Xi Jinping can't survive Trump's tariff pain

Yahoo

05-05-2025

'Chinese society has an incredibly high capacity for pain,' Yasheng Huang of the MIT Sloan School of Management told the Wall Street Journal last month. And because China's people can supposedly 'eat bitterness', the phrase commonly used to describe the country's capacity to endure hardship, we are told that Chinese leaders have the luxury of looking past temporary adversity to think long term.
Yes, both those notions were once true and both are accepted wisdom. But, no, they are no longer correct. In fact, China's society today is among the least resilient anywhere.
Even before Donald Trump took the oath of office in January, the Chinese people were showing signs of disillusionment, despair, and anger. Now, with their economy probably contracting and their country caught up in a tense trade war, Chinese society is beginning to come under new stress.
The regime certainly appears to be on edge, looking desperately to the past for ways to keep the population on side. On April 9, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning posted a Korean War-era video of Mao Zedong. 'No matter how long this war is going to last, we'll never yield,' Mao said in the clip from 1953. 'We will fight until we completely triumph.'
Then on April 28, Beijing Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party's Beijing Municipal Committee, published an article titled 'Today, It Is Necessary to Revisit On Protracted War'. On Protracted War is a series of lectures Mao delivered in 1938 calling for the unity of the Chinese people in their struggle to defeat the invaders from Imperial Japan.
China's regime has good reason to be worried about the mood of the Chinese people.
The warning signs were plain to see. Due to the extraordinary Covid lockdowns and the subsequent failure of the economy to recover, people began withdrawing from society in large numbers. For many Chinese, it was the first time they had ever experienced a downturn. The last officially recognised recession had occurred in 1976.
''Lying flat,' 'Buddha whatever,' 'Kong Yijiism,' 'involution' – China today has so many memes for opting out,' wrote the University of Pennsylvania's Victor Mair in his July 2023 Language Log posting titled 'The Growing Supinity of Chinese Youth'. Since then, young Chinese have also been 'retiring' by leaving cities and taking up farming.
Pessimism – even nihilism – accounts for the large number of Chinese people leaving their country for good and for the precipitous drop in birth rates. According to one estimate, China's total fertility rate last year was just 1.03, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. 'In this country, to love your child is to never let him be born in the first place,' read a comment posted on a Chinese site in 2023. Young Chinese, who refuse to have children, are calling themselves 'the last generation'.
Many argue that the Communist Party's sophisticated social controls can keep the populace in line indefinitely, but the price of severe repression is volatility. The Chinese population, who most of the time have accepted repression, have periodically and unexpectedly exploded.
Beginning in October 2022, for instance, large numbers of workers suddenly fled a Chinese manufacturing complex making iPhones in Zhengzhou, in central China. That incident was followed by spontaneous protests across the country. In November, chants of 'Step down, Xi Jinping' were heard on the streets of Shanghai.
Eventually, the demonstrations died down, but the people of the People's Republic have a greater willingness to protest than is sometimes imagined. The Communist Party, as a result, feels insecure. That's especially true now as Trump's tariffs have hit Chinese workers hard. The US, after counting rerouted goods, takes almost 21 per cent of China's exports. Export-oriented factories are reported to be closing and worker protests are said to have become common across the country.
The regime fears mass protests because the Chinese people, even in calm times, have a history of acting in concert. Last June, four female college students in Zhengzhou decided to take an overnight 50-km bike ride to Kaifeng for soup dumplings. The craze caught on, and in November tens of thousands were making the overnight treks. Authorities tried to limit the number of riders, and there were even reports that colleges and universities were restricting students from congregating and participating, but to little avail.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping's grip on the Communist Party may be weakening. Xi's hatchet man in the military, General He Weidong, has not been seen in public since early March, and may have been sacked. Other indications suggest that Xi is no longer in full control of the military, having lost influence to General Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission and China's number one uniformed officer.
There are also signs that Xi is facing stiff opposition in the senior civilian ranks of the party.
China's president must be thinking short-term these days. He has effectively junked the rules guiding succession, and by grabbing power from everyone else he has ended up with near-total responsibility for everything. Because he is being blamed for what has been going wrong for the last several years, Xi, as a practical matter, effectively faces an election every day.
'China's Communist elite presides over a decaying regime,' Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank told me last week. 'Xi Jinping's imposition of a neo-Stalinist programme of ever-tightening repression and reversion to full-state control of the national economy has led to economic stagnation, social malaise, and greater regime fragility.'
For Xi Jinping, there is no long term.
Gordon G Chang is the author of 'Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America' and 'The Coming Collapse of China'. Follow him on X @GordonGChang
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