China’s goals for reform have much to do with the manner in which the CPC can muster support from the public and the public’s perception of the government. On the outset, the PRC had relied on socialist ideology to command the loyalty of its people, but mismanagement during the Mao era, specifically the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, coupled with the fall of the Soviet Union, disenchanted the Chinese people (Friedman, The Next 100 Years, 2009). This was the context under which Deng launched his market reforms, using the slogan of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which allowed the CPC to maintain a semblance of ideological consistently, but ultimately moving the CPC’s claim to legitimacy from ideology to economic growth.
When Deng launched his market reforms at the end of the 1970’s, he did so with the explicit understanding that China would be developing its eastern coastal regions first through the Coastal Economic Development Strategy, and that the wealth accumulated there would eventually be used to develop the western inland regions. The established goal was to create a stable Chinese state by elevating its population to a “moderately prosperous society”, which involved minimizing the economic inequality between coastal and inland China (Lai, 2002). The social unrest caused by economic inequality between
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western and eastern China was already evident as early as the third-generation Jiang administration, which then launched the aforementioned Western Development Strategy.
As China grew to become the second largest economy in the world, however, two broad issues became clear. First, efforts to tackle wealth disparity between the coast and the interior were limited in effectiveness, faced diminishing returns on investment, and then faltered altogether as the wealth gap widened (The Economist, 2016). Second, China’s increased wealth and the increased standards of living for its people have transformed a significant fraction of its previously impoverished population into urbanites with more sophisticated needs, expectations, and demands of their government.
Localized “mass incidents” recorded by the PRC have increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 90,000 in 2010, and the domestic security budget remains higher than the domestic budget at US$111.6 billion (Blanchard & Ruwitch, China hikes defense budget, to spend more on internal security, 2013). Maintaining stability is expensive, and retaining legitimacy amongst the Chinese population saves on both economic and political cost.
Traditionally, the Chinese leadership has maintained the loyalty of its constituency through economic growth. However, as outlined earlier in the chapter, there is now a slowdown in said growth, which diminishes its reliability. More pertinently, however, the increasingly sophisticated demands of the Chinese populace dictate that national economic growth can no longer be the sole measure of the population’s satisfaction with the performance of Chinese leadership; the CPC must find other, more comprehensive avenues of development to maintain their legitimacy. While the
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generation leadership is still banking on economic growth, out of economic necessity if not out of ideological luxury, there is also an increasingly need for an ideological unification and social mobilization of the Chinese people, particularly through the Chinese Dream ideal, summed up as both “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”
and “the yearning for a good and beautiful life”.
The fifth-generation leadership is not particularly unique in aiming to solve these social issues, nor is it particularly unique in attempting to set ideological goals, certainly not with attaining a “moderately prosperous society”, which was a theme present in every administration from the second-generation and onwards. Deng spoke of the “invigoration of China”, Jiang promoted the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and pushed forth the Great Western Development Strategy, and Hu trumpeted the “harmonious society” (Wang Z. , 2013). However, the fifth-generation is unique in diverging from the long-held axiom established by Deng in prioritizing economic growth over party ideological imperatives; while Xi has not outright contradicted Deng’s axiom in that
“economic construction is the core of party work”, he has noted that “[while] economic construction is the party’s central work, ideological work is extremely important work for the party” (Lam, 2016). This can be seen in the ideology of the Chinese Dream, which includes the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, which implies the return of China to its imperial position of a great regional power, abundant not only in economic strength but also national respect, wherein China is considered a worthy developed polity instead of a controversial “factory of the world”. The question, however, ultimately becomes a matter of what metrics are used to assess this campaign’s success.
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The situation of Chinese society and its challenges can been seen through the fifth-generation leadership’s response in the form of the Four Comprehensives, considered as “strategic guidelines” for achieving the Chinese Dream. The Four Comprehensives are the blueprint by which to achieve the Two Centenary Goals, and the Two Centenary Goals are the benchmarks by which the Chinese Dream will be completely realized. For the purposes of this thesis, “comprehensively strictly govern the Party” and “comprehensively govern the nation according to law” can be set aside, as they are not directly related to the BRI, nor could this thesis uncover tangible links between these elements, and are thus outside the scope of this research. Of the Four Comprehensive, this thesis instead focuses on “comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society” and “comprehensively deepen reform”. Furthermore, of the Two Centenary Goals, the goal of becoming “a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” by 2049 can be set aside, as it is far beyond the projected end of the fifth-generation leadership in 2023; instead, this thesis focuses instead on creating a “moderately prosperous society”.
While separated into two of the Four Comprehensives, the concepts of
“comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society” and “comprehensively deepen reform” are actually inexorably connected and deeply interrelated. Specifically, the CPC has pushed the narrative that the goal of comprehensively deepening reform is ultimately to meet the Two Centenary Goals, one of which is creating a “moderately prosperous society” (Qu, 2015). In other words, a “moderately prosperous society” is simultaneously being treated as one of the Four Comprehensives in and of itself, one of the Centenary
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Goals for achieving another one of the Four Comprehensives, and one half of the goals of the Chinese Dream. This Centenary Goal is the one that Xi administration focuses on the most, and the one that is relevant for the fifth-generation leadership until 2023. This emphasis is unique in that a specific benchmark has actually been provided, which promises to double China’s 2010 per capita income by 2020.
Using the Atlas method favored by the World Bank, China’s per capita income in 2010 was US$4,340, meaning the fifth-generation leadership must produce a per capita income of US$8,680 by 2020 (The World Bank, 2017). Given government estimates of China’s population reaching 1.42 billion by 2020, it would mean China’s GNI will need to achieve US$12.33 trillion at the same time (Xinhua, 2017). While the calculation methods of GDP and GNI are different, they are conceptually similar, they follow similar trends, and Chinese annual GNI figures are only slightly lower than annual GDP figures.
With China’s GNI and GNI annual growth rate being US$10.84 trillion and 6.335% in 2015, this goal will almost certainly be successful so long as the Xi administration can maintain an average GDP and GNI growth rate of around 2% until 2020 (The World Bank, 2017). This is, however, contingent upon a “soft landing” for the Chinese economy; even if per capita income is double from 2010 by 2020, it is unlikely that this will be accepted as being indicative of China becoming a “moderately prosperous society”
if it is concurrent with a significantly diminished GDP and GNI growth. Ultimately, the promise of “a moderately prosperous society” is being banked on successful economic reforms outlined in the previous section, and dependent on “comprehensive reforms”
concurrent with the BRI.
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A closer examination of the other item of the Four Comprehensives,
“comprehensively deepen reform”, requires a look at “The Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform”, adopted by the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the primary blueprint for this
“comprehensive”. In spite of Xi’s break from previous generations of Chinese leadership by increasingly putting an emphasis on ideology, it should be noted that of the sixteen sections of the document adopted by the 3rd Plenary Session, six of the articles explicitly have to do with economic, market, and development reform, the most of any other subject. This includes Section VII, Article 26, which contains mention of the BRI. By contrast, political and legal reform occupies only three sections, cultural reform only one section, social reform only two sections, ecological reform only one section, and national defense only one section (Communist Party of China, 2013).
In spite of Xi’s emphasis on ideology, the Chinese Dream is comprised in large part, perhaps more so than any other part, of economic factors, consistent with the Communist Party platform since the Deng era. More so than any other topic amongst the Chinese Dream, the Two Centenary Goals, and the Four Comprehensive, the creation of a
“moderately prosperous society” is at the center of the fifth-generation leadership’s domestic policy. However, this also sheds a light on the emphasis on reform and its target audience, an urbanizing Chinese population that has come to expect more of its government. The Chinese Dream indicates that government policy is based no longer on pure economic growth that previous generations of Chinese leadership focused on, but on
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the transformation of the Chinese economic system and a more equal distribution of economic attainment. This is coherent with at the other two “comprehensives” not directly addressed in this thesis, “comprehensively strictly govern the Party” and
“comprehensively govern the nation according to law”, a drive for a Chinese definition of social justice, exemplified through Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.
The fifth-generation’s domestic policies as exemplified by the Chinese Dream thus have a clear overlap with the BRI as analyzed in the previous section. While the former pertains to domestic social issues and the latter to international trade issues, both revolve around the ability to attain a strong, sustainable Chinese economy, which can then be translated to wealth equity, especially when considering the division of wealth along Chinese geographic lines. Not only is the BRI meant to address the need for economic and industrial reform, it is meant to ensure that there is a national unity and national equality in being able to distribute resources from coastal China to inland China, just as reforms under the Chinese Dream also aims to allocate resources from urban China to rural China. Both strategies superficially seem different, but they are fundamentally part of the same blueprint. Chinese academic literature may claim that the BRI is reflective and in the spirit of Chinese economic and market reform (Li & Li, 2015).
It is, however, perhaps more accurate to posit that the BRI is one of the major tools through which this reform is possible.
This is not to say that alternative interpretations of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” are not valid. More than just domestic capacity building back home
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when it comes to achieving the economic health of a developed country, China also seeks to become a regional polity deserving of “global respect”, especially in terms of political empowerment (Kuhn, 2013). A measure of this can be seen through China’s prospective ability to build institutions and coalitions independent of Western, particularly American, orbits. In this, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, formally proposed by Xi in conjunction with the BRI in 2013, has been a major first success for Beijing; more than regional coalitions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or market categorizations such as BRICS, the founding of the AIIB became a true international effort with the participation of not only non-regional but also Western polities, some of them U.S. allies in spite of alleged American attempts to discourage its allies from joining the AIIB.
This series of diplomatic gestures of largely diplomatic means has allowed Beijing to create a counterweight against the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank, which China regards as dominated by the U.S. or its traditionally allies in Western Europe and Japan. More importantly, however, it not only allowed China to form an international mechanism by which to function as a precursor to and groundwork for the BRI, but also to showcase that the country had become an international political heavyweight, a recipient of “global respect”, capable of creating alternative world orders without the blessings of the U.S. Similarly, the vast scope promised for the BRI stretches not only through regional neighbors such as Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, but also through the Middle East and Europe, circumventing any potential geopolitical rivalry with the United States in creating international multilateral coalitions. In terms of
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being able to build a “Strong”, “Civilized”, “Harmonious”, and “Beautiful” China for the Chinese Dream, the joint efforts of the AIIB and the BRI, at the very least, seem to be making its first successful steps in realizing a “strong” China (Kuhn, 2013).
Commenting on the conclusion of the Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing in May 2017, Xinhua described China as transforming from “a player in global affairs to a leader of the global agenda” (Wang X. , New Silk Road: Why China Should Be Wary of Overconfidence, 2017). At the very least, China is hoping to create a sufficient counterbalance in the existing international order to ensure that it has more of a say in existing systems traditionally dominated by what China sees as its rivals, especially when it comes to Asian affairs.
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