China has reported a higher-than-expected annualized growth rate of 6.7 percent, the same rate as in the first quarter. As with most dictatorships, it’s difficult to know how accurate that number us. However, in any case, most analysts saw the number as suggesting that the government of President Xi Jinping, in part to keep political control tight, is avoiding economic restructuring.
The Wall Street Journal reported: “Economists say a slower growth rate in the second quarter over the first quarter’s 6.7 percent pace would have sent a welcome signal that China was tackling excess industrial production, rising corporate debt and state-owned enterprise reform.”
“It’s a pretty clear picture with the big, overcapacity state-owned enterprises getting credit and reform plans not getting support,” IG Markets Ltd. analyst Angus Nicholson told the WSJ. “The government talks a good story about helping the private sector, pushing through supply-side reform and lowering investment to state companies, but you’re not actually seeing any of this in the statistics.”
China has lost an important international legal case over control of strategic reefs and atolls that it asserts give it the right to control much of the South China Sea. It has been rapidly militarizing some of these features to cow other nations with claims in the region, through which goes 30 percent of world trade in physical things.
But expansionist dictatorships have a tendency to ignore international law.
The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague overwhelmingly favors claims by the Philippines and will intensify diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in this geopolitically very sensitive area.
As The Guardian noted, “By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing ‘nine-dash’ line that goes almost ridiculously far into the South China Sea, far, far away from China.
China predictably denounced the verdict, which declares large areas of the sea to be neutral international waters or in the exclusive economic zones of other countries. Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, attacked what it called an “ill-founded” ruling that was “naturally null and void”.
The Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily said that the tribunal had ignored “basic truths” and “tramped” on international laws and norms. “The Chinese government and the Chinese people firmly oppose [the ruling] and will neither acknowledge it nor accept it,” it added.
The tribunal declared that “although Chinese navigators and fishermen, as well as those of other states, had historically made use of the islands in the South China Sea, there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources.”
North Korea has predictably called U.S. sanctions against North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and other senior Kim regime officials for human-rights abuses a “declaration of war”. Pyongyang said the announcement of sanctions was a “hideous crime”.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, hopes that China will urge its ally North Korea to cooperate internationally on human rights, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said July 7 in New York. Such hopes have been expressed many times before with no effect.
The United Kingdom’s apparent decision to leave the European Union could be very bad news for China. The U.K. has been its biggest economic ally in the E.U. Further, Chinese investments in the U.K. itself may suffer. The British have long pushed within the E.U. for freer trade with China while other members have feared being economically overwhelmed by cheap imports from China.
“The U.K. leadership always said they would be the guys pushing for China’s interests in the West and the European Union,” a Western diplomat in Beijing not authorized to be quoted by name in foreign media told The Washington Post. “This is quite bad news for China.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of ideological orthodoxy to ensure the power and legitimacy of Communist Party rule.
“The wavering of idealistic faith is the most dangerous form of wavering,” Mr. Xi told an assembly of party officials and members at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on July 1. “A political party’s decline often starts with the loss or lack of idealistic faith.”
“Turning our backs or abandoning Marxism means that our party would lose its soul and direction,” he said.
Mr. Xi has tried to energize the Communist Party with iron discipline and an appeal to nationalism meant to curb corruption and bureaucratic sluggishness — all with the aim of perpetuating the party’s power.
China’s economic slowdown has intensified the pressure to reinforce the party, including by appealing to national pride as expressed by China’s aggressive expansionism. But that, of course has met with increasing pushback from China’s neighbors.
“Xi’s speech was a celebration and a warning,” said Jude Blanchette, a Beijing-based researcher who is writing a book on Mao Zedong’s legacy, told The Wall Street Journal. It is “a reminder that Xi’s vision for China cannot be divorced from a strong, organized and highly disciplined Communist Party.”
Satellite imagery suggests that China might be punishing its ally North Korea for its nuclear-weapons tests by sharply restricting trade between the two dictatorships.
“It is apparent that shortly after North Korea did the fourth nuclear test in January, China took unilateral measures to drastically curtail trade interaction along their border,” Victor Cha, director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, told The Washington Post.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has named Xu Lin to become the government’s new head Internet regulator, succeeding Lu Wei.
Mr. Xu has vowed to maintain the ruling Communist Party’s tight grip over cyberspace, which is overseen by the Cyberspace Administration of China.
The Chinese government has long imposed controls over the Internet, in part to stifle political dissent, and is codifying that policy in law. Officials assert that such restrictions are needed to ensure security in the face of such rising threats as terrorism. However, most of China’s crackdown seems directed against speech that, however carefully, criticizes the Communist dictatorship.
China is pressing ahead with efforts to make it easier for dictatorships like that of Chinese President Xi Jinping to censor information on the Internet under the guise of “cybersovereignty’’. Cybersovereignty is a concept used to try to maintain the power of dictatorships through the suppression of opposition voices.
Stephenie Andal warns in The Diplomat: “Yet while control measures such as the Great Firewall (Beijing’s central censorship apparatus) remain a great source of concern for cyber scholars, the overwhelming focus on the domestic aspects of Chinese cyber policy dangerously ignore the broader, international implications inherent in China’s move towards cybersovereignty, which I argue, we should see as nothing less than an innovative and bold push to reshape the global contours of cyberspace in China’s favor. We might do well to subvert our scholarly bias of China as playing second fiddle to other global power players (most prominently the United States), especially in areas of innovation, cyber policies, and digital communications, and explore the possibility of a China that…is playing a strategic ‘long game’ with highly forward-thinking digital policies. This presents to us a much more complex and challenging picture of a China intent on ‘leading the pack’ in a post-utopian cyber age, with thinking that may be as innovative as it is dangerous.’’
She concludes:
“China’s drive for cybersovereignty should be seen as a calculated power play by Beijing to seize on the moment of transition that the global Internet is in at present, a time when growing geographical and political cleavages in the global cyber terrain are becoming increasingly apparent. The inclusion of the term ‘multilateral’ (in reference to Internet governance) in an outcome document approved recently at the U.N. General Assembly, reflects China’s growing power on the global cyber stage and its sway over future approaches to how to govern and shape the global Internet….’’
The New York Times reports that “there is a widespread recognition that the Western alliance has yet to develop a strategy” to counter Russia’s increasingly aggressive actions against NATO members in cyberspace.
“While there are frequent conferences and papers, there are no serious military plans, apart from locking down the alliance’s own networks. Russia, China and Iran have increasingly sophisticated offensive cyberforces; NATO has none, and no established mechanism to draw on United States Cyber Command or its British equivalent.”
