In stark contrast to the aura of triumphant glory that greeted Xi Jinping at the last National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, this week’s convocation opened with an air of sobriety.
Amid a domestic economic downturn and a return to enmity with Western liberal democracies, Xi offered his own recipe for party legitimacy and the country’s economic survival in the lengthy executive summary of his political report to the CCP congress. The prime keyword was security, with some 73 mentions, underscored with a message of self-reliance.
The periodic report acts as a summary of the party’s achievements and of its future plans, with both expressed as the lowest common denominator of consensus between competing voices in the CCP. It thus typically sheds some light on relationships among senior party members and insights into the political fortunes of important intraparty groups.
Most portions of the new report combined Xi’s personal preferences with concessions to the reality of what is necessary for China’s economic survival. Both ends point to an urgent prioritization of economic and political self-reliance for Xi’s third term as party general secretary.
Holistic concept of security
On the domestic front, much emphasis was given to enhancing national security and promoting equitable growth.
Since even before COVID-19, Xi has advocated a holistic conceptualization of security that includes food, the internet, energy and manpower. Reflecting Beijing’s deep anxieties about high-tech development and its frustrations with dependence on overseas suppliers vulnerable to the vagaries of geopolitical tensions, the political report noted the need for China’s supply chains to become more “self-determined and self-controlled.”
Xi, though, went further to stress the importance of improving scientific education and grooming and attracting the necessary talent to accelerate China’s quest to achieve breakthroughs in semiconductor production and overcome development choke points created by Western technological monopolies.
As China has traditionally relied on connectivity with the rest of the world to support innovation and attract talent, a turn toward autarky is not a viable option, given Xi’s technological priorities. Yet the renewed mention of his ‘dual circulation’ strategy in the report signals that Beijing is indeed turning to domestic consumption and homegrown technological prowess as the means to provide the rising wealth that the Chinese people have come to expect from the Communist Party.
Worsening Sino-US relations and tightening access to overseas markets for Chinese companies have prompted party leaders not only to reconsider the country’s sources of economic growth but have also forced them to reconfigure their approach to foreign affairs.
Judging by his report summary, Xi has completely abandoned the ‘new type of great power relations’ concept used repeatedly in the last two editions of his congressional update to refer to his preferred approach to relations with the US-led West.
The omission shows that Beijing has concluded that its fraught relationship with advanced developed nations is here to stay, with little prospect of improvement soon. To this end, China needs to prepare for the worst of decoupling and become more self-reliant in terms of markets and technologies.
In place of the discarded concept, Xi stressed that China should further develop its ties with the global South through the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative he announced earlier this year. These efforts aim to reshape the global governance agenda in multilateral forums and to project Beijing’s influence on the developing world.
Meanwhile, the party’s latest official rhetoric about the Belt and Road Initiative shows it is no longer a one-size-fits-all slogan but on its way to becoming a genuine tool of trade and investment promotion with China’s near neighbors but with provincial governments taking the lead rather than Beijing.
With the central government grappling with the country’s domestic economic woes, its spending spree on development assistance has had to come to an end. The new political report clearly signals this change.
A modern socialist society is still the aim
The current economic downturn and dangerous geopolitical tensions have not dented the CCP’s ambitions to build a modern socialist society by 2035 and thus join the world’s club of upper middle-income countries, but this is easier said than done.