Chinese Statism, the Transitional Nature of Xi Jinping’s Regime, and America’s Response

(The Chinese version of this article was published in our website in July. It was then translated by Professor David Ownby at University of Montreal and published in the websides Reading the Chinese Dream, run by him, and two others professors : Timothy Cheek at University of British Columbia and Joshua Fogel at York University. To help the reader better understand the article, professor David Ownby wrote an introduction about the author and added some notes. we thank his effort in diffusing the article in the English Language world).

Xi Jinping's rule over China, following the reform and opening period, has undoubtedly led the country into an unprecedented crisis, and it is frustrating that liberal democratic forces seem powerless to do anything about it.  Xi Jinping not only looks to be firmly in power and in a stronger position than he was before the coronavirus pandemic, but in addition, the damaged legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has also been restored to some extent. Despite doing its utmost to contain the Communist Party and China, United States policies have not substantially weakened the Communist Party's rule.

How can we see the direction of history through the fog of reality?  How has Xi Jinping consolidated his power? What are the internal flaws in U.S. policy toward China? Should we remain optimistic about the future?  To answer these questions, this essay proposes to examine a number of questions related to the rise of Chinese statism, the transitional character of Xi Jinping regime, and Trump's China policy.

The Comprehensive Rise of Chinese/CCP Statism

As tensions between the United States and China intensified over the pandemic and over Hong Kong, China also completed a change in its basic narrative from nationalism to statism.

What I mean by Chinese/CCP statism here is the use of a nationalist discourse to package the control by the CCP of Chinese society as being in China’s national interests, the goal of which is to mobilize the people to resist outside efforts to contain and encircle China, especially efforts by the West.

Chinese/CCP statism defends not the abstract interests of the nation-state, but the concrete interests of the nation-state that the CCP represents . Thus, while the discourse displays the general characteristics of statism, it also places special emphasis on the correctness of the CCP's historical choices, meaning that history has chosen the CCP as the representative of China's national interests, and that CCP rule over China is the best way to protect these national interests.

This kind of Chinese/CCP statism is not a recent development, and has instead existed from the moment that the CCP established its rule in China. In the past, however, it had not yet developed into an ideology recognized and accepted by the masses. Of course, the CCP has always wanted to instill this consciousness in the entire population, but doing so required certain pre-conditions, some of had been lacking until recently.

These preconditions include:  a sense of pride in China's long history, a strong sense of national victimhood, the illusion 幻觉 of the rise of contemporary China, and external efforts to contain China. All four conditions must be met. The first two constitute core elements of nationalism, and the illusion of China’s rise adds elements of statism, but it is only the genuine development of external containment and confrontation that activates the first three.  Moreover, for the greater part of the period that the CCP has been in power, these four conditions have not existed at the same time.  After reform and opening, the CCP abandoned fundamentalist Marxism in favor of nationalism as its de facto ideology to carry out social mobilization.

Chinese/CCP statism is a further "distillation" of nationalism, and its relationship to nationalism is that while pure nationalism is merely a passive or reactive nationalism, statism is an aggressive nationalism. Many people, especially liberals, have been critical of Chinese nationalism, accusing it of being destructive.  However, strictly speaking, since reform and opening, although officials and official media have incessantly preached nationalism, and at particular moments have employed nationalism to incite the masses, overall, China's nationalism has generally displayed a challenge-response character, and in this sense it has been passive, especially when it has been in destructive mode.

When we examine several major anti-American and anti-Japanese demonstrations in the first decade of this century, as well as the anti-Korean marches of the last few years, it was invariably the foreign party that first challenged China's interests (e.g., the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, airplanes colliding over the South China Sea, Japan sinking a Chinese fishing boat in the waters of the Diaoyu Islands, South Korea allowing the U.S. to deploy SCUD missiles against China), and while the official propaganda and agitation in these incidents were biased and sometimes even untrue, for the general public China was the wronged party, and what they were demonstrating was a sense of victimhood.

Statism, in contrast to a purely nationalistic sense of victimhood, becomes aggressive and takes the offensive. With China's historical bullying by the great powers now serving merely as background, confidence in China’s rise has developed among China’s middle class, largely made up of Party and government officials and self-employed business people, small and medium-sized business owners, and freelance and middle- and high-income employees, and among the broad masses of China’s poorer population as well, all cheered on by the official narrative of China’s rise and the people’s genuine perception that China’s strength is increasing. 

As a result, they have become extremely sensitive to the outside world’s reactions and attitudes, perceiving normal conflicts and disputes in international relations as intolerable affronts to China.  Unlike in the past, they will no longer react only after a perceived infringement of national interests, but instead adopt a proactive, aggressive posture to defend national interests. Statism may therefore be seen as an aggressive nationalism, which is an adulterated mixture of the four conditions discussed above.

Chinese/CCP statism began to come into its own after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the games having created a sense of pride and elation in the people, sweeping away the century-old image of China as the sick man of Asia, and China’s self-confidence burgeoned. At that time, however, while there were frictions between China and the United States, China generally gave the impression that its national power was rising, and the United States seemed to be declining, and the two countries did not engage in genuine confrontation, to say nothing of containment and counter-containment. Statism had not become a generally accepted ideology among the masses in China.

The turning point was the China Dream, which Xi Jinping promoted when he first came to power. The China Dream is an official manifesto of statism in the form of nationalism. Prior to this point, indeed as early as the late 1990s, some of China's New Left, Liberal, and New Confucian scholars had embraced statist arguments, but these intellectuals remained confined to the academic world, and while they desperately sought to jump into bed with power, at the time, the official world was not particularly interested in statism, and was instead fully focused on economic development, so this statist trend in academia had little impact among the people.

This impact came in the form of a popular book, published in 2009, entitled China is Not Happy.[2]  The publication of this book, which advocated "playing hardball in the market place 带剑经商" gained a great deal of traction among the people due to China's rising power. Ten years earlier, the same author had written a sensational book called The China that Can Say No,[3] but at the time, because China was still rather weak in terms of national power, the people had not taken the statism trumpeted by the book very seriously.  But 2009 was different, and this was reflected to a certain degree in popular opinion.

Xi Jinping first laid out the China Dream in November of 2012, in thoughts expressed as he was leading six Politburo Standing Committee members on a tour of the National Museum's “Road to Recovery” exhibition.  For Xi, the China Dream is the realization of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the greatest dream of the Chinese people in modern times. This has been the long-cherished dream of several generations of Chinese people and embodies the overall interests of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people. It is the common aspiration of the sons and daughters of China.  History tells us that the future destiny of each person is closely linked to that of the state and the people. Only when the state is in good shape, when the people are good shape, will everyone be in good shape... We Communists of this generation must carry on the past and open up the future and propel our Party forward. We must build the Party well, unite all Chinese people to build and develop our country, and continue to move towards the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

​Later, he repeatedly referred to the China Dream, the specific content of which was defined by the authorities as the prosperity and strength of the country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the happiness of the people.

Reading Xi’s remarks, what we call the China Dream typically embodies the general characteristics of statism, namely, the supremacy of the whole, represented by the nation, over the individual.  The state and the nation come first, the individual second, and the realization of the individual's interests must be subordinate to the interests of the state.  The individual is a tool for realizing the interests of the state; the existence and value of the individual is meaningful if and only if the interests of the state are realized.

In addition, this passage also reflects a particular connotation of Chinese/CCP statism: the China Dream is first and foremost a dream of national rejuvenation, which means that China once had a shining, glorious history, which at some point fell into decline. The current hope is to revive it, but who will lead this revival? It can only be the CCP, because the CCP says it represents the advanced productive forces and the interests of the whole people, so the force leading the national rejuvenation can only be the CCP because no other political force is qualified. To lead the rejuvenation, Party-building is necessary.

Evidently, in Xi's China Dream, the Party is the prerequisite and key to China's rejuvenation, and his implicit logical conclusion is that since the CCP is the only force qualified to lead China's revival, then whoever opposes Party leadership and CCP rule is siding with the enemy in obstructing China's revival.  Thus for the sake of this revival, anti-communist forces are to be fought and eliminated, and the elimination must be successful.

This is how the CCP has packaged and surreptitiously turned the Party's interests into the interests of the state, or at least the core interests of the state, which also seems to have furnished a justification for suppressing domestic opposition. The CCP does not shy away from this, and when addressing the outside world on the issue of what constitutes China's core interests, it bluntly states that this includes China's current political system.

Logically, there seems to be no problem with the CCP’s argument, but the problem lies not in the logic, but rather in the unverified nature of the facts, because history cannot be “hypothesized” and cannot be checked repeatedly in a laboratory as in the natural sciences. The "fact" is that the CPC has ruled China for 70 years, and its disasters and achievements cannot be assumed to be better or worse than what leadership by another party would have produced. The cunning of the Chinese Communist Party lies in this point, using an unverifiable "fact" to claim that it is the most qualified to lead the people to achieve the China Dream of national rejuvenation, making the argument irrefutable.

When the CCP “realized” it was carrying forward the “heavenly mission” of China’s rejuvenation and that this could serve as a basis for its political legitimacy, it stopped acting as it had in the past, passively following along in the wake of others, “learning” from others’ experience, and instead started exporting its own experience and values to international society, seizing ever more power to define international norms or even partially changing the international order.  All of this increased the CCP’s confidence in China and in itself, and the outside world has observed that diplomacy under Xi Jinping has seemed quite aggressive and spirited, as we see in One Belt-One Road, the establishment of the Asian Investment Bank, the building of a community of common destiny 人类命运共同体,[4] etc. 

At the same time, in the face of domestic and foreign opposing forces, and especially hostile powers, the CCP again modified its past behavior, and no longer limits itself to passive reactions and return salvos, but is proactive, not backing away from a fight, and daring to take on challenges.  This is also why Xi Jinping put forward the "four self-confidences"[5] and included "great struggle" among the "four greats,"[6] because to achieve the great dream and the great cause, great struggle will be necessary.  Xi has proceeded in this way because he believes that China is currently approaching the moment of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. 

The CCP’s statist appeal, wrapped around the China Dream, has been an effective tool of mass political mobilization.  Even if a fair number of people, especially liberals and reformers within the Party, are dissatisfied with the political turn to the left and the intense pressure associated with Xi’s initiative, they do not differ with Xi on the question of national wealth, power, and rejuvenation.  Others may have different views and objections, but dare not raise them publicly, for fear of being labeled as agents of Western anti-China forces by public opinion. 

Furthermore, the idea that a monolithic state wholly devoted to wealth and power might crush individual freedom and happiness does not have much traction among the masses.  In fact, constrained by the particularities of China’s history and propaganda, in other words, the official historical view that China was for centuries among the world’s leading civilizations and was only cheated out of that position by the Western powers in the modern age, most Chinese people, including some liberals, now have statist elements in their cultural DNA. 

This is extremely clear on questions of national unity, which liberals do not oppose but even champion.  This is awkward for Chinese liberals and is also a reason why the extreme left and the extreme right easily slip into statism. 
The Chinese left and Chinese statism are in fact quite similar, differing little in terms of theory and narrative discourse, and no theoretical obstacle halts the left’s slide toward statism.  For the historical reasons mentioned above, some members of the right are readily drawn to statism.  But the influence of these leftist and rightist statists on the people is not particularly great, basically because of the academic discourse they employ. 

The mass acceptance of official statism, especially their acceptance of Party-led views on national wealth and power, basically grows out of the fact that they have no choice in terms of the message they receive and no way to test that message, as already noted.  The existence of CCP rule over China is not a matter of choice, and the CCP’s insistence that only the CCP could have made China strong is equally untestable, because there is no way to go back in time.  The people’s view of the future is inevitably influenced by existing constraints, and at present the CCP still rules China, so this is the basic, unique fact on which they can imagine China’s future.  When the CCP says that it can lead China to realize the dream of the rejuvenation of the nation, the people can only use past history as a comparison. 

From this perspective, even if the historical ride has been bumpy, and includes major disasters, nonetheless, China has become the world’s number two economy under the leadership of the CCP.  History is easy to forget, especially given the selective history crafted by the CCP, which makes it all the easier for the people to forget the parts of history that do not favor the CCP.  People often tend to give priority to their current feelings and experience, and the fact that China is the number two economy has led most people to believe that if they keep following the road they are on, it is entirely possible that China will surpass the United States and become the number one economy in the world.  The CCP also uses its economic achievements to constantly prove and reinforce the legitimacy of statism.      

Although Chinese statism has been accepted by the majority of the people, certain things had to occur for it to become an ideological weapon to resist the outside world.  And it was precisely Xi Jinping’s strong-arm tactics, domestic political oppression, and external attacks, that caught the attention of the West, and especially the United States, leading to the conclusion that China under Xi Jinping was becoming a revisionist power, i.e., one that is attempting to change or take over the existing international order, something that would directly harm American interests. 

As a result, Washington changed its past policies of engagement and integration, and instead launched a full-scale attack 全面狙击 on China.  It was thus as a response to the containment practiced by the U.S. and the West that Chinese statism assumed even greater proportions, becoming an ideology believed by both the officials and the people.  It took four stages to complete the process:  the U.S.-China trade war, the attacks on Huawei, the Hong Kong protests, and the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S.-China trade war, beginning in 2018, has been marked by negotiations and taunts, taunts and negotiations.  China is the clear loser in the first-phase trade agreement reached in January of this year, and for the CCP it is a matter of having no choice but to sign a treaty under duress.  But the Communist Party's constant assertiveness in the process and the official propaganda linking the trade war to the humiliating history of the end of the Qing dynasty, together with claims that the time has long passed for China to tolerate abuse, succeeded in appealing to and stimulating the people’s nationalist feelings, which are both brittle and bombastic. 

This narrative succeeded in presenting the trade war as an American denial of the Chinese right to the good life, an American attempt to thwart Chinese development, which made the CCP’s counterattacks a kind of counterweight aiming to protect China’s national interests and the dignity of the people, leading most Chinese people to adopt a hostile attitude toward the U.S. 

If we can perhaps understand the China trade surplus as a pretext for the U.S.-China trade war, the U.S. attack on Huawei, launched soon after the beginning of the trade war, employing the strength of the U.S. government and the mobilization of its allies—including the arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada—only increased the dissatisfaction of even more Chinese with the United States. 

In China, Huawei is seen as China’s most successful high-tech enterprise, and has become a symbol of China and China’s pride.  American attempts to kill off Huawei have convinced the Chinese people that American claims to want trade equity are false, and that what they are really doing is launching a high-tech Cold War to strangle Made in China 2025.[7]  Hence, American behavior toward Huawei only strengthens mass support for the company in China, and for most people, supporting Huawei means supporting China and supporting the Chinese government in its resistance to the United States. 

The Hong Kong protests beginning in May of 2019, whether related solely to the issue of extradition or to larger democratic demands for universal suffrage, were originally seen by most Chinese people as internal Hong Kong affairs.  Yet external, and particularly American, interventions led them to adopt the viewpoint of the CCP, the argument that America was using the die-hard faction and Hong Kong independence groups to foment a color revolution in Hong Kong, which would turn Hong Kong into an anti-Chinese base.  By the same token, this undoubtedly led the masses to associate the Hong Kong affair with American support for independence activists in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, which amounts to a direct challenge to Chinese territorial sovereignty. 

On the question of Hong Kong independence, the state position is the basic yardstick for the position of most of the Chinese people, including some Chinese liberals.  The people support the Chinese government’s management of the protests in Hong Kong, and even feel that Beijing’s position should be stronger.

The coronavirus pandemic should have been an occasion for the U.S. and China to repair their differences and improve their relationship, but instead both sides amplified the contradictions and things moved toward complete disharmony.  The fact that the virus originated in China and China’s early cover-up allowed the U.S. to seize on this and blame China for its own poor response to the pandemic. 

The support of the American government for scapegoating China and seeking reparations, fueled by U.S. domestic political struggles and the election, also prompted counter-attacks from the Chinese government.  In addition, China’s relatively early success in controlling the pandemic, the fact that U.S. infection and death rates were much higher than China’s, and the later disturbances throughout the country provoked by the death of the African-American George Floyd, not only greatly strengthened the statist narrative of Chinese officials, but also diminished the aura of American democracy in the eyes of the Chinese people, most of whom instead identify with and accept the governing style of the CCP and its statist viewpoint. 

A typical expression of this is the change in the public attitude toward Fang Fang’s diary.[8]  Fang Fang’s account of the pandemic was at first wildly praised in Chinese society, including by the official media, but after China quickly got the pandemic under control, public opinion began to condemn Fang Fang, who turned into a negative example of someone who solely reveals China’s bad side to promote American values.  Popular support for China’s model of fighting the pandemic and for statism gave the CCP the confidence to dare to continue its resistance to the U.S.

To put it simply, although statism was a CCP ideological and mobilizational choice whose goal was to solidify its rule and counter outside enemies, it nonetheless became a state “religion” that most Chinese people could accept, which is related to America’s overall attack on China.  This attack was motivated by geopolitical concerns, but attacks on the CCP are also attacks on China, and provoke deeply held memories of historical humiliation.  These historical memories merged with dreams provoked by China’s current rise, leading the masses to accept the CCP’s long-standing propaganda claim that America will never stop until China is destroyed, which makes America the enemy of China.  In this sense, America objectively played a role in catalyzing the rise of Chinese statism.

One might say that, over the past three years, the CCP has used these events to successfully portray itself as the protector of state interests and popular dignity, so that the great majority of the Chinese people stands with the CCP.  To a great degree, the bankrupt legitimacy of the CCP has been renewed in the process.  In the absence of the occurrence of important social and economic crises in the near future, Xi Jinping’s exalted position will remain untouchable.  This is a tragedy for China and the world. 

Although a China that has fallen into the trap of CCP statism is highly unlikely to display the tendencies toward external expansion and invasion of Nazi German statism under Hitler, nonetheless, driven by a growing mood of nationalism and statism, China’s ruling factions, to protect their own interests and control, could at any time project inner contradictions outward, with dire consequences for China and the world.

The Transitional Nature of the Xi Jinping Regime

The rise of statist ideology has temporarily consolidated the position of Xi Jinping and the rule of the CCP, leaving Xi’s power untouched despite the impact of the coronavirus, to the frustration of many Xi critics inside China and out who hoped that the virus would weaken Xi and the CCP.  Nonetheless, if we take a longer perspective on Xi’s regime, say, through the next decade, then we might be less pessimistic.

Since Xi revised the constitution during the 2018 meeting of the Two Sessions,[9] removing the two-term limit for State Chairman and opening the path for his third term, speculation as to whether Xi would remain leader for life has never ceased.  My basic judgment is that his goal in revising the constitution was not to create a formal rule-for-life system as Mao had enjoyed, but rather to put in place a system like that of Deng Xiaoping who remained the effective ruler for 15 or 20 years despite having surrendered his formal position.  Having created a new basic institutional framework for the CCP and for China, and having solved some problems that he feels only he can solve, Xi will hand over power to his hand-selected successor.

Saying this is not just to strike an optimistic note.  The factual basis for my opinion is that, in addition to the fact that lifetime rule is not supported in regimes throughout the world, and even the constitution of the CCP contains clauses that oppose lifetime rule for leaders and cadres.  During the period between the 19th NPC in 2017 and the Two-Sessions in 2018, although Xi Jinping encountered a certain high-level resistance to his plan to revise the constitution and remove term limits, he finally pushed it through. 

This suggests that while he could have removed the clauses limiting lifetime tenure in the Party constitution during the same period, he did not, and the reason for this is that he wanted to leave a little something to restrain himself, the only explanation for which is that he did not want to see the restoration of the Mao-style system of lifetime rule.

Some people might ask:  since at present Xi’s power is unconstrained, the existence of such clauses in the Party constitution has little to do with whether or not Xi becomes a formal lifelong ruler, because should he need to, he could remove the offending clauses from the constitution tomorrow.  It is true that he could do this is he chose to indulge his sense of power, but in fact he is not a leader who has taken leave of his rational senses, and the existence of this clause in the Party constitution has to do with Party tradition. 

Accepting Mao’s lifetime rule taught the Party and the people painful lessons, and that the highest leader would not rule for life is one of the most important shared convictions of the CCP high-level leadership, having become a powerful CCP tradition since the time of Deng Xiaoping.  Even if other “good” CCP traditions have been destroyed one after the other by Xi Jinping, this one cannot be lightly dismissed, and even someone like Xi Jinping cannot formally excise this clause from the written text even if in fact he winds up ruling for life.  Should they do away with the clause, the CCP would become a genuine family-run organization, which would not only harm the real interests of other CCP leaders, but would also allow the CCP's ultimate legitimacy as the organization ruling China to be undermined by its own doing. 

For CCP leaders throughout the organization, no matter how much power they have, it is the individual that relies on the organization and not the organization that relies on the individual.  If the CCP is no longer legitimate, the individuals who are part of that organization have no legitimacy either.  Thus whoever wants to preserve the formal rule and political power of the CCP must maintain the regulations in the Party constitution prohibiting rule for life.

Keeping this clause will not prevent de facto lifetime rule.  Deng Xiaoping is an example of this.  From the moment that he named himself core leader of the second generation, even if he never took on the formal title of highest leader, he remained until his death the ultimate behind-the-scenes decision-maker.  So the person Xi Jinping is emulating here is Deng and not Mao, and after creating a new institutional framework for the CCP and for China and passing on his institutional legacy to his successor, in retirement he can continue to control the Party’s and the country’s direction of development.  

The only exception would arise if, in the latter part of Xi’s reign there occurred domestic disturbances that could overturn CCP rule, or if the country were invaded; the former could be an uprising, the latter a war with the U.S. caused by an attempt to unify Taiwan by force.  Should these occur, Xi could use saving China and the CCP as a pretext to impose lifetime rule.

Yet even if something like this were to occur, the Xi Jinping regime would have a hard time avoiding its transitional nature.

What I mean by “transitional” here is that Xi Jinping regime is merely an intermediate transitional state between the regimes preceding and succeeding it, and that the regime that comes after it - if it is still ruled by the CCP - will by its nature revert to and continue the methods and strategies of the regime that preceded it.

What do I mean by this?  If Xi were to rule China for another 10 years after his originally mandated two terms, it would not seem to be much different from lifetime rule in terms of the way most people think about human longevity.  But while the transitional nature of a regime can of course be shorter or longer, from a historical perspective, 20 years, or even 20 plus years, does not seem terribly long.

In Chinese history, the transition between the Han (206 BC-220 AD) and the Tang (618-907) dynasties lasted 300 years, four times as long as the transition between the Tang and the Song (960-1279) dynasties, yet both are called transitions.  The period of CCP rule has just now passed 70 years, and of the six dynasties implicated in the transitions just mentioned, it has surpassed the Sui (581-618) in terms of length and is approaching the length of the entire Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), which would mean that as the Xi Jinping regime enters its latter period of rule, its successor will be a new “dynasty.”  Even if we do not know that nature of this new “dynasty,” whether it will be a democratic China or a continuation of authoritarian China, in either case, Xi Jinping’s regime will have completed its transitional mission. 

And if the CCP’s mandate continues, and, like the Tang, Song, Ming (1368-1644), and Qing dynasties, it continues to rule China for two or three centuries or even longer, then Xi’s regime will have carried out its transitional role within the CCP’s own cycle. 

For this reason, by “transitional” I am not referring solely to a period of rule in time, but as I suggested above, more to the fact that the new Communist regime that succeeds Xi Jinping will not carry forward Xi’s style of rule.  After he hands over power, Xi’s carefully crafted and applied techniques of rule will, within a minimum of a year or two, a maximum of three of four, fall to pieces, denounced by his successor.  Logic and history both prove this.

First, from the perspective of the Xi regime itself, it is a mutation 变异,  a kind of deviance that cannot be a stable feature of the CCP's continued rule; it will return to its normal historical development with the fall of Xi.

Everyone thinks that Xi’s regime has inherited the mantle of Mao Zedong, and has returned to Mao in political terms, abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic focus on development, emphasizing ideology and the cult of personality—using Mao’s political techniques to bring China to heel.  Yet instead of seeing Xi’s regime as a Maoist revival, it is more accurate to see Xi as a mutation combining Mao and Deng, a freak he has created by trying to graft one onto the other.  Xi’s rule has not really abandoned Deng’s basic line of “one center, two basic points,”[10] it is just that Xi has put the “four upholds”[11] in a more prominent place within the “two basic points,” which, for a time, tended to overshadow the "center" of economic construction.

During the Deng era, which from a political perspective also includes the Jiang Zemin (b. 1926) and Hu Jintao (b. 1942) eras, the “two basic points” were in service to the “center” of economic construction, which logically meant that the “four basic principles” would give way to “reform and opening,” because only the latter could guarantee “economic construction as center.”  And this is how reform under the CCP came to pass. 

Yet the unfortunate consequences of loosening Party control and ideology resulted in widespread corruption (even if this was not the reason for the corruption), and when Xi Jinping came to power, corruption threatened Party rule.   Thus from Xi’s point of view, economic work was necessary, but corruption also had to be gotten rid of, otherwise the people might turn against the Party, and further economic development would mean nothing. 

The two issues that Xi Jinping has paid the most attention to over the past few years have been fighting corruption within the Party, and political construction within the Party, the goal being to strengthen anew overall Party control of society.  This in turn brought undue pressure on reform and opening and pushed economic construction aside, which is something that Xi either had not foreseen, or that he had foreseen but felt that the price had to be paid. 

Another product of this process has been an increase in Xi’s personal authority, which has become a cult of personality.  Xi may be using this cult as a tool, but given the basic nature of power, a cult of personality quickly can become a goal rather than a tool, a change Xi himself may not have anticipated. 

With the beginning of the U.S.-China trade war, and as China’s internal and external environments got tougher—and especially with the serious impact of the coronavirus on the economy—Xi was forced to adjust his policies.  Economic construction once again returned to the center, and reform, and especially opening, kicked in due to external pressure.  Although the U.S. continually threatens China with decoupling, China’s opening is not in question for the immediate future.  As long as China remains open, it cannot truly return to the Mao era, because the basic features of the Maoist era were:  ideology in command, a closed country, and no contact or exchange with the outside world.

Another reason that China cannot return to the Maoist era is that Xi’s personal power has never reached Mao’s level.  Even if his domination is supreme at high levels, his spiritual impact on the people in general is nothing like Mao’s.  In today’s China, no matter how much freedom of speech is constrained, a situation like the Cultural Revolution is unthinkable.  If we say that Mao in his day was a god in the eyes of the people, Xi’s power is that of a secular person, and even in terms of the authority he has by virtue of his power, there are many people who still see him as a clown.  This kind of authority disappears once its power base is removed. 

As a Mao-Deng mutation, once Xi steps down, his successor cannot allow the CCP to remain the prisoner of these freak tensions, because maintaining the two may produce a reaction of rejection, meaning a return to either Mao or Deng, but after having gone through 40 years of reform and opening, the ruling group itself will neither want to nor would it be able to return to the Maoist era.  In addition, a Mao-style regime requires a political strongman, but Xi’s successor cannot play this role, because the Maoist regime emphasized an empty and false spiritual life, which most contemporary people despise.  For this reason, a return to Deng will be the necessary choice for Xi’s successor, if the CCP wants to continue to rule.

Second, CCP leaders of the post-Xi era will not have a strong Red consciousness 红色江山 or a sense of mission based in Communist ideology or in having won the heavenly mandate 打天下坐天下, nor in carrying forward ruling strategies based on these.

Xi’s style of leadership, grounded in anti-corruption, highly concentrated political power, and a strengthened Party, is to a large measure the unfortunate result of his particular consciousness as a member of the second Red generation of CCP founders and as a “princeling”[12] who is carrying forward the Communist heritage.  This is all the more obvious when we compare him with the already politically defeated Bo Xilai 薄熙来 (b. 1949). 

When Bo Xilai, as head of Chongqing, promoted “singing red songs and attacking black gangs 唱红打黑,”[13] his goal was precisely to prevent the Communist world created by his father’s generation from falling into the hands of those viewed by the “second generation” as “outsiders.”  Xi is just a larger version of Bo Xilai, who sees his mission as ensuring that the Communist regime forever remain in the hands of the Red aristocracy, a stubborn belief he perhaps acquired during the Hu-Wen era (2003-2013).  As the successor chosen during that era, Xi,  seeing that Hu and Wen, both of “commoner" origin, were unable to effectively lead the fight against corruption, Xi perhaps developed a deep sense of crisis, a feeling that the achievements of Communism could not slip away on his watch. 

Hu and Wen were educated during the Maoist period, and while notions of carrying forward the Communist heritage were everywhere during that period, still, compared to what members of the second Red generation learned from their fathers and from their direct experience, the influence of these notions on Hu and Wen may have been somewhat attenuated, or perhaps may have had more to do with their personal trajectories.  For example, the fact that Wen Jiabao openly promoted political democratization suggests that the impact of Red ideology on him may have been weaker. 

Although the second Red generation also suffered during the Maoist period, with the exception of a few who experienced a great enlightenment, their Red ideology did not diminish, but instead grew stronger in the reform and opening period in response to the problem of special privilege enjoyed by CCP leaders and cadres.  After Xi Jinping became the CCP’s highest leader, regardless of his personal wishes, the privileged class to which he belonged demanded that he keep the Red ideology from being destroyed, and that he pass it on to the next generation.   In this sense, he had no choice, and if he failed then this group would lose its legitimacy.

But post-Xi CCP leaders, be it people like Hu Chunhua 胡春华 (b. 1963) or Chen Meier 陈敏尔 (b. 1960), who, according to rumors, are being groomed as successors, or someone drawn from an even younger generation, cannot possibly have Xi Jinping’s sense of Red ideology and sense of mission.  It is not of course that they reject it, but it is not in their bones. It never occurred to them during their youth, or even many years after beginning their adult careers, that one day they would be the leaders of the country. 

Their ideas of succession came to them after they were already part of the CCP power structure.  They could not possibly have been thinking at every moment of their lives that they had to return political power to the third red generation, or to the fourth.  Not being of the second red generation, they do not want to hand over CCP political power to the third red and fourth red generations, and even if Xi Jinping does hand over power to the third generation, due to the lengthening of the generational chains and the fact that the new generations have been educated and brought up in a more open and cosmopolitan environment, Red ideology will necessarily fade.

After Red ideology weakens, it is impossible that the sense of crisis and the set of ruling policies constructed on that basis will be carried forward intact by the new leadership.  Xi’s legacy will be abandoned, partially at first, but once the new leadership is firmly established, it will be largely or completely jettisoned.

Of course, institutions and ideologies can be stubborn, like Maoist thought, the deceased soul of which has yet to disperse even forty years after his death, and which is taken up from time to time by the ruling group.  Should Xi Jinping’s techniques of rule, and especially his ideological mixture of nationalism and statism, continue to solidify over 15 or 20 years, or even longer, it might be internalized into the DNA of a fair number of people, and it might be quite difficult to reverse the changes he has made to the PRC.  At the same time, there is no need to exaggerate this difficulty.  Looking at Deng’s negation of Mao and Xi’s partial negation of Deng tells us that in the post-Xi era, Xi’s negation can be quickly accomplished.  

Mao ruled China for 30 years, yet in Deng’s hands, Mao’s institutional legacy was basically negated.  Deng kept only the empty shell of Mao’s thought for a simple reason:  Mao’s thought was completely opposed to human nature, and the people had abandoned it long ago, and Deng was simply following the people’s wishes.  Xi’s partial abandonment of Deng’s line was also because corruption and inequality between rich and poor had provoked popular dissatisfaction. 

Yet what Xi is doing now is also against human nature, and if we admit that his authority is based on power, then once he has no more power, the Xi “brand” that he has stamped on the CCP and on China will be quickly erased.  Those high officials that now bow and scrape before Xi, endlessly repeating his name, are motivated by opportunism or fear, and they neither respect him nor identify with him. 

Moreover, mainstream Chinese society in the post-Xi era will be made up of people born between 1980 and 2000.  As a result of globalization, the education these three generations received, and the conditions under which they matured, are completely different from those of their parents.  While we should not overestimate the appeal of democratic consciousness and ideas to these people, it is also hard to imagine that they will submit for a long period of time to a system that preaches an empty ideology and shackles individual freedom. 

For all of these reasons, if CCP rule continues in the post-Xi era, and regardless if China’s rise continues or if China enters a period of decline, the natural development of history will be toward Deng’s line and not the Xi mutation—and even less Mao’s line—and we should feel optimistic about the transitional nature of Xi’s regime.

Beijing’s Revision of the International Order is a Strategy of “Advancing in Order to Retreat”

If the analysis in the two preceding sections makes sense, then it is worth examining the China policy of the current U.S. administration.

At present, there is no force within Chinese society that can challenge Xi Jinping’s rule, which means that such efforts have to rely on outside strength, and looking globally, there is only the West, and chiefly the United States.

The impression this American administration leaves on people is that there is no consistent China strategy.  Former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s new book reveals that Trump’s opinions of China and those of his White House staff are not the same.  Trump is concerned basically with tangible benefits and his reelection, and it was only after the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the election took on important dimensions that Trump was forced to adopt the China policy of his advisors. 

This is why the White House's report on its Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China in May announced a "principled realism" in its approach to relations with China.  Yet the report provides no clear definitions of what those “principles” might be.  According to the reading of a certain number of China scholars, the likely emphasis will be that, at the same time that American China strategy returns to realism, it will focus even more on the idealism that has always existed in U.S. diplomacy.  This means returning to the values of human rights, democracy, and freedom that were neglected in Sino-American relations from Bush Sr. through Obama, and dealing with Beijing on the basis of those values.

“Principled realism” is not a creation of the present moment, and in fact, Trump used it for the first time in his 2017 address to the United Nations, although of course at the time it was not directed solely at China.  Although, as already pointed out, Washington’s China diplomacy and strategy lack consistency, this is the basic line it has followed in issues such as the U.S.-China trade war, the Huawei crackdown, technology and people-to-people exchanges, free navigation in the South China Sea, and the Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong questions. 

The policy is constructed on the intellectual premise that America’s 40 year-old policy of engagement with China has failed, because in the view of the American elite, including both parties as well as Wall Street, engagement “has not achieved America’s original expectations, which were to lead China’s economy and politics to experience the fundamental economic and political changes the United States had hoped for.”[14]  Hence the Trump administration dropped the policy of engagement and adopted that of competition—which in fact, means containment.

Many Chinese people, including liberals, leftists, and nationalists, share the same idea as the two U.S. political parties and the U.S. elite concerning the failure of the policy of engagement.  However, China’s left wing and China’s nationalists view this failure from the opposite direction.  That Americans revisit their past China policy and make needed revisions is as it should be, but judging the 40-year policy of engagement to have a complete failure is wrong, a viewpoint with which many scholars with a genuine understanding of China are in basic agreement. 

The American policy of engagement with China did not in fact fail. 

As the report stated, Washington’s 40-year diplomatic goal was to “bring about the basic changes in Chinese economics and politics desired by the United States.”  If by “basic changes” is meant changing China’s social system and political power, then obviously, for a country like China with a long history of imperial power, the time is too short, and the goal is in itself unrealistic or too focused on immediate success. 

History has indeed lent China and the West such opportunities—June 4 was one—which have led many people to wrongly believe that changing the CCP regime will not be all that hard.  From this perspective, when people see that the CCP’s hold on power remains strong, and that they are even challenging the United States, one can understand that a mindset of “the greater your hopes, the greater your disappointment” kicks in. 

At the same time, I should also point out that, after June 4, formulating China policy based on optimistic predictions that China, like the formerly socialist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, would collapse after 30 or 40 years of reform and opening and globalization, was a mistake made by U.S. China policy-makers, and not by the CCP or by China.  Claims like those by Michael Pillsbury, in his The Hundred-year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America As the Global Superpower, concerning China’s century-long strategic deception of the United States, are basically ridiculous, even if some revision of America’s past policy of engagement of China is necessary, if only in this sense.      

However, if the “fundamental changes” that U.S. China policy sought to bring about did not concern China’s political regime and institutions, but instead meant that China, under American guidance, would start down the path to democracy—in other words, if the goal was one of direction—then clearly, China, under Xi Jinping’s rule, looks to be heading further and further away from that goal.  In fact, it is going the opposite direction.  But in reality, the 40 year-old American policy of engagement had achieved a fair degree of success, to the point that it almost made China change colors.  Looked at from different angles, the evaluation of the same event yields different conclusions.  The U.S., or the West in general, did not fail to change China, but made important changes in China[15]...

The rise of Chinese liberals and of reformers within the Party, and the fact that for a long period of time they had the right to express themselves in Chinese society and within the CCP are proof of this.  Within the CCP have emerged premiers like Wen Jiabao, who have openly championed political democracy, and even in the Xu era, Premier Li Keqiang 李克强 (b. 1955)—who was quite a liberal when he was a student—is China’s second most powerful leader.

China is a country run by elites.  Broadly understood, this elite includes those with political power, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and in addition to these, those in the upper-middle class with a significant degree of financial freedom.  These last three groups believe most fervently in democracy, and they constitute as well the numerically largest portion of the elite.  For these groups, property and freedom are two things that need to be guaranteed, and only democracy can promise this. 

Despite the benefits of power enjoyed by the power-holding class of public officials, their observation of the system has led a substantial number of them to understand that the system is not reliable, and sooner or later will have to change.  The brutality of intra-Party struggle, i.e., in the upper echelons of the power hierarchy, among groups that actually hold power, has also made them look to the West as an option.  They actually are extremely clear that, in the event of a regime change, leaving for the West is their only secure option, so they send their children to the West to study and/or emigrate, and move their assets to the West.  The reason they still defend the current system is to cash in as much as possible before it collapses, so their attitude toward the regime is one of pragmatic opportunism.

If most of China’s elite believes in universal values, how do we explain that, Xi Jinping, after coming to power, blithely turned his back on Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic line of economic development through reform and opening, built a political dictatorship and encouraged a cult of personality, subverting China's political ecology and leading it down a path of no return from confrontation with the West? 

Part 2 of this essay already touched on this subject but I will push the analysis a bit further here.  While Xu employs a range of maneuvers and power plays in his specific operation of power, in logical terms, Xi’s Red background leads him to be extremely vigilant with regard to Western claims regarding “peaceful evolution” and “universal values,”[16] and to make sure that the Red regime does not disappear on his watch, he feels that he must strengthen orthodox education within the Party. 

The CCP's widespread corruption made the Party's middle and senior cadres, including the Party elders, afraid to confront Xi's Red transformation head-on, because his anti-corruption campaign earned the support of the masses, which in turn allowed Xi to easily carry out political purges against his opponents within the Party in the name of fighting corruption.  By hand-cuffing the entire Party, especially senior Party cadres, with political rules and discipline, Xi imposes his will throughout the entire Party, thereby greatly reducing the space for reformists and liberals within the Party.  After seven years in power, Xi has basically destroyed reformers and liberals inside the Party, and the CCP is now Xi’s plaything. 

Nonetheless, as I said above, given that Xi’s regime is a mutant regime blending Mao and Deng, it cannot become a lasting feature of continued CCP rule, and the post-Xi leadership of the CCP will not share his consciousness or sense of mission based on having saved China.  In a situation of weakened authority, once Xi hands over power, the techniques of rule employed during the Xi era will be abandoned, just as Deng abandoned Mao and as Xi abandoned Deng.

Consequently, if Washington’s goal is, as Vice-President Pence said, merely to have China return to the reform and opening of the Deng period, and not to change the CCP system, this can probably be achieved in ten years.  In terms of historical logic, the 15 or 20 years of Xi’s rule are a transitional period in CCP history.  The United States should understand that a super-sized country like China and a super-sized party with more than 90 million members, like the CCP, are slow to change. 

There is a saying in China that “you can’t eat hot tofu in a hurry 心急吃不了热豆腐.”  If your goal is to see radical or even fundamental changes in China, while China is stable and developing, then 40 years is far from enough.  The late Qing dynasty, in the face of major changes not seen for a thousand years, still managed to hang on for half a century, and the end of the dynasty was only brought about by many fortuitous events.  Today’s China is much stronger than the China of the late Qing period, and the CCP is much more stable that the rot at the court of the Qing emperor.  Bringing an end to the CCP will require long-term vision, patience, and the ability to wait and seize the right moment.

Washington will answer that it cannot passively wait, allowing China to peacefully develop for another ten years, allowing China to become stronger still, to the point that the U.S. might no longer have the strength of block the CCP’s challenge to the interests of the United States and the international order.  But there is no need for the United States to “wait passively.”  If the U.S. continues its former policy of engagement, or employs a policy of engagement plus containment, without piquing Xi Jinping’s fears of U.S. intentions, then even if the reformers and the liberals have been crushed by Xi, as ever more Chinese enter the middle class, and with the exchanges brought about by globalization, America will continue to influence China in terms of ideas and ideology, leading more of the Chinese people to turn toward universal values.

From another perspective, the idea that with another ten years of development, the U.S. will no longer be able to thwart China’s challenge to American interests is in fact the second error committed by Washington in his evaluation of China, by which I mean that they overestimate Chinese power.  The remark in the White House Strategic Report of China that China possesses “sufficient” power to challenge the American-led international order represents an exaggeration of Chinese power. 

There is no doubt that after 40 years of development, China has made great strides in economic capacity, levels of science and technology, and military strength.  Economic output is close to 70% of that of the United States at nominal exchange rates, China is rapidly catching up with the United States in some areas of high tech and advanced manufacturing, the PLA has long since upgraded its weapons and equipment with the help of China’s solid economic strength, and has greatly improved its combat readiness. 

However, it is also important to note the "puffy 虚胖" component of China's massive size, which is not as powerful as it appears.  Dictatorships, and especially one-man dictatorships like China’s, are characterized by “reporting good news but not bad,” and coaxing the supreme leader into believing all kinds of statistics that even the Premier doesn't buy.  Li Keqiang's revelation at the Two Sessions in May 2020 that there are still 600 million people in China earning less than 1,000 yuan a month is enough to show that China's true level of wealth is far from what its statistics claim to present.  For this reason, even if China has the strength to start challenging U.S. interests, it lacks sustainability, in addition to which, in terms of soft power—Beijing’s cultural values, China’s alliance system—China is a big zero.

If China’s power is exaggerated at the moment, then in ten years time will it be approaching or even surpassing American strength?  If China experiences ten more years of peaceful development, its strength will continue to notch up on the basis of its current state, and this possibility should not be discarded.  But a greater possibility is that the errors accumulated over these ten years might become extremely troublesome in the latter part of the Xi era, possibly leading to an explosion.  In supreme leader systems the supreme leader always decides, but one person’s wisdom is always limited.  The system will inevitably encourage Xi's arbitrariness and grandiosity, leading to a series of decision-making errors which, if serious, could lead China into a minefield and spark a chain reaction. 

In addition, the tendency of local levels and especially local governments to cover things up will lead to the creation of ever more problems, of increasing seriousness, and the people will become increasingly dissatisfied.  At some point, the cover-ups won’t work anymore and something will explode, igniting a larger social malaise.  A feedback loop will form with the policy errors committed at the top, or errors in decision-making at the top will ignite the suppressed mass discontent at the bottom. 

Given the widespread disinformation and those pandering to leaders, those who hold power have little real responsibility for the future of the country.  Their concerns are their own short-term interests, and they have no desire to take responsibility; they only pursue rapid-turnaround projects that allow them to pad their CVs, and ignore projects that are critical to national development but do not produce results in the short term. 

Take computer chips, for example.  If the United States does not destroy ZTE and Huawei, then even a crisis-conscious enterprise like Huawei, may, in the course of its next ten years of development, be forced to rely essentially on external chips, which will mean that China chip industry will be heavily dependent on external supply. 

So to sum up, if America does not frighten the CCP and allows China another ten years of peaceful development, what will be the consequences?  All of the flaws of past one-man dictatorships will continue to exist in that future decade and in fact will only get worse, perhaps reaching a tipping point.  Even if China’s overall economic output surpasses that of the U.S., the problem of China’s lagging behind the U.S. in key areas and key products, due to U.S. constraints, will become ever more serious, and when the U.S. once again squeezes China with containment policies, China will be like a straw man, and will fall after a single blow, at a lesser cost to the U.S. than what the Americans are paying now.

The White House's policy of a "principled realism"-based containment of China also touches on our understanding of the role of Chinese revisionism and, more fundamentally, the expansive nature of the Chinese Communist regime.  In other words, does China have the right to pursue rights, power, and status commensurate with its size and power?  Is the very nature of the CCP regime that of an expansive dictatorship?  We need to be clear on these questions, because otherwise, China policy based on the basis of such understanding will be flawed.

In terms of their basic natures, all countries, and especially all great powers, are revisionists, who adjust their external policies in line with increases and decreases in their power and changes in the external environment.  Of course, when the U.S. labels China “revisionist,” this has a particular meaning, which is that China wants to overturn or at least revise the current American-led international order, the order, with the United Nations at the center, built after WWII under American guidance, in which China is an important participant.  The system basically reflects American interests, and after seventy plus years, the world has changed enormously, and if norms remain fixed forever, they will no longer accord with the current world order.  Certain developed countries are unhappy with the current order, and it is understandable that the impulse to change it has appeared.

China has been seen as the country that has benefited the most from the globalization of the post-Cold War, something that the CCP admits, which should mean that China has no interest in changing the current international order. It would seem that Beijing has emphasized repeatedly in response to U.S. accusations that China still defends the current international order.  Thus I agree with the opinion recently expressed by the former Indian ambassador to China, that at most, Beijing desires to take over the international order, and not to overthrow it.  Beijing’s true goal is in fact not to take over the international order, but to run it together with Washington.  Xi Jinping may have an exalted opinion of himself, but he is fully aware that China’s current power level is not on a par with that of the U.S. 

The idea of power-sharing that inspires Beijing is in part a “contribution” by American scholars.  Some years ago, an American scholar [C. Fred Bergsten] proposed the idea of a “G2,” which fueled Beijing’s “delusions of grandeur,” but the scholar himself knew that Washington would never allow China to rule the world together with the U.S., and handing over U.S. leadership power to China is even more unthinkable. 

Even if China’s voting rights in the IMF, the World Bank, and other important international financial agencies have increased, and China is accepted among the most important powers, nonetheless, international institutions are still monopolized by the U.S. and Europe and China’s position remains secondary, which is yet another reason that Beijing set up the Asian Investment Bank and launched “One Belt-One Road,” the goals of which are dual:  1.  To use these initiatives as a tool or a means to an end, forcing the U.S. and Europe to grant China increased powers in the above-mentioned international organizations; and 2.  Should this goal be unreachable, Beijing will use the Asian Investment Bank, “One Belt-One Road,” etc., to draw the map of the world economy in its own terms, thus expanding China’s geopolitical influence.  Only in this sense can it be said that Beijing has launched something new. 

Washington would challenge this depiction, claiming that it has no objection to China’s obtaining more and greater rights, but that the prerequisite is that Beijing must abide by the international principles of openness and fairness, and their behavior must be transparent.  Beijing insists on more power first, after which China will discuss the question of abiding by international laws (this last part is my supposition), because the existing international principles and order are not fair to China.  This is the crux of the current conflict, and both sides, looking at the question from their own perspective, are right to a certain point.

The reason why Washington insists that Beijing must first play by the rules—in addition to the fact that Beijing does not always do so—is directly related to its belief that the Beijing communist regime is by nature expansionist and plans to spread communism throughout the world, which in fact is a consensus belief in the U.S. and indeed in the West.  But my feeling is that this is yet another misjudgment by the West of the CCP regime.

It is true that in recent years, Xi Jinping has implemented what I would call an “aggressive realism” in terms of foreign relations (this is popularly known as “Wolf-Warrior” diplomacy), remolding Chinese nationalism and Chinese statism.  Yet just as I argued in Part 2 above, this is still in service of the goal of protecting China’s Red heritage, because with the bankruptcy of international communism, the CCP had to convince the people that only they could lead China’s rejuvenation so as to gain mass support. 

This appeal to nationalism occurred at a moment during the Xi Jinping era when China’s power was on the rise, and Xi believed that he was capable of pushing the pursuit of China’s interests even further.  In this sense, if China’s national strength continued to grow, then China’s external aggressiveness or offensiveness would not stop.

Yet this does not mean that the CCP regime is by nature bellicose or expansionist, or that it is planning to export communism throughout the world.  Although in organizational terms the CCP remains a Leninist party, in ideological terms, Beijing long ago abandoned the “lofty ambition” of using communism to unite the world.  Even if the CCP is constantly talking about communism, and some Party theorists flog Xi Jinping Thought as the Marxism of the 21st century and incessantly claim to want to use the “Chinese solution” to rule the world, in fact I would be surprised if one percent of China’s 90 plus million Party members genuinely believes in communism. 

For this reason, rather than believing that an expansionist vision already has or soon will become China’s foreign policy strategy, it is better to see it as in service of internal politics, part of the “propaganda bubble” through which the CCP manages popular opinion.  Xi Jinping does indeed have ideas that go in this direction, as we can see from his idea of “mankind’s community of common destiny,” but communism appears nowhere in his many discussions of this community, because he knows that the world will not accept communism, which means that if the “China solution” is really to be applied to world governance, communism will not be part of it.

In fact, today’s CCP is not a communist party in the orthodox sense, and today’s China is not a socialist country in a Marxist sense.  As many commentators have pointed out, the CCP is in fact is an extreme right-wing regime masquerading as Marxist, a CCP that has been transformed by Chinese traditional culture in its Confucian and Legalist forms, even if it continues to fly the flag of communism and even if Xi Jinping continues to pretend that he wants to return the CCP to the “original intentions 初心”[17] surrounding the creation of the Party. 

In a recent talk, U.S. National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brian called Xi Jinping the inheritor of Stalin, which is a collective misreading shared by China policy-makers in Washington.  Since the failure of Mao’s attempts during the Cultural Revolution to export revolution throughout the world, the CCP abandoned this “ambition,” nor do they have the capacity—and have not had for a long time.  In truth, after the collapse of the world's socialist camp and China's emergence as the world's only nominally socialist power, the CCP has been careful to prevent the regime from being overturned. 

Beijing’s preoccupation has instead been the United States and the West’s “never-ending goal of putting an end to China 亡我之心不死,” and the CCP is by nature a defensive party, with no dreams of expansion or invasion.  It is just that in the era of Xi Jinping, with the great increase in China’s national power, he has come to believe that he now has the strength to counter Western ideas like China’s “peaceful evolution” and reclaim interests that originally belonged to China, which I see is a kind of strategy of  "advancing to retreat."

For this reason, if America’s understanding of the post-Mao CCP is biased, if they have exaggerated China’s strength, and come to their current fever-pitch conviction that if they don’t stop China now they never will, or the price to pay will be too high, which leads to the full-bore development of their policy of competition and containment, then unless the U.S. carries out sustained resistance or even defeats China in a hot war, China will certainly reply in kind, meaning not only that America will incur losses that she need not incur, but that it will also cost the U.S. Chinese allies with America’s “principled realism”—reformers within the CCP and liberals in the broader society. 

According to the explanation provided in the White House’s China Strategic Report, America aims to separate the Chinese people and the CCP, and the U.S. goal is not to contain China, but rather the CCP.  Accordingly, reformers within the Party and liberals in society at large should be allies that the U.S. should seek to bring on board to remove the CCP.  But in a system where the Party and the state are not divided, there is in fact no way to separate the people from the CCP, all the more because reformers and liberals within the Party are organized parts of the Party. 

Attacking the CCP obviously raises the question of what side this latent ally will choose, which is very important to the U.S., but it is not hard to imagine that in this type of situation, they cannot choose the U.S., but will remain firmly with the Party.  Because once the Party is gone, everything they have goes with it.   

How the U.S. should Respond to China’s Challenge

Consequently, responding to the CCP requires a finer-honed policy.

The White House China Strategy Report mentioned above promotes a policy of competition with/containment of China under the guidance of “principled realism,” and proclaims that the U.S. goal is to increase the resilience of its institutions, alliances, and partnerships so as to defeat the China challenge, forcing Beijing to halt or curtail actions that harm the vital national interests of the United States and its allies and partners. 

Although the report states that American policy begins from the premise of not attempting to change China’s model of internal rule, and will not attempt to contain China’s development, the report also points out that the U.S. will not accept any action by Beijing that weakens the “free, open, norm-based international order,” nor will it accommodate China's requests to create the proper "atmosphere" and "conditions" for dialogue.  Instead, the U.S. is ready to tolerate considerable bilateral friction.

Compared to past China policies that confused the CCP with China, or that referred to the CCP as China, the White House Strategic China Report makes progress in attempting an appropriate separation of the two, and clearly indicates that containment is aimed at the CCP.  From a geopolitical perspective, taking all of China as the object of the American attack commits the error of exaggeration, and makes antagonists out of those Chinese people who support freedom and democracy and who oppose the rule of the CCP, leaving some of them no choice but to become nationalists or statists, to be used by the CCP, while they could have been allies of the U.S. had they played their cards right.

Yet, even if Washington’s recent China policy extends an “olive branch” to the Chinese people, the steps taken in this direction are too limited, since the policy continues to attack the CCP as a whole, and does not note the divisions within the CCP, the reformers, the liberals, the hardliners, the conservatives.  In a Party of more than 90 million members, even if reformers and liberals make up only a minority, there are still many in terms of absolute numbers, especially since, as I argued above, over the course of 40 years of reform and opening, the U.S. has successfully influenced the thought of a good number of Party members, who identify with ideas of freedom and democracy and with universal values, and who take the U.S. as the object to imitate as China undertook institutional reforms. 

These people occupy an important position within the Party, and for a long time monopolized public opinion within the CCP and in Chinese society.  As for why these Party members have not abandoned the CCP, one factor is the lure of practical benefits, and another is that China is too big and too complicated, and they think it is too simple to imagine that freedom and democracy will immediately replace an abandoned CCP. 

In light of China's recent history of colonization and bullying by the West and the Party-centered education these people have received, many of them understand universal values in nationalistic terms, and lean toward a solution of maintaining the CCP and transforming it into a party that supports freedom and democracy rather than overturning it.  If America were not desperate to encircle and contain China, they believe that in the fullness of time, the CCP could be transformed. 

As I suggested in the analysis in Part 2, even if Xi Jinping, through his anti-corruption campaign, his political purges, and his personality cult, has succeeded in building a centralized, individual power and clearly leaving his mark on the CCP, all of which has led to the retreat of the reformers and liberals within the Party, the fact remains that once Xi is gone, his transformation of the Party will be retransformed rapidly.  In the light of this judgement, the best thing for the U.S. today is to stop making a fuss and allow China another ten years of peaceful development, while at the same time stockpiling and upgrading all kinds of preventive "ammunition" against the Chinese Communist Party. 

In other words, speak with actions rather than words, step up measures domestically but loosen up policies internationally, thus allowing the CCP to relax its vigilance.  Hence when the accumulated errors that Xi Jinping will commit over the next decade or so are large enough, a well-focused and comprehensive attack on the CCP will most likely bring it down. 

Of course, America is a democratic country and there is no way to hide the government’s diplomacy from the media and from public opinion, but still, as long as Washington does not up the level of confrontation, some things can be done on the quiet, and by the time Xi Jinping discovers the U.S. intentions, it will be too late.

To take a step back, even if Washington feels that it cannot permit China another ten years of easy development, if U.S. goals are really what Vice-President Pence said they are in the talk he gave at the Hudson Institute in 2018, i.e., a return to the Deng-era line of reform and opening, then the U.S. should shrink the sphere of their attack and focus not on the CCP as a whole, but on Xi Jinping himself, because Xi is the focal point of all internal and external, domestic and international problems, and opposing Xi is not only the largest common denominator in Chinese society but also within the CCP. 

Moreover, given that Xi holds all the top posts in the Party, government and army, then once he falls from power—no matter how it happens—it could readily spark factionalization and reorganization within the CCP, and it is possible, after a series of brutal battles, that the Party will be unable to endure yet another inner-Party split, especially at the upper levels, and will finally dissolve.  If you make no distinctions between contradictions and priorities, and confound Xi with the Party, if you believe that Xi has coerced the Party and that opposing Xi means opposing the Party as whole, then not only the Party will be hard to counter, but it may be impossible to oppose Xi. 

The reason is that even if Xi monopolizes the top positions, he is not after all the organization itself, and his power cannot exceed that of the organization.  Attacking Xi and the Party together can put reformers in the Party in an awkward position, and finally leave them no choice but to embrace the Party, which objectively means helping Xi.

Yet in the past few years, the Trump government’s diplomatic policy with regard to China for the most part has not opposed Xi, but instead has tried to trade with him; nor has it opposed the CCP, but instead has greatly opposed China—it has been going in the opposite direction from what it should.  This kind of policy has not only pulled the rug out from under reformers and liberals within the Party, who have been marginalized by the hardliners, but has perhaps also forced many of the Chinese people, and especially people in the lower classes, to take Xi’s side. 

Having been moved by CCP propaganda, many of these people think that in resisting America, Xi Jinping and the CCP are protecting China’s national interests, and those that oppose them are traitors, which greatly shrinks the social space available to liberals in China.

Even if Washington’s China policy has been adjusted somewhat since May, it remains true that an overall, undifferentiated attack on the CCP has the objective outcome of further marginalizing reformers and liberals within the Party, and driving some of them into Xi Jinping’s camp.  Perhaps Washington is acting this way because it believes that in the current situation, where Sino-American relations are even worse than Soviet-American relations during the Cold War, there is no need to distinguish reformers and liberals within the CCP and create the conditions that would allow them to take power. 

If this is indeed how Americans are thinking, then the idea expressed in the report that “we do not want to cut ourselves off from the Chinese people,” the idea of separating the Chinese people from the CCP, must not mean much.  As I argued in Part 1, the Chinese Communist Party has already stirred up statist sentiments in the majority of the population in the name of patriotism and nationalism, and it is hard for the people to believe that a U.S. attack on the CCP is not a pursuit of American interests (in fact, Washington is not shy on this point), but instead an effort to benefit China and the Chinese people. 

As the people see it, no matter how Washington justifies the attack, no matter what magic formula it uses, attacking the CCP means attacking China.  In a situation where the Party has bound the state and the Party-State together to the point that the two cannot be separated, the more ferocious the American attack on the CCP, the greater the damage to China’s interests.  From this perspective there are limits to what can be done to change the Chinese people’s attitudes toward the U.S. policy of containment of the CCP.

Simply put, based on the argument I have developed that Xi Jinping’s regime is transitional, Washington’s best policy toward the CCP is to create the conditions that will support anti-Xi strength within the Party, allowing the reform factions and the liberal factions to accumulate strength in preparation for a sudden blow as the Xi regime naturally falls apart.  Prior to this it is better not to provoke the CCP, which will only increase its vigilance concerning the U.S. policy of containment. 

But the conditions necessary to carry this out have already disappeared, and Washington has prematurely pointed its dagger at the CCP and at China, revealing its intent to exterminate the regime.  While attacking and encircling China on all fronts, and especially on the "choke hold" of cutting-edge technology, poses genuine dangers for China, it also allows Beijing to examine the weaknesses of its own system and to plug the holes one after the other.  To a large extent, Beijing’s hardline response to the Hong Kong issue followed a similar logic. 

When Beijing uses a new nationwide system to fix these loopholes and publicizes cutting-edge technology that has been sanctioned by the U.S., Beijing will no longer be constrained by the United States in these key areas, which means that even if its technical level remains behind that of the U.S., they will no longer have to worry about American encirclement as they do now, and they will have much greater strength to develop a counter-attack against the U.S.

For this reason, the next five years will be the hardest for Beijing.  Since Washington has already changed its policy, no longer investing hope in reformers and liberals within the Party and instead engaging in an overall attack, it would be better to go one step further, and not bother to deliberately distinguish the Party from the people and to try to separate the two, and not worry that attacking China will incite the Chinese people’s opposition.  As I have already argued, even if the two are divisible in terms of concepts and logic, in policy terms such a division is hard to execute.  Superficially attempting to “suck up to” the Chinese people may in fact have the opposite effect, and weaken the strength of the attack.[18]  

This is where the White House China Strategy Report is confused.  Now that Sino-American relations have descended to the level of a complete cat fight, Beijing portraying Washington as China’s demon and most Chinese people accepting that portrait, there is no reason for the U.S. to worry about the feelings of the Chinese people toward the U.S.  It would make more sense to take even more drastic measures than before, until the CCP has been beaten to the ground and is begging for mercy.  If not, it will be really difficult to contain the CCP after 5 years when Beijing is back on its feet.  For this reason, the coming five years represent a window of opportunity for the U.S. containment policy.

But this also demands that Washington improve its image.  In recent years, the U.S. has not only been challenged by China, but has also suffered from its own internal difficulties, which damages its image as a democratic beacon throughout the world.  Racial issues within the United States, the polarization of party politics, politicians’—especially the president’s—lack of self-respect, populism in electoral politics, social inequalities and questions of fairness and justice—all of these have gotten worse after Trump came to power, and the federal government’s disastrous response to the pandemic only further tarnished America’s image. 

Many people are wondering about the decline of American democracy and the decline of the capacity of the American government, and if Washington wants to “increase the resilience of its institutions, alliances, and partnerships,” join together with its allies and mobilize Americans to support the government’s attack on China, it will first need to repair the holes in American democracy, otherwise it will have a hard time getting its allies to follow it in a fight against China.

In China, the reason that a part of the people, which includes some liberals, have come to support the Chinese government is not a simple matter of having been fooled by CCP propaganda, but in fact because they are disappointed with the U.S.  Seeing all of the problems that have occurred in the U.S. in recent years, many people who once worshipped the American democratic system and saw America as a beacon have changed their view of the country, or at least they worship it less. 

​If American democracy continues to suffer, and problems of its own making continue to pile up, and if government officials who refuse to take responsibility instead try to blame China and continually demonize China, then the moral basis of American attacks on China will receive little support from Chinese people within China, and some people who still have faith in American democracy have to abandon the United States.  

Even if the CCP is overturned due to a U.S. attack, the Chinese people will not necessarily choose the American path of democracy.  From this perspective, American domestic politics is in fact a form of diplomacy, and improving politics in America, fixing the problems with its democratic system, will help to win the Chinese people’s hearts to the U.S., allowing them to launch a better attack on the CCP.

Finally, let me stress one last point.  Responding to China’s challenge is a systemic question, while here I have merely been discussing some thoughts about the direction of strategy and not the concrete details of strategy.  For the U.S., what is crucial is the goal, the goal decides strategy and tactics, and only by thinking clearly about the goals they want to reach in containing China can Americans choose the correct strategy to implement.
 

Notes

[1] 邓聿文, “中国的国家主义、习近平政权的过渡性及美国的应对,” published online here on July 15, 2020. 

[2] Translator’s note:  The book in question is Song Qing  宋强, et, al., 中国不高兴：大时代、大目标及我们的内忧外患 , an angry diatribe which both recounts China’s grievances and demands that China assume a more important place on the world stage. 

[3] Translator’s note:  The book in question is Song Qing  宋强, et, al., 中国可以说不, which sounds similar themes.

[4] Translator’s note:  A concept first put forward by Hu Jintao and endorsed by Xi Jinping as an expression of Chinese universalism in the realm of foreign policy.

[5] Translator’s note:  Often translated as Xi Jinping’s “confidence doctrine,” the four self-confidences include:  confidence in the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, in theory, in institutions, and in culture.

[6] Translator’s note:  A Xi Jinping slogan, first announced in 2017, concerning how to rule China.  The four greats include:  great struggles, great projects, great causes, great dreams.

[7] Translator’s note:  China’s strategic plan, announced in 2025, which charts China’s intended move away from being the “world’s factory” based on cheap labor, and toward a higher value-added economy based on high tech, artificial intelligence, etc.

[8] Translator’s note:  Fang Fang 方方 (b. 1955) is a well-known Chinese writer who kept a diary of her experience as a resident of Wuhan during the coronavirus lockdown.  An English-language translation (Wuhan Diary) was completed in record time and is available for purchase here.

[9] Translator’s note:  The Two Sessions refer to the annual meetings of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) – an advisory body of over 2,000 members – and the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body. They are China’s most important annual political meetings.

[10] Tranlator’s note:  "One center, two basic points" means that the central focus of Chinese state policy is economic development, a development that should also respect: 1) centralized political control and 2) aggressive market reforms and openness to the outside world.

[11] Translator’s note:  Announced in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping and also known as the “four basic principles,” these include upholding the socialist path, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the CCP, and Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism.

[12] Translator’s note:  The reference here is to the sons (and daughters, to a lesser extent) of the first generation of CCP leaders, who are often depicted as seeing themselves in mythic terms, believing that it is their mission to carry forward the historic work of their fathers.  They are members of a “second red generation” and are often referred to as “princelings 太子.”

[13] Translator’s note:  These campaigns were part of Bo Xilai’s broader “Chongqing model,” intended to chart a “third way” between classic socialism and neoliberal capitalism in the Sichuan megacity of which Bo was CCP secretary between 2007 and 2012, at which point he was purged by Xi Jinping.  “Singing red songs” meant reviving aspects of Maoist ideology to provide social cohesion, and “attacking black gangs” meant fighting corruption.

[14] Translator’s note:  I could not find this passage in the language of the report.  The closest passage reads “The PRC’s rapid economic development and increased engagement with the world did not lead to convergence with the citizen-centric, free and open order as the United States had hoped.”  See https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/U.S.-Strategic-Approach-to-The-Peoples-Republic-of-China-Report-5.24v1.pdf , opening paragraph.  Perhaps Deng is citing a Chinese translation of the document.

[15] Translator’s note:  Deng notes that “these changes, in percentage terms, constitute at least 70%,” perhaps a reference to something of which I am unaware. 

[16] Translator’s note:  “Peaceful evolution” and “universal values” express Chinese mistrust of Western intentions toward China.  The idea of “peaceful evolution” goes back to the beginning of the Cold War and to the various efforts, generally involving soft power, undertaken by the U.S. and other Western countries to lead Communist countries to gradually abandon their system and turn toward liberal democracy.  Western insistence on respect for “universal values”—which many Chinese dismiss as Western values—represents a similar kind of insidious “subversion” aiming once again to undermine Chinese socialism.

[17] Translator’s note.  The idea of “original intentions” is part of the current and ongoing refashioning of the ideological components of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and has a vaguely Confucian resonance.  For more on this refashioning and on “original intentions,” see Jiang Shigong’s essay here.

​[18] Translator’s note:  Deng employs what to me was an unfamiliar four-character phrase:  投鼠忌器, meaning  “to hesitate to pelt a rat for fear of smashing the dishes,” or more prosaically, holding back from taking action against an evildoer for fear of involving or harming good people.

            The link of the translation of this article https://www.readingthechinadream.com/deng-yuwen-chinese-statism.html