Fall 2018—The China Reality: Still Communist And Going Strong

While completing my master’s degree in history earlier this year, I once heard a professor at Stan State tell a classroom full of students that “China has nine political parties! It’s not a one-party state! It’s not a dictatorship! It’s just that the Communist Party always wins the elections.” Hearing my professor saying something as outlandish as this really got me thinking: “Has the higher education system in our country become so intellectually corrupt that arguments like THIS pass for higher thinking? Do arguments like THIS really influence public policy at the highest levels of our government?” Unfortunately, I think the answer to both those questions more often than not turns out to be a resounding “yes!”

I’ve spent the last two years of my life pursuing my graduate degree, and I’ve spent a lot of that time associating with professors and students who often seem to be fighting back the urge to roll their eyes at me whenever I talk about my disdain for “communist China,” or whenever I express warnings about how China is still a communist state that has no intention of relinquishing its dictatorial control over its own people or its status as a serious geopolitical adversary of the United States of America. I’ve grown weary of being made to feel like a fear monger or a mindless Trump loyalist. I am neither of those things, and in this blog post, it is my goal to give the reader a clearer picture of just exactly what it is the world is dealing with in terms of the People’s Republic of China.

Despite what my Stan State professor would have me believe, the Communist Party is the only political party in China today that holds any real power or authority. Although other political parties do exist inside the People’s Republic, only the Communist Party of China holds actual political power. In fact, the other Chinese political parties officially owe their continued institutional existence to the good will of the Communists; these other parties are officially tied to the Communist Party in a “united front” situation where only the Communists are allowed to lead out and direct public policy at the national level. Even at the constitutional level, the Chinese institutions of government are inseparably connected to the guidance and “political consultation” offered by the Chinese communist party. Technically, while opposition parties are not altogether banned in communist China, popular voting only takes place for offices and government positions up to the county, district, and municipal levels of Chinese government, and even then, such elections are often tightly controlled and managed by the Communist Party of China. At the level of national politics, no politician or party is allowed to operate outside of the CPC’s express permission and purview. Additionally, no non-communist organizations have a truly effective or legal method for achieving permanent or indisputable recognition in the People’s Republic, and Chinese government structures have built-in provisions allowing for communist organizations to manipulate the powers of state in order to accuse other organizations of sedition, treason, or subversion.

The Communist Party of China is literally plugged in, by default, to the legislative process, and this is according to the design of the Chinese constitution itself! Article 1 of the Chinese constitution says that “the People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.” These sentences constitute the entirety of Article 1! The Chinese constitution is explicit: China is, in fact, a dictatorship…no matter what my Stan State professor might say! Effectively, China is a one-party state where any organization or individual seeking to change the CPC’s relationship with the reins of political power in the government will be repressed and punished. The very idea that any of this is simply the result of Chinese Communists always winning free and fair elections is nonsensical, intellectually dishonest, and even dangerous when used to influence public policy.

It frustrates me a great deal to think that attitudes about China are often swayed by arguments similar to that which came from my Stan State professor. In our country today, there aren’t enough people who understand the threat that China poses, nor enough people who appreciate the moral obligation the United States has to oppose China’s ambitions to dominate the world economy, its record of shameful human rights violations, and its aggressive drive towards military domination of the Asia-Pacific region. The goal of this blog post is to provide a warning about China, and to call for citizens and voters to influence policymakers to start taking China a little bit more seriously as an adversary of the United States on the world stage.

For a long time now, China has been openly challenging the United States for a position of economic, military, and technological dominance. Many pundits and political commentators have asked how this has happened. Many have wondered: who is responsible for allowing China to grow in strength vis-a-vis the United States almost entirely without effective American opposition? Robert D. Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, answered this question very simply earlier this year: “Pretty much everyone.”

In recent years, we have seen the People’s Republic of China aggressively seek to expand its participation in markets for a wide variety of technologies including artificial intelligence, computers, electric vehicles, jet airplanes, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, robots, and semiconductors. This would be fine under normal circumstances, but the problem with China’s aggressive economic expansion during the past few years is that it has often come at the expense of fairness and just market behaviors. Communist China has worked hard in recent years to unfairly favor its own producers by deploying a form of state-run capitalism that, in many ways, is reminiscent of mercantilism. China’s communist government has a record of requiring foreign companies to relinquish their technological innovations in exchange for access to Chinese markets, of stealing intellectual property, of manipulating technology standards, and using the instruments of state power to acquire foreign business enterprises.

At the same time, the United States seems to have a record of doing little to stop the Chinese from acquiring so much economic power. President Richard Nixon first granted the Chinese communists wider access to world markets when he normalized U.S. relations with them in the early 1970s. President Jimmy Carter did even more to advance Chinese technological interests by signing a science-and-technology cooperation agreement with the People’s Republic, allowing tens of thousands of Chinese students to enroll at American universities largely at the expense of American taxpayers. One side effect of this agreement was an accelerated transfer of U.S. technologies and innovations to the People’s Republic. Later on, Bill Clinton became president and pushed for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and even more normalized trading relations between China and the United States. This was done in spite of China’s abysmal history of failures to comply with WTO membership requirements, of using WTO membership to avoid prosecution for its mercantilist policies, and of being far less than rigorous in enforcing market rules whenever doing so suited China’s interests. During the administration of President George W. Bush, the U.S. government worked hard to encourage American companies to invest in China and move operations to the communist state. The theory behind this was that encouraging trade and investment between the two countries would negate the likelihood of future conflicts. Unfortunately, China had already decided by the mid-2000s to wage an economic cold war against the United States; China artificially suppressed the value of its currency so as to make its own exports cheaper. In fact, when Barack Obama ran for the presidency in the 2008 election, he chose to make action against Chinese currency manipulation one of the centerpieces of his proposed foreign policy. Once in office, however, President Obama did very little to fulfill these campaign promises. Perhaps the communist regime in China knew what kind of politician President Obama would turn out to be; the government in Beijing announced it was “elated” when Obama won the election in 2008. Meanwhile, the Chinese decided to change their strategy, and it was during the Obama years that Beijing moved towards becoming an economic powerhouse based upon more technologically advanced industries. President Obama did nothing to counter this. In early 2009, he instead started calling for the United States to partner with China to combat—of all things—climate change. During its tenure in power, the Obama administration also did what it could to cooperate with China on its technological development, in essence helping the communists to compete against major American companies like Boeing and others.

Shamefully, President Obama cared more about saving the environment than about opposing China’s mercantilist economic practices (he even once stated that the United States should “respect [China]’s choice of a development model”). Stupidly, President Obama and his people assumed that partnering with the Chinese communists would inevitably lead to enhanced economic liberalization in the Chinese economy, to the Chinese embracing free trade, low tariffs, and less government regulation. All of this set the table for the ascension of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. For all his faults, Donald Trump was the foremost American politician participating in the 2016 presidential election who also understood the nature and scope of the Chinese threat: that because of the long history of U.S. inaction, communist China has become disturbingly assertive in both international economic and military matters. Hopefully, it is not too late for the current U.S. administration to grasp the importance of confronting Beijing and its mercantilist cold war against American economic interests.

Opposing communist China not only makes sense in economic terms, but it also demands our attention in the moral realm as well. Communist China has always been and remains to this day an egregious offender against human rights. When the Communist Party of China held its 18th National Congress back in 2012 for the purpose of installing Xi Jinping as the newest leader of the People’s Republic, cab drivers in Beijing were instructed to child-lock their vehicles’ rear doors and remove window handles to prevent protestors from distributing political literature deemed offensive by government bureaus. Internet networks were slowed as state-run censorship prevented the efficient flow of traffic on the information superhighway. Basic household items like kitchen knives and pencil sharpeners suddenly became difficult or almost impossible for common citizens to obtain. All of this was done at the behest of a Chinese government tightly controlled by the Communist Party.

In recent years, mass protests by Chinese citizens against their oppressive government have reached new heights of intensity and frequency. In 2012, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China reported that “citizen protests against lack of basic freedoms and official abuse…in some cases were unprecedented. In late 2011 and early 2012, China’s beleaguered workers continued to strike and organize for higher wages and better working conditions in reportedly the most significant series of demonstrations since the summer of 2010.”

Despite the denials of my Stan State professor, it seems pretty obvious to me that thousands of Chinese citizens DO INDEED view their government as a dictatorship that brutally suppresses those who dare stray from the one-party-state doctrine.

Insisting that communist China offers fair elections or a free and open society to its citizens borders on outright self-delusion. It is totally inappropriate to approximate the kind of government they have in communist China with anything currently enjoyed by those blessed or lucky enough to live under Western governments that, at least on paper, prize democracy and freedom. Jillian Kay Melchior, the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, has reminded us that it is folly to hope for substantive liberalizing reforms on the part of the Beijing regime: “The [Communist Party of China] has made it clear that it will ‘resolutely not follow Western political systems.’” New York University law professor Jerome Cohen has said of China’s government that ““we have seen a preference for repression and almost insane paranoia…the atmosphere is almost unbelievable, it’s almost Orwellian.” Congressman Chris Smith from New Jersey explained that “an honest look at [China] must include many harsh realities such as dissidents sentenced to prison and labor camps, the brutal persecution of religious believers and the Falun Gong.” China’s policies “have driven dozens of Tibetan men and women to set themselves afire in protest, brutalized women by forced abortion and involuntary sterilization, and aggressively enforced the one-child policy that has created tens of millions of ‘missing daughters’ and a historically unprecedented imbalance between newborn boys and girls.”

And somehow, even with all of this, we still have institutions of higher learning here in the United States where professors still discourage students from thinking of communist China as a one-party dictatorial state.

As I have already mentioned, this line of thinking is dangerous in several different ways, but it is most dangerous when considered with the quickly accelerating pace of China’s military expansion and modernization programs. According to some experts, China is now only two years away from developing its own stealth aircraft. China’s development of air-to-air missile technology on par with that possessed by the U.S. is also proceeding apace. In the realms of satellite communications and overall air combat superiority, the Chinese are working fast to catch up in these two traditional preserves of American dominance. The time is fast approaching, warn some, that the United States will only be able to maintain military superiority over the Chinese by raising military spending to levels not seen since the Cold War, and it is doubtful if Congress will, in the long term, muster the political willpower to sustain that kind of financial commitment.

China is currently exerting great pressure on the traditionally U.S.-dominated international system that maintains peace and order in the world today. Unfortunately, too many people believe that our only courses of action in facing China are to either plan for war with China or to give up and accommodate the allegedly inevitable rise of China as the new world superpower. As has already been partially explained, most U.S. policymakers have thus far treated China’s challenge to the existing world order as inevitable and as hopeless to oppose short of going to war. This has been both unnecessary and unhelpful. It is not necessary for the United States to declare open war against the Chinese communists in order to successfully counter the threats posed by the regime in Beijing. Realities surrounding the issue of communist China suggest that for the next few decades at least, the cold war between China and the United States will continue. As history has already proven, cold wars do not necessarily need to turn hot for clear victors to emerge.

American history has shown that the United States has always maintained a strong strategic interest in the Asia-Pacific region since at least the 1790s, and American strategic withdrawal from the region is unlikely as long as the twenty-first century promises to see East Asia poised to drive a significant amount of world economic growth for years to come. Ever since World War II, the United States of America has taken the lead in maintaining military security in the region, and no local power is currently better equipped to fulfill this task in a more benevolent or generally beneficial fashion. There is polling evidence which suggests that the American electorate continues to embrace these realities and to embrace their implications for U.S. foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region. It is to be hoped that the American government will continue to maintain a strong U.S. military presence in countries like Japan and South Korea, and that it will continue to maintain and cultivate friendships and alliances with other countries in the area. Preferably, current and future U.S. presidential administrations will work to counter local Chinese efforts to militarily replace the United States as the Asia-Pacific’s main force projector and security guarantor.

It is wrong to believe that China cannot be deterred short of all-out war. Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist who originally inspired the Chinese to found their own Communist Party, once taught: “probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” For a long time now, China’s communist government has proven that it is aggressively seeking to dominate the world economy and to militarily dominate the Asia-Pacific region…all while continuing to be unapologetic about the repression it perpetrates against its own people. This, however, does not mean that shows of American strength and resolve will fail to impress the Chinese, to make them think twice about what they are doing. Indeed, the very lack of American willpower thus far in the history of confronting China leaves the issue an open question worth answering. I, for one, am happy that President Donald Trump at least SOUNDS interested in constructing a systematic doctrine for handling the geo-strategic reality and moral threat that is communist China today. What is the open question worth answering? Charles Edel of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney put it this way: “[the] question is not whether China and the United States are destined for war, nor is it whether other nations must choose between these two countries. The only question worth asking, rather, is whether the political will exists in Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra, Delhi, Singapore, Hanoi, and elsewhere to execute a concerted, consistent, and calibrated strategy of counter-pressure. Policy is most often limited less by some objective reality than it is by the conceptual barriers of a statesman’s imagination. A new vocabulary can help us think about the challenge in a more realistic framework. Doing so is more likely to offer up real policy options.”

I think it’s safe to say that President Trump can possibly offer the field of politics a whole new vocabulary. I just hope that, with regards to China, this new vocabulary will refute the nonsense currently coming out of many American campuses today.

--Christopher Peterson, November 19^th, 2018