Where is China Heading?
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2021
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Helen and David talk to Cindy Yu, host of the Chinese Whispers podcast, about the trajectory of Chinese politics. What is Beijing’s political strategy for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Is Xi Jinping really a socialist? Can the CCP escape its history? Plus, what’s the real reason Xi didn’t show up in Glasgow?
Talking Points:
Before the pandemic, the central questions about China in the West revolved around Hong Kong. Now we don’t talk about it so much.
- Both the West and China itself seem to think that China has the situation under control.
- The pandemic made protest harder. It also meant that the media on the ground was focusing on something else.
- Beijing called the financial companies’ bluff: they didn’t leave when the political situation got worse.
China is trying to repair its territorial claims.
- In some ways, the situation in Hong Kong has made conflict with Taiwan more likely. One country, two systems no longer seems plausible.
- The window of reunification may be closing.
- Xi would probably not want to go in for a long, drawn-out war.
This is a precarious situation: the risks of miscalculation are enormous.
- What would the West need to do to preemptively deter China?
- It’s not clear that this would actually be good for China.
The CCP apparatus is incredibly opaque.
- That said, it appears that the party is more unified now than it was before.
- Xi is delivering, and if he continues to do so, he will probably not face too much pushback within the party.
- There was a domestic reason for Xi to skip COP: it coincided with the Sixth Plenum.
How ideological is Xi’s project?
- China is moving away from pragmatism, not necessarily because of Xi Jinping thought.
- Ideology is most evident in economics.
- Xi is now talking about common prosperity after decades of rampant inequality.
- The policies associated with common prosperity probably would not fly in the West.
- Xi thinks that fixing economic problems is one way to head off social problems.
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Cindy’s podcast, Chinese Whispers
- Cindy’s podcast episode with Oriana Skylar Mastro
- Victor Shih at UC San Diego
Further Learning:
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking to |
| 0:11.0 | Cindy Yu about China, about Xi Jinping, about Hong Kong and about the 100th anniversary of the Chinese |
| 0:17.8 | Communist Party. How does it all fit together? Talking Politics is brought to you in |
| 0:26.0 | partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading review of culture and ideas. |
| 0:31.9 | And the LLB is returning to first principles with their latest exclusive offer for Talking |
| 0:37.0 | Politics listeners. Get 12 issues of the magazine for just £12 and they'll also send you one of their surprisingly famous tote bags, acclaimed by the likes of New York Magazine and Vice. Just use the URL my lrb.combe.combecom.com.uk slash talking bag. That's mylrb.com.com.uk slash talking bag. We recorded this conversation, Helen Thompson and I with Cindy Yu on Tuesday. |
| 1:17.6 | Cindy is the host of the really excellent Chinese Whispers podcast, which covers almost all aspects of China and Chinese politics. |
| 1:24.7 | And we wanted to take advantage of her expertise to try and really |
| 1:28.1 | cover the field and see if we can pull together the different strands of coverage of China in the |
| 1:32.6 | West. So we started with Hong Kong. Cindy, on your podcast, you cover pretty much all aspects |
| 1:39.1 | of Chinese politics, culture, society. And we do want to do a sort of tour of some of the big themes, |
| 1:45.2 | thinking about Chinese politics, particularly as seen from the West. But maybe we could start |
| 1:49.1 | with Hong Kong, because for many people, before the pandemic, the central question about China was |
| 1:54.5 | what was going on in Hong Kong. And it seemed to be a struggle that was high stakes for everyone. |
| 2:00.1 | And now, insofar as it gets attention in the West, |
| 2:02.1 | it's a sort of background rumble. And I think the assumption is that Beijing won, and even if |
| 2:07.8 | it's not under control, that the situation is a sort of slow grind of wearing down the opposition. |
| 2:13.2 | Is that how it seems from Beijing? Does Beijing think Hong Kong is under control? |
| 2:17.0 | Yeah, I think that is pretty much how they see it as well. And what their ideal situation is, |
| 2:23.8 | is to have the world not pay attention because there's no one big dramatic moment that's happening. |
| 2:31.0 | What we've seen over the last year and some months since national security |
| 2:35.0 | law was introduced is this kind of slow trickle down the slow erosion of Hong Kong's freedoms |
... |
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