THE BIG STORY
Xi’s decisions. Since he came to power
in 2013, Xi’s ambition has been a ‘great
rejuvenation’ (the ‘Chinese Dream’) for
his once proud nation, restoring it to the
centre of world affairs after, the narrative
goes, centuries of being marginalized by
Western powers and Japan.
Part of this involves changing the
economy from being a low-tech manu-
facturing hub to a high-value, high-tech
society. But first Xi had to attend to the
sense that ordinary folk were being
shafted by pocket-stuffing elites. Hence
his famous anti-corruption drive, which
saw so many bribes and perks banished
- such as lavish bottles of whisky and
cognac from business people to govern-
ment officials – that the European luxury
sector actually experienced a downturn
in China as a result.
‘The ordinary people, farmers and
workers, like Xi Jinping because they
hate these [corrupt] officials, even if he’s
done nothing really to improve daily life,’
Dongfang says. Xi also wielded his anti-
corruption drive as a weapon to clear the
field of rivals, notably Bo Xilai, a popular
(and corrupt) party chief whose model of
more equitable municipal development
was seen as a challenge to Xi’s vision of
ruthless capitalism.
As for China’s capitalist class, Xi’s
plan has been to smother them so tightly
in the Communist Party’s embrace
that they don’t get any rogue ideas, like
pushing for their own forms of politi-
cal representation. He has ‘dramatically
strengthened’ the role the state plays
in private firms, encouraging them to
all have ‘chapters’ of the party in their
corporate structures.^6 While China
remains a very decentralized country- there is lots of competition between
powerful local governments – Xi has
immensely consolidated his personal
power: changes to the constitution and
party reforms allowed him to get rid of
presidential term limits and elevate his
position above his comrades on the deci-
sion-making Politburo.
Made in China 2.
Last year, Jack Ma (net worth $35 billion)
stepped down as CEO of online retail
giant Alibaba and announced that he was
a member of the Communist Party; the
episode was understood as more evidence
of Xi asserting the primacy of the party
over the market. Ma’s company, along
with Tencent and Baidu, are the three
pioneers of China’s new high-tech future,
which is the fastest-growing sector of
the economy. They make their money
harvesting the data of a billion people,
providing services from social media to
mobile e-payments. They are, effectively,three of the largest corporations on the
planet.^7
Whereas the stereotype among
Western commentators was once that
Chinese capitalism is good at imitating
others but not at coming up with origi-
nal ideas, contemporary China is leading
the world in terms of ‘innovation’. The
popularity of the Chinese app TikTok – a
kind of avant-garde, super-sophisticated
Snapchat that allows users to make mini
music videos – is one sign of this. Patent
applications have increased from almost
nothing in 2000 to 928,000 by 2014,
dwarfing the number coming from the
United States and Japan.^8 To d a y, t h e r e
are public bathrooms in Shanghai and
Beijing that have built-in facial recogni-
tion systems: you need to scan your face
before toilet paper is dispensed.
One function of this is purely repres-
sive: the state’s ability to survey its citi-
zens is unrivalled. But its long-term
social consequences might be even more
deleterious. China has been buying more
industrial robots than any other country
since 2013. In Dongguan, in China’s
manufacturing belt, 60 to 85 per cent of
workers at several small and medium-
sized companies were fired after the
introduction of state-subsidized robots:
in one case study ‘after migrant workers
(some of whom had been employed for
decades) were made redundant, young
university graduates with engineering
bachelor degrees were hired to supervise
the machines’.^9 As a manager at a kitchen
sink factory in Guangdong province told
the Financial Times: ‘These machines are
cheaper, more precise and more reliable
than people.’ He had nine robots doing
the jobs of 140 workers.
I ask Han Dongfang what he thinks:
‘Xi Jinping forgot: this is the country
with 1.4 billion people. If you only need
[a few] people to work with high technol-
ogy, what about the rest? Will they vanish
from the Earth by themselves?’ Even
the so-called middle-class professional
workers in the digital economy find
themselves exploited in sweatshop-like
conditions. At Huawei, the global success
story of high-tech China, the targets are
so intense that engineers and technicians
sleep at their desks. They complain about
the ‘996 regime’: working from 9am to
9pm, six days a week.‘Ripping us off’
Huawei isn’t just causing problems for
its own employees. The reason you may18 NEW INTERNATIONALIST