Do not miss this evening on Arte at 8:55 p.m. the fascinating and chilling documentary devoted to Xi Jinping, the implacable chief architect of a new hegemony claimed by China, between dreams of grandeur and nationalist reconquests.
“Let us observe calmly, secure our positions, manage affairs with composure, hide our abilities and bide our time, know how to keep a low profile, never claim leadership, always seek achievements.” This was the so-called “24-character strategy” formulated by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1991.
A profession of faith that has been China’s Northern Star for the past 30 years, giving the country an absolutely phenomenal economic boom, now assuming without complex an international expansion that makes it a feared economic, political and military power. In the hands of the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party, the Middle Kingdom is no longer content to be, as it was for so long, the workshop of the world.
It now attracts companies with high technological potential, raw materials, a colossal quantity of energy resources, and even agricultural land. Having become the world’s second economic power, China now has a single goal. May this country of 1.4 billion people become the world’s leading power by 2049; anniversary of the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
It is in any case the dream cherished by Xi Jinping, at the heart of an exciting and chilling portrait broadcast this evening on Arte, The world according to Xi Jinping. Behind his apparent bonhomie hides a formidable leader. In March 2018, after extensive purges, Xi Jinping amended the Constitution and became “president for life”. A concentration of powers never seen since the end of the Maoist era.
Born in 1953, this son of a close friend of Mao Zedong dismissed for “anti-party conspiracy” chose as a teenager, in the midst of the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, a voluntary exile in the countryside for seven years, as if to redeem his father’s decline. Claiming blind loyalty to the Party, he climbed in apparatchik “redder than red” all the degrees of power. And even if his father was rehabilitated, he will have the wisdom, if not the intelligence, to (re)start at the very bottom of the ladder, in the provinces; keep a low profile and not behave like a red prince. Enough to satisfy the caciques of the regime, who appreciate this modesty and can especially control the young shoots in the making of the CCP.
Since his accession to the general secretariat of the Party in 2012, then to the presidency the following year, the self-criticism of opponents has reappeared, through television confessions. He will even launch an anti-corruption campaign, called “hunt for tigers and gnats”; the same name as an old campaign of purges at the time of Mao… A practical means especially to condemn all his political opponents. Balance sheet? 170 ministers and vice-ministers, 4,000 army officers and a hundred generals, left to rot in prison or under house arrest. A total of 1.5 million Party cadres were purged.
A few months after his inauguration, his opponents had leaked to the press a confidential document, in which Xi Jinping had synthesized his thoughts. Dubbed “Document No. 9”, it contained a Xi Jinping concerned about foreign forces deemed hostile, listing the 7 Western ideas deemed potentially deadly for China, including democracy, universal values such as human rights. , or freedom of the press.
“What we do not necessarily notice abroad is that daily, Chinese propaganda denounces us, denounces our values. We are therefore in a frontal and total ideological war with popular China” commented political scientist Jean-Pierre Cabestan in the documentary, working at the Baptist University of Hong Kong.
From the Chinese Dream to the Silk Roads
Since coming to power, “he hopes to achieve a great synthesis between the heritage of imperial China and communist China” explains François Bougon, former correspondent in Beijing for AFP, and journalist at Le Monde. In other words, “rebuilding the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And where does he find this new legitimacy? In nationalism and everything that makes the country great”.
To build this new national novel and cement the nation around him, Xi Jinping summons the painful examples of the past. The defeats experienced by China in the two Opium Wars in the 19th century, which ended in humiliating and unequal treaties imposed by the West, such as the loss of the territories of Hong Kong and Macau.
LaPresse / Panoramic / Bestimage
In this Chinese dream cherished by the new Red Emperor, there can be only one identity, no difference. It is in this well-understood and ultra-repressive logic that a system of generalized surveillance supposed to sort out the good and the bad citizens is put in place, when it is not a question of suppressing any dispute, as in Hong Kong. . John Lee, the former security chief who played a key role in the brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, has just been appointed by Beijing to lead the territory.
It also involves a forced assimilation of the Uyghur populations, victims since 2016 of a genocidal policy carried out in Xinjiang, a region in western China. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur citizens have been interned in camps or sentenced to years in prison. Forced labor, family separation, forced sterilization, destruction of cemeteries and places of worship… “Be ruthlesssaid President Xi Jinping in 2014…
Internally inflexible and ruthless, it has set itself the goal of supplanting the West at the head of a new world order. Its “silk roads” project has thus considerably extended the network of Chinese infrastructures on a planetary scale. This strategic expansionism, hitherto developed in silence, worries Europe and the United States more and more.
It’s because China has the means for its ambitions: Xi Jinping has released 1,000 billion dollars to build this project on a global scale, without equal. In these new considerations, Africa also occupies a place of choice: since 2013, China has lent more than $120 billion to the states of the continent, making the country Africa’s leading trading partner.
The fate of the rebel province
A Chinese hegemony built (among other things) on an exacerbated nationalism which is logically accompanied by strong diplomatic tensions, the abscess of which for the years to come has already been found: the fate of the rebellious province of Taiwan.
“Reunification is a historic matter, it is the way forward, while Taiwan independence is a dead end. We do not rule out the use of force, and we reserve the right to use any means required” had struck Xi Jinping in 2021. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has also brutally revived the fear of an invasion of the island by mainland China, to the point that the taiwanese army published a survival manual for civilians last april…
“When China wakes up, the world will tremble” had prophesied the writer and politician Alain Peyrefitte, in his famous work published in 1973. 49 years later, the country woke up well. Having become an economic giant, it frightens as much as it fascinates, with its mixture of absolute authoritarianism and modernity. “Xi Jinping’s ‘dream’ first benefits from the nightmare of liberal democracies, weakened by rising inequalities, the questioning of elites and populism” concludes François Bougon. Not reassuring words…
The world according to Xi Jinping, documentary by Sophie Lepault and Romain Franklin, broadcast tonight on Arte at 8:55 p.m. Also available on Arte TV from May 3 until May 30, 2022.