What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes
Foreign Affairs, 1 November 2022 - Kevin Rudd, president of the Asia Society/New York and previously served as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia
In the post–Cold War era, the
Western world has suffered no shortage of grand theories of history and
international relations. The settings and actors may change, but the global
geopolitical drama goes on: variants of realism and liberalism compete to
explain and predict state behavior, scholars debate whether the world is
witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or something else
entirely. And it is no surprise that the question that now attracts more
analytical attention than any other is the rise of China under President Xi
Jinping and the challenge it presents to American power. In the run-up to the
20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp), as Xi has
maneuvered to consolidate his power and secure an unprecedented third term,
Western analysts have sought to decode the worldview that drives him and his
ambitions for China.
One important body of thought has
been largely absent from this search for understanding, however:
Marxism-Leninism. This is odd because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s
official ideology since 1949. But the omission is also understandable, since
most Western thinkers long ago came to see communist ideology as effectively
dead — even in China, where, in the late 1970s, the ccp leader Deng Xiaoping
set aside the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in
favor of something more akin to state capitalism. Deng summed up his thoughts
on the matter with characteristic bluntness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s dispense with
theory,” he told attendees at a major ccp conference in 1981. His successors
Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role of the
market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that
maximized China’s participation in a global economic order led by the United
States.
Xi has brought that era of
pragmatic, nonideological governance to a crashing halt. In its place, he has
developed a new form of Marxist nationalism that now shapes the presentation
and substance of China’s politics, economy, and foreign policy. In doing so, Xi
is not constructing theoretical castles in the air to rationalize decisions
that the ccp has made for other, more practical reasons. Under Xi, ideology
drives policy more often than the other way around. Xi has pushed politics to
the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left, and foreign policy to the
nationalist right. He has reasserted the influence and control the ccp exerts
over all domains of public policy and private life, reinvigorated state-owned
enterprises, and placed new restrictions on the private sector. Meanwhile, he
has stoked nationalism by pursuing an increasingly assertive foreign policy,
turbocharged by a Marxist-inspired belief that history is irreversibly on
China’s side and that a world anchored in Chinese power would produce a more
just international order. In short, Xi’s rise has meant nothing less than the
return of Ideological Man.
These ideological trends are not
simply a throwback to the Mao era. Xi’s worldview is more complex than Mao’s,
blending ideological purity with technocratic pragmatism. Xi’s pronouncements
about history, power, and justice might strike Western audiences as
impenetrable or irrelevant. But the West ignores Xi’s ideological messaging at
its own peril. No matter how abstract and unfamiliar his ideas might be, they
are having profound effects on the real-world content of Chinese politics and
foreign policy — and thus, as China’s rise continues, on the rest of the world.
Party Man
Like all Marxist-Leninists, Xi
bases his thinking on historical materialism (an approach to history focused on
the inevitability of progress through ongoing class struggle) and dialectical
materialism (an approach to politics that focuses on how change occurs when
contradictory forces collide and are resolved). In his published writings, Xi
deploys historical materialism to position the Chinese revolution in world
history in a context in which China’s move to a more advanced stage of
socialism necessarily accompanies the decline of capitalist systems. Through
the lens of dialectical materialism, he portrays his agenda as a step forward
in an ever-intensifying contest between the ccp and reactionary forces at home
(an arrogant private sector, Western-influenced nongovernmental organizations,
religious movements) and abroad (the United States and its allies).
These concepts may seem abstruse
and arcane to those outside China. But they are taken seriously by elites in
the ccp, senior Chinese officials, and many of the international relations
scholars who advise the government. And Xi’s published writings on theory are
vastly more extensive than those of any other Chinese leader since Mao. The ccp
also draws on the kinds of economic and strategic advice that typically guide
Western political systems. But within the Chinese system, Marxism-Leninism
still serves as the ideological headwaters of a world view that places China on
the right side of history and portrays the United States as struggling in the
throes of inevitable capitalist decline, consumed by its own internal political
contradictions and destined to fall by the wayside. That, in Xi’s view, will be
the real end of history.
In 2013, barely five months after
his appointment as party general secretary, Xi gave an address to the Central
Conference on Ideology and Propaganda, a gathering of top party leaders in
Beijing. The contents of the speech were not reported at the time but were leaked
three months later and published by China Digital Times. The speech offers an
unfiltered portrait of Xi’s deepest political convictions. In it, he dwells on
the risks of the ideological decay that led to the collapse of Soviet
communism, the West’s role in fomenting ideological division within China, and
the need to crack down on all forms of dissent. “The disintegration of a regime
often starts from the ideological area,” Xi said. “Political unrest and regime
change may occur overnight, but ideological evolution is a long-term process,”
he continued, warning that once “ideological defenses are breached, other
defenses become very difficult to hold.” But the
ccp “has justice on our side,” he assured his audience, encouraging them not to
be “evasive, bashful, or mince our words” in dealing with Western countries,
whose goal is “to vie with us for the battlefields of people’s hearts and for
the masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the ccp and China’s
socialist system.”
This meant cracking down on
anyone “harboring dissent and discord” and demanding that ccp members
demonstrate loyalty not only to the party but also to Xi personally. What
followed was an internal “cleansing” of the ccp, accomplished by purging any
perceived political or institutional opposition, in large part through a decade
long anticorruption campaign that had begun even before the speech. A
“rectification campaign” brought another round of purges to the party’s
political and legal affairs apparatus. Xi also reasserted party control over
the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police and centralized
China’s cybersecurity and surveillance systems. Finally, in 2019, Xi introduced
a party-wide education campaign titled “Don’t Forget the Party’s Original
Purpose, Keep the Mission in Mind.” According to an official document
announcing the initiative, its goal was for party members “to gain theoretical
learning and to be baptized in ideology and politics.” By around the end of his
first term, it had become clear that Xi sought nothing less than to transform
the ccp into the high church of a revitalized, secular faith.
HIGH MARX
In contrast to those immediate
moves toward a more Leninist discipline in domestic politics, the shift to
Marxist orthodoxy in economic policy under Xi has been more gradual. Economic
management had long been the domain of the technocrats who serve on the State
Council, China’s administrative cabinet. Xi’s personal interests also lay more
in party history, political ideology, and grand strategy than in the details of
financial and economic management. But as the party apparatus increasingly
asserted control of the economic departments of the state, China’s policy
debates on the relative roles of the state and the market became increasingly
ideological. Xi also progressively lost confidence in market economics
following the global financial crisis of 2008 and China’s homegrown financial
crisis of 2015, which was sparked by the bursting of a stock market bubble and
led to a nearly 50 percent collapse in the value of Chinese stocks before the
markets finally settled in 2016.
China’s economic policy
trajectory under Xi — from a consensus in support of market reforms to an
embrace of increased party and state intervention — has therefore been uneven,
contested, and at times contradictory. Indeed, in late 2013, less than six
months after Xi’s revivalist sermon on ideology and propaganda, the Central
Committee of the ccp (the top several hundred leaders of the party) adopted a
remarkably reformist document on the economy, starkly titled “The Decision.” It
outlined a series of policy measures that would allow the market to play “the
decisive role” in the allocation of resources in the economy. But the rollout
of these policies slowed to a standstill in 2015, while state-owned enterprises
received trillions of dollars in investment from “industry guidance funds”
between 2015 and 2021 — a massive infusion of government support that brought
the Chinese state roaring back to the center of economic policy.
At the 19th ccp Party Congress,
in 2017, Xi announced that going forward, the party’s central ideological
challenge would be to rectify the “unbalanced and inadequate development” that
had emerged during the “reform and opening” period of market-based policy
changes that Deng had inaugurated in the late 1970s. In a little-noticed speech
published in the party’s ideological journal in 2021, Xi in effect challenged
Deng’s definition of “the primary stage of socialism” and Deng’s belief that
China would need to endure inequality for hundreds of years before achieving
prosperity for all. Instead, Xi hailed a faster transition to a higher phase of
socialism, declaring that “thanks to many decades of hard work, [this] is a
period that marks a new starting point for us.” Xi rejected Deng’s gradualism
and the notion that China was doomed to an indefinite future of developmental
imperfection and class inequality. Through more rigorous adherence to Marxist
principles, he promised, China could achieve both national greatness and greater
economic equality in the not-too-distant future.
Such an outcome would rely on
party committees increasing their influence on private firms by playing a
larger role in selecting senior management and making critical board decisions.
And as the Chinese state began securing equity in private firms, the state
would also encourage successful entrepreneurs to invest in state-owned
enterprises, mixing the market and the state to an ever-greater degree.
Xi’s rise has meant nothing less
than the return of Ideological Man.
Meanwhile, ccp economic planners
would be tasked with designing a “dual circulation economy,” which in effect
meant that China would become increasingly self-reliant across all sectors of
the economy while the world’s economies would become increasingly dependent on
China. And in late 2020, Xi laid out an approach to income redistribution known
as the “common prosperity agenda,” through which the rich were to be expected
to “voluntarily” redistribute funds to state-favored programs to reduce income
inequality. By the end of 2021, it was clear that Deng’s era of “reform and
opening” was coming to a close. In its place stood a new statist economic
orthodoxy.
“HISTORY IS THE BEST TEXTBOOK”
Xi’s push toward Leninist
politics and Marxist economics has been accompanied by his adoption of an
increasingly bracing form of nationalism, fueling an assertiveness abroad that
has replaced the traditional caution and risk aversion that were the hallmarks
of China’s foreign policy during the Deng era. Xi’s recognition of the
importance of nationalism was evident early in his tenure. “In the West, there
are people who say that China should change the angle of its historical
propaganda, it should no longer make propaganda about its history of
humiliation,” he noted in his 2013 speech. “But as I see it, we cannot heed
this; forgetting history means betrayal. History objectively exists. History is
the best textbook. A nation without historical memory does not have a future.”
Immediately after Xi was installed as ccp general secretary in 2012, he led the
newly appointed Politburo Standing Committee on a tour of an exhibition at the
National Museum of China in Beijing titled “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which
chronicled the perfidy of the Western imperial powers and Japan and the party’s
heroic response during China’s “100 years of national humiliation.”
In the years since, the concept
of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” has become the centerpiece of
Xi’s nationalist vision. His goal is for China to become the preeminent Asian
and global power by 2049. In 2017, Xi identified a number of quantitative
benchmarks that the country must reach by 2035 on the road to that status,
including becoming a “medium-level developed economy” and having “basically
completed the modernization of China’s national defense and its armed forces.”
To capture and codify his vision,
Xi has introduced or highlighted a number of ideological concepts that
collectively authorize China’s new, more assertive approach. First among these
is “comprehensive national power” (zonghe guoli), which the ccp uses to
quantify China’s combined military, economic, and technological power and
foreign policy influence. Whereas this concept was used by Xi’s predecessors,
only Xi was bold enough to claim that China’s power has grown so rapidly that
the country has already “entered the leading ranks of the world.” Xi has also
emphasized rapid changes in “the international balance of forces” (guoji
liliang duibi), which refers to official comparisons the party uses to measure
China’s progress in catching up with the United States and its allies. Official
ccp rhetoric also features references to growing “multipolarity” (duojihua) in
the international system and to irreversible increases in China’s power. Xi has
also rehabilitated a Maoist aphorism hailing “the rise of the East and the
decline of the West” (dongsheng xijiang) as a euphemism for China surpassing
the United States.
Xi’s public praise for China’s
growing national power has been much sharper and more expansive than that of
his predecessors. In 2013, the ccp formally abandoned Deng’s traditional
“diplomatic guidance,” dating from 1992, that China should “hide its strength,
bide its time, and never take the lead.” Xi used the 2017 Party Congress Report
to describe how China had promoted its “economic, scientific, technological,
military, and comprehensive national power” to the extent that it had now
“entered into the leading ranks of the world” — and that owing to an
unprecedented increase in China’s international standing, “the Chinese nation,
with an entirely new posture, now stands tall and firm in the East.”
THEORY AND PRACTICE
What matters most to those warily
eyeing China’s rise is how these changing ideological formulations have been
put into practice. Xi’s doctrinal statements are not only theoretical — they
are also operational. They have laid the groundwork for a wide range of foreign
policy steps that would have been unimaginable under earlier leaders. China has
embarked on a series of island reclamations in the South China Sea and turned
them into garrisons, ignoring earlier formal guarantees that it would not.
Under Xi, the country has carried out large-scale, live-fire missile strikes
around the Taiwanese coast, simulating a maritime and air blockade of the
island — something that previous Chinese regimes refrained from doing despite
having the ability to do so. Xi has intensified China’s border conflict with
India through repeated border clashes and by building new roads, airfields, and
other military-related infrastructure near the border. And China has embraced a
new policy of economic and trade coercion against states whose policies offend
Beijing and that are vulnerable to Chinese pressure.
China has also become far more
aggressive in going after critics abroad. In July 2021, Beijing for the first
time announced sanctions against individuals and institutions in the West that
have had the temerity to criticize China. The sanctions are in harmony with the
new ethos of “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, which encourages Chinese diplomats to
routinely and publicly attack their host governments — a radical departure from
Chinese diplomatic practice over the last 35 years.
Xi’s ideological beliefs have
committed China to the goal of building what Xi describes as a “fairer and more
just” international system — one anchored in Chinese power rather than American
power and one that reflects norms more consistent with Marxist-Leninist values.
For that reason, China has pushed to strip un resolutions of all references to
universal human rights and has built a new set of China-centric international
institutions, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to rival and
eventually replace Western-dominated ones. A Marxist-Leninist quest for a “more
just” world also shapes China’s promotion of its own national development model
across the global South as an alternative to the “Washington consensus” of free
markets and democratic governance. And Beijing has offered a ready supply of
surveillance technologies, police training, and intelligence collaboration to
countries around the world, such as Ecuador, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe, that
have eschewed the classical Western liberal-democratic model.
These changes in Chinese foreign
and security policy were signaled well in advance by earlier shifts in Xi’s
ideological line. Using what Western audiences might see as obscure,
theoretical mumbo jumbo, Xi has communicated to the party a crystal-clear
message: China is much more powerful than it ever was, and he intends to use
this power to change the course of history. Xi’s doctrinal statements are not
only theoretical — they are also operational.
IN IT TO WIN IT
Xi is 69 years old and seems
unlikely to retire; as a lifelong student and practitioner of Chinese politics,
he knows full well that if he did leave office, he and his family would be
vulnerable to retribution from his successors. So Xi is likely to lead the
country for the rest of his life, although his formal designations may change
over time. His mother is 96 and his father lived until he was 89. If their
longevity is any indication of his, he is poised to remain China’s paramount
leader until at least the late 2030s.
Xi faces few political
vulnerabilities. Elements of China’s society may begin to chafe at the
increasingly repressive apparatus he has built. But contemporary surveillance technologies allow him to control dissent in ways that Mao and Joseph Stalin
could hardly imagine. Xi exhibits growing confidence in China’s rising
“nationalist generation,” especially the elites who have been educated at home
rather than abroad, who came of age under his leadership rather than during the
more liberal regimes of his predecessors, and who see themselves as the vanguard
of Xi’s political revolution. It would be foolish to assume that Xi’s
Marxist-Leninist vision will implode under the weight of its own internal
contradictions in the near to medium term. If political change does come, it
will more likely arrive after Xi’s death than before it.
But Xi is not completely secure.
His Achilles’ heel is the economy. Xi’s Marxist vision of greater party control
over the private sector, an expanding role for state-owned enterprises and
industrial policy, and the quest for “common prosperity” through redistribution
is likely to shrink economic growth over time. That is because declining
business confidence will reduce private fixed capital investment in response to
growing perceptions of political and regulatory risk; after all, what the state
gives, the state can also take away. This applies in particular to the
technology, finance, and property sectors, which have been China’s principal
domestic growth engines for the last two decades. China’s attractiveness to
foreign investors has also declined because of supply chain uncertainty and the
impact of the new doctrines of national economic self-sufficiency. At home,
China’s business elites have been spooked by the anticorruption campaign, the
arbitrary nature of the party-controlled judicial system, and a growing number
of high-profile tech titans falling out of political favor. And China has yet
to figure out how to leave behind its “zero covid” strategy, which has
compounded the country’s economic slowdown.
Adding to these weaknesses are a
number of long-term structural trends: a rapidly aging population, a shrinking
workforce, low productivity growth, and high levels of debt shared between
state and private financial institutions. Whereas the ccp had once expected
average annual growth to remain around six percent for the rest of the 2020s
before slowing to around four percent for the 2030s, some analysts now worry
that in the absence of a radical course correction, the economy will soon begin
to stagnate, topping out at around three percent in the 2020s before falling to
around two percent in the 2030s. As a result, China might enter the 2030s still
locked in the so-called middle-income trap, with an economy smaller or only
marginally larger than that of the United States. For China’s leadership, that
outcome would have profound consequences. If employment and income growth
falter, China’s budget would come under pressure, forcing the ccp to choose
between providing health care, elder care, and pension entitlements on the one
hand and pursuing national security goals, industrial policy, and the Belt and
Road Initiative on the other. Meanwhile, China’s gravitational pull on the rest
of the global economy would be called into question. The debate over whether
the world has already witnessed “peak China” is only just beginning, and when
it comes to China’s long-term growth, the jury is still out. Therefore, the critical question
for China in the 2020s is whether Xi can engineer a course correction to
recover from the significant slowing of economic growth. That, however, would
involve a considerable loss of face for him. More likely, he will try to muddle
through, making as few ideological and rhetorical adjustments as possible and
putting in place a new team of economic policymakers, hoping they can find a
way to magically restore growth.
Xi’s Marxist nationalism is an
ideological blueprint for the future; it is the truth about China that is
hiding in plain sight. Under Xi, the ccp will evaluate changing international
circumstances through the prism of dialectical analysis — and not necessarily in
ways that will make sense to outsiders. For example, Xi will see new Western
institutions intended to balance against China, such as the Quad (the
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic cooperation agreement between
Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and the aukus (a defense
agreement linking Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as
both strategically hostile and ideologically predictable, requiring new forms
of political, ideological, and military “struggle” to roll back. In his
Marxist-Leninist view, China’s ultimate victory is guaranteed because the deep
forces of historical determinism are on the ccp’s side, and the West is in
structural decline.
This view will affect the
likelihood of conflict in Asia. Since 2002, the ccp’s code language for its
belief that war was unlikely has been the official phrase “China continues to
enjoy a period of strategic opportunity.
”This statement is meant to
convey that China will face a low risk of conflict for the foreseeable future
and can therefore seek economic and foreign policy advantages while the United
States is bogged down elsewhere, especially in the broader Middle East. But in
the wake of Washington’s official labeling of China as a “strategic competitor”
in 2017, the ongoing U.S.-Chinese trade war, mutual (if selective) forms of
economic decoupling, and the hardening of U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan,
South Korea, and nato, the ccp is likely to change its formal analytical
conclusion about the strategic environment.
The danger is that dialectical
methodologies and the binary conclusions that they produce can lead to
spectacularly incorrect conclusions when applied to the real world of
international security. In the 1950s, Mao saw it as dialectically inevitable
that the United States would attack China to snuff out the Chinese revolution
on behalf of the forces of capitalism and imperialism. Despite the Korean War
and two crises in the Taiwan Strait during that decade, no such attack
materialized. Had Mao not taken such an ideological view, the thawing of
China’s relationship with the United States could perhaps have been initiated a
decade earlier than it was, particularly given the unfolding reality of the Sino-Soviet
split that began after 1959. In similar fashion, Xi now sees threats on every
front and has embarked on the securitization of virtually every aspect of
Chinese public policy and private life. And once such threat perceptions become
formal analytical conclusions and are translated into the ccp bureaucracies,
the Chinese system might begin to function as if armed conflict were
inevitable.
Xi’s ideological pronouncements
shape how the ccp and its nearly 100 million members understand their country
and its role in the world. They take such texts seriously; the rest of the
world should, too. At the very least, Xi’s embrace of Marxist-Leninist
orthodoxy should put to rest any wishful thinking that Xi’s China might
peacefully liberalize its politics and economy. And it should make clear that
China’s approach to foreign policy is driven not only by a rolling calculus of
strategic risk and opportunity but also by an underlying belief that the forces
of historical change are inexorably driving the country forward.
This should, therefore, cause
Washington and its partners to carefully evaluate their existing China
strategies. The United States should realize that China represents the most
politically and ideologically disciplined challenger it has ever faced during
its century of geopolitical dominance. U.S. strategists should avoid “mirror
imaging” and should not assume that Beijing will act in ways that Washington
would construe as rational or serving China’s self-interests.
The West won an ideological
contest in the twentieth century. But China is not the Soviet Union, not least
because China now has the second-largest economy in the world. And although Xi
may not be Stalin, he is certainly not Mikhail Gorbachev, either. Xi’s
adherence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy has helped him consolidate his personal
power. But this same ideological stance has also created dilemmas that the ccp
will find difficult to resolve, especially as slowing economic growth puts in
doubt the party’s long-standing social contract with the people.
Whatever may unfold, Xi will not
abandon his ideology. He is a true believer. And this presents one further test
for the United States and its allies. To prevail in the unfolding ideological
war that now stretches before them will require a radical reembrace of the
principles that distinguish liberal-democratic political systems. Western
leaders must defend those ideals in word and deed. They, too, must
become true believers.