The next state of fear. How did China fool the world and manage it?

Since the end of the Cold War, Beijing has viewed Washington as its main geopolitical rival, yet Washington has only recently become aware of this strategic competition. As China's ambitions for American observers began to emerge more clearly, they also began to misjudge the challenges posed by these ambitions. During their discussion, political science specialists focused on the theory of force transformation, and the trap of the Thucydides, as if That China is about to bypass the United States in wealth and power, and take its place on the world stage, but this view of the two problems are contradictory.

The first is that the Chinese themselves do not understand their rise this way. When Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the Chinese people to realize that "the realization of the great renaissance of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of all Chinese," it crystallizes the belief that China simply regains its natural political and cultural significance. China is not colonial Germany when it was said after reunification that it is "looking for a place under the sun"; it is regaining its proper status as the sun. The second problem is whether China will be able to achieve that renaissance in the face of what appears to be economic stagnation and partisan divisions, a matter still under discussion.

Shi is more powerful than his predecessors, but his rule is more fragile and weak. The Chinese Communist Party has long faced a crisis of legitimacy, but the transformation of China by Shi into a sophisticated police state may hasten the repercussions of the crisis. These factors make China more dangerous in the short term but also less capable. On the long-term competition, this means that the People's Republic of China recognizes the opportunity to achieve "great renaissance", although it will be less powerful than expected. So trying to assess China's situation correctly does not lead to simple estimates; Washington will have to deal with a strong and rich China, which is also experiencing a potential economic recession and internal decay.

In 2012, shortly after he assumed the post of Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China, he delivered the letter of renewal at a historic exhibition at the China National Museum in Beijing.

The "Road to Innovation" exhibition highlighted China's "century of humiliation", from the opium wars to the fall of the Great Qing Empire in 1911. The exhibition highlighted the ill-treatment of China by foreign powers, Another message is that China is moving towards a new renaissance.

Xi reminded the audience that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has struggled for a long time for China to regain its historical status in international affairs. "Our nation is a great nation, which suffered greatly from untold hardships and tribulations," Xi said. "But the Communist Party continued to advance and thus opened up entirely new horizons for the great renewal of the Chinese nation."

China also enjoys tremendous power. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has developed its capabilities very quickly, causing the balance of power in Asia to change in favor of it. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that since 2014, the PLA Navy has launched a number of submarines, warships, amphibious warships and military relief teams, outnumbering the total number of vessels currently serving in the naval forces of Germany, India, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Its shipbuilding program also surpasses its counterpart in the United States.

In addition, China spends heavily on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, supersonic aircraft, and robots, which may weigh the war in its favor. What the People's Liberation Army has achieved since the end of the Cold War will one day compare what Japan achieved during the Meiji period, the first period in contemporary Japan, in the decades before its victory in the Russo-Japanese War.

Moreover, the size of China alone may be a disincentive to smaller countries, even if their initiatives in economic geography are not as great as they seem. For example, Shi's "One Belt, One Way" initiative does not look like the new geo-economic system he wanted to create. However, for the smaller and less developed countries that will benefit, this initiative is still large-scale. What may seem economically trivial to the United States still carries great geopolitical benefits for China.

In sum, even China, which may seem relatively weaker than many think, could change geopolitics and economic geography. She may slow China's growth further; he has hastened to bring about political change in China that has led the party to focus more on "maintaining stability" policies and reducing growth.

That shift from reform and openness to maintaining stability dates back to the pre-Xi era. That shift began when Jiang Zemin and Zu Rongji, who succeeded Deng Xiaoping, ended their work in reforming the economy and ensuring China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. While he could not Their successors, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, resisted the attacks on reform and opening up led by the New Left Movement, a coalition of reactionary Marxists and conservatives of the Chinese Communist Party, and Hu Jintao began to reverse major economic reforms. This has allowed the government sector to reaffirm its dominance over the Chinese economy.

However, the momentum of reform and opening-up hid the stalemate in reforms. Exports grew by 30 percent annually between 2001 and 2006, following China's accession to the World Trade Organization. China's economy saw a boom in investment, real estate and manufacturing. Commodities to feed its growth and construction strategy.

This boom in the early 2000s made China look as if it was rising unabated, boasting a huge labor force, large capital investments, giant state-owned enterprises scouring the land for resources, and Western markets invading Chinese goods. What many observers have missed, however, is the accumulation of large debt in China, often due to bad loans and unprofitable investments. This has made the economy more dependent on domestic credit to finance investment, and on foreign consumption to buy goods produced by misappropriated investment.

China's poor economic model, based on excessive debt-financed investment, has worsened since the 2008 global financial crisis. At the time, most American observers believed that China was about to outperform the United States, but missed how China was troubled by This crisis, as its global export markets dried up, resorted to domestic credit as a stimulus to growth. China has accumulated more debt through massive stimulus programs. The experience seems to have convinced China's leaders that time is no longer in their favor and that they must make some quick gains. Since the financial crisis and beyond, China's determination has not reflected confidence in its destiny, but rather a lack of minimum security. China's regional ambitions, backed by strength, have grown as a result of economic turmoil, political divisions and the application of large-scale stabilization policies.

Shi inherited not only a weak economy, but also inherited a shattered political elite. His appearance as the successor to Hu Jintao in 2012 has lent him the biggest challenge to the Chinese Communist Party. Bo Xilai, the influential leader of Chongqing Province, made an independent attempt to lead the CPC. The party moved quickly to get rid of him, and punish his wife on charges of corruption and murder. In the midst of this process, public opinion has been exposed to extraordinary levels of corruption in senior positions of the Communist Party of China.

The solution to the double economic and political crisis is to launch a vicious anti-corruption campaign to purge cadres in an unprecedented manner since Mao Zedong. The process of the collective security of the Chinese state began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Communist Party of China became more concerned with the consequences of regime change in the Caucasus, the Middle East, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan over his stay in power. As the legal scholar Carl Menzner says, the policies of maintaining stability include "the increased bureaucratic status of the police, and the emergence of social stability as a key element in the mechanisms of leadership assessment."

He went beyond mere targeting of corrupt leaders and businessmen, and called for "a thorough purge of three undesirable modes of action: formalism, bureaucratic procedures, and extravagance. Spending ". This has led to an expansion in the definition of which leaders can be "punished", often by extrajudicial means. Party and bureaucratic officials now have all the motivations to avoid the application of policies, because any action can be construed as being contrary to the "anti-corruption" rules.

The campaign, by its very nature, was political in nature because it was run by party members and was accountable only to them. Xi institutionalized this new policy by strengthening the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and establishing disciplinary cells in all national and regional party organs. The party then organized mass purges by a new law of national supervision, appointing a higher-ranking committee from the Supreme People's Court, supervising the conduct of more than 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as directors of state-owned enterprises and a wide range of institutions. Hospitals to schools.

Shin also enacted the National Security Act 2015 to address what he called "the worst security environment China has ever faced." This new law has set out the very broad vision of security, which includes everything from the deep sea to the Internet to space; it calls for "the long-established ideological dominance" of the CPC and for "furthering the guidance of public opinion," as well as " The application of the extraordinary culture of Chinese nationalism. "

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has also issued a State Council Memorandum on the Summary of Planning for the Establishment of a Social Credit System. Under this memorandum, a comprehensive database of all Chinese citizens will be created using artificial intelligence techniques and other advanced technology tools and classify them based on their loyalty to the CPC. This system will affect people's requests for schooling and jobs, access to housing and bank loans.

These new political and institutional structures have increased China's difficulties in returning to market-based reforms, which require less control over the flow of information, ideas, people and capital. Changes in the leadership appraisal system are also essential; there will be less motivation to reform the market if they are assessed in accordance with stabilization policies, rather than achieving high growth goals.

These policies were not the result of the prosperity of the Communist Party of China. On the contrary, it seems that the party is more besieged than ever since Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The regime may have been destabilized by ten titles, including the head of state, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the head of the new "leadership groups" to oversee Internet policy, national security, military reforms and China's policies. Towards Taiwan. It has effectively controlled the courts, the police, the internal secret paramilitary forces and other internal control bodies. This means that all successes and failures are due to Shi alone. There is no doubt that he has created for himself powerful enemies among the elites, who stand ready to get out of it if they have the opportunity.

Despite the weakness of the Chinese economy and growing political problems, Shi claimed in 2012 that the country on the threshold of "new prospects for the great renovation of the Chinese nation." The speech of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was firmly embedded in the 5,000-year history of China's civilization and set out its goal of continuing the struggle for China's great rejuvenation after the fall of the Qing Empire. The Chinese Communist Party has always made strenuous efforts to deal with China's imperial past, which was usually dominated by a Confucian-based moral and political system. Mao Zedong, for example, led a revolution aimed to some extent against the feudalism of the past regime. Although Shi did not abandon Maoist methods, he abandoned this interpretation of history. Instead, the CPC has not presented itself as a revolutionary development, but as part of China's long and continuous history that has made "indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization." Shi thus became more willing and willing than his predecessors to highlight China's natural geopolitics.

Shi's distinctive ambitions are embodied in the "Belt and Road Initiative" promoted by Chinese leaders such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi as a move to "advance China's international status in an unprecedented manner." "The Chinese nation, Enjoying a whole new situation, is now standing in the East and standing firm. " The main objective of the Belt and Road Initiative is to expand China's global political and economic networks and ensure a more active role in the "governance of global affairs" without waiting for the West to give more roles and responsibilities to China in existing institutions.

However, the actual funds earmarked for the Belt and Road Initiative are much lower than expected. The Belt and Road Initiative may help China diversify energy sources and give a much exaggerated expression of China's long-term desire to avoid the embargo by buying influence in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Central Asia. However, the Belt and Road Initiative will be unable to meet its biggest goal of linking Asia with Europe, since China does not have the foreign exchange reserves necessary to invest in many unprofitable deals. However, the extent to which China coordinates with its global propaganda mechanisms and agencies has in fact made it geopolitical more central.

Shi sought to regain the pre-Qing Dynasty assets and expand its maritime border to secure major supply lines as part of his efforts to promote innovation. It also built small islands, supplied the South China Sea with military systems, and continued to pressure Japan in the East China Sea. While Shi is overseeing the comprehensive insurance of China's domestic policy and issuing instructions to the CPC to spend money on neighboring continental countries through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has increased its maritime development. In 2012, Xi announced that China had become a "great naval force" and that its success in realizing China's dream depended on its success in becoming a larger world naval force. China's large-scale naval forces carry out day-to-day missions to advance Chinese interests in the South and East China Seas, as well as around Taiwan.

Xi's great geopolitical legacy will be that they have directed China, a continental empire whose current map looks very similar to the map of the Great Qing Empire, to pay greater attention to the sea. China has a combined area of ​​3.7 million square miles and shares land borders with 14 countries - more than any other country - including Russia, India, Vietnam and Korea - all military enemies of the 20th century. It is now effectively demanding its right in the entire South and East China Sea. If China tightens its control over these water bodies, it will be able to expand its geographical distance from the far western border with Tajikistan to Japan's north-eastern seabed and to the south towards the outskirts of Indonesia.

Given the continuing problems it faces in the West, its appalling response to what it describes as turbulence with the Uighurs and the Tibetan people, and its continued competition with other nations on its land borders, China's increasing interest in its control over the seas may prove devastating to the world, To enter into a naval competition with England. China, which is in dire straits, can accelerate this process for a number of reasons, including its desire to rebuild national legitimacy.

With the slowdown in China's economy and the unification of its policies on a new police state with advanced technology, the party will not be able to keep up all these ambitions. Stability policies and efforts to combat bureaucratic corruption will also be exhausted, while the party will destroy itself. Washington can also make it very difficult for that continental empire to achieve its ambitions at sea. Moreover, while Xi's political approach succeeded in addressing the short-term crisis, he doubled the political risks that China might face in the long run; Xi canceled the institutional reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping, which maintained a degree of stability in the system Department of the Communist Party of China.

China has witnessed the rise and fall of many ruling families in its history. The last empire has fallen as a result of a host of complex causes, including its colonial ambitions that have exhausted its capabilities, incensed the West, and resisted a myriad of internal challenges such as the civil war and the Muslim uprising and failure to deal with the economy. And the belief that the emperors have lost the "mandate of heaven" (what we might call today the "ideological vacuum").

Shi is not the interaction of the internal forces of the Chinese nation; the result is that the Central Kingdom will take a much less predictable path than the political science theories

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While policymakers and researchers are appalled by what China has achieved since 1978, they must also continue to study the regime's internal procedures for signs of future turmoil. In 1993, in a special edition of the National Interest, "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism," Charles Verbanks warned that many had overlooked the deterioration suffered by the Soviet Union for a long time because they had not focused on The Soviet Union's loss of ideological legitimacy among the Communist Party elites.

China today seeks to compensate for the absence of attractive political principles or ideologies by creating a new empire of fear, and making calls for nationalist nationalism more acute than ever before. This does not mean that China will collapse, but that Shi is not interfering with the internal forces of the nation; the result is that the Central Kingdom will take a much less predictable path than would be expected from physical political science theories.

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Translation: Translation Team

This article is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the location of Medan.