The annual session of the National People’s Assembly (NPA) held in Beijing left, according to tradition, the announcement of some of the main guidelines that determine the direction of Chinese politics in the short and medium term. For example, in the military sphere, an increase in military spending of 7.2%, a figure that must be considered minimal, but which is relevant in the context of rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait. In economic terms, growth of 5% until 2023, a modest pace in Chinese terms after growing at an annual average of more than 9% during the three and a half decades before Covid.

The conclave also announced institutional reforms that will mean greater concentration of power and greater control of the economy, especially in the financial sector. He also clarified two strategic needs of Beijing for the coming years. On the one hand, to be technologically self-sufficient, a purpose that is a consequence of US sanctions and controls on the export of semiconductors and related technology, the impact of which is enormous. On the other hand, to guarantee their food security, an objective for which Brazil and Latin America have reserved a fundamental role.

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Yet the most politically significant event, although somewhat symbolic in that it was written after a decision at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) last November, was the culmination of Xi’s authoritarian turn. Jinping is consolidating his third term as president of the republic. Aside from being general secretary of the CCP and chairman of the Central Military Commission, the other two bastions of power in the Asian country, Xi Jinping manages to consolidate an omnipresent power only comparable to that enjoyed by Mao Zedong, considered China’s “father of the motherland.” . A turning point that the ANP of 2,952 deputies confirmed unanimously, with no votes against or abstentions.

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Thus, the collective leadership established after the death of the Great Helmsman was definitively dismantled, the mechanism that was supposed to prevent – precisely – the perpetuation of power leading to the wandering of one person bringing chaos to China, as had already happened during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Surrounding himself with allies and protégés, all of whom are proven loyal both within the CCP and in government, and with rival factions neutralized, Xi will have power without strings attached. This is happening in the midst of its authoritarian movement in China and in the context of open ideological hostility towards the West and its political system based on freedom and universal democratic values.

In 2013, shortly after Xi came to power, the regime’s rejection of Western ideological trends was embodied in an internal CCP memorandum known as Document number 9, which was forbidden to talk about or defend both at universities and within the party. Until the 2008 crisis, Beijing insisted that every country has the right to choose its own path of development, but with that distance it viewed the Western system with admiration. Today, Xi presents the supposed model of governance around Covid and the supposed eradication of poverty as propaganda evidence of the greater effectiveness of the Chinese model against democracies. For Xi, the Chinese system is not only the best for China, but also superior in value to the Western system.

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The so-called “White Paper on Democracy”, published by Beijing in late 2021 to counter Joe Biden’s democracy summit, ensures that “there is no fixed model of democracy” to support the idea, increasingly repeated in the regime’s propaganda, that in China there is a democracy with Chinese characteristics based on supposed popular legitimacy. “If a country is democratic, it should be judged by its people, not dictated by a handful of outsiders,” the document reads. Clear indicators, all of them, that the second economic power on the planet will not be, at least in the medium term, a liberal democracy.

This hostility to the Western democratic system, which is undoubtedly imperfect but has no counterbalance in China, is also reflected in China’s foreign policy. Under Xi, the Asian nation has abandoned decades of restraint in favor of hard-line, even aggressive diplomacy, leading to disagreements with many countries: a growing rivalry with the United States, a drastic move away from the European Union, conflicts with Australia, Canada and Eastern European countries, disputes with India and the latent conflict in Taiwan as a background, among others.

China accuses Western countries of implementing “measures of containment, encirclement and repression” against it. Therefore, in this context and with Beijing’s tacit alignment with Moscow on the issue of Ukraine, it seems that coexistence between two ideologically antagonistic worlds is difficult. During the last decades, which led to the modernization of China, there were already differences, but common interests. Now the world is entering a new irreconcilable cold war. (OR)

Juan Pablo Cardenal is a journalist specializing in the internationalization of China and editor of Análisis Sinico u cadal.org