Having experienced the sky-turning 2020, Xi Jinping declared hesitantly at a workshop for provincial and ministerial firsts held on January 11 this year that “the world is experiencing a great change unprecedented in a century, and the time and momentum are on our side, which is where our determination and bottom line lies, and where our determination and confidence lies”; then went on to point out that “China’s development is still in a period of important strategic opportunities”, the opportunities and challenges are unprecedented, but “the opportunities outweigh the challenges”, meaning that the opportunities are on the side of his ruling China. There are different interpretations of this.
Xi Jinping’s “potential” covers politics, ideology and economy
With so much going on internationally, the world’s attention was focused on Biden’s inauguration in Washington on January 20, and not so much on what Xi Jinping had to say. The Chinese world remains bipolar, with the usual loud praise from the official media and the usual criticism that Xi Jinping is arrogant and bragging, and that China is in deep crisis and close to collapse. But this time Xi Jinping is really not bluffing, but has something to go on, and that something is, of course, his good fortune.
When Xi Jinping talks about “time and potential”, “time” refers to timing; “potential” here does not mean “situation”, but The “world trend”. The so-called “Great Reset”, which has been popular in the world since 2019, is full of talkers, but the core points are just a few.
Politically, a comprehensive review of the “capitalism” established over the past century, especially the capitalism of free competition, is needed. To be precise, it is to advocate big government and the reduction of individual freedom for the sake of the general public. Reforming/removing the capitalist system, expanding the government’s authority to control and manage the economy, and censoring social discourse using politically correct standards – by these standards, China fits the bill perfectly: it is still one of the few socialist countries in the world with a mega-government, all-powerful government, and government control over important resources such as land, forests, and rivers; and in terms of control over the In terms of scope and ability to control the economy, no other major country in the world can do so.
In terms of ideology: from globalization to the Great Reset, socialist ideology has gradually taken the mainstream – if in the United Kingdom and the United States, those who believe in socialist ideology are mainly the millennials and Generation Z, China does not even need to make a gorgeous turn. The CCP has always adhered to the four basic principles, of which adherence to Marxism is placed first and the socialist path second. There are many Maoist leftists among the older generation, and the younger generation is generally pink. In the process of the Great Global Reset, even if there is an ideological dispute between China and the West, it is a dispute between the authentic and the collateral branch of the same camp, not a dispute between capitalism and socialism. Whether China is a democracy or not will not matter much after 2020, and the Chinese government has good reasons to believe that this will not be the focus of the debate.
Economically, global integration is accelerating. In the two months or so since the U.S. election, both Southeast Asian neighbors and Western countries have made overtures to China by signing alliances. As I have analyzed in previous articles, China has seized the window of the U.S. election to step up its foreign economic cooperation, signing two agreements that had eluded it for years: one of the results was the official signing of the RCEP-15, which had been in the works for eight years, and the exclusion of Taiwan, a “renegade island” that did not submit to it, and the agreement to integrate the entire The second result is that after seven years of negotiations, the EU and China have agreed in principle on an investment agreement that promises to open up new markets to European companies. The agreement promises to open new Chinese markets to European companies. With the Biden administration set to officially take office, Xi is confident that the Trump-era theory of U.S.-China economic decoupling should henceforth disappear and that the pre-Trump Sino-U.S. relationship can soon be restored. That is why Xinhua reported on January 15 that Xi had written to Howard Schultz, chairman emeritus of the board of Starbucks Corporation, to help repair U.S.-China relations, and that the latter had responded very positively.
No one can deny that the triadic state of the U.S., China and the EU in the global economy has been formed in the Great Reset process. Thus, when Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping said that “we are experiencing a great change unprecedented in a century,” he was referring to the outdated conclusion that “the most important lesson for humanity in the 20th century was the rise and fall of socialist thinking” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His statement that “time and momentum are on our side” is based on the basic elements of the “Great Reset”, which will be publicly flagged at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, and the changes currently taking place in the West.
The Chinese government has a unique hold on tech giants
Why did the Chinese government write to the CEO of Starbucks instead of a U.S. high-tech company? It was precisely calculated.
China has long since taken in the West, including major U.S. tech companies. To put it simply, Beijing’s magic formula is restrictions on market access. Even if countries are dissatisfied, they can at most start the anti-monopoly law to repair the situation and impose some fines, not daring to make any big moves. But the Chinese government has the legislative, judicial and administrative powers in one, and the legislation is subordinated to the needs of the government, which is convenient and fast. If you want to restrict something instantly, you can have a government department issue regulations quickly. In order to gain a firm foothold in the Chinese market and expand their market share, U.S. high-tech companies have implemented a “technology-for-market” strategy, transferring many technology patents to China in the hope that China will lower various thresholds, but they have never been able to do so. In turn, they complained in the United States that the Chinese government was forcing them to transfer technology and that the government was looking for benefits.
Google withdrew from the Chinese market in 2010 because of its opposition to the Chinese government’s restrictive rhetoric, but was pressured by investors to do everything possible to return to the Chinese market and finally entered the market again three years later with a venture capital investment in the name of a joint venture with Vision Fund, a subsidiary of The Japanese company Softbank. This hard work has finally been rewarded, by the end of 2016, Google finally ranked fifth in the Chinese search engine market, to December 2017, was able to set up an artificial intelligence laboratory in Beijing covering an area of 6,000 square meters. 2020, China’s search engine advertising revenue of up to 155.7 billion yuan, Google although the public does not announce its China market revenue, but outsiders Google does not announce its China revenue, but it is estimated to account for at least 10%.
No other high-tech company has done the same. Facebook president Zuckerberg has seriously posed as a student of Mao’s election to enter the Chinese market, and Facebook is famous for vetting user postings, according to Fox host Tucker Carlson linked to reporter Sohrab Ahmari in a late October 2020 report, “FB has at least six H-1B visa-holding Chinese nationals who are responsible for developing algorithms to censor content posted by users on Facebook.” As for Twitter, its management approach is increasingly similar to the Chinese government’s approach to the Internet, removing politically incorrect comments, blue-tagging specific people and canceling accounts, almost a carbon copy of the Chinese government’s management of WeChat.
The “Great Reset” is a plan for high-tech companies to take control of the global Internet, control speech and exert political influence from a supra-governmental position. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Australia and others realized after Twitter blocked President Trump’s account that they had to legislate to limit his role, but not in China. China will insist that the government crosses over everything and controls everything.
All of the above, of course, would make Xi feel that “time and momentum are on our side”. China’s willingness and level of cooperation as one of the two axis countries of the Great Reset is quite important.
(The next article will analyze “The Time and Momentum of the New Coronavirus for China”)
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