Khaleej Times
Tom Plate
I have learned my lesson about political predictions and so try to keep my voracious ego in check and not make them any more. Prediction after prediction was drowning me in misery; and – oh! – the reputational hangovers! I have even begun meetings of ‘Predictions Anonymous’ (as with the original AA, we aim for sober level-headedness in all things), and have promised to swear off predicting. Furthermore, in the crusading spirit of the new sobriety convert, I’ll alert you if I catch sight of news-media vehicles edging toward the infamous prediction cliff. We can engineer interventions together.
Right now, in fact, I have two new alerts for you – even though they are quite a respectable pair of commentators. They involve President Xi Jinping, who is being regularly ‘shorted,’ as it were, by the Western media. We are frequently told he is something of an emerging disaster. If he is not quite a modern Mao, neither is he a forward-looking Zhu Rongji, or a careful step-by-step Deng Xiaoping. He is cracking down on enemies, perceived or real; blocking the Internet like a brawling footballer; causing giant waves on the South China Sea, and peering over a personal power cult that reminds one of the bad old days.
Predictor One: In the elite New York Review of Books, long-time China analyst Orville Schell paints a sad picture of China’s diminishing freedoms. In his Worse and Worse- The New Terror in China, the former American journalism school dean concludes: “His authoritarian style at home and belligerent posture abroad are ominous because they make China’s chances of being successful in reforming the economy – on which the entire world now depends – increasingly unlikely.. Such policies . grow out of a deeply paranoid view of the democratic world . and make it extremely difficult for China to effectively cooperate with countries like the US..”
It gets worse.
Strike Two: From The Economist, surely the world’s most referenced English-language political weekly, comes a blunt, depressing, predictive, cover story: “Beware the Cult of X” It asserts: “Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party.. In the past 66 years of Communist rule in China, the most troubled times have usually come about when tensions break out within the elite. Xi’s style of rule is only serving to stoke them.” Do we sense the suggestion of a coup brewing here?
As both of these long-respected observers are too sophisticated to be simplistic, neither is prepared to paint Xi as the Mao of today. Nonetheless, both view China though the personality and politics of one man, just as many of us imagine North Korea (DPRK) as if summed up by the young Kim Jong-un. This is history through the lens of personality. And it is absolutely the necessary crutch of the journalist, sweating out deadlines – barely finishing with one thing and immediately having to go onto the next. This is not the more pastoral remit of the historian, endowed with the leisure of as much time as is needed, whereas the journalist works with relatively little time, precisely in order to be comparatively timely.
But without more time, we won’t know for sure who Xi is and what he will mean for his China. Maybe a kind thought might surface in our rush to judgment: that a man who has made so many enemies because of his anti-corruption campaign might be trying extremely hard and quite sincerely to clean up China. This involves great personal risk (Xi has to travel with a larger security force than the US president), but countless millions of honest, non-wealthy Chinese are cheering him on. For them, Xi is the hope – maybe their only hope. So, along with them, I am hoping for the best. But I am predicting nothing.
As the late Yogi Berra, a notably inarticulate Hall of Fame baseball player celebrated for memorable ‘Yogi-isms,’ once aptly put it: “It’s tough to make predictions especially about the future.” Maybe the best we can do is to hope for the best.
