"American attempts to demonize Chinese Communist Party spill over to become issue" : The South China Morning Post - For a US China Policy

As voters in the United States prepare for the presidential election in November, the South China Morning Post explores the potential ramifications for China. In the fourth part of what is a series, Jun Mai looked at the unprecedented ideological debate about China, particularly efforts to delegitimize the Communist Party within the country and around the world. The South China Morning Post is certainly not pro-Beijing, but it is clearly irritated by what it sees as a systematic anti-Chinese policy, the real motivations of which are essentially domestic.

If there’s a converging point of the political rhetoric from Washington and Beijing, governments caught in their worst tensions for decades, the answer might be the repeated mention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), writes Jun Mai.

While Beijing has praised the party as the reason for all of China’s successes, from driving economic growth to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, senior Trump administration officials say it is the core threat to the current world order and the American way of life.

US officials including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have said they are seeking to “engage and empower the Chinese people”, who are described as “totally separate from the CCP”.

But one analyst says there is an added dimension to such an effort.

“By separating the [Communist] Party from the people, it allows American leaders and its people to take on a virtually ‘missionary’ role, which some Chinese liberals welcome,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

Yang added that the rhetoric, which began before the election season, was likely to gain hold as public opinion turns against China.

The Trump administration’s suggestion that the Chinese people could turn against the CCP has met with a fierce rebuttal from Beijing, which sees the attack as a threat to its legitimacy. It has also started a policy debate in Washington, where there is concern about potential diplomatic damage and questions about how much such efforts could realistically achieve.

While Pompeo’s remarks were well received among dissidents and human rights advocates in China, the message, says Jun Mai has failed to resonate among most Chinese people, whom Trump officials say they “stand with”.

Inside China, even dissidents like Wu Yangwei, who has sought to challenge Beijing’s legitimacy for decades, admit that public support for the party in China is strong and real.

“Realistically, because of the control of news media, education and personal interests, most people in China believe the CCP is inalienable from them,” said Wu, a dissident who lives in Guangzhou in southern China.

Wu, 50, was among the first 300 people to sign onto Charter 08, a political document from 2008 that called for electoral democracy in China and freedom of speech, among their other demands. Charter 08’s author, Liu Xiaobo, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the document, was jailed for subversion and died of cancer in 2017 while in custody.

Nevertheless, Wu still hopes that more Chinese people will wake up if the American pressure on China continues.

But for most ordinary Chinese, US President Donald Trump’s hardball tactics have not had much effect.

The debate on China is being used by Trump and the Republicans as part of an increasingly ideological issue in the upcoming US presidential elections, said Shi Yinhong, a US specialist with Renmin University in Beijing.

“With or without the China issue, the Republicans will accuse Democrats of practicing socialism – a main source of grass roots populist’s grievances against them, along with globalization and liberalism,” says Shi. “So they might believe connecting the issue with Communism in China would help.”

During the Republican National Convention two weeks ago, political heavyweights turned to the Chinese Communist Party for vilification, linking it with their attacks on Democrats as “socialists”.

While Trump himself is not an ideologue and seldom used words such as “Communism” even in attacking China, his hardball politics against Beijing have created space for strategic hawks in his camp to focus on confronting China, Shi says.

Months before the election, the acronym “CCP” appeared in most of Trump officials’ policy announcements on Huawei, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping is now referred to by US officials, especially the State Department, as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. A bill has been introduced to the US House that seeks to prohibit the federal government from calling Xi “president”, to avoid the appearance that he was democratically elected.

The focus of hawkish forces within the Trump administration could carry great costs for the US, said Ryan Hass, who directed China policy at the National Security Council staff in the Obama administration.

“Beijing has judged Pompeo’s comments as a clear signal of American hostility toward continued Communist Party rule,” said Hass, now a foreign policy fellow with the Brookings Institute in Washington.

“This judgment has lowered the cost and risk to Beijing of taking actions that America opposes because it has concluded that the Trump administration already is entrenched in an adversarial posture toward it,” he said.

So far, Beijing has reacted furiously to the challenge to the CCP’s legitimacy to rule China by Pompeo and others.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said that anyone attempting to break the bond between the Communist Party and the Chinese people was “making themselves enemies of the 1.4 billion Chinese people”.

Speaking at a forum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, Xi declared that no force could prevail in attempting to demonize the Communist Party.

“The Chinese people would never agree with any people and forces who try to distort the history of the Chinese Communist Party or vilify the nature and purpose of the Communist Party,” he said.

Chinese officials have frequently cited a study in July by Harvard’s Kennedy School that said 93.1 per cent of Chinese citizens were satisfied with the Chinese central government in 2016. The approval dropped for lower-level governments, with the township level having the lowest satisfaction rate, 70.2 per cent.

It is a reality that is well understood by China hands.

“The CCP has been around for quite a while, it has a pretty big reserve of legitimacy among the Chinese people themselves,” Susan Thornton, former acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Trump administration, said on a recent podcast.

Thornton recognized the information control and propaganda behind the public support of the party, but said that support was real.

“The reality is, in my view, if there was an election held for the China leader today, then Xi Jinping would win that election,” she said.

Among some audiences in China, Trump’s dramatic style of politics is undermining the soft power of the United States.

“He’s obviously trying to divert attention after he did a lousy job on Covid-19 by acting tough in foreign policy,” said Joy Zhuang, a Beijing-based employee of a major Chinese internet company.

Zhuang, who lived in the United States for seven years before returning to China in 2017, said she was disappointed with the US on a wide range of issues, including the fact that there is a debate about wearing masks during the pandemic.

The Trump campaign has tried to paint the Democratic Party’s nominee, former vice-president Joe Biden, as weak towards China, a portrayal widely disputed by analysts and the Biden camp.

But during a Democratic primary debate in February, Biden called Xi a “thug” responsible for human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. 

In late August, his campaign said the candidate stood against China’s Xinjiang policies “in the strongest terms” and called Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang “genocide”.

Experts, says the South China Morning Post, have also pointed to the notable omission of the “one China principle” from the Democrats’ 2020 platform, a signal suggesting that Biden might also be harsh with Beijing on the Taiwan issue.

Shi Yinhong, the US specialist at Renmin University in Beijing, said he expected that a Biden administration would continue to pressure Beijing over issues including Xinjiang, Hong Kong and decoupling in the technology sector.

“The biggest difference [compared with Trump] might be that Biden will not be after a regime change for China, and will be more cautious about a military conflict,” he said.

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Comment: Let me make the following points.

(1) It is in the interest of neither the US nor China to start a Cold War nor to continue the trade war. But as the cliché says, it takes two to tango and China must amend her behavior on a series of points.

(2) Using China as a presidential campaign issue with all the exaggerations and harsh rhetoric this entails is dangerous: Be Careful What You Wish For, You May Get It! This does not mean that the campaign should avoid the issue of China, however. We shouldn't use the Chinese danger as a pretext to forget Russia -still our main strategic adversary in my view, as Trump did when asked about Navalny.

(3) As the article observes and I have often made the point, Pompeo in particular never talks about Beijing or the Chinese government, but the CCP. Why? Because the word Communism has, and rightly so, extremely negative connotations in the US.

(4) The reality however is that China is no longer Communist in the sense that the advanced, dominant sector of the economy is mostly in private hands. Communism is indeed repressive but it is not the repression that makes it Communist -there are all sorts of repressive regimes that are strongly anti-Communist. Communism is a system that is based on the public or state property of the main means of production and exchange. To this infrastructure, as the Communists used to say, correspond a superstructure: a social and political structure and state institutions. 

(5) But what is the CCP doing here? The originality of the present Chinese system is that it is relying on the the apparatus of social and political control inherited from Communism: the Communist party, tame labor unions, the police, the security services. Social control and repression remain almost as harsh as under Communism except perhaps to some extent to the increasingly affluent middle class -within narrow limits. Chinese leaders and commentators have explained this choice: the main fear of the Chinese leadership is to see the transition to modern capitalism accompanied by the anarchy that developed in Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. A bit like Putin and his siloviki, they don't want to see the great power they are now being reduced to a second- or third-tier nation. So the operative word is: control.

(6) This is the first time in history that a Communist party is leading the march to capitalism. Mind you, it may not stay unique: Vietnam shows signs of taking the same path. Maybe one day North Korea will do the same thing, but obviously not now.

(7) Chinese expansionism: while we must try to avoid a Cold War with China, we can't accept policies that run against international law and include a grab on most of the South and East China seas. These are mostly international waters, except for legal territorial waters, and to the extent that EEZs overlap, there is a need to agree on a delineation of the continental shelf, preferably within the ASEAN framework. In the meantime we should continue to assert international navigational and overflight rights. China should be made to return to her promises of non-militarization of natural and artificial islands.

(8) Military strength: China has a right to have armed forces commensurate with her economic and political power. But we must match her capabilities in Asia, etc, and possibly negotiate forces and posture limitation agreements so as to avoid risks of military conflict, and on use of the armed forces to secure economic positions

(9) Economic expansion abroad: China has the same right as anyone else to expand the economic activities of her companies abroad (for instance to secure access to raw materials and energy) and to propose projects like the Silk Road. But it is our right and indeed duty to forcefully point to risks of excessive indebtedness by the host countries and if possible to offer alternatives.

(10) Human rights: It is the right of all democracies to denounce human rights violations, be they individual or concern ethnic minorities. The most egregious violations must be countered with sanctions, including through an US-EU-Canada-Australia-New Zealand Britain accord to prevent our companies from takin advantage of these violations for economic reasons.

(11) We briefly mentioned trade. China must be strongly encouraged or even made to observe international standards, such as respect not only in law but in fact of intellectual property rights. As a member of the WTO China should be made to observe its rules and voluntarily to forsake its status of developing country which has long ceased to reflect reality. China should also stop on penalty of sanctions to cease her pervasive industrial espionage.

These are just some points that may help the US and other countries to have a China policy, to the extent possible coordinated.

GRM