faced with rising unrest fueled by economic stagnation, the party would have to devote substantial resources to stability, largely at the expense of other priorities. Strict social control would also likely alienate some elites, such as private entrepreneurs and high-profile academics and writers. Escalating repression could generate greater resistance in China’s periphery—Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong—and elicit international criticism, especially from the European countries that China needs to court.

AFTER THE DELUGE

The CCP is still far from dead. Short of China’s losing a direct military conflict with the United States, the party can conceivably hang on to power. That said, a regime beset by economic stagnation and rising social unrest at home and great-power competition abroad is inherently brittle. The CCP will probably unravel by fits and starts. The rot would set in slowly but then spread quickly.

It is possible, but unlikely, that mounting dissatisfaction within the regime could motivate senior members to organize a palace coup to replace Xi. The party, however, has adopted sophisticated coup-proofing techniques: the General Office of the Central Committee monitors communication among members of the committee, the only body that could conceivably remove Xi. What is more, Xi’s loyalists dominate the membership of the Politburo and the Central Committee, and the military is firmly under his control. Under such circumstances, a conspiracy against the top leader would be exceedingly difficult to pull off.

Typically, the fight for power that follows the end of strongman rule produces a weak interim leader.

Another possible scenario is a crisis that creates a split among China’s top elites, which in turn paralyzes the regime’s fearsome repressive apparatus. Such an event could be precipitated by mass protests that the security forces are unable to contain. As with the Tiananmen protests, divisions could emerge among top leaders over how to deal with the protesters, thus allowing the movement to gain momentum and attract broad-based support nationwide. But this scenario, although tantalizing, is unlikely to materialize, since the party has invested heavily in surveillance and information control and has developed effective methods to suppress mass protests.

The scenario that would entail the greatest likelihood of radical change is a succession struggle that would occur if Xi were to pass away or resign owing to infirmity. Typically, the fight for power that follows the end of strongman rule produces a weak interim leader: consider Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov, who followed Stalin, or CCP Chair Hua Guofeng, who followed Mao. Such leaders are often pushed out by a stronger contender with a transformative vision: think Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. Given this new leader’s need to assert his authority and offer a different, more appealing agenda, it is unlikely that Xi’s hard authoritarianism would survive the end of his rule.

That would leave the new leader with only two options. He could return to the survival strategy that the party had before Xi by restoring collective leadership and a risk-averse foreign policy. But he might find this to be a hard sell, as the party and all its previous survival strategies might have been discredited by this point. So he might instead opt for more radical reforms to save the party. Although stopping short of liberal democracy, he would, in this case, roll back repression, relax social control, and accelerate economic reform, just as the Soviet Union did between 1985 and its collapse in 1991. Such a course of action might be more attractive to a party elite traumatized by two decades of strongman rule; it might also resonate with Chinese youth yearning for a new direction.

If reformers gained the upper hand and embarked on such a path, the most critical issue would be whether they could avoid “the Tocqueville paradox,” named after the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that the reforms that a weakened dictatorship pursues have a tendency to trigger a revolution that eventually topples the reformist dictatorship itself.

Riot police at an anti-government protest, Hong Kong, March 2020

Moderate reforms might be more effective in China than they were in the Soviet Union, however, because a new Chinese leader would not have to deal with a collapsing external empire, as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, did in Eastern Europe. Nor would a new leader face national disintegration, as the Soviet Union did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when all 15 Soviet republics bolted from the center, because non-Chinese ethnic minorities make up less than ten percent of China’s population. They may cause serious problems in Tibet and Xinjiang, but otherwise, ethnic minorities pose no real threat to China’s territorial integrity.

Whatever the outcome after Xi’s political exit, the CCP will likely undergo dramatic changes. In the best-case scenario, the party may succeed in transforming itself into a “kinder, gentler” regime, one that endorses economic and political reforms and seeks a geopolitical reconciliation with the United States. By the end, the CCP could be unrecognizable. In the worst-case scenario, deep institutional rot, inept leadership, and the mobilization of anti-regime movements could very well cause a hard landing. Should that happen, it would be one of history’s greatest ironies. Despite the lessons the CCP has learned from the Soviet implosion and the steps it has taken since 1991 to avoid the same fate, the end of one-party rule in China could follow an eerily similar script.

THE SICK MAN OF EAST ASIA

Such a scenario will likely be dismissed as pure fantasy by those who believe in the durability and resilience of CCP rule. But the Chinese party-state’s botched initial response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the subsequent eruption of public outrage should make them think again. The worst public health crisis in the history of the People’s Republic of China has revealed a number of significant weaknesses. The regime’s capacity to collect, process, and act on critical information is much less impressive than most would have anticipated. Considering the enormous investments in disease control and prevention that China has made since the SARS outbreak in 2002–3 and the implementation of laws on emergency management in 2007, it has been staggering to see how thoroughly the Chinese government initially mishandled the new coronavirus epidemic. Local authorities in Wuhan—the epicenter of the outbreak—concealed critical information from the public even after medical professionals sounded the alarm, just as Jiang Yanyong, a veteran army doctor, did in 2003 about SARS. Although they received reports from Wuhan about the spread of the virus in early January, most members of the senior leadership did not take any serious action for two weeks.

The crisis has also revealed the fragility of Xi’s strongman rule. One likely reason that Beijing failed to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak early on was that few crucial decisions can be made without Xi’s direct approval, and he faces heavy demands on his limited time and attention. A strongman who monopolizes decision-making can also be politically vulnerable during such a crisis. A series of decisions Xi made after the Wuhan lockdown began—such as sending Li, the premier, to the epicenter of the virus instead of going himself and remaining unseen in public for nearly two weeks—undermined his image as a decisive leader at precisely the moment the system seemed to be rudderless. He reasserted control only weeks after the crisis began—by firing the party chiefs in charge of the city and the province where the outbreak started and imposing tight censorship rules on the press and social media.

But the brief window during which Chinese social media and even the official press erupted in outrage revealed just how tenuous the CCP’s control over information has become and highlighted the latent power of Chinese civil society. For unknown reasons, China’s censorship system performed poorly for about two weeks after the lockdown in Wuhan was announced. During that period, people were able to learn how the government had muzzled medical professionals who had tried to warn the public. Criticism of the government reached a peak when Li Wenliang—a doctor who in late December was among the first to warn Chinese authorities about the danger of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and who was subsequently interrogated and silenced by local police—died of the illness on February 7, showing that the CCP could lose public support quickly in a crisis situation.

The events of the past few months have shown that CCP rule is far more brittle than many believed. This bolsters the case for a U.S. strategy of sustained pressure to induce political change. Washington should stay the course; its chances of success are only getting better and better.

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