Xi's U-turn?

Has Xi Jinping learned from his mistakes?

Photo by Alejandro Luengo on Unsplash

2022 was a bad year for autocracies. Even skeptics of liberal democracy acknowledged that autocrats seemed trapped in a cocoon of their own poor decision-making. In outlining the top risks of 2023, the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan noted that “dictatorships are stumbling at the same time that they're becoming more consolidated.”

One of the Eurasia Group’s biggest risks was “Maximum Xi” — China’s Xi Jinping amassing more power while making mistake after mistake:

Having stacked the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee with his closest allies, Xi is virtually unfettered in his ability to pursue his statist and nationalist policy agenda. But with few checks and balances left to constrain him and no dissenting voices to challenge his views, Xi's ability to make big mistakes is also unrivaled. Arbitrary decisions, policy volatility, and elevated uncertainty will be endemic in Xi's China.

Writing in World Politics Review, Paul Poast concurred, suggesting that 2023 might be a genuine “end of history” moment: “Xi is pushing policies that further isolate China from the global economy, antagonize its neighbors and even threaten the stability of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.”

It seems hard to argue with these conclusions. In 2022, Xi declared his friendship without limits with Vladimir Putin just as the Russian leader took the most counterproductive step of his leadership. He stuck with zero-COVID policies long after they had any positive utility, eventually triggering widespread protests. His crackdowns sabotaged China’s economy and throttled its tech sector. Just read Keith Bradsher’s latest New York Times story on the home heating crisis in China’s interior provinces — it’s like a perfect storm of Xi’s policy foul-ups.

What if, however, Xi has reached these same conclusions about his mistakes?

The trouble with autocracies is that it can be politically difficult for leaders to course-correct. The advantage of autocracies, however, is that if the leader does change their mind, the state can pivot rather quickly to a new direction.

There is some evidence that this is what China has been doing in recent weeks and months. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius made this argument in a recent column:

Xi in December announced a stunning reversal of major covid-19, economic and technology policies. This turnabout came just two months after an arrogant display at the Communist Party’s 20th Congress, during which Xi had seemed to be doubling down on failing strategies.

Xi didn’t explain or apologize in December. He just changed course. That illustrates his tactical agility, and also his shamelessness about rewriting party doctrine.

Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh buried some similar observations in his latest column:

Xi and his newly appointed foreign minister, Qin Gang, may be hinting at ways to step back from what has been, for the first two years of the Biden administration, a harsh atmosphere of confrontation on both sides. In his annual new year’s message, broadcast on Dec. 31, Xi appeared to somewhat moderate his formerly truculent tone toward Taiwan. Qin, in a Washington Post op-ed  giving his farewell as China’s ambassador to Washington, said that the Sino-American relationship “should not be a zero-sum game in which one side out-competes the other or one nation thrives at the expense of the other.” He added that he leaves his post "more convinced that the door to China-U.S. relations will remain open and cannot be closed." In recent weeks Beijing also moved Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, known for his anti-U.S. rhetoric, into a less prominent role.

From a U.S. perspective, this is an intriguing possibility. It seems clear from Biden’s last meeting with Xi that he genuinely wants some guardrails on the bilateral relationship. It would seem, after years of rising antagonism, that Xi feels similarly.

That said, it is also true that Xi could turn his 180 into a 360 very quickly. Ignatius’ column was based in part of an Asia Society report on what to expect from China in 2023. The report warns:

Xi still controls the hard levers of power. Furthermore, many of these changes on both the economy and external policy are more likely to be short-to-medium term and therefore tactical in nature, rather than representing a strategic departure from the deep ideological direction laid out for the long-term in Xi’s October 2022 Work Report. While these changes to current economic and foreign policy settings are significant in their own right, there is no evidence to date that Xi Jinping’s ideological fundamentals have changed.

In some ways, however, Xi’s underlying policy preferences matter less than delaying any further bellicosity from China as long as possible. If Hal Brands and Michael Beckley are correct, then the longer Xi maintains this U-turn, the harder it will be for China to tack back towards a more confrontational path.