Let’s follow up yesterday’s item on increased immigration to the United States from China amid increased political repression and decreased employment prospects.
Evan Osnos has an article in The New Yorker titled “China’s Age of Malaise.” Osnos lived in Beijing for eight years as a foreign correspondent and won the National Book Award for his 2014 book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.”
Now he writes, after visits this summer to China and émigré communities overseas, "To spend time in China at the end of [President] Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation and, for the first time in a generation, questioning whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union.
"As in America, China’s changing temper partly reflects economic concerns. After Party leaders embarked on market reforms, in 1978, the Chinese economy more than doubled in size every decade. Infrastructure was built at such a pace that China used more cement in a three-year span than the U.S. had used in the entire twentieth century.
"But that boom is over now. … The economy grew three per cent last year, far short of the government’s target. Exports have dropped, and debt has soared. Economists who once charted China’s rise are now flatly pessimistic. Dan Rosen, of the Rhodium Group, a research firm in New York, told me, ‘It is not just a blip. This is a permanent new normal.’”
"As a matter of scale, China is as formidable as ever: it is the largest trading partner for more than a hundred and twenty countries, it is home to at least eighty per cent of the supply chain for solar panels, and it is the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. But the downturn has shaken citizens who have never experienced anything but improvements in their standard of living.
"China’s present troubles are about far more than the economy. Four decades after [Communist leader] Deng [Xiaoping] and his peers put their country on a path of 'reform and opening up,' his successors have reversed course, in politics and in culture.
"Since 2012, when Xi launched an 'anti-corruption' campaign that grew into a vast machine of arrest and detention, China has 'investigated and punished 4.089 million people,' according to an official report from 2021. Some of the disappeared eventually go on trial in courts that have a ninety-nine-per-cent conviction rate; others are held indefinitely under murky rules known as 'double restrictions.'
"In addition to the disappearances, the deepening reach of politics is felt throughout daily life. Early this year, the Party launched a campaign to educate citizens on what Party literature habitually refers to as 'Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.' All manner of institutions — laboratories, asset-management firms, banks, think tanks — are expected to make time for regular lectures, followed by the writing of essays and the taking of tests. Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on 'thought work,' including reading an average of four books a month.
"In Xi’s China — like Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary — a war on democratic influence has brought about a resurgence of gender inequality. Signs of regression are stark: for the first time in decades, the Politburo is composed entirely of men. Feminist activists are often prosecuted.
"Nobody I met thinks politics will loosen up as long as Xi is at the top, and he could rule for decades."