Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Struggle Under Xi Jinping

320 pages

Prof Geoffrey Till

BR Editor’s note: a digital edition of this book is available open access at https://academic.oup.com/book/43062

This is one of the more interesting of the avalanche of books that have appeared in recent years about Chinese domestic and foreign policy. Its approach is different. Many books about modern China are either straight-forward narrative histories that take you through the country’s development since the revolution. Others focus on particular aspects of Chinese behaviour, its foreign policy say, or its navy, or its economy. Such books then look at what the author thinks are the things that China has done, is doing or might well do in this regard, and from this infers the country’s policy drivers. This book does neither but, in a different way, both.  Instead, Bates Gill does it the other way around. He takes a handful of abstract policy driver concepts, looks at what they are and examines where they are likely to take China. And, at the end, the book puts it all together by looking at the way all the policy drivers inter-relate in the central project of ‘the great rejuvenation of China’. To an extent he concludes by speculating about what all this might mean for the rest of us.

Before looking at this approach, perhaps two other things ought to be said in order to situate the appreciation, as it were. The first is that this is a book by an expert China watcher, with Chinese friends and evident expertise in the language. The other is that in the broad spectrum of analysts that stretches from panda-huggers at one end of the scale to dragon-slayers at the other, I think Bates Gill is more towards the latter than the former. And in an unusually well-informed way.

Ok, so what’s the message? Briefly, it’s that Chinese policy is the product of six overlapping policy drivers. They are sovereignty, leadership, ideas, wealth and power  but right at the centre of this web of imperatives there is the most important of them, legitimacy – the ring that rules them all. Legitimacy is the preservation at all costs of the Chinese Communist Party’s  right to rule and, nowadays, exemplifies Xi Jinping’s entitlement to personify that right. In one way, there’s nothing new about this. In China, things have always been that way. Dynasty after dynasty has prospered or collapsed on the basis of its capacity to fulfil its side of the tacit bargain between the ruler and the ruled, the Emperors and their lowly subjects. In return for their taxes and their loyalty, the ruled expected their ruler to provide them with acceptable standards of living and basic security. This made the ruler’s authority legitimate and beyond all reproach, or indeed even restraint.  What has differed over the centuries, however, is the degree of such restraint. Some had little, prospered and flowered; some on the other hand, had lots, dithered, declined and even collapsed. The periphery ignored the centre, the mandarins bickered and conspired, Confucian harmony evaporated and the outside barbarians swarmed at, and sometimes over the gates. No way is that going to happen to XI Jinping and his China.

The necessary success can only be delivered if the other five policy drivers are also properly satisfied. Everything is connected to everything else. China can only be understood in the round. Not just be looking at its economic policy or its naval development or any other constituent in the system, but by putting them altogether.

Bates Gill, accordingly, takes us through each of the policy drivers. And it’s a fascinating series of trips. By explaining what each of these six policy drivers actually mean and what they comprise, Gill in effect covers all of China’s policy and the way everything hangs together. In dealing with legitimacy itself, for example, we read that Xi himself was from the start one of the Party ‘princelings’ deeply and personally imbued with the sense that the Party must rule and so deliver what the country needs. Through him, the Party makes use of what Gill calls ‘aggrieved nationalism’ as a result of the way it has been disrespected and treated by the outside world, especially during the ‘Century of Humiliation’. This disrespect is especially galling for a people convinced of the natural superiority of the Chinese way in the creation of domestic and international harmony. Their moral certitude does much to explain the ruthless suppression of dissent at home and opposition abroad by an increasingly authoritarian regime.  The Party has to be faithful to its own semi-Confucian ideals. And it is a ‘struggle’ as the book’s title (a quotation from Xi himself) emphasises.

Their broad concept of legitimacy explains not just why the Chinese so resent external criticism of their domestic affairs, and their understanding of another of the main policy drivers – sovereignty. This boils down to a prickly sensitivity to intrusion and critics, -don’t touch, don’t interfere- noli me tangere, you might say. This sensitivity is manifested in their fury when other lesser entities oppose what the Chinese are doing, as the Philippines is discovering over Subi Reef and Second Thomas shoal. If others come with their tributes, in a properly deferential way, all will be well.

Each of the other four policy-drivers is dissected in a similarly stimulating way. The conclusion – with its dragon slaying overtones, is two fold – and uncomfortable. It suggests that the Chinese are a problem less for what they do and more for what they are. Moreover, what they are in part reflects what they think they have been and no one else can alter that. Both will shape the way things develop in the future. It shows just how ignorant and naive we were to have expected that once they got as rich and as powerful as us, they would turn out just like us and everything would be fine in the end. Instead, China’s future will develop ‘with Chinese characteristics’ as they keep telling us. Certainly, the Party will face major problems (the economy, demography, debt, climate, a turbulent world) in achieving its aims, but it will double down and ‘dare to struggle’ to resolve them one way or another.

This focus on the great leader himself is especially topical right now. In Russia we have another such authoritarian with a messianic view of his country’s future. Across the Atlantic many fear there’s another appearing in the White House. Perhaps we are emerging in a triangulated world dominated by the ‘politics of personality.’  It will be interesting, in the Chinese sense of the word, to see how they all relate to each other and treat the rest of us. For this reason too, I have rarely read such an interesting, comprehensive, clear and innovative book on China as this. Highly recommended.