The period between the two Olympics has seen a very fundamental shift in China in every sense. In 2008, when China held the Beijing Olympics, it reached the apogee of global respect. It had grown for 25 straight years with double-digit growth. It had majorly contributed to global trade and business. It had expanded diplomatic influence across the world in those 20, 25 years. And the Beijing Olympics were meant to be the crowning glory of that remarkable period of China’s growth.
Subsequently, after a very successful Olympic Games was held by them, in the global financial crisis, while the rest of the world faltered, China was able to keep the global engine ticking away because of the massive infusion of close to $1 trillion dollars in terms of structural adjustment support. As a result, the sense within China was that the 2008 Olympic Games were a coming of age. The global financial crisis only confirmed to them that this was not simply a passing phenomenon and that China’s position was going to go from strength to strength thereafter. It was during this period, therefore, that corresponding changes came in China’s foreign and national security policy, as well as in its general approach to international relations.
If you now cut to 2022 which is the year it is hosting the Winter Olympics, China is going into these Olympics with a greater sense of anxiety and with a sense that things may not be going as they would wish it to, both in terms of the domestic situation, because of the economic problems that are there, and internationally. Despite whatever it may tell itself, that it has been able to stand up to the rest of the world, it actually faces a global environment which is much more complicated, and in which China is not seen across the board as a positive contributor to the global situation.
So although China’s GDP is now almost double what it was in 2008 and its people are more prosperous than they were in 2008, perhaps the perception of China is not as positive as in 2008, both because people have put a question mark on whether China’s economic growth will continue to power global growth, and also whether China’s diplomatic and international behaviour helps in maintaining peace and security, or actually worsens the situation in the region.This does not have a simple answer. There is no doubt that by 2008-2009, alongside the remarkable achievements that China had made, elements of the darker side of the 20 years after the Tiananmen incident were also coming into the open. There was corruption on a vast scale. Within the party, power had fractured. Authority had flowed out from the Politburo and the Central Committee to the provinces. There was no central authoritarian figure to maintain control. Ideology seemed to have disappeared in the new China, where money was the principal determinant of power and, also, of governance.
Consequently, the party faced a dire challenge in that it was seeing the gap between the party and the people was widening. There was a real danger that the party might lose relevance in terms of ideology, in terms of its contact with the people. So there was a challenge. There is no doubt that in 2012, whichever leader was appointed as the General Secretary, the party would have had to deal with this. So to some extent, the answer to your question is yes, there is a correlation between the situation as it developed in China in the decade prior to 2012, and the manner in which the Chinese leadership acted post-2012.
But it is also true that individuals matter. President Xi Jinping has utilised this opportunity to consolidate his own personal authority. One may debate as to whether these twin problems of dealing with corruption and reconstructing the party had the unintended effect of strengthening President Xi, or whether President Xi’s personal ambitions were already there and he merely utilised these two problems to build upon that. This is an issue that can be debated ad nauseam.
The fact of the matter is that from 2012 to 2022, Xi Jinping has consolidated power like no leader since Mao Zedong. Today he is, as one article said, the chairman of everything. Therefore, while the circumstances in 2012 warranted some tough measures in order to make the party relevant to the people again, and to wipe out some of the evils of development, particularly corruption, which were affecting the party, there is no doubt that there has also been an enormous strengthening of the personal authority of the leader. We are in a situation where a central authoritarian figure is back at the centre of everything in China, not just its politics, but its society, military, international relations, and so on. It remains to be seen what the impact of this will be going forward.
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