Commentary
Do the Chinese people believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can bring China back to prosperity?
The short answer is “no.” The Party, under the absolute leadership of Xi Jinping, is promising a glorious future for China. But many are skeptical—and for good reason. Over the past decade or so, the Party has made conditions worse in China, not better.
A brief assessment of the recent past and present is helpful.
Worsening Economy
First, it’s fair and accurate to say that today, China faces domestic challenges and an international environment that have become markedly worse over the past decade or so. The contrast between the China then and the one now is stark.In 2012, for example, China’s economy was booming. Today, it’s flailing. Back then, consumer confidence in China was high; today, it’s dismal. Debt wasn’t a problem back then, but today, a massive debt crisis looms on the horizon.
Jobs were plentiful in 2012, but that’s no longer the case. In August 2023, more than one in five Chinese between the ages of 16 and 24 were out of work.
In terms of trade, in 2012, the world’s factories, technologies, and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment capital flowed into China. The Beijing model of economic development was touted by the CCP.
Today, after seeing the real face of the CCP, China’s trading partners view Beijing as untrustworthy and adversarial, and nations are taking their factories and investment money out of the country.
Geopolitically, Beijing partnered with other nations, first in the West and then, via the Belt and Road Initiative, across Asia, Africa, South America, and even Europe. Today, China wants to dominate technological development and subjugate its trading partners. The West’s predictable pushback against an imperial China now threatens the country’s continued economic growth and technological development.
CCP’s Triangular Financing and Zombie Firms
Notably, in 2012, China’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $6,301, while Taiwan’s was $21,295. In 2024, China’s per capita GDP is estimated at $13,136, while Taiwan’s is $35,129. In other words, while China’s per capita income has grown under the CCP, Taiwan’s has grown as well without the CCP and with many more freedoms. The difference is that Taiwan grew by enabling growth and innovation, and the relatively free flow of capital investment into high-growth industries created enormous value for Taiwan.It’s a very different growth story in China. In fact, the CCP has been and continues to be an obstacle to growth and development. In the late 1970s and 1980s, growth and development only came after Beijing opened China to Western investment and technology.
In the 1990s and thereafter, the CCP routinely confiscated successful companies from their owners, transferring ownership to Party members, who then stole the wealth from the companies. Many of these “state-owned enterprises” became “zombie” companies, which continued to exist but became far less profitable or efficient under Party ownership.
These companies were then repeatedly “recapitalized” with ever-larger loans from banks, which are supported by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). Banks holding the notes on zombie companies became zombie banks themselves, requiring further recapitalization from the PBOC. Eventually, the triangular financing scheme stopped working, and the entire financial system was threatened. That’s where China is today.
CCP Now Telling a New Story
For all these reasons and others, the CCP has had to pivot in how it communicates to the country. It had to change the national narrative to a more nationalistic inclination. The Party and Xi talk of a brighter future known as the “China Dream” while at the same time exhorting the people to “eat bitterness” and embrace the “Great Struggle” to restore the Middle Kingdom to its rightful place in the world.In its efforts to make that narrative work, the Party finds it necessary to look to the past as the key to preserving its power in the present. That’s partly because by breaking the CCP’s post-Mao Zedong era political protocol of rule by consensus, Xi returned to the Maoist model of CCP rule.
The CCP’s campaign of national self-improvement approach under its 14th Five-Year Plan is built on seven themes, which, among others, include Xi’s leadership, the integration of Marxism and Chinese characteristics, and combining tradition and modernity. Xi’s book, “China Dream,” talks about a great and glorious future, but it is nothing more than an appropriation of the past.
Resurrecting classic Chinese cultural motifs and alloying them with CCP propaganda is a desperate attempt to validate the CCP’s and, therefore, Xi’s rule. Illegitimate leaders and failed political parties have often relied heavily upon past cultural institutions as a way to unify a disintegrating nation, especially when it’s clear that their rule is driving the country to ruin.
CCP’s Ani-West Rhetoric
At the same time, the CCP is ratcheting up the anti-West rhetoric as another means of unifying the nation. This is a direct appeal to the cultural memory of the “Century of Humiliation” China experienced under the domination of Western countries from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century.Are the Chinese people buying the anti-Western propaganda?
A certain minority proportion of society may be. What that might be is not clear but is largely irrelevant. The real problem is the economic hardship that a billion people are living with right now, brought about and made worse by the CCP.
Rising Cynicism
The Chinese people aren’t buying into the atavistically romanticized rhetoric of the CCP, either.According to anthropologist Xiang Biao from Oxford University, Gen Z is awakening to a hard reality.
“The entire life of young people has been shaped by the idea that if you study hard then at the end of your hard work there will be a job and a highly-paid, decent life waiting for you. And now they find out that this promise is no longer working,” he told the BBC.
Opportunities that were available to their parents aren’t so easily had today.
“This is not only about a shortage of jobs or opportunities or income, rather there is a collapse of the dream which has pushed them to work so hard,” Xiang said. “That not only brings disappointment, but it also breeds disillusionment.”
This disillusionment is not restricted to China’s Gen Z. China’s millionaires and billionaires have been moving their money and themselves out of China over the past several years—still, it has intensified over the past year. China has become a risky place to do business for the domestic entrepreneurial class and foreign investors alike. Laws prohibiting capital flows out of the country are not stopping them because the rich know what’s really going on in the Chinese economy and are acting while they can.
The CCP is trying to sell the people a new “China Dream” rather than admitting that they’ve already had it and that the Party turned it into a nightmare. As many Party members grow richer, the wealth and size of the middle class vanish. No amount of Marxist or national jingoism is going to change that fact or convince the people otherwise.
But that doesn’t mean the Party isn’t going to give it a very big try.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
