10 Aspects of Chinese Governance Wenatchee Might Appreciate

In a 2023 address to the Chinese masses, President Xi Jinping exuded what you might call tough love.

Rather than complain about a gloomy job market, young people in mainland China should "eat bitterness," Xi said. Translation: there are headwinds on the path to common prosperity. The social contract doesn't rule out periodic austerity and sacrifice.

Right or wrong, this was the position staked out by China's paramount leader.

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You could hear echoes of the MAGA movement in Xi's bootstrap rhetoric; Elon Musk himself has warned that cuts to federal spending will probably hurt.

With the U.S. and China embroiled in yet another verbal tit-for-tat, we got to thinking about aspects of Chinese governance that might appeal, believe it or not, to MAGA devotees here in the Wenatchee Valley.

Decollectivization 

Many of us associate China with bureaucracy - lumbering, top-down, communist bureaucracy. This isn't some wild misperception spun out of whole cloth, but the reality is more nuanced.

The process of capitalist restoration began in 1978. From then onward, writes the libertarian Cato Institute, China renounced wholesale central planning in favor of a mixed market economy.

Today, most of the country's GDP is generated in the private sector, and the vast majority of urban Chinese are employed by nonstate actors. Mao would be ticked off.

Diplomacy 

Remember the White House's televised tussle with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine? Vice President J.D. Vance spoke for millions when he demanded moderation and diplomacy, instead of the usual peacocking and warmaking. This demand would seem to have particular resonance in Wenatchee, where there are a lot of entanglement-weary America Firsters.

Unlike Japan, its neighbor to the east, China isn't constitutionally pacifist, but non-interference is a "core principle" of the Chinese worldview. China's diplomatic pursuits, like the Belt and Road Initiative, may or may not be shrouded in ulterior motive; that's a common contention of the U.S. government and its think tank proxies.

Either way, the PRC has banked significant deposits of goodwill and is popular among the middle-income countries that constitute the Global South. According to the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Chinese-led initiatives such as One Belt One Road (OBOR) and institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are key parts of China’s development-focused economic diplomacy.

 

Doubling down on its core peaceful development foreign policy framework, China has increasingly emphasized how the benefits of a Chinese approach to economic development, especially one focused on funding and building transportation and energy infrastructure, can extend to a broad swath of countries and regions well beyond China’s own borders.

Emphasis on home ownership 

The conservative-leaning Telegraph accuses China of deceptively inflating the number of homeowners in the country. Even allowing for that premise, roughly seven in 10 Chinese own their homes. By most estimates, the figure is closer to 90 or 93 percent.

The veneration of property is a given in Wenatchee and America generally; America was literally founded on Madisonian principles. It's a much newer phenomenon in China, says Reuters:

The property market in the People’s Republic has lurched from one extreme to the other. It was officially created in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, when the state stopped providing free housing for most Chinese.

What followed was a period of booming private home sales and rapid urbanisation. Between 1998 and 2023, over 550 million Chinese, equivalent to two-thirds of Europe’s total population, crossed the rural-urban divide to live in cities. China now has one of the world’s highest home ownership rates.

Immigration control 

A fundamental precept of Chinese governance is strict self-policing. If this sounds familiar, it's because Trump was twice elected on a pledge to seal the Southern border and reverse years of "uncontrolled mass migration."

In 2021, Xi, hardly an immigration dove to begin with, ramped up deterrence of unauthorized border crossings. What about foreign nationals who follow the letter of the law? That won't necessarily help their case for citizenship.

According to World Population Review, China's immigration policies are among the most stringent in the world. WPR says this:

The Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China enables foreign-born individuals to become naturalized citizens if they have relatives who are Chinese citizens, if they live permanently in China, or if they have some other 'legitimate reason' to become a Chinese citizen.

 

The CIA describes China’s naturalization process as 'theoretically possible,' but adds 'in practical terms it is extremely difficult.' Long-term residency is a prerequisite for citizenship but the required number of years is not specified by law.

Inflation hawkery

We can quibble with China's methods. We can point to various cracks in the CCP's braggadocious armor (weak demand, sluggish growth). It doesn't change the fact that China has worked hard to minimize the aftershocks of COVID-19 and keep consumer prices low.

As International Banker wrote a few years back,

The government remains steadfast in its commitment to do everything it can to shield the country from the threats posed by the virus, even if that means sacrificing economic growth. It continues to stress the importance of maintaining economic stability rather than growth.

 

NBS chief statistician Dong Lijuan stated that authorities 'took many steps to ensure the supply of important consumer goods and stabilize their prices' last month. And a recent G-20 (Group of Twenty) meeting of central-bank governors saw People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang discuss how consumer prices in China have remained 'basically stable.'

Stability, relief for everyday consumers: these were two of Trump's bedrock campaign promises.

That's all for now - stay tuned for part two!