The post below is a welcome, if belated, clarion call on the part of George Soros to the West to rise up against the Chinese Dictatorship and annihilate it once and for all. There is only one respect in which we strongly disagree with Soros. Whilst we agree that, for political strategic reasons, it is vital to combat this virulent Dictatorship by setting as many of its own subjects as is possible against it, the sad fact remains, and the history of all totalitarian regimes teaches without hint of a doubt, that expansionist and imperialist regimes have the overwhelming support of their subjects who are conniving and complicit beneficiaries of the bestiality of their leaders. The heinous Chinese Dictatorship could never have got this far without the implicit and slavish support of the vile Han Chinese people. These are beasts whom we must subdue and destroy well before they have any opportunity to endanger us and imperil our free societies. Whilst it is hard to fault Soros’s noble humanitarian effort to spare Han Chinese people from the atrocious bestiality of their Dictatorship, the fact is and will remain that these vile worms will gladly go along with the truculent savagery of the Beijing Rats so long as it helps invade other countries, destroy other cultures and exterminate other peoples for their own sordid material advantage. Never has the world known a race as vile and proliferative and invasive as the Chinese Han. To stop them, we must reduce them to misery and political and military impotence. Above all, we must demolish and dismember the Chinese Empire! Our will to Power, not the pathetic implorations of humanitarian weaklings, is what will preserve and secure the future of the great humanistic, democratic and progressive values of Western culture and society. Cheers.
The rapidly improving instruments of control that machine learning and artificial intelligence can produce are giving repressive regimes an inherent advantage. For them, the improving instruments of control are a help; for open societies they constitute a mortal danger.
I'll focus on China, where President Xi Jinping wants a one-party state to reign supreme. Xi is trying to consolidate all the available information about a person into a centralised database to create a "social credit system". Based on these data, people will be evaluated by algorithms that will determine whether they pose a threat to the one-party state. People will then be treated accordingly.
Xi Jinping is trying to consolidate all the available information about a person into a centralised database to create a "social credit system". THOMAS PETER
The social credit system is not yet fully operational, but it's clear where it's heading. It will subordinate the fate of the individual to the interests of the one-party state in unprecedented ways.
I find the social credit system frightening and abhorrent. Unfortunately, some Chinese find it rather attractive, because it provides information and services that are not currently available, and can also protect law-abiding citizens against enemies of the state.
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China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world, but it is undoubtedly the wealthiest, strongest, and most developed in machine learning and artificial intelligence. This makes Xi the most dangerous opponent of those who believe in the concept of open society. But Xi is not alone. Authoritarian regimes are proliferating all over the world, and if they succeed, they will become totalitarian.
The committed defenders of open society in China, who are around my age, have mostly retired, and younger people, who are dependent on Xi for promotion, have taken their place. In fact, it was retired leaders like Zhu Rongji who reportedly floated the criticisms of Xi at the Beidaihe meeting.
It's important to realise that such criticisms were only a warning to Xi about his excesses, but did not reverse the abolition of the two-term limit. Moreover, "Xi Jinping Thought", which he promoted as his distillation of Communist theory, was elevated to the same level as "Mao Zedong Thought". So Xi remains the supreme leader, possibly for his lifetime. The ultimate outcome of the current political infighting remains unresolved.
By Saijel Kishan, Katherine Burton and Melissa Karsh
I have been concentrating on China, but open societies have many more enemies, Putin's Russia foremost among them. And the most dangerous scenario is one in which these enemies conspire with, and learn from, one another in order to oppress their people more effectively.
What can we do to stop them?
The first step is to recognise the danger. That is why I am speaking out. But now comes the difficult part. Those of us who want to preserve the open society must work together and form an effective alliance. We have a task that can't be left to governments. History has shown that even governments that want to protect individual freedom have many other interests, and they also give precedence to their own citizens' freedom over the freedom of the individual as an abstract concept.
Therefore, I want to focus on what I consider the most important question for open societies: what will happen in China?
Only the Chinese people can answer the question. All we can do is to draw a sharp distinction between them and Xi. Since Xi has declared his hostility to open society, the Chinese people become the main source of hope.
And there are, in fact, grounds for hope. As some China specialists have explained to me, there's a Confucian tradition according to which the emperor's advisers are expected to speak out when they strongly disagree with one of his actions or decrees, knowing full well that it may result in exile or even execution. This came as a great relief to me when I was on the verge of despair. It means that a new political elite has emerged that is willing to uphold the Confucian tradition, and that Xi will continue to have opponents in China.
Xi presents China as a role model for other countries to emulate, but he's facing criticism abroad as well. His Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been in operation long enough to reveal its deficiencies. For one thing, it was designed to promote the interests of China, not the interests of the recipient countries. Moreover, its ambitious infrastructure projects were financed mainly by loans, not by grants, and foreign officials were often bribed to accept them. And many of these projects have proven to be economically unsound.
The iconic case is in Sri Lanka. China loaned the Sri Lankans the money to pay China to build a port that serves China's strategic interests. But the port failed to attract sufficient commercial traffic to enable the Sri Lankans to service the debt, enabling China to take possession of the port. There are several similar cases elsewhere, and they are causing resentment.
Malaysia is leading the pushback. The previous government, headed by Najib Razak, sold out to China. But in May 2018, Najib was voted out of office by a coalition led by Mahathir Mohamed. Mahathir's government immediately stopped several big infrastructure projects being carried out by Chinese companies and is currently negotiating how much Malaysia will still have to pay China.
Fully beholden to China
The situation is not as clear in Pakistan, which has been the largest recipient of Chinese investments. The Pakistani army is fully beholden to China, but the position of Imran Khan, who became Prime Minister last August, is more ambivalent. At the beginning of 2018, China and Pakistan announced grandiose plans for military cooperation. By the end of the year, Pakistan was in a deep financial crisis. But one thing became evident: China intends to use the BRI for military purposes as well.
All of these setbacks have forced Xi to modify his attitude toward the BRI. In September, he announced that "vanity projects" will be shunned in favour of more carefully conceived initiatives, and in October, the People's Daily warned that projects should serve the interests of the recipient countries.
Customers are now forewarned, and several of them, ranging from Sierra Leone to Ecuador, are questioning or renegotiating projects. Xi has also stopped talking about "Made in China 2025", which had been the centrepiece of his self-promotion a year earlier.
Most important, the US government has now identified China as a "strategic rival". President Donald Trump is notoriously unpredictable, but this decision was the result of a carefully prepared strategic plan. Since then, Trump's idiosyncratic behaviour has been largely superseded by a China policy adopted by the agencies of the administration and overseen by the National Security Council Asian affairs adviser, Matthew Pottinger, and others. The policy was outlined in a seminal speech by Vice President Mike Pence on October 4, 2018.
Even so, declaring China a strategic rival is too simplistic. China is an important global actor. An effective policy toward China cannot be summed up in a generalisation. It needs to be far more sophisticated, detailed, and practical; and it must include a US economic response to the BRI. The Pottinger plan doesn't spell out whether its ultimate goal is to level the playing field or to disengage from China.
Fully understood the threat
Xi fully understood the threat that the new US policy posed for his leadership. He gambled on a personal meeting with Trump at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires on December 1. In the meantime, the danger of a global trade war escalated, and a sharp sell-off in the stock market began, creating problems for the Trump administration, which had focused all of its energy and attention on the midterm elections the previous month. When Trump and Xi met, both sides were eager for a deal. So they reached one, though what they agreed – a 90-day truce – is very inconclusive.
But there are clear indications that a broad-based economic decline is in the making in China, which is affecting the rest of the world. A global slowdown is the last thing the market wants to see.
The unspoken social contract in China is built on steadily rising living standards. If the decline in the Chinese economy and stock market is severe enough, this social contract may be undermined, and even the business community may end up opposing Xi. Such a downturn could also sound the BRI's death knell, because Xi may run out of resources to continue financing so many loss-making investments.
On the broader question of global Internet governance, there is an undeclared struggle between China and the West. China wants to dictate the rules and procedures that govern the digital economy by dominating the developing world with its new platforms and technologies. This is a threat to the freedom of the Internet and open society itself.
Last year, I still believed that China ought to be more deeply embedded in the institutions of global governance, but Xi's behaviour since then has changed my opinion. My view now is that instead of waging a trade war with practically the whole world, the US should focus on China; instead of letting ZTE and Huawei off lightly, it needs to crack down on them harshly. If these companies came to dominate the 5G market, they would present an unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world.
Regrettably, President Trump seems to be following a different course: make concessions to China and declare victory while renewing his attacks on US allies. This is liable to undermine the US policy objective of curbing China's abuses and excesses.
Mahathir's government immediately stopped several big infrastructure projects being carried out by Chinese companies. Yam G-Jun
Dangerous enemy
Because Xi is the most dangerous enemy of open societies, we must pin our hopes on the Chinese people, and especially on the political elite, which is inspired by the Confucian tradition.
This does not mean that those of us who believe in the open society should remain passive. The reality is that we are in a Cold War that threatens to turn into a hot one. On the other hand, if Xi and Trump were no longer in power, an opportunity would present itself to develop greater cooperation between the two cyber-superpowers.
It's possible to dream of something similar to the United Nations Treaty at the end of World War II. This would be the appropriate ending to the current cycle of conflict between the US and China. It would reestablish international cooperation and allow open societies to flourish.
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. This is an edited version of his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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