Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Volume I: November 2012-June 2013. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2019.

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Volume II: August 2014-September 2017. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017.

 

Now President of China and, more importantly, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping spent his first five years as General Secretary explaining and implementing a comprehensive strategy for his country, the goal of which he identified in a press conference in November 2012 as “a happy life” for the people of China (I.3; see also Speech at a ceremony marking the 95th Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 71/16, II.40-41)). “A happy life comes from hard work” (I.4), and he unhesitatingly put himself, his Politburo colleagues, the Chinese Communist Party rank and file, and the people of China to work, so that “China can stand firmer and stronger among the world’s nations and make a new and greater contribution to mankind” (I.4). He singled out corruption as his most immediate target for attack and “maintain[ing] close ties with the people” as the CCP’s most urgent constructive task (I.5). These tasks were related, inasmuch as “we will work for the satisfaction of the people and correct any of our practices they are not happy about” (Speech at the Central Conference on judicial, procuratorial, and public security work, 1/7/14, I.163). However, he soon elaborated a “Four-Pronged Strategy,” consisting of a goal—to “complete a moderately prosperous society in all respects,” to be realized by the year 2020, and three “measures”: to “further reform, to advance the rule of law and to strengthen Party discipline” (Speech to Provincial Officials, 2/2/15, I.23). 

To pursue this strategy, he emphasized the character of China’s regime, founded in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party, then ruled by Mao Zedong, who had founded the party in 1921. In a phrase that he would make famous, Xi called this regime a “socialist system with Chinese characteristics” (Speech to the first study group session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 11/17/12, I.6). He emphasized that “only socialism can save China” and that “only Chinese socialism can lead our country to development” in a manner that keeps the populous nation of numerous ethnic groups unified (ibid. I.7)—a perennial Chinese concern, given the history of conflicts between the emperor and regional warlords. Socialism “consists of a path, theory and system,” both a theory and a practice animated by the “scientific” methods of Marxism (ibid. 9). The “Four Cardinal Principles” of Chinese socialism are “the people’s democratic dictatorship,” leadership of the people by the CCP, Marxism-Leninism, and “Mao-Zedong Thought” (ibid. I.19 n.17). “Belief in Marxism and faith in socialism and communism are the political soul of Communists,” the “marrow of their faith” (ibid. I.16). The “path” governed by the Four Cardinal Principles has “economic development” along socialist lines as its “central task,” among many others (ibid. I.9). Because China is only at “the preliminary stage of socialism” (“socialist modernization…will take at least 100 years to take shape from the completion of the socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production in the 1950s” to its completion), the CPC, as “the core leadership for the cause of Chinese socialism,” has “shoulder[ed] a great responsibility.” To meet that responsibility “we must first run the Party well, and to run the Party well we must run it strictly” (ibid. I.15).  Corruption, inertia, incompetence, and separation from the people must be eliminated. This is because “the future and destiny of a political party and government depend on popular support,” the maintenance of which requires the Chinese Communist Party to “organize our people, communicate with them, educate them, serve them, learn from them, and subject ourselves to their oversight” (ibid. I.17). “Socialist democracy,” “consultative democracy,” the “people’s democratic dictatorship” must always be “led by the working class,” however, firmly upholds “the leadership of the CPC”; “we must remain committed to the Party’s core role in exercising overall leadership and coordinating the efforts of all” (Speech to the 60th Anniversary of the National People’s Congress, 9/5/14, II. 18 and II.314; Speech at the 65th Anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, 921/14, II.318). Since “socialism with Chinese characteristics is a cause for all Chinese people,” always “under the Party’s leadership,” what Western political scientists, following Tocqueville, call civil associations require particular attention, inasmuch as they might interfere with the direct control of the central government, ruled by the CPC. “We must maintain and enhance the political nature of the Party’s work with social groups,” which “should always place themselves under the leadership of the Party and be consistent with the CPC Central Committee in politics, thought and action,” “guid[ing] the people to implement the Party’s instructions and follow the Party’s leadership, and unite their own people around the Party in the closest and most extensive way” (Speech to the CPC Central Committee conference on the Party’s work with social organizations, 7/6/15, II.335-336). For their part, the “social groups” should “learn work at the grassroots to learn about the people’s living conditions, becoming practitioners of the Party’s principle of serving he people, executors of the Paty’s mass line, and experts in the Party’s work for the people” (ibid. II.337).

That is, the regime of Communist China is an oligarchy, the rule of the few who are rich, but an oligarchy of a kind first seen only in the previous century, in Soviet Russia. Whereas previous oligarchies consisted of persons already wealthy, the new, Russian Communist oligarchy consisted of persons who had seized the wealth of the wealthy, deploying it as the means to end the old oligarchy. In order to do so, a new oligarchy needed to be established, one that deployed the institutions of the modern, centralized state in order to end private property and, eventually, lead all societies to communism. In Lenin’s formula, the socialist state will “wither away.” But it didn’t. The Russian Communists confronted two problems: in the economic field, socialism failed to deliver prosperity; in the political field, it failed to deliver equality. They lost whatever popular support they may have enjoyed. As a result of these failures, pressured geopolitically by the prosperous and (relatively) egalitarian commercial republics, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Xi is acutely aware of these failures, seeing that they are endemic to socialist oligarchies—unless, as he urges, Communists discipline themselves and make the people “moderately prosperous” and thus “happy.” Chinese Communists must undertake to square the Leninist circle, winning the continuous support of the people while keeping their party firmly in power.

To do this, the ruling body or politeuma must itself be united. “We have to unify the thinking and will of the whole Party, first in order to unify the thinking and will of the people of all China’s ethnic groups so that everyone works together to advance our reform.” In terms of the ruling institution or politeia, this will require “a complete set of closely connected and coordinated systems of the state.” Because the Soviet Union and its several Eastern and Central European satellites failed, “how to govern a socialist society, a completely new society, has not been clearly addressed by world socialism so far” (Speech at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 11/12/13, I.101). Marx and Engels “had no practical experience in the comprehensive governance of a socialist country, as their theories about a future society were mostly predictive”; Lenin died before he could “explore this question in depth”; and the subsequent rulers of the Soviet Union “made serious mistakes and failed to resolve the problem” (ibid. I.101-102). This has left the task to “our Party,” which “has accumulated rich experience and achieved great success in improving our governance system and enhancing our governance capacity,” in “striking contrast to many regions and countries” today “that suffer constant chaos” (ibid. I.102). There are nonetheless substantial economic and political reforms remaining to be undertaken, given “the basic fact that China is still in the primary stage of socialism and will long remain so” (ibid. I.105). While the party has “a good blueprint” in hand for accomplishing these tasks, “what we should do is follow it through to the end and make it a success”; continuing his architectonic metaphor, Xi advises his colleagues, “we need to have a ‘nail’ spirit,” inasmuch as “when we use a hammer to drive in a nail, a single knock often may not be enough” (Speech to the second full assembly of the Second Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central  Committee, 2/28/13, I.446). “If a blueprint is good, factually based, scientifically sound [i.e., Marxist] and well-received by the people we should keep working on it, one administration after another, and the outcome of our work will be real and appreciated and remembered by the people” (ibid. I.446). Then, “as socialism progresses, our institutions will undoubtedly mature, the strengths of our system will become self-evident, and our development path will assuredly become wider.” “Marxism will not remain stagnant,” and it has not (Speech to the CPC Central Committee, 1/5/13, I.24); Chinese Marxism had its first stage under Mao, its second initially under Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978, when China effectively adopted its own version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in an attempt to ensure that socialism, state ownership of the means of production, did not suffocate economic growth and, in foreign policy, ended its geopolitical isolation. These latter-day policies might threaten firm Party rule over the country (as they did in 1920s Russia, a threat met with supreme force by Stalin, and again in the 1990s under Gorbachev, who did not meet the threat and lost the regime). 

That is why “officials must be strict with themselves in self-cultivation, in the exercise of power, and in self-discipline” Speech to the Leading Group for Further Reform under the CPC Central Committee, 5/5/17, II.111). These are “Three Stricts,” outlined by Xi at a session of the Anhui delegation of the Second Session of the 12th People’s Congress in March 2014. Strictness in self-cultivation means a strong “sense of Party awareness,” firm “support of the ideals and principles of the Party,” and a certain high-mindedness, distant from “vulgar interests,” “unhealthy practices and evil influences.” Strictness in the exercise of power means exercising power “in the interests of the people” (very much as defined by the CCP Central Committee) according to the Central Committee’s “rules and regulations,” keeping power “within the confines of systemic checks” designed by the Central Commitee and never seeking privileges or abusing power “for personal gain.” Strictness in self-discipline means the willingness of “leading officials” to “always be ready to apply the rod to themselves,” prudently examining themselves in accordance with “Party discipline and state laws.” The Three Stricts must be supplemented by the “Three Earnests”; earnestly taking “facts as the basis of work planning, ensur[ing] that all ideas, policies, and plans are in line with actual conditions, objective laws, and scientific principle,” lest officials become “overly ambitious and divorced from reality”; earnestly being “down-to-earth” and “pragmatic in work” when undertaking new policies, facing and solving problems as they arise; and earnestly “upholding personal integrity,” by which he means loyalty to the Party, the people, and to Party colleagues. (Anhui delegation speech, I. 421-422). Such “internal Party scrutiny” “is the first and most fundamental means among all forms of scrutiny for the Party and the country,” but “it cannot work as a joint force without being integrated with scrutiny by state agencies, other political parties, the public, and public opinion.” Accordingly, “officials should invite scrutiny from all sides, showing both breadth of mind and confidence.” (Speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/27/16, II.206).

During his years in Yan’an, after the Long March, Mao “put forward the idea of breaking the historical cycle of gaining political power only to lose it because of corruption that had often happened in Chinese history” (Speech to the Second Full Assembly of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee, 10/27/16, II.203). This task remains. “Discipline and rules are indispensable for political parties, especially for Marxist parties,” which rule in the name of the people (Speech to the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/13/15, II.164). This means not only obedience to the Party Constitution and other state and party laws and policies but also “the traditions and working practices developed by our Party over the years” (ibid. II.164). The latter, unwritten rules are indispensable because the Party’s “very large membership” makes self-governance by rules alone impossible; no set of rules could be so detailed and pervasive as to govern such an organization effectively (ibid. II.164). And so, Party officials must avoid forming cliques of mutual self-promotion, oligarchies within the oligarchy; they must never make “careless and groundless remarks,” including gossip, rumors, and “inappropriate jokes” (ibid. II.165). Some kinds of grounded remarks are also forbidden, such as disclosing confidential information. In this vein, “some high-ranking officials have even compiled a coded language, which they use when speaking with their families and those close to them” (ibid. II.167). All of these practices subvert “the authority of the Central Committee” and “the unity of the Party” (ibid. II.168). Officials must “rein in our relatives and immediate staff,” not favor them (II.168). This bears on Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. Party members need “the moral fiber to denounce and rectify violations of Party discipline” (Speech to the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/14/14, I.440), building “a complete system of combating corruption through both punishment and prevention, strengthen[ing] education on combating corruption and upholding integrity” while “promot[ing] a culture of clean government” (Second Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 1/22/13, I.429; see also Speech at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/27/16, II.197-200; and see also Speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/12/16, II.176-184). 

In addition to the “social groups” or civic associations, the regime has a more formal institutional structure that reaches down to the people, namely, the units of the CPC organized on the level of the counties. At the beginning of 2015, Xi announced that all county party secretaries would be trained at the Central Party School, a “strategic move with long-term significance” aimed at “help[ing] Party secretaries better to understand and hence better to implement the decisions made” by the Central Committee by studying “theories of Chinese socialism” along with theoretical and practical problems faced in the counties (Speech at the Central Party School, 1/12/15, II.151). “Counties are a key link in our Party’s set-up and state power, an important basis for developing the economy, ensuring people’s well-being, and maintaining and promoting the enduring peace and stability of our country” (ibid. II.152). Although “not a high-ranking post,” the county secretaryship can also prove a stepping-stone to higher office; “looking back, quite a few well-known figures started their political careers at county level” (ibid. II.152). Apart from Marxist faith, there are opportunities for career advancement within the oligarchy, if a County Party secretary acts well. For a party secretary, “loyalty [to the CCP] is central,” “the greatest virtue” (ibid. II.154). “County Party chiefs are an easy target for all kinds of temptation, plots, flattery and excessive praise with an aim to topple you” (ibid. II.154). To avoid this, they “must always follow the correct political direction,” remember that they “are part of the organization,” think of themselves as “someone who belongs to the Party” as a person “genuinely committed, persistent and faithful to Marxism” (ibid. II.155). County Party secretaries must “address the most pressing and relevant problems that are of the utmost concern to the people, especially the problems that the people complain about, and address them promptly” rather than “indulg[ing] in wasteful showcase projects to prop up your own image” (ibid. II.156-157). “We must act conscientiously as if we were treading on thin ice, and standing on the edge of an abyss,” the abyss of popular discontent (ibid. II.161). 

Overall, Party officials at all levels are subject to “discipline inspection” by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Ministry of Supervision Work under the Administrative Supervision Law (Speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/12/16, II.185). These agencies will coordinate “discipline inspection tours” of the country, a Chinese tradition dating ack to the fourteenth century. While “our discipline inspectors are not ancient circuit inspectors…they must be authoritative,” being “vital to the development of the country and the Party,” both of which must minimize corrupt practices and ideological deviation in order to survive and to thrive (ibid. II.186). Regarding ideological deviation, Party members and prospective members are to study the Party Constitution and rules, along with Xi Jinping’s speeches, to practice the interaction between themselves and the people described above, and cultivate the virtues of honesty in thought, words, and deeds. “In strengthening the Party, the priority is to enhance its political philosophy, and the key is to ensure discipline among Party members and officials” (Directives on the “Two Studies, One Action” education program, 2/4/16, II.189). In selecting and training officials, the Party needs to have a clear understanding of “what a good official is, how to become a good official, and how to use the right officials for the right job” (Speech at the National Conference on Organizational Work, 6/28/13, I.461). The definition of a good official has changed over several historical stages of the Party. In the revolutionary war period, “good officials needed to be loyal to the Party, brae and skillful in battle, and unafraid to sacrifice their lives”; during Mao’s socialist construction period, “good officials needed to be politically and professionally competent”; in the early, Deng Xiaoping period of “reform and opening up,” good officials needed to “have professional knowledge and be determined to carry out reforms”; now, in the Xi Jinping period of reform and opening up, “we require that good officials be politically reliable, professionally competent and morally upright, and…trusted by the people” (ibid. I.461). That is, prior to the 1949 founding, the Party needed warriors; in the first decades of the regime, Communists whose loyalty had been proven in revolutionary war but lacked experience in government needed to learn how to rule; the first stage of reform and opening up also required such knowledge but also willingness to put some of the practices of the Mao period aside and implement the Chinese version of a New Economic Policy; once the increase of prosperity had taken hold, however, a more comprehensive set of characteristics is needed, characteristics that practice good government not only in terms of technical expertise but in moral and political virtues, “cherish[ing] the lofty ideal of communism” while following the precepts of Marxism, the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics, serving the people in a “realistic and pragmatic manner,” never shirking responsibilities, and exercising power cautiously, “keeping it under control in a bid to sustain their political life” (ibid. I.462). Xi knows that “some Party officials…fail to meet these qualifications,” being “skeptical about communism, considering it a fantasy that will never come true,” believing not “in Marxism-Leninism” but in “ghosts and gods,” seeking divine advice”; some (horror of horrors) “even yearn for Western social systems  and values, losing their confidence in the future of socialism” (ibid. I.463). In a socialist regime, in any regime, “the most dangerous moment is when one wavers or begins to show doubt about one’s ideals and convictions” (ibid. I.464). Look at the fall of the Soviet empire: “I have long been wondering if we were confronted with a complex situation such as a ‘color revolution,’ would all our officials act resolutely to safeguard the leadership of the Party and the socialist system?” (ibid. I.464). Most would, but vigilance is still needed: “The exercise of power without supervision will definitely lead to corruption,” endangering the regime by weakening the popular base that underpins all regimes (ibid. I.468; see also Speech at the Fifth Group Study Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee 4/19/13, I.433-435). Assuredly, “if we tailor our practices to western capitalist values, measure our national development by means of the Western capitalist evaluation system, and regard Western standards as the sole standards for development, the consequences will be devastating” (Speech at the National Conference on Party Schools, 12/11/15, II. 356).

Xi understands that Marxism is a materialist form of historicism. “Time is the origin of thought, and practice is the source of theory” (Speech at opening ceremony of a study session on the guiding principles of Xi Jinping’s speeches, 7/26/17, II.66). Therefore, the “ideological progress” that must be “one of [the CP’s] top priorities” will emphasize the unity of theory and practice in time (Speech at the National Meeting on Publicity and Theoretical Work, 8/19/13, I.171).  “It is the requirement of materialistic dialectics to promote work in all areas by focusing on and tackling key issues” (Speech at a Study Session on the Guiding principles of Xi Jinping’s Speeches, 7/26/17, II.64). “To consolidate Marxism as the guiding ideology in China and cement the shared ideological basis of the whole Party and the people,” additional “efforts should be made to enhance the awareness of socialism with Chinese characteristics among the people of all ethnic groups, so as to inspire the people to strive for Chinese socialism” (ibid. I.172). This task takes on special urgency because the CP has “opened its door wider to the outside world,” exposing the people to non-Marxist ideas and beliefs (ibid. I.172). Xi takes care to explicate Marxism as adapted to China, first by Mao Zedong, then by Deng Xiaoping. Mao took Marx’s scientific socialism (“seeking truth from facts,” not abstractions) and Marx’s “mass line” (Party interaction with and leadership of the people) and added “independence”—that is, a refusal to follow directives from the Soviet Union, whose Communist Party under Lenin and especially Stalin attempted to direct Mao’s policies before and after the Chinese Communist revolution (Speech at the Symposium Marking the 120th Anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Birth, 12/26/13, I.27). Although facts obey the dialectical laws of history, which are “universal truths with eternal ideological value,” “classical Marxist authors did not exhaust truth but blazed a trail to seek and develop truth” (ibid. I.28); this, Mao understood. The “mass line” is what “enables our Party to maintain its vitality and combat capability” (one of Mao’s tracts is indeed titled, “Combat Marxism”); the mass line “translates the Party’s policies into the people’s conscientious action” (ibid. I.29). It “encapsulates the basic tenet of Marxism that the people are the creators of history” (ibid. I.29), and Mao likened the Communists to the “seeds” and the people to the “soil” (ibid. I.30). As for independence, in Xi’s paraphrase, “We should always rely on ourselves when seeking our national development and defending our national pride and confidence,” given our status as “an Eastern country with a large population and backward economy” (ibid. I.31). “The diversity of historical conditions determines the diversity of the development paths, chosen by various countries” (ibid. I.31). 

Deng, who studied in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, “never faltered in his faith in the scientific nature and truth of Marxism or in the bright future of socialism and communism” (Speech at Seminar Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Deng Xiaoping, 8/20/14, II.3). His “firm faith in communism” and “unshakeable belief in socialism with Chinese characteristics” led him to policy departures, not departures in principle, from Mao (ibid. II.3). “His lofty revolutionary ideals and charisma will always be an inspiration to us on our path towards the Two Centenary Goals”—a “moderately prosperous society by 2021, the centenary of the CPC’s founding—and the full consolidation of the regime as “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” by the centenary of the founding in 2049 (II.15 n.1). Like Mao, he endorsed Marxism as scientific socialism, “seeking truth from facts” and following the laws of historical/dialectical materialism, which, as he put it, “govern the development of human society” (ibid. II.4). But, as he also said, “The world changes every day, and modern science and technology in particular develop rapidly”; as a consequence, “anyone who fails to carry Marxism forward with new thinking and a new viewpoint is not a true Marxist” (ibid. II.8). This is why he “took another historic step in adapting Marxism to China’s conditions after Mao Zedong Thought” (ibid. II.8). While retaining Mao’s insistence on Chinese Communist “independence and self-reliance,” he opened China to the world because “the problem of development…concerns all mankind” and must be “stud[ied] and solv[ed] on that level,” most especially in reaching out to the Third World (ibid. II.10)—effectively following the strategy that had been recommended by Frantz Fanon, implemented clumsily by the now-failed Soviet empire.

Such worldwide outreach makes sense to Xi because “no theory in history can match Marxism in terms of rational truth, and spread, and no theory has exerted such a huge influence on the world as Marxism”; Marxism therefore has an “irreplaceable role in understanding, reshaping, and advancing the world” as a synthesis of theory and practice (Speech at the 43rd Study Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 9/29/17, II.68). Marxism “must show the way to the people in modern times” and it can do so, if we Chinese Communists “upgrade Marxism on the basis of the realities of modern times” (ibid. II.69). Capitalism, too, has proved highly adaptable; “we need to enhance our research on modern capitalism” in order to “acquire a better understanding of the law governing the profound and complicated changes in capitalism and international political and economic relations” (ibid. II.69). Know your enemy. Learn from him even as you move to defeat him. Although “history will move forward,” Chinese Communists “should always retain the spirit of the Communists at the time of the founding of our Party,” continuing “to hold Marxism as our guiding philosophy” (Speech at a ceremony marking the 95th Anniversary of the Founding of the CPC, 7/1/16, II.32). Indeed, Engels himself wrote that Marx regarded Marxism as “not so much a doctrine as a method” providing “not so much ready-made dogmas, as aids to further investigation and the method for such investigation” (ibid. II.33). Mao acknowledged this, insisting that such ‘bourgeois’ practices as accounting should be adopted without hesitation by Chinese Communists, now that they had a state to run. Today, “we must neither follow the old path of a rigid closed-door policy” as set down by Mao, “nor an erroneous path” of “abandoning socialism” by accepting not merely some capitalist techniques but capitalism and republicanism as a regime (ibid. II.39). The right path is to undertake “a new ‘Long March,” differing from, but just as arduous as the one Mao led, in its own way (Speech at a ceremony commemorating the 80theAnniversary of the Victory of the Long March, 10/21/16, II.49). “The victory of the Long March proved that belief in our hearts gives strength to our legs” (ibid. II.51). The new Long March will bring China to realize “a great national rejuvenation,” “building China into a strong, democratic and harmonious modern socialist country” (Speech at Beijing University Commemorating the 95th Anniversary of the May 4th Movement, 5/4/14, I.189).

In terms of institutions, Marxist doctrine will be taught at the Party Schools. In them, “Marxism and communism come above all else,” Marxism as “the guiding thought of the Party,” communism “the lofty ideal,” the egalitarian social condition of humanity at the end of ‘history’ (Speech at the National Conference on Party Schools, 12/11/15), II. 354). As in any form of historicist thought, an ‘ideal’ for a Marxism means not an abstraction from material reality but the culmination of the evolution of that reality. “The CPC is a Marxist political party under a unified central leadership”—unity in “political stance, homogenized theory and practice” being “critical to the development and growth of the Party’s cause” (Speech at the National Conference on Party Schools, 12/11/15, II.171). Stance, theory, and practice should “always keep in line with the CPC Central Committee,” but “alignment in political stance, theory and practice is not as easy as correction of the physical formation” seen in a military drill (ibid. II.171). Xi again cites Mao’s efforts in the 1940s, which aimed at “reaffirm[ing] the practice of applying the basic theories of Marxism to the actual conditions of China’s revolution” (II.174 n.2). While criticism of Party and state policy is “welcome,” “no matter how sharp it may be,” “academic research does not justify impulsive remarks any time or remarks made for the sake of being different and seeking notoriety”—evidently as judged by the Party (ibid. II.173). Again, the “mass line” of the Party, “linking theory with practice” by maintaining close links with the people, undertaking criticism and self-criticism, exhibiting tenacity in work, pursuing the truth, and being pragmatic, has “underpinn[ed] one victory after another for the Party and the people” (Speech at the Program of Mass Line Education and Practice held by the CPC Central Committee, 6/18/13, I.401). Based on Marxian “dialectical and historical materialism,” the mass line remains “an essential requirement for the Party to maintain its progressive nature and its integrity” (ibid. I.403-404). Following the mass line will prevent the “Four Malfeasances”: going through the motions, excessive bureaucracy, self-indulgence, and extravagance, which “run contrary to our Party’s very nature and purpose”—which, as a form of historicist progressivism, must avoid anything that ossifies, anything that interferes with ‘history’s’ dialectical advance—and “are the problems that the public hates the most,” giving them reason to overthrow the regime (ibid. I. 411). 

“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul, who undertake the essential mission of molding minds” (Speech to the National Conference on Education in Political Philosophy at Institutions of Higher Learning, 12/7/16, II.409). Beyond the Party Schools, all Chinese elementary and secondary school students shall be taught to “act conscientiously to foster and practice” the “thoughts of the ancient sages, the aspirations of public-spirited people, the ideals of the revolutionary martyrs and the expectations of ordinary people” (Speech at the Minzu Primary School, Beijing, 5/30/14, I.201). “Schools should attach greater importance to moral education and work hard to enhance the school spirit and teachers’ professional ethics” (ibid. I.202). At the university level, “education in political philosophy” also requires the integration of “moral and political education,” thereby serving “the people, the CPC’s governance of China, the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics, reform and opening up, and socialist modernization”—in sum, adhere to “the correct political direction” (Speech at the National Conference on Education in Political Philosophy at Institutions of Higher Learning, 12/7/16, II.406, 407). By political philosophy, Xi of course means “the scientific theory of Marxism,” with its understanding of “the historical necessity of social progress and Chinese socialism” (ibid. II.407). With that foundation, university students can then achieve “an accurate understanding of Chinese socialism in comparison with other social systems in the world,” thereby enhancing “their awareness of China’s historical mission” in the world (ibid. II.408). Chinese higher education shall “firmly uphold CPC leadership” and shall be guided in that task by local Party secretaries and by party committees at the universities and colleges, which will “enforce Party leadership and discipline” (ibid. II.409, 410). 

Xi therefore emphasizes the need to “develop philosophy and social sciences with Chinese features” (Speech at a Seminar on Philosophy and Social Sciences, 5/17/16, II.366). “Our standing in the areas of academic ideas, thought, viewpoints, and standards, and our voice in international academia, are still incommensurate with our overall national strength and international status” ibid. II.366). To remedy this disparity, in a sense a disparity of theory and practice intolerable to a Marxist, Chinese philosophy and social science should “bear three hallmarks”: they should “encompass all resources and legacies and retain their Chinese identity” (ibid. II.366); they “must display originality and zeitgeist” (ibid. II.370); and they “must be systematic and professional” (ibid. II.372). The resources include “the best of Chinese culture,” “the philosophy and social sciences of other countries,” selected according to Chinese Marxist criteria (ibid. II.367). “We should make the past serve the present, and the foreign serve China” for the sake “of the development trends of Chinese socialism” (ibid. II.367). The theory and practice of Chinese socialism can then be extended (according to “the law of evolution from particularity to universality”) from “domestic practices” to “suggestions and solutions for global issues” (ibid. II.369). “Originality and zeitgeist” refer to “the requisite of social, practical and historical progress” in philosophy and social science (ibid. II.370). All theories, “unexceptionally,” are “the product of their times and the result of pondering over and delving into prominent conflicts and problems of a given society at a given time,” as Marx contends (ibid. II.371). Recent examples include efforts to “strengthen the Party’s governance capacity” and to “build stronger armed forces” (ibid. II.372). “Systematic and professional” refers “an all-encompassing system of learning”: “strengthen[ing] Marxist subjects; improving “pillar subjects” (i.e., philosophy and the various social sciences); paying “great attention to important subjects in which we are strong”; “give priority to emerging and interdisciplinary subjects of great practical significance” while not neglecting “more marginal subjects that are of high cultural value or bear on Chinese heritage” (ibid. II.372-373). The main point is to promote and teach “Marxist theory,” to establish and fortify “centers of research into Chinese socialist theories, to academies of Marxism, and to newspapers, periodicals, websites and other platforms for ideological and theoretical work,” nationally and internationally (ibid. II.376).

Party rule also applies to the “rule of law,” the laws being framed and enforced by the Party. The supreme law of the land, the Party Constitution, was adopted by the Party in 1982, following the first such constitution, which had been adopted in 1954 and its forerunner, the Common Program of 1949. The 1982 constitution set down the legal framework for Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy, intended to help the country recover from the excesses of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” begun in 1966 and ending in exhaustion ten years later. Deng sought stability, writing, “To ensure people’s democracy we must strengthen our legal system…so as to make sure that institutions and laws do not change whenever the leadership changes or whenever the leaders change their views or shift the focus of their attention”—as had happened under Mao who, rather like Stalin, ordered not only mass killings of class enemies but, far more concerning for Party members, purges of the Party. (quoted in Speech at a meeting of the People from all Walks of Life to Commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the Promulgation and Implementation of the Current Constitution, 12/4/12, I.150). (Xi’s father was the victim of such a purge, and he himself was sent to a remote part of the country, from which he worked his way back, and up.) In this, Deng was a sort of Chinese Khruschev, and Xi is careful to show that he remained a Marxist, quoting him as saying “I am convinced that more and more people will come to believe in Marxism, because it is a science” (Speech at the Seminar on Philosophy and Social Science, 5/17/2015, II.358). Xi approves of the Constitution while calling for its “comprehensive implementation” of the 1982 Party Constitution in order to build “a law-based socialist country,” a “democratic dictatorship”—democratic in the particular sense of Communist oligarchic rule in order to achieve an egalitarian society which eventually will need no state apparatus at all (ibid. I.152). In the meantime, “law is written morality, while morality is conscious law” (ibid. I.157), meaning that the morality of socialism with Chinese characteristics must pervade the hearts and minds of all Chinese, backed by the Constitution, “a legal weapon to safeguard [the] rights and interests” of the Chinese as those rights and interests are defined by the Party as it monitors the people, prudently attentive to their complaints (ibid. I.157). “Upholding the Party’s leadership is fundamental to socialist rule of law” (Speech at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/23/14, II.120). As leaders, “we need to motivate the public to actively involve themselves in the practice of the rule of laws” as “devoted advocates, conscientious observers, and resolute defenders of socialist rule of law,” “integrat[ing] the rule of law with the rule of virtue” (ibid. II.122), considering that “law is a set of virtues in writing” and “virtue represents the law in one’s inner world” (Speech to the 37th Group Study Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 12/9/16, II.144). Given the historical progress anticipated by Marxism, Chinese laws, including the supreme law, will continue to be amended, a process which the CPC’s “Leading Group for Further Reform” will oversee. (See also Xi’s Speech to the National Conference on Law and Order, 9/19/17, II.416). 

Xi’s socialism is doggedly Marxist, but what are its “Chinese characteristics”? “Imbued with the national spirit of patriotism, we have launched the great cause of rebuilding the country” (Speech at “The Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, Beijing, 11/29,12, I.37). As a place and as a people, China and the Chinese people have suffered from “backwardness,” the failure to modernize which has “left us vulnerable to attack” by Western powers and by Japan. “All Party members” must “bear in mind” this lesson, fostering “the Chinese Dream” of “national rejuvenation” (ibid. I.38). Consider, then, that “the Chinese nation has an unbroken history of more than 5,000 years of civilization,” “creat[ing] a rich and profound culture” that has made “an unforgettable contribution to the progress of human civilization” (Address to the First Session of the 12th National People’s Congress, 3/17/13, I.41). The Chinese spirit,” a “national spirit with patriotism at its core” is also “the spirit of the times with reform and innovation at its core” (ibid. I.42). That is, patriotism can be artfully blended with Marxism (hardly a Chinese doctrine at its origin) by claiming, in the same sentence, that “patriotism has always been the inner force that binds the Chinese nation together, and reform and innovation have always been the inner force that spurs us to keep abreast of the times in the course of reform and opening up”—the spirit not only of Chinese Communism but of contemporary, Deng-Xi Communism at that (ibid. I.42). 

This spirit should be made to saturate social institutions that might otherwise resist the Marxist state—families, ethnic groups, and religious denominations. Patriotism or nationalism holds the nation itself to be one big family. Therefore, “we must enhance civility in Chinese families and make it an important foundation for the country’s development, progress, and social harmony” by “combin[ing] the love we have for our families with our love for our nation and integrate our family dreams with the dream of the nation,” “work[ing] together with one heart to weave the wisdom and enthusiasm of our 1.3 billion people from 400 million families into a powerful force” that can realize “the Chinese Dream” (Speech at the First National Conference of Model Families, 12/12/16, II.382-383). Families should encourage “family members, especially he younger generation, to love the Party, the motherland, the people, and the Chinese nation” (ibid. I.384). After all, “traditional Chinese ethics,” taught in families, such principles as “”respecting the elderly and loving the young, gender equality, marital harmony, frugality, and neighborhood solidarity, while promoting loyalty, responsibility, family affection, learning, and public welfare” can surely reinforce a socialist regime, if not in all instances the regime of communism, far in the future (ibid. II.384). And as for ethnic groups, if they respect “the principle of equality” in relation to one another, they can “work together and achieve common prosperity,” thereby “consolidating the ideal that the Chinese nation is a community formed by all ethnic groups,” living in harmony under the rule of the Party (Speech at the Central Conference on Ethnic Affairs, 9/28/2014, II.328). Finally, in regard to religion, “the Party’s basic guidelines on religion result from its adherence to Marxist views on religion”—atheism being the leading one, discreetly unmentioned by Xi—guidelines that acknowledge the facts “prevailing conditions in China and the realities of religion in China” (Speech at the National Conference on Religion, 4/22/16). “The prime purpose and ultimate goal in implementing policies on freedom of religious belief is to unite believers and non-believers to the maximum extent” by “encourag[ing] religions to adapt to our socialist society,” “lead[ing] believers to love the country and the people” and to “embrace the leadership of the CPC and the socialist system,” endeavor[ing] to integrate religious tenets with Chinese culture, “participat[ing] in reform and opening up and socialist modernization” by “contribut[ing] to the realization of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation” (ibid. II.329-330). To put the matter in plainer terms, over time religions in China will be coopted by the Party. 

Patriotism can also be deployed to counter foreign influences among Chinese who have studied abroad or emigrated to other countries. Xi tells scholars who have returned from foreign countries, “I hope you will adhere to patriotism” “remember[ing] that wherever you are you are a member of the Chinese family; the country and the people back home always care about their sons and daughters, and your homeland is always a warm spiritual land for you” (Speech at the Centenary Celebration of the Western Returned Scholars Association, 10/21/13, I.63, 64). As for the emigrants, they should “forward the Chinese nation’s fine traditions of diligence and kindness, and contribute to the development of the country and friendship between the Chinese people and the people in their host countries” (Speech at the 12th National People’s Congress, 3/17/13, I.45). “In the best of Chinese traditions, generations of overseas Chinese never forget their home country, their origins, or the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their veins” (Speech at the Seventh Conference of Friendship of Overseas Chinese Associations, 6/6/14, I.69). Chinese living in other countries should “serve as a bridge for wide-ranging exchanges and cooperation between China and their new home countries” wielding Chinese ‘soft power’ (ibid. I.70).

Whether in families, ethnic groups, religious congregations, or Chinese living oversea, “cultural soft power depends on the vitality, cohesion and appeal of the core values of a nation” (Speech at the 13th Study Group Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 2/24/14, I.181). In order to “cultivate and disseminate the core socialist values we must take traditional Chinese culture as the base” while “mak[ing] the past serve the present,” treating tradition with “a critical approach,” “eliminat[ing] the false and retain[ing] the true while “put[ting] forth new ideas” (ibid. I.182). “As spring drizzle falling without a sound, we should disseminate the core socialist values in a gentle and lively way by making use of all kinds of cultural forms,” whether literary works or “artistic images” (ibid. I.183). The gentle and lively ways must nonetheless be supplemented by “laws and regulations,” which “should act as a driving force for the spread of the core values” (ibid. 183-184). That is, the Party should “transform and boost traditional culture in a creative way,” as Xi urges in a September 2014 speech (II.341), even as we “carry forward the spirit of hard work and plain living,” a spirit not in the least inconsistent with Marxism (Speech to the fourth group of nominees and winners of national ethical model rewards, 9/26/13, I.177). This, he frankly contends, is a “strategic concept”; “deal[ing] with the relationship between material progress and cultural and ethical progress in a dialectical, comprehensive and balanced way, pursu[ing] progress in all aspects of social life in our reform, opening up, and modernization,” standing in the forefront of the times” as the Marxist vanguard with Chinese characteristics (ibid. I. 353). In literature, writers should “speak for the people” by “serving the socialist cause,” “firmly upholding the Marxist view” (Speech at the Forum on Literature and Art, 10/15/14, II.343). “Writers and artists should artfully tell Chinese stories, spread the Chinese spirit,” “giving foreign audiences a better understanding of China through their works, “introduc[ing] foreign audiences to the charm of Chinese culture” while taking care to follow Lenin’s exhortation to appeal to the workers (ibid. II.344-345). “Whether an artist can produce excellent work depends on whether he or she can stand for and speak for the people,” a characteristic with which, Xi assures his listeners, “all classics of Chinese literature are suffused” in their “humanistic vision” (ibid. II.345). As for Party members, so for writers and artists: “To bring down any invisible wall between you and the people, you should not only approach them physically but also empathize with them emotionally” (ibid. 347). And, consistent with Marxist historicism, one must understand that “each era has its unique art and literature as well as its unique spirit,” a spirit “epitomiz[ing] the social life and spirit of that era with coincident traces and features” (Speech at the 10th National Congress of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Ninthe National Congress of China Writers Association, 11/30/16), II.379). 

Extending soft power is also the responsibility of the media, necessarily controlled by the CPC for the sake of “the governance and stability of the country,” inasmuch as “we must uphold the leadership of the Party, keep the correct political orientation, maintain a people-centered work ethic” in the dissemination of news (Speech at the Seminar on the Party’s Media work, 2/19/16, II.359). To “adhere to the Marxist view of journalism” the “fundamental prerequisite is the Party’s leadership over publicity” (ibid. II.360). The media “must represent the Party’s will and advocacy” (ibid.360). This extends not throughout China but to “international audiences,” as it can give the Party “a stronger voice in the international community,” “greater international influence” (ibid. II.362).

And then there is the internet. Xi finds “two groups of people” using it: “new media professionals and social media ‘opinion leaders'” (Speech at the Central Conference on the United Front, 5/18/15, II.354). Because “cyberspace is a major domain for publicity,” “we must take the initiative in this field and win over these two groups,” “work[ing] to enlist the most prominent figures among them in the United Front”—since the 1930s, the term for a Communist strategy for a coalition with other Leftists against a common enemy—establish “regular contact, strengthen online and offline interaction, and seek a common political understanding” (ibid. II.354). In this case, “hostile forces at home and abroad constantly try to undermine our Party, attempting to make us abandon our belief in Marxism, communism and socialism” (ibid. II.355). More specifically, “Western political dogma,” including “Western capitalist ideology,” have seeped into the minds of some Chinese, even Party members, who “cannot see the underlying dangers of accepting the ‘universal values’ that have developed in the West over hundreds of years” (ibid. II.355). Since these dogmas include Marxism, this argument is an obvious smokescreen for fears of regime change in China, and indeed Xi goes on to say that “since the end of the Cold War, some countries, affected by Western values, have been torn apart by war or afflicted with chaos” (ibid. II.356). By 2016, he was prepared to impose restrictions. Since the internet “influences the way that people view the country, society, their jobs and also their lives,” and since “a society that lacks common ideals, goals, and values and that finds itself in disorder all the time will never achieve success,” the Chinese regime “will need to form concentric circles online and offline” (Speech at the Seminar on Cyber Security and IT Application, 4/19/16, II.363). Seeing that “netizens” are the new “grassroots,” the people the Party must listen to in order to ‘lead’—that is, rule—and seeing that “if members of the public go online, so does public opinion,” the Party must also “go online regularly, observing, charting, and posting their comments” (ibid. II.363). But more than that, “the internet cannot be a lawless place”; “the use of the internet to advocate the toppling of the government, preach religious extremism, or incite separatism and terrorism must be resolutely prevented and punished” (ibid. II.364). While continuing to “strengthen positive publicity” about the regime, the Party must also prevent netizens from “caus[ing] trouble” by “overstep[ping] the boundaries of the Constitution and other laws” (ibid.365). Although the CP began its “Golden Shield Project” (nicknamed the “Great Firewall” by an Australian journalist) in 1998 and had established the Cyberspace Administration of China in 2011, under Xi a new, stricter Cyber Security Law would be enacted in 2017. In a speech to the Second World Internet Conference in December 2015, Xi advised the attendees to observe “respect for cyber sovereignty”; if “cyberspace is not beyond the rule of law” and “greater efforts should be made to promote ethical standards and civilized behavior in cyberspace,” then China, as a sovereign lawgiver, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, enforcer of ethical standards, is entitled to make its cyberspace conform to the laws and ethical standards of the CP regime (Speech to the Second World Internet Conference, II.12/16/15).

Having established the happiness of the Chinese people as the purpose of the regime and considering “the ultimate purpose of economic development” to be “to ensure and improve people’s well-being,” Xi devotes substantial attention to political economy (Speech at the Sixth Plenary Session, 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/27/16, II.404). “It is the essential requirement of socialism to eradicate poverty, improve the people’s livelihood and achieve common prosperity” (Speech in Fuping County, Hebei Province, 12/29-30/12, I.209). As of 2015, some 70 million Chinese lived in poverty according to “our standards,” 200 million by World Bank standards (Speech at reception in Seattle, Washington, 9/22/15, II.30). This notwithstanding, he regarded the country as on track to become “a moderately prosperous society in all respects” by the CP centenary, a few years later, although, admittedly, some regions, usually the rural ones, will not have achieved this status by then (ibid. II.30; see also Speech at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/29/15, II.73-75, 83). Rural areas need increased job opportunities (particularly in jobs that improve the Chinese ecosystem such as reforestation, relocation of many residents to the cities, improved education, state-sponsored investment, and “social security,” including public services and healthcare, with all of these initiatives ruled by “Party committee secretaries and Party governors,” themselves supervised by the higher authorities (Speech at the Central Conference on Poverty Alleviation and Development, 11/27/15, II.91 and Speech at a seminar on eliminating poverty, 6/23/17, II.96, 98). 

“Key to realizing a moderately prosperous society” is “expanding the middle income group” by offering property rights, including rights to intellectual property (Speech at the 13th Meeting of the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs under the CPC Central Committee, 5/16/16, I.397). But such prosperity, including the existence of a middle income group—dare one say a ‘bourgeoisie’?—brings its own problems. “In the past, we tended to think that the conflicts and problems afflicting the people resulted from a low level of economic development and low income; if only we could develop the economy, and if the people lived a better life, social conflicts and problems would consequently decrease. Now it seems that problems always exist whether the economy is undeveloped or developed, and that the problems arising when the economy is developed are no fewer than those arising when the economy is undeveloped—they can become more complicated.” (Speech at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/29/15, II.85; see also Explanatory Notes on the “Decision to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major issues Concerning Comprehensively Continuing the Reform” Third Plenary Session, 18th CPC Central Committee, 11/9/13, I.78). Such complexity may be seen in Xi’s term for the Chinese political economy: “the socialist market economy of China” (Speech to the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 12/31/12, I.73). What might a “socialist market economy,” this “key breakthrough in theory,” be? (Explanatory Notes, op.cit. I.82).

“The pivotal part of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics” is a policy whereby “public ownership is dominant” but “diverse forms of ownership develop side by side” with it (Speech at the 4th Session of the 12th CPPCC National Committee, 3/4/16, II.281). The public sector will guide the development of the private sector, as “it is imperative that all sectors work in unison” (ibid. II.283). Entrepreneurs must “maintain a positive social image,” with Party officials “build[ing] a gentlemen’s relationship with them,” unlike the relations “between feudal bureaucrats and entrepreneur holding official posts or between financial consortiums and politicians in Western countries” (ibid. II.288). Similarly, Xi’s version of “supply-side economics” centers not on tax cuts for private businesses but for state-supervised efforts to “ensure that the supply structure is more adaptive and flexible to changes in demand” by reducing “overcapacity and excess inventory” (Speech at Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 1/18/16, II.277). Such state supervision is necessary because “allowing people to share the fruits of reform and deployment is the essence of socialism,” “demonstrat[ing] the superiority of socialism and the Party’s whole-heartedness in its mission of serving the people” (Speech to the Second Fall Assembly of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/29/15, II.220)

That is, the regime shall remain firmly in control as the proletarian vanguard. “We must make sure that the working class is our main force,” since “the working class is China’s leading class,” representing China’s advanced productive forces and relations of production,” serving as “the Party’s most steadfast and reliable class foundation” (Speech at discussion session of “model” national workers, 4/28/13, I.47-48). “Model workers are the cream of the country and role models for the people” (ibid. I.49). Accordingly, “we need to give leverage to the superiority of our socialist system, and let the Party and government perform their positive functions” (Explanatory Notes, op.cit. I.85). “We must put the interests of the state first when making deliberations” (ibid. I.98). While “the proposal to let the market play the decisive role in allocating resources is a breakthrough in our Party’s understanding of the laws governing the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics as well as a new achievement in the sinicization of Marxism,” this “does not mean that the market can replace the government’s functions,” which are primarily administrative, indirect, the exercise of “overall leadership” and the coordination of “all efforts” (Speech to the 15th study Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 5/26/14, i.128-129). Further, the CP “should strengthen and improve the Party’s leadership” of its state-owned enterprises, “with a goal of making them the most reliable force of the party and the country and a major force in implementing the decisions and plans of the CPC Central Committee,” a “material and political foundation for socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Speech to the National Conference on Party Development of SOEs, 10/10/16, II.191). SOEs constitute a “modern corporate system with Chinese features…because it incorporates the party’s leadership into all aspects of their corporate governance and Party organizations into the corporate governance structure” (ibid. II.193). Such “democratic management” makes the “workers congress” its “basic element,” listening “to the views of workers in major decision-making” by including them in the SOE boards of directors (ibid. II.194). The Party committees that rule the SOEs with “strict discipline” “must take political philosophical education as a regular and basic task,” along with “resolving concrete problems” (ibid. II.195-196). The same kind of political structure characterizes financial institutions (Speech at the National Conference on Finance, 7/14/17, II.304-308).

The “growth pattern of our country,” which “is evolving from an extensive economy to an intensive economy”—that is, from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to a technology- and innovation-driven economy—provides a major source of the complications which the “socialist market economy” is intended to address (Speech at the Central Conference on Economic Work, 12/18/15, II.261). Such an evolution “is an objective law, and we cannot go against it no matter what we think” (ibid. II.261). “We should see the Chinese economy dialectically” as good Marxists, understanding that the CPC’s promotion of industrialization has succeeded, now ranking “first in the world,” but that the world economy has itself moved forward technologically, animated by the spirit of the ‘information economy’ (Speech at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 1/18/16, II.262, 270). “The world’s major countries are seeking to make new scientific and technological breakthroughs and gain competitive edges in future economic as well as scientific and technological development,” and China “must catch up and then try to surpass others” (Speech at the 17th Assembly of the Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 6/9/14, I.132). As of 2014, “the foundation of our scientific and technological innovation [was] not solid enough,” as “we still have to depend on others for core technology in key fields”; “we cannot always decorate our tomorrows with others’ yesterdays” (ibid. I.135). Such dependence undermines Chinese sovereignty, especially in such areas as the combination of robotics with IT. “The most urgent thing in this regard is to remove institutional barriers so as to unleash to the greatest extent the huge potential of science and technology as the primary productive force” (ibid. I.134), by which he means that industry should be more tightly coordinated with the university research laboratories, all within “a national innovation system within which experts in all fields can interact and collaborate to achieve high efficiency” (ibid. I.139). The Party will grant scientists “freedom to experiment, always careful to set the goals for such experimentation (Speech at the Joint Session of the National Conference on Scientific and Technological Innovation, 18th Meeting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 5/30/16, II.301). 

Xi summarized his economic policy in a speech delivered at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee on January 18, 2016. “Despite being the world’s second largest, China’s economy is obese and weak” because “China has lagged behind” since “the advent of modern times,” having “missed the great development opportunities brought by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19the centuries” (II.223, 224). Innovation is “the primary driving force for development” (II.221). “According to the materialist dialectics” of Marxism, “things are universally related”; “the world is an interrelated whole and also an interactive system” (II.225). Recognition of this point has led to, among other things, the initiation of the Belt and Road Initiative, a transportation network intended to the prosperous east coast of China to the western hinterlands. Such development can be undertaken according to a “harmonious coexistence of humanity with nature,” as explained by Friedrich Engels in The Dialectics of Nature (II.228). “Only by respecting the law of nature can we avoid setbacks in developing and utilizing nature” (II.230). [1] He acknowledges “four difficulties” in doing so in China: inadequate supervision by the central government over actions taken by local governments and other central government departments; persistent “local protectionism” of polluting industries, which interferes with “the monitoring and scrutiny of law enforcement”; inadequate management of “cross-region and cross-basin environmental issues”; “difficulty in regulating and strengthening local environmental protection bodies” (Speech to the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 10/26/15, II.423). That is, the solution to environmental protection is the implementation of stronger central rule by the regime. In addition to the need for technological innovation and “green development,” Xi calls attention to “economic globalization” (Speech at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 1/18/16, II.232). Globalization began with Western imperialism, made possible by modern technology in Europe and North America. It continued after World War II, with “two parallel world markets,” capitalist and socialist (ibid. II.232). Globalization “quickened its pace” in the years following the end of the Cold War, but today Western dominance declines, the effects of the worldwide financial crisis have abated, and China’s share of the world economy and of “global governance” increases rapidly (ibid. II.232-235). Xi presents China as “the biggest driver of global trade liberalization and facilitating, resisting various forms of Western protectionism” (ibid. II.233). He leaves unmentioned the fact that the Chinese economy itself is largely illiberal, state-owned and state supervised, which means that international trade liberalization with Chinese characteristics embeds the Chinese Communist Party in every country with which it trades and in every foreign corporation it allows to enter its territory. [2]

Xi describes all of this as “the people-centered philosophy of development” (ibid. II.235). “It displays the CPC’s fundamental purpose of serving the people wholeheartedly, and the materialistic historical view that the people are the primary force for propelling development,” “shared prosperity” being “a primary goal of Marxism” and even “a basic ideal of the Chinese people since ancient times” (ibid. II.235). “According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, communism will eradicate the opposition and differentiation between classes, between urban and rural areas, between mental labor and physical labor; it will adopt the principle of distribution from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, so as to achieve shared of development of society and the free and well-rounded development of individualism in the real sense,” rather than the false, ‘bourgeois’ sense (ibid. II.235-236). Of course, “there will be a long historical trek through history to reach this goal,” and in the meantime socialism, the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by its vanguard, the Communist Party, must prevail (ibid. II.237). 

“As China has increased its dependence on the world and its involvement in international affairs, so has the world increased its dependence on China and had greater impact on China.” Given both this new interdependence and “China’s development as a major country,” “we should uphold the CPC’s leadership and Chinese socialism” with an “independent foreign policy of peace,” of “promot[ing] democracy,” and of “uphold[ing] international justice,” especially as regards “developing countries” (Speech to the Central Conference of Foreign Affairs, 11.25/14, II.481-482). Accordingly, “we should abandon the Cold War mentality in all its manifestations, and foster a new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security” (Speech during the General Debate of the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 9/28/15, II.572). [3] To be sure, “we should respect the right of all countries to independently choose their social systems and development paths and the diversity of civilizations,” at least insofar as commercial republics might penetrate China and its allies; “promoting democracy” evidently means promoting socialism with local characteristics (Speech to the Fifth BRICS Leaders Meeting, 3/27/13, I.356). Assuredly, “no matter how strong its economy grows, China will never seek hegemony, expansion or spheres of influence” (Speech at the United Nations Office in Geneva, 1/18/17, II.597). You can depend on that because “to abolish war and achieve peace has been the most pressing and profound aspiration of the Chinese people since the advent of modern times” (Speech to the Third Group Study Session of the Political Bureau of the CCP 18th Central Committee, 1/28/13, I.271). To do so, under Mao China established the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence” (Speech to the Symposium Marking the 120th Anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Birth, 12/26/13, I.32). I.33 n.6). To those who might suspect otherwise, he insists that “China’s pursuit of peaceful development is not an act of expediency, still less diplomatic rhetoric. Rather, it is the conclusion drawn from an objective assessment of China’s history, its present and future.” (Speech to the Körber Foundation, Berlin, 3/28/14, I.293). More, China “present[s] the world with a major country meeting its responsibilities and upholding international humanism” (Speech to the National Health Conference, 8/19/16, II.402). 

“Because different countries and nations have different historical traditions, cultural accomplishments and basic conditions, their development paths are different” (Speech to the National Meeting on Publicity and Theoretical Work, 8/19/13, I.174). Xi can thus appeal to diversity, the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, and so on while simultaneously praising China and working to advance the Marxist cause, now guided by the CCP, globally, upholding international humanism. “We should make the past serve the present and foreign things serve China,” as the ancient Chinese made Buddhism, imported from India, into “Buddhism with Chinese features” (quite literally, on the temple statues) (Speech at UNESCO Headquarters, 3/27/13, I.286). Or, as he puts it more plainly to his CP comrades, “Under the guidance of Marxist and socialist ethics, we should make the past serve the present and put forth new ideas on the basis of eliminating the false and retaining the true for the creative transformation and progress of traditional Chinese ethics, so as to lead the people on the way to yearning for and aspiring to life-long learning, respecting and obeying moral standards, so that every one of the 13 billion Chinese citizens can be part of a team to disseminate Chinese identify and culture,” “popularize our cultural spirit across countries as well as across time and space, with contemporary values and the eternal charm of Chinese culture,” “tell[ing] the rest of the world about the new Achievements of modern Chinese Culture,” thereby “strengthen[ing] our soft power” in the world (Speech to the 12th Study Session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 12/30/13, I.178-179, 180). A well-known instance of this strategy has been seen in the ‘Confucius Institutes’ established on numerous college and university campuses in the West.

Where acknowledgment of cultural diversity actually counts is in crafting geopolitical strategies in different regions of the world. In these early years of Xi’s rule, he was careful to emphasize economic development. In the Asia Pacific, he proposed a “modern Maritime Silk Road,” a trade route financed by the China-ASEAN Maritime Cooperation Fund, which just happens to have been “set up by the Chinese government” (Speech to the People’s Representative Council of Indonesia, 10/3/13, I.321). Similarly, “cast[ing] away the Cold War mentality,” Asian countries should cooperate with one another for “common security” while cultivating “mutual understanding and friendship” (ibid. I.322) among members of “the Asia Pacific family” (Speech at the APEC CEO Conference, Bali, Indonesia, 10/7/13, I.384). All of this, in an effort to push the Americans out of the region without being so crude as to say so.

In its immediate neighborhood on land, Xi tells the CPC that “China and its neighbors are full of vigor and vitality, and show obvious strengths in development and high potential, with regional stability and a willingness among the smaller states to foster “cooperation with China” (Speech at the Seminar on the Work of Neighborhood Diplomacy, 10/24/13, I.326). “We must appreciate the situation to the full, devise appropriate strategies, and plan carefully, to perform better in our diplomatic exchanges with our neighbors” (ibid. I.326).  will see the land version of the modern Silk Road, again for improving transportation infrastructure, fostering “unimpeded trade,” enhancing monetary circulation, and “increas[ing] understanding between our peoples” (Speech at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan, 9/7/13, I.318), always “driven by…and serv[ing] the Two Centenary Goals and our national rejuvenation” (Speech at the Seminar on the Work of Neighborhood Diplomacy, op. cit. I.326). Eurasia will see the modern Silk Road on land as well as the one at sea under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, again dominated by China (Speech to the Council of Heads of Member States of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 9/13/13). [4] The Road would extend not only to the member states but to Mongolia, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. “China is the initiator and propeller of the Belt and Road Initiative, but the initiative is not China’s business alone,” as China “welcomes other countries to board China’s express train of development and help them realize their own development objectives” (Speech to the 31st Group Study Session, Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, 4/29/16, II.547). The Road will not be function only as a travel route but as a comprehensive geo-economic program for “mutual learning” and “mutual benefit,” complete with “people-to-people contacts,” science and technology “exchanges,” and “green development” (ibid. II.558, 564). While it is evident that geo-economic cooperation with China is also geopolitical, Xi deprecates “outdated geopolitical maneuvering” (II.563). He does not rule out updated geopolitical maneuvering. 

Both the Maritime Silk Road and the land-based Silk Road figure prominently in his approach to the Arab states. Invoking the centuries of “peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning, and mutual benefit” between “the Chinese and Arab peoples,” including Chinese “support [for] the cause of the Palestinian people,” Xi proposes the “1+2+3” program for cooperation. The “1” refers to “cooperation in energy,” which is the “core” of the program; “2” refers to the “two wings” of infrastructure and trade/investment; “3” refers to using three advanced technologies, nuclear energy, space satellites and “new energy” as “breakthrough levers in an effort to raise the level of pragmatic China-Arab cooperation.” (Speech at the Sixth Annual Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum, 6/5/14, I. 348-349). Knowing that Chinese persecution of Muslim Uighurs has increased tensions with the Arab states, he calls for “a consensus in the fight against terrorist and extremist forces” and exchange visits by “100 eminent religious leaders” under the auspices of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (Speech at the Arab League Headquarters, 1/26/16, II.503).

China’s most important ally is in northern Eurasia. Xi emphasized that Russia was his first stop on his first overseas trip since becoming the Chinese president. “The relationship between China and Russia is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world” as well as “the best relationship between major countries,” a relationship that “not only serves the interests of our two countries but also provides an important safeguard for maintaining the international strategic balance as well as peace and stability in the world”  (Speech at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, 3/23/13, I.301).”China and Russia enjoy a high complementarity in development strategy,” he tells the Russians (ibid. I.301), and he is pleased to remark the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Treaty of Good-neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the PRC and the Russian Federation, three years later (II. 509). As for the rest of Europe, Xi treats it with anodyne pronouncements about “peace and stability,” “growth and prosperity,” “reform and progress,” and “common cultural prosperity” (Speech at the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium, 4/1/14, I.309-310). In an invocation of Mao’s “Thousand Flowers” campaign, he intones, “Let us work together for all flowers of human civilization to blossom together” (ibid. I.310).

Africa, a continent of greater opportunity for China, rates more attention than Europe. “Unity and cooperation with African countries have always been an important foundation of China’s foreign policy” since the founding of the Communist regime (Speech at the Julius Nyere International Conference, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 3/25/13, I.337); he refers to the policy of supporting Marxist movements in the Third World, including that of Julius Nyere himself. Stirring any lingering resentment of European colonialism, he tells his audience that “China upholds justice and opposes the practice of bullying the small, the strong lording over the weak, and the rich oppressing the poor, just as it opposes interference in other’s internal affairs” (ibid. I.337)—a claim that might fall rather flat in, say, the Philippines. The line about interference in others’ internal affairs signals that China will not let human rights violations in African countries interfere with Chinese investment and financing there, or with the establishment of 18,000 “government scholarships” in the coming years (ibid. I.338). He erects “five major pillars” of Sino-African relations: political equality and mutual trust; mutually beneficial economic cooperation; mutually enriching cultural exchanges; mutual assistance in security; and solidarity and cooperation in international affairs (Speech at the Johannesburg Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, 12/4/15, II.496-497). 

Regarding the one formidable enemy, the United States, Xi treads lightly in these early years. He establishes inroad in Latin America, telling journalists from Mexico, Costa Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago that “although there is a vast ocean between China and Latin America, we are connected heart and soul,” in “the common pursuit of beautiful dreams,” and China stands “ready to work with Latin American and Caribbean countries hand in hand, supporting one another and cooperating sincerely on the path to realizing the great dream of development and prosperity”  (Interview, May 2013, I.62). In the United States itself, he assured journalists that “bilateral cooperation” can be enhanced, thanks to the establishment of “more than 90 mechanisms for high-level dialogues on strategy, economy, culture and humanities (Remarks at a press conference with President Barack Obama, 6/7/13, I.307-308). These initiatives include the presence of some 190,000 Chinese students on American campuses and more than 20,000 U.S. students in China. He also praised efforts at cooperation in cyber security, “eschewing mistrust” (ibid. I.308). With President Donald Trump, he emphasized “pragmatic cooperation” in business dealings and “world peace, stability and prosperity” (Press conference, 4/6,17, II.534), exhibiting some awareness of the difference in the preoccupations of the two American presidents.

Finally, there is the unusual category of foreign relations with areas the CCP refuses to recognize as foreign. Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have (or for some time had) non-communist regimes. Regarding them, the CCP has leaned heavily on the nationalist side of things, announcing a “one country, two systems” formula for incorporating the two smaller places into the ‘People’s Republic (Summary of “talks” with chief executives of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Macao Special Administrative region, 12/20/12, 3/11/13 and 12/18/13, I.247). “Our compatriots in Macao are masters of their own house, entitled to broad freedoms and democratic rights in accordance with the law,” which means that they are “upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation,” understanding “that the destiny of the future of Macao are intricately bound with the mainland” (Speech at a meeting celebrating the 15th anniversary of Macao’s return to China, 12/20/15, 459, 463). Xi uses similar language regarding Hong Kong, which “has joined us on our journey towards the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (Meeting celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Hon Kong’s return to China, 7/1/17, II.471). According to him, “Hong Kong has retained its capitalist system and way of life, and its laws have remained basically unchanged,” with “more extensive democratic rights and freedoms than at any other time in its history” (ibid. II.472). It ought also be noted that the Communist regime took care to arrange the election laws in such a way that a pro-Beijing majority would be assured in the Hong Kong legislature. After all, “it is imperative to always act in accordance with the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China” (ibid. II.474).

The Republic of China on Taiwan has been the much larger prize, since Chiang Kai-Shek retreated there, defeated by Mao on the mainland. Xi offers “the same treatment to Taiwan enterprises as to mainland enterprises in the fields of investment and economic cooperation,” which of course means CCP control of those enterprises (Main points of talks with Vincent Siew, honorary chairman of the Cross-Strait Market Foundation of Taiwan, and his delegation, 4/8/13 and 10/6/3, I.253). “We must increase political trust between the mainland and Taiwan and reinforce the common political foundation of the two sides,” although Xi doesn’t specify what that common political foundation might be, except to stipulate that negotiations must proceed “within the framework of ‘one China'” (ibid. I.254). Additionally, “we must handle cross-Straits relations on the basis of a clear understanding of the trend of history,” a trend Xi has often identified as a combination of Marxism and nationalist revival (ibid. I.257). “Forces and activities for ‘Taiwan independence’ remain a real threat to the peace of the Taiwan Straits,” he states, ominously. “It is therefore incumbent upon us to oppose and contain any rhetoric of move for ‘Taiwan independence’ without any compromise.” (ibid. I.258). “It is a simple truth that blood is thicker than water,” which is why the PRC and the Republic of Taiwan “share the same destiny” (Speech receiving Lien Chan, Honorary Chairman of the Kuomintang of China, and delegation, 2/8/14, I.261, 262). A footnote helpfully adds that a 1992 meeting between the two sides resulted in an agreement “that both sides would follow the one-China principle, each with its respective interpretation” (I.265 n.3). No doubt.

With respect to threats to peace, Xi has presided over a substantial military buildup, already outlined in these early years of his tenure. Political power, Mao famously aphorized, grows out of the barrel of a gun, and the expulsion of Japan from Chinese soil during World War II was “the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times,” a triumph that “re-established China as a major country and won the Chinese people the respect of all peace-loving people around the world” (Commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People’s War Against Japanese Aggression” (9/3/15, II.484). Today, “we must uphold the Party’s leadership of the armed forces,” inasmuch as “the future of socialism, the enduring stability of the party, and lasting peace of our country” are “central to the nature and mission of the armed forces” (Speech to the Central Military Commission, 11/16/12, I.238). “The Party’s absolute leadership over the military is a defining feature of Chinese socialism, and a major source of political strength to the Party and the state” (Speech on the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Liberation army, 8/1/17, II.452). To sustain this leadership, officers and soldiers must be given a “theoretical and political education” so that they “will follow without hesitation the commands of the Party Central Committee and the Central Military Commission at all times and under all conditions”; for that reason, “we will apply political convictions as a measure when reviewing and appointing officers” so as to ensure that they “are reliable and loyal to the Party” (Commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Chinese People’s War Against Japanese Aggression, op. cit. I.238). “We must build a modern and standardized military dedicated to our revolutionary goals” (Speech to the Guangzhou Military Command, 12/8/12; see also Speech at the Plenary Meeting of the People’s Liberation Army delegation at the First Session of the 12th National People’s Congress, 3/11/13, I.243ff.). This education will “develop the army’s military theory and constantly open up new horizons for the Party theory of Marxism and for military practice,” so that “the truth of Marxist military theory applied in practice will shine brighter in China” (Speech on the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Liberation army,” 8/1/17, II.453). “We must be on the alert against any possibility of a ‘color revolution'” supported by the military (Speech at the Military Conference on Political Work, 10/31/14, II.435). 

Accordingly, Xi lays down “Four Fundamentals” of CCP policy regarding the military. The Party must “foster our shared ideals and convictions” in the “new generation of revolutionary force,” particularly among “high-ranking officers” (ibid. II.436). The military must “love the Party, protect the Party, work for the Party and share [their] weal and woe with the Party” (ibid. II.437); “nobody is entitled to cross the red lines of political discipline and rule” and “those who do will have to pay a price” (ibid. II.438). The military must “uphold the standard of combat capability,” especially since “political work itself” depends on it; this includes not only combat capability but “winning local war in the informational era” (ibid. II.439). And finally, officers must “uphold the authority of political work” by serving as “role models,” combining “the power of truth” (Marxism) “with the power of their personalities,” while being pragmatic, fair, and honest (ibid. II.440). Institutionally, this means centralization of power under the Central Military Commission, power over the armed forces but also the “People’s Armed Police,” ensuring “the correct political direction” under the “absolute leadership” of the Party (Speech to the Central Military Commission, 11/24/15, II.443). This will achieve full “civil-military integration,” “a structure in which the military and non-military sectors develop together efficiently across multiple fields” (ibid. II.445). The “long-term endeavor to coordinate economic development with military defense” evidently means that the internal force of the People’s Armed Police will be deployed to enforce Party-driven economic initiatives, while the conventional army and navy will back up foreign trade relations. It will also tap the “tremendous potential for civil-military integration in such areas as infrastructure development, science, technology an industry for national defense, weaponry and equipment procurement, personnel training, outsourcing of military logistical support, and national defense mobilization to be “implemented in such fields as oceans, outer space, cyberspace, biology, and new energy, which can serve both military and civilian purposes” (Speech to the First Plenary Session of the Central Commission for Civil-Military Integration, 6/20/17, II.450).

There can be no question that in his first years of supreme authority in China, Xi Jinping enunciated a comprehensive, not to say ‘totalitarian,’ strategy for the regime of China, with a ruling body (the Communist Party), ruling institutions (economic, educational, and military), a way of life (“moderately prosperous socialism” in pursuit of the “Chinese Dream”), all aiming at the purpose of a “happy life” of the people, a life consisting of hard work in the service of eventual, worldwide Communism.

 

Notes

1. Xi has spoken extensively about “green development” and “promot[ing] green, circular and low-carbon growth” by “integrat[ing] or climate change efforts into the country’s medium- and long-term program of economic and social development” (Speech at the Paris Conference on Climate Change, 11/30/15, II.576) in order to “usher in a new era of ecological progress” (Speech to the Sixth Group Study Session, Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 5/24/13, I.231) in order to “leave to our future generations blue skies, green fields, and clean water” (Letter to the Eco Forum Annual Global Conference, 7/18/13, I.233-234) and to promote a “green way of life” (Speech to the 41st Group Study Session, Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, 5/26/17). See also his speech to the Sixth Meeting of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, in which he announces a policy that will “revolutionize energy consumption” by “rein[ing] in irrational energy use” with “strict controls,” increase the supply of energy by technological innovation and NEP-like controlled allowance of market pricing, and “enhanc[ing] international cooperation” on energy supply with the Belt and Road Initiative, opening energy markets worldwide to China, and “intensify[ing] our efforts in energy exploration and extraction” of oil and natural gas, along with pipelines and storage facilities (6/13/14, I.143). Evidently, Xi wants his audiences to believe that increased use of fossil fuels will somehow co-exist happily with “green development.”
2. Along these lines, see also Xi’s speech to the G20 Leaders Summit, 9/5/13, I.369-371); Speech to the Senate of Mexico, 6/5/13, 342-343.
3. In this speech, Xi also observed that “China was the first country to put its signature on the Charter of the United Nations,” conveniently overlooking the fact that this was done by the Republic of China under Mao’s deadly enemy, Chiang Kai-Shek.
4. Other member states at this time were Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan

 

 

Alexandros Petersen: The World Island: Eurasian Politics and the Fate of the West. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011.

 

Writing in 2011, a few years after a worldwide financial crisis, the late Alexandros Petersen (murdered by the Taliban in 2014) clearly saw that the “geopolitical bubble” was over, too, that the “unipolarity of Western preponderance following Russia’s imperial implosion” had ended, as Russia under the command of Vladimir Putin began to recover and China sought “to challenge the institutionalized setting of Western power as it exist[ed] beyond the borders of the Euro-Atlantic community.” He also understood that this was not only a ‘power struggle’ but a regime struggle, since for both Russia and China, “the watchword is authoritarianism,” it being “increasingly conspicuous” that a “free nation-authoritarian struggle…goes to the heart of the East-West schism.” And although, unlike commercial republics, ‘authoritarian’ regimes, whether tyrannical or oligarchic, often fight wars against one another, by now “Moscow and Beijing do find themselves sharing a common short- to medium-term goal of banishing Western political and economic influence from the larger part of the Eurasian pace and undermining it in its peninsular stronghold of western Europe.” If successful, this effort would reverse commercial-republican advances worldwide, reduce access to natural resources by those regimes, and possibly end in the “demise of Western power altogether.” In the “fissiparous climate of Eurasia,” especially, China is “best placed to exploit” weakness; “eventual dominance by some form of Chinese informal hegemony is a distinct possibility.” 

Why so? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europeans ruled much of the world, thanks to ‘modernity’—their conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, made possible by the technologies invented by modern experimental science. For imperialist purposes, these technologies included coal-powered warships bearing advanced weaponry. This notwithstanding, “shipboard coercion” wielded by Europeans, North Americans, and by then Japan had a limitation described by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder. The “World Island,” as he called it—the vast landmass including Asia, Europe, and northern Africa—could be ruled on its peripheries by sea power, but sea power could not reach into its “Heartland,” soon to be spanned by the Soviet empire. This was a serious problem for the West because, as Mackinder wrote in 1904, “If the whole World Island, or the larger part of it, were to become a single united base of seapower, then would not the insular nations”—the commercial republics of Great Britain, the United States, France, and other maritime nations—be “out-built as regards ships and out-manned as regards seamen?” Hence the two world wars and the Cold War that followed them: all struggles aimed at preventing or at least containing the regime enemies of commercial republicanism, would-be rulers of the Heartland of the World Island.

Petersen wrote in the knowledge that geopolitics often no longer commanded the attention of citizens who thought about foreign policy. From the 1990s through the first decade of the new century, many assumed that geopolitics had become largely obsolete, now that the Internet had made borders porous; more, they assumed, international trade would surely liberalize ‘authoritarian’ regimes. Few noticed that trade hardly prevents wars, as Germany had proved in its several assaults on its principal trading partner, France, in the decades between 1870 and 1940; few considered the fact that the ability to exchange ideas with some newfound friend in Tashkent requires a secure place in which to sit in front of a computer keyboard, peacefully tapping. And so, Petersen attempts to remind his fellow citizens of these realities, beginning with a reprise of Mackinder’s original analysis.

At the time of Mackinder’s writing, geopolitical strategy in the west was animated by U. S. Naval War College historian Alfred T. Mahan’s 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, followed two years later by The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. The latter, especially, drew attention to the fatal error of Napoleon I, who dismissed the sea-going Brits as a merely commercial people, incapable of seriously threatening mighty France, dominant on continental Europe. Nor did Mahan ignore Asia. Dividing the world among Northern, Southern, and what he understatedly called the “Debated and Debatable” zones between the 30th and 40th parallels, he called for “the development of the Panama Canal as a critical U.S.-controlled choke point to complement its British-controlled counterpart at Suez” while advocating Western naval control of other “critical bottlenecks,” including the entrances to the Black and Baltic seas. From America’s Theodore Roosevelt to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, to Imperial Japan’s admirals Yamamoto Gombei and Satō Tetsutarō, statesmen found in Mahan confirmation of their own insights. Accordingly, they undertook massive shipbuilding programs in an effort to compete with British dominance of the seas. 

While understanding and accepting Mahan analysis of the geopolitical importance of sea power in the modern world, beginning with Columbus, Mackinder “foresaw the demise of the relative advantage that seapower had recently enjoyed over landpower and on which Britian’s power wholly rested.” After all, a sufficiently powerful army could block enemy navies from occupying bases while using those ports to radiate naval power of its own. A few years later, Great Britain’s failed Dardanelles campaign during the First World War proved, “contrary to Mahan’s assumptions, that seapower could quite easily be prevented from penetrating critical strategic areas,” such as the Black and Baltic seas. Accordingly, “the power that would ultimately control the seas, he predicted, would be the one based on the greater resources of landpower.” For example, could not the Suez Canal readily be taken from the British by a military power controlling Arabia? And could not the Heartland be united with the help of another form of modern technology, railroads? 

The Heartland of the World Island went from Eastern Europe (the Elbe River in Germany) through Siberia (to the Amur River between the Russian Far East and China) and north-south from the Arctic Circle to South Asian deserts in the east to the isthmus between the Black and Baltic seas in the west. West of Suez and on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, the Heartland’s southern border was the Sahara Desert. Mackinder considered the southern spur of the Ural Mountains “the very pivot of the pivot area,” the “heart of the Heartland.” “Inaccessible to the shipborne coercion of the islanders,” the Heartland was “the greatest natural fortress on earth,” contended over by “waves of nomadic warriors” for centuries. Those shipborne powers consisted of two “crescents”: the inner crescent consisted of western Germany, Austria, Turkey, and India; the outer crescent consisted of the British Isles, Japan, South Africa, North and South American, and Australasia. But “the three so-called new continents” of North America, South America, and Australia “are in point of area merely satellites of the old continent,” the World Island, which is double their size. Since Russia sits on “the essential territory of the Heartland,” it will maintain its geopolitical importance, absent conquest. Mackinder foresaw that the central conflict of the new century would occur between Russia and Germany. Unless the countries between them allied, they would be the victims of the coming struggles. 

Petersen duly notes that Mackinder’s insights were not original. Bismarck had said, “Who rules Bohemia rules Europe.” Nonetheless, “Mackinder made the clearest statement of the problem and its underlying geographical reasons.”

Writing some four decades later, Nicholas Spykman refined Mackinder’s analysis by emphasizing what he called the “Rimland” countries—his renaming of Mackinder’s inner crescent. Judging that Russia would never rival the sea powers, he viewed India, Turkey, and the easternmost areas of western Europe as access points to the Heartland, points that not only looked ‘inward’ toward the Heartland but ‘outward’ as places with viable seaports. And so, “Who controls the Heartland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” Petersen cites the rise of China in the twenty-first century as the most salient example of Spykman’s point. For Spykman, “history was not primarily a story of seapower contesting landpower, but rather a struggle between mixed seapower/landpower alliances to prevent domination of the Rimland.” The invention of nuclear weapons deliverable by intercontinental ballistic missiles has vastly increased the risks of military adventurism, but it has not removed “the struggle for relative power” over territory. In this struggle, Spykman’s “fear [was] that America would slide back into an isolationist repose.” Mackinder, too, understood the potential significance of China “as a possible Heartland organizer with designs to overthrow the Russian Empire,” although at the time it seemed that modernizing Japan would rule then-unmodern China. And Petersen sees that, for the time being, Russia has aligned with China against the commercial republics of the inner and outer crescents, perhaps counting on its nuclear arsenal to deter Chinese encroachment.

The post-World War Two American strategy of ‘containing’ the Soviet empire, famously enunciated by the State Department’s Russia expert, George F. Kennan, drew upon Mackinder and Spykman. Seeing that Soviet rulers deployed an ideology mixing Marxism-Leninism with Russian nationalism in order to unite their empire spiritually (as it were), Kennan understood that the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, then regnant among his colleagues at State, could not adequately respond to the geopolitical realities of the postwar any better than it had responded to the realities prevailing between the world wars. Echoing Mackinder but also the British Viscount Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, “Kennan acknowledge that the heart of the problem was to prevent the gathering together of the military-industrial potential of the entire Eurasian landmass under a single power.” Fortunately, geography imposed limits on “Russia’s political development,” which was likely also to be stunted in the long run by its Marxist “pseudoscience.” These handicaps made containment possible, if the West remained united, Russia, China, and Germany separated. Western unity included observance of Kennan’s “rules” for behavior, vis-à-vis the Soviets; these rules included recognition that there would never be “a community of aims” between the United States and the Soviets, coordination of public and private activities relating to the Soviet Union, and not being ‘diplomatic’ with a regime that would never reciprocate. Liberal-internationalist “hope for a Soviet Union that converged with the Western model of liberal-democratic capitalism was a chimera and transmogrification that would never happen.” The Soviets themselves understood that “there could be no permanent peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and Communist countries,” so Americans had better understand that, too. “There was, moreover, an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed Comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow, intended to set the poor against the rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, and so forth.” That is, the Cold War would be another world war, in its own way.

Kennan confined his strategy to what is now called ‘soft power’—the establishment of Radio Free Europe, negotiations, building political alliances. He eschewed the use of military power, opposing the formation of NATO. And he quickly abandoned even his rather dilute version of containment after Stalin died and the Sino-Soviet split occurred. This, despite the fact that he understood “that the Russian were impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to that of force.” Petersen imagines that Kennan’s softer approach might have shortened the Cold War by reducing the Politburo’s sense of insecurity, but gives no real evidence that the Soviet rulers, buoyed by Marxist optimism, were really all that insecure.

Petersen has his eye on current circumstances, however, in particular the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, which were soon to heighten with the Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014. He regards Ukraine as a lost cause for the West, preferring a renewal of a strategy designed by the Polish statesman Josef Pilsudski in the interwar period. “Pilsudski argued that any great Eurasian power would crumble if its many minorities were empowered from without.” To do so, Pilsudski recommended what he called “Prometheism” and the “Intermarium.” Prometheism was a policy of fomenting rebellion against Russia by supporting nationalist sentiments in nations under Russia’s control; in the interwar years, newly-independent Poland recognized the governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan, subsidized Armenian nationalists, and established firm contact with the Ukrainian nationalist, Symon Petliura. The Intermarium—meaning “Between the Seas,” namely, the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas—was an envisioned federation of small states “united in their desire to be independent from both Russia in the east and Germany in the west—the two great Eurasian powers of their day.” 

The Intermarium proposal had precedent: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been a major power in the fifteenth century. “The Commonwealth enjoyed almost two centuries gathering new territories, mostly in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belarus, and swelling in wealth and culture,” becoming “a hive of artistic and scientific advancement,” even at the time other European nations were being wrought apart by the Thirty Years War. And it really was a commonwealth, with its monarch subordinated to a unicameral aristocratic parliament. This proved its undoing, however, when czarist Russia, unencumbered by restrictions on monarchic power, pushed back against the Commonwealth’s encroachments (it had even occupied Moscow for a couple of years) while the parliament dithered. Between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Commonwealth “was totally dismembered” by the end of the eighteenth century. 

Pilsudski’s hopes of effectually reconstituting something along the lines of the Commonwealth faltered. Born in 1867, he had begun his political career on the Left, possibly as an expression of hostility toward Russia. He organized paramilitary units that later entered World War I against the Russians. By then, he had abandoned Marxism for nationalism, but this made him no more palatable to the victorious Allies, who suspected him of continued sympathies with what had been the Central Powers, on whose side he had fought. In the event, however, he headed the forces of the Second Polish Republic in its the victorious war on Ukraine immediately after the world war, and then, allied with Ukraine against the Bolsheviks—Lenin intended to recover territories surrendered in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and continue westward, linking up with Communists in Germany—he halted the Soviet advances in 1920. Had his plan for the Intermarium been realized, “Russia could be pinned back to her natural frontier in the east and the Germans prevented from overspilling into Slavic lands from the west.”

Pilsudski seized power in Poland in May 1926 and pursued his twin strategies. These never came to fruition, lacking support from the West and from the neighboring Slavic countries, fearful of Polish hegemony in any federation. He fell back to signing peace treaties with Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, rightly believing that neither parchment barrier would hold for long. He died in 1935. Mackinder, too, had “thought it vitally necessary that the tier of independent states between Russia and Germany should be properly linked with infrastructure and with secure access to the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas,” but he enjoyed no more success in persuading his British colleagues than Pilsudski did within the region itself. 

Petersen calls attention to the expansion of the European Union and NATO into Central and Eastern Europe in the early years of the twenty-first century. This means “that Pilsudski’s Intermarium federation has been realized in outline,” and the previous entry of a united Germany into the western block of commercial republics removed any threat to the region from that quarter. (As seen throughout the twentieth century, “German orientation can make or break the continent.”) As of 2011, Petersen writes, “The EU numbers over 500 million citizens and is Russia’s most obvious and necessary market in which to sell its vast energy resources.” The difficulty, obviously, was (and is) resembles that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Russia is united under a (neo-)czar, whereas “the incoherence and provincial character of the EU approach to its dealings with all these countries has meant that Moscow has been able to extract maximum political advantage from what ought to be recognized as the weaker of the two positions.” Weaker in terms of population and economic power, to be sure, but political and military unity matter more, and, as Charles de Gaulle once said of the much smaller but similarly organized Common Market, “Good luck to this federation without a federator!” 

In this century, “Beijing and Moscow have made quietly but concerted common cause to muscle Western actors out of Eurasia, while Iran’s nuclear ambitions threaten to spark the security vacuum that could provide the two great Eurasian powers with the opportunity to finally do so.” For Russia’s Putin, “the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was the pivotal event that convinced Russia the West was attempting to deliver a geopolitical knockout in the post-Soviet space,” while “for China, U.S. insistence on criticizing its approach to human rights, currency valuation, and unbending stance over Taiwanese and Tibetan autonomy all emphasized the way the West was unwilling to accept the larger process of economic and societal development being undertaken by the Communist Part as a quid pro quo for authoritarian governance.” In response, Russia invaded Georgia and China began to build a substantial navy supplemented by naval bases—a “fundamental extraterritorial expansion for China beyond its traditional ‘Middle Kingdom’ territory.” In Central Asia, both countries have increased their economic and political presence.

For its part, Russia formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2002, which today consists of five former Soviet satellites (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) in addition to Russia. The CSTO is “Moscow’s preferred vehicle for safeguarding its sphere of influence in Eurasia,” whereby it offers to participate in United Nations peacekeeping efforts worldwide while stipulating a monopoly on such efforts not only within the member states but in Moldova and other states nearby. This threatens “to seriously undermine the true pillars of European security: the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Charter of Paris, and the pivotal roles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.” This leaves Russia as “the last European empire in Asia, with a territorial extent that would have delighted Peter the Great.” In the long run, “Russia cuts a poor economic and demographic picture,” and Petersen inclines to discount it as a geopolitical force. 

He takes China much more seriously. “For 18 of the past 20 centuries China has ranked as the world’s preeminent global economic power,” and today it has the second-largest GDP, which it “increasingly devote[s] into military” power while doing much more to enable its people to prosper than Mao ever did. It is true that Washington can “decimate China’s export economy instantly by shutting its markets with massive tariff barriers,” a vulnerability the Chinese under Xi Jinping have attempted to remedy. China is also geopolitically contained, at least potentially, by surrounding countries, principally Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines, and Taiwan, although they have systematically built up their military with the obvious intention of seizing Taiwan. Although currently an ally, Russia might be able to resist some Chinese encroachments on its long border. Meanwhile, China has taken care to reduce its dependence on Russia as a source of energy, building a gas pipeline from methane-rich Turkmenistan through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

A year before the founding of the CSTO, Russia and China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Association with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The organization has since admitted India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus, its members encompassing 65% of Eurasia and 42% of the world population. “China appears to form the linchpin and driving force of the organization.” Whatever their suspicions of the West generally and of the United States especially, and whatever misgivings they may entertain concerning China’s intentions, the Russians give priority to blocking Western influence in Eurasia. As of 2011, “practically the entire Heartland and a majority of the World Island” are under “the strong influence, if not direct control, of two powers.” In Petersen’s judgment, containment will not suffice. “If Eurasia is to be preserved from domination by authoritarian, mercantilist powers, and its resources made competitively available for the benefit of both its people and the West…then the West must be grown into Eurasia and its values and institutions transplanted there.”

What to do? Looking at what was then the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich, Petersen writes off Ukraine as “geopolitically lost for the near future.” This turned out to be premature, as Yanukovich, who tilted Ukraine toward Russia during his four years in office, fled to Russia after his countrymen got fed up with him; when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, anticipated a quick conquest, Yanukovich was rumored to be their choice for puppet. And while things did not work out as planned, if Ukraine eventually returns to the Russian orbit, Petersen, had he lived to see it, presumably would recommend his own preferred strategy.

This consists of a combination of Kennan’s containment and Pilsudski’s Prometheist and Intermarian strategy centered in Eurasia. Although the claim that commercial republics don’t fight one another has been questioned, thanks to some minor counter-examples, commercial republicanism “is clearly the best system on offer and in the overwhelming majority of cases its triumph favors the full spectrum of Western values, from rule of law to free trade and beyond.” While this is so, as Americans have learned in Afghanistan and to some extent in Iraq, commercial republicans “must reckon with reality.” “The trends paint a picture of a future marked by Western decline relative to the Asian ascendency,” and in light of this probability, the West had better cultivate some friends there, recognizing that “the pivot of world politics remains more or less where Mackinder first identified it to be—in the Heartland.” 

“The Russia-China nexus is represented less by the prospect of a genuine alliance than by some sort of agreement to partition Central and Inner Asia—whether actively or in terms of spheres of influence—and thus to effectively control the trade and strategic potential of the World Island.” Petersen proposes U.S.-European collaboration in a “forward Eurasian strategy.” This strategy will require increased “coherence” among the Western states themselves “about who they are, where they have come from, and what are their immutable shared values,” a coherence that will buttress institutional coherence in the European Union and NATO. Lack of such coherence led to stumbles in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Once such coherence has been established, or at least approached, the Western powers should address the Heartland countries in terms of three principles: independence, integration, and institutions. By independence, Petersen means an appeal to the smaller Eurasian states’ desire to retain their sovereignty against Chinese and Russian pressure. In this, the West’s weakness is also its advantage: it is too distant from most of those states to threaten them but sufficiently prosperous and militarily powerful to shore them up with investment, training, education, and foreign aid. This also means backing off from hectoring Eurasian governments “with unconstructive criticism of human rights issues and electoral procedures,” a policy that “push[es] them further into the hands of Russia and China,” which have no qualms concerning such matters. Better to offer them “concrete offers of advice about how to remedy some of those ills.” Since “foreign-directed coups and revolutions are a very real danger faced by any of the small Eurasian states that display the desire to diverge from the well-worn paths of corruption and authoritarianism,” the West should emphasize not abrupt regime change but the introduction of the rule of law and “personal security advice for the leaders” of governments that display interest in adopting or enhancing the rule of law. This can be supplemented by assistance in “reorganizing the armed forces and security apparatus hierarchy”—prime sources of ambitious men inclined toward coups d’état. 

He offers some welcome, country-by-country specifics. As mentioned, he more or less writes off Ukraine on the grounds that it “will always hold more significance for Russia than for any Western actor” and “Moscow will not give up Ukraine without a fight, a real fight”—a point subsequent events have confirmed. “The West is at a strategic disadvantage” there, a disadvantage “it will have to accept and adapt to.” However, “the corresponding reality is that Ukraine is not essential for Western integration to continue in Eurasia”; it can be “bypassed” if the Western allies “focus on the far more strategically important Caucasus-Central Asia region.” “Low-yield fumbling in Ukraine…fritters away the opportunity to engage in a truly Eurasian strategy, not just a Black Sea strategy.”

Petersen also deprecates the need to engage with Belarus, which isn’t Western-leaning, Kyrgyzstan (of “little geopolitical significance”), Moldova (the same), and Tajikistan (“the smallest and poorest of the lot” and “politically volatile,” as well). This leaves Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Mongolia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. Petersen hopes (so far in vain, as it has transpired) for the West “to remain a determining player among the many other players” there, in order “to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to being a geopolitical black hole with nothing but drugs and extremism to export to its neighbors and beyond.” He doesn’t have any specific suggestions on how that might be done, eschewing regime change efforts there. Azerbaijan, one of “the most geopolitically important of the small Eurasian states,” located as it is between Russia and Iran and constituting the only route between Europe and Central Asia, makes much more sense for Western attention. As does Kazakhstan, “the regional leader of the smaller Central Asian states” and one with “a deliberate multivectored foreign policy.” Currently, both Russia and China have more influence there than the West does, but the government is open to Western influence precisely in order to avoid subordination to the nearer great powers. 

With its major undeveloped energy resources, Turkmenistan “forms a natural gateway between the Caspian Sea and the rest of Central and South Asia and China.” Moreover, “a nonradical, more commercial, better governed Turkmenistan would add to the pressure on the Iranian regime. Unfortunately, “it is increasingly becoming Beijing’s most powerful pawn in the Caspian,” given its status as the source of supply for China’s energy demands. As the most industrialized of the Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan is a potential field for Western investment.

In southeastern Europe, Turkey has substantial ambitions of its own in Eurasia, “something that is ultimately to the West’s advantage if not mishandled through historical or racial prejudice,” given the centuries of encroachment practiced by the long-defunct Ottoman Empire. It can be “better integrate[d]” into the West by offering it EU membership (France, Germany, and Austria have opposed this), with a reciprocal agreement from Turkey to open the Turkish Straits to NATO and U.S. warships, especially in view of Russian dominance of the Black Sea subsequent to the Russian fleet’s presence at Crimea. “Europe is at grave geopolitical risk should Turkey become a Middle Eastern- or Russia-Iran-orientated power.” For its part, Georgia “is, and will remain, the needle’s eye through which the West must pass to reach the Caspian and Central Asia.” With its neighbor, Azerbaijan, Georgia forms a link from Europe to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. It is “the most anti-Russian actor in the Caucasus and, indeed, of all the small Eurasian states,” thanks to Russia’s annexation of the northern portion of the country in 2008. Finally, Armenia, isolated and “estranged from its neighbors” (still alienated from Turkey since the massacre of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915), might be brought closer to the West if that tension could finally be resolved. “Armenia’s large, well-educated, and very successful diaspora is a wasting asset while the country retains its current Russian-Iranian geopolitical orientation.”

To the north, Mongolia “is a democratic success story in Eurasian terms and contrasts favorably with Russia and China, which it is sandwiched between.”  It has substantial mineral assets and a solid manufacturing base, selling most of its products to China. Having emerged first from Chinese rule in the early 1920s, then from Soviet domination after the collapse of that empire in 1991, it concentrates its attention on staying out of East-West confrontation; prudently, it has its main Western trading partner neutral Switzerland. 

Petersen is optimistic about Western prospects in this decidedly mixed bag. While upholding a policy of political independence for these states, he hopes for increased economic integration. “The EU has a highly dynamic role to play in integrating the smaller Eurasian states, both among themselves and with the West,” thanks to its status as a free trade association. Several “transport corridors” between Europe and East Asia already exist, although it must be noted that the Northern Distribution Network’s roads and railroads run through Russia and the Modern Silk Road depends for its viability on a stable Afghanistan—neither situation being a cloudless sky.

Accordingly, Petersen puts most of his chips on the third dimension of his policy, political institutions. “Unlike Russian or Chinese nationalism many Western institutions, the EU and NATO foremost among them, stand for a set of values” that actually have some universal appeal. “One does not need to be a so-called neoconservative to support the agenda of democracy promotion—it is right to advocate what is simply the best system of government available.” To do so will take time, when dealing with nations that have “no history” of republican government. That “lengthy, incremental process [is] not one that should be doted upon to the detriment of spreading trade and other aspects of good governance.” Unlike the Russian and Chinese regimes, Western alliances are not coerced alliances. Their actions “do not represent unwilling empires or…hegemons but are, in fact, clubs”—a fact seen when a country decides to depart from them, as France did from NATO in the 1960s and Britain would do from the EU in 2020. “This is the West’s great advantage in Eurasia.” Promoting practices of good governance through “institutional links” is “best achieved not through criticism of human rights or electoral procedures but rather through the gradual process of growing functional links with, and institution-building in Eurasian states.” The rule of law and investment are reciprocal drivers of such links, along with education, which can “inculcate a better understanding of Western values.” 

Petersen concludes by remarking that “the overbearing influence of…geography remains undiminished and from this emerges the land’s timeless politics.” Although “it is tempting for the West to respond” to Russian and Chinese dominance of the Heartland of the World Island “with an act of retrenchment,” the “wise course is in fact quite the opposite.” The Western powers have proved “increasingly ignorant of what stands to be lost and indeed gained by their strategy in Eurasia,” and that ignorance will prove increasingly unblissful. “It is in Eurasia that the West’s level of involvement will determine its geopolitical prowess and eventual survival.” The West should pursue a policy of containment and of engagement “to secure the partnership of Russia’s former satellites before China does the same on terms much more disadvantageous for the West and those small states themselves.” I can do so by demonstrating “that it can provide an alternative to the Russo-Chinese system of authoritarian government as a way of ensuring sovereignty.” Emphasis added.

 

 

 

Sean McKeekin: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. New York: Basic Books, 2023.

 

By the early 1990s, many assumed that communism had gone away. The Soviet empire had collapsed; Russia itself seemed well on the way to regime change; the ‘People’s Republic’ of China appeared to be moving toward becoming an actual republic ruled by the people. Commercial republicanism/liberal democracy stood firm. But by the 2020s, “liberal democracy seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese Communism rapidly assimilates much of the world.” “How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?”

The “why” isn’t hard to see. The optimists were deluded by their own wishful thinking, aided by Chinese deception. Within the republican regimes themselves, the Left shifted away from the standard appeals to ‘justice for the working man’ toward cultural-Marxist calls for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’—a shape-shifting that caught their opponents off-guard. The “how” is more interesting.

“Much as we like to imagine that Communism failed because of a cascading groundswell of heroic popular opposition from below, it was actually the disappearance of coercion from above that counted,” since “more than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.” Communism had advanced only through disasters—World War I, the Great Depression, World War II—which had weakened its enemies, changing the relative power equation between Communists and their enemies. “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism,” to cite the first example of a successful Communist regime change, “was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation war to seize power by force—if the devastation was severe enough, and if they armed enough fanatics and foot soldiers to prevail over their opponents.” The supply of fanatics and foot soldiers renews itself with every generation, as a certain number of youths engage in their own characteristic form of wishful thinking, “dream[ing] of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice.'”

Although communism as an ideal is espoused in Plato’s Republic (albeit without social equality and likely with Socratic irony), and Christianity upheld equality of believers before God, and although Rousseau’s Social Contract, distorted, had inspired Robespierre and the Terror, it was Rousseau’s contemporary, a tax official and teacher named Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, whose Code of Nature convinced an erstwhile land surveyor and political scribbler, François-Noël Babeuf to publish a newspaper, Le Tribun du Peuple, in which he defended the late Robespierre as a “sincere patriot” and founded a still more radical organization, the “Conspiracy of Equals.” These egalitarians attempted to turn soldiers, former soldiers, and police against the regime of the Directory. Babeuf eschewed utopianism, rejecting any “assumption…that a government could be overthrown, that property could be seized and redistributed, without ruthless organization and cleansing revolutionary violence.” He and his close associates were arrested and guillotined by the Directory regime in 1797; Napoleon went on to suppress France’s “last revolutionary embers” during and immediately after his 1799 coup d’état. Utopian socialists, and utopians only, were tolerated for the next several decades, with such men as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier enjoying some popularity; it was Henri Leroux, a Saint-Simonian, who coined the word socialisme. “While its meaning was somewhat vague at first, during the years of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) ‘socialism’ caught on among radicals hoping the next revolution would bring about more equal social conditions.” It was during this regime when Pierre Proudhon asserted that property is theft. (A decade later, the liberal Fredéric Bastiat, would reply that the income tax was theft, and the struggle among the ideologues was on.)

Karl Marx would be far more consequential than any of these. Marx rejected natural right altogether, having been decisively shaped by Hegel’s historicism. Marx took Hegel’s “eschatological ‘dialectic,'” whereby the course of events was taken to advance toward ever-increasing human ‘consciousness’—seen concretely in the conquest of nature, the reshaping of nature for human purposes—via a set of conflicts—conflicts of ideas, sentiments, nations—and made it entirely materialistic. Hence Marxian ‘dialectical materialism’: neither materialism nor historical dialectic (much less dialectic itself) were new, but their combination was. As early as 1845, Marx wrote, famously, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It is of course arguable that any number of previous philosophers had indeed both interpreted and changed the world, indeed that the very existence of philosophy had changed the world, but Marx means that there should no longer be any sharp distinction between theory and practice—that thinking, being only an operation of the brain within a given set of economic and social circumstances, itself fully participated in ongoing material changes, functioning at most as clarifying spur to advance history’s dialectic. 

The way forward, he claimed was to form “a social class that did not even exist”—a class, in Marx’s words, “in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes,” one that would make war not on this or that social wrong but on “wrong in general.” This class, the “proletariat,” will demand “the negation of private property” and thereby effect “the dissolution of the existing social order,” which Marx called “capitalism.” In this project, he continued, “Philosophy is the head,” while “the proletariat is its heart.” While the actual industrial and agricultural workers of his time wanted reforms, not revolution, Marx pressed on, writing that the working class will someday “substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called.” That this “total revolution” will require violence—doing and dying, “bloody struggle or extinction”—a dialectic of force—became clear in his Communist Manifesto, published a year before the European-wide revolution of 1848; “the timing of its release was exquisite.” But although the French monarchy was indeed overthrown, the Second Republic didn’t last long; Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had won its presidency and then staged a coup d’état three years later, renaming himself Napoleon III, head of the Second Empire. Marx and his friend-collaborator Friedrich Engels fled Paris for London, where enemies of the French tended to be welcomed, or at least tolerated. When his efforts to sustain a “Communist League” failed, he “return[ed] to his true métier, which was not politics as such but political writing.” The result was Capital.

In that tome, Marx claimed that the complexity of modern political economies, in which barter had been replaced by industrial production by wage laborers, had caused the “alienation” of workers from the products they made; the man on the assembly line might never see the ‘end product’ of his work; further, the industrialists’ policy of breaking labor down into its simplest components, which could be performed by machines, women, and children, lowered the wages they needed to pay the men, “immiserating” them as individuals and the workers as a class. “Marxist economics are a zero-sum game. Growth brings only ever more alienated and impoverished workers.” Industrialists are financed by bankers, who provide them with “capital.” Capital moves easily across political borders; it is international. Capitalism and its ruinous treatment of workers “will engulf the whole earth.” But, thanks to the dialectic of history, this circumstance will enrage the workers, sharpen their “consciousness” of their dilemma, while simultaneously increasing their numbers. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument,” Marx writes. “The integument is burst asunder,” as “the knell of private property sounds” and “the expropriators are expropriated.” McKeekin remarks that Marx’s thesis “was completely demolished by developments [in Britain] over the next few decades,” but (paradoxically, given his materialism) “his moral critique of the unequal returns to capital was and remains plausible enough to sympathetic readers.”

Marx returned to political organizing in the 1860s, now with more success. In his “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” he stressed the importance of “foreign policy” in the proletarian struggle, the “bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries.” And indeed branches of his organization were founded in several European countries, with the French chapter quickly becoming the largest. Marx remained, as he put it, “in fact the head of the whole business.” Although such organizing was useful as preparation for action, it wasn’t legislation or strikes that proved to be “the critical event in the history” of the First International, but the Franco-Prussian War, which ended French domination on the continent and ended the Second Empire. The Paris Commune, a socialist if not Marxist affair, briefly took control of the capital, with Marx calling it “a new point of departure of world historical importance,” although the newly inaugurated forces of the Third Republic quickly crushed the Communards. Marx turned the repression to rhetorical advantage, averring that it had exposed the “undistinguished savagery and lawless revenge” behind the bourgeoisie’s supposed “civilization and justice.” “The very attacks on the Paris Commune, to Marx’s dialectical mind, proved its worth,” as it had proven that Communism could come to power. “Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized world,” to be “forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new societies,” it “martyrs enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” “In fact”: scientific socialism. “Martyrs”: very much like the early Christian Church, minus God. The head and the heart, the Marxist philosophy and proletarian sentiment, combined.

Factions existed within the International itself. The Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, led the most influential one that opposed Marx. Marx’s continued residence in London began “to seem suspect to more hardened revolutionaries facing arrest and prosecution on the Continent.” He responded to the dissenters by imposing “a more rigid and centralized administrative structure,” itself a move sure to antagonize the anarchists still further. Anarchism being resistant to organization of any sort, Marx had the edge. Bakunin was expelled, his followers denigrated as sectarians. Marx “won the day” within the International, although Bakunin intensified his polemical assaults, condemning “the stale and lifeless Germanic quality of Marxism,” which, he predicted will “serve as obedient and even willing agents of the inhumane and illiberal measures prescribed by their governments.” Marxists, he rightly noted, are “the most impassioned friends of state power.” In coming to rule they will only dominate “yet another proletariat” with a “new rule” under a “new state.” As soon as the workers rule, they will no longer be workers; “anyone who doubts this is not at all familiar with human nature.” That, of course, is the nerve of the dilemma: Marxists deny the existence of a stable human nature, claiming instead that what is called human nature is malleable, capable of radical reformation if social and economic conditions are radically reformed. Bakunin went on to say that the actual rulers under Communism so-called quite possibly would not be workers at all but the “scientific socialists” or “philosophers”—men like Marx himself, “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world” who will, as Marx has shown in his rule of the International, “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision,” a “new privileged scientific and political ruling class,” “concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production.” Yes, Marxists intend to overthrow “existing governments and regimes,” but only “so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” By the 1870s, Marx disbanded his organization, recognizing that the time wasn’t conducive to revolution, that capitalism had years more to run. He rightly calculated that, like the Paris Commune, the First International would eventually be judged “heroic failures,” “legends to inspire future generations” of socialists. But then again, Bakunin’s predictions about the character of future Communist regimes also ‘came true.’

“To Marx, it was more important that the doctrine was sound than that the organization outlive him.” When German socialists formed the German Social Democratic Party, producing the Gotha Program (named after their founding congress at Gotha, Thuringia in 1875), Marx went on the attack. His Critique of the Gotha Program excoriated the democratic socialists for their “pernicious and demoralizing” bows to liberalism, including parliamentarism. On the contrary, the “period of revolutionary transformation” must consist of “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” with no serious alliances with bourgeois elements, compromises typical of parliamentary log-rolling. When the SPD won nearly twenty percent of the vote in the 1890 election, making it the top vote-getter, Marx gave up on the Germans and began to focus on Russia, just before the radical members of that party, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, dedicated Marxists, turned the party away from the Gotha Program and toward “Marxist orthodoxy” in the Erfurt Program of 1891, which “was based on the Verelendung (immiseration) thesis of ever-deepening inequality and class conflict.” Practically, this meant a turn from efforts to improve working conditions for proletarians in Germany to use the “size and prestige” of the SPD “to set the ideological agenda for the international socialist movement.” In France, for example, Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue teamed with another Marxist, Jules Guesde, top form the French Workers’ Party, which was similarly internationalist. “The very idea of international coordination of doctrine ran against the needs of nationally or regionally focused reform movements, which must, after all, be particular to their local circumstances,” but this amounted to small potatoes to the real Marxist, who formed the Second International at a congress in Paris in 1889. 

Factionalism again hobbled the movement. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein, “the closest intellectual heir of Marx and Engels,” who had co-written the Erfurt Program with Engels, began to deviate from the master’s doctrine precisely because, in attempting to be a good scientific socialist, he saw that the facts of 1890s did not support the immiseration thesis. The claim “that capital was accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, and classes were being melted down into an ever poorer proletarianized ‘mass’ was not happening.” In fact (to borrow one of Marx’s phrases), industrial organization and ever-improving technology correlated with higher wages for the workers. The average worker’s life had improved, culminating with his rise better “from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citizen” with civic rights. Meanwhile, agricultural workers showed no interest in collectivized farming, preferring “to get their own land.” Liebknecht and Bebel were appalled. “Islam was invincible as long as it believed in itself,” Liebknecht wrote, “but the moment it began to compromise…it ceased to be a conquering force.” Similarly, “Socialism can neither conquer nor save the world if it ceases to believe in itself.” For the hard-core Communists, the secular religiosity of Communism trumped Marxian ‘science,’ although not intentionally, inasmuch as they continued to assert the scientific status of Marx’s doctrine. 

At the Fourth Congress of the Second International in 1900, the two sides papered over the dispute by admitting socialist participation in “bourgeois” governments to be “permissible only as a temporary expedient, adopted in exceptional cases under the force of circumstance.” Bernstein’s Revisionism was rejected. The now-prominent French socialist Jean Jaurès joined with the Russian, Karl Kautsky, declaring, “We are all good revolutionaries; let us make that clear and let us unite!”—echoing Marx’s call at the end of the Manifesto, nearly a half-century earlier. This earned him the condemnation of Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg, German socialists who called him “the Great Corrupter.” By 1903, the Germans had won, and Jaurès, outwardly pliant but “quietly seething,” told a Belgian colleague, “I think, my friend, that I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.” That is, he foresaw the possibility of national warfare, a war in which German socialists and French socialists would fight for their countries and the Second International would die. 

“The Russian Revolution of 1905 injected new urgency to the question of how socialists might respond to a war between European powers.” Once again, it was war, the stunning defeat of Russia by an Asian power, Japan, that weakened an existing regime sufficiently to render it potentially vulnerable to revolutionary action. However, the socialists in Russia were split between the Leninist, “Bolshevik” (i.e., “Majority”) faction and Julius Martov’s “Menshevik” (“Minority”) faction. Both of these men were in exile when regime troops shot several hundred people in St. Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, 1905. The ensuing labor walkout induced Czar Nicholas II to convene a Russian parliament, the Duma, which legalized labor unions. Rosa Luxemburg endorsed the workers’ revolt, observing that in the “backward” conditions of Russia, “the mass strike” could indeed prove effective, resulting in parliamentarism—which, in backward Russia if not in advanced Germany or France, could be accepted on Marxist grounds. Internationally, the 1905 revolution also induced a recalculation for Jaurès and the French; Russia was an ally of France, providing a needed counterweight to powerful Germany. With Russia now the vanguard of the socialist movement, French socialists could turn pacifist, passing a resolution to resist militarism “by all means” in an attempt to contain the German socialists. “The problem was that absent precise international coordination, any country” that tried to imitate the Russian example of the general strike in, for example, munitions factories or the railways “would consign itself to a crushing defeat from an enemy that suffered no such disruption.” The German Bebel frankly acknowledged this. “Do not fool yourselves,” he told an English delegate to the 1907 Congress in Stuttgart; in the event of war, every German Social-Democrat would “shoulder his rifle and march to the French frontier.” As another SPD delegate remarked, more mildly, “It is not true that workers have no Fatherland. The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good Germans.” A few years later, it didn’t. And in France, poor Jaurès died from a bullet shot by a French nationalist, in July 1914, symbolizing the death of French pacifism among French socialists and indeed “the failure of the pacifist wing of the Second International to prevent the outbreak of European war in August.”

Ever-calculating Lenin hoped that the coming war would hasten the collapse of capitalism. He aimed “to transform politics into warfare” and warfare into politics, now that the bourgeois ruling class had armed their proletarians to fight what he deemed their “imperial war.” After all, previous great-power wars had been “progressive,” accelerating “the development of mankind by helping to destroy the most harmful and reactionary” social institutions (slavery, serfdom) and moderating “the most barbarous despotisms” (Russia, Turkey). Urging socialist soldiers to mutiny, he encouraged a policy of “revolutionary defeatism,” whereby proletarian soldiers would turn their weapons “against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.” To do so, the socialists must take advantage of their wartime bonds with fellow soldiers, working to indoctrinate them. And would not mothers of soldiers join the movement? After all, in the Paris Commune they had fought “side by side with the men.” Moving still further, Lenin published his pamphlets, Socialism and War and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in 1916, broadening his call for revolt to colonized peoples worldwide, another front in his envisioned war of workers of the world against international capitalism. “Lenin was prophesying—endorsing and promoting, basically—a whole age of unending armed conflict, of imperialist wars and civil wars and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggle, one war begetting another in a global bonfire of violence as Marx’s prophesy from Das Kapital came true and the ‘expropriators were expropriated.'”

That didn’t happen worldwide, but Russia was another matter. The Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the February Revolution of 1917, when the Czar abdicated in the face of socialist agitation and the mutiny of a Petrograd garrison. Lenin proceeded from his exile in Switzerland through Germany not in the fabled ‘sealed train’ but with full cognizance of the German government, which provided them with an escort. Germans calculated that Lenin would further disrupt the Russian war effort, and so he did, although he got a lot more out of that than the Germans did. 

“In his view of politics as sublimated warfare, Lenin reduced revolution to its Marxist essence: Who had more men under arms, the government or its enemies?” By October 1917, Lenin saw that his Bolsheviks had more members under arms than the government did, in Moscow and, a bit later, St. Petersburg. “There was nothing secret or unsuspected about the Bolshevik putsch.” The post-czarist government was weak. “While much of European Russia, and nearly all of Asiatic Russia beyond the Urals, remained outside of Bolshevik control, with the capture of Russia’s two capital cities [i.e., Moscow and St. Petersburg] and Russian military headquarters in the October Revolution Lenin’s Bolsheviks had raised high the red flag.” They did so at a cost. In their peace settlement with Germany, the Communists ceded 1.3 million square miles, a quarter of its territory, on which 44 percent of its population lived, to the temporarily victorious Kaiser Reich.

Marxism hangs its theoretical-practical hat on economics, and it was there that the Soviet Union experienced its most signal failures, immediately. Lenin quickly established the Supreme Council of the National Economy (later renamed the State Planning Commission or Gosplan. “The planned economy” rapidly went out of control—that is, out of the control of people who had owned property and knew how to manage it. “Economic indices, already trending down, declined still more precipitously despite rampant inflation caused by runaway money printing.” In response, the planners effectively attempted to abolish money itself, imposing rationing and banning money payments for rent and fuel. Once they understood that “economic activity of any kind was impossible” without currency, they recurred to the gold standard, that symbol of apex capitalism. But by 1920, industrial production had fallen to eighteen percent of the prewar level.

Russia thus not only shared in the postwar economic depression, starvation, and disease that afflicted Europe but all of these things were exacerbated by the Communists’ bungling. Some five million Russians and Ukrainians died in 1921. Without the aid of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, the Red Cross, and other, ahem, bourgeois charities, which shipped and distributed more than two million tons of food and seed to Soviet Russia, Lenin’s regime might have fallen in its turn. But by 1922 the famine had ceased, and the influenza epidemic was over. Lenin continued his regime building with “a monopoly over the press, education, culture and Russian intellectual life more broadly.” The Marxist war on the family was implemented, with easy divorce and the first European law permitting abortion. Civil war between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites” (not czarists, as the Leninists pretended, but partisans of republicanism), the latter aided by the European republics and the United States, gave cover for substantial purges, the extent of which McKeekin does not attempt to calculate.

Meanwhile, the short-lived Communist takeover of Hungary saw similar ruling procedures. Under People’s Commissioner for Education György Lukács, sex education was introduced in the primary schools as a part of his aim to rid his country of “‘bourgeois’ morals on monogamy, premarital sex, and female chastity.” Although this attempt at what he called “revolutionary destruction,” the “one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” died with the regime, it was transferred to “the avant-garde Marxists of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (the ‘Frankfurt School’)” and eventually landed in the West “by way of Frankfurt School disciples such as Herbert Marcuse and Charles Reich.” Lenin sent Soviet troops across Romania in what turned out to be a futile attempt to shore up the Hungarian Communists. He also invaded Poland, nearly taking Warsaw before Polish troops under the command of General Józef Pilsudski, outnumbered nearly two-to-one, drove them back to Ukraine.

Lenin died in January 1924. Before doing so, he initiated two important policies. The first, internal, measure, the New Economic Policy, was intended to strengthen the still-weak Soviet economy by loosening state controls over business without relinquishing Party rule. The second, foreign, policy was support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang, a modernizing armed party that had overthrown the Qing Dynasty. By then, it was fighting against rival warlord armies; Lenin backed them in the hopes of infiltrating the organization with his own agents—the first example of what would become known as a ‘united front’ or ‘popular front’ strategy.

Lenin called his NEP a temporary (if likely to be long-lasting) instance of what he termed, in his ever-inventive rhetoric, “state capitalism.” Money was readmitted, replacing rationing. This “was a painful compromise for the Communist party, a constant reminder of failure,” a concession to bourgeois decadence. Leon Trotsky himself detested it. Stalin eliminated him, along with other rivals for power, but he faced a problem: the NEP and its administrators, the “nepmen,” detested by hard-core Communists, were becoming too successful, their leader, Nikoli Bukharin, too powerful. “Who would vanquish whom, Communism or private capital?” A very bad harvest 1927 harvest served as a pretext for getting rid of the nepmen; after collectivizing agriculture, Stalin ordered the secret police to arrest nearly 2.7 million, throwing them into the newly founded Gulag to endure forced labor. Collectivization spurred peasant resistance; reviving Lenin’s term kulak for disobedient peasants, Stalin initiated a terror campaign consisting of grain confiscations and public hangings. He also ramped up “the confiscation of Church valuables with” (as he put it) “the most rabid and merciless energy.” Yet the resistance continued, with some 8,000 peasant revolts and protest in the first quarter of 1930; in response, the Politburo decreed the “elimination of kulaks as a class.” The population of the Gulag swelled still further. But by killing or imprisoning “the most productive peasant smallholders” and appropriating their lands and produce, Stalin brought down the Great Famine of 1932-33. “Cannibalism was commonly observed” and duly reported to Stalin by the secret police. In Ukraine alone, where the event is remembered as the Holodomor or “Terror-Famine,” “at least 3 million or 4 million victims starved to death, often in gruesome conditions.” In Kazakhstan, with its sparser population, two million starved. All of this coincided with Stalin’s drive to industrialize; he ordered confiscated grain to be sold abroad in order to fund his first Five-Year Plan. He retained other grain supplies to feed the factory workers, “even while deported Russian and Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ and Central Asian nomads, like the nepmen before them, furnished an almost bottomless supply of forced labor for Stalin’s industrialization drive.” McKeekin duly remarks that Western capitalist firms designed the industrial plants, a point acknowledged in an official Soviet history published in 1933, which called the Five-Year Plan “a combination of American business and science with Bolshevik wisdom.” 

Bolshevik wisdom continued on its rampage, as “Stalin found yet more categories of people to punish for his regime’s failures.” The years 1936-38 saw an even greater terror campaign, now called “the Great Terror,” which saw the show trials and ‘purge’ of Communist Party members themselves, those whom Stalin deemed insufficiently fanatical. “Whether out of party loyalty, a sense of guilt for their own role in terrorizing the country, or because they had been tortured in the notorious cells of the Lubyanka prison, defendants invariably confessed all” and faced what Stalin termed “death by shooting.” Ever inventive, Stalin’s Bolshevik wisdom extended the possibility of the death penalty to minors down to the age of twelve, enabling the Man of Steel “to threaten political opponents with the murder of their children, in case guilt and torture were not enough to induce show-trial confessions.” 

McKeekin finds in these atrocities “a certain logic endemic to Communism.” After all, “until the planned economic utopia was achieved, those standing in the way might become casualties in the war between Soviet Communism and its enemies, be they ‘capitalist’ agents, spies of ‘imperialist’ powers, industrial ‘wreckers,’ saboteurs, or mere troublemakers.” When the 1937 census numbers “came in 15 million lower than expected,” Stalin simply ordered the census board members arrested for their act of “treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR.” Communism ruled its subjects by force and spread its regime abroad also “by force of arms.” 

All the while, the Soviet Union enjoyed substantial prestige, around the world. To many, the Great Depression seemed capitalism’s death rattle, the rise of Nazism in the heart of Europe its reductio ad malorem. Sympathetic ‘fellow travelers’ toured Russia, visiting carefully constructed and organized ‘Potemkin villages,’ steered away from the sites of mass murder and squalor. This led many on the Left in the republics to form the Popular Front, the ‘one big Left’ opposed to fascism. “The Popular Front was a godsend,” McKeekin chooses the word with a certain irony, “for Soviet foreign relations,” not least in the United States, where “the once-tiny Communist Part USA, or CPUSA, received instructions from Moscow about the new ‘Popular Front’ doctrine,” including an order to stop calling Franklin Roosevelt a fascist. The New Dealers relaxed their guard, as Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles removed “Stalin-phobes” from the State Department’s East European Affairs Division. Soviet espionage in the United States and in Great Britain enjoyed what should have been a predictable uptick. Meanwhile, Spain and France saw the Left win national elections in 1936, sparking civil war in Spain and another ’cause’ for the Popular Front to back. The Spanish Left had founded a supposedly republican regime, but its two premiers were Communists—a “facade of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy” with “shadowy Communist advisers and agents—some Spanish, some foreign European, some Soviet Russian—rul[ing] behind the scenes.” 

Stalin himself had no problem in forging a not-so-popular ‘front’ with the Nazis, negotiating arms deals with Hitler’s regime at the same time the anti-Communist ‘fascists’ in Spain, led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco and indeed backed by the Nazis, were defeating the Stalin-backed regime there. Most notoriously, Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Poland between them. This shocked many of the fellow travelers, and when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, even many French Communists deserted the Party, a bit too late. But with Hitler on the rampage, Soviet territorial acquisitions in Central Europe were downplayed in the Western media. And not only land grabs but regime change, Soviet-style, as Stalin ordered the deaths of more than 25,000 Polish military officers and other officials; their wives and children were deported to “special labor camps” in Kazakhstan. Intimidated, the rulers of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania quickly submitted to Stalin’s dictates, with the usual purges immediately following. Hitler was not amused and began to prepare for war with the Soviet Union; Stalin saw it, prepared for the assault but eventually found that his preparations were inadequate to fend off the initial German assault, which came in June 1941. A timely troop transfer from Siberia (made possible by Soviet intel, which showed that the soldiers wouldn’t be needed against Japan, whose rulers intended to attack the United States, not Russia); American Lend-Lease aid; the same ‘General Winter’ that had ruined Napoleon’s army in the previous century; brutal ‘discipline’ of Russian subjects by the secret police; and “Stalin’s courageous decision to stay in Moscow,” strengthening morale, prevented a crushing defeat, at the cost of tens of millions dead. The 1944 victory in alliance with the Western republics restored worldwide esteem for the Soviet regime, as “the Great Patriotic War was both the finest moment of Soviet history, the one unquestionable geopolitical achievement Communists everywhere could claim as their own, and the movement’s most harrowing and near-fatal episode.” “Oblivious to both horrendous NKVD disciplinary measures and the Lend-lease story, which was little reported at the time, many Westerners generously credited Stalin and his government with the victory.” The fact that “Communist fortunes still depended on military force—on the successes and failures of the Red Army and its clients” and not so much on economic performance or Bolshevik wisdom—went largely unnoticed.

Further, in Central Europe the Soviets were seen as liberators, at first. This soon changed, since “the use of both industrial property and slave labor as ‘reparations in kind’ [for their alliances with the Nazis] had actually been codified into the Yalta agreement of February 1945, approved by both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and Stalin was not shy about exploiting either resource.” Germany alone supplied almost two million slave laborers to the Soviet Union. Stalin exacted some one million slaves from smaller Romania. Even Bulgaria, which had refused to offer troops to supplement the Nazi forces in Russia, suffered a “wave of Communist Terror” and subjected to collectivization of its agriculture in “a small-scale Holodomor.” By 1949, “the ‘people’s democracies’ were thoroughly Stalinized, with nearly identical secret police forces, all thoroughly penetrated by and loyal to their Soviet handlers, answering to the Comintern-esque ‘Cominform’ in Moscow, and with state-planed economies that had production targets and mandatory trade quotas coordinated…in the USSR via the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comcon).” When the United States and its allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, this served as a useful pretext to maintain the tightness of the screws. [1]

In China, what would prove an even more momentous and enduring Communist revolution followed the war. Previously, the Kuomintang regime under Chiang Kai-Shek had kept Mao Zedong’s Communists underground, following their failed uprising in 1927. Stalin had lost interest in promoting such things there, worrying more about Japan’s imperial moves in neighboring Manchuria. At the same time, however, the invasion helped the Chinese Communists because it forced Chiang to deploy forces to his northern border, taking the pressure off them. This proved temporary; another military campaign against the Communists drove them on the “Long March” to northeastern China, next to the Soviet Mongolian Republic. Seven thousands of 200,000 Communists survived the ordeal. But when Japan invaded in 1937, “it was the Nationalists who did the fighting and dying against Japan, not the Communists,” who “observed from the sidelines.” In 1944, Stalin obtained Lend-Lease equipment for a major incursion into Asia,” where the United States and its allies were still fighting, even as the Nazi regime had been brought down. This enabled Stalin’s army to liberate Manchuria, not the Nationalists. The Kuomintang, America, and Britain “had spent four years softening up Japan’s forces”; the Soviets lost relatively few men in exchange for the victory. “Stalin had played his cards perfectly,” proving once again that Bolshevik wisdom worked better in war than in peace.

President Harry Truman—the man who, with great good fortune, had replaced Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president, averting the debacle of saddling the United States with a Communist sympathizer as president, upon FDR’s death—understood the threat Stalin posed in Europe and the United States, but not his machinations in China. Stalin made a show out of recognizing the Nationalist government while putting his forces in control of a naval base at two ports, “giving [him] control over Manchurian communications with the outside world.” He also exacted pledges from Mao to end the civil war and form a unity government with Chiang, neither of which Mao had any intention to keep. Nor did Stalin want him to. He supplied his ally with a raft of military equipment and told him to “expand towards the north.” “By October 1945. “Manchuria, the richest and most industrialized region in China, was likely lost for good to the Chinese national government, owing to Soviet wiles and American naïveté,” while Stalin, never won to ignore a quid pro quo, stripped the country of “almost $900 million worth of good and equipment.” As to a promise made to Chiang to withdraw Soviet troops three months after the end of the war—well, no.

No less naïve than Truman, United States Army Chief of Staff George Marshall visited China in an attempt “to establish a coalition government between Chiang and Mao—two mortal political enemies whose civil war had just bloodily resumed.” Inanely, Truman had warned Chiang that US aid to his government would be cut off if it were used to fight Mao. As a result, “by 1947, the proxy conflict in China was wholly one-sided: Stalin provided Mao with whatever he needed in Manchuria…while the United States forbade Chiang to use American arms to defend his government against the Communists.” That is, even as the US administration announced its “Truman Doctrine,” committing aid to support “free peoples” against “Communist subversion or armed aggression,” that policy was ignored in China. By the time Truman saw what was happening it was too late. The “People’s Liberation Army” took Beijing in January 1949; “so rapid was the advance of Mao’s Communist armies that Stalin himself was taken aback,” worried that a strong Communist China with its capital at great distance from the Soviet Union might well spin out of his control. Too late for him, too. Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the end of the year, soon invading Tibet and sending troops into Korea to aid the Communists there and initiating the usual campaign of state-sponsored terror at home. As for “the cultural sphere, Mao channeled Hitler more than Stalin,” launching an “anti-intellectual thought-reform campaign” which “saw public book burnings so colossal that they were measured by the volume,” with 237 metric tons of books “torched” in Shanghai alone. These were replaced by more suitable ideological fare under the slogan, “Learn from the Soviet Union.” 

Mao cannot be said to have mellowed in subsequent years. During a 1957 trip to Moscow, “he hinted that the ultimate goal was for the Communist world to win a world war with the capitalist powers—a war that, he predicted with curious confidence, would kill ‘a third,’ or ‘if it is a little higher it could be half,’ of the world’s population, which he reckoned at ‘2.7 billion people.'” Not to worry: as he put it, “imperialism would be erased, the whole world will become socialist” and “after a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again.”

Meanwhile, in lieu of that prospect, Mao launched his program of forced industrialization, the “Great Leap Forward.” He took a similarly long view of things, coining still another slogan, “Three Years of Hard Work Is Ten Thousand Years of Happiness.” Here, the calculation was “one dead worker for each million cubic meters of soil removed”; at that rate, one of his minions remarked, I can “move 30 billion cubic meters” at the expense of a mere 30,000 dead. In the event, some 45 million Chinese died by famine in the years 1958-1962, although the Chinese Communist Party admits only 20 million. This was too much even for the reigning Soviet tyrant, Nikita Khruschev, who ventured to criticize the “Leap,” even as he had criticized some of Stalin’s excesses in his well-publicized “Secret Speech” at a Communist Party Congress, a few years earlier. “Of course,” McKeekin notes, “what most animated Khruschev and his audience” at that point “was not Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people as such, but his treatment of Communists.” That was going too far.

As far as Mao was concerned, Khruschev was the one who had gone too far. His laxity had inspired rebellion against the Communist regimes in Hungary and East Berlin. Stalemated in Europe, Khruschev pushed into the newly-christened ‘Third World’ in the wake of declining French, Dutch, and British imperialism there. He supported Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, Castro in Cuba, and Communist movements throughout Latin America. After Khruschev himself was deposed by his fellow Politburo members, the Soviets continued these efforts. By the 1970s, the future of Communism looked bright, even if the Sino-Soviet rift widened.

The Chinese regime successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1964 and launched the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966. This time, the Soviet Union was no longer the model, Mao having published his “Little Red Book” not of Bolshevik but of Maoist wisdom a couple of years earlier. Chinese youth, organized as the “Red Guards,” killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Chinese while brandishing this new bible, despite the protestations of Leonid Brezhnev, now head of the Soviet Politburo. Mao also funded Pol Pot, the Cambodian Communist Party leader whose Red Guard equivalents eventually murdered something like a quarter to a third of all Cambodians—in terms of percentage of population, the worst genocide in modern history. Most Western historians blamed North Vietnam and the United States for igniting the catastrophe by their conduct in the ongoing Vietnam War, “ignoring the Chinese role entirely.”

Back in the West, the United States and its allies attempted to blunt Soviet advances with the policy of détente, initially proposed by French president Charles de Gaulle in the mid-1960s. It didn’t work because regimes finally determine policy, foreign as well as domestic, and the Soviet regime didn’t change. “The only real price Brezhnev paid for détente was Western scrutiny of certain Soviet human rights abuses,” about which it lacked the power to do much. Détente did lead to an even more futile policy of entente conceived by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt; his Ostpolitik resulted primarily in an increase of spying and bribery by East Germany in West Germany.

While undermining the republics, European Communists talked peace. “The crowning jewel of Soviet peace propaganda was the ‘nuclear freeze movement’ that swept across Western Europe and the United States in the early 1980s.” The election of the strongly anti-Communist Ronald Reagan to the presidency provoked “fears and anxieties…about the terrifying prospect of nuclear war” among many, so it wasn’t as though the campaign had no genuine support in the West, “but when the Soviet archives were opened in 1991 it was revealed that the campaign was also highly organized and funded by the Kremlin” to a tune of almost $600 million—equivalent to $1.8 billion in 2023 dollars. The Politburo hoped “to lull Western Europeans to sleep as Moscow deployed a new arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 missiles targeting their capital cities, ideally causing a NATO split between the United States and its European allies, whose leaders might not trust that American presidents would really risk courting the obliteration of Washington, New York, Chicago, and other US cities with a retaliatory nuclear missile strike to defend Bonn, Paris, or London.” The nuclear freeze and the missile buildup, “we now know, were planned out together.” When the Reagan Administration rejected calls for the ‘freeze,’ and instead planned to station its own intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany, mass marches were staged in NATO capitals as well as Vienna and Stockholm. “None other than Ostpolitik designer Willy Brandt, who was corresponding regularly with Soviet officials about the nuclear freeze movement, headlined the…protests in Berlin.” That is, the Politburo had convinced millions of West Europeans (and not a few Americans) that blame for the supposedly impending nuclear holocaust lay not with “the regime whose deadly arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles were now aimed squarely at them…but rather the US government trying to defend them.” [2]

It all might have worked, had not the European nations ruled by the Communists not begun to ‘demonstrate’ even more impressively, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland. “Here was a general strike of the laboring masses against ‘proletarian dictatorship,’ giving the lie to the claim of Communists to rule in the name of the workers” in what Brezhnev, working himself up into a state of moral indignation, termed a “brazen challenge” aimed at “provok[ing] unrest in socialist countries and stir[ring] up grounds of all kinds of renegades.” While Bulgaria remained loyal (the daughter of the local tyrant there briefly became a feminist glamor girl, a sort of Eastern Bloc Gloria Steinem), this played better in the West than it did in the Middle East and Central Asia, “as the Soviets were about to discover in Afghanistan.” As to the West, however, Reagan won re-election in a landslide (primarily on the strength of the economy, which had rebounded from its 1970s doldrums), the Pershing missiles were installed, and the nuclear freeze movement, now defunded, deflated.

There had been “a time when [Afghanistan’s] capital, Kabul, was the shining hope of Communist modernizers,” as Afghanistan under King Ghazi Amanullah Khan “was one of the first foreign countries to recognize and signed a Treaty of Friendship with the USSR in 1921, which paved the way for decades of Soviet investment in the country,” continuing far beyond Khan’s abdication in 1929. Although the United States “made some inroads in Kabul in the 1950s” as part of its strategy of containing Soviet expansion, the war in Vietnam precluded any really effective engagement and the Soviets subsidized the newly-formed Afghan Communist Party, beginning in the mid-1960s. The Party staged a successful coup in 1978. But “like the British before them and the Americans after, the Soviets swiftly discovered that political coups or regime changes in Kabul did not necessarily register in the Afghan countryside,” with its ever-feuding tribes, many animated by fundamentalist forms of Islam. As in the 1920s, so in the 1970s and 1980s, the tribal chiefs declared jihad against the modernizers and their foreign backers. The Politburo decided to commit military specialists and KGB advisers in support of the Communist regime, subsequently sending in the Red Army, at a cost of some 1,700 dead every year. In reaction, the West paused détente, imposed economic sanctions, increased military spending (including the anti-missile missile system, called ‘Star Wars’ by its embattled domestic critics), and supported the jihadis. 

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In an attempt to “revitalize the Soviet economy in order to ramp up military spending (italics added), he introduced another Five-Year Plan,” which included perestroika or “reconstruction.” That is, he and his Politburo colleagues enacted a new version of the NEP. Although the economy never came close to matching the West in its production of consumer goods, its improvement did enable him to outstrip even the substantial U.S. military buildup. In so doing, however, the Soviets overspent, putting that buildup into question, while the Chinese Communists, after Mao’s death, introduced their own version of a NEP without overspending. The difference in the future, short, history of the Soviet Union and the future, long history of the People’s Republic, originates there. But there was also Western investment in China, contrasting with the withdrawal of investment from the Soviet Union. Western businessmen had been mesmerized by the sheer size of the Chinese ‘market’ since the nineteenth century; absent any military adventurism by China, they remained so. Businessmen told Western politicians, and perhaps themselves, that increased trade and investment would liberalize the regime. It didn’t; the Chinese “never made so much as a nod toward political liberalization, imposing a policy allowing families to have only one child (leading to “thousands of gruesome coerced late-term abortions”) and crushing a democratization movement led by students in the spring of 1989. His military and secret police allies overthrew Gorbachev, that year; he could not summon the forces he needed to keep him in power; soon, the restive captive nations in eastern and central Europe rebelled, and there wasn’t much the weakened regime could do to stop them. In Russia, the regime “vanished once the sword was shattered,” whereas “in China, the sword was still there.” 

Today, China is more powerful than ever, even if its ‘image’ in the West is far less attractive than was that of the Soviet Union often was. “Few hard-core Western Communists, and fewer still progressive reformers and women’s rights activists, look to Beijing today for inspiration in the way so many did to Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, or again in the 1970s and 1980s.” Yet “in terms of raw economic and the institutional and often personal leverage that comes with it, the CCP has been more successful than the Soviets ever were,” purchasing “politicians, firms, and real estate,” not to mention technicians and business executives, sending its students to work in Western research laboratories and its spies everywhere, and, when that reaches its limits, stealing technology. They take many of these tactics from Lenin and Stalin, but they have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They have outnegotiated their enemies. “In exchange for the United States granting China unprecedented access to its market and easing the legal path for US multinational corporations to outsource manufacturing to China, the CCP conceded—nothing.” If anything, Communist Chinese methods of surveillance and political censorship have increased in the West, not only in the universities but in private corporations. “Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.”

 

Note

1. The apparent exception, Yugoslavia, in which the Communist Party chief Josip Broz Tito, having led the resistance to Nazi occupiers during the war, taken power, and effected a regime change to tyranny in 1945, pursued a foreign policy independent of Moscow. Unfortunately, “in his political and economic policies” in Yugoslavia itself “Tito was arguably more Stalinist than Stalin”—a “pioneer in political terror himself.”
2. For a contemporaneous statement in opposition to the ‘freeze,’ see “Thoughts on the Nuclear ‘Freeze'” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”