{"id":4663,"date":"2021-02-19T14:12:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T14:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/?p=4663"},"modified":"2021-02-19T14:14:13","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T14:14:13","slug":"chinas-plans-to-win-control-of-the-global-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/2021\/02\/19\/chinas-plans-to-win-control-of-the-global-order\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an \u2018intense, ideological struggle\u2019 for survival and that to win they must defeat the West<\/strong><\/p>\n

BY<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

TANNER GREER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

MAY 17, 2020<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

[Taken from https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/china-plans-global-order<\/a>]<\/div>\n
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The People’s Republic of China now commands the world’s largest population, its second-largest economy, and a military-industrial complex and high technology sector second only to America’s. Behind this great mass of men and material stands Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Xi, supported by the class of Chinese communists who rule along with him, believe it is their role to guide China\u2014and the rest of the world\u2014into a new age. China’s military expansion, massive economic investment in controlling global trade routes, and escalating information operations all point to a struggle for dominance that puts it in direct conflict with the West.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In their internal speeches and planning documents, China’s communist party leaders\u00a0describe their perceptions of this struggle<\/a>\u00a0quite openly<\/a>: As Beijing sees it, China\u2019s success depends on discrediting the tenets of liberal capitalism so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system. To understand how China\u2019s leaders intend to accomplish this and fully appreciate their designs for the future, we must first come to terms with how they understand themselves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,\u201d Xi Jinping\u00a0explained to an audience of party cadres in 201<\/a>2<\/a>, \u201cis to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.\u201d This \u201crejuvenation\u201d of the Chinese people, which might also be translated as their \u201crevival\u201d or \u201crestoration,\u201d reflects a specific understanding of Chinese history and China\u2019s proper place in world affairs. Chinese of all political persuasions are acutely aware that China was once the standard setter in advanced civilization, the center point around which the economies and cultures of much of the Earth revolved. For many Chinese nationalists, the last two centuries have been a painful aberration from this natural order. The party labels the years that China was exploited by imperialists and divided by warlords \u201cthe century of humiliation<\/a>,\u201d a century that ended only when they took control. The century that followed\u2014which comes to its end 29 years from now, in 2049\u2014is different. This will be the century that makes China great again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe rejuvenation of the Chinese people\u201d has been officially endorsed as the \u201chistorical mission\u201d of the Communist Party since 1987 but it is an old dream whose origins predate the\u00a0party\u2019s founding<\/a>. In the early 20th century Chinese intellectuals searched for a way to \u201csave China,\u201d modernize it, and restore it to the preeminence that the world\u2019s largest civilization deserved. What made the later communists different from other Chinese modernizers was the solution they endorsed. As their sloganeering went: \u201cOnly socialism can save China.\u201d The slogan is still in use, though Xi and other 21st-century Communists add a second clause: \u201cOnly socialism can save China, and only socialism can develop China.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Listening to Chinese communists champion their socialist bona fides in one of China\u2019s money-hungry metropoles summons a special sort of cognitive dissonance; distant electric billboards gleam through industrial smog while your conversation partner parrots Marxist cant. But this dissonance cannot be too different from, say, what an outsider might have felt listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt address a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in 1936. If Jefferson\u2019s writings are your scripture, Roosevelt\u2019s titanic interventions in American life are heresy. Yet Roosevelt thought of himself as the heir to Jefferson and Jackson. He earnestly believed that his program was an adaptation of Jeffersonian ideals and principles to a 20th-century political economy. Roosevelt\u2019s politics were a natural\u2014albeit historically contingent\u2014evolution of America\u2019s liberal tradition, so the politics of the Chinese communists are an outgrowth of their Leninist identity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the most salient continuities between classical Leninism and the current version of communist politics endorsed by Beijing, which the Chinese uncreatively have labeled \u201csocialism with Chinese characteristics,\u201d is the conviction that true modernization must be led by a \u201cvanguard\u201d party that is able to act in the interests of the \u201coverwhelming majority\u201d of people. According to this Leninist line, free markets and free elections lead to the rule of selfish elites, and China\u2019s rejuvenation depends on being protected from both. Despite the concessions made to market-price mechanisms that have helped drive China\u2019s recent economic boom, Chinese communists believe that they lead an ideological-political system distinct from and in opposition to those of the capitalist world. Circumstance forces temporary cooperation with the self-interested capitalists, but these two systems cannot be permanently reconciled. This was the message Xi delivered to party cadres in\u00a0one of his first speeches as general secretary of the party in 2013<\/a>, when he declared his faith in the \u201chistorical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.\u201d However, as \u201cthe ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism\u201d may take several lifetimes to achieve, China\u2019s communists should focus their efforts on a more modest goal:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[We must now] broaden our comprehensive national power, improve the lives of our people, build a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and lay the foundation for a future where we\u00a0will win the initiative and have the dominant position.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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As proud self-declared Marxists, the Beijing leadership has carefully studied the failures of past attempts to \u201cconstruct a socialism superior to capitalism.\u201d From the failings of the Maoist era, the Chinese communists\u00a0learned that economic and technological modernization cannot happen in a vacuum<\/a>. In many Chinese minds the People\u2019s Republic of China\u2019s technological stagnation under Mao blends together with the Qing dynasty\u2019s unfortunate discovery that scientific advances in the West had left their military obsolete. The lesson in both cases is the same: If China is to grow strong, it must be integrated with the world outside it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there are dangers to \u201copening up\u201d to the outer world. This is the lesson Chinese communists draw\u00a0from<\/a>\u00a0extensive<\/a>\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of the<\/a>\u00a0Soviet failure<\/a>. The party\u2019s official explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union\u2014which has been communicated to party cadres through speeches, party school education, and\u00a0even a full-length documentary<\/a>\u2014is that its demise had nothing to do with the weaknesses of its planned economy or the tensions inherent in a multinational empire masquerading as a people\u2019s republic. In the telling of the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union began to die the day Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Stalin. Though the reformist policies of destalinization were only intended to strengthen the communist system by eliminating its errant and excessive aspects, it ended up eroding the foundation of the value system that made the USSR cohere. Once it became possible to question the party leadership, the Soviets lost the ability to shore up the \u201cideological security\u201d of their regime. In these circumstances, Chinese communists studying the USSR\u2019s dissolution now conclude, Gorbachev\u2019s decision to \u201copen\u201d the system and expose formerly culturally quarantined Soviet peoples to the enticements of the Western order was a suicide pact.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse\u00a0in a 2013\u00a0<\/a>address to party cadres<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cWhy did the Soviet Union disintegrate?\u201d he asked his audience. \u201cAn important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!\u201d The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake.\u00a0A leaked internal party directive from 2013<\/a>\u00a0describes \u201cthe very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization\u201d within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an \u201cintense, ideological struggle\u201d for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with \u201cmajor disorder\u201d include concepts such as \u201cseparation of powers,\u201d \u201cindependent judiciaries,\u201d \u201cuniversal human rights,\u201d \u201cWestern freedom,\u201d \u201ccivil society,\u201d \u201ceconomic liberalism,\u201d \u201ctotal privatization,\u201d \u201cfreedom of the press,\u201d and \u201cfree flow of information on the internet.\u201d To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would \u201cdismantle [our] party\u2019s social foundation\u201d and jeopardize the party\u2019s aim to build a modern, socialist future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Westerners asked to think about competition with China\u2014a minority until fairly recently, as many envisioned a China liberalized by economic integration\u2014tend to see it through a geopolitical or military lens. But Chinese communists believe that the greatest threat to the security of their party, the stability of their country, and China\u2019s return to its rightful place at the center of human civilization, is ideological. They are not fond of the military machines United States Pacific Command has arrayed against them, but what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are\u00a0ideas<\/em>\u2014hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order. \u201cInternational hostile forces [seek to] westernize and divide China\u201d warned former CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin more than a decade ago, and that means that, as Jiang argued in a second speech, the \u201cold international political and economic order\u201d created by these forces \u201chas to be changed fundamentally\u201d to safeguard China\u2019s rejuvenation. Xi Jinping has endorsed this view, arguing that \u201csince the end of the Cold War countries affected by Western values have been torn apart by war or afflicted with chaos. If we tailor our practices to Western values … The consequences will be devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But how exactly does one go about combating a values system? One could silence those who champion it. This is the repressive logic behind the vast system of censorship and surveillance the party has built to control the traffic of ideas among the Chinese people. As communist anxieties have intensified over the last decade this system grows more blood curdling: The Chinese internet has been\u00a0flooded with disinformation<\/a>; prominent\u00a0dissidents<\/a>,\u00a0journalists<\/a>,\u00a0lawyers<\/a>,\u00a0historians<\/a>,\u00a0academics<\/a>,\u00a0businessmen<\/a>, and\u00a0activists<\/a>\u00a0who have voiced opposition to Xi\u2019s program have been censored, imprisoned, and \u201cdisappeared\u201d;\u00a0universities<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0corporations<\/a>\u00a0have had party cells inserted within them; thousands of\u00a0churches<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0mosques<\/a>\u00a0across China have been demolished; and\u00a0somewhere close to a million<\/a>\u00a0Uighurs \u201cinfected with extremism<\/a>\u201d have been placed in concentration camps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most Americans paid little attention to this\u2014until the party leadership decided to punish the NBA with punitive sanctions in response to an \u201coffensive\u201d tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey. Though surprising to most Americans, the truth is that this was just an especially prominent example of a practice the party has long used to silence those who speak against it\u2014be they living inside\u00a0or<\/em>\u00a0outside of China. In its drive to control the outside world, the Chinese state has not hesitated to\u00a0threaten foreign companies with cyber attacks or hold their employees hostage<\/a>, cut\u00a0celebrities<\/a>,\u00a0corporations<\/a>,\u00a0industries<\/a>, and even\u00a0entire<\/a>\u00a0countries<\/a>\u00a0off from the Chinese market. They\u00a0bribe foreign<\/a>\u00a0government officials<\/a>,\u00a0buy foreign media<\/a>\u00a0organizations<\/a>,\u00a0astroturf protests<\/a>, stir up\u00a0online mobs<\/a>\u00a0against<\/a>\u00a0or send goons to personally intimidate prominent foreign\u00a0researchers<\/a>,\u00a0activists<\/a>, or\u00a0media personalities<\/a>.\u00a0Chinese diaspora communities<\/a>\u00a0have been especially vulnerable to these tactics. A cocktail of\u00a0surveillance<\/a>,\u00a0blackmail<\/a>,\u00a0harassment<\/a>,\u00a0intimidation<\/a>,\u00a0bribery<\/a>, and\u00a0threats<\/a>\u00a0to<\/a>\u00a0family<\/a>\u00a0members in<\/a>\u00a0China<\/a>\u00a0have\u00a0silenced critics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0brought one<\/a>\u00a0Western-based Chinese-language publication\u00a0<\/a>to toe the party line<\/a>\u00a0after another<\/a>. When the party has enough leverage to win the contest of ideas by silencing them at their source, they do so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Internally, the Chinese government can appear terrifyingly omnipotent. As an actor on the global stage, the current balance of power and the existing norms of the international system still constrain the party\u2019s power to control free speech and association outside their borders. The NBA fracas showed that the United States and other Western powers have the capability to push back against communist encroachments in their society, given sufficient will and motivation to do so. For the party, censorship of hostile ideas and intimidation of those who voice them is only a stopgap solution. To secure their victory, liberal values do not just need to be silenced. They must be\u00a0discredited.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Chinese communists\u2019 plans to discredit and dismantle the liberal values baked into the existing global architecture are incredibly ambitious. They imagine a future reality where even the notion that China could be more successful, wealthy, or powerful if it were free would sound too ridiculous to take seriously. Xi Jinping has given a name to this future world. He\u00a0calls this vision<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca community of common destiny for mankind.\u201d This future community of nations would give Chinese communism the moral recognition it is now denied. The party-state would be lauded, in Xi\u2019s words, as a new \u201ccontribution to political civilization\u201d and a new chapter in \u201cthe history of the development of human society.\u201d Power blocs and existing military alliances would soon melt away as the various nations of the Earth are drawn into China\u2019s economic orbit. No country would be compelled to shift their regime to the Chinese model in this scenario, but most would recognize that the Chinese social and political system has \u201cdemonstrated socialism\u2019s superiority.\u201d Many would gladly adopt the tools Beijing has perfected to manage economic and political problems to shape their own societies. Democratization, free markets, and universal human rights would no longer be enshrined as the bedrock of the world\u2019s most important international institutions or be seen as the default standards of good governance. They would instead be reduced to a parochial tradition peculiar to a smattering of outcast Western nations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The party does not just dream of this future: It has begun building it. In his\u00a0report to the 19th Party Congress in 2017<\/a>\u2014think of it as a communist dictatorship version of a State of the Union Address, if that address were the result of six months of drafts, redrafts, and bureaucratic skirmishing\u2014Xi Jinping declared that China had entered a \u201cnew era.\u201d No longer would the country \u201chide its strength and bide its time,\u201d as his predecessor Deng Xiaoping had directed the country to do in the initial stages of China\u2019s opening up. Instead, China would begin to openly and proudly reshape the international system. \u201cThe banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics is now flying high and proud for all to see,\u201d said Xi. Already, the party was<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. [The Chinese example] offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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In light of these pronouncements, politburo member and former senior diplomat Yang Jiechi\u00a0urged China\u2019s diplomats<\/a>\u00a0that the time had come to confidently and \u201cenergetically control the new direction of the common progress of China and the world.\u201d The billions Chinese investors have plowed into infrastructure in developing countries under Xi\u2019s \u201cBelt and Road Initiative\u201d are a key part of this plan. Each BRI-branded project, the party hopes, moves humankind another step closer to a new global order organized around economic partnership with Beijing. In Xi\u2019s words, each is a chance to \u201cwelcome [other countries] aboard\u00a0our<\/em>\u00a0development train.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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China\u2019s grandstanding in favor of trade and against protectionism is similarly motivated. By increasing China\u2019s economic integration with the world, Xi has argued, \u201cthe world also deepened its dependence on China.\u201d As the largest trading partner of most the globe, Xi believes that China is finally positioned to begin to \u201ctransform the global governance system\u201d and shape the \u201cnew mechanisms and rules\u201d that will determine \u201cthe long-term systemic arrangement of the international order.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Xi does not expect this contest over the future world order to be resolved quickly. In 2013 he warned cadres that \u201cfor a fairly long time yet, socialism in its primary stage will exist alongside a more productive and developed capitalist system … [And there will be a] long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems\u201d before China has \u201cthe dominant position.\u201d The PRC\u2019s plan to build up the economic sinews of a less hostile order will take several decades to come to fruition. To make that future a reality requires convincing the world that,\u00a0in the words of Yang Jiechi<\/a>, \u201cWestern governance concepts, systems, and models [no longer] grasp the new international situation or keep up with the times.\u201d Only when the world is persuaded that Yang is correct\u2014that liberal ideals like pluralism, individual rights, and constitutional government are anachronisms of a past age incapable of solving 21st-century problems\u2014will Chinese communists no longer fear that their bid to restore China to greatness will be derailed by the ideological plots of their enemies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From this context many actions taken by the Chinese party-state suddenly make more sense. The PRC\u2019s decision to allow Chinese diplomats and propaganda accounts\u00a0to spread anti-American coronavirus conspiracies<\/a>, for example, are hard to understand until you realize that the people spreading these conspiracies believe they are engaged in an \u201cideological struggle\u201d with the values of a hostile liberal order. The stakes of this struggle could not be higher: They believe that the future of the global order and the survival of their regime is at stake. Americans should not be surprised when they act like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an \u2018intense, ideological struggle\u2019 for survival and that to win they must defeat the West BY TANNER GREER MAY 17, 2020 [Taken from https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/china-plans-global-order] The People’s Republic of China now commands the world’s largest population, its second-largest economy, and a military-industrial complex and … Sigue leyendo China\u2019s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4664,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions\/4664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}