I can’t recommend this discussion highly enough.
«China's Leadership Is Prisoner of Its Own Narrative»
Joerg Wuttke, President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, is concerned about the state of the world’s second largest economy. The Zero Covid policy has led the country into a dead end.
https://themarket.ch/interview/chinas-leadership-is-prisoner-of-its-own-narrative-ld.6545
The main points:
1
For the past two years, the party leadership and government have spun the narrative that China has handled the pandemic much better than the decadent West. Now this narrative is blowing up in their faces.
2
The president has maneuvered himself into two dead ends at once: He can’t change his COVID policy, and he can’t change anything about his friendship with Wladimir Putin.
3
The political leadership can’t admit, so close to the Party Congress, that there is another way in dealing with COVID.
4
China is losing its credibility as the best sourcing location in the world.
5
For now, China is not getting out of the corner the president has maneuvered the country into. They are prisoners of their own narrative.
6
China was the first to get into the pandemic, and it’s the last to get out... in the meantime, they’ve been telling the whole world that they’re the best.
Disclosure: my 20 years (1999-2019) living in Beijing overlapped with Mr Wuttke’s 30 years; our conceptual maps are not without overlaps as well. But he should not be assumed to share all the perspectives of Beijing Baselines.
Thanks for your comments.
Note that the points listed were cherry-picked by me, not by Mr Wuttke. You need to go to the source, cited somewhere in my post, to get the whole picture.
Imperialism is an easy word to pronounce but hard to substantiate. Wuttke’s analysis is quite uncharacteristically blunt for a director of BASF in China (as well as of the EU chamber of commerce).
On the other hand, it will not be too hard to show that the points I cited are no different to points made by very senior people in the PRC government. You might find them interesting.