China chases ‘rejuvenation’ with control of tycoons, society – KIRO 7 News Seattle

BEIJING – (AP) – An avalanche of change launched by China’s ruling Communist Party has rocked everyone from tech billionaires to school children. Behind it: President Xi Jinping’s vision of reviving revolutionary ideals to make a more powerful, prosperous country with more economic equality and stricter party control over society and entrepreneurs.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has urged the party to return to its “original mission” as China’s economic, social and cultural leader and to carry out the “rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation.”

Since then, the party has spent the decade silencing dissenting opinions and tightening political scrutiny. Now, after 40 years of growth that turned China into the world’s factory but left a rift between a rich elite and the poor majority, the party promises a more even distribution of wealth and is pushing private companies for social welfare and Beijing’s ambitions pay to become a global technology competitor.

To support their plans, Xi’s government is trying to create what it believes is a healthier society by reducing children’s access to online games and banning television “pigmen” who are not sufficiently masculine.

Chinese leaders want to “direct the constructive energies of all people in a party-selected laser-focused direction,” Andrew Nathan, a Chinese policy expert at Columbia University, said in an email.

Beijing has launched antimonopoly and data security measures to tighten its control over internet giants, including the Alibaba Group e-commerce platform and game and social media operator Tencent Holdings Ltd., which looked too big and potentially independent.

In response, its billionaire founders have sought to show loyalty by pledging to share their wealth under Xi’s vaguely defined “Shared Prosperity” initiative to narrow the income gap in a country with more billionaires than the United States.

Xi has yet to provide details, but in a society where every political term is scrutinized for meaning, the name revives a propaganda slogan from the 1950s under Mao Zedong, the founder of the communist government.

Xi is reviving the “utopian ideal” of early communist leaders, said Willy Lam of Hong Kong University of China. “But of course, huge question marks have surfaced because that will hurt the most creative and lucrative parts of the economy.”

Alibaba, Tencent and others have pledged tens of billions of dollars for job creation and social welfare initiatives. They say they will invest in developing processor chips and other technologies that Beijing identified as priorities.

The anti-monopoly enforcement and crackdown by the party against corporations’ handling of information about customers are similar to Western regulation. But the abrupt, persistent manner in which changes have been pushed has warned that Beijing is threatening innovation and economic growth, which is already declining. Nervous foreign investors have cut Tencent’s market value by more than $ 300 billion and other companies by billions more.

“I expect a very difficult relationship will likely develop between the political and business elites in the next year or two,” said Michael Pettis, finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Business, in a report .

Chinese officials say the public, consumers and entrepreneurs will benefit from higher incomes and more regulatory oversight over corporate giants. Parents are welcoming curbs announced last month that limit children under the age of 18 to three hours of online play per week and only on weekends and Friday nights.

“I think that’s a good rule,” said Li Zhanguo, father of an 8-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl in downtown Zhengzhou. “Games still have some addictive mechanisms. We cannot rely on the children’s self-control. “

The raids intensify the party’s efforts to control a rapidly developing society of 1.4 billion people.

About one million members of predominantly Muslim ethnic groups were locked in prison camps in the northwest. Officials deny allegations of abuses, including forced abortions, saying the camps are used for vocational training and the fight against extremism.

A surveillance initiative called Social Credit aims to prosecute every person and company in China and punish violations ranging from dealing with business partners who violate environmental regulations to littering.

“Our responsibility is to unite and lead the entire party and people of all ethnic groups, take the baton of history and work hard to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Xi said as he and the six other members of the new In November 2012, the party’s Standing Committee appeared publicly for the first time.

The party’s central committee shifted the economic focus “from efficiency to fairness” at the end of 2020, wrote a researcher at a Beijing think tank in Caixin, China’s best-known business magazine, in August.

The party moved from “early prosperity for some to” common prosperity “and” from capital to work, “wrote Luo Zhiheng of the Yuekai Securities Research Institute. He said the executives emphasize science, technology and manufacturing over finance and real estate.

Prominent economists have tried to reassure entrepreneurs.

“It is impossible to achieve common prosperity by ‘robbing the rich and helping the poor,'” Shanghai Fudan University Business School dean Zhang Jun told The Paper News Agency on August 4.

The introduction of market-oriented economic reform in 1979 under then-leader Deng Xiaoping led to predictions abroad that China would develop into a more open, possibly even more democratic society.

The Communist Party allowed more freedom of movement and promoted Internet use for business and education. But the leaders oppose changes to a one-party dictatorship that has copied its political structure from the Soviet Union, and are closely watching the entrepreneurs. Beijing controls all media and tries to limit what China’s public sees online.

As the economic boom of the past decade subsided, “Xi sees himself as the only person able to regain momentum,” said June Teufel Dreyer, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Miami.

Party members fearing reforms could weaken political control appear to have decided that China’s rise is permanent and liberalization is no longer necessary, said Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

That means that “anti-totalitarian elements of the reform agenda could be reversed,” Friedman said in an email. “This is what Xi does, which manifests itself in his attack on the supposedly gay and girl culture as a supposed threat to so-called male militarism.”

An August 29 comment by obscure writer Li Guangman described “common prosperity” as “a profound revolution.” Li wrote on WeChat news service that the financial markets “would no longer be a haven for capitalists to get rich overnight,” and said the party’s next targets may be high housing and health costs.

The comment was posted on prominent state media websites, including the government newspaper People’s Daily. This led to the question of whether Beijing could lapse into an ideological campaign echoing the violent Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 that killed around 5 million people.

Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, a People’s Daily newspaper known for its nationalist tone, responded by criticizing Li’s comment. Hu warned against a return to radicalism in a blog post.

“The Cultural Revolution was a time of chaos that Mao deliberately unleashed because he was comfortable in the chaos,” said Nathan.

“It’s almost the exact opposite,” he said. “It is an effort to create a tightly structured order.”

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The AP researcher Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to this report.

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