2021 is likely go down in history as the year President Xi Jinping’s legacy was set in stone. In November, the powerful central committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a landmark resolution that will allow Xi, 68, to secure an unprecedented third term in office next year. He could rule China for life.
2022 is likely to reveal whether that legacy is dangerously negative or enrichingly positive for China and the world. At this stage it’s looking frighteningly like the former.
Of course, for Xi there are actually six more weeks before the year ends on January 30 — which means there’s enough time for almost anything to happen.
There’s time for more countries to follow the lead set by the US, the UK and Australia and announce they won’t send government delegations to the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. Beijing has already warned that those three countries "will pay the price for their mistaken acts".
There’s time for a few more hypersonic missile tests.
There’s time for several hundred more billion dollars of investment to be written off Chinese tech stocks as the CCP formalises its position on foreign listings for powerful, data-rich firms.
Perhaps there’s even time for a few more Chinese billionaires to disappear, as Xi gives further substance to his "common prosperity" slogan.
For decades the West assumed China would continue to mimic its version of democratic capitalism as the most effective way to secure economic growth. Eventually, it was thought, China would abandon its socialist roots and join the global capitalist club.
When he addressed the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2017, it seemed Xi had enthusiastically bought into this perspective, as he defended globalisation and the liberal economic order that underpins it. If nothing else, 2021 has shown this was yet another example of the dangerously low levels of understanding between China and the West.
In the years after Xi’s Davos speech, international relations became increasingly tense, initially led by US President Donald Trump’s erratic assault on China’s trade policy. But more recently, Xi’s increasingly assertive global stance and Beijing’s perceived reluctance to help deal with Covid have encouraged other Western countries, which for decades had seemed terrified of antagonising one of their largest markets, to take a tougher stance.
President Joe Biden has maintained Trump’s assertive policies. Even the EU, which announced a new investment deal with China on December 30 2020, began to get tough. The deal, championed by Germany’s Angela Merkel, was frozen months later, after the EU parliament voted 599 to 30 against it.
By November, members of the European parliament were on official visits to Taiwan and advocating an upgrade of Taiwan’s trading status, ignoring the sacrosanct One-China policy.
From an international perspective, 2021 has been tough for Xi — tougher even than 2020. He may be perplexed by his fall from "grace", given that for years the world’s most powerful politicians and businesspeople didn’t seem to care a jot about China’s policy towards Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, or its increasingly aggressive claims on the South China Sea.
For much of the past 40 years the international business and political community has kowtowed to China’s leadership, just as traders did to the emperors of the Middle Kingdom hundreds of years ago. Some still do.
One of the most powerful business leaders in the world, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, tied himself in knots recently trying to unwind his joke about his bank outlasting the CCP. Tesla’s Elon Musk, who never hesitates to criticise the US government, has only sweet things to say about China.
The much more hostile international environment is not restricted to the West. Xi’s Belt & Road Initiative seems to be losing traction, with increasing focus on the high levels of debt, corruption and environmental degradation that come with it.
The hostility may explain why Xi didn’t venture out of the country in 2021 — the second year in a row he stayed home. If so, it reflects a worryingly thin-skinned attitude from the leader of one of the world’s most formidable trading economies.
Like many Chinese leaders, Xi seems to suffer from a superiority complex derived from the centuries-old Middle Kingdom mentality. He is also obsessed with the era of humiliation that began with the Opium Wars in the 19th century and ensured China played no role in creating the global system it now operates in.
The increasing hostility seems to have encouraged a more aggressive stance by Xi.
Of course, it could just be that he was too busy to venture out, and 2021 was not a good year for that in any case. Not only was he caught up in China’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid, he was also putting an end to extreme poverty in the country. This he did in early 2021; a remarkable achievement given that in 1990 more than 750-million people — about two-thirds of the population — lived in extreme poverty.
There was also his commendable "common prosperity" policy, intended to ensure that not just a small minority of Chinese prosper from economic growth. This ambitious plan essentially aimed to curb the excesses of capitalism that have been given free rein for almost 30 years. In 2021 Xi did what every other global leader has refused to do — he challenged Big Tech.
In addition, 2021 saw progress with his "dual circulation" plan, which envisages a largely self-sufficient China that will continue to engage with the international economy and play a central role on that stage.
Xi’s more assertive leadership style may secure his position among the great leaders of the CCP, but it’s having a chilling effect outside China. His hopes of replacing the frayed international liberal democratic system with one in which the state has primacy over every aspect of individual life reflect a dismal understanding of global sentiment.
During 2022 we will get some indication of whether these hopes stand to be radically revised or violently dashed. The world will be a far better place if it is the former.
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