(p. A1) A song called “Tomorrow Will Be Better” became a sensation in mainland China in the 1980s, when the nation was emerging from the poverty and turmoil of Mao Zedong’s rule.
Its inspirational lyrics, which exhorted listeners to “look upward for the wings in the sky,” came to represent a generation that was starting to believe in a brighter future.
Now people in China are listening to the song again—but for a very different reason. Videos of the song are circulating on WeChat and other communications apps, often with taglines expressing sadness about the end of that era.
“The 1980s are gone forever,” wrote one listener. “So long, those years of burning passion,” wrote another.
For many Chinese, especially those who came of age during the past 40 years of reform and opening, China appeared to be on an irreversible path forward toward more growth, openness and opportunity.
But now China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is restoring aspects of Mao’s rule, forcing people to confront a more uncertain future rooted in China’s past.
Xi’s predecessors, beginning with Deng Xiaoping, embraced market forces, growth and limited freedoms. Xi, by contrast, is placing national security over the economy, tightening government control, and putting the Communist Party—and himself—at the center of Chinese society.
A Dec. 16 [2023] article published by the party’s influential journal, Qiushi, elevated Xi to the same historical status as Mao, calling Xi “the People’s leader”—a title previously reserved for China’s Great Helmsman.
Gone is the booming China that inspired many young people and entrepreneurs to take risks and bet on the future. Home prices are falling, youth unemployment is at a record high, private investment is shrinking, the financial system is drowning in debt and deflation is setting in.
. . .
(p. A9) “Xi is dampening the energy and optimism of the Chinese people,” said Susan Shirk, a former senior diplomat during the Clinton administration and author of a recent book, “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.”
“In a system so dominated by one leader,” Shirk said, “everyone feels powerless to effect positive change.”
. . .
In Shenzhen, Deng’s reform policies helped transform the former fishing village in the shadow of neighboring Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city of 13 million, home to globally competitive tech companies such as Tencent.
“Time is money, efficiency is life” was the slogan that guided the city’s early development.
Today, Shenzhen has a new slogan: “Follow the party, start your business”—with the party coming first.
Communist Party direction doesn’t seem to be brightening the city’s future. More than a quarter of Shenzhen’s office space sits empty after Xi started a campaign in 2020 to rein in risk-taking at private firms. The regulatory crackdown wiped out more than $1 trillion in market value from publicly-listed tech firms and triggered layoffs and business retrenchment.
. . .
Faced with growing economic headwinds and challenges to order, Xi is doubling down on Mao-style control, embracing a Mao-era tool as a way to ensure national security.
The practice, called the “Fengqiao experience,” is named after a town in eastern China that gained national fame in the early 1960s when Mao praised the way its officials mobilized people to identify and punish so-called enemies of the proletariat—capitalists, traditionalists and the like.
People were encouraged to report on one another, with husbands informing on wives and children on their parents, leading to some of the most brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution. After that tumultuous period, the “Fengqiao experience” faded into history.
Xi is trying to revive aspects of it to mobilize people to fix problems at the local level before they lead to widespread social unrest.
. . .
John Ling, an e-commerce entrepreneur in Shanghai in his late 40s, recalls a far more liberal environment in the early 2000s. Lured back home by China’s seemingly limitless opportunities after studying in the U.S., he started a business trading goods online.
Back then, “I did feel like you could realize your American dream in China, as long as you worked hard,” Ling recalled.
Year by year he felt greater government interference. As more capital poured into e-commerce, he said, Beijing grew concerned that the sector was diverting resources away from more strategic areas such as semiconductors, an industry in which China still heavily relies on Western firms.
Ling said it became so difficult to raise fresh funding for e-commerce that he decided to shut his venture earlier this year. “It’s all about hard-tech these days,” he said, referring to sectors now favored by the government. “But can you sustain the entire economy with just hard-tech?”
“It feels like nothing is possible” nowadays, he said.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated December 28, 2023, and has the title “China Wants to Move Ahead, but Xi Jinping Is Looking to the Past.” The fourth and eighth paragraphs quoted above appear in the online, but not the print, version of the commentary. In other sections where the online version is more detailed than the print version, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)
Shirk, Susan L. Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
