US-China Relations Updates

This speech is about 2 years ago by Eric Li to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong.

Thank you Keith(Chairman of CCP HK) , I’d like to thank FCC to having me here tonight. There’s an old saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The Chinese Communist Party is about to reach 100 years of age. As a political organisation though is it getting old or is it still young and therefore can learn new tricks? I would like to explore the answer to this question and that would determine the answer to the larger question posed as a title of this talk. The last fine to ten years have been a transformative era for China both in terms of its self-perception and its perceived relations with the world. The changes that have been taking place have for reaching implications I think. I like to argue that this transformation is driven at least in decisive part by the party’s undertaking of a major self-reinvention.

Actually self-reinvention has been a hallmark of the party. I count at least two major self-reinventions in the past : One was in 1949 when the party transformed itself from a revolutionary fighting force into a governing institution few predicted it will last but it did; the second was in 1979 as we all………….when the party reinvented itself from a closed and centrally planned economy manager to a market economics reformer .

I like to suggest that a third one is taking place right now and the most important aspect of this current reinvention of the party is that it is winning the hearts and minds of China’s youth. In terms of China’s own development now the most significant event was the 19th party congress in 2017. It was then that China officially declared a paradigm shift , namely from a single-minded pursuit of economic development to the goal of achieving more balanced development and what is called common prosperity.

Now this pivot did not come out of blue, it was culmination of economic and social development some years in the making China’s headline pursuit of economic growth in the last 30to 40 years since Den Xiaoping’s reforms had achieved tremendous results as we all know, but new challenges also emerge as results or side effects of market economics , official corruption; inequality and environmental degradation to name three major ones. Now corruption was tackled ferociously at beginning with the 18th party congress in 2012 with notable results on the social and economic fronts we have observed significant social trends taking place in Chinese society especially amount young people.

Those who were born post 90s to 2000, the so-called “jiulinhous” and “linglinghous”, they’re qualitatively different generations from previous from my generation for instance. They’ve grown up with a lot of education and China that has been increasingly prosperous and strong. As opposed to my own generation we were primarily concerned with China being poor and lacking development so we wanted market economics to propel development , almost no matter what the costs , and these new generations, they see the main challenges to them and Chinese society as a whole rooted in inequality. There are many significant signs that indicate young people ‘s perception of capital and market have turned negative and their support for socialism and communism have increased marginally now the party is seeking to get ahead of the trend and rebalance economic gains to build a more equitable society.

The intense campaign to eradicate extreme poverty in the entire Chinese nation was historic and unprecedented. The reason the government initiatives to bring in monopolistic companies is another example of effort from the other end it’s called containing the unchecked power of capital. I believe we are only seeing the beginning of this paradigm shift , this presents a challenge to the party China’s young generations wnat to fix inequality but also they desire economic opportunities that can continue to raise their standard of living so the country needs to continue on this path of sustained economic growth for obvious reasons. Now how to achieve a more equitable society of common prosperity while the same time keep China’s society entrepreneurial which is essential for further growth is the challenge and this is the trend that we ought to watch, another paradigm shift has occurred in the same period and it was China’s perception about the world and its relations with it especially the west. I would probably put the pivoting moment at 2016. The Trump era showed the Chinese people in America that was so drastically different from the perception they had for many decades.

My generation looked up to America, and many even if advocated China changes its political system and ideology in favour of liberalism Now young generations today They see America that is rather belligerent toward China of course and that is poorly governed and inequality problems worse than Chinese owned with politics that seems so dysfunctional and society so polarized and hostile from within and a bit of a bully on the world stage . So as I said before the post 90 and 2000 generations are very different so their perceptions of America and the west are fundamentally different from ours when we were at their age. and several significant recent events helped consolidate this shift. One was the pandemic of course, how china handled it and how it was attached initially and to this day and they see how the US and Europe have handled it, and then came the attacks on China with regards to Hong Kong and Xinjiang. I am not here to debate the specifics of these issues or the merits of these issues , I am just pointing out that the western attacks on these two issues have caused a near total loss of their credibility in the Chinese public. A vast majority of Chinese public resent the Hong Kong protests and the violence . that’s just the fact that everyone her knows the uyghur population of Xinjiang has more than doubled and for western government and media to call it a genocide seems totally politically motivated.

So you know before for many years, Western criticism of China did have some support within the Chinese public especially amount the commercial and intellectual elites because some of these criticisms resonated and the Chinese knew they had problems but this time it’s different , this time they see a portrayal of China in the west that is so dramatically different from the China they live and experience every day. Especially amount the young people, as I said the post 90s and 2000 generations are more patriotic and more confident to begin with and they respond natualy to party’s call for greater confidence in China’s own past. Indeed contemporary Chinese youth are on course to be the strongest supporters within Chinese society of the party’s long-held goal of pursuing China’s own development path both politically and economically.

I will argue that today’s Chinese youth their dispositions and their inclinations are more in syng with the party’s outlook and intent than ever before. Nearly 400 million strong the post-90s and post 2000s , they formed the backbone of China’s future. and Party’s current vigorous self-reinvention is placing itself at the vanguard of Chinese youth. This indicates that it is still young indeed . The question is can the party harness this synergy with China’s new generations and turn it into effective governance for the long term. The party needs to steer the raw energy and aspirations of China’s youth to a productive socialism and away from excessive populism; toward healthy patriotism and away from narrow nationalism. If it can do this it will deliver on the material and spiritual aspirations of China’s new generations. and as a result, I think they will stay in the power for a long time to come, now success is not a short but I wouldn’t bet against.

Thank you Keith.

More to come for Q&A…