China’s Marxist-Leninist Communist Party came to power under chairman Mao Zedong on the promise of building a radically equal and just society in China. More broadly, the Chinese Communist Party promised to be the instrument of China’s national revitalization as a great power, drawing on its glorious ancient history as a magnificent civilization.
In the end, China’s Marxist-socialist planned economy was a failure. By the 1980s, China’s state socialism was replaced with Chinese state capitalism. But China has maintained its Leninist “police state” political and social institutions. China’s party state is actively hostile to liberal democratic values of citizenship with inherent entitlement to human rights. The national legislature is a rubber stamp that only meets in one full session for 10 days annually. The media and internet are ruthlessly censored. The judiciary serves at the whim of the one-party state without due process of law.
Connected to the lack of free press, rule of law and parliamentary oversight, there is pervasive corruption, increasing year by year, at all levels of political authority. This has been accompanied by an ever-growing gap in wealth between the Communist rich and super rich elite and the rest of the population, most of whom still struggle just to get by. Desperate poverty continues to be prevalent in the interior of China west of the major coastal cities. And after 35 years of sustained high rates of growth, the Chinese economy is faltering.
The Communist revolution has not fulfilled its promise to engender a good and just society in China. But the Chinese Communist Party continues to hold state power. Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that China’s state capitalistic Leninism without Marxism has been reduced to sustaining itself through the politics of national socialism with its appeals to ethnic pride, race and the Motherland. It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. Chairman Mao must be rolling in his grave.
But opinion polls indicate that China’s Communist Party regime continues to enjoy high levels of support among Chinese people as it has successfully positioned itself as the vehicle for China to achieve global prestige, influence and power in the 21st Century.
Furthermore, the party is able to counter popular discontent with its domestic policy shortcomings using high-volume propaganda that rallies Chinese people to mobilize against threats to China’s sovereignty by belligerent foreign forces. It is a dual strategy of simultaneously captivating patriotic pride by the glowing promise to restore China’s historical greatness, while, at the same time, engendering a sense of crisis of national sovereignty by a discourse of extreme hostility of the west and one suggesting Japan is conspiring to derail China’s virtuous rise to power. Both aspects resonate strongly with the very deeply felt nationalistic sentiment of ordinary
Chinese citizens.
China fabricates 1,300 hectares of land
Shortly after he assumed office in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed to the United States that it should acknowledge China as an equivalent great power and establish what the Chinese authorities dubbed “a new kind of major power relationship.” The implication is that the U.S. should withdraw from East Asia so that China can reassert its ancient traditional historical role as the sole dominant power in the region. This would fulfil Chairman Mao’s mandate that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would “no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.”
While the United States is not prepared to engage China on this “new kind of major power relationship” narrative and divide the planet into U.S.- and Chinese-controlled zones, under Xi, China has assertively expanded its area of control by occupying disputed uninhabited islands strategically situated in surrounding seas. Most of these islands are far from China’s coastal waters, but close to the borders of Japan and the Southeast Asian nations that have traditionally claimed them. So far, China has expanded these mostly rocky points and semi-submerged reefs by massive land reclamation, creating more than 1,300 hectares of land in the South China Sea. On these, 200-metre runways have been installed, harbours dredged and communications, logistics and intelligence-gathering facilities put in place. This gives China strategic control over the maritime region to its south in ways falling just short of the threshold that would provoke the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region to engage in military action to stop it.
China’s understanding of its global destiny runs counter to a liberal internationalist vision of co-operating with other nations through transnational institutions and regimes to achieve a common good. China sees its relations with the west and other major powers as a zero-sum game. The government of China, moreover, has a long-term and globally comprehensive strategy with the goal of ultimately displacing the U.S. to become the world superpower through expansion of a closely knit network of interests and obligations in every country on every continent.
For example, when interviewed about China’s proposal for a free-trade agreement with Canada last year, Chinese Ambassador Luo Zhaohui remarked, “we really wish to have a free-trade agreement with Canada. It’s more than that: China wants Canada to lift its eyes from the U.S. and look instead to the Asia-Pacific area. Economic policy should also be more positive toward this area.” That is to say, that from a longer term geopolitical strategic perspective, China hopes to reduce Canada’s dependence on the U.S. and bring it gradually more and more into the orbit of Chinese influence. Trade relations in Chinese state capitalist terms are more about international politics and China’s national security and global strategy than they are about beneficial reciprocity based on mutual concessions.
Building new institutions
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was recently conceived by Beijing as a counter to such U.S., European and Japanese-led institutions as the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank. China, as the largest stakeholder in the AIIB, sees this institution as a way to exert influence across the region, drawing on the bank’s planned $100 billion capitalization. Among the AIIB’s first four funded projects are improvements to a highway between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. This would be part and parcel of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt proposal whose focus is on infrastructural connection and co-operation between China and the rest of Eurasia.
The scope of the Silk Road Economic Belt proposal extends from Central Asia and Russia to Europe as well as to West Asia through the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. This hugely ambitious scheme, if implemented entirely as proposed, would cost about $8 trillion (see a story on this on page 56). Leaving its long-term feasibility aside, the concept of China leading a global infrastructure project wherein all roads lead to Beijing is a great boon to the prestige of the Chinese Communist Party among its people, thus engendering patriotic pride that compensates for the popular discontent associated with the domestic shortcomings of the Chinese Communist regime.
But China’s expansionist ambitions have led East Asian nations to strengthen their defensive alliance with the United States. The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement excludes China while increasing the integration of the surrounding economies that have signed on to it. In addition, China’s enabling of the dangerous North Korean regime has increased support for the proposed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a U.S. anti-ballistic missile system proposed to be stationed in South Korea to counter Pyongyang’s Toksa, SCUDs and Nodong missiles. China is, needless to say, very much opposed to it.
In 2017, it can be anticipated that under Xi, China will continue to aggressively reassert its great-power national uniqueness by flouting international regimes, including explicitly rejecting governance norms as defined by the UN’s covenants on human rights and national sovereignty. It can be expected that there will be more incidents involving seizure and persecution of foreign nationals of Chinese ethnicity and increasing PRC subversive interference with democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
As its economy continues to falter, it can also be expected that there will be more emphasis placed on pursuing China’s interests through cyber-espionage and by security agencies seeking to influence critical foreign decision-makers to speak for China’s interests in western nations and throughout the world.
As part of its comprehensive rise to power, China will continue to attempt to acquire critical infrastructure through the activities of state-owned enterprises currently active in countries great and small throughout the world.
The People’s Republic of China devotes significant resources and expertise to pursuing its interests through its foreign policy. Unfortunately, for the most part, western nations have not put sufficient resources into responding to the challenges and opportunities that China presents.
China is coming, but are we ready?
Charles Burton is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines and was a counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing between 1991 and 1993 and 1998 and 2000.
