Foreign Affairs – The Introduction
For the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party has grounded its political rule in the success of its administration—particularly in managing the economy. In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, an implicit political bargain was struck between the government and the general population: the people would accept authoritarian rule, and in return, they would enjoy higher living standards. Although this may not have been a true “bargain”—in the sense that the general population had actual freedom of choice—the party-state did indeed make economic performance its overwhelming priority in the decades that followed, with highly favorable results.
By the mid-2010s, cracks had begun to emerge in this political foundation: growth had slowed significantly since the early years of the twenty-first century, and the economy was facing strong headwinds. Local government debt was becoming unsustainable, the real estate bubble appeared increasingly dangerous, the returns on infrastructure investment continued to decline, and, most worrying, the country was headed for irreversible long-term demographic decline. In response, social tensions over wages, inequality, and the lack of upward mobility escalated.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and the prolonged suspension of “business as usual” in China—until November 2022, when massive protests forced the government to finally discard its “zero COVID” policy—dramatically accelerated these developments. For a brief moment in 2021, when China managed to keep itself largely open by means of extraordinary controls on entry and internal movement, the Chinese economy once again seemed to outperform nearly the entire world. By the second half of 2022, however, any sense of Chinese exceptionalism had been shattered as severe lockdowns took a devastating economic toll. Annual GDP growth, as reported in official statistics, slowed to three percent—and in reality was probably even lower.
Read more at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xis-law-and-order-strategy
