Xi Jinping's third Chinese revolution

The 3rd historic resolution of the 6th Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has elevated Xi Jinping to the revolutionary pantheon, seating him between Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, thus forming the new trinity of the Centre of the Earth, the name the country gave itself in the times of the Ch'ing dynasty. Even before that, Chinese mythology records the theogony of Pangu, Xi Jinping's predecessor, whose genesis came from the synthesis resulting from the thesis of Yin and the antithesis of Yang, which took the form of an egg from whose agitated incubation Pangu struggled to free himself, until the egg was broken into two halves, from which emerged Heaven and Earth, as we know it. 

Although some rain has fallen since then, it is still interesting that the story of Xi's celestial ascent is woven around his dilemmatic "dual circulation", the strategy behind China's third revolution, which synthesises the expansive "international circulation" promoted by Deng Xiaoping and the autarchic "internal circulation" promoted by Mao, so that, thanks to a better distribution of the cake, the Chinese people will find Heaven on Earth by improving their standard of living. 

However, the transition to a virtuous economy balancing domestic consumption and exports, in the German style, will be more of an evolution than a revolution, so that in the medium term the inertia of Chinese expansionism will continue, because striking a balance between the archetypes advocated by the city of Canton (more cake) and Chongqing (more slices) is essential to establish China's influence in Western markets, which, as in the case of the mythical Pangu's egg, will create tensions from which the pillars of a new polycentric international order will emerge. 

But before reaching that point, the challenge for the mythical animal we know as the international community will be to gently manage the transition to avoid the collision of continental tectonic plates, while China's presence in new latitudes conditions the choices of local political and economic elites, influencing the dynamics of academia, the media and, ultimately, public opinion, just as happened with American commercial expansionism during the Cold War years. 

As then, the battleground will be Europe, which will force the European institutions to decide without much delay whether it aspires to be a leading actor or is content to play a supporting role on its own turf. This is particularly relevant in those EU member states where, for one reason or another, it is more difficult to fit in, such as Hungary, which, after 50 years under the Soviet boot, suffers from a weak civil society dominated by the oligarchies of the old Nomenklatura, which exercises cacique control over the media and associations. 

This fertile ground for clientelism seems to have been chosen by China to test its model of soft power, which, if successful, could become the template for other member states. Thus, while in most Western countries the presence of the Confucius Institute (on paper the equivalent of Spain's Instituto Cervantes) is modest in scale, in Hungary it is planning to set up a large educational complex of Fudan University, the doyenne of Chinese academic institutions and one of the jewels in the crown of its elites. If this project, strongly contested by dissident sectors of Hungarian civil society, is realised, the campus would join the already existing Confucius network with sites at Eötvös Loránd, Szeged, Miskolc, and Debrecen universities. 

The facilities granted by Hungary for this educational project are in apparent contrast to the hostility exercised against the Central European University, founded by George Soros, which was forced to leave Hungary in 2018.  However, this is a misleading contrast, as Xi, unlike Soros's Open Society Foundations, is not aiming for political reform in Hungary, but to create a state of opinion predisposed towards China among the future Hungarian intelligentsia, and thus have a fulcrum with which to influence EU decision-making.  In turn, Orbán exploits China's influence in Hungary by using it as a political wild card in his dealings with Brussels, confident that his country is relatively less dependent on EU funds than other member states that lack a preferential relationship with China, making it the main destination for Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe. 

The truth is that China's presence in Hungary is characterised by a low profile, and it has not even sought to have its own media to propagate its soft power, because the Hungarian government-run media convey a neutral to positive view of China, selectively broadcasting information that might be controversial from Beijing's point of view. However, one only has to scratch the surface to find that this lack of public ostentation contrasts with the financial and technological importance of entities such as the Bank of China and Huawei in Hungary. 

While the Bank of China for Central and Eastern Europe is headquartered in Budapest, from where it operates in the European financial market, the technology company Huawei has its main European logistics centre in Hungary, from where it distributes the firm's products throughout EMEA. Unlike in other NATO member states, there is no substantial public rejection of Huawei's products and activities in Hungary, which would show that China's fine and persistent rainmaking is bearing the expected fruit. 

From the perspective of a not inconsiderable part of the Hungarian population, their relationship with the People's Republic of China - which dates back to its formal recognition in 1949, and which began in its present form in 2000 under socialist Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy - is seen as a buffer against what they perceive as Western countries' misunderstanding of the historical particularities of their counterparts in the Visegrad Group, from which derives an ethno-religious homogeneity, an identity, and a model of society that is more conservative than liberal, a product of the paradox that in Central Europe, the traditional values pursued by communism were not only preserved, but became more solid than in Western Europe. 

Naturally, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party does not care about all this, but precisely because Xi is indifferent to the colour of cats, as long as they do not prevent him from making China the Centre of the Earth again, the bien-pensant elites should perhaps make a greater effort to avoid the risk of falling into the traps of single-minded thinking.