I recently paid my first visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England, which is a worthwhile stop for anyone interested in the history of the Industrial Revolution. If you follow the promenade along the river to the west, outside the city center you come to a low-rise brick office park. There is no particular reason for a tourist to hang out there, but I was intrigued by the fact that several of the buildings had what appeared to be Japanese names. Looking around, sure enough there was an explanatory placard: the office park sits on the site of the old Newcastle shipyards, and one of their major customers in the late 19th century was the Japanese navy. The buildings were named after the ships.

I had not known until then that the UK had supplied much of the hardware that enabled Japan’s famous military victory over Russia in their war of 1904-5. British shipyards had built all six of the Japanese navy’s battleships, four of its eight cruisers (other European powers supplied the rest), and 16 of its 24 destroyers (the other eight were domestic).

Japan of course was busy building up its own shipbuilding industry, but being able to purchase leading-edge military technology on the open market was essential. Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who commanded the navy in the battle in which Russia’s Baltic fleet was destroyed, had studied in England as a young man, and in 1911 visited Newcastle to express his thanks for its role in arming the navy.

Japan’s military victory over Russia was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European one in modern times. It was shocking to European and American observers at the time, as it overturned what had been assumed to be an established order. The Russo-Japanese War was a clear turning point in what was to become the century-long rise of Asia and the quest of non-European countries to achieve parity with the European imperial powers. But what does it mean that Japan’s victory was in fact aided and encouraged by some of those same European imperial powers?

Perhaps one point is that rivalry among existing great powers is one of the forces that helps produce new powers: an existing power can seek advantage over its adversaries by encouraging the rise of new powers. The US decision to engage with Communist China in the 1970s cannot, of course, be understood in isolation from its rivalry with the Soviet Union: the US wanted to make sure that China was, if not exactly on its side, at least not on the USSR’s side.

Another possible interpretation is that commercial interests (or, if you prefer, capitalism) can be disruptive to hierarchies in international relations. Would Japan’s aggressive drive to bring its navy up to European standards have been as successful if it did not also boost the sales and profits of Armstrong Whitwork & Co in Newcastle? Similarly, it is hard to imagine that the US would have been so accommodating of China’s “peaceful rise” over the past few decades if it had not also presented big opportunities for American companies.

On the recommendation of several friends, my wife and I went to see China’s hit summer movie in Beijing last month. Called “Dying to Survive” in English — the Chinese title 《我不是药神》 translates as “I Am Not the Medicine God” — it’s an unusual blockbuster in that it’s not escapist action fare but a realistic social drama. It tells the story, loosely based on real events, of a Shanghai man who smuggled Indian generic cancer drugs for patients who could not afford the real thing.

It’s a pretty good movie and worth seeing (the print we saw in Beijing had English subtitles, so it’s accessible to non-Chinese viewers): it’s well shot, well acted, well edited, and if the tearjerker parts of the storyline are not too surprising, they are still moving and effective. The first half of the film is my favorite, thanks to its sympathetic and realistic depiction of the lives of people living at the margins of Shanghai’s glitzy society. The protagonist starts out as an obviously dodgy seller of supposed aphrodisiacs, and his partners in crime include a dancer in a club, a rural migrant working in a slaughterhouse and, most surprisingly, a Christian pastor.

But what’s really interesting about the film is how you can see the struggle between the demands of making popular art and satisfying official propaganda playing out in the open. How many dramatizations of social problems end by displaying on screen a detailed timeline of the government policy measures that decisively solved said social problem? (The Economist wrote a bafflingly wrong-headed article about the film, calling it “a radical departure from China’s film policy, which is to encourage the production of uplifting fare that presents the government in a good light.” They must not have stayed for the credits.)

At times “Dying to Survive” feels like two movies stapled together. When the main characters are on the screen, the tone is of low-key realism. But when the police and court system appear, everything changes: the actors are stiff and predictable, straight from central casting for one of China’s cookie-cutter state television dramas. The cops are upright, businesslike and effective, the judges wise and firm. They ensure that the drug smuggler is eventually brought to justice, and serves a prison sentence for his crimes. The message is: yes, high drug prices are a social problem, but that does not excuse breaking the law; the government will take care of things.

What’s more interesting is how the movie departs from the real-life story of Lu Yong, who did smuggle into China the Indian generic version of Novartis’ cancer drug Glivec (the drug did not have patent protection in India). Lu was himself a patient who needed the drug, while the movie’s protagonist Cheng Yong gets into smuggling because he needs the money, and then develops sympathy for the struggling patients over time. (Lu has publicly stated he was unhappy with being portrayed in this way, and said he had not been consulted or compensated by the producers of the movie.) This alteration is rather understandable, as it creates a more interesting story arc: Cheng Yong starts off as an unsympathetic character (he hits his ex-wife in an early scene) and gradually matures into a sympathetic one.

The real punchline is that Lu Yong never served a prison term for his smuggling. When he was brought before a court, the public outcry led the judges to release him. The true story, in other words, was even more like a movie than the movie: in the end, the morally upright hero is recognized for doing good deeds and praised rather than condemned. (In Lu Yong’s blog post about the movie, he says that the movie’s producers told him that a political leader had ordered that the movie play up the role of the government and play down individual heroics.) That courtroom scene would have been a triumphant climax for any other drama. But suggesting that popular morality can override the demands of the law was apparently a bit too dangerous.

I do think “Dying to Survive” is a successful piece of popular art, but it is one that shows very clearly the constraints under which it was made. For further reading, I recommend this piece by Richard Yu, in which he argues that it serves as a potential template for how Chinese movies can discuss social problems–as long as they celebrate the accomplishments of the government.

Richard Bush from Brookings has come up with the best point-by-point comparison of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, the two most important global political figures of the present moment, that I have yet seen.

Some of these points may seem obvious by now, but there is always value in a concise and clear summary, and I thought this was exceptionally concise and clear. I also largely agree with it. I have lightly edited the bullet points below for clarity:

The similarities:

• Ambition. They each have grand and similar ambitions for their countries: the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again.
• Self-regard. They each have a high estimation of their own ability to lead their countries and confidence that they can overcome all obstacles. Each believes he is above the law and each in his own way. Xi has worked to ensure that the courts are subordinate to the Communist Party and to create extra-judicial mechanisms. Trump wants a law-enforcement system that is loyal to him.
• Nationalism. Each is tapping into nationalist sentiment. Xi plays on the public’s desire to restore China to a global leadership role. Trump plays on the fears of white people about non-whites, both immigrants and native-born.

The differences:

• Institutions. Xi basically accepts China’s political institutions. He believes they work and that they can be improved. Much of what he has done is to restore the Party’s leadership role. He is confident about his ability to work within China’s institutional structure. In this regard, he is very much like Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, but like Liu, he wants the CCP to penetrate most sectors of Chinese society. Donald Trump rejects the role of institutions and the limits they place on himself. He regularly criticizes America’s governing institutions and works to undermine them. In this sense, he is something of a Maoist.
• Program. Xi Jinping has a much more systematic vision of what he wishes to accomplish and how to get there. Trump thinks in terms of slogans and does not appreciate the contradictions among his various goals. Each leader appears to be a populist but Xi is a genuine populist and Trump is a sham populist.
• Discipline. Xi Jinping is very disciplined in his leadership style. Trump thrives on chaos, which he does everything to create, and he cares very much about his image and whether others respect him.

The whole speech on US-China relations from which this is drawn is very much worth reading.

The latest issue of Bill Bishop’s excellent Sinocism newsletter pointed out an interesting speech by Kevin Rudd analyzing recent Xi Jinping’s official pronouncements on foreign policy. Here is the section that jumped out at me:

There is a second element to the June 2018 Conference which grows out of the first. It is Xi’s deeply Marxist, dialectical-materialist view of history based on permanently evolving “contradictions” between what dialecticians call thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In Xi’s view, this in turn gives rise to defined “laws” of historical development which are both prescriptive and predictive.

This may sound like old-fashioned Marxism. That’s because it is. The intellectual software of generations of Chinese leaders has been shaped by this conceptual framework for interpreting and responding to what they define as scientific, objective reality. And Xi Jinping belongs to that tradition. Remember he has already convened special study sessions of the politburo on understanding both dialectical and historical materialism in the past.

According to the conference report: “Xi suggested to not only observe the current international situation, but also review the past, summarise historical laws, and look towards the future to better understand the trend of history.” Furthermore, according to the same report in Xinhua, to obtain “an accurate understanding of the overall situation, Xi underlined not only the observation of detailed phenomena, but also a deep appreciation of the essence of the overall situation in order not to get lost in complexity and the changing international situation.” Xi concludes on this count by stating that “throughout human history, the development of the world has always been the result of contradictions intertwining and interacting with each other.”

Once again, all this will seem more than a little arcane. But in the ideological dialect of the Communist Party, it seems to mean several things. First, that there is nothing random about what is unfolding in the world today. Second, these reflect certain immutable laws of political and economic development. Third, the business of Chinese foreign policy is to use this dialectal prism to understand precisely what is happening in the world today, why it is happening and what to do about it. And fourth, applying these disciplines to the current period, it means that the global order is at a turning point with the relative decline of the US and the West, with this coinciding with the fortuitous national and international circumstances currently enabling China’s rise.

This sounds very much like a conclusion that I also have come to: Xi Jinping’s thinking really comes out of a 19th-century social-science worldview. He has a high degree of confidence that objective laws governing the workings of society and the economy exist, that knowing these laws does not pose any particular philosophical or practical difficulties, and therefore that these laws form a solid basis for government policy (see my post “Reading the Communist Manifesto with Xi Jinping“).

Since the Chinese Communist Party has figured out these rules, it can have a high degree of confidence in the success of its policies. Far being a cynical post-truth manipulator like Putin, Xi gives every sign of being a true believer in his brand of pseudo-scientific, authoritarian, developmental Marxism. His confident nationalism in foreign policy and confident interventionism in economic policy are both underpinned by a high degree of epistemic confidence that he knows how the world really works.

Dominique Fong at The Wall Street Journal has checked in on Ordos, Inner Mongolia, and found that China’s most famous ghost town–the new district of Kangbashi–is still, well, pretty ghostly:

Local officials had hoped to attract a million people to the new area, nearly matching the size of the old city 20 miles away. Architectural showpieces—a museum in the form of a giant metallic bean bag, a library resembling a shelf of books, a sports stadium reminiscent of a modern Coliseum—were built as attractions. Officials have since reduced their population goal to 300,000, and they are just halfway there. An early resident, Hu Richa, has been waiting seven years for more neighbors. Still, he says, “There’s barely anyone living here.”

The city has spent 14 years planning, erecting and maintaining Kangbashi, which has the distinction of being one of China’s best-known “ghost towns”—gleaming but sparsely populated new urban centers adjacent to older metropolises. Built by the dozen across the country, the new areas reflect—and were meant to accelerate—China’s economic boom. As the country’s growth has slowed, many of them have become serious liabilities, deep in debt, with little prospect of full occupancy anytime soon. …

According to a study by Lu Ming, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 272 new districts across China have been built with borrowed funds near existing cities. Other researchers, using different definitions for ghost towns, find smaller numbers, but all agree that there is a serious problem.

While I don’t really disagree with anything in this piece (in which one of my colleagues is quoted), I have to say that I find the limited analysis a little frustrating. The ghost town phenomenon has been extensively reported for several years now, and yet the Chinese property market strangely refuses to collapse in the way that these reports always suggest it should. Construction starts have been growing pretty consistently for the past two and half years, and have actually accelerated some this year.

At this point in the China story I feel like saying “there is a serious problem” and stopping there is not really sufficient. It is of course not wrong to point out that China has lots of capital misallocation and has been heavily reliant on expanding debt to drive growth. But many people have correctly identified problems in the Chinese economy, and yet they have not been correct about the trajectory the economy would take.

In my view, outside observers of China have not been so good about understanding 1) the actual size of problems, 2) the constraints on policymakers’ ability to address problems. It is easy to suggest that problems are extremely large or cannot be easily solved, but it would be better to put more effort into identifying just how big problems are and how they might be addressed.

The ghost town phenomenon is a good example where the relative size matters a lot. Both anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests these huge clumps of unused housing are concentrated in northern China, in areas more reliant on resoure extraction and heavy industry. The property markets in these areas are certainly troubled, but they are also a relatively small part of the national total. The construction and sales recovery of the last few years has been driven mostly by southern and central China, where populations are growing and inventories are in fact quite low.

 

A  long essay by Chinese constitutional scholar Jiang Shigong has been making the rounds of China-watching circles, thanks to an impressive full translation by David Ownby (Don Clarke has made some interesting comments on it already). It’s a fascinating document in a kind of court philosopher mode, with Jiang interpreting the Communist Party’s current political priorities and leadership into an intellectual framework using both Chinese history and Western philosophy.

One part that I found particularly surprising and interesting was Jiang’s analysis of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in terms of Max Weber’s tripartite classification of authority:

In terms of Weberian theory, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s position as the core of the Party center, the core of the entire Party, his authoritative position as leader, arises not only from the ‘legal authority’ obtained by virtue of his legally defined positions as Party Secretary, National Chairman, Chairman of the Central Military Committee and not even from the ‘traditional authority’ born of the Party’s historical tradition.

More important is the fact that Xi Jinping, at a particular moment in history, courageously took up the political responsibility of the historical mission, and in the face of an era of historical transformation of the entire world, demonstrated the capacity to construct the great theory facilitating China’s development path, as well as the capacity to control complicated domestic and international events, thus consolidating the hearts and minds of the entire Party and the people of the entire country, hence becoming the core leader praised by the entire Party, the entire army and the entire country, possessing a special ‘charismatic authority’.

One of the interesting things about this passage is that it comes remarkably close to admitting that there is in fact a cult of personality around Xi Jinping: “charismatic authority” in Weber’s formulation is based on people’s personal devotion to the leader and their belief in his special qualities. Perhaps this Weberian terminology is a useful way for his supporters to recognize that Xi Jinping has in fact shifted toward personalized rule without evoking the more problematic Communist precedents of Mao and Stalin.

But I think Jiang’s framework is not just interesting as propaganda: it is significant, I think, that he argues that Xi possess all three forms of Weberian legitimate authority: traditional, legal, and charismatic. This analysis in my view is correct, and actually helps us understand how Xi differs from his predecessors.

Xi is more powerful than Hu Jintao because he has a charismatic authority that Hu never managed. But Xi’s charismatic authority is a complement to his traditional and legal authority, not a replacement for it. This is the major way he differs from Mao Zedong, who tried to use his personal charisma to overthrow tradition and law. Xi is an organization man as well as a charismatic figure, who has put lots of effort into clarifying bureaucratic reporting lines and emphasizing traditional morality–things that Mao never had much time for.