How Xi Jinping’s obsession with security derailed China’s rise

Have you noticed all the doom-and-gloom news stories about China lately?

Headlines like “Xi’s Age of Stagnation,” “The Chinese century is already over,” and “China’s Stalling Economy Puts the World on Notice” are appearing regularly. The prevailing vibe not too long ago was one of a rising China inexorably destined for global dominance — so what’s going on?

One explanation, of course, is that the facts changed, so people changed their minds. The destructive effects of Beijing’s draconian pandemic policies coupled with the knock-on effects of its draconian one-child policy, and amplified by its growing debt problem, have altered China’s development trajectory in ways that are slowing the country’s growth and will soon send it into decline. And all this long before it achieved Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of global greatness.

There’s definitely something to that account. There’s little doubt that the constellation of factors most commonly offered in the recent spate of doomsday articles have played a role in bending the arc of China’s rise. But many of those factors have been on prominent display for those with eyes to see for many years. So while the “facts changed so we changed our minds” brigade is not entirely wrong, neither is it entirely right.

The “China nightmare” that the Chinese people are currently suffering through is the direct result of President Xi’s security obsession and his largely successful decade-long effort to operationalize the Orwellian concept of “comprehensive national security.”

Xi has long believed that security is more important than prosperity as guarantor of Chinese Communist Party rule. This wasn’t always the case among China’s post-Mao leaders, of course. Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao all saw continued CCP rule as being dependent on China’s economic development, and China’s economic development as being dependent on the liberalization of China’s economy and its integration into the global capitalist economy. Ultimately, they believed that, as Deng put it as long ago as 1984, “to uphold socialism we must eliminate poverty.” In other words, we must build prosperity in order to keep the CCP in power. 

But Xi sees both the trajectory of China’s economic development and the foundations of Chinese Communist Party rule  quite differently. He simply doesn’t see economic development as sufficient to ensure the continued legitimacy and leadership of the CCP — especially at a time when the contradictions inherent in China’s growth strategy are beginning to generate what is likely to be a sustained economic downturn. He sees China’s integration into a globalized capitalist economy as perhaps the defining contradiction in the Chinese political-economic system created by his post-Mao predecessors.

On the one hand, China needs to be part of a global, market-based economy in order to become prosperous. On the other hand, plugging into that economy creates vulnerabilities for the CCP that prosperity alone cannot eliminate — especially the creation of alternative centers of power within China, economic and technological dependence on the West, and the dissemination of ideas that challenge the party’s official ideology. The question then has long been how to reorient China toward the world economy and reposition the CCP within Chinese society so that the party-state he presides over does not succumb to this contradiction.

For Xi, this reorientation and repositioning has always necessarily entailed transitioning to a radically new, “security first” or “securitization of everything” mode of governance — one in which securing the party-state against internal and external threats is the principal goal. Effectively rejecting his predecessors’ assumption that economic development and growing prosperity would assure the continued legitimacy and primacy of the CCP, Xi has long advocated reducing China’s technological and economic dependence on the West, reasserting CCP control over the Chinese economy, and otherwise limiting the spread of external cultural and ideological influences.

Xi’s security obsession is far from just a personal hang-up. Upon his ascension to power, China’s leader quickly translated his “security first” vision into a concrete political concept: “comprehensive national security.”

Since first mooting it back in 2012, Xi has aggressively sought to embed the concept of “comprehensive national security” in Chinese law and policy. As an opening act, in 2013 he created the Central National Security Commission — a party rather than state body — to oversee China’s national security apparatus. He has worked through that commission, which he leads, to construct a “legal Great Wall” comprising a host of national security–related legislation covering almost all aspects of Chinese life.

The upshot of all this activity has been the creation of a hypervigilant, truly Orwellian party-state surveillance apparatus — one geared primarily toward the preservation of the CCP in the face of perceived threats emanating from both within and beyond China.

And this, in turn, has had a number of effects that have contributed to the sense that China is stagnating: a stifling of cultural and intellectual life; the partial walling off of the country’s economy and society from the rest of the world; and a profound inability to engage in the kind of self-critical reflection necessary for political or economic adaptation.

Add to this the related phenomena of what Chinese people call neijuan and tangping — the “endless cycle of self-flagellation” associated with ceaseless competition for limited educational and economic opportunities and resisting neijuan by “lying flat” or doing the minimum amount of work necessary — and you know all you need to know about why the Chinese century is already over.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him @aalatham.