Bron Larner

Something very strange happened at the Communist Party's 5th Plenum last week, its most important meeting this year. They issued a massive resolution at the end of the meeting together with an official commentary on it by Xi Jinping and, if you read both, you're left with one overwhelming impression: it's crisis time inside the Party. I'm not exaggerating, check the vocabulary they're using: Xi talks of "viruses eroding the Party's healthy body" (侵蚀党的健康肌体的病毒, qīnshí dǎng de jiànkāng jītǐ de bìngdú) and "stubborn chronic diseases" (顽瘴痼疾, wánzhàng gùjí), with problems so "shocking" (触目惊心, chùmù jīngxīn) that the Party has to "turn the blade inward" (刀刃向内, dāorèn xiàng nèi) - in effect, self-mutilate to get the poison out. Heck, it was the very theme of the meeting: all about hard discipline with Xi saying he wants to send "a strong signal that things will get stricter the further we go" (越往后越严, yuè wǎng hòu yuè yán). You don't do that when things are going well. Except that - and here's the paradox - factually speaking, things are going well in China. One can even say that - looking back centuries - China is at the very height of its power. This is no exaggeration either: China makes nearly 30% of everything manufactured on the planet, has a record $1.19 trillion trade surplus despite Trump's tariffs, and is in the lead in 69 of 74 critical technologies according to the (hardly pro-China) Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It's also, geopolitically, more secure than it's been in a long time: in a truce with Washington with Xi having just been welcomed at the White House with a pomp very few have ever been granted - Trump personally waiting for him on the tarmac - while the rest of the world keeps flocking to China, now the world's favorite diplomatic destination. So what gives, how do you reconcile these 2 things? I'd argue that China is having its own Fukuyama moment, except in reverse. Remember the West in the early 1990s at the height of its power: Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of history", with liberal democracy as the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution". In other words we concluded we had reached perfection, that there was nothing left to fix. History had ended: we were the final form of human civilization. Maximum hubris. We all know how long that lasted... China, now at its peak, is taking the exact opposite route. This is not just a supposition by me: last week's resolution literally makes it a rule - the longer the peace lasts, the more the Party must "strengthen its sense of peril" (增强忧患意识, zēngqiáng yōuhuàn yìshí) and "think of danger" (思危, sī wēi). China, officially, also keeps referring to the so-called "cave dialogue" (窑洞对, yáodòng duì): a 1945 conversation in Yan'an where an educator, Huang Yanpei, warned Mao that every Chinese dynasty had followed the same arc - tough at the start, then soft and rotten once comfortable. "Good times create weak men", basically, 80 years before the meme. Which is an old Chinese idea: 2,300 years ago, Mencius summed it up with 生于忧患，死于安乐 (shēng yú yōuhuàn, sǐ yú ānlè, "adversity keeps us alive, comfort kills us"). The resolution, and Xi's commentary on it, keep referring to this new strict doctrine that's officially called "self-revolution" (自我革命, zìwǒ gémìng) as the "second answer" to the "cave dialogue". In other words as China's way of escaping history, of preventing the "good times create weak men" curse. So, it's "end of history" versus "escaping history", maybe both hubristic in their own way - nobody escapes history forever - but with one big difference: the first stopped looking for its own flaws, the second has made obsessing about them its official doctrine. That's what I look at in my latest article - from a 3,000-year-old bathtub inscription to the 42 generals who fell off their horses - and why China's obsession with its own flaws might be the most underrated strategic advantage in the world. Or its biggest weakness: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…