CHINA HURTLING TOWARDS ‘SELF-RELIANCE’
China’s leadership may actually welcome some of these developments. Yu Jie, a fellow at Chatham House in London, argues that the pandemic has allowed Xi to accelerate down a path where he was already heading — towards national self-reliance.
That policy began well before the pandemic, with the “Made in China 2025” campaign, which promoted domestic technology and production.
But with COVID-19, an emphasis on economic self-sufficiency has become a much broader inward turn — with dangerous implications for China and the world.
China’s extraordinary rise over the past 40 years was triggered by Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of “reform and opening” in the 1980s.
Deng saw that the isolation of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution had led to poverty and backwardness. He was humble enough to realise that China could learn from the outside world.
The current mood in China is very different. Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford, points to a danger that “closed borders will lead to closed minds”. After 40 years of rapid growth, China is self-confident.
The Chinese media portray the west, and the US in particular, as in inexorable decline. The Chinese government believes that the country is well ahead in some key technologies of the future, such as green tech and artificial intelligence.
Beijing may believe that the world now needs China more than China needs the world.
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