A Son Rises in the East

“Hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead” was the advice from Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s but that’s proving to be increasingly difficult considering China’s meteoric rise.

China is an illustrious civilization that invented gunpowder, paper, and printing. However, since the Renaissance it has been overshadowed technologically and militarily by the West. The Century of Humiliation from 1839 to 1945 saw British and French forces strong-arm China into permitting opium trading despite its devastating social toll. They have never forgotten, and it is unclear whether they can ever forgive.

Out of this century of struggle and chaos emerged a battle-hardened and deeply ideological cadre of leaders, in particular Mao Zedong, who attempted to enforce a unique version of Leninism with almost no regard for human life. In one example of his many catastrophic policies, the Great Leap Forward resulted in as many as 50 million deaths by starvation with even top officials foraging the countryside for food. While the great purges and ubiquitous threats from the Red Guards failed to usher in a Communist Utopia, dissent and critical thinking became a foreign concept for several generations.

Princeling Xi Jinping was only 10 years old when his father Xi Zhongxun, Vice-Premier and Standing Member of the CCP Central Committee, was purged and eventually imprisoned. At 15, Xi left Beijing to live in a cave in Shaanxi Province and later pursued Chemical Engineering at Tsinghua University. He quietly rose through the ranks of the CCP after Deng Xiaoping became Chairman and rehabilitated the purged loyalists, including his father.

Deng Xiaoping abandoned Communism in all but it’s central authoritarianism. He opened up China economically and culturally and many Western observers started counting the days until China would become a liberal democracy. But China had already observed the Achilles Heel of liberalism, namely addiction and its softer variant vice, and they were determined to avoid any pitfalls that could jeopardize their return to greatness. The first indication that China would eschew liberalization was the crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

This and other warning signs were ignored. There was just too much money to be made. The West believed they were getting a free lunch by exploiting China’s broken economic system with cheap labor and easy access to large markets. ?But in turn, China was deliberately exploiting the biggest flaws in Western strategy: short-term thinking and openness.

When Xi Jinping became Chairman of the CCP in 2012, most analysts in the West regarded him as a mild-mannered, pragmatic bureaucrat. However, he had been assiduously following Deng Xiaoping’s advice. He was a second-generation ideologue in a family that persevered through guerilla wars, suicide marches, a world war, civil war, famines, state terror, purges, exiles, political intrigue etc. He is deeply patient, knowledgeable and focused. And he is incorruptibly intent on taking China back to its rightful place as a world hegemon.

He flashed his political stripes with large scale purges of corrupt officials in 2017, his statecraft by artfully quashing unrest in Hong Kong in 2020, and finally, his disregard for individual liberties through the mass home confinement from his Zero-COVID policies, in place until 2023. His deliberate implementation of a cult of personality akin to Mao shocked observers.

What China lacks in liberalism, they make up for in discipline and cohesion. Recent polls reported 85% trust in government policies versus only 25% in the US. They have built an education juggernaut that simply cannot be replicated in more laissez-faire societies. They actively quash addiction through incredibly punitive measures while the US hasn’t come to terms yet with the dangers posed to youngsters by digital media and substance abuse, of which the most addictive emanate from China. Coincidence, perhaps?

Many of our leaders seem to be stuck in a cold war mentality, antagonizing Russia and Iran that are hosts to powerful liberal cultures that could be instrumental in the resistance against the highly effective and disciplined form of authoritarianism on display in China.

China has a tremendous number of internal problems, from cratering birth rates, to lack of natural resources to centralized decision-making. Xi Jinping is a formidable leader and the Chinese people are exceptional. And together they have been through a pit of misery that very few in the West can even imagine. Trade tariffs and economic meltdowns do not keep them up at night.

As China gets stronger, they will bristle at their limited access to resources and a world order established under American hegemony. They are brewing a particularly dangerous cocktail of nationalist socialism with an unhealthy side of xenophobia and disregard for human life. Expansionism is almost guaranteed and the world will have to bend without breaking to accommodate. The fight for the 21st century is on. Let’s keep it clean.