Back to Cold War Part II: China’s Plan for Victory is “Years Ahead of Schedule”
This is Part II of a three-part essay. Part I was published on April 30, 2020.
Beginning with certainty that Marxism-Leninism had been a catastrophic choice, the wrong horse, to say the least, Deng Xiaoping and China’s other leaders began the project of bringing one of the world’s poorest economies, in 1979, to parity with the United States. The new economy is variously called “market socialism” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This policy change emerged out of debate—but you understand that “debate” occurs solely within the Chinese Communist Party.
There are approximately 78 million party members. And that does not mean just that they voted for the party in the most recent election (bad joke) or “registered.” New members qualify for admission and accept obligations such as periodic lifelong attendance at party schools. They are in a hierarchy of command nationwide, subject always to party discipline, and enjoy the only government privileges in China. Yes, there are hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and journals in China on every aspect of policy, but all are staffed by party members. As are all schools, universities, institutes, major state-owned corporations, and every government job. All judges, law officers, and regulators are party members. The typically very brief trial in China ratifies the party’s earlier decision. The decision that counts is made within the giant apparatus for “party discipline.”
This private system mints more billionaires a year, now, than any country in the world.
The exception, now significant, is the “private economic sector,” outside the formal command structure of the party (but with a party committee in most companies to watch over things). This private system mints more billionaires a year, now, than any country in the world. There is significant leeway to compete, make profits, grow, acquire other companies, and expand and invest abroad. But all of it is monitored by the party, which steps in when anything of political importance is at stake.
This was the system launched by Deng Xiaoping, who prevailed in the fierce internal party economic debates, including in the journals, magazines, and newspapers, between those who would “open” the economy and those who defended communism Soviet style. The transformation was sold to the West as neo-liberal economics—free markets. It was not. After more than 15 years seeking membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a meticulously managed campaign to influence U.S. support of that membership, China had access to the World Bank. It asked World Bank economists in 1983 how it could overtake the United States by (yes) 2050. Reportedly, the size and intensity of the World Bank involvement in China were unprecedented in the bank’s history. In a secret meeting with Deng, World Bank economists made recommendations to the party such as maintaining government ownership of major corporations, maintaining one-party rule, avoiding taking on major debt, and focusing on exporting products of technology. In its annual reports, writes Pillsbury, WTO made vague allusions to guiding China’s path to “free markets.”
China also sanctions or itself commits theft of technology, patents, and counterfeiting of products in every industry to a degree previously unimagined.
Mr. Pillsbury argues that with World Bank guidance, China became a mercantilist economy committed to government’s dominant role in the “market” to enable Chinese companies to achieve international market dominance. This government role entailed party ownership of major enterprises, favored in every way by government, to become “national champions.” It has involved China in worldwide, sustained violations of every agreed behavior for WTO membership. China directs major company decisions. It also sanctions or itself commits theft of technology, patents, and counterfeiting of products in every industry to a degree previously unimagined. China, writes Pillsbury, “never plays by the rules.”
The world witnessed effects of this change, which, in my view, is not “market socialism.” It is China’s shift from totalitarianism (control of everything) to authoritarianism (control all politics, policy, and ideology, but with people left relatively free if they entirely avoid all politics). Socialism/communism is totalitarian, including “ownership of the means of production.” Authoritarianism is dictatorship and one-party rule aimed at absolute political control. In China, argues Pillsbury, authoritarianism serves mercantilist international economic success.
No Western advocate of capitalism would have held out hope for this new Chinese hybrid economy. Its success still baffles me. But, as you read Mr. Pillsbury’s meticulous report on the vigor of the debate over how to proceed (e.g., establishing the economic free zones), and the painstaking bureaucratic omnipresence, an incredible sophistication becomes evident in the levers used by the party to stage-manage society. Still among the poorest nations on earth at the time of Mao’s death, China entered 30 years of economic boom at rates viewed as impossible. From 1997 to 2007, China’s economy tripled in size to become the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. Party owned-and-supported companies went from no representation on the international Fortune 500 to 50 companies on that list in 2014, five of them in the list’s top 50. There are many measurements of national debt, but roughly China has $5.0 trillion of national debt and the United States has $24.0 trillion. China has 65 cities with populations of more than a million and half-a-dozen cities more populous than New York. When talking with U.S. leaders, however, the Chinese always emphasized the daunting “obstacles” to China’s growth.
During the first decade under Deng, these changes began to justify “market socialism,” as led by Deng. China already was a world phenomenon. And then, in 1989 and 1991, the party abruptly staggered, slammed by two body blows. After those events, and the party’s extended, agonized response, China’s direction today—the focus of Mr. Pillsbury’s book—was established.
The 100-acre Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, not far from party central headquarters, was occupied by students demonstrating for more opening, freedom of speech, some real democracy—the “liberalization” that Western analysts almost unanimously predicted would evolve from China’s opening economy and globalization. Students were intensely pro-America, reading aloud from the Declaration of Independence, erecting a three-story Statue of Liberty. The Western press was all over the story. The fewer than two dozen men who ruled China as members of the Politburo watched, debated, hesitated. A few backed the students. The military was restrained. The students, however, did not “go home” after the school holidays ended. They stayed and those who joined them brought the number to a million demonstrators. They called for what could be interpreted only as the end of one-party rule, the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. It was intolerable, an attack on the single overriding goal and value of the entire party. What is more, looking at the long span of Chinese history, there was the case—uniquely powerful in the Chinese psyche—that when a regime “loses control,” when “disorder” reigns, then millions and tens of millions of Chinese die. It is Chinese history.
When the tanks rolled in, and troops opened fire with automatic rifles, the protestors were mowed down by exploding bullets, flattened by tanks whose treads ran over legs and backs. The death toll, of course, is undiscussable and unmentionable in China, but Mr. Pillsbury writes that thousands died and thousands more were wounded. The blunt tactic was to fire until the demonstrators were lying dead or wounded or had fled.
Purges, imprisonment, and “discipline” shook the party for years, shook it to the apex as Politburo members who had favored the students got their payback. The Tiananmen Square massacre cannot be discussed in China—ever, in any school or forum outside of party inner circles. Any prominent journalist or publication or politician outside China who harps on it is liable to be listed by China as an enemy and pressure brought in any of dozens of ways.
The consensus reached in the Politburo was that the West, especially the United States, had instigated Tiananmen Square by its ongoing agitation for “human rights” and “liberalizing,” by exposing the history of communism in China, and by direct subversion. China had not been in control of the knowledge, thoughts, and viewpoints of its young, especially students, and the result was the near destruction of the party.
China is big, the party is big, and thinking can be unlimited in its ambition.
China is big, the party is big, and thinking can be unlimited in its ambition. The party response to Tiananmen Square was “Patriotic Education.” Every school in China, every college and university, every professional organization would be supplied with newly written textbooks, new curricula, new teacher training, and new directives to teach the true, correct history of China at every level without exception. China can do this. The party hierarchy either directly runs or oversees all these institutions and activities. Deng became a new “hardliner,” on this. But Deng and his colleagues—and his successor as “core” leader of China, Jiang Zemin—would manage to protect the “market,” the “open economy,” from the backlash of military and other hardliners against Tiananmen.
The publications of Patriotic Education, universal in China, systematically portray the United States, beginning as far back as Presidents John Tyler and Abraham Lincoln—but including all major contacts with China—as evil subjugators of China intent on its humiliation, appearing to help China only as a strategy of deception, always keeping China down. Always. For example, Nixon and Kissinger in this narrative schemed to instigate a nuclear war between China and the Soviet Union. China never was helped, except to be used. Mr. Pillsbury lays out in detail these remarkable narratives—remarkable because there is no evidence of an American history of scheming against China. Mr. Pillsbury comments that China’s leaders talk ceaselessly about “partnership” with the United States; but how will this work as China demonizes America to generation after generation of students?
Today, writes Mr. Pillsbury, rising generations of Chinese are dimly unaware of Tiananmen Square, the great famine under Mao, the Cultural Revolution, the incorporation of Tibet as a subjugated Chinese province, or America’s role in building the Chinese economy and scientific and technical establishment. Now, there is no generation that might gather to read aloud the Declaration of Independence and erect a Statue of Liberty. The admiration of America and the desire to emulate its freedom that moved earlier generations have been replaced by suspicion, resentment, and fear. China indeed has some quarter-million students in the United States studying science, technology, and medicine, but they are selected and controlled by the party.
As this response to Tiananmen Square was being initiated, another blow slammed China. In December 1991, the hammer and sickle flag of Soviet communism came down over the Kremlin. The Communist Party was out of power, for good; the Soviet satellites had left the communist orbit and would be joining NATO; the Berlin Wall had come down. The new openness in Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev (“glasnost”) and the loosing of economic controls (“perestroika”) had been watched by the Chinese—as by the world. Many wondered if in the long run this “liberalization” might endanger Soviet communism’s control. No one dreamed that not years, but months—and then, intensively, weeks and days—would see the massive structure of the police state, party control, the gulag, the Red Army, and the far-flung agents crash with not a battle or a shot.
If one could conjure a nightmare—a horror film—to agitate the rulers of China, what could be more horrifying than this? And guess what? Two world superpowers, two “hegemons,” had confronted each other, each vowing victory—if necessary, in war—and the mighty, heavily armed Soviet Union had been defeated utterly, ended, swept away into history by the United States of America.
Although its history is longer, China has been a unified nation since 221 BC.
It confirmed all that Chinese leaders feared, both as party members and as Chinese. In China’s 5,000 years of civilization, there is one period to which the Chinese return repeatedly in novels, books on culture, movies, educational films, textbooks, and policy discussions: the “Warring States” era. Although its history is longer, China has been a unified nation since 221 BC. Before that year, for some 250 years, seven powerful states—Qin, Qi, Chu, Han, Yan, Zhao, and Wei—fought ruthlessly for hegemony. The period forced the perfection of strategy for war and conquest. Every conceivable strategy for overcoming an enemy, often a stronger one, became part of the history all educated Chinese know. And the result is viewed as inevitable, an unchangeable and unchallengeable fact of nature: One of the warring parties gradually and inevitably conquered the others and became, necessarily, the sole hegemon, ruling all. That is just the way it goes.
Mr. Pillsbury returns again and again to the Warring States period with its codified lessons, pregnant maxims, and instructive tales. It might appear at first to be Mr. Pillsbury’s clever metaphor for illuminating China today, using the Warring States stories simply to clarify the present. No, all references to the Warring States in Chinese strategy, today, are literal; the manifold lessons and symbols of the period are everywhere in the writings of Chinese geopolitical, but especially military, strategists. Chinese leaders allude to them constantly.
Today is an era of Warring States. America is the hegemon, China is rising, still weaker. Only one hegemon can exist, so for China to regain its rightful glory as the heavenly kingdom, it inevitably must clash with America. If events that created China more than two thousand years ago are not enough evidence, then kindly look at what happened when the rising Soviet Union challenged the American hegemon; at what happened as the rising United States throughout the Nineteenth century confronted and displaced the British Empire as hegemon.
I have followed here only the chief steps, themes, of Mr. Pillsbury’s historic summons to his fellow Americans to awake to the challenge of China. China is not a peaceful Confucian kingdom with entirely laudable aspirations to join the developed nations economically. That is a conscious cover story promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party. China today is all about deception on every level, domestic and foreign. Its narratives are so effective, Mr. Pillsbury suggests, because these narratives—all details of the deception—first are planted domestically in the 100 percent party-controlled media. Then, they are “reported” by the Western and world media as the real dope on what is being said and thought in China.
China has succeeded in convincing the American public and its leadership that China is a peaceful nation, unlike the old Soviet Union or North Korea.
Why deception? It is the spirit, the essential dynamic, of the Warring States. If the prevailing hegemon becomes alarmed at a rival rising, then the hegemon can act before the rival is prepared to make its move. Then, possibly decades of planning may be baffled. At a minimum, the assistance that the rival requires from the hegemon might be withdrawn. China has succeeded in convincing the American public and its leadership that China is a peaceful nation, unlike the old Soviet Union or North Korea, with aspirations to economic development and a wish to be respected in the councils of nations. When that image is challenged in America by those who point to the “hawks” and “hardliners” in China, China’s response is, yes, there is a fringe of hardliners, now aging, and the “moderates” must be strengthened against them. So please do not agitate about “human rights” or “one-party” rule. The hardliners will take fright and oppose the continued “liberalization.”
That story succeeds, argues Mr. Pillsbury, citing chapter and verse of evidence that in China the “hardliners” are the “mainstream,” because U.S. scholars and policy advisors are eager to buy it. And those “panda huggers” ostracize all those who sound the alarm about what is going on in China. When Mr. Pillsbury made his long journey from “panda hugger” to “enemy of China,” his colleagues turned on him. He had visited China every year as a scholar and writer with access for interviews, conferences, and travel. Then, suddenly, he could not get a visa to enter China.
Well, at least, China realizes that America is militarily superior, so far ahead of China that competition in war-making is useless, right? China has huge military budgets, but they are mostly secret and not spent on expensive military hardware—missiles, bombers, aircraft carriers—that would go face to face with the United States. The old rising rival, the Soviet Union, tried that strategy and went broke. Yes, China has trillions of new wealth to invest in bombers, ships, submarines, and other conventional warfare. But the lesson of the Warring States period is clear: The rising power must ferret out all weaknesses of the hegemon, including the military, and target investment on the capacity to strike at those weaknesses “like a thunderbolt” at the beginning of a conflict.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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