Cheung on Esarey and Han, 'The Xi Jinping Effect' [Review]
Esarey, Ashley; Han, Rongbin, eds.. The Xi Jinping Effect
University of Washington Press, 2024. 304 pp. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 9780295752815.
Reviewed by Olivia Cheung (King's College London)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2025)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61434
Xi Jinping is known for his authoritarian rule, foreign policy ambitions, and confrontational stance toward the United States. Shortly after taking power in late 2012, Xi articulated the goal of achieving “the China Dream of national rejuvenation” by mid-century.[1] To reach this, he has focused on reinvigorating the Chinese Communist Party on the basis of centralizing powers in his hands. He has disregarded conventions, launching an unprecedentedly intense rectification-cum-anticorruption drive; elevating his “thought” as the state ideology; restructuring the party, military, and state; abolishing term limits in 2018; taking a third term in 2022; and ending the “hide and bide” foreign policy. Politically, Xi appears invisible, but does his power translate to effective governance? Even under former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s totalitarian rule, resistance and subversion persisted. As a Chinese saying goes, “From the top comes policies; from the bottom, coping strategies.” To govern as effectively as he holds power, Xi must overcome not only resistance and inertia, but also deep-seated structural factors and international forces beyond his control.
To what extent does Xi impact China’s governance and policies? The Xi Jinping Effect, edited by Ashley Esarey and Rongbin Han, examines this question. The book is divided into four parts, with the first three addressing the Xi effect on domestic affairs—internal party governance and ideological rectification (part 1), socioeconomic inequality (part 2), and mass surveillance and control (part 3). Part 4 considers Xi’s impact on Taiwan and China’s relations with Southeast Asia. While these areas are significant, it is unclear why they were chosen over others. Notably, Xi has invested in technological supremacy, party control in business, securitization, military-civilian fusion, rebooting “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong, befriending the Global South, competing with the United States, and changing the global governance system in a more Sino-centric fashion. Would focusing on these areas yield a different assessment of the Xi effect?
If I were to study the Xi effect, I would use X’s strategic intentions as the starting point and anchor. Based on an analysis of Xi’s speeches and writings, I would identify the areas he is most and least determined to change, his benchmarks of success, time frame, and the trade-offs he is willing to make.[2] Thereafter, I would sort Xi’s policies into categories depending on the strength or outcome of the Xi effect as Xi intended them to be. I would then select several cases from each category for analysis with a view of producing findings that will have a good degree of generalizability. Putting Xi’s preferences and worldview, or Xi Jinping Thought, front and center implies taking Xi’s agency fully into account in appraising the Xi effect. Assessing the Xi effect by checking whether Xi Thought was faithfully implemented should allow us to probe more deeply into the nature and limits of Xi’s strongman rule, this being the very phenomenon that motivates a study of the Xi effect in the first place.
The book concludes that the Xi effect is highly uneven. It is found to be the main reason behind the “total surveillance” of society (chapter 6), especially the Xinjiang Uyghurs (chapter 7). It has shown to be robust in anticorruption in the party-state (chapter 1). Its impact on ideological governance in the party (chapter 2) and society (chapter 3) is sweeping. Furthermore, it has risen above all factors in shaping China’s Taiwan policy (chapter 8). In these areas, Xi has overturned long-standing post-Mao policies. It is nothing short of a “counter-reformation” (chapter 2) of the post-Mao or Dengist reform, one that will most likely endure as long as Xi is in power. The authors of these chapters, except chapters 7 (on Xinjiang) and 8 (on Taiwan), observe that the changes ushered in by Xi are not entirely new. They either built on or adapt existing trends or took a page from earlier periods. Deng Kai, David Demes, and Chih-Jou Jay Chen (chapter 7) point out that Xi’s “total surveillance” system was made possible by the preceding Hu Jintao regime’s decision to build a national population database (p. 154). Andrew Wedeman traces the origin of Xi’s anticorruption campaign to Mao’s times (chapter 1). Timothy Cheek observes ideological governance under Xi had roots in the Qing dynasty (chapter 2). Gerda Wielander demonstrates that Xi’s reaffirmation of “faith” in the party, though overtly political, strikes a chord with popular thinking at the social grassroots (chapter 3). Prior to Xi, many human right dissidents in China publicly proclaimed the importance of keeping faith. Like Xi, they also saw faith as a “spiritual and motivational force” to help them move forward (p. 73). Whereas they claimed inspiration from Christianity (pp. 73-74) to confront the authorities, Xi, an atheist, urged people to submit to the party out of faith in its moral righteousness.
In contrast to the above chapters, Martin King Whyte (chapter 4) and Alexia T. Chan (chapter 5) conclude that the Xi effect is slight, if not negligible, in improving socioeconomic inequality. Both present ample evidence of persistent and increasing urban-rural inequality under Xi. Their findings juxtapose to Xi’s declaration, in 2020, that the antipoverty campaign he started in 2015 had delivered a “miracle.” Xi claimed that the campaign had lifted seventy million rural Chinese out of “absolute poverty.”[3] Yet, the everyday poverty documented in chapters 4 and 5 shows that the success of the antipoverty campaign was short-lived. Whyte attributes the lack of a Xi effect in reducing inequality not to Xi’s weakness but his reluctance to take “bold” steps to combat inequality (p. 117). Chan goes further. She finds that the persistence of second-class citizenship under Xi is intentional and “serves state goals” (p. 146). Both further observe that structural factors have come into play. For example, Chan finds that the problem of “unfunded mandates” has persisted under Xi (p. 139), whereby the central government announced goals to improve the people’s livelihood without supporting cash-strapped local governments to translate these goals into actual policies. I would add that the massive increase in local government debt under Xi is another important structural factor, this being one that is inadvertently contributed by his other policies, notably the crackdown on the property sector and shadow banking.[4]
The middle point between a strong Xi effect and a weak Xi effect is found in China’s relations with Southeast Asia. Brantly Womack (chapter 9) shows that the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s signature foreign policy program, has strengthened connectivity between China and Southeast Asia, and with that, their asymmetric power balance to the advantage of China (p. 229). Yet Womack stresses that Southeast Asia is not only “concerned” about Xi’s arrogance but also “the possible side effects of China’s confrontation with the United States”—a prominent feature of Xi’s foreign policy (p. 229). Womack concluded that Southeast Asia’s reluctance to take a side between the United States and China is a more decisive factor than Xi’s personality, diplomacy, or aggressive actions in shaping their approach to China.
Every chapter in this book is highly informative on the latest developments of China under Xi. However, not all of them addresses the Xi effect explicitly or systematically. In some chapters, there is a lack of a focused examination of the Xi effect. Policy changes under Xi are taken as evidence of a Xi effect at work, almost at face value. Other chapters, notably chapter 9, make efforts to isolate Xi’s agency from other factors contributing to the policy outcome observed under Xi. The lack of a shared theoretical framework to examine the Xi effect is not particularly conducive to understanding the Xi effect. This brings me back to my earlier suggestion of using Xi Thought as a yardstick to appraise the Xi effect, one that is, from what I can see, feasible to be adopted by all chapters.
As discussed earlier, the book concludes that the Xi effect is highly uneven across policy issues. It would have been helpful if the book had also addressed the implications of this observation more deeply, beyond pointing out the tension between agency and structure. At a start, perhaps the following questions could be addressed. Has Xi’s success in implementing a system of total surveillance in society, which greatly raises the cost of the public expression of dissatisfaction, inadvertently reduced his commitment to take bold steps to improve the quality of living for China’s workers? Has the persistence of income inequality in China weakened Xi’s ideological governance? What are the common variables behind the strong Xi effect in anticorruption, ideological governance, social control, and China’s Taiwan policy?
Finally, it would have been invaluable had the authors reflected on whether the conclusions drawn in their studies can be extrapolated and why. In the book where this is done, it is often insightful. For example, in chapter 3, Wielander links Xi’s ideological governance—namely his strategy to “tighten control of all faith-based activity and to position the Party itself as an object of faith”—to China’s emergence as a “fundamentalist power” that challenges the “international order built on commonly shared values” (p. 71). This is a fascinating insight that speaks of the role of domestic factors in how China sees its place in the world. It contributes a more textured understanding to the role of domestic factors in Chinese foreign policy, a welcome variation to the dominant accounts, which focus heavily on international structural factors. This is only one of many examples of the usefulness of this volume in unraveling the complexities of Xi’s China.
As Xi is nearing the middle of his third five-year term, we are increasingly witnessing a distinct Xi effect on China’s relations with the rest of the world. Xi’s personal rapport with Putin, head-of-state diplomacy with world leaders, and the three global initiatives he introduced as a better alternative to the liberal international order are some examples.[5] To bring the analysis of the Xi effect up to date, it would be helpful to examine closely Xi’s tianxia worldview and his role in foreign policymaking. This could be one of the directions which the research program of the Xi effect may develop.
Notes
[1]. Jinping Xi, Xi Jinping tan zhiguo lizheng [Xi Jinping: The Governance of China] (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 2014), 35-36.
[2]. Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024).
[3]. Ibid., 102, 112-13.
[4]. Victor Shih and Jonathan Elkobi, Local Government Debt Dynamics in China: An Exploration Through the Lens of Local Government Debt and LGFV Debt, November 27, 2023, 21st Century China Center, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/2023-report_shih_local-government-debt-dynamics-in-china.pdf.
[5]. These are the Global Development Initiative (2021), Global Security Initiative (2022), and Global Civilization Initiative (2023).
Olivia Cheung is a lecturer in politics at the Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London. Her research specialization is the domestic politics and foreign policy of China. Her latest major publications are The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024), coauthored with Steve Tsang, and Factional-Ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right?(Amsterdam University Press, 2023).
Citation: Olivia Cheung. Review of Esarey, Ashley; Han, Rongbin, eds.. The Xi Jinping Effect. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61434
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário