Gordon (Chang)'s alive!
October 1, 2021
I COME across the enthralling China Coup by Roger Garside, who lays claim to being the new Gordon Chang by predicting an imminent coup d’etat against Xi Jinping and China’s subsequent transition towards, er, liberal democracy. Needless to say, this is a pleasing fantasy, but it is all rather far-fetched, and rests on the notion that the overreaching Dictator is “in thrall to a vision of himself as the strong man” and is deaf to the voices of reason, as dictators often are. Garside assumes Xi will eventually be boxed in, and will become irrational. And he assumes Xi’s irrationality will persuade his subordinates to turn on him.
Garside’s fictional scenario begins with a trading suspension of the five Chinese firms with the highest valuations on the U.S. stock exchange for refusing to comply with information disclosure rules. This effectively confiscates the assets of some of China’s richest and most powerful families, and tips the wary, wily Premier Li Keqiang and his ally Wang Yang - “well aware of the factors that have produced the sea change in American attitudes towards China” - over the edge towards mutiny. It comes in the context of growing distrust of China’s leaders internationally, reinforced by the coronavirus outbreak but really the result of a long process of unscrupulous national assertiveness on the part of the Xi regime.
These men [Li and Wang] recognised that China’s economic slowdown was taking place in an environment poisoned by an array of deep-seated problems, political, social, and moral, which would interact at some point ot cause a crisis. They have long resolved to be ready to seize that moment to move against Xi Jinping himself. Nothing less offers an escape from the dead end in which his policies have trapped China. His China Dream is a waking nightmare.
All this seems to repeat a very familiar trope when it comes to analysing Chinese politics: the assumption that there is a much nicer leader waiting in the wings if only the bad guy is removed.
Throughout the history of the People’s Republic, analysts have contrasted the sinister and unscrupulous bastards in charge (Mao, Deng, Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping) with subordinate reformers who could have made the regime so much kinder if they’d been given an opportunity (Peng Dehuai, Zhou Enlai, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Zhu Rongji, Wen Jiabao, and now Li Keqiang). Here, Garside explains how Li is so much smarter, better-educated, wittier, lither and fitter than the heavy-joweled Xi.
The imaginary dialogue between Li, Wang, and the other prospective protagonists of this coup is unintentionally hilarious. “I have been waiting for you, waiting to see if you would dare to act. I will work with you,” says Wang Qishan, Xi’s old mucker and chief anti-corruption tsar.
Eventually, the Politburo meets and almost to a man, denounces the Paramount Leader. Li’s summing-up is a perfect crystallisation of the author’s wishful thinking, accusing Xi of centralising too much power, of capitulating to vested interests and failing to move with the times when it comes to political and social reforms. “Is there any reason why you should not resign all your posts?” he concludes.
And thus, Xi is forced out and escorted to his retirement villa. “In his luxurious prison, Xi will have time to reflect upon his mistakes, while China makes a transition to democracy and the rule of law.” Because of course, the only thing standing in the way of democracy in China is a single dictator.
Still, one never knows what could happen once just one of the many dykes and ramparts that protect Xi finally collapses, causing dozens of others to fall in its wake. In an autocracy where expressions of opinion are strictly circumscribed, no one really knows the true extent of Xi’s popularity or lack thereof. If the Party struggles to ascertain the extent of the discontent, then it is therefore unable to properly address it. After all, the degenerate Romanian dictator Ceaucescu was said to have had a positive approval rating just a few days before he was dragged out of his palace and shot at the end of 1989.
Garside makes the point that China fits all the definitions of totalitarian government, particularly “the absence of any restrictions on the Party”. It no longer needs to rely on mass terror after harnessing “technologies of power and reach that not even George Orwell, let alone Hitler or Stalin, could dream of.” The Party “remains determined to act as the final arbiter of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, and of what may or may not be known and remembered, as it has since it came to power in 1949.” All this makes any smooth “transition to democracy” almost impossible to conceive, despite Garside’s best efforts.
Men of letters like Garside (and me, as it happens) are more than usually affronted by systematic untruth, by the lies that flood through all one-party states. We like to believe the lies are corrosive, that they distort the signals that allow government to function effectively. If the Party lies about local government debts, for example, it cannot adequately respond to them. Garside believes misinformation has skewed the regime’s clockwork at every level.
It has always been made clear that the Chinese government has always kept two sets of books, with the more honest assessments reserved for internal consumption only and circulated among leaders to formulate policy, but the dishonesty runs deeper than that: every tier of society is motivated to bury bad news, including news about lethal new SARS-like infectious diseases. It is scarcely credible that the leaders have a substantially more accurate picture than anyone else.
But it is Garside’s chapter on the moral collapse of China that is the most arresting. With civil society almost completely destroyed, we are left with an atomised population doing the only thing that is permitted, which is to work, to consume, to get rich. With the Party in charge, there is no law that can’t be bent, no contract that can’t be weasled out of, no product standard or act of environmental compliance that can’t be faked. Nothing and no one can be trusted. “Truth is buried, conscience is castrated and our language is raped by money and power,” said the writer Yan Lianke.
Garside seems to trace the ultimate source of China’s modern degeneration not to the victory of Xi, but to China’s persecution of the Christians. He suggests that there was a fork in the road in around 2008, when China could have chosen not only to move forward with market reforms, but also legalise the thousands of unregistered churches that had appeared over the last couple of decades. Instead, fearful for its own survival, it chose stagnation and repression. There could be no other master, no other source of authority and legitimacy. It was no longer enough for religious organisations to pay homage to the authority and organisation of the Party: all religion now had to be crushed, as could be seen by the shameful assaults on Xinjiang.
Garside suggests there’s a dialectic at work, and that even the unchecked, arbitrary deployment of extreme force by the Chinese Communist Party will eventually lead to unforeseen counterreactions that could destroy it. The force of China’s attempts to outlaw religion cannot be considered in isolation, and will create social pressures that cannot be contained indefinitely. All Christians, he says, “now face a common enemy.”
Garside also makes his case against the CCP’s handling of COVID-19, and he doesn’t even need to blame the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Lest we forget, every indication suggests that the virus was circulating in Wuhan much earlier and far more widely than the government has officially acknowledged, and that information was deliberately suppressed. Every indication suggests that Beijing knew about the virus far earlier than its official timeline claims. This in itself is enough to explain the decision - apparently made at the highest level - to conceal or destroy crucial evidence relating to the origins of SARS-CoV-2, a cover-up now used as circumstantial evidence to show that it had in fact originated in a laboratory.
The thing about the lab leak hypothesis: it blames the wrong people. It blames the scientists, who are by and large far more amenable to the idea of cooperation, transparency, information disclosure.
It is easy to lose sight of this and many more of China’s abject failures over the years. Many seem to have bought into the narrative of China’s ruthless, authoritarian competence - “they might be tough, but at least they get things done” - and forgotten how accident-prone autocracies can often be. From the beginning, I was more inclined than others to give China the benefit of the doubt on case numbers, and to cast doubt on proxy indicators such as cremations or hospital parking lots. When Europe and the United States failed spectacularly to contain the pandemic, I was quick to point out the futility of blaming China’s system, when other systems were doing equally badly, if not worse. As Garside puts it, “The incompetence displayed by some liberal democracies in handling the coronavirus has been a valuable gift to China’s rulers, helping them deflect criticism of their own performance and their political system.”
What Garside makes clear is that the CCP is a survival machine. Survival is its priority, and is above all considerations of truth or falsehood, and of right and wrong. The CCP leaders are themselves “prisoners of a system that dictates that at every stage their overriding priority is the survival of the regime they serve.” It isn’t the case that they didn’t care about a new infectious disease spreading through the hospitals of Wuhan: it’s just that their priority was “stability” and pleasing their superiors.
Something else we should never lose sight of: the lack of dissent in China - not to mention the compelled expressions of faith in the virtues of Chinese Communist Party - are meaningless when everything is controlled, when social media is censored, and when reporters are part of a hierarchical system controlled by the Party itself. We have no idea how popular Xi really is. The lessons of history suggest that dictators are never popular at all. We will have no idea how fierce the torrents of hatred will be until he is finally toppled.
