What China’s Leader Wants—and How to Stop Him From Getting It. By Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith.
In October, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), General Secretary Xi Jinping set himself up for another decade as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, replaced his most economically literate Politburo colleagues with a phalanx of loyalists, and enshrined the Stalinist-Maoist concept of “struggle” as a guiding principle in the Party Charter. The effect was to turn the page on “reform and opening,” the term the CCP uses to describe the economic liberalization that began in the late 1970s and led to the explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the past four decades.
At the party congress, Xi was granted a third term as the CCP’s top leader—an unprecedented development in the contemporary era and a crucial step in his effort to centralize authority. But perhaps even more significant was the way the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all.
These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.
Granted, Beijing’s aspirations, like Moscow’s, may be greater than what it can realistically accomplish. But Xi, like the man he has described as his “best, most intimate friend,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, does not seem to believe that his reach exceeds his grasp. Policymakers around the world should take note.
It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.”
The Biden administration’s recent steps to constrain Xi’s quest to make China the world’s dominant semiconductor manufacturer—a status that Beijing has already achieved in telecommunications equipment, solar panels, advanced batteries, and other key sectors—mark an important evolution in U.S. strategy. If Congress, the White House, and U.S. allies move quickly to enact similar measures that sustain Chinese dependence on the rest of the industrialized world, it could blunt Xi’s growing appetite for risk.
There is a moral imperative for concerted action, too, highlighted by the street protests that have erupted in several Chinese cities in recent days as people have grown exasperated with draconian anti-COVID measures bearing Xi’s signature. If the demonstrations gain momentum, Xi’s response could be severe, judging from some of his more ominous statements. In any case, democracies should do more to side with the Chinese people by facilitating safer means for them to communicate with one another both inside and outside China.
MOUTHFULS OF SAWDUST
Reading CCP documents can be a brutal exercise. The late Simon Leys, one of the most insightful China watchers in the West, compared it to “swallowing sawdust by the bucketful.” Wading through the texts of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” as the leader’s ideology is officially known, is no exception. Much of Beijing’s rhetoric, particularly when it is directed at foreign audiences, is confusing and ambiguous.
But Xi’s most revealing statements are not the ones he makes at Davos or while standing next to the U.S. president in the Rose Garden. Rather, he is at his most trenchant when delivering speeches to top CCP leaders. Such speeches, which serve as guidance to the party faithful, are sometimes kept secret for months or years before appearing in Chinese-language publications. But as Leys understood, they contain slivers of insight if one is patient and diligent enough to search for them.
Xi’s texts reflect his inheritance, as the latest in a long line of communist theorists and leaders steeped in similar doctrines, traditions, and desired end states. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao can all be seen in Xi Jinping Thought, in letter and in spirit. And Xi does not represent as radical a departure from his more immediate predecessors as some analysts believe; his ambitions and those of the party that elevated him are broadly in sync.
None of this is to say, however, that CCP bosses are interchangeable. Leadership matters in Leninist systems as much as in any other system. And Xi’s personal imprint is all over Beijing’s current approach, even if his desired end states are consistent with those of his predecessors. Chinese critics mock him as “The Great Accelerator,” alleging that he is speeding the eventual demise of the party’s monopoly on power. His champions would probably agree that he is an accelerator—but in their eyes, he is speeding up the process of achieving the party’s long-standing goals. Either way, there is no denying that Xi is the most important person to watch and read if one is to understand where China is headed and why.
Xi does not seem to believe that his reach exceeds his grasp.
One key to understanding Xi is to look at his interpretations of history. It is well known that Putin once declared the Soviet Union’s collapse to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Less well understood is the extent to which the Soviet collapse also haunts Xi and how it functions as a fundamental guide to the Chinese leader’s actions.
In December 2012, just after becoming general secretary, Xi gave a closed-door speech to cadres in Guangdong Province, excerpts of which were leaked and published by a Chinese journalist in early 2013. Xi’s speech, framed as a cautionary tale, provided an early window into his worldview:
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. . . . It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.
Xi’s mention of “historic nihilism” may have been an implicit criticism of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had faulted the record of his predecessors. But the explicit villain in Xi’s speech was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening) reforms set the stage for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “A few people tried to save the Soviet Union,” Xi said.
“They seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship. Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” The phrase “the tools of dictatorship”—the idea that it is essential for the party and especially its top leader to control the military, the security apparatus, propaganda, government data, ideology, and the economy—would recur again and again in Xi’s speeches and official guidance over the next decade.
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MATT POTTINGER is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021.
MATTHEW JOHNSON is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has taught Chinese history and political thought at the University of Oxford and Grinnell College.
Xi Jinping by Ju Peng Xinhua via AP
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