We must stand for our values

For decades, Germany, Switzerland and Austria avoided investing in renewable energy. After all, there were cheap imports. Now the long inaction is taking a heavy toll. And we are paying with our morals.

Whether in Moscow or Beijing, autocrats are convinced of their own superiority and vehemently defend their regimes. We should be just as determined to stand up for democratic values. Occasionally, novels can foretell what would unfold in reality. The script for the humiliating removal of Hu Jintao on the occasion of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of China could have been taken from Ken Follett’s current political thriller „Never“. In addition to these and other intrigues, which are by no means a specialty of the CP, what stands out in Follett’s novel is the sense of threat from the West. The Chinese leadership team in the novel is obsessed with the idea that America’s sole aim is to destroy their country. Historical resentment resonates, as does the conviction that their culture, their empire and their achievements are ultimately superior.

Help from the West is not welcome

If one looks back into Xi’s leadership to date on the basis of this exciting fiction, the focus on security really jumps out. Domestically, any criticism of politics and the party must be suppressed; externally, in addition to the focus on ensuring intact supply chains, the primary concern is to be prepared for the aforementioned threat from the West.
The zero-covid policy, which has been criticised from many quarters, may be in the service of public health, but it ultimately amounts to imprisoning one’s own people and testing the effectiveness of the latest surveillance technologies. In any case, help from the West, for example in the form of effective vaccines, is not desired.

In order to implement his security policy, Xi established the new Central National Security Commission in 2014, which, according to the Foreign Affairs magazine, is responsible for all political, military, economic, cultural, social, technological, ecological, biological, polar, nuclear, internal security, cyberspace, overseas and underwater issues. Implementation is no longer solely about maintaining stability, but about prevention and control.

China sees the U.S. as a security threat

In April 2022, in a speech that received little attention because of the war in Ukraine, Xi also unveiled the new „Global Security Initiative“ GSI, whose official goal is the „common security of the world,“ but which basically portrays Pax Americana as a global security risk and seeks to challenge it. In its implementation, GSI adopts terms such as wolf-warrior diplomacy – named after a motion picture with a nationalist-aggressive undertone – to rhetorically attack liberal host countries.

Less liberal regimes are given technological support, if they wish, for example through Huawei’s „Safe City“ platforms, which provide facial recognition, social media monitoring and other surveillance capabilities. The U.S. has already called this an „export of authoritarianism”.

There has been no shortage of interpretations of China’s rapid rise to global power and its potential consequences in recent years. However, some of them are already outdated. There was „Chimerica“ a good 15 years ago which spelt the economic symbiosis of the two great powers and did not anticipate an economic war. The concept of „change through trade“ can be described as a failure. My own prediction then was that China’s large-scale social experiment of giving people economic freedom but denying them political freedom would fail was also rendered obsolete by technological surveillance.

Well armed against uprisings

For the same reasons, I am skeptical when economists predict Xi’s demise due to economic weakness. This fits in with the history of the empire, according to which revolts always occurred when the emperor could not fulfill his „mandate from Himmel“ and offer the people a decent life. But today’s elite, with its sophisticated surveillance apparatus, has already taken precautions against such potential revolts.
Less attention is paid to the fact that underpinning Xi’s wider  conceptual, institutional and organizational security approaches is his ideology. He has spelled out very precisely through writings and speeches his vision for China. True to Marxist-Leninist theory, he advocates a more equal society and a stronger state in the economy.

The implementation of this state presence did not take long to come into action, as Western companies in China also came to experience. The core of this worldview, however, is the materialist dialectic, which understands reality as a constant struggle of opposing poles – autocracy versus democracy, capitalism versus socialism: a struggle that can only be won through the leap-frog transition from quantity to quality, as the corresponding canon of writings puts it.

From strength to superiority

My interpretation is that China’s increasing economic, technological and military competitiveness is to turn into sudden superiority – with  unclear consequences. Already with Putin, the West fell into its own trap of assessing his possible behavior only through the lens of its  cost-benefit logic – and subsequently not expecting an invasion of Ukraine. Under no circumstances should the West make this mistake again. China also does not simply function according to the cost-benefit principle. Xi’s theoretical framework, solidly underpinned and understood as a guideline, dominates the discourse. Conversely, China, for its part, knows our logic very well and knows that the costs of Western economic sanctions would fall back on us to a disproportionately greater extent than those imposed against Russia.

So should we prepare for the worst? As Xi Jinping demanded of his audience at the congress? At least the above mentioned novel spells this as the end – but I don’t want to give away more spoilers at this point. However, things develop, China stands by its conviction that its autocracy is superior and must be safeguarded. We should be just as determined with our liberal democracies.