China s Inconvenient Truth | Foreign Affairs
Xi Jinping is in a race against time. The glow of China s early economic rebound and containment of COVID-19 is fading. The international media have moved on to celebrate vaccine efficacy and vaccination rates elsewhere, and other economies have started posting solid growth rates. Yet President Xi continues to advance a narrative of Chinese exceptionalism and superiority. The East is rising and the West is declining, he trumpeted in a speech last year. Senior Chinese officials and analysts have adopted and amplified Xi s message, pointing out the relative decline in Europe s and Japan s shares of the global economy and stressing the United States racial and political polarization. Former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs He Yafei has asserted starkly that the United States will find that its strength increasingly falls short of its ambitions, both domestically and internationally. . . . This is the grand trend of history. . . . The global balance of power and world order will continue to tilt in favor of China, and China s development will become unstoppable.
But behind such triumphalist rhetoric lurks an inconvenient truth: China s own society is fracturing in complex and challenging ways. Discrimination based on gender and ethnicity is rampant, reinforced by increasingly nationalistic and hate-filled online rhetoric. The creative class is at loggerheads with petty bureaucrats. And severe rural-urban inequality persists. These divides prevent the full participation of important sectors of society in China s intellectual and political life and, if left unaddressed, have the potential to sap the country s economic vitality. As Xi seeks to bolster indigenous innovation and domestic consumption, his success depends on the intellectual and economic support of the very constituencies his policies are disenfranchising. And as he promotes the China model as worthy of emulation, these same divides dim China s appeal and undermine China s influence. Unless Xi moves quickly to heal the rifts, his Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will remain just that.