BEIJING: Exactly one year ago Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech in which he reflected on the exercise of power in the most populated country with the world’s oldest continuous culture on January 13, 2020. The speech is the last one of the 92 articles included in his work The Governance of China III. This third volume assembles President Xi’s speeches and texts delivered between October 18, 2017 and January 13, 2020 preceding the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the ideas in the book are clearly still valid today.
Several insights attract readers’ attention from the start. At the national level, Xi’s goal of realizing rejuvenation of the Chinese nation manifests itself in multiple ways, with the most striking one being the unleashing of the country’s vitality leading to the greatest economic growth in humankind’s history. During 2020, such vitality had not been subdued by the pandemic, but on the contrary, remained strong. Despite the still uncertain global economic outlook, the World Bank projected that China’s GDP growth will accelerate to 7.9 percent in 2021. At the same time, the pandemic also reinforces Xi’s assessment that the current world is facing changes unseen in a century. In contrast with volatile international situations and the alarming domestic division in the United States, the world largest economy, also the representative of Western democracy, China’s incredible feats unfolding before our eyes make people believe that it will not be long before the country can realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Indeed, anyone who dispassionately observes the crisis in the U.S. Capitol, where hordes of vandals stormed the building encouraged by the sitting American president himself, against the backdrop of tens of millions of citizens who do not trust the mechanisms of their own democracy, knows that we are witnessing a major change with remarkable potential echo in international politics. U.S. democracy, seen as a model in the West for two centuries, is cracking dramatically due to internal causes.
In the West, it’s usually the case that politicians trumpet short-term goals to win over voters, while statesmen who think deeply or adopt a long-term approach are hardly recognized and seem to belong to the past.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
