The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers Read Free

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    In September that year, with western governments and companies still on the back foot, China readied lines of credit of up to $60–70 billion for resource and infrastructure deals in Africa–in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. In Guinea, just days after the army had shot citizens and raped women on the streets of the capital, the military-backed government, a pariah on the continent and around the world, announced it was in talks with China on a billion-dollar resources and infrastructure deal.
    Beijing’s ambition and clout was being lit up by flashing lights in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years previously. The Chinese central bank called for an alternative to the US dollar as a global reserve currency in early 2009, and reiterated its policy as the year went on. France obediently re-committed to Chinese sovereignty over Tibet to placate Beijing’s anger over the issue, after Beijing had cancelled an EU summit in protest at Paris’s welcome for the Dalai Lama. Barack Obama spurned meeting the Tibetan spiritual leader in late 2009, to sweeten the atmosphere for his first visit to Beijing in November that year, although he did agree to meet him in early 2010. On its navy’s sixtieth anniversary, China invited the world to view its new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines off the port of Qingdao.
    The giant Chinese market, dismissed as an enduring western dream a few years previously, had become more important than ever. Just ahead of the Shanghai auto show in April 2009, monthly passenger car sales in China were the highest of any market in the world, surpassing the US. A month later, Wang Qishan and a team of Chinese ministers met Catherine Ashton, the then EU Trade Commissioner, and about fifteen of Europe’s most senior business executives in Brussels to hear their complaints about Chinese market access. Sure, Wang conceded after listening to their problems over a working lunch, there are ‘irregularities’ in the market. ‘I know you have complaints,’ he replied, as confidently as ever. ‘But the charm of the Chinese market is irresistible.’ In other words, according to executives in the meeting left astonished by the vice-premier, whatever your complaints, the market is so big, you are going to come anyway. Even worse, many of the executives realized that Wang was right.
    China’s aggressive new confidence was on display on a wide screen by the end of 2009, at the Copenhagen climate change conference. In the final fractious day of negotiations, the Chinese snubbed a heads-of-state session, sending along a relatively junior official to talk with President Obama and other world leaders. At another session on the same day, this one attended by Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, a member of the Chinese delegation loudly lectured Obama, waving his finger at the US President. Needless to say, if a relatively junior western government official had been dispatched to meet a Chinese leader and, even worse, delivered him a lecture, the affront would have been serious enough to have provoked violent anti-foreign street demonstrations at home in Beijing. China was nonplussed by criticism afterwards. ‘What the developed countries need to learn from this whole process is to make up their minds whether they want to pursue confrontation or co-operation with China,’ said a senior official.
    The growth and transformation of Asian countries in the wake of de-colonization after World War II, countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea, were important for the citizens of those countries and uplifting for the region. Japan’s rise as an economic giant shook up and challenged the west. The economic transformation of China, by contrast, a country with one-fifth of the world’s population, is a global event without parallel. The rise of China is a genuine mega-trend, a phenomenon with the ability to remake the world economy, sector by sector. That it is presided over by a communist party