What's the problem with China?
Existential conflict as an expedient heuristic
For the Western layman, China is culturally and politically unintelligible. There’s a reason for the abundance of English-language literature purporting to explain the country’s history, customs and politics to Western audiences: the law of supply and demand. This isn’t to say that there is anything objectively strange about China; the same principle applies conversely, evident from the befuddled way in which Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials often respond to probing questions posed by Western interlocutors1. With some exceptions, the incomprehensibility seems to be mutual.
Against this backdrop, it’s difficult to know what to think - and how Western governments should act - regarding various China-related policy issues. Does the emerging superpower pose a meaningful threat to the West, and the ‘liberal rules-based international order’ (whatever that means) more broadly? Does Xi actually intend to invade Taiwan, or is his rhetoric just posturing, designed to save face? What is the basic rationale underlying its prolific and substantial economic diplomacy? Mixed signals are rife, and so are contradicting responses to all these questions.
Take, for instance, the debate around whether the CCP is sincerely committed to Marxism-Leninism, the answer to which impinges heavily upon the three issues raised above. On the one hand, the CCP does continue to call itself a communist party, and its officials maintain the trappings of one; there are party congresses, a politburo, a seemingly endless variety of bureaucratic committees, and all the other features characteristic of a 20th century Leninist state. Some commentators, such as historians Niall Ferguson and Stephen Kotkin - both authoritative voices with extensive experience and knowledge in the field - argue that the CCP’s communism is more than skin-deep, and advocate an analytical approach to China that places Marxist-Leninist principles at the fore. Furthermore, recent attempts by the Party to clamp down on the private sector and augment state power fit quite neatly into this narrative.
The argument is an increasingly strong one, but there is nevertheless something persistently strange about the notion that an authentically Marxist regime can preside over one of the world’s most dynamic and rapacious capitalist economies. Of course, one could say that their cultivation of the private sector is merely a means to an end, a vehicle for the country to accumulate economic power so that they will be more equipped to actualise their principles and resist the liberal-capitalist West when the appropriate time comes. But can this really be the case? From an outside perspective, China’s particular strain of capitalism appears aggressively and almost egregiously consumerist. Additionally, despite the aforementioned crackdown, China’s immense (and private) tech sector continues to be a powerful economic and societal force.
And then there’s the adoption by the state of traditional Confucian principles and aphorisms of a distinctly nationalistic, small-c conservative flavour. At least on paper, Marxism-Leninism - in many ways paradigmatic of revolutionary modernity - has no place for ancient tracts extolling the virtues of paternalistic hierarchy, and for Mao and many other early Chinese communists, rejecting vociferously the legacy and cultural influence of Confucianism was one of their cardinal projects. Lin Chun, who in a recent book ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution in China’ articulates a Maoist critique of contemporary Chinese political economy, cuttingly notes the absurdities of communist party apparatchiks kneeling before statues of Confucius, describing it as “a sure sign of ideological bankruptcy”2. Against this backdrop, Noah Smith’s comparison of Xi Jinping with George W. Bush, despite its immediately absurd quality, rings true in an important sense. The vision espoused by the CCP in many respects resembles big-state social conservatism rather than radical, revolutionary Marxism.
We might get a better idea of the CCP’s underlying principles (or lack thereof) as the country faces mounting economic and geopolitical challenges over the coming years; but at the moment, the picture is anything but clear. This ambiguity is only exacerbated by the fact that the Party’s internal proceedings are legendarily opaque. My point here isn’t to resolve this particular debate, but simply to call to attention the inherently confounding character Chinese politics presents to an individual immersed in Western norms and culture, as well as the difficulty of imagining a scenario in which the median knowledgable observer would be entitled to their knowledge claims. I don’t feel remotely qualified to give conclusive answers to the questions I ran through earlier, but neither are many of the self-proclaimed experts, I would wager.
Because of this predicament, pitching China as an implacable cultural and ideological enemy, and the competition against it as existential, serves as a gratifying and comforting narrative amidst all the uncertainty. As in many matters, the writings of the Pragmatist philosopher William James are instructive here. On why we ascribe ‘truth’ to certain narratives: “Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet our requirement [of truth]”3. China is the world’s second-largest economy and one that nearly every major Western state extensively interacts with without understanding its history or culture to any meaningful extent. As the relationship has come under strain, policymakers and commentators have had to ‘deal’ with the phenomenon of the People’s Republic both practically and intellectually, and have cast around for narratives that ‘fit’ with the observed but ill-understood facts while harmoniously integrating them with our pre-existing beliefs, attitudes and purposes. Critical for James in this context is that truth is expedient4; it is a product of anthropic epistemic demands, which are invariably moulded by our individual and societal circumstances. In other words, the narratives we form about the world are unavoidably and irreducibly functional.
The existential conflict narrative is a straightforward way of assimilating or dealing with the manifold complexities posed by a resurgent China harbouring acute historical grievances - complexities which are only heightened by the relative information vacuum and mutual cultural incomprehensibility - and for many commentators, I would wager, it probably feels right. It fits. The parallels with the Cold War are no doubt a major component of the narrative’s congeniality for Western observers (which isn’t to say that the Cold War framing is entirely incorrect); Niall Ferguson has already taken to dubbing the US-China dynamic as “Cold War II”. It is both easy and intellectually gratifying to frame things in terms of historical analogies; in the face of unintelligible and unpredictable events, they furnish us with a tried-and-tested template that lets us know what to expect. No doubt it helps that the West ultimately prevailed in the “Cold War I”, the implicit connotation of “Cold War II” being that it too will result in eventual victory for the liberal capitalist order, albeit one that presupposes our magically getting our act together and surmounting the deep and seemingly intractable political and economic problems plaguing Western societies.
These heuristics around China are comforting, but they are just that: heuristics. And they invariably reflect our own desires and epistemic needs more than any objective facts of the matter. Those, on the other hand, might not be as congenial. Whatever one’s basic intuitions on the topic are, western engagement (or lack thereof) with China is and will continue to be one of the most consequential policy issues of our time. And it is an issue that warrants a hell of a lot more thought - genuine, critical thought - than we’re currently giving it.
The Sinica podcast’s interview with Huang Ping, at that point head of China’s New York Consulate, is illustrative in this regard. Despite facing a relatively sympathetic interviewer in Kaiser Kuo, when asked about Taiwan Ping gave the impression not merely that he was dodging the question, but that he couldn’t grasp at a basic level why Americans cared about a small country on the other side of the world. In any case, it’s a fascinating listen.
Lin Chun, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China, p255
William James, ‘Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth’ in Pragmatism and Other Writings, p94
ibid., p97