The self-serving, time-tested strategy features four powerful components.
The self-serving, time-tested strategy features four powerful components.
T he 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offered no surprises. Xi Jinping extended his tenure as paramount leader of the party and the country for “a third term,” which we must assume means the rest of his life. The fact that much of the reporting on the congress has been about whether Xi would “be elected” to “an unprecedented, third five-year term” proves that the world has much to learn about what it should not do any longer: Namely, understand and respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in terms of the CCP playbook.
That Xi has turned the PRC into a totalitarian state in which every sector must pay fealty to the Communist Party is now obvious to all. Democratic governments around the world, global business, the media, and others should stop acknowledging and repeating Beijing’s terms or frames of reference (e.g, “elected” to a “five-year term”). The period ahead demands clarity and truth-telling because following the CCP playbook will only help the totalitarian regime.
Xi will rely on a time-tested playbook:
(1) Image and propaganda are oldies but goodies for totalitarian regimes. How can the world not be in awe of a man who has more titles than any reigning monarch? In our age of 24-hour media, images of those tens of thousands of synchronized soldiers in Tiananmen Square are irresistible. Grand pageantry of military might is something China has mastered; confident governments don’t need to rely on such displays. If the Chinese people and the world remain hypnotized by this theater, they will continue to miss the deep and fundamental problems in the Chinese economy and the warped nature of the CCP narrative of devotion to the party.
(2) Control and order: This will include ongoing and intensified state intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens through the digital surveillance apparatus. The “zero Covid” policy has introduced additional tools to the arsenal. Much of the world bought into Beijing’s story that China was doing a better job than the rest of us in controlling a pandemic that had originated in . . . well . . . China. Subtlety is not a totalitarian attribute. Nearly three years in, it’s hard not to notice that official death statistics from Covid never moved from about 5,000, despite ineffective vaccines. The saying going around in China today is that the government doesn’t care if you die, as long as it isn’t from Covid.
Xi and his cohorts in the Politburo will continue to blame the faltering economy — which is the result of failed central planning over many decades — on the need to eradicate the virus and keep the public safe. Does anyone really believe that people are starving in their homes, dying from being deprived of other forms of medical care, or even being burned alive unable to leave their apartment complexes — all stories we’ve seen of late from citizen journalists — because of a desire to annihilate Covid? The policy remains a powerful tool of state control and the color-coded (red–yellow–green) phone symbols are having their desired effects. There is a recent report of a murderer who turned himself in because his Covid status was red and, literally, there was nowhere else he could go.
(3) Exaggerated tales of accomplishment: We will continue to hear about the remarkable job the CCP has done to create growth and deliver its citizens from poverty. Of course, the real record is sketchier, particularly in rural China where half a billion people live on a few dollars a day. The CCP came into power, and Mao Zedong threw everyone into starvation and poverty. Since then, the party has had the decency to let many of them farm their own land so they can return to pre-CCP living standards. From the party’s perspective, they are grateful, and they should be.
The CCP will continue to tout the development of the broader economy, too, though it has a mixed record. The government has spent almost a trillion dollars on high-speed rail, which remains highly unprofitable and wasteful. At the same time, after 70 years of CCP glory, only 30 percent of the population has a high-school education. Despite China’s 300 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, nothing has been done to prevent society from becoming highly stratified, with great disparities between urban and rural education and income. And the urban middle class is starting to fall behind, too. College-graduate unemployment exceeds 20 percent in the cities, and many have lost their lives’ savings in the housing-market bust. In fact, the CCP story is the story of China over the centuries: Regimes come, regimes go, the poor suffer.
(4) Misdirection: Xi will want to keep your attention on the military parades, the provocations in the South China Sea, on Taiwan. These are time-tested distractions that allow him to advance his agenda of control and growing Chinese influence elsewhere.
The party knows that Taiwan is a near-term distraction and that Beijing’s claim to a historic affinity to Taiwan is shallow. In the thousands of years of Chinese history, the claim over Taiwan came relatively late, during the Qing Dynasty. In the 17th century, Ming Dynasty holdouts had fled to Taiwan and started causing problems. The Qing leaders took it under control. That ended when the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. The island was not affiliated with the mainland regime before or since. But that won’t stop Xi and the CCP from blustering about the deep historical ties and the inevitability of reunification, as Xi did during the congress. It is guaranteed to get the attention of his compatriots and the world.
U.S. overreaction to that, and ostensibly to a PRC–Taiwan military conflict soon, would be playing by the CCP playbook. Certainly, the United States and other countries who believe in Taiwan’s vibrant, democratic, and free people should pursue deterrence and encourage Taiwan to invest in its own defenses. But it would be a mistake to focus on bluster about Taiwan to the exclusion of Beijing’s other objectives in the region, which is precisely what Xi hopes will happen.
PHOTOS: Chinese Communist Party Congress
Misdirection on Taiwan has obscured the emergence of PRC client states in the region, which will have significant long-term impact. Through a mix of diplomacy, investment, and military sales, Cambodia has become tethered to Beijing. Phnom Penh has ceded some of its sovereignty to the PRC in so-called Special Economic Zones and Chinese military installations. The government of Hun Sen denies all of this. Laos is following a similar path and is sinking under the weight of debt owed to China. The Diplomat reports that the country’s electricity grid is now in the control of a Chinese-state-owned firm. Even Thailand, with which the United States has been signing friendship and security pacts since the 19th century, is increasingly leaning toward Beijing for military purchases. While the security and freedom of Taiwan should be an important U.S. objective, the PRC seeks broader influence and even hegemony across the region that the U.S. and its allies should not tolerate.
The United States should lead the world in rejecting the CCP playbook. We must continue to build a democratic alliance to resist PRC hegemony in Asia. By design, our societies have advantageous features that the PRC cannot mimic. Xi and the CCP misread the raucous nature of America politics. Radical transparency, through social media and a free press, is something that the party does not understand and, of course, does not permit. Xi doubts American resolve, and believes we have little tolerance for pain. He overestimates, for example, the NBA’s kowtowing to Beijing over perceived slights and thinks it reflects the general American spirit. The inconvenient truth for Xi is that the belief that the PRC is a danger is one of the few unifying elements in American life. A recent Pew study found that 82 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of China while only 16 percent have a favorable view. The split was 44–43 just five years ago. That trend is observable in Japan, South Korea, and Australia, too. The CCP’s heavy-handedness and Xi’s emergence as a totalitarian hardliner has not gone unnoticed where freedom and individual autonomy are valued. These gaps and blind spots in Xi’s understanding of the United States are strengths that we should use against his designs for hegemony.
The American and broader democratic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is consistent with these findings. Observing this response, Xi must now wonder what that entails for Taiwan. Xi has seen the relatively low-level response to his takeover of Hong Kong. He should realize that the context of Taiwan is notably different in many respects, including the absence of anything akin to the Hong Kong hand-over agreement between the U.K. and the PRC. Xi may be doubting the wisdom of his actions earlier this year, during the Beijing Winter Olympics, when he and Vladimir Putin gazed into each other’s eyes and pledged their mutual, unwavering support. We all say things we live to regret, but his embrace of Putin has become a significant dead weight.
There should be little doubt that Xi emerges from the congress with a mandate from the party to deal with the challenges China is facing. He is the hardliner the party has decided it needs now to address problems decades in the making. The CCP playbook will continue to prescribe a mix of diversion, imagery, and deception. China is rife with internal challenges – social, demographic, economic — that were glossed over at the congress. Xi intended for the pomp and bluster to keep the focus of the world, and of the Chinese people, on himself. We’ll see more, glorious national-day celebrations with thousands of goose-stepping soldiers in Tiananmen Square and military provocations in the South China Sea. Taiwan will continue to be a source of much misdirection. Xi knows that when he slams his fists about Taiwan, his own citizens are temporarily distracted from their woes — state intrusion into their daily lives, Covid lockdowns, rural poverty, rising urban unemployment, and declining net worth caused by the bursting real estate bubble. Scenes of busy nightlife and of top-tier cities hide the fact that many in the PRC live a life of suffering and servitude to the party and state, which have replaced all other values. Individuals need to find purpose elsewhere.
The free world’s most effective response to the CCP playbook would be to demonstrate the ingenuity and cooperation that can result only from the freedom that democracy fosters. Dictatorships cannot understand that free societies are not predicated on the inhibition or the regulation of impulse, but on willing self-discipline and the adoption of responsibility — motivating others to cooperate freely rather than at the point of a gun or by the forced direction of a party or the state. This freedom also motivates people to transcend their individuality and make sacrifices. Individuals and groups empower their governments to determine which goals and ideals to pursue, and that in turn gives freedom both nobility and purpose.
The CCP playbook is about fealty to the party; its purpose is only to preserve its own existence.