Dictator Xi Jinping opened the 20th Chinese Communist Party National Congress on Sunday with a “report” to the Central Committee, which he nominally serves, that claimed China has ascended to global leadership in economics, diplomacy, clean government, and military power.
Xi’s address was triumphant as expected, with little concern for how it might sound to a world still coping with fallout from the coronavirus pandemic China unleashed. The pandemic was old news for Xi, who had no interest in conceding the smallest error in how China handled the crisis.
Instead, Xi’s theme was China’s overwhelming success at creating a “modern socialist country” with “high-quality development,” a slogan that seems designed to sweep aside concerns that China’s economy is in more trouble than the Communist Party wants to admit.
“We must fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy on all fronts, continue reforms to develop the socialist market economy, promote high-standard opening-up, and accelerate efforts to foster a new pattern of development that is focused on the domestic economy and features positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows,” the dictator said.
Xi seemed at pains to reassure observers who thought China would use the 20th five-year National Congress, and his own claim of an unprecedented third term in power, to pivot away from growth and modernization to deal with internal issues and intensify its focus on militarization.
Xi instead said China would move even faster on modernization and creating a “high-standard socialist market economy.”
“We will work to see that the market plays the decisive role in resource allocation and that the government better plays its role,” he said, perhaps teasing a lighter touch from the central government after years of ham-fisted crackdowns on high-flying Chinese tycoons and tech giants.
Xi said “opening up” to the outside world would remain a priority, and also sought to push back against predictions that China would scale back its ambitious Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure program as its economy sputters, funding grows tighter, and some BRI clients entertain second thoughts about mortgaging their countries to Chinese banks.
Xi also boasted of China’s growing military power and said “modernizing” the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through “informatization and intelligentization” was a priority. He said increasing military power was vital to “building a modern socialist country in all respects,” and hinted some projects along these lines would be timed for completion by the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding in 2027.
“Informatization and intelligentization” sounds like modernizing the PLA’s communications systems and data processing capabilities up to Western state-of-the-art levels, but when Chinese military planners speak of “intelligentized warfare,” they actually mean something much more sinister and aggressive: a new form of all-out hybrid warfare that would include cyber and psychological attacks on a massive scale.
A primary goal is using artificially intelligent systems and “information dominance” to manipulate the politics and morale of adversary nations. Some international analysts expect Taiwan to be the first target of “intelligentized warfare,” and indeed suggest the early stages of such a campaign are already underway against the island.
Xi’s speech to the Party Congress also stressed the importance of increasing political control over the PLA, with programs to “strengthen Party organizations in the people’s armed forces, carry out regular activities and put in place institutions to improve the military’s political work, and make unremitting efforts to improve conduct, enforce discipline and combat corruption in the military.” A tighter political grip over the military would be an important defense against the kind of intelligentized warfare China is planning to use against its adversaries.
Xi also used his report to the Central Committee to declare the latest in his unending string of “successes” against corruption, which somehow keeps rising again as a dragon for him to heroically slay no matter how many times he declares total victory over it.
“As long as the breeding grounds and conditions for corruption still exist, we must keep sounding the bugle and never rest, not even for a minute, in our fight against corruption,” Xi declared.
“We have waged a battle against corruption on a scale unprecedented in our history. Driven by a strong sense of mission, we have resolved to ‘offend a few thousand rather than fail 1.4 billion’ and to clear our party of all its ills,” he said.
Xi asserted the Chinese Communist Party and its ostensible crusade against corruption would “never change its nature, its conviction, or its character,” a clear rebuttal to the notion of significant reforms or greater freedom under the Communist system. It was also a signal that Xi is untroubled by criticism that his “anti-corruption crusades” often turn into thinly-disguised political purges.
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