According to official media, China combines an “economic development miracle” with a “miracle of political stability”
, boasts of China’s openness to the world will come thick and fast when President Xi Jinping addresses the Second China International Import Expo in Shanghai on November 5th. Speaking at the inaugural edition of that trade fair last year, Mr Xi cast China as a champion of free trade and mutually beneficial co-operation. Openness brings progress while seclusion leads to backwardness, he declared.
China’s leader has every reason to offer warm words at the upcoming event. Even as his country grows richer and more powerful, it is dependent on the world in ways that it cannot control. China has ambitions to become a standard-setting technology superpower. For all its talk of self-reliance, it needs foreign know-how to get there. In the short term, China is anxious for a truce in its trade war with America.
Propaganda organs pretend there is no contradiction between these two personas—a smiling President Xi talking to foreigners about global villages, and Xi the general secretary grimly demanding party discipline and vigilance in the face of hostile external forces and internal threats.
At home, it is fair to concede, many Chinese accept the social contract implicit in that Xinhua commentary, that personal freedoms should be traded for prosperity and order. To outsiders, however, China’s two self-declared miracles are increasingly in tension. For a long time, many foreign admirers of China treated party rule as a bit of a joke. This place has only one ideology, they chuckled: making money.
The authoritarian turn that China is taking, in the name of saving one-party rule from itself, is hard to square with a quest for globally driven growth. Already foreign bosses privately admit to wondering, as never before, what it means when a Chinese business partner is a party member. Mr Xi seems to want a China that is open to foreign investors and inventions but closed to dangerously foreign ideas. Communists are fascinated by contradictions. This one may prove hard to resolve.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
Similar News:Vous pouvez également lire des articles d'actualité similaires à celui-ci que nous avons collectés auprès d'autres sources d'information.
China to use import fair to highlight trade credentialsChina will use a giant import fair in Shanghai next week to try to showcase its ...
Lire la suite »
US-China trade deal in sight after progress in high-level talksThe Chinese Commerce Ministry on Friday said the world's two largest economies had reached 'consensus on principles' during a 'serious and constructive' telephone call between their main trade negotiators.
Lire la suite »
On eve of China import fair, EU warns of 'promise fatigue'The European Union said that China should make rapid and substantial improvement...
Lire la suite »
China-backed hackers stole text messages and phone records in push for intelligence, report saysCybersecurity firm FireEye says the hackers targeted phone details of 'foreign high-ranking individuals of interest to the Chinese intelligence services.'
Lire la suite »
China Oct. factory activity expands at fastest pace in over two years: Caixin PMIChina's factory activity unexpectedly expanded at the fastest pace in well ...
Lire la suite »