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Nationalism key to President Xi’s political capital to enact reforms.

Matt Sheehan 15 (China Correspondent, The WorldPost9/20, “What You Need To Know About China’s Strongman President,” )

This week President Barack Obama will host one of the other serious contenders for most powerful person on Earth: President Xi Jinping of China (pronounced “she jean-ping”). Just three years after taking the reins of power, Xi has already placed his stamp firmly on his country, his region and China’s relationship with the rest of the world. The United States and China have been butting heads for years over everything from cyberattacks to territorial disputes in the South China Sea. With Xi almost guaranteed another seven more years in power, Obama and his successor will both need to wrestle with China-U.S. relations in the age of Xi. Here’s what you need to know about him. Xi has quickly emerged as maybe the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. China’s previous leaders largely shunned the spotlight, portraying themselves as part of a group ruling by consensus. Xi has instead built a huge personal brand by employing strongman tactics at home and abroad. In China, Xi has consolidated enormous personal power through a blistering crackdown on both corrupt officials and civil society activists. The prosecution of powerful officials (many who happen to be Xi’s political rivals) and the detention of civil rights lawyers have shocked China-watchers in their audacity and depth. Some scholars argue that the twin crackdowns reveal Xi’s vision for China’s future: not a liberal, electoral democracy, but an efficient authoritarian state with a strong leader at the helm. Abroad, Xi has asserted China’s contentious territorial claims by building artificial islands in the South China Sea. Over the objection of the United States and its allies, China has managed to build airstrips and outposts in waters also claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam. Xi has also expanded Chinese influence in Southeast and Central Asia by founding new international organizations and pledging huge money for infrastructure investments abroad. Those stances have built popularity and political capitalthat Xi may spend on broad-ranging economic and environmental reforms. In 2013 the Chinese leadership announced its intention to kick-start sputtering economic reforms, shrinking the role of the state by giving market forces a “decisive role” in the economy. Those reforms are meant to power the Chinese economy through a tough transition: away from traditional sources of growth (cheap exports and heavy industry) and toward a new economy built on services, consumption and innovation. That’s a monumental task, and so far the record on reform is mixed. Early progress was made on thorny issues of restructuring local government debt and wrenching the Chinese economy away from high-polluting industries such as steel and cement. Sudden drops in Chinese coal consumption also laid the groundwork for last fall’s landmark climate change agreement with the U.S. But this summer, the government fumbled on several fronts. When a politically expedient stock market bubble began to burst, the leadership pumped in money in a desperate attempt to keep the party going. That move and a sudden devaluation of the RMB fueled speculation that Xi may sacrifice deep reform in hopes of propping up short-term growth. Xi has branded his administration with the trademark phrases “the Chinese dream” and “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” That branding reinforces a narrative that the Chinese Communist Party has been preaching for decades: after a “century of humiliation” characterized by foreign invasion and domestic strife, China is finally returning to its rightful place of prominence in the world. Xi is striving to take ownership of that revival narrative by pushing reforms at home and asserting Chinese preeminence in the Asia-Pacific. He has appealed to nationalism with an enormous military parade, and to hopes for clean governance by cracking down on lavish official expenditures and corrupt officials. Taken together, Xi has attempted to build a public image as a strong leader devoted to the people. While there are few reliable gauges of public opinion, surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest Xi remains immensely popular at home. Dangerous Road Ahead But ahead lie enormous challenges for China as a whole and Xi in particular. Can he transform the Chinese economy without generating massive unemployment? Can he truly root out corruption while also quashing the sprouts of independent civil society? Can he crack down on official perks without provoking a mutiny within the Chinese Communist Party? Can China expand its influence abroad without driving other countries into the arms of the United States? We won’t know the full answer for years, but when two of the most powerful people in the world sit down next week, these are the questions and currents that will be driving the conversation.

Bowing to foreign pressure crushes legitimacy- risks regime collapse.

SUSAN SHIRK ’14 (Chair of the 21st Century China Program and Ho Miu Lam Professor of China and Pacific Relations at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego.OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF ASIA, Edited by SAADIA M. PEKKANEN JOHN RAVENHILL and ROSEMARY FOOT”)

Insecure Leaders China’s leaders have a deep sense of political insecurity. None of them have the charisma or personal following that their revolutionary predecessors once had. And as the current leaders look out from their compound in Zhongnanhai to a Chinese society drastically transformed by market reform and opening to the world, everywhere they see threats to their own political survival and to the survival of the CCP regime. The leaders’ anxieties about their survival spiked during the Tiananmen crisis as the CCP leadership divided over how to respond to the protests. Only because the PLA followed Deng Xiaoping’s command to use force to put down the demonstrations did the PRC remain in power. Adding to the fears, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe started to collapse. As Chinese leaders try to extend the lifespan of the regime, they pay particular attention to the three lessons they took from the 1989 crisis: prevent large-scale social unrest, avoid public leadership divisions, and keep the military loyal. As China’s leaders make their foreign policy decisions, these domestic imperatives are very much on their minds. Antiforeign Nationalism One type of unrest that China’s leaders fear most is an opposition movement that fuses together various discontented groups—such as unemployed workers, farmers, and students—under the banner of nationalism. Antiforeign nationalism could provide the glue that unifieswhat so far has been small-scale and localized protest into a revolutionary tide that sweeps the CCP out of power. Such nationalist revolutionary movements overthrew the Qing dynasty (1912) and the Republic of China (1949). Any Chinese government that looks weak in the face of foreign pressure could meet a similar fate. Popular nationalism is intensifying in China. In part this is a natural consequence of the country’s rise after more than a century of being weak, internally divided, and internationally marginalized. Antiforeign nationalism also has been constructed by the post-Deng leaders as a source of legitimacy now that almost no one believes in Communism. During the 1990s when Jiang Zemin led the Communist Party, a Patriotic Education Campaign in the schools and media propaganda stimulated a “rediscovery of nationalism” (Zhao 2004, 213), with the focal point being Japan’s brutal occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s. Once the official line became explicitly nationalistic, this made it difficult for anyone with ambitions to join the Party or make a career in a state organization to deviate from it in meetings or public statements. This stoking of antiforeign nationalism has boxed the CCP into a corner. Having allowed students to demonstrate against the US government—in 1999 after the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, Yugoslavia—and against Japan—in 2005 in protest of Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and efforts to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and in 2012 against Japan’s purchase of several Diaoyu/Senkaku islands—how do leaders manage future protests without risking having the students turn on them? Yet it is this risk of losing control of antiforeign protests that may encourage the Chinese government to tolerate them as a way of gaining “audience cost” leverage over the United States or Japan (Weiss 2013). Nationalist public opinion has a clear influence on Chinese foreign policy. When the public is paying attention to an issue, it stiffens the government’s stance, notably in the case of Japan. However, in recent years other issues have also emerged as nationalist causes. Tibet and Xinjiang had not been particularly salient to the public before the 2008 and 2009 violent demonstrations in those ethnically divided regions. But the photos and videos posted on the Internet of Tibetans and Uyghurs beating Han Chinese sparked a burst of online criticism of the government that drove it to take a more insistent approach to the two issues in diplomatic relations with the United States and Europe. When mobilized to a high pitch by the media, nationalist public opinion can also make it more difficult for decision-makers to de-escalate during foreign policy crises.So far, after each crisis related to Japan, the government has been able to suppress protests and smooth over relations with Tokyo (Reilly 2012). Over time, however, the repeated highly publicized clashes have turned the Japanese public and many Japanese politicians against China despite the close economic ties between the two countries.

Economic failure in China risks miscalculation and escalation in SCS, Taiwan, and ECS.

Ted Galen Carpenter 15 (Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The National Interest, September 6, “Could China's Economic Troubles Spark a War?” )

Global attention has focused on the plunge in the Shanghai stock market and mounting evidence that China’s economic growth is slowing dramatically. Moreover, the contagion appears to be spreading, characterized by extreme volatility and alarming declines in America’s own equity markets. Those worries are compounded because there always have been doubts about the accuracy of Beijing’s official economic statistics. Even before the current downturn, some outside experts believed that Chinese officials padded the results, making the country’s performance appear stronger than it actually was. If China is now teetering on the brink of recession, the political incentives for officials to conceal the extent of the damage would be quite powerful. The focus on the possible wider economic consequences of a severe Chinese economic slowdown is understandable, since the ramifications could be extremely unpleasant for the U.S. and global economies. But we should also be vigilant about how such economic stress might affect Beijing’s diplomatic and military behavior. It is not unprecedented for a government that feels besieged to attempt to distract a discontented public by fomenting a foreign policy crisis. In Henry IV, Shakespeare pithily described that process as the temptation to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” China’s leaders likely feel increasingly uncomfortable. The implicit bargain that has been in place since the onset of market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s has been that if the public does not challenge the Communist Party’s dominant political position, the Party will deliver an ever-rising standard of living for the people. The bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was a graphic reminder of what happens if the Party’s position is challenged. However, until now, the economic portion of the bargain seemed secure, characterized by breathtaking, often double digit, rates of growth. It is uncertain what happens if the Party can no longer maintain its part of the implicit bargain, but it is likely that a dangerous degree of public discontent will surface. Beijing might refrain from deliberately provoking a major foreign policy crisis, since the Chinese economy depends heavily on export markets, and access to those markets would be jeopardized by war. However, the need to preserve and strengthen national unity and distract the public from mounting economic troubles is likely to impel Chinese leaders to adopt very hardline policies in at least three areas. And all of those situations entail the danger of miscalculations that could lead to war. One issue is the South China Sea. Beijing has made extraordinarily broad territorial claims that encompass some 90 percent of that body of water. China is pressing its claims with air and naval patrols and the building of artificial islands. Those policies have brought Beijing into acrimonious disputes with neighbors such as Vietnam and the Philippines, which have rival territorial claims, and with the world’s leading maritime power, the United States, which resists any manifestation of Chinese control over the South China Sea and the crucial commercial lanes that pass through it. The conditions are in place for a nasty confrontation. Chinese leaders have already stressed the country’s alleged historical claims to the area, and made it clear that it will not tolerate being subjected to humiliation by outside powers. Such arguments are designed to gain domestic support by reminding the Chinese people of the country’s long period of weakness and humiliation in the 1800s and early 1900s. A second issue is Taiwan. Beijing has long argued that Taiwan is rightfully part of China and was stolen from the country in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895. Although Chinese leaders have exhibited patience regarding the issue of reunification, relying in large measure on growing cross-strait economic ties to entice Taiwan to eventually accept that outcome, Beijing has also reacted very sharply whenever Taiwanese officials have pushed an agenda of independence, as during the administration of Chen Shui-bian from 2000 to 2008. The danger or renewed confrontation is rising, since public opinion polls indicate that the nominee of Chen’s old party, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, will be Taiwan’s next leader. A new crisis in the Taiwan Strait would be extremely serious, since the United States has obligated itself to consider any Chinese efforts at coercion as a “grave breach of the peace” of East Asia. Yet there is little doubt that there would be widespread domestic support on the mainland for a stern response by the Beijing government to a Taiwanese attempt to enhance its de-facto independence. Indeed, there might be more political danger to the regime if it did not take a strong stance on that issue. The third possible arena for crisis is the East China Sea. China is increasingly adamant about its claims to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, which are under Japanese control. From China’s perspective, those islands were stolen by Imperial Japan at the same time that Tokyo took possession of Taiwan following the 1895 war. And ginning up public anger against Japan is never difficult. China just finished celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which is touted in China as “the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.” Recalling Japan’s invasion of China, and the resulting atrocities, was a prominent theme of the various commemorative events. But the animosity is not based solely on historical grievances. Anger at Japan over the ongoing East China Sea dispute and other matters has already produced anti-Japanese riots in Chinese cities, characterized by attacks on Japanese businesses and automobiles. There is a powerful incentive for Chinese leaders to take an uncompromising stance on the Diaoyu/Senkaku feud, confident that the Chinese people will back such a stance. All of this suggests that the United States and its allies need to proceed cautiously about dealing with China, especially on these three issues. Now is not the time to press a Chinese leadership that likely feels beleaguered by the country’s economic woes. The last thing we should do is give those leaders further temptation to distract the Chinese people with a foreign policy confrontation. Such a strategy entails the grave risk of miscalculation and escalation, and that would be a tragedy for all concerned.

Legitimation crisis causes lash-out and nuclear escalation.

Ash 15 (10/16, Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, “If US relations with China turn sour, there will probably be war,”

If Washington and Beijing do not get it right, there will probably be war somewhere in Asia some time over the next decade. Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist Russia and the brutality of Islamic State are medium-sized regional challenges by comparison. Climate change and the world economy cannot be managed without American-Chinese cooperation. All this demands a bipartisan American grand strategy for the next 20 years, but US politics seems incapable of generating anything more than a partisan soundbite for the next 20 minutes. In the South China Sea, China has, by massive dredging operations, turned submerged reefs with names out of the novels of Joseph Conrad – Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef – into artificial islands, and is completing a 3,000m runway on Fiery Cross. President Xi Jinping recently presided over a massive, Kremlin-style parade of China’s military force, with Putin standing beside him as an honoured guest. In support of its claim to a vast area of the South China Sea, within its “nine-dash-line”, China has rammed Philippine fishing boats and buzzed a US spy plane. The US has responded by telling its Asian allies that it will run “freedom of navigation” patrols past the disputed islands. Interestingly, when Chinese warships sailed through US territorial waters around the Aleutian islands last month, the US military reacted coolly, saying the Chinese naval vessels passed “in a manner consistent with international law”. The technical term for this is “innocent passage”. So now watch out for the Chinese reaction when US warships make innocent passage past Fiery Cross or Mischief Reef. Battleships sailing defiantly past disputed islands: what century are we in? All this is bubbling up while Xi is firmly in control at home, with no immediate domestic crisis. But the Chinese Communist party does face a long-term legitimation crisis. For decades, it has derived political legitimacy from impressive economic growth, which is now slowing down. I believe Xi is making a massive Leninist gamble that reasserted single-party rule can manage the development of a complex, maturing economy and satisfy the growing expectations of an increasingly educated, urban and informed society. The Chinese leadership’s crude attempt to command the Chinese stock markets to rally earlier this year, reminiscent of King Canute’s confrontation with the incoming tide, is not encouraging. They can almost certainly keep the lid on for several years but, as always happens when necessary reform is postponed, the eventual crisis will be larger. At that point, the temptation for the Communist party leadership to play the nationalist card, perhaps with an actual military move, Galtieri-style, against one of China’s Malvinas/Falkland Islands, would be very strong. Probably this would not be a direct confrontation with a formal US ally, but the risks of miscalculation and escalation would be high. With angry, nationalist public opinion in both countries, neither the Chinese nor the American leader could be seen to lose, and both sides have nuclear weapons. This is not idle scaremongering; it’s something the US military, intelligence and thinktank communities think about all the time, in order to avoid it.