Полная версия:
Battlegrounds
To master the past as a means of securing his future, Xi cultivated a more benign interpretation of Chinese Communist Party history, one based on three phases of progress. First, Mao Zedong ended the century of humiliation. Second, Deng Xiaoping and his successors generated wealth. Third, Xi Jinping returned China to greatness. Xi’s portrayal of Mao as savior rather than tyrant represented more than a manipulation of history; it required the suppression of personal trauma. Xi and his family suffered physical and psychological abuse during the Cultural Revolution. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior party official and veteran of the revolution, was imprisoned and tortured. The Red Guards ransacked his childhood home and forced his family to flee. One of Xi’s sisters died from the hardship. Xi was brought before a jeering crowd during a “struggle session,” a humiliation ritual used during the Cultural Revolution, where his own mother denounced him. Like many of his contemporaries who are now at the top of the party, Xi was forced to work in the countryside. He rarely speaks of the horrors inflicted on his family at the outset of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1968. Instead, his propaganda apparatus portrays his seven years of hard labor as an uplifting coming-of-age story that explains his resilience as well as his empathy for the hardships suffered by the less fortunate people of rural China. Xi’s reluctance to criticize Mao and the Cultural Revolution is more than a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which victims develop positive feelings toward their captors and sympathy for their causes. Xi is unwilling to renounce the Mao era mainly because he understands that any historical questioning of the Communist Party past could morph into skepticism of and opposition to the Communist Party present. Contemplation of the Maoist period’s failures might raise doubts about the party’s ability to deliver on the China Dream through absolute control. Losing control of the past is, for autocrats, the first step toward losing control of the future.11
MANIPULATING THE collective memory of the Chinese people requires ever greater feats of censorship and nationalistic education under Xi. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms generated prosperity, but they also caused ideological incoherence. The contradictions between Communist orthodoxy and a highly globalized economy were starker than ever thirty years after Deng said, “Let some people get rich first” and “Getting rich is glorious.”12 Authoritarian capitalism created ample opportunities for corruption and produced a bourgeois class larger than any other self-proclaimed Communist country has ever seen. When he assumed leadership of the party in 2012, Xi was determined to reemphasize the ideological underpinning of CCP rule but to couch it in a rhetoric of Chinese chauvinism and national destiny. In speeches, he revived Mao’s claim in his Little Red Book (a collection of 267 of the dictator’s aphorisms) that it was “an objective law independent of man’s will [that] the socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system.” In tandem, he has promoted a “community of common destiny for mankind,” a bid for global leadership that strongly echoes his dynastic forebears, based on the idea that China reigns supreme over tianxia—“everything beneath heaven.”
Xi was the consensus pick to lead the party in 2012, a bona fide member of what Australian journalist John Garnaut has labeled the “princeling cohort.” The princelings, direct descendants of the party elders who fought and won the revolution in 1949, share existential angst that they may succumb to the historical cycle that destroyed every dynasty that came before them. For Xi and his contemporaries at the top of the CCP, maintaining control and achieving national rejuvenation can be matters of life or death.13
This attitude was further reinforced by the Tiananmen Square protest. In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square to demand democratic governance, free speech, and a free press. Within a week, many of the protesters began hunger strikes. The Chinese government declared martial law and dispatched mechanized PLA units to the capital. On the night of June 3, the PLA closed in on the center of Beijing, firing live ammunition into crowds of people on the streets. The army stormed the square at 1 a.m. on June 4. Estimates of civilian deaths ranged from several hundred to ten thousand. The massacre generated global outrage. As I glimpsed Tiananmen Square, I remembered that history and thought once more about the paradox of China’s growing power and fragility.
For the CCP’s leaders, the lesson of Tiananmen was never to loosen its grip on power. Xi and the party see 1989 as a period during which the Chinese Communist Party might have joined the Soviet Union in collapse. As with Putin and the Russian Siloviki, party leadership viewed Mikhail Gorbachev as weak. Gorbachev, who visited Beijing amid the Tiananmen Square protests to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Soviet-Communist China relations, lost faith in the primacy of the Soviet party elites and compromised. Xi and his cohort believe that Gorbachev’s effort to make the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a “party of the whole people” was misguided and led to the Soviet Union’s demise.
While obsessed with party purity and order at home, the CCP is determined to advance its system of authoritarian capitalism abroad to expand Chinese power and influence at the expense of countries that adhere to democratic principles and free-market economic practices. On the morning of the second day of our visit, we stood on the steps of the Great Hall of the People as the American and Chinese leaders, clad in overcoats against the brisk autumn air, reviewed a People’s Liberation Army honor guard. Off to one side was a throng of Chinese and American elementary school children leaping up and down and enthusiastically waving the flags of the two nations. The kids, who had been cued to begin their cheering too soon, were visibly exhausted by the time the two leaders passed in front of them to enter the Great Hall and begin the day’s talks. Pottinger (who wouldn’t be stopped from attending the second day’s meetings) leaned over and deadpanned into my ear, “The children are getting an early start on their social credit scores.” Such bits of humor were what made our intense schedule feel tolerable—and would have landed a Chinese blogger in jail.
The ceremony and the tour of the Forbidden City left me with the impression that the party’s leaders believe that they have a fleeting window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor. To seize upon this opportunity, the CCP integrates internal and external efforts to expand its comprehensive national power. Internally, realizing the so-called China Dream requires unprecedented economic growth, popular support for national rejuvenation, and tight control of the population. Externally, satisfying the narrative of national rejuvenation renders a dramatic expansion of Chinese economic, political, and military influence indispensable. The CCP’s strategy relies on co-option and coercion to influence China’s population, other nations, and international organizations to act in the party’s interests. The party also attempts to conceal its intentions and its actions to preclude competition. This strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment integrates a range of cultural, economic, technological, and military efforts. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous, not only to the United States and the free world but also to China’s citizens deemed a threat to the party’s ambitions, is the integrated nature of the party’s effort across government, industry, academia, and the military.
TO MAINTAIN its exclusive grip on power in the post-Mao period, the party strove to meet the population’s rising expectations mainly through increased economic opportunity. Since Deng’s reforms, the Chinese people achieved an astonishing rate of growth, which pulled more than 800 million people out of poverty. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, China’s middle class grew by 203 million people. China became the world’s second-largest economy and the largest exporter. Infrastructure and construction projects transformed China’s harbors, airports, railways, and roads, connecting the Chinese people to one another and the world to an unprecedented degree. By the early 2000s, half the world’s cranes were building gleaming skyscrapers in China’s rapidly expanding cities. The party’s goal was to double income levels between 2010 and 2020. This proved unsustainable. Since 2015, China has marked less than 7 percent growth every year, and by 2020, China’s leaders saw this key pillar of their legitimacy, economic growth, fracturing. Policies designed to maintain high rates of growth generated long-term frailties in the economy.14 Vast debt fueled inefficient growth but did not produce profitable returns. Overinvestment in particular sectors led to overcapacity and losses. By early 2020, economic growth had decelerated to the lowest rate in twenty-nine years as capital investment by Chinese firms dropped. To boost the decelerating economy, China cut banks’ reserve rates to free up $126 billion for loans. But then the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in early 2020 and the associated quarantine and travel restrictions affected nearly half of China’s population, slowing China’s economy further. It seemed possible that China’s economic policies designed to keep the party’s exclusive grip on power and allow China to sprint to catch up to the United States might risk what party leaders feared most: internal dissent based on a failure to meet the peoples’ rising expectations.
The logical way to continue the economic growth that began with Deng’s reforms in the 1980s would have been to reform markets even further, unleashing free enterprise and deemphasizing large, inefficient state-owned companies that lacked incentives to increase productivity and pursue innovative technologies. Instead, under Xi, the party strengthened the primacy of state-owned enterprises (SOE). Although SOEs are inefficient and major sources of waste and corruption, they are critical to maintaining the party’s control over the economy and co-opting the population. SOEs are also foundational to the party’s plans to shift the economy toward high-end manufacturing and dominate critical sectors of the emerging global economy. Xi moved to “strengthen, optimize, and enlarge” state companies, directing more than $1 billion in mergers to create national champion industries such as railway, metals, mining, shipping, and nuclear energy.15
UNDER THE party’s strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment, China’s authoritarian system has become ubiquitous. To ensure their grip on power even if they fail to meet their goals for improved standards of living, party leaders emphasized propaganda and accelerated the construction of an unprecedented surveillance state that is more intrusive than that imagined by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Indeed, the party invented the term brainwashing, and today’s efforts have their roots in the thought reform movement that Zhou Enlai initiated in 1951 and the CCP perfected during the Cultural Revolution. Twenty-first-century brainwashing has been upgraded with new technology. For 1.4 billion Chinese people, government propaganda is a seamless part of everyday life. Chinese television news follows a regular agenda: ten to fifteen minutes on Chairman Xi and other CCP leaders, five to ten minutes on Chinese economic achievements, and five to seven minutes on the failures of the rest of the world. There is also routine coverage of the theme that the United States wants to keep China down. Students in universities and high schools must take lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the chairman’s fourteen-point philosophy that emphasizes the party’s “people-centric” approach to governance and the many benefits of the CCP’s supreme leadership over everything. Xi Jinping Thought is the subject of the most popular app in China. The app, whose name translates to “Study Strong Country,” requires users to sign in with their mobile numbers and real names before earning study points through reading articles, commenting daily, and taking multiple-choice tests about the party’s virtues and wise policies.16
The social credit score is one of the party’s many tools for co-opting the population into conformity and coercing recalcitrant individuals. The party uses its control of the internet and all forms of communication in combination with artificial intelligence technologies to monitor activities and conversations. The resulting social credit score is meant to determine eligibility for almost all social services, such as loans, internet access, government employment, education, insurance, and transportation.
Like its dynastic predecessors, the party leadership is particularly concerned about dissent in China’s border regions. The party has acted most aggressively toward the ethnic minority populations and in territories annexed in recent history. In western Xinjiang, for example, where the ethnic-majority Uighurs mainly practice Islam, the party has engaged in systematic repression designed to coerce the population into forswearing their religious and cultural identity in favor of the party’s nationalist ideology. By 2019, the party had detained at least a million Uighurs in concentration camps where they are subjected to systematic brainwashing. Uighur families are forced to house loyal party members so their progress in reeducation can be monitored. The CCP has demolished historic mosques. Ethnic Han have been forcefully resettled into Xinjiang to dilute Uighur culture. Xinjiang has become a testing ground for maintaining ideological purity and psychological as well as cultural control. In Xinjiang’s concentration camps, prisoners begin the day with a flag-raising ceremony; they pass time singing Communist Party songs, praising the party and Xi Jinping, and studying Chinese language, history, and law. The CCP responded to international criticism of these repressive tactics with denial, but evidence mounted. In November 2019, the New York Times uncovered a startling cache of documents allegedly leaked by a member of the CCP. The more than four hundred pages of records revealed party orders to crush all minorities’ opposition, imprison more than one million people in concentration camps, and carry out systematic brainwashing and cultural control. Included in the documents were internal speeches by Chairman Xi directing officials to show “absolutely no mercy” as they crack down on minority populations. He also directed follow-up efforts to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China. Local officials who resisted the party’s orders were purged; a county head in southern Xinjiang was jailed for quietly releasing more than seven thousand inmates.17 The CCP is also repressive, albeit more subtly, in Tibet, and it has continuously chipped away at local autonomy and individual rights in the former colonial territories of Hong Kong and Macao.
In Tibet, where the Buddhist majority regards the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader, the party blended co-option with coercion under a campaign of “stability maintenance.” To appear as a benefactor, the party refurbished rather than razed temples and historical sites. As in Xinjiang, however, Communist Party cadres monitor every village, oversee political education, and manage every monastery and religious institution. Enabled by new technology, the party intends to scrutinize daily behavior so it can identify and swiftly punish dissent. The party also claimed the right to approve “high reincarnations” that select future Dalai Lamas, the foremost leader of the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism.
In June 2019, the party’s effort to tighten its control over Hong Kong’s population sparked sustained protests that continued into 2020. The protests were initially in response to a law that would allow local authorities to extradite criminal fugitives wanted on the mainland. The demonstrators demanded suspension not only of the bill, but of other means of eroding Hong Kong’s democratic autonomy. The party responded by waging a sustained campaign of propaganda to discredit the protestors and by carrying out coercive measures against companies and individuals that supported them. A landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates in the November 2019 election indicated widespread support for the protest movement and Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status. Demonizing dissent and blaming foreign forces were the same tactics employed after the Tiananmen Square massacre thirty years earlier. After President Trump signed a bill expressing support for the protestors and authorizing sanctions against individuals and entities that used force against them, thousands of people assembled in front of the Hong Kong City Hall for a pro-American and pro-democracy rally.18 The party conducted a global propaganda campaign to portray the protests as a foreign-backed color revolution designed to destabilize China.
Efforts to prevent dissent and maintain control through co-option and coercion span the entire country. Religion is one of the party’s perceived threats because it encroaches on the void left after the collapse of Maoism. Mao attacked religion as “vulgar superstition,” but his effort to replace spirituality with Communist ideology and his own cult of personality failed. The Catholic Church and fast-growing Protestant religions concerned Xi and the party, although their campaign against Christianity was less brazen than the campaign against Islam. In 2018, for example, the party attempted to co-opt the Catholic Church by ceding veto power to the Vatican over bishop nominees in return for Rome’s recognition of party-appointed bishops. Despite its effort, about half the country’s ten million Catholics continued to worship underground and reject churches run by the state. When Protestant congregations proved difficult to control because of their diversity, the party forcefully removed crosses from the tops of churches and even demolished some churches to make an example of those that had failed to register with the government. To provide an alternative to Christianity and Islam, Xi and the party resurrected the Confucian moral code, with its emphasis on deference to hierarchy and preservation of harmony, as a form of folk religion intended to strengthen the CCP’s grip on power. The party has also significantly boosted patronage of Buddhism and Daoism as “Chinese” alternatives to what it regards as foreign belief systems.19
Suppression of religion extended to suppression of ideas associated with Western liberalism. Any principles or values that might challenge the absolute control of the party had to be eliminated. Particularly dangerous were materials that extolled individual rights, including freedom of expression, representative government, and rule of law. In 2019, for example, the Ministry of Education ordered a nationwide check on all university constitutional law textbooks. Within weeks, a popular textbook written by Beijing University law professor Zhang Qianfan was pulled from bookstores throughout the country. Zhang noted in an interview that “constitutional law, as an academic discipline, should not be politicized.” Not long after it was posted on a social media platform, the interview also disappeared.20
THE PARTY’S effort to stifle human freedom and extend authoritarian control does not stop at China’s borders. China uses a combination of co-option and propaganda to promote its policies and its worldview. China’s expanding influence in the world, what scholars and policy makers call tianxia (
Made in China 2025 is designed to make China a largely independent science and technology innovation power. To achieve that goal, the party is creating high-tech monopolies inside China and stripping foreign companies of their intellectual property through theft and forced technology transfer. SOEs and private companies work in concert to achieve the party’s objectives. In some cases, foreign companies are required or coerced to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies to sell their products in China. These Chinese companies mostly have close ties to the party, making routine the transfer of intellectual property and manufacturing techniques to their partners and, by extension, to the Chinese government. Thus, foreign companies entering into the Chinese market often make huge profits in the short term, but after transferring their intellectual property and manufacturing know-how, they see their market share diminish as Chinese companies, advantaged by state support and cheap labor, produce goods at a low price and dump those goods into the global market. As a result, many international companies lose market share and even go out of business. Made in China 2025 aims to fuel China’s economic growth with a vast amount of transferred technology and eventually dominate sectors of the emerging global economy that will give it military as well as economic advantages.
The party’s international efforts to achieve national rejuvenation and realize the China Dream come together under the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, later labeled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for foreign audiences, to mask its China-centric nature. OBOR calls for more than one trillion dollars in new infrastructure investments across the Indo-Pacific and Eurasian continents and beyond. While the initiative initially received an enthusiastic reception from nations that saw an opportunity both for economic growth and to satisfy their need for improved infrastructure, by 2018 it had become clear to many of those nations that CCP investment came with many strings attached, most prominently unsustainable debt and widespread corruption. Under the CCP’s integrated strategy, economic motives are inseparable from strategic designs. OBOR projects are meant to gain influence over targeted governments and place the “Middle Kingdom” at the hub of routes and communications networks. New or expanded transportation and shipping routes will ease the flow of energy and raw materials into China and Chinese products out. More routes would significantly reduce the risk that the United States or other nations could interdict those flows at critical maritime chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca (the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific).22 To ensure control at key geographic points, the CCP uses investment and indebtedness as the basis for servile relationships between the Middle Kingdom and modern-day vassal states. OBOR is, in large measure, a colonial-style campaign of co-option and coercion.
Belying the party’s description of OBOR as development of a “community for shared future for mankind,” the initiative has instead created a common pattern of economic clientelism that the Chinese Communist Party eagerly exploits.23 The CCP first co-opts countries with large, high-interest loans from Chinese banks. Once they are indebted, the party coerces that country’s leaders to align with the party’s foreign policy agenda and goal of displacing the influence of the United States and its key partners (e.g., Japan, Australia, India, and European nations). Although Chinese leaders often depict these deals as “win-win,” many OBOR projects have proven to be a one-way toll road that ensures China’s access to a client country’s energy and raw materials, creates artificial demand for Chinese products and a Chinese labor force, and allows China to control critical physical and communications infrastructure. These deals, rather, fit the description of “triple wins” solely for China: Chinese companies and workers abroad cycle money back into the Chinese economy, Chinese banks enjoy high-interest payments, and the Chinese government gains powerful influence over the target country’s economic and diplomatic relations.
