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At the end of a year of setbacks and humiliations, the Hong Kong district council elections were the biggest embarrassment yet for Xi’s regime. Beijing completely misjudged the mood and seems to have been intoxicated by its own propaganda, unbelievably expecting a victory for the pro-Beijing camp. Instead, a six-month cannonade of tear gas and rubber bullets from the CCP’s police force in Hong Kong produced a record 71 percent turnout, sweeping the pan-democrats and other opposition forces forward to take 87 percent of the seats. The CCP’s giant propaganda machine was paralysed, shocked and voiceless for almost three days, unable to explain an election result it had convinced itself was impossible. This episode says a lot more than just how disconnected the Chinese regime is from the real situation in Hong Kong. Why should anyone believe it has a firmer grasp of the real situation on the ground in China? No amount of censorship can fully keep this crushing defeat for the CCP’s proxy parties from becoming known in mainland China. At the top, where of course the full scale of the fiasco is already known, this can only stoke the internal power struggle and raise doubts about the political strategy and general competence of Xi’s ruling group.
The elections in Taiwan on 11 January could be an even bigger, more humiliating setback for Xi Jinping, given also the more important character of these elections. It is unlikely Beijing will be so badly disorientated this time around. But given the likelihood of a major win for Tsai Ing-wen, based almost entirely on rejection of the CCP’s authoritarian system, and fuelled by the defiant spirit of the Hong Kong protests, this will pose major new problems for Xi’s regime. For the strategic conflict with US imperialism, within which Taiwan is a crucial ‘domino’, the CCP has now realised it must play a long game. But the bullying, ultimatist position of Xi, under pressure not to show ‘weakness’, limits the range of options for the Chinese regime. Not for nothing there are growing voices being raised within China, also in relation to Hong Kong, for pragmatism – an implicit criticism of Xi’s approach.
The CCP fears the movement in Hong Kong, as it fears all mass movements and “instability”, but mostly because of the potential for this to spread to mainland China. Although a direct ‘copy cat’ movement is unlikely, the Hong Kong mass protests will become a vital reference point when the mainland masses move into struggle against state repression. That would fundamentally change the situation and pose an existential threat to CCP rule which Hong Kong by itself does not pose. Above all the CCP fears a movement of the working class in China, as was the case in 1989, when the student-initiated mass protests became the trigger for the emergence of an independent workers’ movement. By downplaying and refusing to recognise the potential role of the working class in the Hong Kong struggle, the moderate pan-democrats and their allied trade union leaders have rendered an unintended service to the CCP and Hong Kong government, complicating and limiting the ability of the mass struggle to rise to another level. A workers’ movement in Hong Kong combining revolutionary anti-authoritarian demands with anti-capitalism and demands for workers’ rights would wield much greater influence in mainland China. A key new development in the mass movement, after six months of struggle, is the turn of a section of the masses towards the concept of trade unionism, with new union groups sprouting up, strikes erupting, and slogans in favour of trade unions on demonstrations.
The explosion of revolt in Hong Kong is payment for the brutal authoritarian policies of Xi’s regime, slavishly implemented by the CCP’s local proxies, piled upon the social catastrophe of extreme neo-liberalism. Despite a succession of humiliations and forced retreats in the face of the masses’ tenacity, the regime shows no signs of a re-evaluation or change of direction. Not for Hong Kong, not for Taiwan, and not within China itself.
Instead the ruling group is doubling down on its hardline approach, ploughing even greater resources into its repressive capacity, building a model “techno authoritarian state”, and extending new methods of control and surveillance even over the elite layers of the CCP-state. This was confirmed at the Fourth Plenum in October, which announced no new policies but “much more” of the same. This superficial show of strength in fact reveals growing weakness and insecurity at the top, with more than a hint of paranoia. Devoid of ideas and options, Xi’s regime repeats itself ad nauseum. The message is even greater “control” by the regime with Xi at its “core”, but in reality this control is slipping rather than gaining strength. In Hong Kong, faced with a wall of resistance the regime, “adopted a strategy to procrastinate in the absence of any better ideas,” said Beijing-based commentator Wu Qiang.
After waves of strikes in China in 2018 and the remarkable Jasic struggle, the regime’s repression induced a temporary downturn in workers’ struggle. But as in Hong Kong, repression only accumulates more anger and leads to a bigger wave of struggle at a later date. 2018 represented an important turning point because an advanced layer of youth in China gained experience in struggle and greater understanding of the nature of the regime (fewer illusions in reform). This is similar to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014.
Xi’s numerous setbacks in the international power struggle with US imperialism is seriously damaging his ‘strongman’ image. The nationalistic, triumphalist propaganda surrounding the BRI, and claims of the technological dominance of major Chinese companies has suffered a backlash and loss of credibility. The change in consciousness is shown by mass reactions on China’s social media to the one-year anniversary of the detention of Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou: Anger over Huawei’s mistreatment of its employees overshadowed any nationalistic indignation over her treatment by Canadian and US authorities.
The BRI project faced setbacks even before the China-US conflict escalated since July 2018. The debt trap problem for small countries, especially South and East Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Philippines, already caused waves of project cancellations. The anti-BRI campaign of Western imperialism means governments in neo-colonial countries will try to balance between the superpowers and will see increasing splits between pro-US and pro-China political factions. After four years of increases, Chinese-led new contracts and direct investments in BRI countries declined to US$116.4 billion in 2017 from US$143.2 billion in 2016. The total value in the first-half 2018 was only 42 percent of the same period in 2017.
The need to drum up Han Chinese nationalism in order to create a ‘strongman’ image and consolidate Xi’s power within the CCP-state makes its hardline approach towards Xinjiang irreversible. The unprecedented repression, racist apartheid-style laws, and mass incarceration in Xinjiang, shows how the CCP-state has created a crisis from its own ultra hardline policies. Even local officials who are more subjected to mass pressure on the ground have shown unwillingness to implement some of the repressive policies causing divisions within the state apparatus. The recently leaked 400 pages of internal CCP documents reveal that 12,000 local CCP officials have been investigated for not pursuing the crackdown vigorously enough. The leaking of these documents to Western media is itself a sign of discontent within the state apparatus about these policies.
China’s economic slowdown
China’s economic performance is a crucial factor for working out perspectives for the coming period. Based on official data, GDP growth has fallen to its slowest pace in almost thirty years. There has been an uninterrupted slowdown in quarterly growth rates from an average of around 9 percent from 2011 to 2016 to around 6.5 percent since 2016. Recently Premier Li Keqiang admitted that it would be “very difficult” to maintain GDP growth at six percent, in remarks that were interpreted to mean growth could drop below 6 percent in the final quarter of 2019. Most international forecasters are predicting sub-six percent growth for China next year and beyond.
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