QThere is no doubt that Xi Jinping is not a liberal, neither politically nor economically. Nor does the fact that the Chinese president stands out on many points from his predecessors, notably Deng Xiaoping. But to believe that it is only since coming to power in 2013 that China has criticized the globalization of the economy would be a mistake.
The doubt is older. “There is a before and after 2008. The financial crisis has had a significant impact on the Chinese. Leaders and academics understood that we should not blindly follow the American model and that China could have its own model. There was then a slowdown in the country’s transformation towards a market economy., explained to World economist Tu Xinquan, in 2021, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. That in February 2012 German Chancellor Angela Merkel had no other choice than to go to Beijing to plead the cause of the single European currency, attacked by the financial markets due to the Greek crisis, was convincing. China that it had no lessons to learn.
What has changed with Xi Jinping is that China has moved to the next stage: not only will it no longer receive lessons, but it will give them. However, in his eyes, a lesson is essential: “If, after thirty years of reform and opening up, economic and social development in China has made enormous progress and people’s living conditions have considerably improved, it is because we firmly maintain the leadership exercised by the Party »Xi explained in May 2014, in a speech to communist leaders entitled “We must correctly use the invisible hand and the visible hand”.
Priority of national security over freedom of trade
The invisible hand is obviously the market, the usefulness of which Xi Jinping does not deny, but the visible hand is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). An iron fist, moreover: under Xi, not only are public companies once again considered the spearhead of the economy, but, within private companies, the CCP cells play a role just as decisive as boards of directors. It is now common for the general director of a company to also be the secretary of the PCC unit.
It is on the strength of this Leninist primacy of the Party over the country and the economy that China has taken two major initiatives, worrying the West. On the international level, the launch, in September 2013, of the “new silk roads” by Xi Jinping then, in 2015, the Made in China 2025 program, which defines ten key technologies that Beijing intends to master, even dominate, in order to to reduce its technological dependence on the rest of the world. If, officially, this latest program is abandoned so as not to frighten Westerners, the Chinese strategy of mastering key technologies remains. From then on, Beijing, like the West, gradually favored “national security” to freedom of trade.
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