After German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” in a September 15 interview, Beijin called in the German ambassador and emphatically and publicly complained. This tantrum was no mere semantic complaint, but a paradoxical revelation of both China’s fragility and its global authoritarian aspirations.
One might imagine that the Chinese Communist Party would be less concerned about a foreigner’s description of its leader and more concerned with the many challenges facing China: a slowing economy, unsustainable debt, a housing glut, endemic corruption, a shrinking and unbalanced population, massive youth unemployment and lethal levels of pollution. One would be wrong. Those developments do not threaten the CCP’s legitimacy. Words do. Beijing reacted so harshly to Baerbock’s speech because, to the CCP, contradicting the party line anywhere challenges the legitimacy of its rule.
China is hardly unique among dictatorships in its hypersensitivity to perceived criticism. But it differs in terms of scale, economic power and ambition. It wants to control speech everywhere. No doubt Vladimir Putin would operate in the same way if he could, but Russia lacks China’s market power and budget; Kim Jong-Un and the Iranian mullahs clearly bristle at any criticism from abroad, but can’t do much about it. China differs because it can and does.
The lengths to which Beijing will go to repress foreign speech include trade boycotts, punitive tariffs, fines, raids and investigations of foreign company offices in China, cancellation of visas, lawsuits, cyber-attacks, online harassment, exit bans, arrests, detention and long prison terms. The government wields these weapons because they work or have worked in many instances.
China also stands apart in the scope of the threats it imagines. Don’t search for a precise definition of what actually offends China — the regime leaves that purposely vague. However, in practice, the definition is elastic. Any criticism constitutes a threat. In July, the CCP banned any information in a business foreign IPO prospectus that could “discredit” China. That same month, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, Beijing’s puppet leader, vowed to hunt eight Hong Kong citizens for protesting the end of freedom of speech. In August, Chinese authorities instructed economists in China, whether citizens or foreigners, not to discuss youth unemployment, deflation or other signs of economic weakness. And, of course, the German foreign minister’s accurate characterization of Xi Jinping elicited official condemnation and name calling.
For the CCP, its institutionalized and prickly paranoia generates three significant harms to regime effectiveness: reality distortion, resource depletion, and negative reaction. Reality distortion skews decision-making. The CCP cannot solve problems that it denies exist. One might argue that Xi is well aware of the problems he faces, but this is unlikely. No one inside China risks telling the emperor that he is naked for fear of giving offense and suffering dire consequences. Furthermore, foreigners who ask the wrong questions, or simply do normal financial due diligence, are branded as spies.
The second harm is resource depletion. Even with China’s means, tracking and reacting to every perceived insult all the time and everywhere require resources that would be better spent on more productive pursuits, such as the aforementioned economic problems. Moreover, without a prioritization of threat, Chinese authorities condemn themselves to a game of perpetual insult “whack-a-mole.”
Finally, the party’s policy of aggressively responding to what the democratic world considers normal economic, social and political discourse provokes reactions that unify antagonists and start the cycle anew. The CCP’s paranoid lashing out may seem appropriate and effective inside China, but outside it is now proving counterproductive.
Consequently, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce called China “uninvestable”; Southeast Asian countries increasingly look to America as a security guarantor; South Korea and Japan strengthen mutual ties; Germany and the U.K. become increasingly wary of Beijing; and companies all over the world start exploring alternatives to China as a supplier and market.
This is not to argue that China has never gained from its aggressive fragility — it has successfully bullied people, companies and foreign governments for years. But the trend is now going the other way, which will only reinforce China’s paranoia and insecurity, and making the country more dangerous as it takes greater risks to prevent additional perceived losses.
Fear of a more risk-tolerant China might tempt some in the West to seek to propitiate Beijing by tempering their criticisms. That is a moral hazard that rewards and encourages China’s bullying. The best course is for the democratic world to continue to speak the truth and force China to recognize that its dictatorship stops at its borders.
Glenn Chafetz has more than 30 years of experience in government, academia, and the private sector, working at the nexus of foreign policy, trade, and technology. He currently directs 2430 Group, a non-profit, non-partisan research institution that educates and advises on state-sponsored espionage against the American private sector.