Antonio Navalón
Xi Jinping’s father was one of Mao Zedong’s many victims during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The current President of China grew up in a rural environment, a man who – like so many millions of his fellow citizens at the time – had to hide in the landscape and keep a low profile to survive. What the Cultural Revolution and Maoism really meant for the Chinese generation that Xi Jinping and Deng Xiaoping’s parents lived through has never been acknowledged or assessed.
Today, what is undeniable is that there are two Chinas: one before Mao Zedong and one after the Cultural Revolution. When Deng Xiaoping decided to undertake the epic of feeding every day what just over 1.1 billion Chinese who had gone from starvation to the Great Helmsman’s brutal leaps forward, no one, not even the former Chinese leader, could have imagined that he would be so successful. In the experiment of keeping the communist spirit that China really has in the purest capitalism, Deng Xiaoping’s maneuver astonished the whole world.
China has woken up, and everything seems to indicate that in addition to the fact that the world needs China, as the recently elected for the third time President of the People’s Republic of China proclaimed, what is clear is that China needs to find a way of accommodation where the unlimited escalation it has been engaged in for a long time can finally come to an end. An escalation consisted of financing, building, giving, and exposing the world’s financing daily based on China’s great sacrifice.
When in 1979 Deng Xiaoping signed the order allowing the creation of China’s special economic zones, he could not have imagined that he was not only allowing the creation of two systems within the same country but also creating the greatest manifestation of overall success. A success where, on the one hand, the people ate; on the other hand, the country had the capacity to develop and, finally, for the first time, it could export a system of life unknown to the world and the Chinese until then.
China’s growth has been gradual. It should not be forgotten that from the Opium War to the present day – with the loss of Hong Kong and all that it meant – Chinese self-esteem has always been ambivalent. China is a country made under the domination it had during the various invasions it suffered throughout its history. At multiple times, the feeling of having been dominated – a situation that had its apotheosis in the 19th and 20th centuries during the Opium War and its implications – created a self-conscious complex in Chinese society. During the Opium War, Empress Cixi saw China being taken back only to be occupied and used again by foreigners. The Chinese – like the Boers when they started the movement in South Africa to stop foreign domination – have always had a need to regain their pride and nationalism.
China is a society that first had about seven hundred million human beings working as enslaved people seeking to make more and better everything that the West consumed. Then, little by little and with good management, they began to save and plan without falling into the trap of playing games or trying to give the impression that what they had to do was look like everyone else. The yuan is a currency that has stealthily risen in value to become a global reserve currency, standing outside the International Monetary System and the World Bank. These two institutions are dependent on and accountable to themselves. They are institutions that have helped locate and exploit the raw material reserves that African or Latin American countries have or have had.
At the same time, as it was establishing its fundamental axes of growth and development, China was investing in and creating technological conquests such as it had never even thought of having before. Huawei and 5G are the proof. Contrary to the Chinese, I have always been amazed that the United States – the world’s largest economy and with all its technological and infrastructural capabilities – would not have been able to build a single high-speed train on its territory and beyond. Not only because of the practicality of such transport but also because it would be a way of demonstrating that North America and the Western Hemisphere also have the capacity to undertake such infrastructure. It is also striking that in order to compete with the huge step forward that Huawei’s 5G represented, it really has to shake all the foundations of international trade. And it is necessary to prevent the investment in technology that the Chinese have made, which gives them, among other things, a global hegemonic status.
From here, what will happen to the world and to China? It is clear that the Chinese – so far – are not adventurous. This is not to say that issues such as Huawei, which has a lot to do with drivers and chips, will eventually be decided around a table by the invasion. Either way – as it has shown in its attitude towards its ally Russia or its ally Iran – China will be very keen to be careful or to have imperialistic attitudes. What the Chinese will definitely not do, however, is follow the crazy dreams of leaders like Vladimir Putin or the Iranian ayatollahs. China understands its role in the world lies in its neutrality and balance towards what it means to give the world a solution.
Today more than ever, the world needs solutions. In that sense, China’s power can be a guarantee that there will not be too many adventures in the air. But it is also true that, at the same time as the others are weakening, China’s excessive prominence also places us in a dangerous situation. In the end, nothing is more challenging to control than excessive force or forces that are incapable of maintaining balance in the environment in which they find themselves.
With Xi Jinping at the helm, a new era is beginning. China can no longer grow based on what others do not or are not willing to do. The Chinese need to find and define a system that compensates for what they have struggled to learn from the US domestic market and matches it with their strategy for the future, both domestically and globally. In any case, we have a few years ahead of us in which it will be too provocative to try to weaken or take away China’s seemingly excessive strength. In the meantime, starting with the United States – which has the most significant complex problem of controlling and dominating trade, financial and other relations – it should not be forgotten that we are now living in a time in which the internal adjustments of the great powers will define the game. In this sense, China’s excessive strength vis-à-vis the others is the greatest challenge and the most significant guarantee of balancing the world scene.
It is worth not forgetting what we saw the other day, broadcast globally when Hu Jintao was moved and recused from voting – even though he would vote against and despite his state of health -; that was clear proof that as soon as the worst forms of regimes and countries are neglected, the worst forms of regimes and countries come to the fore. President Xi Jinping is a leader of a communist Chinese state, but what he cannot since Mao Zedong covers the Great Helmsman is pretending to be the great pilot of the Chinese voyage.
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