While Justin Trudeau is beating around the bush over the creation of a public inquiry into Chinese interference in the Canadian electoral process, President Xi Jinping simultaneously happens to be confirming two things with the outfit this week in Beijing, of the great meeting of the Chinese Parliament: its growing grip on power and the hardening of China in its relations with the United States against the backdrop of increasing military budgets.
From this to that, the totalitarian tendencies that Mr. Xi manifests and applies are thus matched only by those of Mr. Trudeau in having minimized — which is frankly irresponsible — the danger represented by Chinese intrusions into our federal institutions.
The annual session of the Chinese Parliament, which has been held since Sunday and for ten days at the Palace of the People’s Assembly, Tian’anmen Square, is an exercise regulated like clockwork, where President Xi will be officially renewed for a third five-year term. Unsurprisingly, to be sure, since he had the two-term limit abolished in 2018, but a milestone nonetheless, as Xi, who is 69, potentially settles into the dictatorship of a presidency at life.
By extension, this high mass, which brings together nearly 3,000 docile delegates, is an opportunity for the president to consolidate his hold on the party-state by confirming the formation of a government forged in his image.
In international relations, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Qin Gang, set the tone on Tuesday by denouncing Washington’s “hysterical neo-McCarthyism”, after Xi had for his part attacked the United States by name for the way it seeks to ” contain us, encircle us and suffocate us”.
Which is objectively not wrong. Following an elementary principle of reciprocity, the United States is indisputably in a strategic and economic standoff with China, when it comes to perpetuating its empire. Blaming China for being a threat to the international order through its support for Russian aggression in Ukraine is, moreover, forgetting that Washington, so to speak, had a school, 20 years ago on March 20. , attacking Iraq without UN approval.
“In China, the time has come for direct confrontation with the United States”, recently chronicled the correspondent of the World in Beijing, Frédéric Lemaître. Beyond the inflammatory statements, this confrontation is concretely part of the 7.2% increase in the Chinese military budget announced on Sunday – its largest increase since 2019. At 225 billion US dollars, Chinese military spending is still far to be what they are in the United States (over US$800 billion), a country that suffers from a “morbid addiction to war”, to use the words of political scientist Rafael Jacob. A morbid dependence which did not prevent Washington from crying out in horror at the Chinese announcement, seeing in it the continuation of the build up around the Taiwanese question and, more immediately, the sign of imminent military support for Vladimir Putin when Xi Jinping is expected in Moscow this week.
In 2021, for the record, global military spending exceeded the record threshold of US$2 trillion, according to SIPRI. Spending up for the seventh year in a row, in a context of deconstruction of international arms control treaties. The endless growth of military spending has created a vicious circle that prevents our governments from seeing, if they really think about it, that these sums should be used for more virtuous projects.
So it is with China.
Head of State, of the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army, determined to establish the supremacy of the party-state over the private sector, what some call the “Sovietization” of China, Xi Jinping is the head of a country which, under promises of social justice, suffers from glaring inequalities dug by the zero COVID policy. Nearly 20% of its population lives below the poverty line (273 million people), and the situation is particularly serious in rural areas.
Other challenges: a youth unemployment rate of 18%, while a record number of 11.5 million graduates will come out of colleges and universities in 2023. At the other end of the spectrum, China, as elsewhere, will have to deal with particularly critical problems of the aging of its population. The regime does try to apply pro-natalist policies, but they come up against strong objections among young people, first for economic reasons, but also for societal issues related to the status of women. The fact is that in China, the cost of living—housing, education, health—is one of the highest in the world relative to household income.
Between international shocks and immense domestic challenges, the Chinese power led by Xi over the next five years is likely to be as disruptive as it is disrupted.