In a Corner post today, Jimmy Quinn draws attention to a piece by Melissa Chan in the Washington Post on how to label the Chinese regime.
Chan:
In 2009, when I began to more frequently describe China as “authoritarian” as a broadcast correspondent for Al Jazeera English, some editors pushed back, believing it was too much editorializing. We have since become more comfortable with regularly using the designation, in media coverage and beyond. But as journalists and athletes head to Beijing for the Winter Olympics, it may be time to reassess and consider calling the Chinese state what it is fast becoming: a fascist one.
Chan is quite right to suggest that this is the direction in which China is headed. The word “fascist” is often, as George Orwell noted in a famous article from 1944, no more than a handy insult that has been reduced to almost meaninglessness, but, he added, “fascism is also a political and economic system.” And so it is.
Fascism, as Orwell recognized, took different forms in different countries. Italian fascism was not the same as the fascism that (whether acknowledged or not) took root elsewhere in Europe or, say, in Perón’s Argentina. It is thus perfectly possible to have a fascism “with Chinese characteristics,” characteristics that may, incidentally, include paying continuing lip service to China’s communist heritage and, indeed, even using some of its rhetoric and symbolism.
And this, in a well-argued piece, is what Chan clearly recognizes, even if this passage falls slightly short of the mark:
Consider the hallmarks of fascism: a surveillance state with a strongman invoking racism, nationalism and traditional family values at home, while building up a military for expansion abroad.
With the exception of building up the military for expansion abroad, which, as Orwell discussed, was not necessarily a feature of fascism in his era, those are all characteristics of fascist regimes, but they are not uniquely fascist. There have, for example, been plenty of surveillance states on both left and right (East Germany may have won that dubious distinction up at least until the birth of China’s high-tech iteration of such a state, an iteration that Chan describes in chilling detail).
But perhaps what is most distinctively fascist about China is the direction in which it is going economically. Orwell was careful to describe fascism as a political and economic system, and with good reason.
Chan:
Companies may chase profit margins like other capitalist enterprises, but party officials step in when they see an overriding state interest. Those who fail to fall in line are felled — the most spectacular example being billionaire tech magnate Jack Ma, who disappeared for months after criticizing the country’s financial regulators. Together with Beijing’s anti-union, anti-labor stance, the Chinese economy today recalls Mussolini’s corporatist fascism.
The treatment of the unions (or, more specifically, labor) under fascist theory, if frequently not practice, is complicated (and the role of unions as a mainstay of the regime in Perón’s Argentina only complicates matters further), but Chan is right to draw a link between the Beijing regime’s handling of the economy and corporatism. Corporatism does not have to be fascist (far from it), but fascism wouldn’t be fascism without it. It is, incidentally, worth examining how neatly Xi’s doctrine of “common prosperity” fits within a corporatist model.
I touched on the shift in the way that the Chinese economy is being run in the course of a post the other day:
The Chinese state . . . has moved a long way from communism and, indeed, the relatively freewheeling era that followed the Deng-era reforms. Instead the “People’s Republic” is rapidly evolving into a regime run on fairly classic fascist lines, even if that fascism comes with, as the phrase goes, “Chinese characteristics.” While fascism frequently involves strong elements of “state capitalism” (then and now: Think of Mussolini’s IRI), another important element within its economic history is the notion of “harnessed” capitalism, a system that is designed to exploit some of the dynamism of capitalism — companies remain privately owned — while ultimately subordinated to the interests of the state.
Chan concludes:
Taken together, “authoritarian” …hardly feels enough, nor does it feel accurate. That is a disservice to the public. Journalists, politicians and others should consider calling elements of the Chinese state fascistic, if they are not entirely comfortable describing the state writ large as fascist.
We may be facing an absence of existing terminology to properly describe contemporary China. But that behooves us to rethink our vocabulary and not dismiss the f-word out of hand.
Indeed we shouldn’t. If China is not already a fascist state, it soon will be, albeit one with Chinese characteristics.