As the PRC confronts mounting challenges, its leader will do anything to prevent becoming China’s Gorbachev.
As the PRC confronts mounting challenges, its leader will do anything to prevent becoming China’s Gorbachev.
T he November plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party central committee contained no real surprises. President Xi Jinping remains on track to begin a third term as the head of the party, government, and armed forces — a true maximum leader — when the party’s 20th central committee is convened next year. By design, the November meeting was intended to airbrush Xi’s nearly ten-year reign and prospects into an arc of history reaching back to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 100 years ago.
Xi’s task at the plenary was twofold: (1) create a place for himself on that historic arc that is on par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; and, thereby (2) firmly establish the party’s current course as the best path forward. The meeting’s communique, issued by state news agency Xinhua, suggests those tasks were accomplished. The communique calls on the party “to adhere to ‘Mao Zedong thought’ and ‘Deng Xiaoping theory’” but “fully implement Xi Jinping’s new era” and to “grasp the times and lead the times.”
But given the profound challenges China faces, Xi is not focused on being the second Mao, the architect of the Great Leap Forward, or the second Deng, the great reformer. What Xi is desperate to avoid is being a second Gorbachev, who rose to the top in the Soviet Union at a time when the inconsistences and system fractures in the USSR were irreversible, even though much of the world didn’t realize it. Gorbachev’s attempts to embrace half-hearted reforms and win the acclaim of the West only accelerated the Soviet Union’s demise. Xi will not follow that pattern.
The conventional analysis of Xi’s tenure is that, despite his desire to cement his stature vis-à-vis previous communist-party leaders, he has broken from them in certain ways. Analyzing regimes from Deng on, many Western analysts believed those leaders were steering the People’s Republic of China (PRC) toward market liberalization and joining the community of nations through trade liberalization and other mechanisms of global integration. The emerging consensus about Xi is that he is stopping that and seeking not integration but dominance and harder-edged Party control. To some degree, characterizing Xi as an outlier from his predecessors is convenient analysis by those who were mistaken about what was transpiring in the PRC before Xi.
Though the CCP is a regime skilled in diversion and deception, there are hard truths one must discern. For example: It is now clear that Xi’s predecessors did not see the PRC as an economic powerhouse in waiting. The reality of China’s many difficulties, now Xi’s problems, was evident before he took power. Already by 2007, then-premier Wen Jiabao was acknowledging that the PRC economy was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” Yet the CCP had the world convinced that the PRC was ascendant economically. Wen was not an exception but a respected leader within the party, and he was reflecting the known reality, even if the rest of the world wasn’t listening or couldn’t pierce the opaque veil of official falsehoods.
Western governments mostly ignored Wen, and businesses accepted the alternate reality crafted by the CCP. In this world, the PRC was growing at 9 percent per year, and party leaders had supposedly found the perfect mix of market liberalization and state industrial policy necessary to sustain growth and dominance over time. In 2010, the Financial Times reported that, with the U.S. and Europe reeling from the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the world — in the words of HSBCs chief China economist — could be “on the verge of a financial revolution of truly epic proportions” and that the yuan could soon eclipse the dollar as the global reserve currency.
That didn’t happen. And if the titans of Wall Street or the global foreign-policy establishment were not paying attention to Wen, Xi was. Xi has known since taking office that Wen’s formulation was accurate, that the die was already cast well before then, and that the situation has gotten worse since.
This mirrors what Mikhail Gorbachev faced when he became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. Plenty of Western analysts who had gotten the Soviet Union wrong for decades touted Gorbachev as the leader who would take the Soviet Union into a new era. We often forget today how for much of the mid-20th century, many around the world saw the Soviet command economy as a viable alternative to the market-led western economies. Many also saw it as a fierce geostrategic military competitor to the United States and her allies. The USSR averaged better than 5 percent growth from the late 1920s to until about 1970. Through the first half of the 1970s, a period of stagflation in the U.S. and Europe, growth in the USSR was still close to 4 percent per year. Soviet military and political influence were dominant throughout eastern Europe, and Soviet client states extended Moscow’s heft throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Much contemporary foreign-policy analysis focused on how a plateauing, soon-to-decline West should contend with the rise of an assertive, confident communist counterforce. As Gorbachev was coming to power, American political theorists were writing about the “rise and fall of great powers” — seen by many in the foreign-policy elite as a how-to guide to manage America’s decline.
Yet so many missed that, by the late 1970s, the corruption and inefficiencies of the Soviet system already had taken hold, and that it was Soviet decline that was inevitable, not Western decline. Against a backdrop of perceived U.S. lack of resolve and overstretch, Moscow even then presented an image of strength and influence, including the 1978 Sandinista/communist revolution in Nicaragua and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But by the mid-1980s, following the economic and military build-up of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and a return to free-market economics in the United Kingdom, the forces that led to the USSR’s ultimate failure became obvious and irreversible. Gorbachev came to office in 1985; the USSR and Gorbachev were gone by 1991. In that sense, he was not an anomaly on the path of progress but a harbinger of failure.
The same could well be true of Xi. The CCP in Xi’s third term will do all it can to avoid that. The PRC will not follow the same path as the USSR. But whether Mark Twain ever said that “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” the aphorism applies. It is quite obvious that Xi is presiding over a period of relative decline after many years of expansion and growth — recognizing that Beijing’s official statistics undoubtedly overstated that growth. It is apparent that the many internal cracks in the artificial edifice of control and progress — massive public and private debt; upside-down demographics of an aging, declining population; the lack of social mobility and a social safety net for hundreds of millions trapped in poverty; ecological and natural-resources challenges; the increasing expectations of prosperity for urban, educated elite that cannot be met; large-scale human rights violations and mistreatment of minorities; and an energy shortage, to name just a few — are beyond the party’s ability to reverse.
Meanwhile, many in the West who were bullish on the PRC just a decade ago are now rethinking their own assumptions and realizing they were mistaken. To pick just one example, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon acknowledged as much in recent comments chiding the CCP by saying that he expects his company will outlast it. Dimon effectively admitted that policy-makers and the business community had gotten the PRC wrong and that, in effect, the Trump administration was right for reversing course. That Dimon was persuaded to apologize for his comments almost within the same news cycle he made them doesn’t nullify their accuracy.
The enhancement of Xi’s authority over the party that the recent plenum validated does not represent a break from the past. Rather, it is a natural continuation of CCP regime policy to try to control the narrative so the rest of the world will fall in line. This is the approach Xi and his predecessors have taken for decades. The CCP created the illusion of permanent, outsized growth based on market-led reforms that drew in western business, seduced Western governments, and made the rest of the world want to accommodate it. To try to avoid the fate of Gorbachev and the USSR, Xi and the CCP will work all the harder to sustain an edifice of perceived strength and dominance.
The practice of maintaining illusion to gain strategic advantage and to control the perceptions of adversaries is almost as old as China itself. The “Thirty-Six Strategems” (henceforth, “strategies”) is a collection of dicta on politics, diplomacy, war, and other affairs of state that dates perhaps to the 5th century BC. The collection is of uncertain provenance but has been part of oral- and written-history traditions for centuries. The dicta probably influenced Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers. They gained newfound attention from the CCP under Mao.
At the heart of the strategies is that deception, misdirection, disinformation, and trickery are appropriate and winning approaches to dealing with outsiders. These approaches have accelerated as an element of state control under Xi as China’s weaknesses have become more obvious and the regime gets more desperate.
This deception strategy has been well-documented. Researchers at the University of Oxford concluded in 2019 that “China has become a major player in the global disinformation order,” citing “computational propaganda” through targeted use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The analysis helps explain how the CCP controlled global perceptions of Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, which was instrumental in ensuring that the West would do what it did in response: nothing. In another example, the EU last year declared that the PRC was engaged in a sophisticated disinformation and misdirection campaign regarding the coronavirus pandemic, with the deliberate intent to “sow divisions in European societies.”
The CCP uses means other than social media to advance its disinformation and misdirection campaigns. A recent analysis in the Wall Street Journal describes how “a new data-security law has made it harder for foreign companies and investors to get information, including about supplies and financial statements” about the true state of its economy. But this is not new; it has been obvious for years to anyone willing to look into it. It is just more obvious. Close CCP-watchers have known for years that official statements about the PRC’s economic growth and strength were overblown, if not outright lies, even if many Western investors and governments accepted them anyway.
The use of deception extends to the field of diplomacy, where Xi’s so-called wolf-warrior diplomats have been active in global capitals pushing the party’s propaganda and disinformation. Another channel is the Confucius Institutes typically affiliated with universities in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. These are nominally intended as centers of cultural awareness. This work of diplomats and other aspects of soft power reflects the priorities of a CCP United Front Work Department that has been well-documented, and includes the use of propaganda spread through academic and community-exchange programs. According to a 2018 report by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, the strategy is “borrowed from the former Soviet Union [and] President Xi has placed a greater emphasis on United Front work . . . describing it as important for the ‘whole [Chinese Communist] Party’ and elevating its role within China’s broader foreign policy.”
In these matters as well, Xi is following a pattern established by predecessors. Beijing has long used diplomacy and United Front tactics to influence western capitals. During the George W. Bush administration, Beijing accommodationists in Taiwan found themselves out of power for the first time in the island’s history after the election in 2000 of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shui-Bian as president. Chen spoke often about the PRC military buildup across the Taiwan strait. In late 2003, he highlighted the powers in Taiwan law that were available to him, including a referendum on sovereignty as one potential remedy. While these moves were intended for domestic political consumption, Chen nonetheless created the impression that he favored Taiwan independence and a unilateral change to the status quo. This alarmed senior U.S. officials. It also was an opening for pro-Beijing forces to generate false stories that U.S. Defense Department officials and others were secretly encouraging Chen in his pro-independence tendencies. The result was tension and the perception of schism among President Bush’s senior advisers. In fact, the administration was speaking with one voice in support of the president’s policies.
All of this advanced Beijing’s objectives, in the spirit of the 36 strategies. One advises leaders to “kill with a borrowed knife,” or let someone else do your dirty work. Another dictum calls for “sowing discord in the enemy’s camp.” Both were effective. President Bush, at an Oval Office press conference with Wen Jiabao during Wen’s December 2003 visit to Washington, used the occasion to upbraid the democratically elected leader in front of the communist leader. Bush admonished Chen, noting that “the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose.” This gave Wen his own opportunity to highlight — in partnership with the president of the United States standing alongside him — that “Taiwan authorities, headed by Chen Shui-bian, are only using democracy as an excuse and attempt to resort to defensive referendum to split Taiwan away from China.”
The PRC’s use of such deception and misdirection will become more aggressive as the economic and geopolitical situation for Beijing gets more challenging. We will see that regarding PRC posture toward Taiwan. There is no likelihood that the PRC intends to conduct military operations to occupy or defeat Taiwan anytime soon. There are too many mainland challenges to embark on such an expedition, even if the communist government were capable of doing so now, which it is not.
Instead, we will see continued feigned intentions, such as the military overflights and other demonstrations of force. Along the way, the CCP will accept whatever fortunes it gains in the way of concessions that may be made because of its projection of strength. The 36 strategies counsel adherents to “create something from nothing” and to “take the opportunity to pilfer a goat,” or take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself on the way to a larger objective. If the world wants to make concessions to Beijing in other areas for Beijing to “avoid” conflict with Taiwan, even if Beijing knows no conflict is coming, Beijing will accept them with pleasure.
A better approach by the U.S. and her allies would be resolve and resistance to Beijing’s antics. Thus far, the Biden administration seems to be taking that general approach and is bringing allies along. The recent decision to include Taiwan in the administration’s “Democracy Summit” is one example. So, too, the administration’s decision to provide Australia with nuclear-submarine capabilities to counter Beijing’s expansion in the South China Sea. There are other positive developments. Several universities in the U.S. and elsewhere have severed their relationships with local Confucius Institutes, and Beijing’s obfuscation and lies about the pandemic and its early handling of it have been discredited.
Showing resolve and clarity toward Beijing and embracing a policy of strategic coherence toward both the PRC and Taiwan — one is an authoritarian adversary, the other is a democratic ally — is informed by the approach Reagan and former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher took toward the Soviet Union. These leaders did not confront the USSR, but they were clear in describing its true nature, and they showed resolve in meeting the challenges the USSR presented. That approach predated Gorbachev. When Gorbachev came to power, the results were inevitable because the inconsistences of the Soviet system were irreversible.
The same is true for the PRC. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi wants the world to see it as in the ascendancy and in control of its destiny. It is neither of these. Xi is keen that the world see him as a transformational leader of the CCP like Mao or Deng, not preside over the collapse of the system as Gorbachev did. Clarity and resolve toward Beijing by the rest of the world is a better approach than the prior naivete and seeming willful avoidance of reality. The 36 strategies offer insight into Xi’s likely behavior if the world takes a more resolute stance. In the category known as the “Desperate Strategies” is this nugget: “If all else fails, flee.”