China’s Challenges Foreign and Domestic
China’s Demographic Time Bomb described the projected change in China’s ratio of workers to retirees over the next thirty years. The country’s extremely low birth rate is producing fewer workers in relation to the population reaching retirement. In 2020 there were 5.4 people age 20 to 64 for every person age 65 or older. That number will drop to 2.1 by 2050.
While China’s President Xi Jinping is pondering how to overcome that problem, two authors have put additional problems on his plate. Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, wrote an article in the March/April 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs titled “How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Confrontation From Ending in Calamity.” And journalist Kai Strittmatter, who reported for more than a decade from China for a German newspaper, has a new book, “We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State,” about China’s tracking and reporting system.
Rudd describes Xi’s measured strategy toward reaching a position of world leadership for China. China places great significance in its prospect of surpassing the U.S. in becoming the world’s largest economy in terms of GDP by the end of the decade. “Taking the number one slot will turbocharge Beijing’s confidence, assertiveness, and leverage in its dealings with Washington.” Along with this goal, China intends to decouple its economy from the U.S. and become self-sufficient in core technologies such as semi-conductors.
China is modernizing its military to establish regional superiority over the U.S. “Xi’s strategy now is clear: To vastly increase the level of military power that China can exert in the Taiwan Strait, to the extent that the United States would become unwilling to fight a battle that Washington itself judged it would probably lose.” In the short term Xi will work to de-escalate tensions with the U.S. to prevent security crises.
Strittmatter puts China’s domestic policies under the microscope. China looks to become the world leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as quickly as possible. Public security plans encompass “intelligent surveillance, early-warning, control systems… The plan calls for new ‘intelligent applications’ for the ‘management of society,’ with the specific examples of ‘video image analysis and identification technologies, biometric identification technologies, intelligent security, and policing products.’”
China’s ubiquitous cameras and automated collection of transactional data constantly observe every citizen. If people know they can be observed, even if they are not being observed continuously, the possibility that they will be observed doing something that is forbidden keeps them from doing it. “Those who are naked before this eye take over surveillance of themselves.”
The data collected becomes the basis for China’s Social Credit System. Points are given for good behavior and deducted for bad behavior: Five-point penalty for not picking up after your dog. Five points earned for helping an elderly couple move into a new house. The gradual rolling out of the system was ongoing as Strittmatter wrote in 2020.
In China’s model, “human rights are to be redefined, and political and civil rights are to be replaced by ‘economic’ and ‘social’ rights; … The sovereignty of states is the highest of all rights.”
However, Strittmatter cited survey results identifying a population longing for the “mainstream values” of freedom, democracy, equality, and individualism. “The Party is well aware that the support of citizens rests on increasing prosperity first and foremost, but also on information control, mind control, and the suppression of dissent.” Rudd does not assume that “intense political repression” can prevent what he perceives to be a latent threat to the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s population may not find increasing prosperity in exchange for personal freedom to be appealing, or harmonious.