Xi's vision of greater isolation will make his country poorer

In August, there was an unexpected stir in China about a scholarly article. The piece, published in a respected but specialist journal, argued that during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China had been a country relatively closed off to the outside world. Most recent I scholarship has assumed that this was a bad thing and that greater openness in the modern era had led to China's rise in global standing and growth. But the article took a contrarian position, suggesting that there were economic and social advantages to the doors being closed in large part. The argument was then sent out on the social media feed of a thinktank closely linked to the Chinese Communist party. There was plenty of social media comment, mostly wondering whether the CCP was hinting that today, too, China should think about whether openness was quite such a good idea.

- Rana Mitter

At first glance, it might seem that the opening speech by Xi Jinping at the 20th party congress was giving a very different message: indeed, there was a specific pledge praising the idea of openness in the next five years that will mark his third term. And attention at the end of the Congress has been on the sudden, still unexplained, escorting of former president Hu Jintao out of the meeting, and the new Politburo standing committee whose members owe their positions almost entirely to Xi. But there are other signs that the China of the 2020s may be considerably less open than the one we have known for some four decades from the 1980s to 2020.

China since the 80s has been defined by the idea that "reform" and "opening" have gone together. Yet that openness created an anomaly in the first two decades of this century. China became a society highly connected with the outside world but also deeply controlled at home. Unlike the old Soviet bloc, there was little sense that China tried to restrict its citizens, except political dissidents, from travelling abroad. The Chinese of the reform era studied in Britain, did deals in America, and saw the sights and bought luxury goods in Italy. Nobody stopped visitors from observing democracy in the liberal world, but they understood that open discussion of the concept stopped when they arrived back in Beijing.