China-US Relations in the Eyes of the Chinese Communist Party

A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY 

China-US Relations in the Eyes of the Chinese Communist Party 

AN INSIDER’S PERSPECTIVE 

CAI XIA         CGSP Occasional Paper Series No. 1 • June 2021

How does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) view the China-US relationship, and what factors have shaped China’s approach to the United States? As a former insider in the CCP and professor at the Central Party School for many years, I would like to offer here some personal reflections on these questions (even though I am not an expert on Sino-American relations). 

Looking back on China-US relations over the past half century, we Chinese should first affirm and thank the US government for its “engagement policy” with China, which helped China end thirty years of isolation and poverty. China’s rapid economic and social development and tremendous changes are inseparable from the sincere exchanges and help of the US government as well as people in American scientific, technological, educational, cultural, and economic circles. This assistance provided an extremely precious historical opportunity and development space for China to integrate into international society, get in touch with and understand modern civilization, and restore economic and social vitality. As a result, many Chinese have had the opportunity to get out of the country and thus change their destiny and that of their families. Currently there are more than five million Chinese who have emigrated to the US. The vast majority of them came after the 1980s through study, work, or immigration, becoming permanent residents with green cards or naturalized American citizens. In turn, their close interactions with their relatives, friends, and colleagues back in China have helped to broaden the Chinese people’s views and opened their minds. 

However, looking at it objectively, the Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental interests and its basic mentality of using the US while remaining hostile to it have not changed over the past seventy years. By contrast, since the 1970s, the two political parties in the United States and the US government have always had unrealistic good wishes for the Chinese communist regime, eagerly hoping that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the CCP’s rule would become more liberal, even democratic, and a “responsible” power in the world. However, this US approach was a fundamental misunderstanding of the CCP’s real nature and long-term strategic goals. All along the CCP hid its real goals and intentions, so as to gain various benefits from the United States. Although there have been economic, political, and personnel changes within the two countries, as well as steady frictions, conflicts, and tensions in China-US relations, normal diplomatic relations between the two countries have been maintained and conflicts and risks have generally been kept under control. 

As a result, the effects of the engagement policy over the past half century have been multifaceted. On the one hand, engagement has helped the Chinese people to get rid of poverty and isolation and enter the international community, and it has also allowed civil society to emerge and gradually develop in China. On the other hand, the engagement policy has also hastened the rapid rise of China under the CCP’s neo-totalitarian rule. The CCP is determined to reframe the existing international order and norms and lead the world in the opposite direction of liberal democracy. [my emphasis dc]

Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he has continued the diplomatic strategy toward the US established by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping—namely, to take advantage of the engagement policy to gain time to achieve the CCP’s goals. But, with China’s enhanced strength now, Xi Jinping has wrongly judged that the international configuration is “the East is rising and the West is declining,” and he has become more aggressive and outspoken about his strategic intention to displace the United States. As a result, in recent years, troubles and conflicts in China-US relations have continually increased, and the CCP has increasingly become the greatest challenge and greatest threat to postwar international relations, to the liberal system of freedom and democracy, and to the security of the United States. The March 22, 2021, clash between the top diplomatic officials of the two countries in Anchorage, Alaska, showed that the relationship between China and the US may return to the rivalrous state of fifty years ago. 

How the US government understands and handles China-US relations affects not only the well-being of the Chinese and American peoples but also the peace and stability of the world. As a former member of the CCP system, looking back at the changes in China-US relations over the past fifty years, I have three basic perspectives that I wish to share with Americans, so that they can more clearly see the CCP and its strategies for what they are. 

First, in the more than seventy years since it came to power, the CCP has treated domestic and foreign affairs as “one integrated game,” with the top priority of strengthening the CCP’s control and preventing the collapse of the regime. In this regard, diplomacy is an extension of domestic affairs and is seen as a device to keep the party in power. 

Second, as far as the CCP’s global strategic objectives are concerned, China-US relations are the primary, and most important, factors among all. Therefore, the CCP’s attitude toward China-US relations and the engagement policy is determined by how well they serve the CCP’s internal political needs. 

Third, international engagement and economic development have failed to soften the political character of the CCP regime. Its combination of ideology and extreme repression  make it a totalitarian regime, and the sophisticated digital nature of its surveillance and repression has given totalitarian control a new dimension. All of this makes China a more dangerous adversary for the United States. 

The “Honeymoon Period” of 

China-US Engagement Policy 

It was President Nixon who gave birth to the US policy of “engagement” with China. He not only saw a US alliance with China to contain the Soviet Union as a necessity from a geopolitical perspective, but he also viewed the significance of changing China-US relations from a long-term perspective of global security. Writing as early as 1967, Nixon stated, “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside of the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”1 But Nixon forgot to ask if communist China could be easily integrated into the international community. 

On China’s side, it was Mao Zedong who opened the door, but it was Deng Xiaoping who established the strategic framework for China-US engagement. Deng’s positive attitude toward the engagement policy was due first to the fact that China’s economy was at the edge of collapse at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, choosing the United States in the confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union at that time helped the CCP to rely on the strength of the US to reduce Soviet threats. 

China and the United States formally established diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. Following Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit to the US that month, large numbers of CCP officials also visited the US and European countries. These visits prompted the CCP’s determination to open the country to promote reforms, and China began to experience remarkable changes. 

Deng Xiaoping was greatly impressed by his visit to the US. He had a classic saying: “After WWII, those who followed the U.S. have become rich, and those who opposed the U.S. are still poor.”2 In the early 1980s, all members of the CCP from the top down hoped to change China’s poverty and backwardness. When I lived in Suzhou in the 1980s, I once chatted with a senior reporter of the Suzhou Daily newspaper who had just interviewed a city official recently returned from his first visit to the United States. The reporter was expecting the official to talk about how US imperialism was struggling and dying. The reporter was stunned when he heard the official say, “Ah, now I know what a civilized life is. We are all barbarians here.” Of course, the interview was not published. 

In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping emphasized that since a third world war would not occur, China should take advantage of the historic opportunity to fully develop itself. The CCP and the government at national, provincial, and local levels enthusiastically promoted China-US friendship and opening to the outside world. Fourteen coastal cities were designated as Special Economic Zones, offering various preferential policies to attract foreign investment to China. At the same time, China sent students to the US and Europe to learn cutting-edge technology and social science theories. 

Then why, shortly after returning from his triumphal tour of the US, did Deng Xiaoping launch the war in the border region of China and Vietnam? There were two narratives circulating within the CCP at the time: one was that it was to “show a loyalty pledge” to the US, that China did not hesitate to teach its former “little brother” in the international communist movement a “lesson” in order to express sincere friendship with the US; the other was that Deng Xiaoping wanted to gain firm control of China’s military through this conflict. After the Sino-Vietnamese border war ended (and the Chinese people were never told how poorly our forces fared or how many of our soldiers died), Deng Xiaoping executed a demobilization plan, reducing the army by one million soldiers and converting military oriented enterprises to civilian production, thus saving military expenditures to develop the economy. He also formulated a three-step strategy. The goal was to make China a modern great power in the world by 2049, the centenary of the PRC. 

The acceleration of China’s economic growth was something that the US was happy to see. The US was looking forward to the gradual emergence of democracy in China in the course of economic changes. President Nixon said: “Thus, our aim—to the extent that we influence events—should be to induce change.”3 From the outset of the engagement policy, US strategy has been to produce liberal change in China—economically, socially, and politically. Perhaps what American officials did not expect was that Deng Xiaoping would delineate the boundaries of Chinese politics by setting down the Four Cardinal Principles: adherence to the socialist road, to the people’s democratic dictatorship, to the leadership of the Communist Party, and to Marxist and Mao Zedong Thought.4 From the very beginning, the CCP’s senior leaders have made it clear that the ultimate purpose of accepting and using the American engagement policy was to restore China’s economy in order to strengthen the CCP regime. Some space could be properly opened in the economic field, but in the political arena the Four Cardinal Principles must not be changed and the dominance of the CCP’s one-party rule must never be challenged. 

However, the simultaneous economic reforms and opening to the outside world brought in democratic ideas and universal values, thereby causing ideological confusion within the party and the country. As a certain liberalizing trend was under way and reformers within the party were proposing various alterations to classic Marxist theories in 1982–1983, the conservatives within the CCP could not tolerate it and countered with the “Spiritual Pollution Movement.” This campaign was short-lived, though, and by 1984 liberal leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were again pushing philosophical and political boundaries in a much more open and liberal direction. 

Although Deng himself had spoken of the need for political reform as early as 1980 and again in 1982, by 1986 the reform of China’s political system was put on the official CCP agenda and, at the same time, the first nationwide pro-democracy student movement occurred in China. Although Deng Xiaoping had given numerous directives regarding China’s political reform, he remained highly vigilant about any negative effects that might be caused by introducing Western liberal and democratic ideas into China, and he would never allow political changes to go beyond the CCP’s control. 

Together with several old party leaders, he exerted strong pressure and quelled the “Democracy Wall Movement” in late 1979, the Hunan student movement in 1980, and then a nationwide student movement in late 1986 (which started in Hefei, in Anhui Province, but rapidly spread to other cities). The latter movement resulted in Hu Yaobang being forced to resign as the general secretary of the CCP and the expulsion from the party of leading intellectuals Fang Lizhi, Wang Ruowang, and Liu Binyan. In expelling them, Deng importantly said: “When we talk about democracy, we cannot copy bourgeois democracy, and we cannot engage in the threefold separation-of-powers system.”5 The 1986 student movement was labeled “bourgeois liberalization” by Deng and party conservatives. This kind of characterization and treatment paved the way for the Tiananmen Square incident on June 4, 1989. 

The period from the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the US in 1979 to the June 4 incident in 1989 was the “honeymoon” period of the China-US engagement policy. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party not only used the engagement policy to create favorable conditions for achieving their goals, but they also never flinched on the sensitive and complex issues concerning CCP rule. For their part, American leaders, out of goodwill and wishful thinking, intentionally or unintentionally, covered up or ignored some sensitive and complex issues (mainly concerning civil and political rights and Taiwan), and at times even used ambiguous wording to make de facto concessions. Some clearheaded people in American political and academic circles did express doubts about US engagement policy toward China at the time, but they were in a distinct minority.6 Things that happened later proved that the doubts were justified, but US government leaders at the time did not pay much attention. The buy-in to the engagement theory was so pervasive among US policy elites that it had an intoxicating effect on them. The big fallacy of the engagement policy was in assuming that the CCP could be transformed to share power and accept democracy, and therefore it erred in engaging heavily with China’s elites rather than its people. 

Deng Xiaoping Clarified the Basic Strategic Framework for China-US Relations after the June 4 Incident 

The June 4 incident in 1989 and subsequent drastic political changes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe greatly shook the foundation of the CCP’s rule and shocked its top echelon. How to stabilize the domestic situation and ease international pressure as soon  as possible became a major and urgent problem facing the CCP at that time. The subsequent overall framework of China-US relations and the engagement policy were gradually reset against that background. 

The incident on June 4, 1989, when the army opened fire on protesting citizens in Tiananmen Square and other parts of Beijing, shocked the world and caused immediate worldwide reactions, which put the CCP’s international reputation and relations under fire. The Group of Seven (G7) countries strongly condemned the action and instituted various sanctions against China. The CCP was very nervous at the time. First, the Tiananmen Square incident suddenly deteriorated China’s external international environment after a decade of positive engagement with the world. The events in China coincided with similar unrest in Eastern European countries, challenging communist rule there. Then, two years later, the political turmoil spread to the former Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was overthrown. Those inside the CCP could hardly believe these extraordinary events. 

These two factors exerted enormous pressure on the CCP, and an uneasy panic and fear permeated the party. Deng Xiaoping worked hard to restore the unfavorable political situation over the next year or so, trying to stabilize the party and the people internally, while externally trying to restore a normal international environment, especially in China-US relations. In response to international sanctions, Deng gave a talk inside the party, saying, in effect, why should we be afraid of the blockade? Before the reform and opening-up policy the CCP had been blockaded for thirty years, but the party and country survived. Deng also said that China’s one billion people were a “big market” and “we don’t need to beg the foreigners to come back—they will do so of their own volition, as they need us.”7 At the time, this internal speech was intended to stabilize the mood inside the party. But in July of the following year, when Deng met with former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, he clearly expressed this opinion more openly.8 Meanwhile, the CCP issued multiple directives to combat corruption, rectify the party’s work style, establish an internal reporting system (whereby party members report on others), and adjust the relationship between the CCP and other Chinese “democratic parties” (the eight “united front” parties that are permitted to exist to give the façade that the CCP shares power) as well as with the general public to alleviate public grievances and stabilize the domestic situation. 

The turning point was Deng Xiaoping’s misjudgment that the US was behind the 1989 pro-democracy protests. In their aftermath Deng frequently met with international figures, private or official, as well as semiofficial dignitaries from the US. His words were soft but tough, trying his best to repair foreign relations, especially with Washington, yet he made unfounded countercharges. Deng specifically blamed the June 4 incident on Western countries and the United States, saying: “The Western world really wanted chaos  in China. . . . The United States, as well as some other Western countries, have engaged in peaceful evolution towards capitalism in socialist countries. The United States is waging a smokeless world war without gunpowder.”9 

In another meeting with the prime minister of Thailand, Deng Xiaoping said, “China, among the countries in the world, is least afraid of isolation, blockade, and sanctions. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we have been in a position of being isolated, blocked, and sanctioned for decades. But in the end, it has not harmed us much. Facts show that those who want to sanction us are beginning to learn their lessons.”10 In a meeting with former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, Deng said: “After we put down the rebellion, the Group of Seven summit meeting issued a declaration imposing sanctions on China. What qualifies them to do that? Who granted them the authority? Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is only designed to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which pursue hegemony and practice power politics. We never listen to such stuff.”11 

Then Deng met with former US president Nixon on October 31, 1989. He first gratuitously praised Nixon and said: “I appreciate your opinion very much. When considering the relationship between countries, we should primarily proceed from our own country’s strategic interests. . . . So, your trip to China in 1972 was not only a wise but also a very brave action.” Then, Deng defended the shooting and poured a pot of dirty water over the conversation: “Frankly, the recent disturbances and counter-revolutionary rebellion that took place in Beijing were fanned by [the forces of] international anti-communism and antisocialism. It is a pity that the United States was so deeply involved in this matter and that it keeps denouncing China. Actually, it is China that is the real victim. China has not done anything to harm the United States.” Then, after trying to justify his and the CCP’s actions to use force, Deng took an even tougher stand, telling Nixon: “I would like you to tell President Bush that the United States should take the initiative in putting the past behind us, because only your country can do that. . . . The U.S. is strong and China is weak; China is the victim. Don’t ever expect China to beg the United States to lift the sanctions. If they lasted a hundred years, the Chinese would not do that.” In the end, Deng did not forget to gratuitously remind Nixon of the Chinese market as a temptation: “The Chinese market is not fully developed yet, and the United States can take advantage of it in many ways. We shall be happy to have American merchants continue doing business with China. This could be an important way of putting the past behind us.”12 

Looking back today, we can see that Deng’s talks were indeed very clever. It was clear that he was the perpetrator, but he described himself, the CCP, and China as the victim. Deng blamed the June 4 incident on Western countries and the United States because that was badly needed to quell the discontent of the entire party and all the people in the country over the shooting.

Defying the national mood of censure in the United States, President Bush seemed desperate to get the relationship back on track (another example of American naïveté). Bush dispatched his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing on two secret trips, in July and December 1989. Instead of keeping Deng isolated and on the defensive, Bush’s initiative appeared groveling and played into Deng’s hands. The Chinese public had no way to know of these secret visits; even we in the central party apparatus did not know. When Deng met with Scowcroft his attitude was tough and condescending, but he also held out an olive branch: “China cannot be a threat to the United States, and the US should not treat China as a threatening rival. We have never done anything to harm the U.S. . . . If both sides make concessions, we can reach a settlement acceptable to both.”13 Scowcroft, the well-mannered “gentleman” American diplomat, was not confrontational. He used humble diplomatic etiquette to defuse the embarrassing atmosphere of concealed confrontation during the meeting with Deng, and this perhaps made a bad start for the subsequent handling of conflicts in China-US relations. 

After more than a year of internal and external adjustments, Deng Xiaoping gradually formulated the CCP’s basic domestic and international policies to deal with the June 4 Tiananmen Square incident and the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. In a speech announcing his retirement on September 4, 1989, to the Central Committee, Deng observed:

I think the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were inevitable. . . . There is no doubt that the imperialists want socialist countries to change their nature. The problem now is not whether the banner of the Soviet Union will fall—there is bound to be unrest there—but whether the banner of China will fall. . . . As long as China doesn’t collapse, one fifth of the world’s population will be upholding socialism. . . . In short, my views about the international situation can be summed up in three sentences. First, we should observe the situation coolly. Second, we should hold our ground. Third, we should act calmly. Don’t be impatient; it is no good to be impatient. We should be calm, calm, and calm again.14 

At first Deng declared a twelve-character policy, but later it turned to the twenty-four character policy “stabilize the position, observe calmly, take all in stride, never take the lead, and hide our capacity to bide our time.” The latter phrase, taoguang yanghui (韬光养晦), became famous as Deng’s famous dictum to guide foreign policy. Most people don’t know that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc that triggered Deng’s taoguang yanghui strategy. A group of CCP top-ranking cadres came to Deng after the collapse, urging that China take over the leadership of the world communist community. Deng insisted that “we should not stick our neck out” (不当头) but must “hide our capacity to bide our time.” 

Deng handled internal affairs and diplomacy in a comprehensive way and emphasized several points to the CCP. His political brilliance and experience enabled him to see clearly  that China had no strength to confront the US at the time and that regime survival had to be the party’s utmost task. He also knew that the CCP’s legitimacy and survival depended on its economic performance. If China could not shake off poverty, the Communist Party would collapse sooner or later. China’s economy could only improve by continuing the reform and opening-up policy. And only by so doing would China’s relations with the US be eased. At that time, China was far from possessing the strength to stand up as an equal to the United States and European countries. If China wanted to enter the international economic community and use the world market to increase its national power, China could only achieve this by acting softly, lowering its posture, and keeping a low profile in dealing with the US and the Western world. In other words, China must deceive the West by hiding its long-term strategic goals, pretending to be weak and harmless, in order to take advantage of Western markets, technology, capital, and talent, while waiting for the opportunity to strike back and win the ultimate war. This was an ancient strategy that Chinese emperors and kings had used many times in the past. 

The Post-Deng Basic Framework for Managing Relations with the United States 

The framework based on the Four Cardinal Principles formulated by Deng Xiaoping governed the subsequent twenty years of the CCP’s and China’s approach to the US under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, but changes began after 2009. 

Anti–Peaceful Evolution Has Been the Long-Term Consistent Policy of the CCP 

“Guarding against peaceful evolution” and preventing the undermining of the regime have been the basic policies of ideological propaganda within the CCP since the Mao period. After the Tiananmen protests and the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the CCP vigorously strengthened its propaganda and indoctrination within the party and worked hard in four aspects, which primarily targeted the elimination of US influence. 

The first tactic was to tie the fate of all party members and officials to the CCP regime’s security. After 1989 the CCP continued to strengthen its “crisis education” within the party, emphasizing that if the CCP fell from power, as in the former communist party-states, tens of thousands of cadres could be incarcerated or killed, and most party members and cadres would face unemployment and difficulties in making a living. In particular, the party used the execution of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife as an example to warn that maintaining political power is literally a matter of life and death for individual leaders. It further strengthened the notion that “anti-liberalization and anti–peaceful evolution” is a correct political position. 

The second party initiative was to mobilize institutions (Central Party School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, famous university scholars on the international communist 1 movement, as well as military personnel) to study the causes, lessons, and countermeasures of the political upheavals in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to prevent the CCP’s own collapse. These detailed studies (which continued throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s) produced two main schools of opinion: one favored advancing political reforms and gradually moving toward a democratic constitutional system, while the other urged sticking to the traditional thinking of the Communist Party and fighting an “invisible war” against the United States.15 Both schools of opinion had an impact on the highest levels of the CCP—but, in the end, the hard-liners prevailed. 

The third initiative involved ideology. The CCP realized the confrontation with the US would ultimately focus on ideology—but the party’s ideology was contradictory, inconsistent, and inferior, making it hard to justify its perpetual rule over the country. So, party theoreticians strived to reshape a new ideology to resist the influence of modern concepts such as universal values, freedom, democracy, and constitutionalism on the party and Chinese society. On the one hand, the CCP defines “Chinese-style democracy” and the rule of law as its “core socialist values”; on the other hand, it attacks or denies universal values such as freedom and democracy. Instead, it tries to integrate traditional Chinese culture with Marxist theory to form a “Chinese Marxism for the 21st century.” With the collapse of the CCP’s ideological pillar, the CCP is increasingly relying on material temptation and high-pressure punishment to hold the party together. 

Fourth, the party has sought to combine anti–peaceful evolution with manipulation of public sentiments. The CCP is highly vigilant and restrictive against the activities of foreign NGOs in China, and it suppresses the budding and growing civil society forces, or any organized and collective actions by its citizens, in China. Furthermore, it agitates and manipulates nationalist sentiments among the Chinese people, advocating an ideological consciousness of “grand unification,” inciting hatred of the United States to justify the regime’s legitimacy on social and psychological levels. 

“Sovereign Rights” Are Used to Suppress “Human Rights,” and “Protection of Human Rights” Has Become a Major Point of Contention between China and the US 

The CCP had almost no concept of human rights in the past, and it basically parroted the Soviet Union’s narratives on the subject. After the June 4 incident, no one in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was even able to write an article in response to the international community’s condemnation of the CCP’s violation of human rights. A professor at the Central Party School accidentally learned of this situation and offered to help. In his article for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he put forward the argument that “the rights to subsistence and development are superior to human rights,” which subsequently became regarded as “the viewpoint of human rights with Chinese characteristics.” This echoes exactly Deng Xiaoping’s statement that “sovereign rights are superior to human rights.” These two points have subsequently become the CCP’s basic narrative on human rights issues.16 

It is precisely because the CCP has seen through the American capitalists’ strong desire for the Chinese market that it knew that big business would willingly pressure the US government to make concessions. Therefore, the CCP couldn’t care less about criticisms of its human rights violations, and it has become increasingly repressive domestically. The party deprives people of their basic rights of belief, speech, information, migration, and work; it brutally persecutes truth-telling journalists, lawyers, scholars, and NGOs; and it destroys churches and arrests church members and believers. In ethnic minority areas it continues to push its long-term practice of “grand unification,” distorting the ethnic autonomy policy, weakening and depriving ethnic cultural practices, and more recently forcefully implementing disguised ethnic annihilation. The CCP has also brutally suppressed the autonomy of the people of Hong Kong since 2019. It forcibly passed the Hong Kong version of the National Security Law and detained and sentenced well-known people from all walks of life who defended their rights to freedom. In recent years, the CCP’s human rights violations have become more serious and are causing widespread concern and public outrage all over the world. 

The US government has repeatedly negotiated with China to rescue those persecuted by the CCP—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The US government has strongly condemned China’s brutal acts in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong. In the final stage of the Trump administration, the US made it clear that the CCP is carrying out “genocide” against the Uyghurs, a position that the Biden administration has continued. These statements have aroused worldwide attention. In the meeting between senior Chinese and US officials in Anchorage, Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the issue of Xinjiang and Hong Kong in his opening statement, clearly declaring their importance and the position of the US government. This provoked a retaliatory tirade from CCP Politburo member and foreign affairs czar Yang Jiechi indicating that the US had no right to lecture China and “interfere in its internal affairs.” 

Expand Opening to the Outside World to Benefit China’s Economic Growth 

After Jiang Zemin became the general secretary of the CCP, he initially emphasized anti–peaceful evolution and was inclined to negate the economic reforms, return to the planned economy, and close China’s door to the outside world. But Jiang came to realize that if the economy did not work well, not only would the CCP fail to maintain its control, but also Deng Xiaoping’s decade of achievements would be denied. Deng too could not sit idly by. In early 1992, he made a famous inspection tour of Shenzhen and repeatedly emphasized reform, opening up, and economic development. He said harshly: “Anyone who opposes reform and opening will be removed.” This was a direct warning to Jiang Zemin, pushing him to clearly declare the goal of establishing a socialist market economic system at the 14th CCP National Congress. 

The CCP made great efforts to attract foreign companies (including US companies) to enter China’s market, and to increase economic, cultural, and technological exchanges with developed countries. At the same time, the CCP took advantage of opportunities for economic and cultural exchanges to sneakily acquire economic, commercial, technological, political, and military intelligence. In particular, the theft of high-tech research results is not only carried out in foreign companies within China but also by Chinese students and scholars who go abroad and may be required to “cooperate” with certain agencies to filch various information. About ten years ago I talked with a scholar who had returned to China about my desire to be a visiting scholar in a prestigious school in a foreign country. The scholar immediately said: “If anyone asks you to ‘cooperate’ with them for something, be sure not to agree.” I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but looking back now, this scholar’s reminder said a lot. For a long period of time, these covert activities that endangered American national security were only noticed by a few Americans. 

Taoguang Yanghui Is the Most Important Principle Restricting the CCP’s Handling of China-US Relations 

The Chinese saying taoguang yanghui (hiding our capacity to bide time) typically reflects the scheming way of thinking in traditional Chinese culture. The CCP earnestly avoided sticking its neck out internationally for the twenty years from 1989 to 2008, because the CCP needed time to become bigger and stronger. Jiang Zemin talked about his sixteen character principle in handling China-US relations in an internal report in 1994, showing China’s weakness to the US.17 Realizing that the power disparity between China and the US was too great and that China was unable to directly confront the US, the CCP practiced “forbearance” in encounters. Thus, China “tolerated” the 1993 container ship Yinhe incident, the 1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis, and the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. After the latter, China-US relations fell to their lowest point for a while, and finally the two governments negotiated a settlement and China “stomached it.” In April 2001, the US EP-3 spy plane collision with a Chinese air force fighter jet (which had been harassing it) produced a new incident that once again caused the relationship to deteriorate. After the US expressed “regrets” twice, the Chinese side decided to “put up with it” again.

China suffered casualties in both incidents. To a certain extent, China could have made a big deal of it as the “injured party” to obtain more compensation. This passive response disappointed the Chinese people and directly affected the credibility of the CCP and government. Having long been brainwashed by the government’s anti-American propaganda, people in China protested, stoning and damaging the US embassy in Beijing (though actually, the protests were orchestrated by the authorities). This frightened the CCP and PRC government, which feared that the people’s nationalistic anger would turn into discontent with the government’s passive responses and backfire on the party, so they deployed various means to calm the people down and restrict their behavior in order to end the diplomatic incidents as soon as possible. 

After these two incidents the CCP reaffirmed Deng’s idea of taoguang yanghui, gradually making this strategic principle that was originally focused on diplomacy a basic policy that the entire party must follow. This was generally accepted by middle- and high-level officials in the party. Two things impressed me deeply. One was that between August and September 2001, the Central Party School held a national symposium in Harbin (the Party School system consists of approximately 2,800 schools across all administrative levels in the country). This national meeting was to study the “Important Thought of Jiang Zemin on the Three Represents.”18 During one of the sessions I chatted with an influential bureau-level leader of the Central Party School. Believing that the government’s position was too weak, I said that it seemed that public opinion was dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the plane collision incident in April 2001. She responded: “How can we be tough? The US is too strong.” 

Another impression I recall is that after the doctrine of “Three Represents” was put forward, Zheng Bijian, then the executive vice president of the Central Party School, proposed the idea of China’s “peaceful rise” (和平崛起), which was extensively publicized by the Chinese official media and attracted widespread attention from the world. After some time, this “peaceful rise” meme was no longer mentioned, and the phrase “peaceful development” was substituted instead. I noticed the change (any party ideology theorist like me is keenly alert to the CCP’s phraseological changes because they often have deeper political implications). I asked Zheng Bijian’s associate, who was the director of the International Strategic Research Institute of the Central Party School, “Why is ‘peaceful rise’ not talked about anymore?” The director told me that the main consideration was that Western countries were concerned about the word “rise,” believing that it could be seen as a “potential threat”—thus it was changed to the more benign term “peaceful development,” emphasizing that China’s development does not pose a threat to any country. 

In order to conceal China’s true strategic intention, Xiong Guangkai, the CCP’s top military intelligence officer, made a big fuss about the English translation of Deng’s taoguang yanghui strategy. He alleged that the translation was wrong and completely distorted China’s peaceful diplomatic strategy, and it thus had caused undue negative effects on China’s normal foreign exchanges. General Xiong claimed that “the core meaning of the expression is not to show one’s strength, especially when one is strong and able, not to show off but to keep a low profile.” Anyone who has some knowledge of Chinese history and the writing of the characters knows that the hidden meaning of classic idioms such as “hiding our capacity to bide time” and “sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall” (卧薪尝胆) is to endure hardships and plan for retaliation.19 As a leading Chinese propagandist, the former head of the State Council’s Information Office, Zhao Qizheng, cynically explained, “The ‘peaceful’ is for foreigners, and the ‘rise’ is for us Chinese.”20 

Indeed, the CCP has skillfully played the game of Oriental cultural exceptionalism in China-US relations. After China joined the WTO in 2001, China-US relations entered a new stage. The US was quite optimistic about possible changes in China, thinking that a market economy would lead China on the road to democracy. When lecturing students at Johns Hopkins University, President Bill Clinton said, “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people, their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise . . . [and] the genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle.” President George W. Bush also said, “Economic freedom creates the habits of liberty, and habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. . . . Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” 

The Americans are too naïve. There are many differences between the cultures of Americans and Chinese. One basic cultural tradition of Americans is not to lie, to obey the rules, and to respect the spirit of contracts. In Chinese culture deception is in our blood. There is no spirit of the contract, no sense of fairness, and people often say different words to mean the same things under different circumstances. Something said today can change tomorrow. American people don’t have to care what the CCP says—but they must be careful about what the CCP does. If Americans naïvely believe the benign words and empty propaganda slogans that the CCP propagates, then they will be deceived and cheated. This is Chinese style cunning. The Chinese Communist Party does not think that this is morally bad. On the contrary, they think that it is a “strategy,” as Sun Zi long ago instructed that “there can never be too much deception in war” (兵不厌诈). 

The CCP utilizes everything to achieve its aims. They think that as long as the purpose is achieved, any means can be used (the ends justify the means). They will use enticing language to lure multinational companies into China. But then these companies will soon find that they have fallen into a trap: they must transfer their technologies or face shutdown. After acquiring the foreign technology, China often figures out ways to force these companies to leave the Chinese market. Elon Musk’s Tesla company is experiencing this situation now. 

In 2008 China hosted the Olympic Games with great success, while the US fell into the subprime financial crisis. This stimulated the ambitions of the CCP’s top leaders, who believed China’s rise and America’s decline were inevitable. Therefore, there was no need to hide China’s ambition and tolerate American “suppression” any longer. Instead, China had to step into the world spotlight. China-US relations began to show discreet and subtle changes. CCP leaders in Beijing began imagining that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was possibly equal, if not superior, to the American model. Since the end of 2008, taoguang yanghui was thus gradually abandoned. The Chinese have the saying that “diplomacy and internal affairs are just one game of chess.” In other words, using diplomacy to achieve domestic and international political goals and thus maintain one-party rule has been the CCP’s consistent discreet intention. 

The CCP took advantage of the 2008 Olympics to do several things. First, it established a large-scale and comprehensive surveillance system for monitoring the Chinese people, which laid the foundation for the current high-tech rigorous nationwide surveillance system. At that time, the government said that the system was only to ensure the security of the Olympic Games and was only temporary—but, in fact, after Xi Jinping took power he made great efforts to strengthen the accuracy and strictness of this surveillance system. One year later another draconian security blanket descended over Beijing, this time in conjunction with the military parade commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. The Olympics security lockdown was only a trial run for this event. 

Second, the CCP used the success of the Olympic Games to propagandize the “China Model.” The grand scenes and various exquisite and dazzling performances at the opening ceremony amazed the world, presenting an illusion of a free and prosperous China. The foreign media reports were much more positive than before. In the same year, the subprime mortgage crisis broke out in the US, which directly impacted the global economy. The huge economic contrast between China and the US caused the world to pay attention to the hot topic of the “China Model.” Borrowing the words of scholars in Britain and the US, the CCP externally hyped the “Beijing Consensus” to counter the “Washington Consensus.” What this really meant was that Beijing used the so-called China Model of blending private economic activities and state control of resources to cover up its one-party monopoly rule and avoid much-needed political reform. To a certain extent, this was the beginning of the CCP abandoning its policy of taoguang yanghui and beginning to aggressively penetrate and expand in the world. 

Third, the CCP used the influence of the successful Olympic Games in psychological preparation for China to “gain its due position” in world affairs. Voices suggesting the need to abandon the policy of “keeping a low profile” began to emerge within the CCP. Against the background of China successfully hosting the Olympics and the US being simultaneously caught in a financial crisis and near depression, the CCP boasted that the Chinese government’s four trillion RMB ($640 billion) relief fund not only enabled the Chinese economy to continue to grow at a rapid rate as before, but it also bolstered the entire global economy. A voice in the CCP advocated that China’s strength is no longer what it used to be and that China must win its due position—that is, from a “big country” (大国) to a “strong power” (强国) and from a receiver of world rules (including WTO rules) to becoming a participant in making the rules. 

As a faculty member of the Central Party School, I not only gave lectures to party officials but also participated in their discussions. I sensed a change of feelings from 2009 to 2012. At first there were doubts. An official asked me in a discussion session: “Professor Cai, Deng Xiaoping said ‘hide our capacity and bide one’s time.’ But that was the situation at that time. How long must we taoguang yanghui?” Then later, I began to hear remarks like these: that in the global financial crisis, only China was the “sacred calming pillar in the sea,” which demonstrated the superiority of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; that the “Chinese road” and the “China Model” have global significance; that China has found a “new development path” for developing countries; and so on. 

Against this backdrop, newly elected President Obama paid a state visit to China in November 2009. The visit did not go well, and China’s leaders treated him rudely. Not only that, but the CCP’s domineering and arrogant attitude began to appear in the South China Sea issue, where the PLA Navy began to provoke the US Pacific Seventh Fleet. As its repression increased domestically, 2009–2010 seemed to be a turning point in China’s external assertiveness. 

China-US Relations from Friction and 

Conflict to Cold War Opposition 

When Xi Jinping came to power at the end of 2012, ultranationalist sentiments were beginning to spread in the party and among the people as a whole. Taking advantage of this situation, Xi has preached and incited the escalation of nationalist sentiments, promoted military expansion, and put pressure on the West and the US. Eventually, the US had enough of China’s obfuscation, and during the Trump administration it made a fundamental shift in American policy, effectively abandoning the engagement policy and choosing to be “strategic competitors” instead. 

From the time Xi took office at the end of 2012 to the present time he has used nationalist sentiments to strengthen the sense of xenophobia domestically and arrogance abroad. If China’s nationalism during Hu Jintao’s period was to restore self-confidence and work hard to “build a prosperous society in an all-round way,” then the nationalist fervor during Xi Jinping’s period has gradually shown an aggressive, domineering, and arrogant tendency. When Xi made an overseas trip to Mexico in 2009, he said, “There are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country. China does not export revolution, hunger, poverty nor does China cause you any headaches. Just what else do you want?”21 These words already revealed Xi’s arrogant character, but the Americans didn’t pay much attention at the time. Many even believed that he could be China’s Gorbachev. To the contrary, since coming to power Xi has further strengthened nationalist rhetoric and has poisoned the minds of the Chinese people. 

The Chinese Communist Party teaches the people to hate the United States. It has regarded the US as an enemy for more than seventy years and has consistently, from 1949 to this day, promoted anti-American sentiment. In fact, the CCP has long referred to the United States as the “American imperialists” (美帝), and the consistent, systematic instilling of hatred toward the US for decades has implanted anti-American sentiment in the Chinese people for generations. I and others of my generation grew up with an anti-American education. The words I have been most familiar with since kindergarten and primary school are phrases such as “stop the American imperialist wolves,” “the American imperialists have always wanted to destroy us,” and so on. Once, I bought a toy pistol and gave it to a six-year old boy. The boy played with it and blurted out: “Kill the Yankees.” I was shocked. Many people in China cheered after the September 11 attacks on America, and anti-American  sentiment gradually heated up. The CCP’s “wolf warrior–style diplomacy” in 2020 further reflected people’s anti-American sentiment. Yang Jiechi’s offensive remarks against the US at the high-level Anchorage meeting in 2021 attracted great applause in China. The CCP’s anti-American propaganda meets with different reactions from different groups of people in Chinese society. Since the control of speech and the media is extremely strict in China, people cannot openly express their opposition to the anti-US incitement by the CCP’s official media. 

Xi has been using nationalist sentiment to engage in worldwide expansion under the slogan of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” At the 18th CCP National Congress he proposed to “build a community with a shared future for mankind,” and then began to implement the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. After 2015, Xi put forward in his speeches more deceptive words such as “providing the world with a ‘Chinese solution’ and ‘Chinese wisdom.’” CCP official media have touted the integration of Xi and his inflated nationalist sentiments. The CCP Propaganda Department also spends huge sums of money on “external propaganda” (对外宣传) every year, including convening the World Political Parties Conference in Beijing, organized by the CCP International Department (中联部). This meeting not only showcases the CCP’s ideology and expands its influence in the world, but also creates a “scene of all nations coming to the imperial court” to kowtow to Xi, so as to satisfy his imaginary vision of dominating the world. 

The CCP’s penetration of the United States and other countries, especially ideological penetration, began at the start of the twenty-first century. But at that time the scope and scale were limited. After Hu Jintao mentioned the need to build China’s “soft power” in his report to the 17th Party Congress in 2007, external propaganda activities have received much greater priority. As China’s economic strength increases, its ambition to expand internationally and even to dominate the world has grown larger, and its infiltration and influence activities have become more and more pervasive and invasive. The propaganda penetration overseas initially occurred in the name of cultural exchanges, but then expanded to media, finance, economy, technology, education, think tanks, museums, and other fields and institutions. Reportedly, almost all independent Chinese-language media in the United States have been bought up and are now controlled by the CCP, and the CCP interferes with academic freedom in American universities and think tanks. Also, the CCP’s “long arm control” has reached Chinese students and Chinese organizations across the US, and the party has even set up CCP branches in American universities (this is the case in many other countries as well). Meanwhile, China has progressively closed its doors to American and other foreign scholars. A number of prominent China scholars have been denied visas and have had their access to China curtailed. Many strictures have been put in place by the CCP to severely limit foreigners’ research access in China and interactions with Chinese scholars and officials. 

With Military Preparations and Intensified Confrontation with the US Military, the Danger of War Is More Imminent 

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the only country that could claim to have a world-class military was the United States. After Xi Jinping came to power, he emphasized efforts to deepen the reform of national defense and improve the actual combat level of military training. His repeated phrases “achieve the goal of building a strong and world-class military” and “prepare to fight and win wars” are obviously aimed at the United States. 

China’s expenditure on national defense has been steadily increasing. In 2021, the official budget reached 1.35 trillion yuan ($209.16 billion), an increase of 6.8 percent over 2020.22 This is the second-largest military budget in the world. However, according to estimates by the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China’s actual military expenditure in 2019 reached $240 billion US—38 percent higher than Beijing’s official figure.23 

China’s vigorous expansion of Xi’s military reform also runs in tandem with Xi’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative. A few years ago, I was invited to participate in the selection of “best curriculum” for military, ideological, and political education, and I attended the lecture competitions for a week. Quite a number of the lectures were about how to use the military to “keep the Belt and Road on course” (保驾护航). 

Moreover, Chinese authorities have deliberately heightened tensions in the South China Sea. In 2011, when Vice President Joe Biden visited China, Xi personally promised that China would not carry out military expansion in the South China Sea, and he publicly reaffirmed that pledge in the White House Rose Garden standing next to President Obama in 2016. But subsequent actions have once again proven that the CCP never keeps its promises. China has accelerated the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea and has begun to deploy weapons and troops there. It will likely soon establish a naval base. China has provoked disputes with several Southeast Asian states in the territorial waters of the South China Sea that it claims within its “nine-dash line,” and it has arbitrarily refused to accept the decision of an international tribunal in The Hague that thoroughly invalidated these claims. All these actions have significantly increased tensions in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. In September 2015 Xi told Obama: “The Pacific Ocean is large enough to accommodate the two major powers of China and the US.” Xi seemed to be calling for the peaceful coexistence of China and the US, but actually this exposed his ambition to dominate the world on an equal footing with the US. 

On January 1, 2021, the PRC began to implement the newly revised National Defense Law, and two key terms were added to the original Article 2, as follows (in italics): “The State’s military activities are to prevent and resist aggression, prevent armed subversion and division, and defend national sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, security, and development interests.” These two key terms, “division” and “development interests,” have profound implications: one is for Taiwan; the other is a threatening signal for all countries, and most importantly the US, that China’s military will go to war with whoever prevents the CCP from unifying Taiwan and whoever affects China’s development interests.24 

On February 10, 2021, President Biden announced the establishment of a working group on China strategy at the Pentagon. The Chinese government did not seem to make any public comment about this, but it responded with a long-range intercontinental missile launch ten days later. On February 20, the Chinese navy’s nuclear submarine launched the Julang-3 intercontinental ballistic missile (SLBM) from the deep sea near Yantai. The official launch video was broadcast in China. The official commentary stressed the significance of this missile’s “intercontinental deterrence,” which means that the People’s Liberation Army will have a world-class sea-based nuclear strike capability. The official commentary continued: “Recently, a certain country relying on its own force frequently exerts pressure on other countries in the world, trying to profit by other people’s toil. Obviously, we will not let this happen. At this moment, launching a new generation of submarine-launched missiles that have been hidden for many years clearly shows our firm attitude.” These signs indicate that the CCP has embarked on the path of militarism, conspiring to wage war, and it regards the United States as its most threatening enemy. In fact, no matter which political party is in power in the United States, it is impossible for the CCP to change this perspective. 

Using the Pandemic to Seek Hegemony 

COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, but the CCP concealed the truth and delayed prevention and control. This caused the virus to spread around the world, and it has not ended yet. Hundreds of millions of people have been infected and millions of people have died. In 2020, the CCP took advantage of the pandemic to spread false news, replacing normal communication between countries with “wolf warrior” verbal abuse in its diplomacy, falsely alleging that the virus originated in the US and trying to shirk its own responsibilities. The CCP has used every means to conceal the truth, preventing the World Health Organization and governments of other countries from investigating the origin of the virus, obtaining information on patient zero, and discovering the true situation at the beginning of the pandemic. 

With the pandemic going on, China announced its economic growth rate had slowed to 2.3 percent, while many economies in the world contracted. At the Understanding China Forum held in November 2020, a Peking University professor stated that China’s economic gains from fighting the pandemic will be 67 trillion RMB, accounting for about two-thirds of China’s total GDP in 2020.25 In contrast, the United States was deeply plagued by the Wuhan virus pandemic, and its economy and society, including the general election, have  been hit hard. All this shows that the CCP is using the pandemic against the US, trying to benefit from it in its discreet competition for world leadership. 

The Engagement Policy Is Destined to End Bleakly 

China-US relations have finally moved toward a Cold War confrontation. The sad ending of the engagement policy is an inevitable outcome. Although it is difficult for the engagement policy to continue, no totalitarian Chinese ruler can eliminate the enormous influence that the US continues to have on the CCP and the Chinese people. The economic and cultural exchanges between the people of China and the US have been growing continuously. As American capital, companies, products, and culture have entered China; as many Chinese travel abroad and see their children, relatives, and friends go abroad to study and work; and with the increasing number of intermarriages among Chinese and Americans, people have seen the real situation in the United States with their own eyes, and the false propaganda of China’s totalitarian regime has been exposed. Yet, under its totalitarian rule, the CCP publicly incites anti-American sentiments, while many people secretly transfer their assets, their children, and their families to the United States. They are criticized as “two-faced people” and ridiculed by Chinese netizens, with the epithet “anti-Americanism is the work, while migrating to the US is the life.” In fact, however, many CCP members and officials, and a considerable number of elites in Chinese society, especially the middle class, accept and approve of the American democratic system and freedom as universal values. 

Many Americans deplore the sad ending of the engagement policy, which is completely understandable. But in my view, this is an inevitable outcome. This is because the engagement policy was based on the faulty assumptions that international integration and economic development could transform the CCP into a modern political party that is willing to give up or share its hegemonic rule. But the CCP’s founding mission and organizing principles are to eliminate capitalism and achieve proletarian dictatorship, which institutes a completely opposite value and political system from those of the US. The two conflicting systems cannot be reconciled, and they cannot indefinitely coexist. As a result, China-US relations will inevitably move toward a standoff and/or confrontation (cold war or hot war is the external manifestation of confrontation). In fact, it is the CCP that has unilaterally ruined the engagement policy, because it believes engagement has served its purpose and is no longer useful. 

Is America China’s Adversary or a Competitor? 

The CCP regards the United States as a hostile adversary, even an enemy (敌人), while the US regards the CCP as its “competitor.” These are different concepts, which generate different strategies for bilateral relations, with different policy consequences. An adversary or enemy poses a relationship of life and death, but competitors only seek to gain advantage in a perpetual contest.  

The CCP has always regarded the United States as its adversary or enemy, for two reasons. First, it fears that its regime will be overthrown. This insecurity and paranoia, and the need to justify its dictatorship, are the rationale to create an archenemy. Therefore, from my childhood to today, the slogan that “the US imperialists have not given up the wild ambition to subjugate our country” incessantly lingers on. Inside China, the CCP launches a political campaign every few years to eliminate domestic opposition, and it always guards against the influence of the US and other Western countries on China—in its words, to “oppose peaceful evolution.” Whenever the CCP and the people have intense conflicts, the CCP will use the pretext of “the hostile black hand of foreign forces behind the scenes” to justify suppressing the protest. After decades of anti-American propaganda within and outside the CCP, anti American sentiment has become an indisputable political correctness. Second, the CCP always regards “eliminating imperialism and liberating all mankind” and “planting the red flag all over the world” as its political objectives. For more than seventy years, from Mao Zedong’s “anti–peaceful evolution” and “all imperialist reactionaries are paper tigers” rhetoric to Deng Xiaoping’s “calm observation, holding a firm foothold” and “hiding one’s capacity and biding one’s time,” or Xi Jinping’s “bottom line thinking,” “maintain political security, regime security” and “build a community with a shared future for mankind”—the fundamental point has always been to treat China-US relations as a hostile relationship of “life and death.” Up until now, only China’s lack of strength and the influence of the international community constrained China. But now that the CCP perceives American weakness and has an inflated sense of China’s own strengths, Beijing is adjusting its strategy toward the US accordingly. 

On the other hand, no matter how many doubts it has about the CCP, the United States has continued to treat China as a normal country. The US government granted China Permanent Most Favored Nation trade status (PNTR) and supported China’s accession to the WTO. At that time the US was happy to see China’s national strength rapidly increasing, under the assumption that economic freedom would bring about political changes. While well intended, such actions were profoundly naïve. 

Up until recent years, most American elites in political circles, business, academia, and think tanks had not believed that China would become America’s biggest competitor when it became strong. Naysayers such as Samuel Huntington, with his theory of a “clash of civilizations,”26 and Graham Allison, who took seriously the possibility of a war breaking out between China and the US in the future,27 were ridiculed. None of the mainstream elites regarded China as a real potential enemy of the US. Yet, the concept of the “clash of civilizations” and especially Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” were quickly taken over by the CCP as pretexts to incite anti-American sentiments among the Chinese people, and to mobilize social and psychological groundwork to aggravate tensions and prepare for a future war. 

Although the CCP has always regarded the US as an adversary, because of its poverty and backwardness in the past it needed time to build up its strength. Therefore, China had to “bide its time” and be on friendly terms with the US. However, now that Xi Jinping believes that he is firmly in control and that China is strong enough to challenge the US, the PRC no longer has to bide its time and is beginning to behave aggressively. This can be clearly seen from the CCP’s military expansion in the South China Sea and the growing military belligerence toward Taiwan in recent months. 

Consider again the rare public war of words at the opening session of the meeting between Chinese and American high-level diplomats in Anchorage on March 18. In ignoring basic diplomatic etiquette, and even using Chinese street cursing language in chastising his American counterparts, Yang Jiechi showed that the CCP only believes in “speaking with the fist” and “law of the jungle.” 

What is also deeply concerning is that in 2020 Xi tore up China’s commitment to “one country, two systems” and willfully passed the Hong Kong version of China’s National Security Law. The failure of the US and European countries to impose resolute sanctions to support the struggle of the Hong Kong people is tantamount to tacit acceptance of the CCP’s severe suppression. When the pandemic spread across the world, causing serious damage to the US and the global economy, Xi said that China now has the strength to “look at the world on an equal footing.” In the eyes of CCP leaders, “the East is rising and the West is declining.” Their judgment is that there are opportunities embedded in crisis, and the crisis can turn to opportunities to realize the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” 

All of these perspectives show that the engagement policy that had been so painstakingly maintained for a long time was just wishful thinking of the two political parties and the government of the United States. The CCP has merely been using the engagement policy for its own needs. The CCP just used and took advantage of the goodwill and benign intentions of the Americans. The reason why the engagement policy ended sadly is due to the fundamental misjudgment by the United States about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and regime, which in turn has made the US a victim of its own policy. The consequences of misjudging the nature of the CCP regime can be described in a Chinese idiom: “leaving a carbuncle unchecked will lead to endless troubles.” 

Is the CCP Authoritarian or Totalitarian? 

Is China under the CCP’s rule an authoritarian or a totalitarian regime? So far, this issue has not been clearly understood by either party in the US. While unprecedentedly harsh, even former secretary of state Pompeo’s speeches referred to the CCP as an authoritarian country. In fact, the CCP regime has always been a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. 

When Mao, Nixon, and Deng began China-US contacts, the CCP only loosened its foreign policy, but never loosened its domestic rule. After the 1980s, the CCP loosened its economic system, but never loosened its monopoly over power, over ideological discourse, and over  economic and institutional resources. However, most influential American figures in politics, government, and academia seem to have overlooked this. 

As a result, the continued implementation of the engagement policy by the US failed to influence China to move toward freedom and democracy. Instead, the CCP used the engagement policy to infiltrate the US, to steal scientific and technological intellectual property, to gather commercial and political intelligence, and even to lure some American political, business, academic, and technological elites to serve the interests of the CCP. Since Xi came to power, the party has stepped up all of these efforts at theft and infiltration. 

As long as China’s totalitarian system does not change, China-US relations are destined to enter a period of fundamental confrontation. This is determined by the fundamentally different institutional nature and values of the two countries, as well as the different interests of the two countries. This will endanger world peace. 

Future Possibilities for China-US Relations: “Competition and Cooperation” or “Standoff and Confrontation”? 

Before the China-US high-level meeting in Anchorage, US Secretary of State Blinken spoke about “the three principles of handling US-China relations: competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, and adversarial when it must be.” In fact, these three principles are in logical conflict. They show that the US government fully understands the complexity and difficulty of China-US relations, yet still hopes for the best. But this is mere wishful thinking. Over many years, although the US government and elites in various circles sensed some political changes happening in China, they did not realize that China has turned into a refined form of neo-totalitarianism. Many still regard the CCP regime as an authoritarian one. Relying on unilateral good wishes and illusions, they adhered to engagement, which caused the policy to have a certain “appeasement” effect in reality. 

This author believes that China-US relations will inevitably move toward standoff and confrontation, and this view is based on the following points. 

If the CCP’s rule is simply authoritarian, then it is possible for the US to shape a relationship with China centered on competition, with a certain range of cooperation and confrontation when necessary, as the US government hopes. But this is impossible for a totalitarian system. Although both totalitarianism and authoritarianism are dictatorships, they have distinct differences. The political scientist Giovanni Sartori distinguished different types of autocratic dictatorships. Comparing the CCP regime with the core analysis of Sartori’s theory shows that the CCP regime is totalitarian rather than authoritarian.28 The work of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a great scholar of communist systems, points to a similar conclusion. He wrote, “The two decisive dimensions of totalitarianism are terror + ideology. It is the extreme combination of the two that creates other characteristics of this system.”29 The extremely repressive, controlling, and rigid nature of totalitarianism means it cannot advance directly to a liberal democratic system. It must first be slackened from totalitarianism to authoritarianism.30 

These two pillars of terror and ideology supported Hitler, Stalin, and even the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in the post-Stalin era, including the totalitarian regime of the CCP in the Mao era. After Xi Jinping took office, he worked hard to use high technology to obtain super powerful surveillance capabilities, beyond the capacity of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. On the basis of Brzezinski’s generalization, maybe now we can redefine the CCP’s rule in China as terror + ideology + a digital surveillance system (using information technology and artificial intelligence) = a highly refined and sophisticated neo-totalitarianism. Sartori, Brzezinski, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, and other scholars of dictatorial systems would easily recognize it for what it is.

 I characterize Xi’s regime as totalitarian because he practices “one doctrine, one leader, one party, and one nation (Han-centric nation).” Following in Mao Zedong’s footsteps, Xi Jinping has fostered a personality cult, made himself equal to the party, revised the constitution to secure a lifetime dictatorship, and further intensified repression with the rule of coercion and deception. The Nazi Party’s “national socialism” under Hitler was based on racism. Yet Xi’s “extreme nationalism” is also interlinked with racism. For a long time, the CCP has been continuously imbued with Han racial superiority and has carried out cultural genocide in disguised forms against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. 

I characterize the CCP as a new type of totalitarian system because it uses information technology, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the people twenty-four hours a day. This kind of precision surveillance, closely combined with severe repression by the police and national security departments, makes it extremely difficult for people to voice their opposition in China. Since 2013, seven friends of mine who voiced their opposition have been detained and imprisoned by the Xi regime, all on fabricated charges. 

In short, with internal suppression and external expansion, the CCP regime has deteriorated to neo-Stalinist totalitarianism.31 Its nature and values are fundamentally opposed to those of the United States and all liberal democracies. The CCP has always viewed the US as an enemy, but never more so than today. Thus, it is difficult to form a multifaceted relationship of “competition, cooperation, and confrontation under certain circumstances,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken apparently believes. The most likely trend is toward standoff and confrontation. 

The CCP’s neo-totalitarian system and Xi’s negative personal traits will cause the US to face an adversary that does not follow common sense or rules, that does not have integrity, and that is unpredictable. This will further increase the risks for the US and the world. At the same time, the CCP’s long-term and deep penetration into American society, especially elites,  has greatly affected US policy formulation toward China, making Washington unable to see the CCP’s true strategic intentions, goals, and motives, and therefore unable to effectively respond to and eliminate the threats from the CCP. In short, the CCP is the greatest threat to American security and world peace, and the CCP regime has no moral compass.

That said, the CCP is not monolithic. The author has been working in the CCP Party School system since 1986. In my more than thirty years of contact with middle- and high level CCP officials, I can say that at least 60–70 percent of the CCP’s high-level officials understand the trend of progress of the modern world. They understand that only a democratic constitutional government can ensure long-term stability in China and protect human rights, personal dignity, and personal safety for oneself. Members with vision in the CCP recognize the goodwill of the United States. The US should continue to support China’s civil society, which has gone underground, and at the same time foster and support liberal elements within the party to return to the path of political reform, so as to realize the benign and peaceful transformation of Chinese society.

Finally, while it is difficult to imagine, I recommend that the US be fully prepared for the possible sudden disintegration of the CCP. The CCP appears to be powerful on the outside, but this refined neo-totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship is actually quite fragile inside. The CCP has the ambition of a hungry dragon but inside it is a paper tiger. There are many factors that may lead to unexpected changes in the situation and even possibly the collapse of the regime. They include the unsustainable economic model and high levels of debt; the inherent and insurmountable contradiction between exaggerated ideological propaganda and social reality; the incompatible dual-track ownership system between the market and the state; the increasing social disparity between rich and poor; continuing corruption; and the fierce infighting for succession to supreme power. Xi Jinping’s overly suspicious and narrow-minded personality has led to continuous purges inside the party, which have brought extreme dissatisfaction among the middle- and high-level officials of the CCP. Everyone feels unsafe.

All of these factors make it possible that any unexpected event may cause a chain reaction leading to huge changes in the situation and even the collapse of the regime. Recall that no one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union or other communist states in Eastern Europe—yet they occurred. A sudden and instant collapse triggered by random events will almost inevitably bring disorder and chaos within China, which will reverberate outside the country. Therefore, the US must have a clear-eyed understanding and prepare for unpredictable contingencies.

In this essay, I have put forward several interrelated arguments. First, the CCP regime is a refined neo-totalitarian rather than an authoritarian system. Second, the top priority of the CCP’s international relations, especially with the US, is to strengthen its internal control and prevent the collapse of the regime. Third, the nature of the relationship between China and the US is actually one of adversaries and rivals rather than competitors. Fourth, both countries are large and possess considerable strength. Neither one can swallow the other, and a “hot war” between the two would be calamitous for the world. It is on this basic assessment that I suggest that the US needs to clearly see the CCP and PRC for what they are—strategic adversaries—and thus forge its strategies and policies toward China accordingly. Wishful thinking about “engagement” must be replaced by hardheaded defensive measures to protect the United States from the CCP’s aggression—while bringing offensive pressures to bear on it, as the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume.

notes

https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/xia_chinausrelations_web-ready_v2.pdf

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