After the G20 forfeit, the Chinese leader does not even go to Scotland: internal dossiers have priority
TAIPEI. After the videoconference, here is the letter. G20 and Cop26 must do without the presence of Xi Jinping. The Chinese president sent a written message to Glasgow in which he gives three tips on how to tackle climate change: maintain multilateral consensus, accelerate the “green transformation” with the help of technology and take “concrete actions”, an invitation to countries developed countries that “not only must do more, but must also provide support to developing countries”.
Meanwhile, there are questions about the double absence of Xi, who has not left China for almost two years. Unofficially because of the pandemic, but actually for other reasons as well. The first is symbolic: Beijing believes that “Western-led” multilateral platforms are being used for the sole purpose of containing its rise. Thus it becomes superfluous or even harmful to seek compromises with one’s “great accusers”. The second reason is internal and political: Xi has started the delicate long march that will have to lead him to obtain the third term.
With the sixth plenum next week, China officially enters the 12 months preceding the Communist Party congress. Behind the silences, it is a year traditionally a harbinger of plots and reckoning. Xi cannot be weak, nor distracted from internal dossiers that risk damaging him: from the housing crisis to the energy crisis, up to the recent fuel shortage. There are even those who imagine that he can attempt an action on Taiwan to cement his role but at the moment a remote hypothesis appears, a desperate risk card that Xi does not seem to have to play. On the other hand, in about ten days the plenum will approve the third resolution on history after those that paved the way for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s visions of the future. Like them, Xi also sees himself as helmsman. And that helm at this moment cannot leave it, not even for G20 or Cop26.
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