From China Law Blog, February 21:
When Xi Jinping took office in 2013, I—like many others—hoped that his leadership would improve China’s trajectory. But over time, my optimism faded as the country became more repressive, and the spaces I once enjoyed began to disappear.
I was living in Shenzhen in 2013. Whenever I read Western media hopes that Xi might potentially be China’s Gorbachev, I recalled one of my courses at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Virginia, which among other topics covered cable-writing (a cable is basically a report, in the State Department’s fusty parlance). In one class, a 2000 cable from the Moscow Embassy was hailed as the epitome of what good reporting from the field looks like. The topic was Vladimir Putin’s recent ascension to power, and the reporting officer made the bold claim (based on a careful analysis of Putin’s track record) that he would be a reformer. To be fair to FSI instructors, I took the course in 2004, when it was not quite as clear that the cable’s predictions were totally wrong.
This historical cautionary tale, along with insights from my Chinese friends about Xi’s background, led me to have no illusions that he would be a democratic reformer. That said, I felt he would probably be an improvement over drab Hu Jintao, whose vision for China appeared uninspiring. I even posted a syrupy message on WeChat wishing President Xi the best on his mandate and hoping that China would be a better place at the end of it, or something along those lines.
My disenchantment took place gradually, yet there were a couple of moments that have stuck with me. A few months after Xi took office, I moved to Hong Kong but continued to travel to the Mainland regularly for business. As happens when you stop seeing a place regularly, changes become more noticeable. One evening, while walking around Shamian Island in Guangzhou, I saw what can only be described as a big character poster along the driveway of a government building—something I had never previously encountered in the city.
Big character posters (大字报) were a hallmark of Mao-era propaganda and public denunciations, so seeing one in modern Guangzhou was deeply unsettling. While propaganda was not uncommon in China, Guangzhou had always struck me as a pragmatic, commerce-driven city with little time for ideology. In fact, a tiled announcement calling for compliance with family planning rules in one of the alleys near the Garden Hotel stood out as a relic — to the extent that I made a point of photographing it....
....MUCH MORE
As noted in a March 2024 post:
....Fifteen years ago Chinese Gen X and millennials were saying “It’s basically impossible to lose money from buying apartments.”
The 2008 Beijing Olympics and the next half-decade were probably the high-water mark for the national mood, nothing was impossible. Then in November 2012 Xi Jinping took over as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from Hu Jintao, the government, central bank and the Party goosed the economy by way of construction for the next seven years but it was all a debt-fueled mirage.
Over the years I've mentioned my thinking on China had changed sometime in the mid-twenty-teens:
In 1980 China's GDP per capita was $312.
In 2017 China's GDP per capita was $8,836 with purchasing power parity being $17,015.
The world has never seen anything like it.
2021
....I had a similar road to Damascus moment, though later, maybe 2015, 2016.
In 2012 I was still pro-China and immensely pro Deng :
Deng Xiaoping Smiles: Peoples Daily Online is Doing an IPO
Peoples Daily Online is the website of the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China.
Deng Xiaoping helped lift 1,000,000,000 Chinese out of subsistence poverty* with his pragmatic market reforms:
*Real GDP per Capita 1980-2009 (2010: $7,600):
1980 $ 531.41
2009 $6,309.15But Xi? He's a whole different kind of cat . I keep waiting for him to pull a Hitler line out of his pocket:
