ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 36-49

Neo-Napoleonism and the Politics of Trust
POMPEO’S NEO-NAPOLEONISM AND THE CCP RÉGIME
Eric C. Hendriks-Kim“Liberal opinions will rule the universe. They will
become the faith, the religion, the morality of all nations;and … this memorable era will be inseparably connectedwith my name.”1―Napoleon Bonaparte

Abstract
The People’s Republic of China arguably represents the world’s most politicallysignificant deviation from the liberal democratic model. Anglo-American foreign
policy discussions frequently express frustration at China’s defiance of liberal
democratic norms, especially in recent years, as the China debate re-ideologized.
Under Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, the White House rebranded thetechnology-oriented Trade War as a world-spanning ideological struggle between
the US-led “Free World” and “the Beijing regime.” Pompeo’s suggestion that the
Chinese people should be liberated from an evil regime echoes not only American
neo-conservatism but also, ultimately, the anti-regime-ism of the French
Revolution. The overthrow of the Ancien Régime—from which the contemporary‘regime’ semantic derives—is the paradigmatic modern regime change. Since
Napoleon exported this regime change and styled himself “the first soldier” ofliberty’s global propagation, one may call the liberationist strand in modern
political idealism ‘Napoleonic’. ‘Napoleonic’ criticisms of China’s political systemtreat it as an ‘ancien régime’ standing in the way of liberty’s global march.
Pompeo’s suggestions of bringing regime change to China seem so unserious,
however, that it might be better understood as a hyper-real simulacrum of
Napoleonism. Such Neo-Napoleonic rhetoric seeks to delegitimize China’s politicalleadership, sketching a dichotomy between the ‘evil’ Chinese Communist Party(CCP) and the ‘good’ Chinese people. This moral dichotomization may seem
sympathetic and humanistic as it exonerates ‘the people’, yet it, in fact, serves tojustify and encourage unrestrained ideological aggression against the CCP by
1

Comte Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases, Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor
Napoleon, Vol. II, translated from French by W.J. Widdleton (Auckland, NZ: Pickle Partners Publishing,
2013[1855]), Chapter: “Politics: The State of Europe.”

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

36

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

painting it as a target isolable from the rest of Chinese society. In response,
mainland-Chinese political theorists often conceptualize the West’s ideologicalaggression as the civilizational antithesis of China’s supposedly harmonious
Tianxia tradition. However, this overdrawn civilizational dualism is complicatedby the fact that the CCP, ironically, also comes out of the anti-regime-ist modern
revolutionary tradition.

The modern West’s constitutive revolutionary hostility to the Ancien Régime echoes throughthe centuries. I propose to call this tradition of aggressively idealistic, liberationist anti-regimeism: ‘Napoleonic’. A contemporary reincarnation of this Napoleonic idealism appears in an
ideological hostility to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Many Anglosphere intellectuals
and politicians deem the CCP-led People’s Republic of China (PRC) – which is perhaps
presently the world’s most politically significant and outspoken deviation from liberaldemocratic normativity – an ‘ancien régime’ standing in the way of liberty’s global march.
The long-standing controversy around China’s regime deviation from liberal democracy
has flared up as part of the recent Sino-American or Sino-Anglosphere conflict. In its intensified
form, this conflict, which unfolds in both diplomacy and intellectual and academic spheres,probably goes back to 2017. It has various complexly interrelated causes, the relative weightsof which can be disputed. Among these causes are less ideological ones, such as the economic
power struggle between China and the US and the dramatically increased Western anxieties
about Chinese information technologies. 2 Other factors were China’s increased
authoritarianism during the 2010s; the 2017-exposure of Muslims’ mass internment inXinjiang, which complicates defenses of the Chinese government’s legitimacy in Western
public spheres; and the corona pandemic. 3 One result of the conflict’s intensification was therise (or revival) of a hyper-idealistic, neo-conservative and Cold War-like discourse vis-à-vis
the PRC in geopolitical discussions in the Anglosphere (and to a lesser extent in the EU). 4
This essay will first touch upon the aggressive liberationist idealism claimed and,indeed, epitomized by Napoleon. Second, it will show how some reincarnation of this idealistic
imagining is at work in the speeches of US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Third, it will
analyze the specific vehicle through which this discourse legitimizes and maximizes its
Kaiser Kuo, “Fear of a Red Tech Planet: Why the U.S. is Suddenly Afraid of Chinese Innovation,” SupChina
blog, October 13, 2020, https://supchina.com/2020/10/13/fear-of-a-red-tech-planet-why-the-u-s-is-suddenlyafraid-of-chinese-innovation/
3
Dali L. Yang, “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Estrangement of US-China Relations,” Asian Perspective, Vol.
45, No. 1 (2020), pp. 7–31.
4
The European Commission for the first time branded China “a systemic rival” in its report European Commissionand HR/VP contribution to the European Council: EU-China – A strategic outlook, March 12, 2020, p. 1. Also,
Dr. Janka Oertel, director of the Asia Programme of the European Council on International Relations, suggested
that China may have an “interest in destroying the European Union.” She added that China currently “attempts todivide Europeans during the crisis, along with its fierce and openly hostile rhetoric targeting the capacity ofWestern democracy.” Those are rather bold statements for any scholar or diplomat to make, let alone in the absenceof evidence or further elaboration. See Janka Oertel, “China, Europe, and Covid-19 Headwinds,” a commentary
article on the website of the European Council on International Relations from July 20, 2020,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_china_europe_and_covid_19_headwinds/
2

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

37

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

ideological aggression. This vehicle is the overdrawn moral dichotomization of ‘the evil
regime’ and ‘the good people’. Last, this essay will compare the ‘Napoleonic’ label with theimage of a ‘new Roman Empire’, which is invoked by contemporary Chinese political theorists
such as Zhao Tingyang and Jiang Shigong to typify the West’s imperialistic idealism.
Napoleonic idealism
Imagining a possible world that, in some respects, is better than the one that currently exists iswhat allows us to envision improvement. In this sense, idealism is indispensable, creative, andquintessentially human. But idealism is also unavoidably aggressive. In any idealism, there isinherent aggression, no matter how subtle. The idealist slams an idea against an existing,evolved, complex reality which she swears to eliminate and overwrite. Admittedly, many formsof idealism are modest in scope. An idealism can be ethical and even merely personal, as in thecase when one thinks: “I am not the person who I want to be, and will try to destroy my bad
habits!” In that case, all the ‘violence’ of one’s idealism is directed against one’s existing habits,
not against other people. Yet, if an idealism is political, targeting a change in society’sorganization, then particular people or groups or even entire societal orders may appear to standin the way of the right idea’s realization. Those ‘obstacles’ must be denounced, pressured, andreformed – or cast aside or overthrown.
Arguably no strand of political idealism has been as politically ambitious and influential– and violently destructive on a global scale – as that which finds its ultimate source in the
French Revolution. The Revolution enabled us to imagine the possibility of a society-wide,
culturally transformative ‘regime change’. In fact, the contemporary usage of the word ‘regime’
derives from polemics against the French Ancien Régime. Its original referent – the first objectof ‘regime change’ – was the system of aristocratic, clerical, city, and university privileges thatthe revolutionaries abolished. Hence, it is a legacy of the Revolution that we call supposedly
unenlightened, authoritarian political systems: ‘regimes’. Take the ‘Assad regime’, the‘Apartheid regime’, the ‘Nazi regime’, etcetera: we implicitly (and unconsciously) associatesuch political systems with France’s Ancien Régime.
However, the continuity is not merely linguistic, for the Revolution lives on in ourpolitical imagination. We keep discovering new (kinds of) ancien régimes to overthrow. AfterLouis XVI’s execution, the Girondists wanted to export the Revolution to the rest of Europe. A
decade later, the Napoleonic Code began overwriting the Continent’s ancien régime order. For
the next half-century, liberal and liberal-democratic revolutions spread globally.
Simultaneously, Marxists expanded the Revolution’s goal to include full equality in theeconomic realm, turning capitalism into an ‘ancien régime’ to be overthrown. And recently,
American activists have discovered an ‘ancien régime’ in America’s ethnic stratification. 5Groups like BLM have reintroduced the concept of privilège;6 it is just that now ‘whites’, rather
5

See for example: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).
The word “privilege” derives from the Latin privus and legum and means “private law.” Under Europe’s ancien
régime, the privilege system included tax exemptions for aristocrats and clerics, as well as self-determination rights
for universities, monastic orders, free cities, and guilds. In France, during the night of August 4, 1789, the French
revolutionaries of the National Constituent Assembly officially abolished all privileges. Little did they know that
one day future activists would identify a range of new privileges, including ‘white privilege’.
6

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

38

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

than aristocrats or clerics, are deemed to be the bearers of an oppressive system of privilege. In
each of these outbursts of modern political idealism, there is an echo of the French original.
This modern (Western) political idealism, which forever seeks to liberate people fromever new ‘ancien régimes’, can also manifest itself as an ideologically aggressive universalism
in the domain of foreign policy. If one supposes that ‘the people’ must be ‘liberated’ in every
country on earth, and that a few ‘leading states’ already show the way, it would be hard totolerate substantial politico-ideological diversity on the world stage. And it would be tempting
to dream of pushing all ‘illegitimate regimes’ off the map.
We may call such a geopolitical and political-philosophical idealism ‘Napoleonic’
because Napoleon embodied the intertwining of liberal idealism with expansionist imperialism.
He was indeed the great founder of the modern, foreign exported ‘regime change’. Two
centuries before the neo-conservative Bush administration ordered the Iraq invasion in the nameof Liberté and Égalité, Napoleon rode through Europe under the banner of freedom andequality, ‘nation-building’ all over the Continent. The Emperor was a neo-con pur sang, avant
la lettre. In his Saint Helena memoirs, he styled himself the “first soldier” of liberty andprophesized the global hegemony of the liberal ideas:
Liberal ideas flourish in Great Britain, they enlighten America, and they are nationalized in France;
and this may be called the tripod whence issues the light of the world! Liberal opinions will rule theuniverse. They will become the faith, the religion, the morality of all nations; and, in spite of all that
may be advanced to the contrary, this memorable era will be inseparably connected with my name;for, after all, it cannot be denied that I kindled the torch and consecrated the principles; and now
persecution renders me quite their Messiah. Friends and foes, all must acknowledge me to be theirfirst soldier, their grand representative. Thus even when I shall be no more, I shall still continue tobe the leading star of the nations...7

This Napoleonic imagining continues to inform and reemerge in strands of Western
geopolitical and political-philosophical thought. At present, its arguably most prominent objectof (frustrated) idealism, and its biggest stumbling block and target is the CCP-led PRC.
Reemerging with some frequency in Western discussions about China is the backgroundassumption, thesis, or prophesy that the CCP’s PRC must fall, eventually, perhaps inevitably.
“There has been,” as Xi Jinping complains, “no end to the different flavors of [Western] ‘China
collapse’ theory.”8 The CCP must fall because it is unfree, authoritarian, and ‘on the wrong sideof history’. That is, it is yet another ‘ancien régime’ standing in the way of a fully liberaldemocratic – indeed ‘liberated’ – world. In response, the post-Maoist Chinese government
officially presents itself as the tolerant one. In the words of Foreign Minister Wang Yi: “We
are not interested in [the] rivalry of systems, or ideological confrontation with any country.

7

Comte Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases, Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor
Napoleon, Chapter: “Politics: The State of Europe.”
8
Jinping Xi, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” translated from Mandarin by Tanner
Greer, Palladium, May 31, 2019, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guidingideology/

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

39

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

Likewise, we hope that the U.S. will respect China’s social system and the Chinese people’s
choice, and give up its failed interventionism.” 9
The irony of Western imaginings of the CCP as an ‘ancien régime’ is that the CCP isitself a revolutionary party drawing on a branch (the Leninist–Stalinist one) of the Westernrevolutionary tradition. Accordingly, the Party has always, and especially during the Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976), styled itself the revolutionary eliminator of the remnants of China’s
feudal ancien régime (though the Republic of China and the late Qing arguably have a stronger
claim to that title10). Also, the CCP continues to assert that instead of being in the rear, its
socialism makes it the world’s avant-garde. As Xi stated in 2013: “[C]apitalism is bound to die
out and socialism is bound to win. This is an inevitable trend in social and historicaldevelopment.”11 Thus, to the extent to which CCP ideologues have an equivalent ‘missionary’zeal to their Western liberal-democratic counterparts (a subject of dispute, which I will touchupon below), we continue to face competing Napoleonisms.
However, the preoccupation of Western and Chinese intellectuals and politicians withthis ideological opposition – and with the putative dawning demise or damning divergence ofthe other side – ebbs and flows. Over the last three years, but especially since the beginning of
the 2020-coronavirus crisis, suggestions, predictions, and legitimizations of regime change in
China – together with expressed frustrations over the CCP’s continued defiance of the Western
liberal democratic norms – have again moved to the forefront of the Western, and especiallyAnglo-American, foreign policy discussions. Illustrative in this regard is the recently intensified
ideologization of the Trump administration’s approach to China.
Pompeo’s regime change talkThis summer, the Trump administration and right-wing intellectual America had a particularly(neo-)Napoleonic moment. When the American presidential elections emerged on the horizon,
and China’s popularity among the Western citizens plummeted to an all-time low,12 American
foreign policy rhetoric took an ‘idealistic’ turn. Most theatrical were Steve Bannon, the former
White House adviser, and anti-CCP businessperson Guo Wengui. In front of the Statue of
Liberty, they launched the lobby group The New Federal State of China, whose stated aim is
the overthrow of the CCP. Meanwhile, the White House’s course shift produced a serious trend
break in its foreign policy. After three years of spewing America First rhetoric and couching
the Sino-American Trade War in economic terms, the Trump administration suddenly sought

Wang Yi, “Full Text: Wang Yi's Interview on Current State of China-U.S. relations,” CGTN, August 6, 2020,
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Full-text-Wang-Yi-s-interview-on-current-China-U-S-relationsSJ8tae0mIw/index.html
10
See Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2008), p. 15.
11
Jinping Xi, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” translated from Mandarin by Tanner
Greer, Palladium, May 31, 2019, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guidingideology/
12
Pew Research Center, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries,” October 6,2020,
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-inmany-countries/
9

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

40

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

to reclaim the leadership of the “Free World,” calling upon allies to stand up to the Chinese
government on ideological grounds.
The policy paper “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of
13
China” broadened a conflict over primarily economic power to the domain of ultimate values.
It proclaims that “Americans have more reason than ever to understand the nature of the regime
in Beijing and the threats it poses to American economic interests, security, and values.” 14 The
paper sketches a world-ideological conflict, asserting that the “CCP promotes globally a value
proposition that challenges the bedrock American belief in the inalienable right of every person
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”15
Further promoting this revision was a series of speeches, by Robert O’Brien,
Christopher Wray, and William Barr on, respectively, June 24th, July 7th, and July 16th, which
culminated, on July 23th, in Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s speech “The Communist
China and the Free World’s Future.” Pompeo also made his position known in his November
10th speech titled “The Promise of America,” in which he proclaims that “the fight is between
authoritarianism, barbarism on one side and freedom on the other.” 16
Pompeo suggests that America could and should strive to change China’s politicalregime: “We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change.”17 His
paean to regime change may be echoing the neoconservative rhetoric of the Bush-era, but incontrast to the Bush administration – which not only called for regime change in Ba’athist Iraq
but actually executed it through military means – Pompeo’s denunciation of the CCP is merely
a performance of assertiveness for the domestic audience. He did not seem to have a plan forfurthering its overthrow; instead, he appeared to address the domestic audience within anelection season. His speech moves within Baudrillardian hyperreality. If Napoleon was the“first soldier” and “grand representative” of the universalization of liberalism, Pompeo might
be seen as its latest simulator and great poser. His call for regime change in China is asimulacrum of Napoleonic idealism; in this sense, we can qualify it as ‘neo-Napoleonic’.
Two features of Pompeo’s discourse escalate its ideological and aggressive character.
The first is Pompeo’s consistent reference to ‘the CCP’ or ‘the Beijing regime’ instead of ‘theChinese government’, which has the effect of foregrounding the ideological differences. Thisterminological choice is striking. As America’s highest diplomat, Pompeo does not deal directlywith the CCP; he meets with China’s governmental officials who, though doubling as Party
members under the party-state structure, speak to him in their role as representatives of thegovernment, and not of the party. This may seem a trivial distinction, but as former French

National Security Council, United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China, Report, May
26, 2020,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/united-states-strategic-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-ofchina/
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Michael R. Pompeo, “The Promise of America,” Speech, Ronald Reagan Institute, Washington, D.C., November
10, 2020, https://www.state.gov/the-promise-of-america/
17
Michael R. Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” Speech, Yorba Linda, California, July23, 2020, https://www.state.gov/communist-china-and-the-free-worlds-future/
13

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

41

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

diplomat Gérard Araud commented: “This use of CCP … substitutes ideological rivalry – whichis unbridgeable – for diplomacy.”18
The second escalating feature, which I will deconstruct in the next section, is the CCPdelegitimizing dichotomy of Party and people. Pompeo sharply distinguishes between the evil
CCP and the good Chinese people: “We must also engage and empower the Chinese people –a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist
Party.” The latter he calls: “this Marxist-Leninist monster.”19 In his narrative, Chinese people
appear as secretly wishing their liberation from the Party’s communist authoritarianism, a wish
at least in part inspired by the American-led Free World:
I grew up and served my time in the Army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned,
communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion
people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.20

Central in Pompeo’s perspective is the moral claim that, by being against the CCP, theAmerican government is on the side of the Chinese people. As he asserted in an interview on
Fox News: “We continue to seek a better life for the people of China. It’s important to us. It’s
personal for me too as a man of faith. I’m hopeful that we together will be able to achieve better
outcomes for religious minorities inside of China.” 21 In another interview, when asked what heconsidered his “greatest accomplishment at the State Department,” Pompeo answered:“[W]orking on religious freedom. We have fundamentally reordered the world’s attention to
the challenges presented by the Chinese Communist Party, but we’ve done good things for thepeople of China.”22
Yet, complicating this moral claim and the White House’s ideological-humanitarian
rebranding of its conflict with China was a revelation by the former security advisor John
Bolton. In his memoirs, which appeared on the same days as Pompeo’s speech (July 23), Bolton
reports that Trump had told Xi in 2019 that he was fine with the anti-Muslim crackdown in
Xinjiang.23 The US was indeed the only major Western country not to join the 22 nation-statesthat together, on July 8, 2019, declared their opposition to Muslims’ mass incarcerations in
Xinjiang (even though the US joined similar declarations at later moments). That the WhiteHouse had not led the international human rights criticism on Xinjiang, but had, to the contrary,joined late in the game after having taken the opposite position in the form of Trump’s off-therecord consent, conflicted with Pompeo’s post hoc claim to international human rights
leadership.

18

Gérard Araud, Tweet, July 23, 2020, https://twitter.com/GerardAraud/status/1286196242226257920
Michael R. Pompeo, “The Promise of America.”
20
Michael R. Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future.”
21
Michael R. Pompeo, “Secretary Michael R. Pompeo with Amy Kellogg of FOX News,” Interview, Fox News,
October 1, 2020, https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-amy-kellogg-of-fox-news/
22
Michael R. Pompeo, “Secretary Michael R. Pompeo with Tony Perkins of Washington Watch with Tony
Perkins.” Interview, November 10, 2020, https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-tony-perkinsof-washington-watch-with-tony-perkins-3/
23
John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p.
312.
19

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

42

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

Explaining the apparent lack of consistency in the White House’s China policy under
Trump, political scientist Andrew Nathan points to a combination of incompetence andideological divisions,
The dirty little secret is that the administration has no strategy. It is a snake pit of competing policy
entrepreneurs, most of whom understand little about China or world affairs. For many, domestic
politics is the key consideration.24

Nathan argues that Pompeo is part of a newly emerged dominant faction that interprets the
Sino-American conflict in terms of a world-spanning battle over “ultimate values” andideological domination. This new faction’s ideological and ideologizing interpretation differsfrom that of Trump, who narrowly frames the conflict as an economic competition (in the
beginning, ‘making a deal’ had been his key phrase). Also, it differs from the vision of Peter
Navarro, the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, “who apparently dreams of dividing
the world into two economic and technological blocs.”25 Pompeo’s ideological faction, Nathan
argues, is deeply wrong in assuming that China wants to export its political model:[An] apparently now dominant faction consists of people like Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Steve
Bannon (out of the administration but still influential), and Newt Gingrich (also influential), who
appear seriously to believe, as Gingrich put it, that China poses ‘the greatest threat to us since the
British Empire in the seventeen-seventies, much greater than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union’.
This group has turned the competition into a life-and-death struggle over ultimate values. They seemto believe that China wants to extend its political model to the rest of the world, including America.
This is a deep misunderstanding of Chinese strategy, which is assertive, helpful to authoritarians,
and in many ways dangerous, but not ideologically ambitious.26

Sinologists and China-oriented political scientists disagree, as mentioned, on just how
ideologically ambitious the Chinese party-state really is.27 The question of the extent and theAndrew Nathan, In: “What Now? A ChinaFile Conversation,” China File, August 5, 2020,
https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-now
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
For example, contrary to Nathan’s assessment, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg warn in their book Hidden
Hand (2020) that “The Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image.” In his previous
work, Hamilton, who works at Australian National University, even described Beijing as “Australia’s enemy.”(Silent Invasion: China's Influence in Australia (San Francisco: Hardie Grant, 2018), Conclusion).
More carefully, but strikingly, the European Commission for the first time explicitly labeled China “asystemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.” (European Commission and HR/VP contribution to
the European Council: EU-China – A strategic outlook, Report, March 12, 2020, p. 1).
Indeed, the Chinese political system’s intellectual proponents often claim that it is a legitimate and evensuperior alternative to liberal democracy. Still, because such claims tend to be formulated against the backgroundof, and as a counter to, Western ideological pressure, one can often also read them as primarily defensive, which
creates ambivalence. An example would be this strong yet seemingly defensive statement by the CCP-supporting
geopolitical analyst Andy Mok in an op-ed on a Chinese state media website: “Many around the world, especiallyin the United States, are still trapped in a benighted, primitive and perniciously toxic superstition that, of all theavailable choices, a democratic free market system is the best and most moral form of government. But … more
and more people around the world are coming to see China as the true shining city on a hill.” (Andy Mok, “Latest
5-Year Plan shows benevolence of China’s system,” Op-ed, CGTN, November 2, 2020,24

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

43

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

nature of the Chinese government’s international ambitions in this regard lies far beyond boththe scope of this essay and my knowledge – although the answer would, indeed, bear on theprudence of ‘defending democracy’ through hardline containment and decoupling policies visà-vis the PRC. Instead, I will analyze the central rhetorical simplification by means of whichhawkish or idealistic Anglo-American politicians, pundits, and intellectuals rebuke anddelegitimize the CCP’s leadership of China, namely, the moral dichotomization of Party andChinese people.
Dichotomizing Party and people
The sharp Party-people dichotomy – which Pompeo puts forward in a crude form, but which,as illustrated below, is widely employed by hawkishly idealistic China pundits and public
intellectuals in the wider Anglosphere – allows the critic to condemn the CCP without
implicating hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Of course, there is much sense in avoiding
stigmatization; it would be mistaken and unethical to blame individual Chinese for an entire
political system. One should not take one’s grievances with the CCP out on any Chinese
individual, nor consider a whole people as tainted due to political differences.
On the other hand, radically divorcing the object of criticism from its cultural andsocietal embedding licenses the critic to denounce it in full. The reasoning is that there could
be no harm in condemning, even demonizing, the CCP since one has clarified that the CCP
does not represent or reflect the character of great masses of Chinese people. Therefore, thedichotomous conception, which superficially appears merely to reflect a sympathetic
humanistic concern for empathetic interpersonal communication, is, in fact, also a vehicle for
maximizing idealistic aggression.
In his essay “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of ‘Evil’,” sinologist Kerry
Brown depicts the Party-people dichotomy, which he subsequently dismisses as simplistic andpatronizing, as follows:
The Communist Party is evil. Chinese people are good. They are oppressed, downtrodden. It is easy
to progress beyond this to the heroic statement that we, outside of China, with our enlightened ways
are those who will be key in delivering this salvation. We are on our way. Freedom is nigh. The
neatness of this approach is attractive. Binary, black and white systems are always easy to engage
with. It also evades some of the pointier, more complex issues. We have located the single sourceof the problem – the evil Communist Party. Once that is out of the way, everything will be plain
sailing.28

More nuanced variants of this dichotomous construct frequently appear in scholarly andintellectual discourse. Most directly, the dichotomy serves to preempt the accusation of
stigmatizing ordinary Chinese people. The political scientist and public intellectual Andreas
Fulda explains, “[W]ild accusations of racism are the key context to understand and appreciate
why many non-Chinese discourse participants go to great length to distinguish between thehttps://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-02/Why-China-s-five-year-plans-work--V5Gn4iu5vW/index.html).
28
Kerry Brown, “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of ‘Evil’,” Oxford Political Review, April 24, 2020,
https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2020/04/24/china-series-1/

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

44

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

political regime and Chinese citizens in their critique of the political situation in mainland
China.”29
Additionally, in scholarly and intellectual discourse, as in Pompeo’s speech, thedichotomy suggests that the CCP is at least partly illegitimate. Tellingly, Fulda, who employs
and defends the dichotomy, adds to his explanation that despite having a “constituency of
supporters,” the CCP, like “other autocratic regimes, e.g., in Syria and Iran,” lacks “politicallegitimacy”; or “at least the CCP doesn’t have democratic legitimacy.” 30 It is not a coincidence
that upholders of the dichotomous conception often reject the CCP’s legitimacy; the dichotomy
is the very form of delegitimizing criticism.
Finally, upholders of the dichotomy also attach to it a moral weight as a means toexonerating ‘the people’. For example, journalist Tanner Brown (not to be confused with Kerry
Brown) warns that without it, one would have to “extend the moral accountability” to “somehundred million people.” According to him, one would have to consider all those people to be“in opposition to universal suffrage [and] in support of concentration camps and mock trials.” 31
Since it would be immoral to cast such a negative light on so many people, it would seem tofollow that we must treat the Party (or the Party’s elite) as located in a separate moral universe.
Relatedly, dichotomy-upholders insist that we should abstain from the blanket term ‘China’ asmuch as possible because it could lower awareness of the need to treat the Chinese people
differently – and better – than we do their government. There are the CCP and its leadership,
which should be criticized, pressured, and negotiated with, and “the Chinese public, which[American] policymakers should respect in word and deed,” 32 as historian Pamela Kyle
Crossley of Dartmouth College argues.
However, as sinologist Kerry Brown explains, “a neat division between Party andpopulation” is untenable because “the Party is part of society, and its [ninety million] members
are, unsurprisingly, more often than not typical Chinese people.” 33 Thus, though one obviously
should not conflate the categories of the CCP and the general Chinese population, theirrelationship is, as Brown puts it, “complex.” It is also to be noted that the CCP’s governing
style and claim to legitimacy creatively interact with various critical Chinese political andpolitical-philosophical traditions. Granted, China’s governance could be fundamentally betterand freer. Providing indications of this are the Republic of China on Taiwan and phases of
openness in China’s modern history.34 Nonetheless, political China cannot be cleanly separated
from ‘the people’ and the rest of society.
Andreas Fulda in a twitter response to Kerry Brown’s article “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of‘Evil’,” April 24, 2020, https://twitter.com/AMFChina/status/1253699200631652352
30
Ibid., https://twitter.com/AMFChina/status/1253699204536549377
31
Tanner Brown, Comment on Kerry Brown, “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of ‘Evil’.” Oxford
Political Review, April 24, 2020, https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2020/04/24/china-series-1/
32
Pamela Kyle Crossley, In: “What Now? A ChinaFile Conversation,” China File, August 5, 2020,
https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-now
33
Kerry Brown, “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of ‘Evil’.”34
In the above cited book The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (2008), Frank Dikötter develops the claim that
the Republican Era (before the Japanese invasion of 1937) had been surprisingly cosmopolitan and forwardlooking. The republican government oversaw the modernization of the state apparatus and the legal system, andintroduced mass education.
29

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

45

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

It follows, then, that the CCP is not a boxing sack that one can punch with trade
sanctions or decoupling policies without thereby also hurting the ‘real China’ or the ordinary
Chinese people. The same counts for its denunciations. Kerry Brown recommends moderationand nuance: “[I]f you want to start deploying language like ‘evil’ about the Party, then you aregoing to have to start labeling a good number of Chinese people that way too. Party members
are Chinese people, after all – not some separate species!”35 The dichotomous discourse, which,by contrast, pictures the CCP as an isolatable target, legitimizes a maximization of ideologicalaggression and potentially obscures its effects on real groups and individuals.
Or is it ‘Roman’?
Of course, the mainland’s political theorists are all too aware of the discussed ideologicalpressure because it targets ideologies that they either hold or are otherwise profoundly familiarwith. They often describe Western intellectuals’ aggressively universalizing idealism, not as
Napoleonic, but as Roman. Jiang Shigong, for example, claims that American geopolitics aims
to create a “new Roman Empire” on a global scale. He argues that “American liberals” wage
“a new Cold War” against China out of a “deep-felt resentment” with the fact that “the CCP
leadership and socialist system with Chinese characteristics became a stumbling block in the
United States’ construction of a ‘New Roman Empire’ for the entire world.” 36 His colleague at
Peking University, Zhao Tingyang, has constructed an entire philosophical framework aroundthe conceptional opposition between the ‘Roman’ and ‘Tianxia’. He claims that, “The worldorder has two traditions: imperialism invented by the Romans and the Tianxia system invented
by China.”37‘Tianxia’ means ‘all under heaven’. It is an ancient Chinese concept that varyingly
denoted the emperor’s complete territory, the civilized world, or the entire world. Both Jiang
and Zhao believe that Tianxia has existed for millennia, not only as a word covering a changing
semantic field but also as an imagined order and political practice. They claim that from these,a model for a culturally all-inclusive world universalism can be extrapolated, one in which there
is “harmony without [world-regional ideological] assimilation” (hé ér bùtóng). Zhao claims
that the Tianxia ideal – “a concept of perpetual peace based on non-exclusion” – transcends thedifferent cultures and political systems and is not “the universalization of Chinese values.” 38
Still, he also argues that “China [is] an epitome of Tianxia,” that it has carried the “Tianxia
spirit” from the ancient times to the present, and that it has been, in effect, “a ‘world-structured’country.” 39

Kerry Brown, “The Communist Party of China and the Idea of ‘Evil’.”Jiang Shigong, “Zhōng ‘měi guānjiàn shí nián’: ‘Xīn luómǎ dìguó’ yǔ ‘xīn de wěidà dòuzhēng’.” Guancha
website, May 9, 2020. Quote: “Yóu cǐ, zài tāmen de luójí zhōng, jiàng zhōngguó gòngchǎndǎng de lǐngdǎo hézhōngguó tèsè shèhuì zhǔyì zhìdù kàn zuò měiguó jiàngòu ‘xīn luómǎ dìguó’ tǒngzhì shí jiè de bànjiǎoshí.”(https://www.guancha.cn/QiangShiGong/2020_09_05_564144.shtml).
37
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, translated from Mandarin by Liqing Tao(Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2019). p. 11; cf. p. 58.
38
Ibid., p. 89. Cf. Régis Debray and Zhao Tingyang, “Tianxia: All Under Heaven.” Noema, June 19, 2020,
https://www.noemamag.com/tianxia-all-under-heaven/39
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, pp. 38-39.
35
36

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

46

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

According to Zhao, a future world order inspired by the ideal of Tianxia would bedomination-free, while allowing for much cultural diversity under a gently harmonizing
federalist world government informed mainly by New Confucian and Buddhist values. In
contrast, on the same view, any neo-Roman imperialism wants to universalize its values –liberal democracy, individualism, the formal diplomatic equality between nation-states, and aliberal understanding of human rights – by pushing the ideological others off the map. Crudely
put, Zhao and other Tianxia theorists suggest that in a Tianxia-led world, China and other nonliberal democracies would coexist harmoniously with liberal democracies; whereas in a‘Roman’-structured world one ideological block would impose an intolerant hegemony.
But why is such an isomorphic ideological pressure called ‘Roman’? What about it isspecifically Roman? After all, there have been many empires in history, and the historical
Roman Empire consisted of a complex, locally diversified governance landscape, not a regimeuniformized plane. In the Chinese political theoretical literature, many auteurs are vague about
what makes Western universalism ‘Roman’, apart from some underspecified characterizations,such as its penchant for ‘domination’.
In what follows, I will attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the term in this mainland
Chinese discourse critical of Western ideological pressure. I discern four reasons for the‘Roman’ framing. First, ‘Rome’ carries common associations. The word ‘imperialism’ derives
from the Latin ‘imperium’. In European history, many rulers dreamt of reviving Rome. And
over two centuries, non-Western critics of the West’s liberal and liberationist idealism haverepeatedly associated this idealism with imperialism and the Roman Empire. 40 For example,
Ottoman political activist Ali Suavi (1839–1878) wrote: “Just look how those Frenchmen talkpretentiously about freedom and equality, all the while seeking world domination like
Caesar.”41 Since the Second World War, with the rise of the United States to the status of aworld power, the Rome-America analogy took precedence. The image of a Pax Americana fits
nicely to Washington’s political architecture, which is neo-classical, with the American
Founding Fathers drawing extensively on Roman political conceptions.
A second, more specific reason for the mainland theorists to associate America with
Rome might be their Marxist-Leninist training. In 1917, Lenin theorized that the last stage ofcapitalism takes the form of imperialism. 42 This theoretical framework, which closely
associates capitalism and imperialism, makes it tempting to conceive of the capitalist US as anempire.
Third, Zhao mentions in passing the influence of Hardt and Negri’s work Empire.43 The
book indeed argues that the present world order, which it calls ‘Empire’, ultimately derives

40

Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian
Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
41
Ali Suavi, “Democracy: Government by the People, Equality,” in Charles Kurzman (ed.), Modernist Islam,
1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1870]), p. 142.
42
Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).
43
Zhao Tingyang, “All-Under-Heaven and Methodological Relationism: An Old Story and New World Peace,”
Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, in Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang (eds.)(Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 133.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

47

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

from a Roman legacy. And very indicatively, this legacy’s “universal notion of right” is seen
there as “form[ing] the core of the Empire.” 44
Fourth, there is Rome’s religious connotation. Zhao argues that the new Roman
imperialism is informed, not just by ancient Roman and modern European imperialism, but also
by “the Christian ideology of cultural universalism.” The latter “creat[es] the paradox oflaunching wars in the name of making peace and destroying liberty in the name of defending
human rights.”45 Indeed, Christianity, like its Islamic brother, has strong universalistic
pretensions. The faith is for everyone, for as Saint Paul proclaims in Galatians (3:28): “Thereis neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus.” This fits the ‘Rome’ imagery of the Catholic Church, which indeed means‘universal church’ and has its headquarter in Rome. Thus, ‘Rome’ can symbolize both the ‘hard
power’ and the idealistic dimension of the Western political universalism.
If one were to adopt this imagery, one would subsume ‘Napoleonic idealism’ under thebroader and older ‘Roman spirit’ belonging to and associated with Western civilization in
general. However, this perspective has various shortcomings, one of which is that it could leadto essentialized and reified conceptions of the Western and Chinese civilizations. Zhao andJiang employ a dualistic scheme in which, crudely put, the Roman stands for a dominating
West, whereas Tianxia is seen as the global application of the supposed Chinese appreciation
for harmony. Zhao writes: “While both envision a universal world order, the imperial systemseeks to conquer and achieve a dominating rule, while the Tianxia system, on the other hand,tries to construct a sharable system.” 46 Critics argue that Zhao turns Tianxia into a “utopian
world order”47 that corresponds neither to something that exists in present-day China, nor tosome Chinese golden age in ancient history. This essay lacks the space to delve into that
discussion.48 But if Tianxia cannot signify the essence of a historical Chinese-civilizational
approach to universalism and diversity, then its pair concept of the essentially Roman Westmight be untenable too.
It is arguably a strength of the ‘(neo-)Napoleonic’ framing that it does not imply any
civilizational dualism. Instead of positing a divide between two age-old civilizations, each with
its unique tradition of universalistic thought, the ‘Napoleonic’ framing is more open-ended.
Though undoubtedly deriving historically from Christian and Roman-legal traditions ofuniversalism, Napoleonic liberationist universalism has influenced – and perhaps has becomea permanent component of – Chinese political thought. Admittedly, the Chinese and Westernpolitical-philosophical landscapes do differ fundamentally. Comparative philosopher Thomas
Metzger argues that the Neo-Confucian epistemological and ontological assumptions that
44

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 198.
Zhao Tingyang, “All-Under-Heaven and Methodological Relationism,” p. 133.
46
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, translated from Mandarin by Liqing Tao(Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2019), p. 3.
47
Chishen Chang and Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Tracking Tianxia: On Intellectual Self-Positioning,” in Ban Wang (ed.),Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2017), p. 274.
48
On the topic, see Ban Wang (ed.), Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); as well as Zhiping Liang, “Xiǎngxiàng ‘tiānxià’: Dāngdài zhōngguó
de yìshí xíngtài jiàngòu,” Sixiang, Vol. 36 (Dec. 2018), pp. 71–177.
45

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

48

Volume III, No. 01/2020

ERIC C. HENDRIKS-KIM
Pompeo’s Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime

dominate contemporary Chinese political thought cause its utopian idealism to diverge fromthe (liberal) American political-philosophical mainstream. 49 This divergence falls outside thescope of this essay. But even if it implies that present-day Chinese political thought lacks astrong universalistic-liberationist strand, branding the latter as entirely non-Chinese and putting
it in some disjunctive ‘Roman’ category would sit awkwardly with the CCP’s history. After all,the CCP itself stands in the modern revolutionary tradition. Through its foundational Maoist
ideology and Leninist party-state apparatus, the party is connected to a long, global, andhistorically traceable chain of revolutions and liberationist imaginings that find their ultimate
source in the French Revolution.
In conclusion, despite the Revolution’s global legacy, currently there is still no single
liberal or liberationist ideology that ‘rules the universe’. Instead, the co-existence ofsignificantly different regime forms persists, in part because the revolutionary tradition
branched out into competing avant-garde ideologies, creating a liberal-democratic and acommunist block. Neo-Napoleonic hawks like Pompeo style themselves as the avant-garde ofliberty’s global march, but the reality of global regime-pluralism is not likely to give in any
time soon. Therefore, any realistic diplomacy or activist engagement must acknowledge thatthe regime pluralism is here to stay for the foreseeable future and that declaring the other side’s
political system fundamentally illegitimate does not benefit constructive international
communication.

49

Thomas Metzger, A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash Between Chinese and Western Political
Theories Today (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), pp. 1–184.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

49

Volume III, No. 01/2020