China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America (CNN, aired November 28, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Tony Bennett-Lady Gaga special I ended up switching channels and watching a quite different sort of show, a Fareed Zakaria special report called China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America. Xi Jinping is the current President of China, and Zakaria’s show argued that his leadership is as revolutionary as those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, who ruled China as virtually an absolute dictator from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to his death in 1976, not only created the current Communist government of China but periodically threw the country into economic and social chaos with big campaigns like the Great Leap Forward of 1958 (an ill-advised attempt to modernize China by literally encouraging people to install steel furnaces and other bits of industrial infrastructure in their backyards) and the Great Proletaroan Cultural Revolution of 1966. This was the one in which Mao purged virtually the entire leadership of China, sending politicians and intellectuals into the Chjinese countryside to work as farm laborers and upending the entire social structure of China. One of the victims of this was Xi Jiaoping, whose father had been in the leadership class Mao was determined to purge, and instead of racing to it by becoming either an active or a secret opponent of the regime, Xi responded to being essentially orphaned in his teen years by becoming “redder than red,” in the Chinese phrase, and embracing the orthodoxy with the fervor of a true believer. (Come to think of it, this was probably toue outcome Nao wanted for the cadres he so suddenly displaced and relegated to manual-labor jobs.)

Xi applied for membership in the Communist Party and at first was rejected several times because of the continuing disgrace of his family, but ultimately he got in and rose methodically through the hierarchy. He also specialized in agronomy as his career and spent several years in the U.S. learning American farming methods. When Xi became vice-president under Deng – whose policies opened the door both to Chinese capitalism and to foreign investors (and leading to the essential de-industrialization of America as U.S. companies en masse moved their production to China, where wages were low and the repressive dictatorship banned trade unions and blocked any attempts by workers to organize or demand higher pay, benefits and safer working conditions), thereby rendering China a “Communist” country in name only – he was hailed as a reformer, met with U.S. Presidents, and projected a boyish, energetic image. When Xi became President of China on Deng’s death and subsequently had himself proclaimed “President for Life” by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (he did that while Donald Trump was President of the U.S., and Trump’s reaction was predictable: “‘President for Life’? That sounds like a good idea to me”), he swung China towards a policy of even more bitter repression, a huge military buildup aimed at reconquering Taiwan and dominating the South China Sea and the Asian-Pacific region in general, and an aggressive industrial and high-tech development project that, among other things, is making China the world’s leader in renewable energy technology.

While China skipped the recent Glasgow summit on climate change and is openly defying any international efforts to limit the use of highly polluting fossil fuels like coal, it’s also vastly expanding its renewable energy technology while the U.S. is basically ignoring it – with the likely result that when the U.S. finally decides to switch to renewable energy (most likely because we’ll simply be running out of any other kind), we’ll probably have to buy the technology from China. Among the concerns of the current Chinese government are any attempt at political opening, which they regard as an invitation to allow the whole regime to collapse the way the Soviet Union did in 1989 – which, Zakarla explains, is the main reason not only for the forcible takeover of Hong Kong and the systematic breaking of all the agreements China made when it received Hong Kong back from British colonial rule in 1997, but also for the fierce, almost Nazi-style repression of the Uiguhrs, the Muslim community in northwestern China’s Sinjiang province. The film graphically portrayed China as a country on the move while the U.S. is mired in political conflict and stasis – Zakaria included footage of the January 6, 2021 riots in the U.S. Capitol (which Chinese propagandists have been showing around the world to get non-aligned countries to come to their side instead of ours: the message China is sending with these images is, “This is what democracy looks like – and this is why you shouldn’t want it!”) and contrasted it with the lock-step military parades in Tienanmen Square last June to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

It also briefly discussed the fate of China’s leading high-tech entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who mysteriously “disappeared” for three months on the eve of a major initial public offering for one of his companies, and when he reappeared on Chinese TV, instead of the highly flamboyant figure he’d been before (including performing as a rock musician at company parties in makeups and costumes the members of KISS might have found excessive) he looked defeated and wan. One gets the impression that in China there’s room for only one personality cult, and it’s Xi’s. Shows like China’s Iron Fist seem to me eerily to invoke the similar debates during the 1930’s over whether democracy or dictatorship was better for the long-term health of a society: a lot of people in the 1930’s seriously argued that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Soviet Union could handle the Great Depression and the other issues facing major countries better than presumably slower-moving, less efficient republican systems like Great Britain’s and the U.S.’s. World War II was long assumed to have resolved that conflict on the side of republican democracy (though Britain and the U.S. had had to ally themselves with Stalin’s dictatorship to defeat Hitler’s), but now it’s coming back big-time as today’s ruling classes increasingly regard democracy as an expensive luxury they can do without. When people have a right to vote on their leaders – even within the highly circumscribed limits imposed on them by capitalist ruling classes – they have a tendency to elect people who will at least try to slow down the current ruling elite’s long-term project of increasing wealth and income inequality. Between that and the ways in which public dissent from that is taking shape – not as calls for socialism or a more egalitarian capitalism, but as nationalism, racism and calls for long-term democracies like the U.S. to become more dictatorial and seek a return to previous cultural norms and thereby “make _____ (fill in country’s name) great again,” the prospects for democracy worldwide look even bleaker today than they did in the 1930’s.