In the post-Cold War era, the Western world has not lacked wonderful theories of history and foreign relations. Contexts and actors may change, but the global geopolitical drama continues: variants of realism and liberalism compete and expect state, academic behavior. wonder if the world is witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or anything else. it poses the American force. In the run-up to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), as Xi maneuvered to consolidate his strength and secure an unprecedented third term, Western analysts have sought to decode his global vision and porcelain ambitions.
However, one vital existent of thought has been largely absent from this search for understanding: Marxism-Leninism. This is strange because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s official ideology since 1949. But the omission is also understandable, since long ago Western thinkers came to consider communist ideology dead, even in China, where, in the late 1970s, CCP leader Deng Xiaoping pushed marxist-Leninist orthodoxy away from his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something closer to state capitalism. Deng summed up his opinion on the factor with characteristic frankness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s go to theory,” he told participants at a CCP primary convention in 1981. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed suit, rapidly expanding the role of the market. in China’s domestic economy and adopt a foreign policy that would maximize China’s participation in a U. S. -led world economic order.
Xi brought an abrupt end to this era of pragmatic, non-ideological rule. Instead, he developed a new form of Marxist nationalism that now shapes the presentation and substance of China’s politics, economy, and foreign policy. In doing so, Xi is not building theoretical castles in the air to rationalize decisions the CCP has made for other, more practical reasons. Under Xi, ideology drives politics more than not. Xi pushed politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left, and foreign policy to the nationalist right. He reaffirmed the CCP’s influence and control over all arenas of public policy and personal life, revitalized state-owned enterprises, and imposed new restrictions on the personal sector. Meanwhile, he fueled nationalism by pursuing an increasingly assertive foreign policy, spurred on by a Marxist-inspired confidence that history is irreversibly on China’s side and that a global force rooted in China would produce a foreign order. fairer. In short, the rise of Xi meant nothing less than the retreat of ideological man.
These ideological tendencies are not just a return to the Mao era. Xi’s worldview is more complex than Mao’s, combining ideological purity with technocratic pragmatism. Xi’s statements about history, power and justice may seem impenetrable or to Western audiences. But the West ignores Xi’s ideological message is in jeopardy. No matter how summarized and unknown their concepts may be, they have profound effects on the actual content of China and foreign policy and therefore as China’s rise continues, in the rest of the world.
Like all Marxist-Leninists, Xi bases his thinking on ancient materialism (a technique of history centered on the inevitability of progress through the constant struggle for elegance) and dialectical materialism (a technique of politics that focuses on how substitution happens when contradictory forces collide and resolve). ). In his published writings, Xi uses ancient materialism to position the Chinese revolution in global history in a context in which China’s transition to a more complex level of socialism necessarily accompanies the decline of capitalist systems. Through the prism of dialectical materialism, he describes his program as a step forward in an intense struggle between the CCP and internal reactionary forces (an arrogant personal sector, Western-influenced nongovernmental organizations, devout movements) and foreign forces (the United States and its allies).
These concepts may seem abstruse and difficult to understand to those outside China. But CCP elites, senior Chinese officials, and many foreign relations specialists advising the government take them seriously. And Xi’s published writings on the theory are far more extensive than those of any Chinese leader since Mao. The CCP also relies on the kinds of economic and political recommendations that Western political systems consult. But in one aspect of the Chinese system, Marxism-Leninism still serves as an ideological worldview bridgehead that places China in the right aspect of history and portrays the United States as suffering in the clutches of inevitable capitalist decline, fueled through its own internal political contradictions and destined to fall by the wayside. This will be, according to Xi, the true end of the story.
In 2013, just five months after his appointment as party general secretary, Xi addressed the Central Conference on Ideology and Propaganda, a gathering of the party’s most no-nonsense leaders in Beijing. The content of the speech was not reported at the time, but was leaked 3 months later and published via China Digital Times. The speech offers an unfiltered portrait of Xi’s innermost political beliefs. He insists on the dangers of the ideological decline that led to the collapse of Soviet communism, on the role of the West in fostering the ideological department in China, and on the need to abolish all bureaucracy of dissent. “The disintegration of a regime begins with the ideological realm,” Xi said. “Political unrest and regime replacement can happen overnight, but ideological evolution is a long-term process,” he continued, warning that once “ideological defenses are broken, the other defenses become very difficult to maintain. But the CCP “has justice. ” on our side,” he confided to his audience, urging them not to be “evasive, timid or stingy” in dealing with Western countries, whose aim is “to contest the battlefields of hearts and masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the CCP and the Chinese socialist system.
That meant cracking down on anyone who “harboured dissent and discord” and it is not easy for CCP members to show loyalty not only to the party but also to Xi personally. What followed was an internal “cleansing” of the CCP, complete by purging any perceived political or institutional opposition, largely through a decade-long anti-corruption crusade that began even before the speech. A “rectification crusade” led to a new series of purges in the political and legal apparatus of the party. Xi also reaffirmed his party on the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police and centralized China’s cybersecurity and surveillance systems. Finally, in 2019, Xi introduced a party-wide schooling crusade titled “Remember the Party’s Original Purpose, Keep in Mind the Mission. ” According to an official document pronouncing the initiative, its goal was for party members to “acquire theoretical knowledge and be baptized in ideology and politics. ” Towards the end of his first term, it became clear that Xi sought nothing less than to make the CCP the main church of a revitalized secular faith.
In contrast to those rapid moves toward a more Leninist camp in domestic politics, the shift to Marxist orthodoxy in economic policy under Xi has been more gradual. Economic control has long been the domain of technocrats sitting in the State Council, China’s administrative cabinet. Xi’s non-public interests also lie more in party history, political ideology and grand strategy than in major monetary and economic checkpoints. the state and the market have become increasingly ideological. Xi also gradually lost confidence in the market economy in the wake of the 2008 global currency crisis and the 2015 Chinese currency crisis, which was triggered by the bursting of an inventory market bubble and led to a nearly 50% collapse in the price of Chinese stocks before the market was nevertheless consolidated in 2016.
The trajectory of China’s economic policy under Xi, from a consensus in favor of market reforms to state and top-party club intervention, has been uneven, questioned and contradictory. Indeed, in late 2013, less than six months after Xi’s revitalizing sermon on ideology and propaganda, the CPC Central Committee (the several hundred party leaders) followed a remarkably reformist document on the economy, brutally titled “The Decision. “He defined a series of policy measures that would allow the market to play “the decisive role” in the allocation of resources in the economy. But the rollout of those policies stopped in 2015, while state-owned enterprises earned billions of dollars in investments from “industry steering funds” between 2015 and 2021, a large injection of government aid that brought the Chinese state back into force. centre of economic policy.
At the 19th CPC Party Congress in 2017, Xi announced that, in the future, the party’s main ideological challenge would be to rectify the “unbalanced and insufficient progression” that had emerged in the era of “reform and opening-up” of the market-based policy adjustments that Deng had given way to in the early 1970s. the “number one school of socialism” and Deng’s confidence that China would have to suffer inequality for many years before achieving prosperity for all. Instead, Xi praised a faster transition to a higher phase of socialism, saying that “thanks to many decades of hard work, [this is] an era that marks a new starting point for us. “Xi rejected Deng’s gradualism and the idea that China was doomed to an indefinite period of imperfect progress and social inequality. Through more rigorous adherence to Marxist principles, he promised, China could achieve national greatness and greater economic equality in the not too distant term.
Such end results would count on expanding the influence of party committees over private companies by betting a greater role on the variety of high-level control and critical decision-making of the board. Successful marketers to invest in state-owned enterprises, mixing the market and the state.
Meanwhile, CCP economic planners would be tasked with designing a “dual-circulation economy,” which meant that China would become increasingly autonomous in all sectors of the economy, while global economies would become increasingly dependent on China. And in late 2020, Xi brought a technique to the source of income redistribution known as “agfinisha common prosperity,” through which the rich were to “voluntarily” redistribute the budget to state-sponsored systems to decrease the source of income inequality. By the end of 2021, it was transparent that Deng’s era of “reform and opening-up” was coming to an end. In his position was a new statist economic orthodoxy.
Xi’s push toward Leninist politics and Marxist economics was accompanied by his embrace of an increasingly invigorating form of nationalism, fueling a self-assertion abroad that replaced the wariness and aversion to threats that were the hallmarks of of Chinese foreign policy during the Deng era. Xi’s popularity on the importance of nationalism was evident early in his term. “In the West, there are other people who say that China deserves to replace its old propaganda angle, that it deserves to stop propagandizing its history of humiliation,” he noted in his 2013 speech. “But the way I see it, we can’t take that into account; to history means to betray. History exists objectively. History is the most productive textbook. A country without ancient reminiscences has no future. Immediately after Xi was sworn in as CCP General Secretary in 2012, he led the newly appointed Politburo Standing Committee on a tour of an exhibit at the National Museum of China in Beijing titled “The Path to Rejuvenating the Country. ” . Matrix that narrates the perfidy of Western imperialism. powers and Japan and the party’s heroic reaction during China’s “100 years of national humiliation”.
In the years that followed, the concept of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” became the centerpiece of Xi’s nationalist vision. His aim is for China to become the leading Asian and global force by 2049. In 2017, Xi was made aware of a series of quantitative benchmarks that the country will need to achieve by 2035 on its way to this status, adding that it conforms to a “medium level”. evolved economy. and having “substantially completed the modernization of China’s national defense and armed forces. ” To capture and codify his vision, Xi contributed or highlighted a series of ideological concepts that, taken together, reinforce China’s new and more assertive approach. The first of these is “overall national strength” (zonghe guoli), which the CCP uses to quantify China’s combined military, economic, and technological power and influence over foreign policy. While this concept was used throughout Xi’s predecessors, only Xi had the audacity to claim that China’s strength has grown such that the country has already “entered the world’s most sensible ranks. ” Xi also stressed immediate adjustments to the “foreign balance of power” (guoji liliang duibi), which refers to the official benchmarks the party uses to gauge China’s progress in catching up with the United States and its allies. Official CCP rhetoric also includes references to the development of “multipolarity” (duojihua) in the foreign formula and irreversible increases in Chinese strength. Xi also rehabilitated a Maoist aphorism praising “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” (dongsheng xijiang) as a euphemism for China overtaking the United States.
Xi’s public praise for China’s developing national strength has been far sharper and more extensive than that of his predecessors. In 2013, the CCP officially abandoned Deng’s classic 1992 “diplomatic directives” that China “hides its strength, bids its time, and never takes the lead. “Xi used the 2017 Party Congress report to describe how China had promoted its “national economic, scientific, technological, military and global strength” to the point that it had now “entered the most sensible ranks in the world. “Thanks to an unprecedented increase in China’s external position. “The Chinese nation, with a completely new stance, now has an upright status and company in the East. “
The main issue for those who are wary of China’s rise is how these shifting ideological formulations have been put into practice. Xi’s doctrinal statements are not just theoretical, they are also operational. They laid the groundwork for a wide diversity of foreign policy measures that would have been under previous leaders. China has embarked on a series of claims to islands in the South China Sea and turned them into garrisons, ignoring earlier formal promises that it would not. Under Xi, the country has carried out large-scale live-fire missile movements around the Taiwanese coast, simulating a sea and air blockade of the island, something previous Chinese regimes have refrained from doing despite their skill. to block it. TO DO. Xi has escalated the China-India border dispute through repeated border clashes and the construction of new roads, airfields and other military-related infrastructure near the border. And China has pursued a new policy of economic and industrial coercion opposed to states whose policies offend Beijing and are vulnerable to Chinese pressure.
China is also much more competitive in filing complaints abroad. In July 2021, Beijing first announced sanctions against Americans and Western establishments who had the audacity to criticize China. The sanctions are in line with the new “wolf” philosophy. warrior diplomacy, which encourages Chinese diplomats to systematically and publicly attack their host governments, a radical break with Chinese diplomatic practice over the past 35 years.
Xi’s ideological convictions have committed China to the purpose of building what Xi describes as a “more equitable and equitable” foreign system, anchored in Chinese than American strength and reflecting norms more in line with Marxist-Leninist values. For this reason, China has pushed to remove UN resolutions from any reference to universal human rights and created a new set of foreign institutions focused on China, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. to compete with and eventually upgrade the governed across the West. A Marxist-Leninist quest for a “fairer” world is also shaping China’s promotion of its own style of national progression in the global South as an option to the “Washington Consensus” of flexible markets and democratic rule. And Beijing has presented in a position offering surveillance technology, police education and intelligence collaboration to countries around the world, such as Ecu ador, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe, that have eschewed the old Western liberal-democratic style.
These adjustments in China’s foreign and security policy were signaled well in advance through previous changes in Xi’s ideological line. Using what Western audiences can be difficult to understand and theoretical gibberish, Xi conveyed a transparent message to the party: China is much tougher than it is. There has ever been, and he intends to use that force to replace the course of history.
Xi is 69 years old and unlikely to retire; As a longtime student and practitioner of Chinese politics, he knows all too well that if he were to leave office, he and his circle of family members would be vulnerable to retaliation from his successors. For the rest of his life, his official designations are likely to be replaced over time. His mother is 96 and his father lived to be 89. If his longevity is any indication of his own, he is poised to remain China’s ideal leader until at least the vanquished ones of 2030.
Xi faces few political vulnerabilities. Elements of Chinese society may begin to chafe at the increasingly repressive apparatus it has built. But new surveillance technologies allow him to disagree on tactics that Mao and Joseph Stalin can hardly imagine. generation,” especially elites who have been knowledgeable at home rather than abroad, who have grown up under his leadership rather than the more liberal regimes of their predecessors, and who see themselves as the vanguard of Xi’s political revolution. Assume that Xi’s Marxist-Leninist vision will implode under the weight of its own internal contradictions in the short and medium term. If a political replacement occurs, it will most likely happen after Xi’s death than before.
But Xi is not absolutely sure. Its Achilles heel is the economy. Xi’s Marxist vision of greater party control over the personal sector, a developing role for state-owned enterprises and trade policy, and the pursuit of “common prosperity” through redistribution is very likely to slow expansion. economical over time. Indeed, declining business confidence will decrease personal investment in constant assets in reaction to developing perceptions of political and regulatory risk; after all, what the state gives, the state can also take away. This applies specifically to the technology, finance, and real estate sectors, which have been key drivers of China’s internal expansion over the past two decades. China’s attractiveness to foreign investors has also diminished due to supply chain uncertainty and the effect of new doctrines of national economic self-sufficiency. At home, China’s business elites have been spooked by the anti-corruption drive, the arbitrary nature of the party-controlled justice formula, and a growing number of high-profile tech titans falling out of political favor. And China has yet to figure out how to get out of its “zero covid” strategy, which has worsened the country’s economic slowdown.
These weaknesses are compounded by a series of long-term structural trends: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, low productivity expansion, and high degrees of shared indebtedness among institutions. public and personal finances. While the CCP once expected the average annual expansion to hover around 6% for the rest of the 2020s before slowing to around 4% by the 2030s, some analysts now worry that in In the absence of a drastic course correction, the economy may not begin to recover soon. retrieve. plateau, peaking at around 3% in the 2020s before falling to around 2% in the 2030s. As a result, China may simply enter the 2030s still caught in the so-called intermediate source of income, with one smaller or slightly larger than that of the United States. For China’s leaders, these end results would have far-reaching consequences. If the task and source of income expansion falters, China’s budget would come under pressure, forcing the CCP to decide between offering physical care, elderly care, and pension rights on the one hand and pursuing national security, trade policy and the Belt and Road Initiative on the one hand. the other. The other. Meanwhile, China’s gravitational pull on the rest of the global economy would be called into question. The debate over whether the world has ever experienced “Peak China” is just beginning, and when it comes to China’s long-term expansion, the jury is still out.
Therefore, the very important question for China in the 2020s is whether Xi can set a course correction to recover from the significant slowdown in economic growth. This, however, would mean a great loss of prestige for him. Get ahead, making as few ideological and rhetorical changes as imaginable and combining a new team of economic policymakers, hoping they can find a way to magically repair growth.
Xi’s Marxist nationalism is an ideological assignment for the future; it is the fact of China that lurks at first sight. Under Xi, the CCP will evaluate the conversion of foreign cases through the lens of dialectical inquiry, and necessarily in a way that makes sense to others. For example, Xi will see new Western establishments aimed at countering China, such as the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic cooperation agreement between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and AUKUS (a defense agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), whether strategically hostile and ideologically predictable. It requires a new bureaucracy of political, ideological and military “struggle” to withdraw. According to his Marxist-Leninist view, China’s final victory is guaranteed because the deep forces of old determinism are on the side of the CCP and the West is in structural decline.
This view will have effects on the likelihood of a confrontation in Asia. Since 2002, the CCP’s coded language for expressing confidence that war was probably not the most likely has been the official word “China continues to enjoy an era of strategic opportunity. “through that, China will face a low threat of confrontation in the foreseeable long term and can therefore seek economic and foreign policy benefits as long as the U. S. The U. S. is stuck elsewhere, especially in the Greater Middle East. “strategic competitor” in 2017, the ongoing industrial war between the U. S. and Canada. The US and China, the mutual (albeit selective) bureaucracy of economic disengagement, and the hardening of US alliancesWith the U. S. with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and NATO, the CCP is very likely to adjust its formal analytical conclusion on the strategic environment.
The danger is that dialectical methodologies and the binary conclusions they produce can lead to spectacularly incorrect conclusions when implemented in the real world of foreign security. In the 1950s, Mao thought that it was dialectically inevitable that the United States would attack China to put down the Chinese revolution in the call of the forces of capitalism and imperialism. Despite the Korean War and two crises in the Taiwan Strait in that decade, no such attack materialized. Had Mao not adopted such an ideological standpoint, the thaw in China’s relations with the United States might also perhaps have started a decade earlier than it did, especially given the ongoing truth of the Sino-Soviet split that began after of 1959. Similarly, Xi now sees risks on all fronts and has embarked on securing virtually every facet of public policy and personal life. Chinese. And once those risk perceptions are turned into formal analytical conclusions and translated into CCP bureaucracies, the Chinese formula will likely begin to work as if armed confrontation is inevitable.
Xi’s ideological statements shape how the CCP and its nearly one hundred million members perceive their country and its role in the world. They take these texts seriously; so does the rest of the world. At the very least, Xi’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy put an end to any illusion that Xi’s China could simply peacefully liberalize its policies and economy. And it makes clear that China’s foreign policy technique is driven not only through a continuous calculation of strategic dangers and opportunities, but also through the underlying confidence that the forces of antiquity are inexorably advancing the country.
Thus, this leads Washington and its partners to conscientiously compare their existing Chinese strategies. The United States realizes that China represents the ultimate politically and ideologically disciplined challenger it has faced in its century of geopolitical domination. U. S. strategists avoid “mirror images” and do not assume that Beijing will act in a way that Washington would interpret as rational or serving China’s non-public interests.
The West won an ideological competition in the twentieth century. But China is not the Soviet Union, especially since China now has the world’s largest economy. Leninist orthodoxy helped him consolidate his non-public power. But this same ideological stance has also created dilemmas that the CCP will struggle to resolve, especially since the slowdown in economic expansion calls into question the party’s long-standing social contract with the people.
Whatever happens, Xi will not abandon his ideology. He is a true believer. And this presents an additional brake for the United States and its allies. To succeed in the ongoing ideological war now unfolding before them will require a radical reconsideration of the principles that distinguish liberal and democratic politicians. Systems. Western leaders will have to defend those ideals in word and deed. They too will have to be true believers.