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The calculations behind scrapping of Xi’s term limit

Saturday March 24 2018
china

Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel at the opening of China’s new military base in Djibouti in August 2017. The base is a mere 16km from Camp Lemonnier, the only permanent US military base in Africa. PHOTO | AFP

By WACHIRA MAINA

In 1982, with 1.5 million dead, the economy stalled and the country on the edge of chaos and collapse from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, China amended its Constitution to scrap the life presidency that had made Mao’s paranoid policies possible.

From then on, the president and his deputy would serve no more than two consecutive five-year terms. 

On the March 4,2018, barely 40 years later, the 2,970-strong National People’s Congress, the Chinese parliament, restored unlimited tenure, giving President Xi Jinping a free pass to run again when his second term expires in 2023.

It seems foolish, even dangerous. China has grown rich at a faster rate than any other country in world, and rich countries invariably become freer, not less so. Why, then, has the Chinese Communist Party, bucked the historical trend and returned to a practice they blame for the devastation of the Cultural Revolution?

The easy answer lies in Xi Jinping’s populism. The more complicated reason is the fact that the Communist Party cannot see how, in the medium term, Mr Xi’s audacious plan for China, the One Belt One Road initiative, can be implemented without him to lead it. That grand plan is backed by an action plan and a military strategy that Mr Xi launched in 2015.

The Belt strategy will revamp growth and secure China’s prosperity into the foreseeable future. His military strategy will strengthen China as a major land power while building it up as a naval power that could one day rival the US, the world’s premier naval power.

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Though the vision is still mostly fuzzy, Mr Xi has made some firm commitments and milestones clear enough to silence sceptics.

At the 18th Congress of the Communist Party in 2012, he promised that by 2021, the first centenary of the Communist Party, China would have doubled its 2010 per capita GDP and that by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, China would be “a strong, democratic, civilised, harmonious and modern socialist country.”

The first centenary goal, the doubling of China’s GDP by 2021, depends on the success of the One Belt and One Road (OBOR) initiative.

Under the OBOR action-plan, China is investing nearly $900 billion in what it thinks of as a two-trunk silk-road. One trunk is an overland network of rail, road and power-grids that links China’s industrial heartland to the vast oil, natural gas and mineral resources of the Central Asia and on to the markets of East and Western Europe.

The second trunk is a maritime silk road with two branches — an Indian Ocean link to sub-Sahara Africa and a Red Sea link to North Africa and Europe, where the “Maritime Road” and “Overland Belt” converge.

So far, 65 countries with a combined GDP of more than $20 trillion have bought into Mr Xi’s OBOR vision.

Land to naval power

To put this in perspective, consider the last comparable programme of foreign investment — the 1948 Marshall Plan — a US-funded blueprint to rebuild post-war Europe and check the spread of communism. That cost $13.3 billion then, about $140 billion today, or a mere 15.6 per cent of what China is investing in the OBOR plan.

The brilliance of OBOR lies in how smartly it blends China’s long-term economic growth and its military strategy. In strategic terms, China is a land power aspiring to be a naval power. The OBOR initiative will pay for that military strategy.

For this to work, China needs to neutralise its land threats and forestall, at least for now, war with the US, the world largest and most aggressive naval power. China’s greatest threats on land are India and Russia.

Russia, the bigger threat, has a 3,645km border with China, much of which runs across the Eurasian steppes. These plains make artillery and military logistics relatively easy, ideal conditions for a conventional land war.

China knows this and has neutralised Russia with a $400 billion, 30-year natural gas supply deal, which the two countries signed in 2014. The deal is too large and too important for Russia to undermine through armed provocation.

Relations with India are friskier. Moreover, China’s annexation of Tibet in the 1950s created an extensive 3,380km border with its southern neighbour.

Fortunately, from a land war perspective, the border, haphazardly slashed and diced by the Himalaya ranges, is not hospitable to military manoeuvres.

But Mr Xi is not relying on hostile geography to keep India at bay. Instead, he will use the overland belt of OBOR to cultivate friends and allies along the spine of Eurasia. That will serve two strategic goals.

One, when complete, it will reduce China’s dependency on Indian Ocean’s maritime routes to Europe and the Mediterranean. It will also free China from the menace of the US Navy in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean if hostilities should ever erupt.

Two, “Belt infrastructure” will increase China’s force mobility in the region, securing its eastern and southern provinces from any menace from India. Most important, over time, Central Asian republics will become more economically dependent on China. That would make it harder for them to take India’s side in any quarrel with China. Mr Xi, described by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as “impressive,” knows that nations that trade rarely fight each other.

US presence

China’s Maritime Road Strategy complements the Overland Belt Strategy and is driven by three factors. The first is China’s growing nervousness at the large US presence in the South China Sea.

The second is China’s hunger for the vast resources — especially hydrocarbons — at the bottom of the China Sea.

The third is China’s desire, over the long term, to loosen the US stranglehold on the six choke points — very narrow seaways, that is — on China’s critical sea routes.

These are the Straits of Malacca in the Malay Peninsula; the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf; Bab-el-Mandeb off Djibouti in the Horn of Africa; the entry into the Mediterranean from the Red Sea at the Suez Canal; the entry into the Black Sea at the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus and the exit from the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar.

Let’s begin with China’s growing unease. This is fed by the Obama-era shift in America’s foreign policy — termed the pivot — from a focus on the Middle East to a focus on Southeast Asia. That meant that from then on, the US deployed more naval assets to the region.

China thinks, with good reason, that it is the target of these moves, a fact it has openly stated in its 2015 military strategy. Though, for now, China thinks that a world war is unlikely, it worries that American “pivoting to Asia” comes with new threats from hegemonism, power politics and neo-interventionism. These are obvious references to Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and America’s itch for military adventurism.

To counter the threat, the Chinese military is strengthening its “Near-Seas Strategy,” that is, its military posture in the South China Sea. That means improving its surveillance capability — the rapidly growing space programme — and creating beachheads.

This is why Beijing is building artificial islands in the South China Sea. Beijing’s spats with the US and Japan over the Spratly Islands arise from the same cause.

However, the Spratlys also lie on the sea route through which China imports 80 per cent of its oil and are the gateway into the Straits of Malacca, one of the busiest choke points in global maritime commerce. According to Globalsecurity.org, two-thirds of the world’s shipments of liquefied natural gas pass through the straits and into the South China Sea.

Then there is the second factor: Beijing’s hunger for the seabed wealth in these same waters. China believes, as Robert Kaplan reports, that there may be up to 130 billion barrels of oil and 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the South China Sea.

China knows that, if extracted, these resources are an economic boon and, most important, a strategic advantage. If extracted, these would free it from relying on far-off oil to home-field oil that would significantly reduce its strategic vulnerability to future naval blockades by the USA. Given this, control of the Straits, the South China Sea and the Spratlys is strategically priceless.

This brings in the third factor: China’s desire to loosen USA’s naval grip on Asian maritime trade. This is China’s “Far Seas Strategy,” which reinforces its Near Seas Strategy. The Far Seas Strategy has two aims: One, to reduce Beijing’s vulnerability to an American naval blockade and, two, it is part of China’s Africa Strategy.

The Far Seas Strategy

Consider, first, the question of a possible US blockade of China’s maritime commerce. Even with road and rail networks across Asia to Europe, sea routes will remain vital to China. From the US’s naval deployments, Mr Xi must know that a serious naval conflict with the US is probable, perhaps inevitable.

If a clash at sea occurs, the US’s most portent tactic would be to waylay China’s merchant fleet in the Malacca, Hormuz, Suez, Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, Gibraltar or the Bab-el-Mandeb. In such a blockade, China’s prospects would be grim.

The Far Seas Strategy is meant to correct this. That is why China is frantically making big investments in Indonesia (on Straits of Malacca); in Iran (on the Straits of Hormuz); in Djibouti (on the Bab-el-Mandeb); in Egypt (on the Suez Canal); in Turkey (on the Dardanelles and Bosphorus) and in Morocco (on the Straits of Gibraltar).

The energetic way Beijing has implemented this strategy is astounding. In 2015, it drafted Morocco into the One Belt One Road strategy as the first African country. Soon after, the Chinese Group Haite, in partnership with Morocco, committed $10 billion to a new industrial and technology hub in Tangier on the western entrance into the Straits of Gibraltar.

By 2016, China’s investments in Turkey stood at $2.2 billion. Last year, Beijing announced that it would double investments in Turkey by 2019. In 2015, Turkey allowed Cosco Pacific, a Chinese container terminal outfit, to pay $940 million for a 65 per cent stake in Turkey’s third largest port, Kumport, which — surprise, surprise! — lies right on the Bosphorus.

In Egypt, China is now the largest investor in the development of the Suez Canal Corridor, to which it has earmarked $3 billion of the $10 billion it committed to Egypt in 2016. Mr Xi has just become President Fattah al-Sisi’s most important partner in the 0.2km wide Suez waterway.

As the West’s investments in Iran dropped after years of sanctions, China’s went up with billions invested in infrastructure, including a new high-speed railway.

Last year, CITIC Group (formerly China International Trust Investment Corporation) gave Iran a $10 billion line of credit, later topped up with another $15 billion line from China Development Bank. Is it an accident that Iran is so crucial to the control of the 33km wide Straits of Hormuz?

In Southeast Asia, the four countries on the Straits of Malacca — Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand — are now among the largest recipients of Chinese investments from OBOR Strategy.

But perhaps the loudest statement of intent was Beijing’s opening of its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017. Pointedly, the 90-acre base lies on the Bab-el-Mandeb, the narrow straits into the Red Sea. Suggestively — some might say provocatively — the base is a mere 16km from Camp Lemonnier, the only permanent US military base in Africa.

Africa Strategy

As Beijing’s base causes frissons in the Pentagon, China’s future plans seem obvious. It is laying the groundwork for future naval competition with America.

China’s choke points logic is unassailable: Its maritime security lies in binding its commercial interests with those of the states that lie on the choke points. The US would not hurt China’s interests without hurting the interests of those countries, some of which are America’s allies too.

That brings us to the second element in the Far-Seas Strategy, that is, that strategy’s link to China’s Africa Strategy.

From 2006, when 35 African heads of state and government went to China for the biggest meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC), Beijing’s investments in Africa have grown exponentially. By 2009, it was Africa’s largest trading partner.

From 2005 to 2016, it had invested $66.4 billion in 293 projects in Africa, according to the 2016 Ernst & Young Africa Attractiveness Report

Huge investments in infrastructure grew apace: $1.2 billion went into the Tanzania Gas Field Development Project in 2015; $874 million went into the 186km Abuja-Kaduna railway launched in 2016; $3.4 billion went into the 750km Ethiopia-Djibouti railway launched in 2016; $3.8 billion went into the 609km standard gauge railway in Kenya launched in 2017.

The pace of investment has picked up since December 2015 when President Xi pledged a further $60 billion at the Johannesburg Summit of FOCAC for a three-year infrastructure development programme across Africa.

Going forward, a 2017 report by McKinsey, Dance of the Lions and Dragons: How are Africa and China Engaging, and How Will the Partnership Evolve? hypothesises two growth scenarios for Sino-Africa relations: Business as usual and accelerated growth.

Under the first, the revenues of Chinese firms in Africa would grow from the current $180 billion to $250 billion by 2025. On the aggressive scenario, they could top $440 billion. Investments on this scale and China’s growing need for Africa’s natural resources need a secure maritime route, hence the One Maritime Road plan.

And in this roundabout way, we get back to Mr Xi’s term limits. To implement these plans, he needs political support and a united communist party. His frequent “re-unification” and “rejuvenation” messages are tropes to tap into Han nationalism, as much a dog-whistle in the night as Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”

Oblique warning

What these emotive terms mean, the military strategy explains, is that China will deal firmly with separatist forces: An oblique warning that China will brook no secessionists in Taiwan, Tibet and East Turkistan, the restive Central Asia home of the Turkic Uyghur Muslims that Beijing has been trying to Sinicise for years.

Mr Xi and many Chinese refuse to see Taiwan as anything but a province of China. He would also love it if Tibetans saw their union with China as irreversible.

Peace in East Turkistan would smooth China’s relations with the Turkic and Islamic populations of Central Asia. Xi’s message sells well to Han nationalists and has given him a heady dose of legitimacy.

Having mobilised the country, Xi needs a united party. The Communist Party agrees. The OBOR initiative was conceived and then aggressively marketed by Xi, at home and abroad. Mr Xi was aggressive, travelling to more than 50 countries and putting his reputation on the line.

China’s prestige as a world power is now also at stake. Mr Xi seems to have the personal gumption and diplomatic heft to see OBOR through. And if it succeeds, he will give China the galloping growth rates it had a decade and a half ago. He will also make China a great power, not merely a global one.

By removing term limits on Xi, the Communist Party has eliminated the political jostling that would have inevitably stalked Mr Xi’s second term. The party has gambled that, given time and their undivided support, Mr Xi has what it takes to implement this astonishing and heady strategy.

Wachira Maina is a constitutional lawyer.

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