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What to Expect From China in 2023
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What to Expect From China in 2023
2022 was a momentous year for China. President Xi Jinping won an unprecedented third term—but that was entirely as expected. The real surprise came in November, when mass protests over Beijing’s strict zero-COVID-19 policies erupted across the country, the most significant demonstrations in China since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Beijing reacted first by cracking down on protests, and then by dropping most of its lockdown measures, opening up the risk of rapid COVID-19 spread.To get more China economy news, you can visit shine news official website.
Beyond the pandemic and protests, there is much to look out for in China next year. The world’s second biggest economy has reduced its pace of growth, raising questions about the competence of China’s leadership. Will Xi change course? And given concerns about China’s designs on Taiwan, how will Beijing’s foreign policy adapt next year?
I spoke with three top China experts on FP Live, the magazine’s forum for live journalism. Susan Shirk served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 1997 to 2000 and is the author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise; Zongyuan Zoe Liu is a fellow for international political economy at the Council on Foreign Relations; and James Palmer writes Foreign Policy’s weekly China Brief. Subscribers can watch the full 45-minute video interview in the box above. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.
James Palmer: It’s very bad at this point. Most people stockpiled home tests in anticipation of this moment and have been able to confirm that they have COVID. There’s this real disjunction between the official numbers—which claim that cases have been going down since the zero-COVID policy ended—and the reporting of extremely rapid spread. The caseload would be doubling every day if these numbers were anywhere near accurate.JP: No. The official numbers are not trustworthy. Beijing has consistently underreported deaths since the start of the pandemic. It has particularly underreported them this year. In the whole of China this year, during all of the outbreaks that necessitated shutting down Shanghai, and huge parts of the economy, Beijing officially noted less than ten deaths. There’s a huge gap there.
Susan Shirk: I’m watching to see if it’s defensive and ideological or practical and effective, because the problem with Xi Jinping’s rule has been that it’s been the former, not the latter—and that’s a big difference from previous Chinese leaders. In this case, what we should look and see is how are they vaccinating the older population. Are they going to be willing to accept the offers of donations of Western vaccines? The U.S. government has offered very quietly; they haven’t publicized this because they want to make it possible for Xi to accept it. They don’t want to humiliate him. But many middle-class Chinese are taking trips to Macao so that they can get a Western vaccine.
Xi’s nationalism and xenophobia is harming the welfare of the Chinese people. It’s really a tragedy that compares to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong had what Deng Xiaoping called overconcentration of authority, which led to tragedies for the Chinese people.