The primary China correspondent for the Economist magazine uses the pen-name, "Chaguan", who is, in fact, David Rennie, the magazine's Beijing bureau chief. As it happens, his father is the late Sir John Rennie, a former Director of MI6, the British international secret intelligence service from 1968 to 1973.
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A recent Chaguan column covered a four-day visit to Malipo county in Southwest China's Yunnan province, which was finally decreed free of extreme poverty in 2019. Chaguan expressed some foreseeable skepticism about how comprehensive and sustainable the poverty relief was, while noting certain clear improvements in housing, roads and schools.
The column concluded by observing that, "China remains a big country with complex problems run by men who see a world full of hostile forces. But the domestic confidence of its ruling party is unmistakable. Outsiders miss that tigerish swagger at their peril."
Well, the new tri-party AUKUS pact, which promises to swell the size of the US nuclear submarine fleet by some 10 percent at Australia's expense, surely does give cause to detect a whiff of serious fresh hostility in the air. And as for seeing a "world full of hostile forces", look no further than Washington: many influential US commentators now actively embrace the need for a resentful Cold War directed against China (and Russia).
The Economist article also observed how poverty relief assistance from the central government dates back some decades in China, though it did not investigate this crucial foundation building.
When one pays serious attention to how much has been so strikingly achieved for so many, particularly over the last four decades, in China, the deep foundations for that "unmistakable domestic confidence" are clear to see.
Such improvements in Malipo, managed ultimately by the Communist Party of China, have been repeated thousands of times across all of China over several decades. My personal witnessing of this dates back 30 years, though, as Professor Lin Chun, from the London School of Economics, explains in her new book Revolution and Counterrevolution in China, crucial foundation building began much earlier.
My first trip into China was in 1992. A friend took me across the border to a far smaller version of Shenzhen than we see today. Our mission was to visit the then rather new, Splendid China Theme Park. Not far outside of the Shenzhen urban area, the road we were on turned to dirt: It was badly rutted and still muddy. We wobbled steadily forward toward our destination, in a rattling mini-bus, and, in due course, arrived safely.
Soon after, I made a trip to Shenzhen continuing on to Guangzhou by coach, using the first freeway built linking the two cities. Memories remain vivid. The major transport innovation in Guangzhou at that time was the deployment of second-hand KMB double-decker buses from Hong Kong. They retained the KMB yellow and red livery and were still right-hand drive – far too expensive and difficult to convert to the mainland's left hand. Passenger entry was swapped from the left to right-hand side. Rudimentary but effective.
Many open fruit and vegetable shops provided a basic pay-phone facility, with a phone handset resting near the bananas. Roadside repairmen mending bicycles-in-trouble provided another handy service. On my first trip to Beijing in 1994, some academic friends explained how it cost three months of average local wages – and a very long wait – to have a home phone connected.
Later trips across rural areas of Guangdong were eye-opening. What was striking was how sealed roads were being built everywhere, into smaller villages and more remote areas. Meanwhile, major, dual carriageway roads were advancing at a remarkable rate. By 1996, before high speed rail, a new electrified rail service from Hong Kong to Beijing was operating and it arrived ahead of schedule when I used it.
Today China has around 40,000 kilometers of high speed rail and over 1.6 billion mobile phone subscribers. Now you can visit Splendid China using the Shenzhen Metro or a modern electric bus. Those used, KMB double-decker buses have long since been replaced in Guangzhou by a metro system featuring around 300 stations spread across 600 km of track length, with more lines coming. It is one of the largest and most busy metro systems globally, in a country now home to over 6,000 km of metro lines in over 40 cities, including the four longest metro systems worldwide.
When one pays serious attention to how much has been so strikingly achieved for so many, particularly over the last four decades, in China, the deep foundations for that "unmistakable domestic confidence" are clear to see.
The challenges looking forward remain immense, for China. And the best responses are not going to materialize seamlessly. But China has proved, time and again, that it has a governance system that works – not least, for the masses – in ways that many other developed jurisdictions wish they could emulate.
Chaguan also argued (with a touch of the chic mockery many Economist readers find agreeable) that CPC membership "has been presented as something close to a secular priesthood, where a select few selflessly serve the masses."
Using like-analysis, being selected to enter the senior ranks of the Economist might be equated to admission to a college of secular cardinals – established to serve a rather narrower cut from society than "the masses". One might fairly ask which priesthood is doing more, with a positive focus, to sort out how to build a better world?
The author is a visiting professor in the Law Faculty of Hong Kong University.