Despite his aspirations to play the responsible world statesman, Xi’s foreign-policy record is filled with squabbles, misfires and unfulfilled promise. If he’s going to restore China to superpower status and cement its dominance in East Asia, he should take a cue from Chinese history about how to wield power.
How should a great power manage a rival with an authoritarian government, a state-directed capitalist economy, strong mercantilist tendencies and a “leader for life” that exploited a “cult of personality?” To make matters more difficult, this country’s government dominates society through an all-pervasive party structure that stresses nationalism and argues that only the party can reverse recent slights and return the nation to its rightful place in the sun. This might sound like modern-day China, but in fact it is 1930s Germany.
Chinese tourists in South Africa. Pix/LBB
Chinese President Xi Jinping heads to Africa this week as Beijing moves to further cement its role as one of the continent’s closest economic and diplomatic allies. After a brief stop in the Persian Gulf Thursday, Xi’s itinerary — his first overseas trip since beginning his second term as leader — takes him to Senegal, Rwanda, South Africa and Mauritius, spanning almost every corner of Sub-Saharan Africa, where China’s economic clout, and strategic ambitions, are growing by the year.
China’s control of public discourse about the trade war, an issue too big to be ignored completely, has gone beyond a white-or-black approach and aims to be more subtle…State media outlets with a higher political ranking are allowed to publish news and editorials about the trade war, while local media and internet news portals are often told to republish what state media have already published and not to overplay the issue.
China’s US imports aren’t large enough to match Trump’s tariffs dollar for dollar, but there are other levers available, such as taxes and added regulation on US companies, slowing deal approvals, or boycotts of American products.
With a China-US trade war under way, both parties are adopting a no-insult strategy, choosing to remain muted in their rhetoric about the opposing side’s leader. After answering Washington’s 25 per cent levy on US$34 billion of Chinese goods with equivalent tariffs on US products, Beijing has directed state media to watch how they report on US President Donald Trump, mainland media sources said.
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
The trade dispute between China and the US could be the biggest challenge Chinese President Xi Jinping has faced since coming to power in 2012, analysts said. During his first term of office, a period Beijing described as a time when “the West is chaotic and China is prosperous”, Xi accomplished many of the goals on his to-do list, both at home and abroad…But a so-called trade war with the United States is a whole new ball game.
EU ports have recently caught the attention of various Chinese corporations, as China undertakes infrastructure projects around the world as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is an international infrastructure and trade development project led by the Chinese government in an effort to pursue greater cooperation and deeper integration of China into the world economy. It is, in the simplest sense, a vision to carry on the ‘Silk Road spirit’ – “communication and cooperation between the East and the West”.
The Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of China’s leader Xi Jinping, aims to build trillions of dollars of infrastructure from Asia to Africa to Europe, and along sea routes too. Involving roughly 70 countries so far, it entails massive spending (and lending) by China on railroads, ports and energy projects, highways—and, increasingly, satellite launches.
For years, most experts believed that China’s military challenge to the U.S. was regional in nature — that it was confined to the Western Pacific. After decades of tacitly free-riding on America’s global power-projection capabilities, however, Beijing now is seeking the capabilities that will allow it to project its own military power well outside its regional neighbourhood.
