China enters 2016 facing an increasingly complicated domestic political and economic environment and growing challenges to its assertive foreign policy.
Since becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has sought to consolidate his power and rejuvenate the Party through a sweeping campaign against corruption, intensified ideological controls, and a muscular assertion of Chinese nationalism.
His apparent success has fueled a narrative of China’s inexorable rise to great power status as well as descriptions of Xi as a strongman more dominant than any Chinese leader since Chairman Mao.
But recent trends in China, which are likely to continue in 2016, cast doubt on that narrative.
Economic growth—so central to the country’s dynamism and the Communist Party’s legitimacy—has slowed. Despite a blueprint for new reforms laid out at the Party’s Third Plenum in 2014, Xi has moved to centralize authority and strengthen state-owned enterprises at the expense of the more vibrant private sector.
The sense of economic malaise, also reflected in the collapse of a stock market bubble and dangerously high levels of debt, has been exacerbated by Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. While popular among ordinary people, the campaign has spread fear throughout the system, causing many officials to be afraid of making decisions.
In one example, according to a well-informed western scholar, last year the State Council sent investigators to determine why 15 percent of new state-approved projects had not gotten off the ground. The investigators discovered that local officials were simply too scared to move ahead.
Xi’s war on corruption has shattered the mechanisms put in place following the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis to maintain leadership unity. The toppling of such once-powerful figures as Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, senior figures in the People’s Liberation Army, and security chief Zhou Yongkang—the first former member of the Politburo Standing Committee to be purged in years—has changed the rules of the game.
In an atmosphere where, as one analyst noted, “Xi has moved against the structure of the system itself,” and no one feels safe, the Chinese leader has made numerous enemies, who may be quiet now but are in all likelihood biding their time to push back. One source of conflict could come with the Party’s nineteenth Congress, scheduled for 2017, where several new members of the Standing Committee will be appointed, and where Xi may face a difficult challenge in ensuring that his loyalists get the key jobs.
This is the volatile domestic context in which Xi’s foreign policy decisions will be made in the coming year—a climate where internal tensions and the forceful sense of Chinese nationalism he has promoted may well limit his flexibility in the face of a host of China-related tensions in the Asia-Pacific region.
Beijing’s robust assertion in recent years of its claims to large chunks of the South China Sea, which several other nations also claim, as well as the East China Sea, where China and Japan both claim the uninhabited Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, has generated growing friction with many of its neighbors, who have now begun to push back.
“The region is now mobilizing—and arming—itself to deal with the prospect of Chinese attempts to become the overwhelming power,” noted one former State Department official.
The Philippines, for instance, is challenging China’s South China Sea claims before a UN tribunal in The Hague. Vietnam and Japan have started to bolster their own military capabilities. An Australian air force plane recently conducted a reconnaissance flight over the disputed waters, despite strong Chinese objections.
More broadly, many Asian nations are now urging the U.S. to play a bigger role in the region as a counterweight to China.
For its part, the Obama administration, in November, sent a warship through a 12 nautical mile zone around two artificial islands China has built in the South China Sea. In December, a U.S. B-52 overflew the area, and Washington has repeatedly denounced Beijing’s behavior and sought to strengthen security ties with key regional allies.
All of this means the possibility of a confrontation—either deliberate or accidental—is likely to grow in the coming months, even as two key elections, one at the start and one at end of the year, raise the prospect of a further increase in regional tension.
On Jan. 16, voters in Taiwan are expected to elect Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which is sympathetic to the idea of an independent Taiwan, as the island’s new president. Tsai does not accept the so-called “1992 consensus” –a formula in which each side accepts that Taiwan is part of China but retain their own interpretations of what that means –which has underpinned the thaw between Taiwan’s current president, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang, and Beijing. The thaw was underscored by a dramatic summit Ma and Xi Jinping held in Singapore in November, the first such meeting between Taiwan and mainland leaders.
Tsai’s likely election will pose a challenge for Xi, raising questions about whether he will continue Beijing’s relatively conciliatory approach of recent years, or seek to ratchet up the pressure on Taiwan—a move which could well draw in the United States.
And in November, the U.S. will elect a new president. China has not figured prominently in the campaign so far, but when it has come up, all of the candidates in both parties take have taken a more confrontational approach to Beijing than President Obama.
Together, all these factors suggest that both China’s domestic politics and international relations are in for a bumpy ride in 2016.
