The Sneering at China’s President Xi

In mainstream U.S. media, it’s always a “safe play” for pundits to sneer at foreign leaders and countries that interfere with American hegemony, thus guiding the public toward unnecessary hostilities, a phenomenon now playing out in the treatment of China and President Xi, writes Dan Steinbok.

By Dan Steinbok

Thanks to misguided stories about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reforms, America risks losing the opportunity to participate appropriately in China’s massive economic rebalancing and reform drive.

In their Animal Spirits, George A Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, two Nobel Prize winners, show how human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism. In particular, they show how stories move markets and are themselves a real part of how the economy functions.

The same goes for other economies, including China. What “we” in America know about China is filtered through aggregate stories by Washington’s political pundits, policy wonks, economic analysts, and news oracles. Some stories reflect realities; others don’t. Still others are misguided and flawed, while the rest have self-serving agendas.

As President Xi is in his first official state visit in the U.S., he remains an enigma to most Americans — not in spite of these stories, but because of them. After his first year in power, leading media, such as Bloomberg, reported that “Xi amassing most power since Deng raises reform risk.” After two years, the Chinese president was portrayed in the West as “Xi who must be obeyed” as The Economist put it in its cover story, calling him the most powerful Chinese ruler certainly since Deng, and possibly since Mao.

What united these stories, which quickly spread across the world via lesser-tier media channels, was their common denominator: Xi had acquired too much power. More recently, Washington’s stories would like us to believe that the problem with President Xi is not that he has too much power, but that he is increasingly powerless.

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