The year in China 2023

In 2023, China continued its inward turn as optimism for a post-Covid recovery, both economic and spiritual, ceded to malaise. The Communist Party no longer espoused prosperity, or even its own competence, but instead trafficked in insecurity. Xi Jinping warned of the need to prepare for “worst case scenarios” and the Ministry of State Security called for the “mobilization of all members of society” against espionage. 

The apparent triumph of the national security state gives license for the subordination of rational policy to its dark imperatives. China’s own modern history demonstrates how systemic insecurity feeds upon itself; how overwatch devolves into misgovernment; distrust into disorder; and economic frictions into decay. 

In the year ahead, the peat fire pervading China’s financial system will especially challenge the country’s shadow banks, which combined with multiple de facto local government bankruptcies, may cause widespread unrest. Diplomatically, China may benefit from countries, including close American allies, seeking to recalibrate their ties after a period of distancing. America’s election will be a contest between keepers of a global order towards which China is ever more hostile and agitators of chaos in which China has no greater certainty of success.  

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The year in China 2022

In 2022, as war returned to Europe; millions suffered due to costlier food and energy and ever more devastating natural disasters; and America’s vulnerable democracy deepened its confrontation against an array of authoritarian powers, China’s fate was further submitted to the will of one man. 

China’s leaders, whose country’s rise had been facilitated by geopolitical stability and growing economic interdependence, saw both opportunity and threat in the year’s turbulence and fragmentation. While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine failed to break Western resolve, highlighted questions about the battle-readiness of China’s military, and hurt China’s standing in Europe for its rhetorical support of Putin, China nonetheless gained from Russia’s strategic subordination. Heightened tensions reinforced Xi Jinping’s calls for struggle against external threats and his vision of an expansive national security-driven domestic policy and greater self-reliance.

In the year to come, China’s evolution away from a Covid-zero posture may prompt yet more anger and disillusionment as its people confront an inadequately prepared healthcare system. The property sector will continue to be a drag on consumer confidence and economic growth. China may seek to facilitate a face-saving off-ramp for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine as part of an effort to reset its relations with Europe. America’s new, Republican-controlled House of Representatives may flirt with symbolically cheap, but strategically dubious provocations of Beijing. China’s continued intransigence on debt relief may sour relations with parts of the developing world.  

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Smoke and mirrors

Reviews of The Cashless Revolution by Martin Chorzempa. PublicAffairs, 2022; Influence Empire by Lulu Chen. Hodder & Stoughton, 2022; Surveillance State by Josh Chin and Liza Lin. St. Martin’s Press, 2022; Trafficking Data by Aynne Kokas. Oxford, 2022. 

So completely have Tencent’s WeChat and digital payments taken over life in modern China that it is difficult to remember what it was like to live without them. But they are just the surface manifestations of more sweeping technological change affecting how China’s people live, how its economy operates, and how the country is governed. As multiple new books underscore, the implications of these changes matter not just to China, but to the world. 

Unlike the flamboyant founder — until his recent troubles — of Alibaba, Jack Ma, Tencent’s founder, the unrelated Pony Ma, has always maintained a lower profile. In Influence Empire, Bloomberg reporter Lulu Yilun Chen chronicles Pony and his company’s rise to the heights of China’s technology industry. Today, Tencent is not just the keeper of WeChat, with its more than one billion users, or WeChat Pay, which facilitates staggering volumes in annual transactions, but also a vast gaming, media, cloud, and artificial intelligence enterprise with a host of investments ranging from Chinese food delivery service Meituan to Tesla.

Pony, like most entrepreneurs who define an age, is a product of talent and timing. A prodigious student, Pony came of age in the booming special economic zone of Shenzhen, graduating with a degree in computer science shortly before China joined the world wide web. Pony, as Chen reveals, also possesses something rarer which may explain his enduring success: sound judgment. In Tencent’s early days as developer of the QQ instant messaging service, for example, he was sensitive to avoid the government “red lines” that other competitors were willing to flout for short-lived growth. Thanks to his low-key temperament, he has refused to court the spotlight that in China almost invariably invites a comeuppance by the Communist Party. 

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Briefly noted

Review of Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s by Julian Gewirtz. Harvard, 2022.

In China’s official history of the 1980s, political reform was never on the table. The Party was and would always remain in command of a modernized China. In fact, Julian Gewirtz writes, it was a “period of extraordinary open-ended debate, contestation, and imagination. Chinese elites argued fiercely about the future, and official ideology, economic policy, technological transformation, and political reforms all expanded in bold new directions.” Whether supportive of or opposed to what became known as China’s reform and opening, China’s elite acknowledged, much as the West once hoped, that economic and political reform could not be decoupled.

On the economic track, officials debated how open China’s economy ought to be, how fast it would be allowed to get there, and whether the country was prepared for the social and environmental consequences. Politically, elites disagreed whether it was the efficiency, effectiveness, or efficacy of China’s system that was at fault. Those who sought a more efficient Party focused on rooting out corruption and ineffectual leadership. Those who wished for a more effective government pushed for greater separation between Party and state. The boldest envisioned empowering alternative power centers, including independent labor unions and minority political parties, as a supervisory check, but not threat, to Party rule.

While the open advocacy of alternative paths for China may have receded, their adherents remain within and beyond the Party. As Cai Xia, a former professor at the CCP’s Central Party School, has recently written in Foreign Affairs, “although Chinese politics are largely personalistic, there are real differences over the direction of national policy.” Outside the Party, a vastly more educated and connected population than the 1980s is generally aware of and engaged in these debates. Their diverse imaginations of their individual and collective possibilities are undoubtedly greater than that era, enriched by the tens of millions who have experienced other systems directly, as is their choice in how and where they realize those possibilities for their lives.

The wisdom and tragedy of Zhao Ziyang, the liberal general secretary who would be deposed amid the Tiananmen protests, weighs heavily on this book. Arguing in favor of the resilience inherent to political pluralism, Zhao remarked that “if there is no small chaos, there will be big chaos. Society needs ‘safety valves.'” Today, that safety valve is principally emigration. Gewirtz writes that Deng Xiaoping, contrary to popular understanding, “was not regularly and actively engaged in policymaking throughout the 1980s.” It was only due to the erasure of Zhao that Deng was manufactured into the personification of the official history of reform and opening in which China could grow rich, but not free.

Zhao presciently warned that “if [political system reform] lags too far behind, continuing with the reform of the economic system will be very difficult and various social and political contradictions will ensue.” Xi evidently agrees, having reasserted the Party’s control over the country’s economy and arrested the country’s social flourishing. Xi’s lack of political vision is understandable. In the 1980s, China’s future was easy to envision: it was to catch up with the West. Now it has and, in some technical respects, even surpassed the West. And yet, the Communist Party’s rule is no more secure. It is because it has nothing more to offer.

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Review of The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations edited by Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi. Harvard, 2022. 

Four years ago, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies released a volume of essays in honor of its sixtieth anniversary. More restrained than the original’s flights to esoterica, the new edition better anticipates what generalist readers will want to know on topics spanning international relations and security to technology and culture. 

The first edition lacked critical examination of how the fundamental assumptions about engagement with China were changing. In the new volume, the authors almost uniformly acknowledge, with varying degrees of regret, that relations have entered a more confrontational paradigm. 

Do any see a way out short of conflict? Alastair Ian Johnston suggests a redefining of how such conflict is framed. Rebutting the prevailing narrative that China is undermining the rules-based international order, he argues that a single such order does not exist. Instead multiple orders do, encompassing state sovereignty, political development, trade, and military domains. China’s challenge to each is more nuanced than what American political debate permits.

A number of other essays stand out. Bonnie Glaser inhabits Chinese strategic thinking on the South China Sea with authoritative concision. Victor Shih explores whether a demographically unrepresentative Communist Party (composed predominantly of college-educated northern Han Chinese men) will invite stagnation or worse. And Ian Johnson insightfully captures what America misunderstands about faith in China and why it matters. The editors should be applauded for inviting a number of emerging voices, such as Elsa Kania and Naima Green-Riley, to join established names such as Elizabeth Economy and John Pomfret. 

While most contributors gamely calibrate their writing for a generalist audience, few cede the limited space to acknowledge divergent viewpoints, let alone Chinese discourse, on their assigned topics. Contextualizing chapters on China’s governance model and Xi Jinping would have been welcome. Japan too merited a chapter of its own. The economics section would have benefited from a more expansive view of US-China commercial relations beyond the trade war as well as a chapter on the drivers and sustainability of China’s growth. The repeated citation of a Pew study reporting record lows in American sentiment towards China underscored the need for essays on how public opinion influences American and Chinese foreign policy. 

Better execution overall only makes the flaws inherent to The China Questions’ concept more apparent: a book about what to think about China is less useful – to generalist and specialist readers alike – than a book about how to think about China. Prospective readers limited to this year’s book stack will be better served by Kevin Rudd’s hierarchy of China’s policy priorities in The Avoidable War or Bates Gill’s synthesis of the country’s thematic objectives in Daring to Struggle.

What CEOs don’t get about China

The past several years have been an unrelenting challenge to multinational CEOs determined to profit in China. Covid laid bare the vulnerabilities from overreliance on the country as a supply hub. Western governments, which increasingly see the country as an adversary, have made it more difficult to do business. Beijing, with its mix of targeted capriciousness and self-destructive macroeconomic policies, has been little help. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made the prospect of conflict over Taiwan tangible enough to prompt hedging

Some CEOs are even becoming more outspoken in their frustration about doing business. “There is growing political interference in the way we do business as a Western company in China,” Carlos Tavares, CEO of carmaker Stellantis, recently complained. While a refreshing change from vapid boosterism, remarks such as these still betray a fundamental ignorance about multinationals’ presence in China. From the vantage point of the CCP, multinationals have always been political instruments. 

Multinationals know why they are in China – to profit. But ask why their businesses are permitted to operate there and their answers may be less assured. The CCP scoffs at the invocation of trade reciprocity. Advancing China’s development may have once been an acceptable answer, but no longer. Yet it at least acknowledges a degree of heightened conditionality that differs from nearly every other market in which multinationals operate.

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The intractable nations

Review of China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future by Scott Moore. Oxford, 2022. 

America was once proclaimed to be the indispensable nation, without which no problem of consequence could be solved. Today, it and China are seemingly competing to be the intractable nation, core to both the causes of and potential solutions to global challenges such as climate change, yet stymied by systems that thwart ready resolution. 

In China’s Next Act, Scott Moore, who is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, surveys the public health, environmental, science, and technology frontiers in search of opportunities for bilateral collaboration. Written with an admirable commitment to nuance, Moore nonetheless concludes that “if liberal societies fail to lead” in these areas, “the illiberal values Beijing increasingly relies on are more likely to hold sway.”  

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Briefly noted

Reviews of America’s Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition by Ali Wyne. Polity, 2022; The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters by Megan Walsh. Columbia Global Reports, 2022; and Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Ambitions Under Xi Jinping by Bates Gill. Oxford, 2022.


Ali Wyne, an analyst with the Eurasia Group, questions “great power competition” as the guidepost of American foreign policy, warning that it risks lulling the United States into an “increasingly expansive, yet poorly defined struggle” that would place the country perpetually on the defensive and ignore critical transnational challenges.

China and Russia, “while significant competitors, are not overwhelming ones, either individually or in concert,” Wyne writes. While greater American self-confidence and commitment to self-renewal is merited, one wishes that Wyne detailed a circumscribed list of areas in which competition is warranted; when absolute vs. relative or selective leadership is needed; and when outperformance versus obstruction of America’s adversaries makes sense. Mastery of artificial intelligence; countering China’s efforts at territorial denial, including in the South Pacific; and winning global public opinion are varied examples of priorities that should make this list.

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2022 most influential online China journalists

In print journalism, a story placed on the front page above the fold is a signal of its importance. The journalists whose work is consistently featured there are rightfully considered among the most influential. But what is the equivalent in the digital age, when readers can find reporting aggregated across outlets and disaggregated by topic?

China Books Review has produced a new measure of the most prominent online journalists in China reporting, building on its previous analysis of the leading outlets and coverage trends. The index, based on daily Google News results for China-related stories, considers the author’s share of stories that are in the first position on the platform and the total number of days these leading stories persist in any position, a measure of their impact over multiple news cycles. 

Nectar Gan, a correspondent for CNN, dominated the list with 30 first position articles in 2021 which collectively persisted on the Google News platform for 442 days, earning a score of 15.6 points. Gan was followed by CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng and the New York Times’ Keith Bradsher with 8.6 and 7.2 points, respectively.

Among Gan’s work with the highest staying power on Google News last year were her coverage of China’s belated disclosure of the four soldiers killed during a 2020 border clash with India; Covid and China’s disinformation campaign surrounding its origins; and the extension of the US-China rivalry into space. Prior to joining CNN, Gan was a reporter at the South China Morning Post. Cheng, currently based in Beijing, previously covered markets from CNBC’s New Jersey headquarters. Bradsher, currently the Times’ Beijing bureau chief, previously served in that capacity in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Detroit. 

The index is based on daily pulls of the top China-related stories on Google News in 2021 (results were available for 90% of days); given that Google accounts for a significant share of web traffic, it is considered a useful proxy for an article and journalist’s reach. Both the story position and endurance measures are equally weighted. Co-authors were credited equally regardless of byline order. To be sure, the measure is dependent on a complex set of factors that influence the Google News algorithm. For example, the algorithm may privilege articles produced by CNN over outlets, irrespective of the journalist, topic, or article in question. As ever, a journalist is influential both because of their talent, the salience of their beat, and the reputation of the outlet with which they are affiliated. The index does not consider other potential indicators of influence, such as the author’s count of followers on Twitter or the volume of retweets of their work. 

Unavoidable reality

Review of The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China by Kevin Rudd. Public Affairs, 2022. 

Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister and diplomat, takes pride in being a zhengyou, or honest friend, to both the United States and China. As with others who aspire to this role, the burden of his public truth-telling is imposed mostly upon the former.

There is a “profound sense of difference, mystery, and confusion about what China is about, what it is becoming, and what this may mean for American interests, values, and the future of US global leadership,” he writes. This is not surprising because “Americans have been asked to come to terms with a people, culture, and political system that lies way beyond traditional American frames of reference.” 

By contrast, Chinese leader Xi Jinping “is no neophyte in his understanding of America” before conceding mere sentences later that “his understanding of America has always been intermediated through official Chinese sources of translation, which are not always known for accuracy, subtlety, or nuance.” (He also incorrectly states that no American leader has ever spoken or read Chinese. In fact, Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou, both spoke Mandarin.) 

While Rudd is animated by a belief that better American understanding of China would reduce the risk of conflict, the irony is that even Rudd’s strenuously balanced presentation does not diminish the reality of China’s challenge, but adds clarity to it.

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Never going back again

Review of The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership by C. Fred Bergsten. Polity, 2022. 

Within the next few decades, assuming their current charters are followed, the IMF and World Bank will be headquartered in China as the world’s largest economy. By this time, China, which has gotten “the best of both worlds from the present international order” by gaining “hugely from the order’s openness while cheating on the rules” may well have managed to rewrite those rules in its favor. 

C. Fred Bergsten, founding director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, seeks to “fill a critical gap in the other voluminous literature on the rise of China” by focusing on the contest for global economic leadership. Regrettably, the book breaks no new ground in its assertions that the United States must not abdicate global leadership, that it must get its domestic affairs in order, and that some compromise with China is inevitable. 

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