'Is China under the CCP’s rule an authoritarian or a totalitarian regime? So far, this issue has not been clearly understood by either party in the US..
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It is important to remember that the People’s Liberation Army is a “party-army”, responsible solely to the CCP as the ruling party and not the nation, state, or government of the PRC.'
- Cai Xia'As a leading Chinese propagandist, the former head of the State Council’s Information Office, Zhao Qizheng, cynically explained, “The ‘peaceful’ is for foreigners, and the ‘rise’ is for us Chinese.”
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Americans are too naïve. There are many differences between the cultures of Americans and Chinese. One basic cultural tradition of Americans is not to lie, to obey the rules, and to respect the spirit of contracts. In Chinese culture deception is in our blood. There is no spirit of the contract, no sense of fairness, and people often say different words to mean the same things under different circumstances. Something said today can change tomorrow. American people don’t have to care what the CCP says--but they must be careful about what the CCP does. If Americans naïvely believe the benign words and empty propaganda slogans that the CCP propagates, then they will be deceived and cheated. This is Chinese-style cunning. The Chinese Communist Party does not think that this is morally bad. On the contrary, they think that it is a “strategy,” as Sun Zi long ago instructed that “there can never be too much deception in war”. (p. 13 & 14)
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The CCP’s penetration of the United States and other countries, especially ideological penetration, began at the start of the twenty-first century. But at that time the scope and scale were limited. After Hu Jintao mentioned the need to build China’s “soft power” in his report to the 17th Party Congress in 2007, external propaganda activities have received much greater priority. As China’s economic strength increases, its ambition to expand internationally and even to dominate the world has grown larger, and its infiltration and influence activities have become more and more pervasive and invasive. The propaganda penetration overseas initially occurred in the name of cultural exchanges, but then expanded to media, finance, economy, technology, education, think tanks, museums, and other fields and institutions. Reportedly, almost all independent Chinese-language media in the United States have been bought up and are now controlled by the CCP, and the CCP interferes with academic freedom in American universities and think tanks. Also, the CCP’s “long arm control” has reached Chinese students and Chinese organizations across the US, and the party has even set up CCP branches in American universities (this is the case in many other countries as well). Meanwhile, China has progressively closed its doors to American and other foreign scholars. (p. 17)
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..the CCP has embarked on the path of militarism, conspiring to wage war, and it regards the United States as its most threatening enemy. In fact, no matter which political party is in power in the United States, it is impossible for the CCP to change this perspective.
COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, but the CCP concealed the truth and delayed prevention and control. This caused the virus to spread around the world, and it has not ended yet. Hundreds of millions of people have been infected and millions of people have died. In 2020, the CCP took advantage of the pandemic to spread false news, replacing normal communication between countries with “wolf warrior” verbal abuse in its diplomacy, falsely alleging that the virus originated in the US and trying to shirk its own responsibilities. The CCP has used every means to conceal the truth, preventing the World Health Organization and governments of other countries from investigating the origin of the virus, obtaining information on patient zero, and discovering the true situation at the beginning of the pandemic. (p. 19)
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Many Americans deplore the sad ending of the engagement policy, which is completely understandable. But in my view, this is an inevitable outcome. This is because the engagement policy was based on the faulty assumptions that international integration and economic development could transform the CCP into a modern political party that is willing to give up or share its hegemonic rule. But the CCP’s founding mission and organizing principles are to eliminate capitalism and achieve proletarian dictatorship, which institutes a completely opposite value and political system from those of the US. The two conflicting systems cannot be reconciled, and they cannot indefinitely coexist. As a result, China-US relations will inevitably move toward a standoff and/or confrontation (cold war or hot war is the external manifestation of confrontation). In fact, it is the CCP that has unilaterally ruined the engagement policy, because it believes engagement has served its purpose and is no longer useful.
The CCP regards the United States as a hostile adversary, even an enemy, while the US regards the CCP as its “competitor.” These are different concepts, which generate different strategies for bilateral relations, with different policy consequences. An adversary or enemy poses a relationship of life and death, but competitors only seek to gain advantage in a perpetual contest. (p. 20)
The CCP has always regarded the United States as its adversary or enemy, for two reasons. First, it fears that its regime will be overthrown. This insecurity and paranoia, and the need to justify its dictatorship, are the rationale to create an archenemy. Therefore, from my childhood to today, the slogan that “the US imperialists have not given up the wild ambition to subjugate our country” incessantly lingers on. Inside China, the CCP launches a political campaign every few years to eliminate domestic opposition, and it always guards against the influence of the US and other Western countries on China--in its words, to “oppose peaceful evolution.” Whenever the CCP and the people have intense conflicts, the CCP will use the pretext of “the hostile black hand of foreign forces behind the scenes” to justify suppressing the protest. After decades of anti-American propaganda within and outside the CCP, anti-American sentiment has become an indisputable political correctness. Second, the CCP always regards “eliminating imperialism and liberating all mankind” and “planting the red flag all over the world” as its political objectives. For more than seventy years, from Mao Zedong’s “anti–peaceful evolution” and “all imperialist reactionaries are paper tigers” rhetoric to Deng Xiaoping’s “calm observation, holding a firm foothold” and “hiding one’s capacity and biding one’s time,” or Xi Jinping’s “bottom line thinking,” “maintain political security, regime security” and “build a community with a shared future for mankind”--the fundamental point has always been to treat China-US relations as a hostile relationship of “life and death.” Up until now, only China’s lack of strength and the influence of the international community constrained China. But now that the CCP perceives American weakness and has an inflated sense of China’s own strengths, Beijing is adjusting its strategy toward the US accordingly.
On the other hand, no matter how many doubts it has about the CCP, the United States has continued to treat China as a normal country. The US government granted China Permanent Most Favored Nation trade status (PNTR) and supported China’s accession to the WTO. At that time the US was happy to see China’s national strength rapidly increasing, under the assumption that economic freedom would bring about political changes. While well intended, such actions were profoundly naïve. (p. 21)
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..The CCP just used and took advantage of the goodwill and benign intentions of the Americans. The reason why the engagement policy ended sadly is due to the fundamental misjudgment by the United States about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and regime, which in turn has made the US a victim of its own policy. The consequences of misjudging the nature of the CCP regime can be described in a Chinese idiom: “leaving a carbuncle unchecked will lead to endless troubles.”
Is China under the CCP’s rule an authoritarian or a totalitarian regime? So far, this issue has not been clearly understood by either party in the US. While unprecedentedly harsh, even former secretary of state Pompeo’s speeches referred to the CCP as an authoritarian country. In fact, the CCP regime has always been a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. (p. 22)
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..In short, the CCP is the greatest threat to American security and world peace, and the CCP regime has no moral compass. (p. 25)''..looking at it objectively, the Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental interests and its basic mentality of using the US while remaining hostile to it have not changed over the past seventy years. By contrast, since the 1970s, the two political parties in the United States and the US government have always had unrealistic good wishes for the Chinese communist regime, eagerly hoping that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the CCP’s rule would become more liberal, even democratic, and a “responsible” power in the world. However, this US approach was a fundamental misunderstanding of the CCP’s real nature and long-term strategic goals. All along the CCP hid its real goals and intentions, so as to gain various benefits from the United States.. (p. 1)
..the engagement policy has also hastened the rapid rise of China under the CCP’s neo-totalitarian rule. The CCP is determined to reframe the existing international order and norms and lead the world in the opposite direction of liberal democracy.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he has continued the diplomatic strategy toward the US established by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping--namely, to take advantage of the engagement policy to gain time to achieve the CCP’s goals .. the CCP has increasingly become the greatest challenge and greatest threat to postwar international relations, to the liberal system of freedom and democracy, and to the security of the United States..
..As a former member of the CCP system, looking back at the changes in China-US relations over the past fifty years, I have three basic perspectives that I wish to share with Americans, so that they can more clearly see the CCP and its strategies for what they are.
First, in the more than seventy years since it came to power, the CCP has treated domestic and foreign affairs as “one integrated game,” with the top priority of strengthening the CCP’s control and preventing the collapse of the regime. In this regard, diplomacy is an extension of domestic affairs and is seen as a device to keep the party in power.
Second, as far as the CCP’s global strategic objectives are concerned, China-US relations are the primary, and most important, factors among all. Therefore, the CCP’s attitude toward China-US relations and the engagement policy is determined by how well they serve the CCP’s internal political needs.
Third, international engagement and economic development have failed to soften the political character of the CCP regime. Its combination of ideology and extreme repression make it a totalitarian regime, and the sophisticated digital nature of its surveillance and repression has given totalitarian control a new dimension. All of this makes China a more dangerous adversary for the United States. (p. 2 & 3)
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..Nixon forgot to ask if communist China could be easily integrated into the international community. (p. 3)
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..what American officials did not expect was that Deng Xiaoping would delineate the boundaries of Chinese politics by setting down the Four Cardinal Principles: adherence to the socialist road, to the people’s democratic dictatorship, to the leadership of the Communist Party, and to Marxist and Mao Zedong Thought. From the very beginning, the CCP’s senior leaders have made it clear that the ultimate purpose of accepting and using the American engagement policy was to restore China’s economy in order to strengthen the CCP regime. Some space could be properly opened in the economic field, but in the political arena the Four Cardinal Principles must not be changed and the dominance of the CCP’s one-party rule must never be challenged. (p. 4)
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..Although Deng Xiaoping had given numerous directives regarding China’s political reform, he remained highly vigilant about any negative effects that might be caused by introducing Western liberal and democratic ideas into China, and he would never allow political changes to go beyond the CCP’s control. Together with several old party leaders, he exerted strong pressure and quelled the “Democracy Wall Movement” in late 1979, the Hunan student movement in 1980, and then a nationwide student movement in late 1986 (which started in Hefei, in Anhui Province, but rapidly spread to other cities). The latter movement resulted in Hu Yaobang being forced to resign as the general secretary of the CCP and the expulsion from the party of leading intellectuals Fang Lizhi, Wang Ruowang, and Liu Binyan. In expelling them, Deng importantly said: “When we talk about democracy, we cannot copy bourgeois democracy, and we cannot engage in the threefold separation-of-powers system.” The 1986 student movement was labeled “bourgeois liberalization” by Deng and party conservatives. This kind of characterization and treatment paved the way for the Tiananmen Square incident on June 4, 1989.
..The big fallacy of the [American] engagement policy was in assuming that the CCP could be transformed to share power and accept democracy, and therefore it erred in engaging heavily with China’s elites rather than its people.(p. 5)
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..1989 .. Deng also said that China’s one billion people were a “big market” and “we don’t need to beg the foreigners to come back--they will do so of their own volition, as they need us.” [7].. Meanwhile, the CCP issued multiple directives to combat corruption, rectify the party’s work style, establish an internal reporting system (whereby party members report on others), and adjust the relationship between the CCP and other Chinese “democratic parties” (the eight “united front” parties that are permitted to exist to give the façade that the CCP shares power) as well as with the general public to alleviate public grievances and stabilize the domestic situation.
The turning point was Deng Xiaoping’s misjudgment that the US was behind the 1989 prodemocracy protests.. (p. 5)
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..Deng said: “After we put down the rebellion, the Group of Seven summit meeting issued a declaration imposing sanctions on China. What qualifies them to do that? Who granted them the authority? Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is only designed to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which pursue hegemony and practice power politics. We never listen to such stuff.”
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Looking back today, we can see that Deng’s talks were indeed very clever. It was clear that he was the perpetrator, but he described himself, the CCP, and China as the victim. Deng blamed the June 4 incident on Western countries and the United States because that was badly needed to quell the discontent of the entire party and all the people in the country over the shooting. (p. 6)
Defying the national mood of censure in the United States, President Bush seemed desperate to get the relationship back on track (another example of American naïveté). Bush dispatched his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing on two secret trips, in July and December 1989. Instead of keeping Deng isolated and on the defensive, Bush’s initiative appeared groveling and played into Deng’s hands. The Chinese public had no way to know of these secret visits; even we in the central party apparatus did not know .. Scowcroft, the well-mannered “gentleman” American diplomat, was not confrontational. He used humble diplomatic etiquette to defuse the embarrassing atmosphere of concealed confrontation during the meeting with Deng, and this perhaps made a bad start for the subsequent handling of conflicts in China-US relations. (p. 7)
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At first Deng declared a twelve-character policy, but later it turned to the twenty-four-character policy “stabilize the position, observe calmly, take all in stride, never take the lead, and
hide our capacity to bide our time.” The latter phrase,
taoguang yanghui, became famous as Deng’s famous dictum to guide foreign policy. Most people don’t know that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc that triggered Deng’s
taoguang yanghui strategy. A group of CCP top-ranking cadres came to Deng after the collapse, urging that China take over the leadership of the world communist community. Deng insisted that “we should not stick our neck out” but must “hide our capacity to bide our time.” (p. 8)
..In other words, China must deceive the West by hiding its long-term strategic goals, pretending to be weak and harmless, in order to take advantage of Western markets, technology, capital, and talent, while waiting for the opportunity to strike back and win the ultimate war. This was an ancient strategy that Chinese emperors and kings had used many times in the past. (p. 9)
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It is precisely because the CCP has seen through the American capitalists’ strong desire for the Chinese market that it knew that big business would willingly pressure the US government to make concessions.. (p. 11)
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The CCP made great efforts to attract foreign companies (including US companies) to enter China’s market, and to increase economic, cultural, and technological exchanges with developed countries. At the same time, the CCP took advantage of opportunities for economic and cultural exchanges to sneakily acquire economic, commercial, technological, political, and military intelligence. In particular, the theft of high-tech research results is not only carried out in foreign companies within China but also by Chinese students and scholars who go abroad and may be required to “cooperate” with certain agencies to filch various information. About ten years ago I talked with a scholar who had returned to China about my desire to be a visiting scholar in a prestigious school in a foreign country. The scholar immediately said: “If anyone asks you to ‘cooperate’ with them for something, be sure not to agree.” I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but looking back now, this scholar’s reminder said a lot. For a long period of time, these covert activities that endangered American national security were only noticed by a few Americans. (p. 11 & 12)
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In order to conceal China’s true strategic intention, Xiong Guangkai, the CCP’s top military intelligence officer, made a big fuss about the English translation of Deng’s taoguang yanghui strategy. He alleged that the translation was wrong and completely distorted China’s peaceful diplomatic strategy, and it thus had caused undue negative effects on China’s normal foreign exchanges. General Xiong claimed that “the core meaning of the expression is not to show one’s strength, especially when one is strong and able, not to show off but to keep a low profile.” Anyone who has some knowledge of Chinese history and the writing of the characters knows that the hidden meaning of classic idioms such as “hiding our capacity to bide time” and “sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall” is to endure hardships and plan for retaliation. As a leading Chinese propagandist, the former head of the State Council’s Information Office, Zhao Qizheng, cynically explained, “The ‘peaceful’ is for foreigners, and the ‘rise’ is for us Chinese.” (p. 13)
Indeed, the CCP has skillfully played the game of Oriental cultural exceptionalism in China-US relations. After China joined the WTO in 2001, China-US relations entered a new stage. The US was quite optimistic about possible changes in China, thinking that a market economy would lead China on the road to democracy. When lecturing students at Johns Hopkins University, President Bill Clinton said, “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people, their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise . . . [and] the genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle.” President George W. Bush also said, “Economic freedom creates the habits of liberty, and habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. . . . Trade freely with China and time is on our side.”
The Americans are too naïve. There are many differences between the cultures of Americans and Chinese. One basic cultural tradition of Americans is not to lie, to obey the rules, and to respect the spirit of contracts. In Chinese culture deception is in our blood. There is no spirit of the contract, no sense of fairness, and people often say different words to mean the same things under different circumstances. Something said today can change tomorrow. American people don’t have to care what the CCP says--but they must be careful about what the CCP does. If Americans naïvely believe the benign words and empty propaganda slogans that the CCP propagates, then they will be deceived and cheated. This is Chinese-style cunning. The Chinese Communist Party does not think that this is morally bad. On the contrary, they think that it is a “strategy,” as Sun Zi long ago instructed that “there can never be too much deception in war”. (p. 13 & 14)
The CCP utilizes everything to achieve its aims. They think that as long as the purpose is achieved, any means can be used (the ends justify the means). They will use enticing language to lure multinational companies into China. But then these companies will soon find that they have fallen into a trap: they must transfer their technologies .. The Chinese have the saying that “diplomacy and internal affairs are just one game of chess.” In other words, using diplomacy to achieve domestic and international political goals and thus maintain one-party rule has been the CCP’s consistent discreet intention. (p. 14)
The CCP took advantage of the 2008 Olympics to do several things. First, it established a large-scale and comprehensive surveillance system for monitoring the Chinese people,which laid the foundation for the current high-tech rigorous nationwide surveillance system. At that time, the government said that the system was only to ensure the security of the Olympic Games and was only temporary--but, in fact, after Xi Jinping took power he made great efforts to strengthen the accuracy and strictness of this surveillance system. One year later another draconian security blanket descended over Beijing, this time in conjunction with the military parade commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. The Olympics security lockdown was only a trial run for this event. (p. 14 & 15)
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The Chinese Communist Party teaches the people to hate the United States. It has regarded the US as an enemy for more than seventy years and has consistently, from 1949 to this day, promoted anti-American sentiment. In fact, the CCP has long referred to the United States as the “American imperialists”, and the consistent, systematic instilling of hatred toward the US for decades has implanted anti-American sentiment in the Chinese people for generations.. (p. 16)
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The CCP’s penetration of the United States and other countries, especially ideological penetration, began at the start of the twenty-first century. But at that time the scope and scale were limited. After Hu Jintao mentioned the need to build China’s “soft power” in his report to the 17th Party Congress in 2007, external propaganda activities have received much greater priority. As China’s economic strength increases, its ambition to expand internationally and even to dominate the world has grown larger, and its infiltration and influence activities have become more and more pervasive and invasive. The propaganda penetration overseas initially occurred in the name of cultural exchanges, but then expanded to media, finance, economy, technology, education, think tanks, museums, and other fields and institutions. Reportedly, almost all independent Chinese-language media in the United States have been bought up and are now controlled by the CCP, and the CCP interferes with academic freedom in American universities and think tanks. Also, the CCP’s “long arm control” has reached Chinese students and Chinese organizations across the US, and the party has even set up CCP branches in American universities (this is the case in many other countries as well). Meanwhile, China has progressively closed its doors to American and other foreign scholars. (p. 17)
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China’s vigorous expansion of Xi’s military reform also runs in tandem with Xi’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative. A few years ago, I was invited to participate in the selection of “best curriculum” for military, ideological, and political education, and I attended the lecture competitions for a week. Quite a number of the lectures were about how to use the military to “keep the Belt and Road on course”.
Moreover, Chinese authorities have deliberately heightened tensions in the South China Sea. In 2011, when Vice President Joe Biden visited China, Xi personally promised that China would not carry out military expansion in the South China Sea, and he publicly reaffirmed that pledge in the White House Rose Garden standing next to President Obama in 2016. But subsequent actions have once again proven that the CCP never keeps its promises. China has accelerated the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea and has begun to deploy weapons and troops there. It will likely soon establish a naval base. China has provoked disputes with several Southeast Asian states in the territorial waters of the South China Sea that it claims within its “nine-dash line,” and it has arbitrarily refused to accept the decision of an international tribunal in The Hague that thoroughly invalidated these claims. All these actions have significantly increased tensions in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. In September 2015 Xi told Obama: “The Pacific Ocean is large enough to accommodate the two major powers of China and the US.” Xi seemed to be calling for the peaceful coexistence of China and the US, but actually this exposed his ambition to dominate the world on an equal footing with the US. (p. 18)
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..the CCP has embarked on the path of militarism, conspiring to wage war, and it regards the United States as its most threatening enemy. In fact, no matter which political party is in power in the United States, it is impossible for the CCP to change this perspective.
COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, but the CCP concealed the truth and delayed prevention and control. This caused the virus to spread around the world, and it has not ended yet. Hundreds of millions of people have been infected and millions of people have died. In 2020, the CCP took advantage of the pandemic to spread false news, replacing normal communication between countries with “wolf warrior” verbal abuse in its diplomacy, falsely alleging that the virus originated in the US and trying to shirk its own responsibilities. The CCP has used every means to conceal the truth, preventing the World Health Organization and governments of other countries from investigating the origin of the virus, obtaining information on patient zero, and discovering the true situation at the beginning of the pandemic. (p. 19)
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..however, many CCP members and officials, and a considerable number of elites in Chinese society, especially the middle class, accept and approve of the American democratic system and freedom as universal values.
Many Americans deplore the sad ending of the engagement policy, which is completely understandable. But in my view, this is an inevitable outcome. This is because the engagement policy was based on the faulty assumptions that international integration and economic development could transform the CCP into a modern political party that is willing to give up or share its hegemonic rule. But the CCP’s founding mission and organizing principles are to eliminate capitalism and achieve proletarian dictatorship, which institutes a completely opposite value and political system from those of the US. The two conflicting systems cannot be reconciled, and they cannot indefinitely coexist. As a result, China-US relations will inevitably move toward a standoff and/or confrontation (cold war or hot war is the external manifestation of confrontation). In fact, it is the CCP that has unilaterally ruined the engagement policy, because it believes engagement has served its purpose and is no longer useful.
The CCP regards the United States as a hostile adversary, even an enemy, while the US regards the CCP as its “competitor.” These are different concepts, which generate different strategies for bilateral relations, with different policy consequences. An adversary or enemy poses a relationship of life and death, but competitors only seek to gain advantage in a perpetual contest. (p. 20)
The CCP has always regarded the United States as its adversary or enemy, for two reasons. First, it fears that its regime will be overthrown. This insecurity and paranoia, and the need to justify its dictatorship, are the rationale to create an archenemy. Therefore, from my childhood to today, the slogan that “the US imperialists have not given up the wild ambition to subjugate our country” incessantly lingers on. Inside China, the CCP launches a political campaign every few years to eliminate domestic opposition, and it always guards against the influence of the US and other Western countries on China--in its words, to “oppose peaceful evolution.” Whenever the CCP and the people have intense conflicts, the CCP will use the pretext of “the hostile black hand of foreign forces behind the scenes” to justify suppressing the protest. After decades of anti-American propaganda within and outside the CCP, anti-American sentiment has become an indisputable political correctness. Second, the CCP always regards “eliminating imperialism and liberating all mankind” and “planting the red flag all over the world” as its political objectives. For more than seventy years, from Mao Zedong’s “anti–peaceful evolution” and “all imperialist reactionaries are paper tigers” rhetoric to Deng Xiaoping’s “calm observation, holding a firm foothold” and “hiding one’s capacity and biding one’s time,” or Xi Jinping’s “bottom line thinking,” “maintain political security, regime security” and “build a community with a shared future for mankind”--the fundamental point has always been to treat China-US relations as a hostile relationship of “life and death.” Up until now, only China’s lack of strength and the influence of the international community constrained China. But now that the CCP perceives American weakness and has an inflated sense of China’s own strengths, Beijing is adjusting its strategy toward the US accordingly.
On the other hand, no matter how many doubts it has about the CCP, the United States has continued to treat China as a normal country. The US government granted China Permanent Most Favored Nation trade status (PNTR) and supported China’s accession to the WTO. At that time the US was happy to see China’s national strength rapidly increasing, under the assumption that economic freedom would bring about political changes. While well intended, such actions were profoundly naïve. (p. 21)
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..The CCP just used and took advantage of the goodwill and benign intentions of the Americans. The reason why the engagement policy ended sadly is due to the fundamental misjudgment by the United States about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and regime, which in turn has made the US a victim of its own policy. The consequences of misjudging the nature of the CCP regime can be described in a Chinese idiom: “leaving a carbuncle unchecked will lead to endless troubles.”
Is China under the CCP’s rule an authoritarian or a totalitarian regime? So far, this issue has not been clearly understood by either party in the US. While unprecedentedly harsh, even former secretary of state Pompeo’s speeches referred to the CCP as an authoritarian country. In fact, the CCP regime has always been a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. (p. 22)
When Mao, Nixon, and Deng began China-US contacts, the CCP only loosened its foreign policy, but never loosened its domestic rule. After the 1980s, the CCP loosened its economic system, but never loosened its monopoly over power, over ideological discourse, and over economic and institutional resources. However, most influential American figures in politics, government, and academia seem to have overlooked this. (p. 22 & 23)
As a result, the continued implementation of the engagement policy by the US failed to influence China to move toward freedom and democracy. Instead, the CCP used the engagement policy to infiltrate the US, to steal scientific and technological intellectual property, to gather commercial and political intelligence, and even to lure some American political, business, academic, and technological elites to serve the interests of the CCP. Since Xi came to power, the party has stepped up all of these efforts at theft and infiltration.
As long as China’s totalitarian system does not change, China-US relations are destined to enter a period of fundamental confrontation. This is determined by the fundamentally different institutional nature and values of the two countries, as well as the different interests of the two countries. This will endanger world peace.
..China has turned into a refined form of neo-totalitarianism.(p. 23)
..Comparing the CCP regime with the core analysis of Sartori’s theory shows that the CCP regime is totalitarian rather than authoritarian. The work of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a great scholar of communist systems, points to a similar conclusion. He wrote, “The two decisive dimensions of totalitarianism are terror + ideology. It is the extreme combination of the two that creates other characteristics of this system.” 29 The extremely repressive, controlling, and rigid nature of totalitarianism means it cannot advance directly to a liberal democratic system. It must first be slackened from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. [30] (p. 23 & 24)
These two pillars of terror and ideology supported Hitler, Stalin, and even the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in the post-Stalin era, including the totalitarian regime of the CCP in the Mao era. After Xi Jinping took office, he worked hard to use high technology to obtain superpowerful surveillance capabilities, beyond the capacity of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. On the basis of Brzezinski’s generalization, maybe now we can redefine the CCP’s rule in China as terror + ideology + a digital surveillance system (using information technology and artificial intelligence) = a highly refined and sophisticated neo-totalitarianism. Sartori, Brzezinski, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, and other scholars of dictatorial systems would easily recognize it for what it is.
I characterize Xi’s regime as totalitarian because he practices “one doctrine, one leader, one party, and one nation (Han-centric nation).” Following in Mao Zedong’s footsteps, Xi Jinping has fostered a personality cult, made himself equal to the party, revised the constitution to secure a lifetime dictatorship, and further intensified repression with the rule of coercion and deception. The Nazi Party’s “national socialism” under Hitler was based on racism. Yet Xi’s “extreme nationalism” is also interlinked with racism. For a long time, the CCP has been continuously imbued with Han racial superiority and has carried out cultural genocide in disguised forms against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.
I characterize the CCP as a new type of totalitarian system because it uses information technology, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the people twenty-four hours a day. This kind of precision surveillance, closely combined with severe repression by the police and national security departments, makes it extremely difficult for people to voice their opposition in China. Since 2013, seven friends of mine who voiced their opposition have been detained and imprisoned by the Xi regime, all on fabricated charges.
In short, with internal suppression and external expansion, the CCP regime has deteriorated to neo-Stalinist totalitarianism. [31] Its nature and values are fundamentally opposed to those of the United States and all liberal democracies. The CCP has always viewed the US as an enemy, but never more so than today. Thus, it is difficult to form a multifaceted relationship of “competition, cooperation, and confrontation under certain circumstances,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken apparently believes. The most likely trend is toward standoff and confrontation.(p. 24)
The CCP’s neo-totalitarian system and Xi’s negative personal traits will cause the US to face an adversary that does not follow common sense or rules, that does not have integrity, and that is unpredictable. This will further increase the risks for the US and the world. At the same time, the CCP’s long-term and deep penetration into American society, especially elites, has greatly affected US policy formulation toward China, making Washington unable to see the CCP’s true strategic intentions, goals, and motives, and therefore unable to effectively respond to and eliminate the threats from the CCP. In short, the CCP is the greatest threat to American security and world peace, and the CCP regime has no moral compass. (p. 24 & 25)
That said, the CCP is not monolithic. The author has been working in the CCP Party School system since 1986. In my more than thirty years of contact with middle- and high-level CCP officials, I can say that at least 60–70 percent of the CCP’s high-level officials understand the trend of progress of the modern world. They understand that only a democratic constitutional government can ensure long-term stability in China and protect human rights, personal dignity, and personal safety for oneself. Members with vision in the CCP recognize the goodwill of the United States. The US should continue to support China’s civil society, which has gone underground, and at the same time foster and support liberal elements within the party to return to the path of political reform, so as to realize the benign and peaceful transformation of Chinese society. (p. 25)'
- Cai Xia,
China-US Relations in the Eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, June 28, 2021
Notes[7] An internal CCP narrative at the time argued that, on the one hand, the governments of developed countries in Europe and the US publicly announced sanctions against China, but secretly big European and American companies lobbied their governments to relax sanctions for their own interests and they maintained contacts through some unofficial channels. This emboldened Deng Xiaoping and other high-level CCP officials. I clearly remember the content of this talk circulated internally at that time.
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[30] For example, Spain realized peaceful democratic political transformation, and its foundation was established in the last ten years of General Franco’s rule. At that time Spain was already a de facto authoritarian regime. Yet in the former Soviet Union, although there was no large-scale bloodshed in the process of political upheaval, it did not smoothly move toward a democratic political system, and in fact stayed at the stage of Yeltsin-Putin’s strongman-type authoritarian rule. This shows that the totalitarian system cannot directly advance to the democratic political system, but authoritarian rule can.
[31] Minxin Pei, “From Tiananmen to Neo-Stalinism,” Journal of Democracy 31, no. 1 (January 2020): 148–57.
Context The Broken Promises of China's WTO Accession: Reprioritizing Human Rights - '..reduce supply chain reliance on China.'China's Xi Faces no 'Power to Constrain Him' - Xi Brings 'Era of Exquisite Totalitarianism' - '..ever since Xi took office in 2012 .. It is as barbaric and ferocious as Hitler’s rule..' - Cai Xia(War)(The threat to world order is China) - '..rigorous analysis of Chinese political warfare and a warning of its effects on democracy.' - ..‘Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy’(The New Alliance)(China is 'threat to world') - '..the only way to truly change communist China is to act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but how they behave..''Some are just psychopaths': Chinese detective in exile reveals extent of torture against Uyghurs(Like the Third Reich) - '..we are in a moment right now .. right before the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The Beijing Olympics are approaching..'(The Republic of China) - Taiwan Can Win a War With [Communist] China - '..[Taiwan] .. the freedom to purchase the sort of arms that make invasion unthinkable.'Kissinger's folly: The threat to world order is China'..We have a revanchist Russia .. And we have a China, which is still Leninist..''Far too many American multinational corporations have kowtowed to the lure of China’s money and markets by muzzling not only criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, but even affirmative expressions of American values.' - Pence'What do we do about China now?' - '..the Chinese manipulated Western politicians and business leaders into thinking China was evolving toward democracy and capitalism.''..the West’s 25-year bet on China has failed.' - How the West got China wrong - '..China uses business to confront its enemies. It seeks to punish firms directly, as when Mercedes-Benz..'(The Chinese Communist Party is a threat) - ' “Made in China 2025” .. “Civil Military Fusion” .. Xi Jinping speaks regularly of “preparing to fight and win wars.” From Europe to the Middle East, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific..''..a boycott on the Beijing 2022 Winter Games..'For Freedom, Justice, and Love - '..Chinese people learned about freedom, rule of law, human rights, and civil society. In some places, they found ways to practice democracy and freedom..'(Spanish, English, Chinese) - The Values: 'You only have to read one book, "The History of Spain" by Father Juan de Mariana.' - Thomas Jefferson