# The Elements of the China Challenge/III. The Intellectual Sources of China's Conduct

​III. The Intellectual Sources of China’s Conduct
Many misunderstand the shape and significance of China’s conduct because they disregard the Chinese Communist Party’s ideas about communism, about China, and about the world. In the United States, this neglect of ideas is sometimes rooted in the supposition that all governments want the freedom for their people in which the United States was conceived and to which it remains dedicated. At other times, the neglect stems from an unrealistic internationalism that downplays power in politics or an unrealistic geopolitical realism that discounts the political significance of opinion, culture, and tradition. The China challenge demands a more reasonable approach, one that honors principle in the execution of prudent judgment by taking seriously both interests and ideas.131 Instead of imposing America’s self-image on China or foisting America’s preconceived notions about international politics on world affairs, it is crucial to examine the CCP’s understanding of its short-term priorities, long-term objectives, and rightful place among nations in order to grasp how, and the purposes for which, the PRC exercises power.
It is reasonable to wonder to what extent CCP statements, speeches, and authoritative writings are designed for domestic consumption — to preach to the faithful, to demonize dissenters, and to define the full range of the regime’s supposed enemies — and to what extent they reflect the party’s core convictions and essential thinking. But without examining them, one cannot determine whether CCP statements, speeches, and authoritative writings are only rhetorical weapons of great-power competition or also expressions of deep-seated beliefs and abiding aims and aspirations. Such examination discloses a tight connection between the CCP’s words and deeds. As John Garnaut argues. “There is no ambiguity in Xi’s project. We see in everything he does and — even in a system designed to be opaque and deceptive — we can see it in his words.132
​China’s pursuit of global preeminence and drive to remake world order flow from the CCP’s overarching sensibility. That sensibility is authoritarian, collectivist, and imperial. Two streams of ideas nourish it. Seminal CCP writings and speeches proclaim cardinal tenets of Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by successive Chinese communist leaders beginning with Mao Zedong, CCP chairman from 1943 to 1976 and the PRC’s founding ruler. CCP writings and speeches also espouse an extreme interpretation of Chinese nationalism. The result is an ideological stance that is neither strictly communist nor purely nationalist, but resolutely authoritarian, collectivist, and imperialist.
Although both communism and nationalism are compatible with authoritarianism, collectivism, and imperialism, communism and nationalism are generally seen as opposing ideologies. Communism, as Marx taught, culminates in a single, worldwide, classless society. In pursuit of that goal, communist parties have tended to be authoritarian, collectivist, and imperialist. Nationalism emphasizes a particular people and its distinctive traditions and sense of political destiny; it varies as customs, practices, and political experiences vary. Accordingly, national traditions can be drawn on to justify repression and conquest but also to vindicate the claims of freedom and democracy — as, for example, in the United States, whose founding principles and constitutional system revolve around individual liberty, human equality, and government grounded in the consent of the governed. The CCP reconciles the conflicting imperatives of Marxism-Leninism and its extreme intrepretation of Chinese nationalism by assigning to China the dominant role in interpreting the ultimate configuration of, achieving, and administering international socialism.
Neither the communist authoritarianism the CCP has imposed on the people in China nor its hyper-nationalism are inevitable. Indeed, prominent alternatives to CCP authoritarianism have prospered in the region. No less steeped in Confucian traditions than the population of the People’s Republic of China, the people of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea embraced freedom and democracy.
Nevertheless, because the Chinese Communist Party calls the shots in China, the party’s ideas about communism must be well understood. So too must the traditional political ideas that the party draws on be taken into account.133 Grasping both brings into focus the authoritarian, collectivist, and imperial synthesis that drives the CCP’s conduct.
​The CCP’s Communism
In 1954, Mao stated, “The force at the core that leads our cause is the Chinese Communist Party; the theoretical foundation that guides our thinking is Marxism-Leninism.”134 Daniel Tobin has underscored the continuity of the party’s ideological convictions: “In his first speech to a Politburo group study session as general secretary in November 2012, Xi [Jinping] echoed each of his post-Mao predecessors in insisting: ‘Only socialism can save China, and only Chinese socialism can lead our country to development.’”135 And only socialism, from the party’s point of view, can confer upon China its deserved role in world affairs. The CCP aims to make China “a global leader in terms of power and global influence,” as Xi stated in 2017, by strengthening socialism as its “path, theory, system, culture.” Following former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Xi calls this approach “socialism with Chinese haracteristics.”136
In governing China, the CCP adheres to familiar features of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. The party is supreme. It acts on the assumption that the communist end sanctifies all means. It absorbs the state, subordinating the individual to the collectivity. It directs the economy (even as it permits a degree of private ownership and creates limited space for market forces). It controls education, media, culture, and religion. It regularly purges counterrevolutionary forces. It preaches the priority of socialism’s struggle to defeat international capitalism and political freedom. It proclaims the inevitability of socialism’s victory, which, it maintains, the scientific laws of social and economic development guarantee. And it promulgates among the people a rigid ideology from which it tolerates no dissent
Ideological indoctrination is among the party’s paramount concerns. The CCP imposes conformity of thought and action, for example, through the Great Firewall of China, which censors the internet, and a national “social credit” system that rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. To control information and surveil the population, “Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others.”137 Meanwhile, Xi is determined to put the power of the state behind the one and only legitimate understanding of economics, politics, and international relations. “We will work harder to study and develop Marxist theory,” he vowed in 2017. “We will foster a Marxist-style of learning, and make it regular practice and an institutionalized requirement for all Party members….”138
​In a landmark 1979 speech, Deng announced the Four Cardinal Principles, which distill the CCP’s communist convictions: “1) We must keep to the socialist road; 2) We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party; 4) We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.”139 In 1982, the CCP wrote the Four Cardinal Principles into the PRC Constitution; the principles also form an essential part of the party’s constitution. Since then, party leaders have emphasized that the CCP’s loosening of state control of the economy in some areas beginning in the late 1970s — a decisive factor in unleashing China’s economic potential and propelling China to great-power status — did not diminish China’s dedication to communism. In 2019, Xi lavishly celebrated the 40th anniversary of the declaration of the Four Cardinal Principles.140
Central to the CCP’s understanding of world affairs is the Marxist teaching that throughout history human societies have been divided into an oppressed class and an oppressor class. In the modern era, the emergence of two opposed economic and political systems dividing the world heightens the contradiction. On one side, according to the Marxist view, stands capitalism, with its fraudulent commitment to a political and economic freedom that inherently exploits the individual. On the other side, Marxism teaches, stands communism, based on central planning and the conscription of the people in service to the party, and devoted to what communism believes to be true human emancipation.141
Xi embraces this Manichean view of world affairs. In 2013, shortly after he came to power, the CCP issued “Document No. 9,” which enumerated seven perils to Chinese society emanating from the West.142 These include constitutional democracy, human rights, free speech, robust civic participation, and a vigorous free market. Daniel Tobin stresses that for the CCP, “individual human rights, including freedom of speech, assembly, and religion are to be subjugated in the name of the collective ends of security, development, and the Chinese nation’s status in the world.”143 At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, the CCP reaffirmed that China offered a new model of socialism that would prevail in the great struggle with capitalism and, by so doing, overcome the division between oppressor and oppressed and bring harmony to world affairs. As some Central Party School scholars have noted, the party intends to replace the post-World War II order which, in its view, is grounded in unjust Western political and economic principles, with a new one rooted in the CCP’s socialism.144 Despite Xi’s promises ​of “win-win” deals with the outside world, a recurring phrase from internal CCP directives proclaims the encounter between capitalism and socialism to be a matter of “you die, I live.”
According to the CCP, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc communist countries betrayed the cause, which compelled China to lead the struggle for socialism. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the emergence of a post-Cold War international order that welcomed fledgling Eastern European democracies, the CCP — though governing the world’s most populous country — saw China as greatly outnumbered in a perilous geopolitical environment.145 Since then, the accumulation of economic clout and military power have fortified the CCP’s belief that China is socialism’s savior and herald of an alternative world order.
Notwithstanding the CCP’s unswerving professions of fidelity to the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism, decisive features of the PRC’s conduct resist explanation in strictly communist terms. The CCP’s determination to indoctrinate the nation with an extreme theory of Chinese moral and institutional superiority is not drawn from the Marxism-Leninism playbook.146 While communism aims to create a universal and classless international order, the CCP seeks to export the Chinese model of authoritarian governance and create economic dependence on Beijing in nation-states around the world. And whereas communism envisages the eventual withering away of the state, the CCP has made a paramount national priority of rectifying the indignities and injustices that it believes China has suffered at the hands of the West — starting with the recovery of what the party asserts as the Chinese nation’s rightful rule over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.
These defining components of China’s conduct derive support from the CCP’s hyper-nationalist convictions.
The CCP’s Chinese Nationalism
At no point in its long history has China embraced the idea — assumed by liberal democracies and affirmed by the United Nations — of sovereign equality among nations grounded in respect for rights inherent in all persons. Instead, traditional Chinese thinking about government ​encompasses a strategic outlook that asserts China’s right and responsibility to rule the world “under heaven” through its uniquely refined culture and institutions. This strategic outlook also comprises views about China’s proper position in world affairs, the flow of history, military strategy and tactics, economic power, and domestic political order.147
First, traditional Chinese thinking sees China as the “Middle Kingdom,” the central state surrounded by lesser states.
Second, traditional Chinese thinking understands history cyclically. While the fortunes of particular Chinese dynastic empires wax and wane, China remains at the center and deserving of exalted status.
Third, traditional Chinese thinking is marked by a long view of military strategy and tactics. Military power should be accumulated, stored, and showcased publicly but only to the extent necessary to dissuade adversaries from compelling China to use it. Tactics revolve around the slow, incremental acquisition of positions so that opponents only grasp after it’s too late that they are surrounded and face overwhelming power with no reasonable choice but to submit. Sometimes an opponent will suffer a crisis that creates “an auspicious moment” for the landing of a decisive blow.
Fourth, traditional Chinese thinking views economic power as a primary component of imperial power. China should use its advantages in size and excellence to convey to partners in commerce the benefits of acquiescing to a China-dominated system.
Fifth, traditional Chinese thinking features authoritarian proclivities. It is characterized by a statism that directs economics and society. It is home to a legalism that employs a strict penal code to create the domestic stability that allows for the building of wealth and military might. And it sees political power as properly residing in an elite bureaucracy rather than springing from the people.
This is not to deny the depth and crosscutting complexity of Chinese tradition and the richness of the moral, philosophical, and religious ideas within it.148 Nor is it to suggest that freedom and democracy cannot flourish in China, as they do in Taiwan and South Korea, and did in Hong Kong. It is to observe, rather, that the CCP draws on certain prominent components ​of traditional Chinese thinking to bolster the conviction that authoritarian government undergirds China’s manifest superiority and inherent centrality. That conviction is as basic to the CCP’s self-understanding as is the communist dogma of intractable class conflict until capitalism’s demise.
All of the CCP’s paramount leaders, from Mao to Xi, have affirmed China’s nationalist prerogatives, envisaging China as the “big country” or “major country,” which should not be resisted by “little countries.” In the early decades of CCP rule, however, China’s economy was relatively small and weak. Because of the need to modernize and accumulate wealth and power, Xi’s predecessors tended to balance Chinese assertiveness with accommodation and compromise. Deng famously counseled that China should “bide its time, and hide its capabilities.” Early in the post-Cold War era, the PRC’s growing engagement in regional and international institutions — from the ASEAN Regional Forum to the World Trade Organization — created an image of moderation that encouraged the belief that Beijing would play fair and sometime soon embrace the norms of freedom and democracy.
However, underneath PRC rhetoric lay the CCP’s steadfast belief in China’s status as the “big country” and the need to protect the nation’s sovereignty against foreign influence. In the 1990s, former PLA Navy Chief Liu Huaqing repeatedly told his American counterparts that the problem was not China, the big country, bullying the little countries, but the other way around — that is, the little countries bullying the big country.149 “China is a big country and other countries are little countries, and that’s just a fact,” China’s then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi explained to his Singapore counterpart in 2010.150 Although insisting that China would act benevolently toward “smaller countries” in the dispute over maritime claims in the South China Sea, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated in March 2014 that “we will never accept unreasonable demands from little countries.”151 Similarly, China’s state-run media — most notably the jingoistic Global Times — justifies Beijing’s bellicosity toward its many neighbors as “punitive” actions undertaken to teach the little countries to submit to the big country.152
Xi can be assertive because of the fruits of his predecessors’ patience and determination, and because of the failure of liberal democracies — for fear of damaging commercial relations with the PRC — to put pressure on Beijing for bad behavior. China’s size and recently developed strength enable Xi to energetically pursue “Big Country Diplomacy” (or “Major Country ​Diplomacy”). Such diplomacy is bolstered by party propaganda and growing international influence,153 and champions the nationalist privileges and prerogatives to which the CCP remains dedicated.154
Even as the CCP proclaims China’s supremacy among nations and indoctrinates the people with a belief in the PRC’s paramount status, the party has for decades fostered in China an acute sense of historical victimhood and national shame. The CCP traces the nation’s grievances to the concessions the British imposed on China in the mid-19th-century Opium Wars. While seeing itself as the rightful heir of China’s ancient and storied civilization, the CCP resents the Qing dynasty’s failure to modernize, which it blames for China’s territorial losses and other disgraces at the hands of Western imperial powers during the so-called “century of humiliation” (1839-1949).155 Notwithstanding its destruction of major parts of China’s magnificent cultural heritage, the CCP stokes popular indignation by promulgating the belief that, for a protracted period, smaller and morally and intellectually inferior countries deprived the Middle Kingdom of its rightful status. The refusal of the United States to recognize China’s exalted position as the CCP understands it provides ammunition for the party’s narrative of China as a victim.
For the CCP, pride in China’s inherent centrality and resentment at its mistreatment by the West reinforce one another. This potent mix of pride and resentment nourishes party members’ conviction that China is endowed with incontrovertible title to rule in a loose system in which other countries enjoy considerable autonomy provided they recognize their place and submit to China’s socialist norms. At the same time, the combination of pride and resentment weakens China’s inclination to compromise and cooperate. Built around defeat at the hands of the West, the CCP’s founding myth disposes China to dwell on settling old scores and righting historic wrongs.156
Xi’s Synthesis of Communism and Chinese Nationalism
All five Chinese Communist paramount leaders — Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping — have affirmed the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism ​while adhering to an extreme interpretation of Chinese nationalism. A beneficiary of the massive modernization campaign launched by Deng and stewarded by Jiang and Hu, Xi has spoken most forcefully and openly about the union of communism and Chinese nationalism in service to the CCP’s ambitions for global preeminence.
At the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, the CCP amended its Party Constitution to enshrine Xi’s concept of “the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.”157 Xi emphasized the fidelity of his synthesis of Chinese communism and Chinese nationalism to the party’s fundamental teachings: “At its founding,” he said, “the Communist Party of China made realizing communism its highest ideal and its ultimate goal, and shouldered the historic mission of national rejuvenation.”158
The flourishing of the individual, according to the party, flows from the flourishing of the nation. “History shows that the future and destiny of each and every one of us are closely linked to those of our country and nation,” Xi said in a 2012 speech. “One can do well only when one’s country and nation do well. Achieving the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is both a glorious and an arduous mission that requires the dedicated efforts of the Chinese people one generation after another. Empty talk harms the country, while hard work makes it flourish.”159
Individual and national flourishing, Xi emphasized in a 2019 speech, are indissolubly bound up with the triumph of communism and socialism: “In today’s China, the essence of patriotism is the complete combination of our devotion to the country, to the Chinese Communist Party and to socialism.”160 The patriotic work of national rejuvenation, as Xi explains it, culminates with China’s dominance of a globe-spanning socialist order.161
​The party’s Constitution contains a passage known as the “basic line” that summarizes the goal for national rejuvenation:
The basic line of the Communist Party of China in the primary stage of socialism is to lead all the people of China together in a self-reliant and pioneering effort, making economic development the central task, upholding the Four Cardinal Principles, and remaining committed to reform and opening up, so as to see China become a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.162
Notwithstanding its brevity and seemingly anodyne language, the “basic line” captures the mingling of communism and Chinese nationalism in the service of the CCP’s ambition to prevail in great-power rivalry with the United States. Such terms as “democratic,” “harmonious,” and “beautiful” appear compatible with government that protects rights, and which is grounded in the consent of the people. However, the words reflect the CCP’s autocratic intentions, alluding to Mao’s concept of “the people’s democratic dictatorship” as well as to the party’s comprehensive control of society and the CCP’s unyielding conviction that the United States heads an international capitalist conspiracy to prevent socialist China from achieving global dominance.
In short, the “basic line” points to the CCP’s quest to make the Chinese nation the world’s greatest power.163 The CCP set a deadline of 2049 — the PRC’s 100-year anniversary — for achieving this national rejuvenation,164 and has identified several steps to accomplish it.
First, China must complete the project of modernization by developing a world-leading economy and world-class military. The economic, social, and political order necessary to achieving this objective, according to the CCP, is socialism.
Second, China must overcome its “century of humiliation” by recovering what the CCP views as lost territory and as its full maritime claims over littoral waters. The CCP’s 2017 Constitution states that the party “shall work continuously to strengthen the unity of all the Chinese people, including compatriots in the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and in Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese.” It will also achieve “the reunification of the ​motherland” — a euphemism for recovery of Taiwan — “in conformity with the principle of ‘one country, two systems.’”165 In his address to the 19th Party Congress, Xi explicitly identifies “achieving China’s reunification” as “essential to realizing national rejuvenation.”166
Third, China must lead the struggle to institute socialism globally. “In this long period of cooperation and conflict, socialism must learn from the boons that capitalism has brought to civilization,” Xi instructed the CCP in 2013. “Most importantly, we must concentrate our efforts on bettering our own affairs, continually broadening our comprehensive national power, improving the lives of our people, building a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.”167 To win the initiative and have the dominant position, China must displace the United States as the world’s foremost power. Xi plans for China by 2049 to complete its emergence as “a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence.”168
Fourth, socialism must culminate in the unification of humanity under Chinese leadership. In his address to the 19th Party Congress, Xi refers several times to a “community of common destiny for mankind.”169 This notion figures extensively in China’s far-reaching efforts under Xi to extend its global influence. In August 2018, top diplomat Yang Jiechi, director of the CCP’s Office of Foreign Affairs Commission and a Politburo member, went so far as to assert, “Building a community of common destiny for mankind is the overall goal of China’s foreign affairs work in the new era” and requires a “new type of international relations.”170 Xi’s community of common destiny for mankind would replace the established international order grounded in free and sovereign nation-states with a unity of nations in shared deference to the CCP’s interpretation of international socialism.171
In a 2016 speech to a Politburo collective study session on global governance, Xi stressed the need to “improve our ability to participate in global governance, and in particular, our ability to make rules, set agendas, and carry out publicity and coordination.”172 Accordingly, Xi exhorts PRC diplomats to “take an active part in leading the reform of the global governance system.”173 Xi, however, does not envisage improvements in democratic accountability, impartial administration, and fidelity to human rights. To the contrary, those essentials of individual freedom and human equality must be defeated by implanting socialism’s norms, standards, and goals in international organizations.
​The difference of opinion about the reform of world order between the United States and China is stark. For the United States — and for fellow liberal democracies — the aim is to preserve the freedom and sovereignty of nation-states by fortifying the established order, which is grounded in respect for human rights and in fidelity to the rule of law, understood as the impartial application of publicly disclosed, settled, and binding rules. For China, the objective is to transform world order. The CCP seeks to reconfigure the community of nations by placing China at the center while subordinating freedom, national sovereignty, human rights, and the rule of law to socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Conclusion
China’s conduct flows from a distinctive blend of Marxism-Leninism and of the party’s extreme version of Chinese nationalism. Viewing the conduct in the context of the ideas that inspire and shape it dispels the starry-eyed optimism about the PRC that has distorted U.S. policy. It also encourages sobriety in cooperating with, containing, and deterring the CCP. Grasping China’s conduct in light of the CCP’s governing ideas, moreover, illuminates the vulnerabilities that afflict China’s authoritarian regime, and clarifies the tasks the United States must undertake to secure freedom.