Some Thursday reading

Interesting article by US academic Ryan Fedasiuk on China’s modern-day success and hubris…

The questions I fielded from diplomats, scholars, journalists, and cab drivers — whether there are any China experts left in the U.S. government; whether tariffs are designed to deliberately collapse China’s economy; or whether the United States may be deliberately goading China into launching a disastrous war over Taiwan — revealed how distorted the picture of the United States has become. The Party’s success in sealing out Western influence has also sealed in ignorance about the American policy process and political economy.

…After decades spent demanding respect abroad, the irony is that China has engineered an environment so controlled and self-referential that it no longer understands the world it seeks to lead — or the superpower it aims to surpass.

A (probably paywalled) NYT column raises the question of who takes over after Xi Jinping goes…

“Xi almost surely realizes the importance of succession, but he also realizes that it’s incredibly difficult to signal a successor without undermining his own power” said Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Policy Center for China Analysis. “The immediate political and economic crises that he faces could end up continually outweighing the priority of getting around to executing a succession plan.”

Speculation about Mr. Xi’s future is highly sensitive and censored in China, and only a handful of officials may be privy to his thinking about the issue. 

…Even officials poised to be elevated to central leadership at the next Communist Party congress, in 2027, are probably too advanced in age to succeed Mr. Xi, said Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California San Diego who studies elite politics in China.

With Mr. Xi likely to serve another term or even longer, his successor could prove to be an official born in the 1970s, likely now working in a provincial administration or an agency of the central government. The party has been promoting some younger officials who fit that profile, said Wang Hsin-hsien, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan who studies the Communist Party.  

But…“Xi is highly distrustful of others, especially those officials who have only an indirect relationship with him,” Professor Wang said. “As he grows older and has fewer connections to the generation of his possible successors, this factor will become more important.”

In the years ahead, the upper ranks of the party may grow more fluid as Mr. Xi tests and discards potential recruits for leadership, experts said. Behind the scenes, officials within his circle may jockey more intensely for influence and political survival.

“This will make the succession process more fragmented, because he can’t possibly just have one designated successor,” Professor Shih said. “It has to be a collective to choose from, and that probably also means they will have low-grade power struggles with each other.”

History Workshop (a ‘digital magazine of radical history’) on the UK’s stash of old Hong Kong government files, most of which are still not open to the public…

Control over history has been exercised to an even greater degree in the Hong Kong case than [other colonies]. As in other territories, colonial officials maintained the administration based partly on the extensive information they held and, towards the end of the administration, chose which documents to remove to the UK. But unlike other territories, the British Government continues to deny access to the Hong Kong files. Even after the 1997 handover and recent pressures on Hong Kong’s history, the records that were relocated to the relative safety of the UK remain closed. By controlling access, the British Government maintains a handle on the narrative of its colonial administration and on the broader history of Hong Kong. In withholding these files, the British Government denies Hong Kong people access to their own cultural, social, economic, political and personal past, controlling history as it controlled the colony.

The UK government releases papers after 20 years, but some are kept under wraps for longer for national security or other reasons. Sensitive materials (in Hong Kong’s case, perhaps to do with the handover) don’t account for more than a tiny percentage of the content and are redacted. One possible reason the Hong Kong files are still not released is simply that there are huge amounts of them, and they are mostly on microfiche, which is a pain to digitize – not because of a desire to ‘control history’.