| To Western ears at least, President Xi Jinping's speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) struck an ominous tone, particularly at a moment when relations with the U.S. are at a three-decade low. Just this week, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. and Japan have been conducting war games and military exercises in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan. Foreign forces, warned Xi, who try to "bully, coerce and enslave" China will "break their heads on the steel Great Wall built with the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion Chinese people." It may be the case, as some contend, that his remarks don't sound quite as hostile in the original Chinese. "Anti-China forces need to stay calm," said Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, a Chinese government-controlled publication. But this misses the bigger point. Far more significant than Xi's barbed comments was the roar they elicited from the packed crowds on Tiananmen Square. They were the loudest cheers, in fact, of his entire speech. If such accolades were sincere and representative of what most Chinese citizens feel, Xi's words may augur a very dangerous era indeed.  Xi Jinping delivers a speech July 1 in Beijing during the 100th anniversary of the Chinese communist party. His attacks on the West received the biggest cheers. Photographer: Wang Zhao/AFP This Week in the New Economy
Belligerent nationalism has played well in Xi's China, even if it sometimes shocks what the party apparatus calls "anti-China forces." A few years ago, the Chinese leader startled a group of multinational executives in Beijing by stating that Chinese people, unlike Westerners, don't turn the other cheek when they get hit in the face. "In our culture," Xi said, "we punch back."
Such pugilistic rhetoric has become the stock-in-trade of China's "wolf-warrior" diplomats. It resonates with a domestic audience fed a steady diet of propaganda that vilifies the West, glorifies the CCP and whitewashes its darkest chapters, such as the violent excesses of "land reform" that followed the 1949 Communist Revolution, and the decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, which traumatized the entire nation. Under Xi, the moving force behind both of those upheavals is making a political comeback. The teachings of Mao Zedong, also known as the "great helmsman," are being redeployed to shape the beliefs of CCP members—all 95 million of them a number equal to about 8% of China's adult population.  Military vehicles carry ballistic missiles during a Beijing parade in 2019. China is reportedly expanding its nuclear capabilities with more silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Photographer: Mark Schiefelbein/AP We should probably expect relations between China and the West to get progressively more fraught, a reality sharpened this week with news of its efforts to expand its nuclear strike capability by building more silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And those cheers on Tiananmen Square? They were probably sincere. The CCP has been especially successful at getting its message across to millennials and Generation Z—doing so, ironically, by leveraging the power of the internet, a technology many in the West thought would ultimately bring democracy to China. "Young people across the world should be the most anti-establishment, the most open and alive in their thinking—but not in China," Dong Zehua told the Los Angeles Times. Dong said he was imprisoned for months after commemorating the government's 1989 massacre of protesters in the same Tiananmen Square where young people cheered Xi's saber-rattling. "In China, the youth have been shut in the government's thinking-cage for too long and cannot find an exit," said Dong. In a podcast this week, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, an adviser to the Bloomberg New Economy, noted the importance of understanding the attitudes of ordinary Chinese toward the U.S. and the rest of the world. "Often, authoritarians who lack the legitimacy of democratic election have even more need to cater to the popular will in order to maintain power," he said.  Members of the Chinese Communist Youth League at a monument in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Younger Chinese have cheered on Xi Jinping's nationalistic policies. Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images This is why there may be more reason to worry about the reaction on Tiananmen Square this week than the darts thrown by Xi in his speech. As the Times reported, counter-narratives to the official story of the CCP have been crushed. In part, this has been achieved by encouraging netizens to tattle on each other's speech, using phone, app and website options issued by China's Central Cyberspace Administration. In April, there were 15 million reports. The West has consistently underestimated the CCP's ability to survive— and thrive—by adapting to change. In fact, the Party has excelled at turning potentially fatal weaknesses into towering strengths. Plenty of Western skeptics predicted Chinese scientists and engineers inculcated with CCP dogma would never produce breakthrough innovations, and that state banks and industrial enterprises would hold back growth. They were dead wrong on both counts of course. China has caught up with the U.S. in several advanced technologies, and its economy is streaking ahead. Those same observers were also wrong to assume that China's growing middle classes and Western-educated youth would demand democratic reform. If anything, public sentiment is pushing China in the opposite direction. At age 100, the Party is both stoking nationalism and being led by its most vociferous proponents—the country's youth. The West should take note, before it takes any steps that cannot be recalled.
The fourth annual Bloomberg New Economy Forum will convene the world's most influential leaders in Singapore on Nov. 16-19 to mobilize behind the effort to build a sustainable and inclusive global economy. Learn more here.
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