A Forgotten Battle: Fifty Years Ago, Russia and China Slugged it Out on Damansky Island

Russia’s commemoration of the Damansky Island battle has been low key, but the few Russian articles that have been published did not pull any punches.

by Lyle J. Goldstein

Few skirmishes have had consequences on the scale of the violent clash on Damansky Island Даманский остров from early March 1969. 

Thankfully war was averted between the two Communist powers, but the reverberations had an enormous impact on geopolitics, and most likely also contributed in a partial way to both the demise of the USSR and the concomitant rise of China. 

Putting these larger historical questions aside, however, another vital question also arises when considering the blood on the Ussuri River ice that was spilled in some quantity during those dark days. 

As Beijing and Moscow are once again enjoying “a golden age”—quite akin to the heady days of the 1950s—will these nettlesome historical issues continue to impact the otherwise blossoming partnership?
Even as more and more oil and gas projects come on line, with new rail and highway bridges connecting the two countries, and ever more frequent joint exercises bring the Russian and Chinese militaries together, many doubters remain. 

They point out that trade and investment remains relatively limited, regional cooperation has yielded few clear diplomatic “wins,” and even military cooperation remains quite stilted amidst a paucity of significant joint endeavors. 

The resolution of this important debate will be determined by China and Russia themselves, of course. 

But what of the emotive historical issue with all its attendant “baggage?” 

In this short article, I cannot hope to offer a comprehensive historical accounting. 

Instead, I will merely summarize a couple of the articles that have appeared on the Damansky episode in the Russian-language press.
Whether on purpose or not, the Russian coverage of the sensitive anniversary appears to have been quite low key. 

Many major news outlets, to include Gazeta.ru, Kommersant, Izvestiya, and Rossiskaya Gazeta, seemed to ignore the anniversary completely. 

Nezavisimaya Gazeta was also silent on the anniversary, but had published a rather detailed retrospective piece back in mid-December 2018 under the not too delicate title: “Damansky – An Island Covered in the Blood of Our Heroes [Даманский – остров, залитый кровью наших героев].”
That article, by Andrei Shavaev, begins with a brief discussion regarding the origins of border tensions. 

It cites a Chinese book published in 1954 with maps that showed Chinese territory seized by the Czar between 1840 and the First World War. 

The “cartographic aggression” was apparently followed by a succession of more and more serious incidents on the border. 

This article is unequivocal about Beijing’s responsibility for the armed clash, asserting: “…on March 2, 1969, units of the Peoples Liberation Army of China (PLA) carried out a pre-planned armed invasion of Soviet territory ... [2 марта 1969 года подразделения Национально-освободительной армии Китая (НОАК) осуществили заранее спланированное вооруженное вторжение на советскую территорию].”
Shavaev explains that Chinese Marshal Lin Biao, Commander of the Shenyang Military District, generated the plan of attack in January 1969 under the code name “Retribution [Возмездие].” 

The key elements of the plan, according to this article, were “the factor of surprise [фактор внезапности]” along “with massive firepower [с массированным огневым].” 

The exact location for the “ambush [засад]” was to be the border area of the Ussuri River at a point roughly two hundred miles north of Vladivostok, but still well over one hundred miles south of Khabarovsk. 

The goal of the Chinese operation, as explained in this Russian account, was simply to “eliminate” a group of Russian border guards. 

Shavaev emphasizes the point that the battle plan was approved by Mao Zedong himself.
This account relates that about three hundred PLA soldiers crossed over to the island on the night of March 2 and suddenly opened fire on the group of Russian border guards that had been sent to investigate at mid-morning, killing almost all of them. 

Out on the ice of the Ussuri River, the Russian unit evidently had no protection and was “quickly destroyed.” 

Shavaev cites medical reports revealing an even greater atrocity: “[the border guards] were brutally finished off with bayonets and shots at close range. Their sheepskin coats, felt boots and hats were removed [были зверски добиты штыками и выстрелами в упор, с них были сняты тулупы, валенки, шапки].” 

According to this report, thirty-two Soviet border guards perished that day, along with a couple hundred of Chinese soldiers, as well, in the fighting that ensued. 

“And the Ussuri ice melted from bullets … and shells. The white March snow of the Island of Damansky turned dirty and bloody,” Shavaev writes in his description.

A larger fight then unfolded on March 14 in the same area. 

That battle, as Shavaev notes, involved both tanks and artillery. 

“It was brief … but it was a war.” 

Most critically, the Soviets employed the Grad rocket artillery system with devastating effects. Shavaev relates: “In a matter of minutes, Chinese battle formations and rear areas turned into a bloody mess mixed with earth, corpses and metal [За считаные минуты китайские боевые порядки и тыловые районы базирования превратились в горящее, перемешанное с землей, трупами и металлом кровавое месиво.].” 

Thousands of Chinese soldiers are said to have been killed in the second engagement.

Interestingly, this author suggests that the Soviet border guards were sacrificed, in part, due to a lack of “strategic foresight” in the Soviet military high command. 

Yet, it is explained that the main cause of the engagement were intrigues in Beijing that sought to “further unite the people under the banner of the ideas of the “great helmsman [еще больше сплотить народ под знаменем идей ‘великого кормчего,’” a reference to Mao obviously. 

With evident bitterness, Shavaev explains that Damansky Island was turned over to China in 1991 and that the PLA maintains a museum there commemorating the “victory” over the Soviet Union.
Another article appearing in the Russian military press was published on March 2 in Военное Обозрение. 

That article has a similar tone and conclusions. 

As for apportioning blame for the clash, this article states in the first sentence: “China organized an armed provocation against the Soviet Union [Китай устроил вооруженную провокацию против Советского Союза].” 

This rendering once again portrays China’s actions as amounting to an atrocity, offering the additional detail that one Soviet border guard (Corporal Pavel Akulov) seems to have been captured and allegedly tortured to death. 

Author Ilya Polansky laments in the final sentence that the victims of China’s “political game” were the young defenders of the Soviet border.
The intent of this article is certainly not too stir up angry sentiments among the two Asian giants. 

As remarked in the introduction, Russia’s observance of the anniversary seems to have been rather low key. 

These articles do show an impressive consistency that may suggest the basic truth of the Damansky Island battle, which is that the Chinese were indeed looking to give Moscow a “bloody nose.” 

China specialists have long been inclined to explain Mao’s actions as a reaction to Moscow’s heavy-handed intervention in Czechoslovakia that occurred just over seven months prior. 

According to that interpretation, Mao needed to make a radical move to convince the Kremlin that it was prepared to fight hard against “Soviet revisionism” and would not tolerate a similar Russian move against Mao’s regime. 

Other Chinese scholars have pointed out that the skirmish may have reflected Mao’s intention to signal the Americans that he was ready to cooperate in an Anti-Soviet bloc.
Certainly, the Soviet T-62 on prominent display in China’s Military Museum [军事博物馆] in Beijing implies that contemporary China has some interest recalling this important history. 

Over the next month, I will try to find some relevant Chinese-language articles to offer a fresh Chinese perspective. 

As interesting and consequential as these events proved to be, however, this author nevertheless cautions readers against reifying the conflict paradigm in Russia-China relations. 

In fact, violent conflict between Beijing and Moscow has been far more the exception than the rule over the last five hundred years of interaction. 

A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia

By Amy Qin

A rally at a stadium in Harbin, China, in 1966, attended by the photographer Li Zhensheng. A Communist Party secretary and the wife of another official were denounced and splattered with ink.

HONG KONG — The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.
“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. 

“Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”
Clad in a dark blue photographer’s vest, Mr. Li, 78, spoke in a recent interview in Hong Kong, where the first Chinese-language edition of his book “Red-Color News Soldier” was published in October by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
Blending history and memoir, the photo book compiles images taken by Mr. Li in the 1960s when he was working at a local newspaper in northeastern China. 

Since 2003, the photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, bearing witness around the world to the Cultural Revolution — the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 and turned students against teachers, sons against fathers, and friends against friends.
With the new edition of his book, Mr. Li joins the small ranks of Chinese who survived the excesses of Mao Zedong’s rule and are determined to challenge the official historical narrative at a time when a new dictator -- Xi Jinping -- has pushed to suppress criticism of his party’s traumatic past. 

Under Xi’s rule, the authorities have waged a broad ideological crackdown on dissenting voices, making efforts to objectively chronicle history fraught with risk.

A 5-year-old girl, Kang Wenjie, center, performed a “loyalty dance” for Red Guards in Harbin in 1968.

In China, the Cultural Revolution has become a taboo topic and officials there have repeatedly blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the photos. 

The new edition of his book can be distributed only within the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong, but that has not dampened his hopes of getting copies of it into the Chinese mainland.
“We’ll bring the books into the mainland one by one,” Mr. Li said. 

“It’ll be like ants moving house.”
After Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, what began as a political campaign aimed at reasserting control at the top soon became a sweeping nationwide movement that shook all levels of society. 

Rival groups of militant youth known as Red Guards fought against one another and against perceived “class enemies,” including intellectuals, officials and others.
Tens of millions of people were persecuted. 

Up to 1.5 million died as a result of the campaign. 

Many were driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in China’s recent history lasted as long, was as widespread in its impact, and as deep in its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said.
He added that he was concerned that without a deep historical reckoning, something similar could happen in China again. 

Already, Xi’s efforts to elevate himself to the status of Mao and extend his rule indefinitely have for many evoked the days of one-man rule, when Mao was worshiped like a god, culminating in the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution.

Pilots in the People’s Liberation Army reading from “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong,” also known as “The Little Red Book.”
Mr. Li’s collection of photos from that time is a nuanced portrayal of both the pain and the passion that the movement generated. 

At a time when cameras were scarce, he was given rare access to official events, taking more than 30,000 photos, many of which he carefully stashed under the floorboards of his home in the city of Harbin.
Among those are scenes of Red Guards forcing monks at a temple to denounce Buddhist scriptures and tearing out an official’s hair because he was deemed as too closely resembling Mao. 

There are people shouting praises to Mao as they swim in the Songhua River. 

There are many images of officials and ordinary folk, some standing on chairs, some splattered with black ink, many bowing their heads, and all at the mercy of massive crowds denouncing them for supposed crimes, sentencing them to hard labor or taking them away for execution.
Mr. Li’s photos first gained widespread attention abroad in 2003, when he worked with Robert Pledge, the director of Contact Press Images in New York City, to publish “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Almost immediately, publishers in China began reaching out to Mr. Li, who had moved to New York to be closer to his children. 

Knowing that the photos had only a slim chance of receiving approval from China’s official censors, Mr. Li and his editors in China made plans for a Chinese-language version of the book that would bury the contentious photos in a sea of text.
But censors rejected the nearly finished book with no explanation.
Livid, Mr. Li sent letters of protest to China’s top leaders. 

One of his main points of contention: In 2000, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter had published a book about her father titled “Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years.”
“I was so angry,” Mr. Li recalled. 

“Why can Deng Xiaoping share his Cultural Revolution experience and not Li Zhensheng?”

People swimming in the Songhua River in Harbin in 1967 while shouting praise for Mao.

Now, more than a half-century after the Cultural Revolution began, there is little public discussion of that period in China. 

The nation’s collective amnesia has only gotten worse in recent years as leaders have walked back efforts to reckon with the country’s modern history.
Last year, the South China Morning Post reported that a state-run publisher had evidently revised a middle-school history textbook to omit references to Mao’s “mistakes” in stirring up the Cultural Revolution. 

And a recent exhibition at the Capital Museum in Beijing featuring historical images taken by photographers for the official news agency Xinhua made no mention of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not always off limits. 

In 1988, the organizers of a nationwide photography competition approached Mr. Li with a request that would be almost unimaginable in China’s current political climate.
“We can’t have an entire decade of history missing in a competition as big as this,” Mr. Li recalled one of the organizers saying. 

So would he consider submitting his photos to the competition?
Mr. Li won the competition. 

The local news media and observers were stunned by the images, which depicted the Cultural Revolution more completely than had been seen before.
Seeing how the atmosphere has changed since that time, Mr. Li has only become more hardened in his resolve to see his photos published in China.

The execution in 1980 of Wang Shouxin, far left, a rebel during the Cultural Revolution. A guard, right, is handing a single bullet to Wang’s executioner.

“Some people have criticized me, saying I am washing the country’s dirty laundry in public,” he said, using a Chinese idiom that refers to the belief that a family’s problems should not be aired in public. “But Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past, America still talks about its history of slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about our own history?”
Though his photos cannot be published in the mainland, Mr. Li has given lectures on the Cultural Revolution at several Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.
In 2017, a new museum dedicated to Mr. Li’s life and photography was opened in a small town in Sichuan Province. 

It was part of a cluster of private history museums opened by Fan Jianchuan, a property developer and history buff who, like Mr. Li, has become well-versed in the push and pull of China’s censorship system.
But walking the line has meant making compromises. 

Sitting in his hotel room in Hong Kong, Mr. Li mentioned a new book he had been preparing using photos he had taken in Beijing during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Asked if he had plans to publish the book, the normally opinionated photographer went quiet. 

He was hesitating, he said, because he was concerned the museum in Sichuan could get shut down by the authorities in retaliation.
“Let’s not talk about the Tiananmen book,” he said. 

“One story at a time.”

How Beijing’s propaganda dents China’s image, rather than burnishes it

The inconsistencies in messaging confuse others about China’s intent, while the strict censorship and jingoistic tone invite questions about the government’s credibility, both at home and abroad
By Chauncey Jung

Posters of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are plastered on a wall in Shanghai in March 2016. 

Anyone who follows Chinese state media coverage can see that Chinese propaganda is inconsistent. From the changing strategy on Xi Jinping’s image to its stance on patriotic films, Chinese propaganda does not follow a consistent guideline. 

Chinese officials seemingly decide in an arbitrary and random fashion how the nation is presented, both to a domestic audience and to the outside world.
The Chinese government’s public communication appears aimed only at meeting short-term goals. But contradictions arise without a coherent strategy. 

There have been occasions when Chinese propaganda has adversely affected the country’s image, or triggered reactions that were opposite to what the regime intended.
Without a clear, modern and consistent strategy, Chinese propaganda will only hurt the nation’s image.
Take for example the propaganda effort surrounding Xi. 

In his earlier public appearances, the Chinese president was portrayed as an amicable leader whom the people could easily relate to. 

In 2013, he showed up at a Beijing steamed bun shop to order food alongside ordinary Chinese. 

In 2014, Chinese propaganda officials created the term “Uncle Xi” (Xi Dada) and “Auntie Peng”, for first lady Peng Liyuan. 

In these early years, propaganda officials set the tone for Xi’s persona as a caring leader who is close to the people.
However, his image has changed dramatically. 

The propaganda apparatus today lionises Xi as a leader second in stature only to Mao Zedong. 

It has encouraged the growth of a personality cult surrounding “Xi Dada”, and named him the undisputed “core” leader of party and country. 

Out goes the personable uncle, and in comes the strongman leader.
Inevitably, censors are deployed to scrub out propaganda associated with Xi the caring leader, including articles on his visit to the steamed bun shop and interviews claiming he carried 100kg of wheat as a youngster.
Such inconsistencies – driven by a propaganda strategy that is increasingly at odds with the more educated and more globally aware Chinese population today – create significant problems in controlling and managing public opinion. 

Every time propaganda officials change their tune, people see the contradictions and question the regime’s credibility.
Xi’s changing personas, for example, have made people more aware that the government has turned more authoritarian in the past five years, and have became fodder for critics to signal their discontent. Thus, when the government amended the constitution earlier this year to abolish presidential term limits, thereby allowing Xi to potentially rule for life, Chinese internet users turned the propaganda term Xi Dada into memes in protest.
Instead of stabilising the regime, as intended, the propaganda campaign is undermining it.
The government’s propaganda effort aimed at a foreign audience is similarly flailing. 

Since Xi came to power in 2013, China has promoted its “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation, built on the foundation of the “Four Self-confidences” (faith in its own system, path, theory and culture). 

This became the basis for its resistance to Western ideology, and its assertiveness, even aggression, towards perceived enemies.
Its goals were twofold: to show the world a unified, strong and modern China, and to showcase the confidence of the government by bashing countries with which it has disputes. 

But this strategy has backfired.
By allowing the production of such videos as the Seven Sins of India, published last year by New China TV, the official YouTube channel of Xinhua News Agency, at the height of China’s border stand-off with India, Beijing has only created a negative image of itself. 

By using racist and disrespectful language and tone in such blatant propaganda, the Chinese government showed its ignorance of the social conventions that bind the international community.
China’s propaganda strategy in its trade war with the US has also been a mess, with official statements alternately threatening a fight to the end with US hegemony and seeking cooperation to advance the global interest. 

This confuses others about China’s true intent.
Without a clear strategy, Chinese strategic intent seems equivocal and lacks focus. 

Recently, for example, China revelled in the release of Amazing China, a jingoistic documentary film celebrating the country’s achievements over the past five years. 

Yet now, to minimise the impact of the trade war, the regime even began to play down its “Made in China 2025” policy, a key plank for advancing the nation’s technological reach.
Unlike China’s tightly controlled internet, the free flow of information in other, more democratic, parts of the world means people can easily track Beijing’s inconsistencies, making its propaganda efforts futile in shaping international public opinion.
This only shows that Chinese officials have little understanding of how journalism works in countries with freedom of speech. 

They appear to assume that the world operates the way China does; they believe that deleting content and stopping journalists from publishing stories is a more effective way to support the regime’s actions than crafting a reasonable argument to convince and persuade critics.
China spends billions of dollars to ensure the country has a positive image. 

But unless it updates its style of public engagement, it will be extremely difficult for the country to achieve its goal of making the world see beyond the regime’s abuses of human rights, freedom of speech, and other undemocratic practices.
The problem is that China does not believe in constructive criticism. 

Rather, the regime bets on silencing and repressing those who are eager to speak.

China’s Second Century of Humiliation

The conduct of Xi Jinping and the CCP will ultimately bring China a new century of shame.
By Ted S. Yoho

The “Century of Humiliation” describes a period in Chinese history from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, when China was diplomatically and militarily dominated by Western colonial powers. Ending at the close of the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Century remains a major component of “modern China’s founding narrative.”
Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China’s overriding national goal is setting to right the injustice of the century of humiliation by achieving “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” 

Since he entered office, China’s dictator Xi Jinping has widely promoted the “Chinese Dream” of achieving rejuvenation. 

Called fuxing in Chinese, this rejuvenation is an end state in which China has overcome the humiliating handicaps of colonial history and become strong and powerful enough to prevent its recurrence.
China’s first century of humiliation was forced upon it by colonial powers. 

Now, China is at the beginning of a second century of humiliation, albeit of a much different kind. 

This time, Xi Jinping and the CCP will bear responsibility. 

Xi’s China is a norms-busting, human rights-violating bully and thief among the community of nations. 

A poor nation that behaves as China does would be shunned, but China has become rich. 

China’s newfound wealth has bought a place at the height of global power, but the conduct of Xi Jinping and the CCP will ultimately bring China a new century of shame.
A great irony of China today is that in seeking to overcome the injustices of history, the CCP is turning China into the 21st century’s great antagonist. 

The first years of Xi’s leadership have put to rest a lively debate about how China will conduct itself in the modern world. 

Those who argued that engagement and acceptance would induce China to become a contributing member of the rules-based global order have admitted defeat.
Xi is set to rule for life, should he wish to do so, and has recommitted the PRC to hardcore Leninism, reasserting the control of the vanguard Party over every aspect of life. 

Occasionally, Xi’s CCP experiments with neo-Maoist myth building exercises, usually around significant political events. 

For example, following the March 2018 session of the puppet National People’s Congress that allowed Xi to rule for life, China’s state media granted him the title “helmsman of the nation,” an allusion to Mao Zedong’s “great helmsman.”
In terms of sheer numbers, Xi is the most accomplished human rights violator alive today. 

Xi’s CCP governs 18 percent of humankind, depriving them of freedom of speech, political rights, religious freedom, independent media, and open internet access – all of which should be fundamental components of modern society. 

Political indoctrination is being reinserted into Chinese curricula, and an Orwellian “social credit” system is being developed to more closely control individuals’ every behavior. 

Additionally, the CCP continues its efforts to wipe out the ethnic heritage of Tibetans and Uyghurs, with recent reports confirming the existence of massive internment camps in Xinjiang province.
As he turns his homeland into a dystopia, Xi is also playing the villain globally. 

This is seen most clearly in a series of huge lies Xi has attempted to sell the world — lies that have global consequences. 

These lies, and the conduct they seek to cover, will also bring shame to Xi’s leadership.
In 2015, Xi stood beside Barack Obama in the White House’s Rose Garden and pledged that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the South China Sea. 

By this time China’s construction of artificial islands throughout the disputed territory was already well underway. 

Though the military implications of these facilities were always obvious, it has become increasingly clear that Xi’s Rose Garden promise was a bald-faced lie.
At the 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that “[d]espite China’s claims to the contrary” the placement of weapons systems on artificial islands in the South China Sea “is tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion.” 

China has emerged as a modern maritime power under Xi, but instead of using this power responsibly, Xi has instead applied it to push around China’s smaller neighbors.
Xi has also lied to the world about China’s economic engagement and trade policies. 

At the World Economic Forum in January 2017, Xi delivered a speech that made headlines across the globe, portraying China as the world’s new champion of globalization and open markets. 

Casting the United States as a protectionist and isolationist force in global trade, Xi alleged that “China must have the courage to swim in the vast ocean of the global market… China took a brave step to embrace the global market.”
Our national debate over trade notwithstanding, the argument that China will become the world’s leading force for economic globalization is preposterous on its face. 

Xi presides over closed and protected markets, has instead injected greater Party control into even private business, and shamelessly promotes plans for tech dominance through protectionism, forced technology transfer, and outright theft. 

The CCP uses China’s massive consumer market to intimidate private industry in furtherance of its political goals, such as when individual companies are targeted for simply recognizing the reality that Taiwan exists as a distinct political entity. 

Xi intends not to lead the global economic order, but to leech its benefits while avoiding its obligations.
Xi has sought to portray China as a positive influence and democratizing force on the world stage, when in reality his signature foreign policy initiatives rely on the predation and abuse of less powerful countries, and seek to undermine global democracy. 

At the 19th CCP Congress in November 2017, Xi said that “China stands for democracy in international relations and the equality of all countries, big or small.”
Yet in the very same speech, Xi promoted China’s authoritarian system as a “new model” for the developing “nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.” The implication is that in exchange for their loyalty, China will help the world’s petty strongmen attain the benefits of economic growth, without the need to democratize.
Xi regularly promotes the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive westward infrastructure program, as a “win-win” undertaking that will fill infrastructure gaps in less-developed countries for mutual profit. But major components of the Belt and Road have proven to be debt traps that endanger participants’ sovereignty and increase China’s political influence, while benefiting corrupt officials and bringing few opportunities to the average citizen. 

In some places, like Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Pakistan, it’s also apparent that the Belt and Road is a cover for military expansion.
Xi Jinping’s leadership seeks to advance China’s interests not within the prevailing global order, but at its expense. 

For now, it is working. 

China has no peer competitors along its immediate periphery to be concerned about, and plenty of cash to advance its interests in other parts of the world. 

But in making himself into an emperor, Xi has ensured that the world will come to realize he has no clothes. 

Xi’s totalitarianism inside China is severe, and China’s international conduct is drastically out of step with global norms. 

Eventually, and probably quite soon, the world will refuse to accept it any longer. 

Xi’s egregious conduct will alienate China from the rest of the world, and the story of China in the 21st century will be one of humiliation.

The last Maoists in China find refuge in capitalist Hong Kong

Suppressed on the mainland, Mao Zedong’s torch-bearers head to the southern city to mark the anniversary of the Cultural Revolution
By Jun Mai, Choi Chi-yuk

Hong Kong may be the heartland of capitalism but it is also the improbable last redoubt of the unlikeliest of Chinese dissidents – China’s band of Maoists.
The city has become the only place where the self-proclaimed holdouts of Mao Zedong’s cause and staunch opponents of market economics can keep the revolutionary flame burning in public.
The Maoists claim to be the true keepers of the late chairman’s faith and are nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution, a destructive decade that the Chinese government now describes as a period of “turbulence”.
Chen Hongtao, one of dozens of mainland Maoists who headed across the border last week for a demonstration to mark the 52nd anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, said the Chinese authorities had suppressed such gatherings.
The march was organised by Hong Kong’s Mao Zedong Thought Society, an organisation registered in Kowloon City district.
“This [march] is approved and protected by the Hong Kong police. But it’d be impossible to think of doing the same on the mainland,” Chen said.
“Some comrades from the mainland have failed to make the trip due to all sorts of pressure and restrictions.
“It’s very peculiar for a country that claims to be a socialist nation ruled by the Communist Party.”
Those who did make it crossed the border in blue Mao-era military uniforms and waving hammer-and-sickle flags, according to a video circulating on social media.

Despite Beijing’s official line that Maoism is a central part of its ideology, hardline Maoists are very critical of the central government’s policies, blaming the market reforms launched after Mao’s death for widening the country’s wealth gap and rampant corruption.
Chen also lashed out at Beijing’s high-profile commemorations of the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, which included Xi Jinping saying in a speech the party had inherited and innovated with Marxism.
“[The government] never mentions that the core of Marxism is class struggle, or the ultimate mission of the Communists is to bring an end to private ownership,” Chen said.

China’s Cover-Up

When Communists Rewrite History
By Orville Schell

The Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution” destroyed tens of millions of lives. 

From the communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, through the upheaval, famine, and bloodletting of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set segments of Chinese society against one another in successive spasms of violent class warfare. 

As wave after wave of savagery swept China, millions were killed and millions more sent off to “reform through labor” and ruination.
Mao had expected this level of brutality. 

As he once declared: “A revolution is neither a dinner party, nor writing an essay, painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely, gentle, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Today, even experts on Chinese history find it difficult to keep track of all the lethal “mass movements” that shaped Mao’s revolution and which the party invariably extolled with various slogans. 

Mao launched campaigns to “exterminate landlords” after the Communists came to power in 1949; to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” in the early 1950s; to purge “rightists” in the late 1950s; to overthrow “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s; and to “rectify” young people’s thinking by shipping them off to China’s poorest rural areas during the Down to the Countryside Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

The ideological rhetoric obscured the extremism of these official actions, through which the party permitted the persecution and liquidation of myriad varieties of “counterrevolutionary elements.” 

One of Mao’s most notable sayings was “the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.” 

Long after his death, his successors carried on in that tradition, most visibly during the Tiananmen Square massacre and the ensuing crackdown that the CCP carried out in response to peaceful protests in 1989, which led to untold numbers of dead and wounded.
Today, China is enjoying a period of relative stability. 

The party promotes a vision of a “harmonious society” instead of class struggle and extols comfortable prosperity over cathartic violence. 

Someone unfamiliar with the country might be forgiven for assuming that it had reckoned with its recent past and found a way to heal its wounds and move on.
Far from it. 

In fact, a visitor wandering the streets of any Chinese city today will find no plaques consecrating the sites of mass arrests, no statues dedicated to the victims of persecution, no monuments erected to honor those who perished after being designated “class enemies.” 

Despite all the anguish and death the CCP has caused, it has never issued any official admission of guilt, much less allowed any memorialization of its victims. 

And because any mea culpa would risk undermining the party’s legitimacy and its right to rule unilaterally, nothing of the sort is likely to occur so long as the CCP remains in power.

(RE)WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS
Despite its success in shepherding China’s economic development and rise to global power, the party remains insecure and thin-skinned, perhaps because its leaders are still so painfully aware of the party’s historical liabilities. 

The Central Propaganda Department—which, along with myriad other state organs, is tasked with censoring the media and making sure that all educational materials toe the party’s line—has sealed off entire areas of China’s past. 

Serious consequences flow from the manipulation of something as fundamental to a country’s identity as its historical DNA. 

Maintaining a “correct” version of history not only requires totalitarian controls but also denies Chinese the possibility of exploring, debating, understanding, and coming to terms with the moral significance of what has been done to them and what they have been induced to do to themselves and one another.
The task of “correcting” or erasing entire segments of a country’s past is costly and exhausting. 

An example of the lengths to which propaganda officials go has recently been brought to light by Glenn Tiffert, a China scholar at the University of Michigan. 

Through dogged sleuthing, he discovered that two digital archives—the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, which is connected to Tsinghua University, and the National Social Sciences Database, which is sponsored by the Chinese government—were missing the same group of 63 articles published between 1956 and 1958 by two Chinese-language academic law journals. 

These articles had long been available via both archives, only to inexplicably disappear. (Tiffert is not sure when the erasure occurred.) 

His study revealed that certain scholars, especially those who had been influenced by the West and had run afoul of the party’s ever-changing political lines, almost always had their articles deleted. 

At the same time, certain topics, such as “the transcendence of law over politics and class, the presumption of innocence, and the heritability of law,” and certain terminology, such as the phrases “rule of law” and “rightist elements,” also seemed to serve as cause for removal. 

Tellingly, there was a striking uniformity in the writers and topics that were excised.

Students attend a history course at the China Executive Leadership Academy of Pudong in Shanghai, September 2012.

Except for a few institutions abroad that maintain hard-copy collections of such journals, those articles are now unavailable to Chinese citizens and to the world. 

Such manipulation is made all the more pernicious owing to the fact that “even sound research practice may offer no defense,” as Tiffert points out. 

“Perversely, the more faithful scholars are to their censored sources, the better they may unwittingly promote the biases and agendas of the censors, and lend those the independent authority of their professional reputations.”
As the astrophysicist and dissident Chinese intellectual Fang Lizhi wrote in 1990 of such state-sponsored assaults on China’s historical memory:
The policy’s aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true history of the Chinese Communist party itself...

In an effort to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.
Fang wrote those words just after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when he was trapped in the U.S. embassy and the CCP was undertaking one of its most audacious efforts at historical erasure—namely, wiping away all traces of the crimes it had just committed from archives, books, and electronic media. 

So successful was this censorship that, in 2004, the Chinese dissident and future Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo lamented that even though “the people of Mainland China have suffered some unimaginable catastrophes after the Communist accession to power, the post-Tiananmen generation has no deep impression of them and lacks firsthand experience of police state oppression.” 

Ten years later, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei put it more bluntly: “Because there is no discussion of these events, Chinese still have little understanding of their consequences. Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational, and purposeless creature.”
In this way, China has become “the People’s Republic of Amnesia,” in the words of Louisa Lim, a former BBC and NPR correspondent in Beijing, who used that phrase as the title of her 2014 book. As she wrote, “A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state’s carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, scaffolded in place over a generation and kept aloft by a brittle structure of strict censorship, blatant falsehood and willful forgetting.”

A man stands in front of a column of army tanks on Changan Avenue east of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, June 1989.

THE STONES SPEAK
But is it really better for societies or communities to collectively remember traumatic periods of their histories? 

Might not such retrospection reopen old wounds and revive old, murderous struggles?

The CCP would like the people it rules—and the rest of the world—to embrace such logic and accept that evasion of the brutal truth about the past is the best route to healing.
An entirely different school of thought grew out of the German experience of facing up to the crimes of the Nazis. 

The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. 

Even though what happened under Adolf Hitler precipitated something “like a transmutation of our being,” said Jaspers, Germans were still “collectively liable.” 

All of those “who knew, or could know”—including those “conveniently closing their eyes to events or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantage, or obeying from fear”—shared responsibility. 

The “eagerness to obey” and the “unconditionality of blind nationalism,” he declared, constituted “moral guilt.” 

Human beings are, said Jaspers, responsible “for every delusion to which we succumb.” 

He put his faith in healing through “the cultivation of truth” and “making amends,” a process he believed had to be completely free from any state-sponsored propaganda or manipulation.

Security cameras in front of the giant portrait of former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, November 2012.
“There can be no questions that might not be raised,” he declared, “nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable.” 

In Jaspers’ view, only through historical awareness could Germans ever come to terms with their past and restore themselves to a semblance of moral and societal health.
Jaspers’ approach owed a great deal to psychoanalytic theory and the work of Sigmund Freud. 

For Freud, understanding a patient’s past was like “excavating a buried city,” as he wrote in 1895. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the Latin expression saxa loquuntur: “The stones speak.” 

Such mental archaeology was important to Freud because he believed that a repressed past inevitably infected the present and the future with neuroses unless given a conscious voice to help fill in what he called “the gaps in memory.” 

In this sense, history and memory were Freud’s allies and forgetting was his enemy.

Mao, too, was fascinated by history, but he took a far more utilitarian view of it: for him, the historical record served chiefly to fortify his own reductive theories. 

Independent historians engaging in free-form explorations of the past represented a profound threat, and during Mao’s reign, many of them were dismissed from their official positions, charged as “counterrevolutionaries,” sent off for “thought reform” at labor camps, and in all too many cases persecuted to death.

DANGEROUS HISTORY
Given his own neo-Maoist predilections, it is hardly surprising that Xi Jinping also views independent scholars as dangerous progenitors of what Chinese state media have termed “historical nihilism.” 

In 2015, the People’s Liberation Army Daily warned that China “must be [on] guard” against such malefactors because they are now “spreading from the academic realm into online culture,” where “capricious ideas are warping historical thoughts and leading discourse astray.”
Tiffert spells out what it means when Chinese historians run afoul of party censors. 

They confront, he writes, “a sliding scale of penalties, including harassment by the authorities, closure of publications and online accounts, humiliating investigations into personal affairs, business activities and tax status, and ultimately unemployment, eviction, and criminal prosecution.” 

Last year, Chinese civil law was even amended to punish “those who infringe upon the name, likeness, reputation, or honor of a hero, martyr, and so forth, harming the societal public interest,” writes Tiffert, which explains why “previously outspoken intellectuals and activists are going silent.”
Tiffert also reports that “the Chinese government is leveraging technology to quietly export its domestic censorship regime abroad, by manipulating how observers everywhere comprehend its past, present, and future.” 

Indeed, last summer, Beijing hectored Cambridge University Press into sanitizing the digital archive of The China Quarterly, an important English-language academic journal, by removing over 300 articles the CCP found objectionable from its Chinese search function. (The publisher reversed its decision days after a number of news outlets reported on its initial capitulation.) 

Then, last November, Springer Nature, the publisher of such titles as Nature and Scientific American, eliminated from its Chinese websites a large number of articles that included politically sensitive references—more than 1,000 articles in all, according to the Financial Times.
China’s leaders seem to believe they can escape the party’s compromised history without penalty, at least in the short run—and they might be right. 

After all, China’s economic progress and emergence as a significant global power do not appear to have been impeded, so far. 

The CCP is wagering that it can undo, or at least dodge, the long-term damage it has inflicted on the Chinese people by simply erasing history.
But hiding the crimes of the past sits uneasily alongside the CCP tenet that there is no such thing as “universal values,” which are invariably associated with democracy and human rights and which the party casts as something foisted on China by the West as a way to undermine China’s authoritarian one-party system. 

According to this view, human beings have no common bias against such things as persecution, forced confession, torture, and violent repression; no basic shared yearning for liberty or for freedom of expression, assembly, and religion; and no desire to live in a world where wrongs can ultimately be righted.
If that were true, however, the party would have no reason to fear an honest accounting of the past. After all, if universal values do not exist, then Mao’s attacks on his critics and enemies do not represent grave transgressions. 

And yet the CCP goes to great lengths to hide the truth about those deeds—a contradiction that suggests something like a guilty conscience, or at least embarrassment at being exposed. 

If that is the case, then perhaps some future Chinese regime will have to find a way to acknowledge and even come to terms with the full dimensions of what the CCP has done to China.

For the foreseeable future, however, that seems unlikely.
In the wake of China’s Democracy Wall Movement of 1978–79, during which thousands of Beijingers gathered at an unprepossessing brick wall to hang political posters, deliver speeches, and hold political debates, Chinese writers began examining their country’s decades of political oppression. 

This writing came to be known as “investigative reportage” and “scar literature.” 

But such inquiries ended after 1989, and ever since Xi took office, in 2012, an ever-heavier shroud of censorship has cast China into an increasingly deep state of historical darkness. 

A recent study by the China Media Project, at the University of Hong Kong, searched 140 mainland Chinese publications for articles about the Cultural Revolution, a ten-year period during which countless millions of middle-class Chinese, intellectuals, and Western-trained professionals were persecuted and killed for having “bad class backgrounds.” 

The researchers found only three articles that dared delve into that decade in any detail. 

For publications to cover the subject more thoroughly “would mean running a foolish risk,” wrote the authors of the project’s report.
And even if such work were someday again welcomed in China, its impact might be less than dramatic, because so much has been suppressed and repressed. 

In the words of the dissident Liu: “Eyes kept too long in the darkness do not easily adapt to dazzling sunlight when it suddenly pours through a window.”

The Great Dictator

Xi Jinping should heed the lessons from history, former official says
By Simon Denyer

Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, at his apartment in Beijing. 

BEIJING — Twice Bao Tong rose within the Chinese Communist Party’s hierarchy, and twice he was dramatically cut down. 

He has endured long spells in jail and “re-education” for failing to fall into line behind the hard-liners holding power.
So it is perhaps no surprise that this 85-year-old views the Chinese president’s latest attempt to impose his dogma on the entire nation — under the banner of Xi Jinping Thought — with a considerable degree of skepticism.
“In China’s history of more than 3,000 years, there were other leaders who tried to use their own thoughts to regulate the thoughts of others,” he said in an interview in his modest Beijing apartment. “But none were successful. There were only failed attempts.”
Bao was the most senior Communist Party official to be incarcerated for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, thrown into jail May 28, a week before a military crackdown that left hundreds if not thousands dead.
He was to remain in solitary confinement for seven years, and even today lives under constant surveillance, with three agents following him on foot and others in a car whenever he leaves his home. 

Yet he still manages an occasional interview with the foreign media, his manner affable, his opinions trenchant, and with a cigarette never far from his lips.
In the late 1980s, Bao had worked as a top aide to Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, helping push China in a more liberal, reformist direction — until the June 4 crackdown ended that dream. 

Zhao was demoted, purged and placed under house arrest for expressing sympathy for the students’ demands and opposing Deng Xiaoping’s decision to send in the troops.
Bao was thrown into Beijing’s maximum-security Qincheng Prison, a destination for many of the nation’s most important political prisoners.
Today, a photograph of Zhao sits proudly on a shelf in his apartment, and he talks affectionately of a man who “treated everyone as equals” and wanted to turn over decision-making power from the party to the people.
There is no such affection in his comments about Xi Jinping, whom he describes as a “hard-liner” and a throwback to Mao Zedong.
Last month, the Communist Party enshrined Xi’s name in its constitution as it granted him five more years in power: Xi Jinping Thought now sits alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory in the party’s ideological canon.
“It is called Xi Jinping Thought, the new thought, but they are just old ideas, not new ideas,” said Bao. 

“Ideas like ‘the party leads everything’ — they are exact quotes from Mao Zedong. Why call them new ideas?”
Bao knows only too well the madness that can be unleashed when one man rises to absolute power over the Chinese people, and when officials are too scared to tell him when he is wrong.
“The mistakes Mao made were all huge,” he said. 

“Mao didn’t recognize his mistake when the Great Leap Forward led to a famine that caused millions of deaths; he didn’t recognize his mistake in the Cultural Revolution in which tens of millions were purged.”
In 1966, only days after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Bao, who was working as a bureaucrat, was denounced as a “capitalist roader.”
Barred from his office, he spent a year cleaning toilets, another year doing hard labor in a re-education camp and the better part of a decade working the fields of rural China. 

He was only rehabilitated, like millions of others, after Mao’s death in 1976.
“There was only one slogan at that time — ‘Down with anyone who opposes Chairman Mao,’ ” he said. 

“But in the end Mao failed, too. He failed so badly his wife was labeled a counterrevolutionary, and so he himself became part of a counterrevolutionary family.”
Mao’s widow Jiang Qing was arrested after his death for her role in the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to life imprisonment, finally committing suicide in 1991.
Bao also draws lessons from much further back in his nation’s history to warn of the dangers of unchecked power, starting with King Li of the Zhou dynasty, who ruled in the 9th century B.C. 

The General History of China, an 18th-century text by French Jesuit historian Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, describes Li as proud, conceited and cruel.
Indeed, so conscious was he of how much he was hated, he forbade his subjects “on pain of death to converse together, or even whisper to one another,” Du Halde wrote, so that people could be seen walking the streets with downcast eyes, “in mournful silence.”
Eventually, peasants and soldiers rose up against Li, and he died in exile.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang is remembered as the first ruler of a united China in the 3rd century B.C., and for his mausoleum guarded by the Terracotta Army, but he also banned and burned books, and executed scholars.
The Hongwu Emperor, who established the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, expected total obedience from his subjects, inflicting torture and death on those who opposed him, including, it is said, some of his own advisers.
But in the end, Bao said, these rulers’ dynasties foundered and were overthrown.
“If you want to imitate Chairman Mao, that’s okay, but the problem is whether you will succeed,” Bao said, referring to Xi. 

“I can’t say whether his attempt will succeed or not. Only time will tell.”
Bao blames Deng for ending the dream of political change in China, and for instigating an era of corruption and growing economic inequality that “broke” Chinese society.
But he has no faith in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which the government says has led to some form of punishment for more than a million officials.
“It’s a selective anti-corruption campaign. Its nature is the selective protection of corruption,” he said. 

“When you purge some corrupt officials, you are protecting the others. You protect the corrupt system, and you protect corrupt people who support you.”
Bao was one of the first signatories of Charter 08, a manifesto for democratic changes issued in late 2008. 

The only way to fight corruption properly, he says, is for independent supervision of the effort.
“Power tends to corrupt,” he said, quoting Britain’s Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Sina Delenda Est

How China became emboldened and embittered -- and how its leaders' desire for global domination may lead to a conflict with America
By MAX HASTINGS

With the busy lives that everybody leads and one eye on the clock for when Tesco shuts, you might have failed to notice that Beijing has this week been hosting the 19th Congress of the Communist Party.
Some 2,300 unswervingly loyal apparatchiks have gathered to cheer to the rafters Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.
Those last few words may cause some people to demand: but what about Donald Trump?
It is true that the leader of the United States commands a much larger nuclear arsenal, and that his country is still richer and stronger than China. 

But Trump — thank goodness — is a moron.

America remains the world’s largest democracy: its system of checks and balances is (sort of) working.
In China, by contrast, there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights. 

Xi wields almost absolute authority, amid ever more draconian restrictions on dissent and free speech, even within the Party hierarchy. 

‘China needs heroes,’ he has written, ‘such as Mao Tse-tung’.

In China there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights.

He thus celebrates a predecessor whom almost everybody recognises as the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, even ahead of Adolf Hitler.
The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability. 

The only institution that retains any influence is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
While Xi talks to the world (without being much believed) about his desire for China to be a good neighbour, part of the fellowship of nations — his commanders become ever more hawkish.
Hundreds of billions are poured into armies, fleets, missile forces, with the defence budget rising by 10 per cent last year. 

The country has established its first overseas military base, in the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and now boasts a navy that sails the Red Sea and the Baltic.
Some 60,000 people are employed in military cyber-operations of scary sophistication: four years ago, 140 attacks on U.S. institutions were traced to a single PLA unit in Shanghai. 

The Chinese own a formidable satellite-killer capability, which could inflict critical damage on American communications.
Chinese people seem ready to applaud their armed forces’ new activism: their big movie hit of 2017 has been Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier mowing down his country’s enemies abroad, on a more lavish scale than does Britain’s James Bond.
Here is the Heavenly Kingdom, among the oldest and greatest civilisations on earth, seeking to reassert long-lost might and majesty. 

Young Chinese are taught that their ancestors possessed a 'civilised', literate culture five centuries before Julius Caesar invaded Britain. 

The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability.

Today, the Chinese reason: why should we continue to follow the dictates and to swallow the "insults" of the West?
The U.S. Navy still claims dominance of the Pacific, as it has done since 1945. 

Both Washington and Tokyo question China’s right to extend its frontiers in the South and East China Seas.
Above all, the West resists Beijing’s insistence on reclaiming Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists established a bastion under American protection after they lost the Civil War to Mao in 1949.
The Chinese refer to their ‘century of humiliation’ which began with the Opium Wars, during which in 1860 an Anglo-French army pillaged one of their greatest artistic masterpieces, the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing.
This symbolic climax of ‘Western barbarianism’ stands close to the head of a catalogue of historic grievances that feeds China’s modern sense of victimisation, and which it is determined to repair.
The mounting tensions between China and the U.S. and its allies could lead to conflict in the decade or two ahead.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, declares in his new work, The Future Of War, that armed conflict between great powers is almost certain to continue ‘wherever there is a combination of an intensive dispute and available forms of violence... at first it may bear little resemblance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into something bigger’.
Freedman means, of course, that a new great power clash is likely to start with an escalating, yet invisible and noiseless, cyber-exchange, which could deliver a pre-emptive strike against the enemy’s high-tech weapons systems, or even more broadly its civil infrastructure, for instance electricity grids and telecoms networks.
In 1991, an American expert on security and cyber-warfare wrote a futuristic novel suggesting the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ surprise assault. 

This has since become technologically more plausible.
Almost no nation — perhaps not even North Korea — is eager to launch a nuclear first strike, justifying annihilatory retaliation. 

But many Americans, in and out of uniform, are apprehensive about the danger of a cyberwar first strike.
Both Chinese and U.S. commanders fear that failure to knock out the other’s high-tech information and weapons-guidance systems early in a confrontation could fatally weaken the loser if hostilities heated up.

Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments. 

Consider the effect if, for instance, a Chinese cyber-thrust disabled the catapults on a U.S. aircraft carrier: a £12 billion platform would suddenly become impotent.
Christopher Coker urges the peril of reprising 1914, when Austria and Germany precipitated a huge conflagration because they started out with illusions that they risked only a small one, with Serbia.
This is a comparison I made myself a few years ago to a delegation of Chinese military men visiting London, who asked if I saw comparisons with 1914, about which I had just published a book. 

I suggested that the huge irony of what happened a century ago was that if Germany had not gone to war, it could have achieved dominance of Europe within a generation through its industrial and technological superiority.
Surely nothing at stake in the South China Sea or with Taiwan, I said to the Chinese, is worth risking all that you have achieved by peaceful means? 

A Chinese officer, obviously unconvinced, responded: ‘But we have claims!’
In my own travels in China, I have often been impressed by how much real popular feeling exists, albeit stoked by propaganda, about the separation of Taiwan.

Xi, his personal power strengthened by this week’s 19th Congress, may start throwing his weight around in ways that could generate a crisis — for instance, setting a time limit for the return of Taiwan to Beijing’s control.

In the South China Sea, there are constant tensions and potential flashpoints between the Chinese building new bases in previously acknowledged international or Japanese waters, and American warships and planes asserting rights of navigation.
There is a real prospect of Japan not merely rearming but seeking nuclear weapons in response to the threat posed by North Korea, which Beijing is unwilling to defuse. 

China is morbidly fearful of regime collapse in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, followed by Korean unification and a U.S.-South Korean army on its Yalu river border.
Christopher Coker argues that China, like Russia, is psychologically crippled by its own firewalls against open debate, and thus finds it extraordinarily difficult to relate to other nations, or to see things from others’ points of view.
Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments.
Beijing sees things through a narrow nationalistic prism which makes it hard for its leadership to guess how an antagonist might act in a confrontation. 

None of the academics I cite above suggests a major war is inevitable. 

Some argue that Chinese ambitions are more economic than globally strategic; that the country’s internal difficulties and resource shortages — especially of water — will constrain its growth and keep Xi too busy at home to gamble disastrously abroad.

Yet the combination of Donald Trump’s isolationism alongside Xi’s unconstrained dictatorship, poses grave dangers to stability and peace.
We should not underrate the risk that a Chinese general or admiral might lash out on his own initiative or overplay his hand by firing on U.S. warships or aircraft.
In the recent past, there have been episodes in which China’s commanders have taken dangerous and provocative actions without reference to Beijing — for instance, launching a new satellite weapon or testing a stealth aircraft with great fanfare while a U.S. defence secretary was in town.
Again and again, escalation has been averted by wise caution on the part of the Americans.
Statesmanship, which requires steady diplomacy and constant horse-trading, is indispensable to keep us safe. 

Yet this is becoming ever harder to come by when China is flexing its muscles.
On one side, we see a rising power impelled by a centuries-old sense of grievance; on the other, the U.S., with a sense of global entitlement no longer compatible with the aspirations and might of others.
In 1910, Brigadier Henry Wilson, commandant of the British Army’s staff college, told his students there was likely to be a big European war. 

One of his audience remonstrated, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could make such a thing happen.
Wilson guffawed derisively: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is what you are going to get.’
So the world did. 

And could again.

Rogue Nation

Scholars Are Being Punished Amid Growing Squeeze On Public Expression
By ANTHONY KUHN

Staff wait at the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in August. An international outcry ensued when the publisher agreed to block certain articles from one of its journals after pressure from Beijing. The press later reversed its decision.

When students returned to Beijing Normal University for classes last month, there was a notable absence in the classical Chinese class taught by Shi Jiepeng: Shi himself.
University authorities fired the assistant professor in late July, citing a number of offenses, including "expressing views outside the mainstream of society."
The charges still puzzle the lanky teacher, as he sits speaking to me in a café just outside the university's main gate.
"Sure, my views are a bit different from the mainstream and from official views," he concedes. 

"But an open society should be able to tolerate them."

China apparently can't. 

In the past five years, space for public expression has been tightening in media, the arts and civil society. 

Education hasn't been spared: The ruling Communist Party and congress have ordered the country's institutions of higher learning to build themselves into bastions of socialist and Marxist ideology, while purging campuses of liberal thought and subversive foreign ideas.
The drive could have an impact on one of China's stated ambitions, to boost its colleges and universities into the world's finest. 

It seems sure to affect the millions of Chinese students who seek education in the U.S. and other countries, as well as foreign scholars studying China.
Spearheading the drive is the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party's internal control apparatus, which, besides rooting out corruption, appears to have taken on the additional duty of enforcing political loyalty and ideological conformity in academia.
This year, the CCDI sent inspection teams to around 30 of China's top universities. 

Roughly half were named and criticized for their "weak political work."
When CCDI inspectors arrived at Beijing Normal University in February, conservatives who objected to Shi Jiepeng's ideas reported him to the team.
"The party secretary of my institute told me that the inspectors had criticized me by name," Shi says.

Clashing with the party line
Shi was not fired for his teaching or academic work. 

He says his students never complained about his classes. 

Instead, the inspectors appear to have targeted him because of columns he wrote for a newspaper and his postings on social media.
Oddly, Shi points out, university administrators seem to have overlooked the fact that the CCDI is supposed to enforce Communist Party rules — but since he isn't a party member, it should have no jurisdiction over him. (China has roughly 88 million Communist Party members, or less than 7 percent of the population).
Beijing Normal University didn't respond to NPR requests for comment. 

Nor did China's Ministry of Education.
In his social media postings, Shi criticized Mao Zedong, the leader of China's Communist revolution, as a "demon" for his role in political mass movements including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which cost millions of lives due to political violence and famine.
Shi points out that the party itself admits that Mao made mistakes, so he feels this shouldn't have gotten him fired. 

But if such statements were not grounds for substantial punishment a few years ago, they apparently are now: Another scholar was fired by an architectural university in Shandong Province in January after he criticized Mao.
Shi Jiepeng's criticism of another Chinese ruler — an ancient one — also ticked off many conservatives.
Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ruled China a few decades before Julius Caesar ruled ancient Rome. 

Wu's wars of conquest against nomadic tribes on China's borders expanded the Chinese empire in all directions, but an estimated one-fifth of the empire's population perished in military adventures, forced labor on huge infrastructure projects and mass executions of anyone suspected of plotting rebellion.
Shi says he criticized Wu "because I believe the welfare of the individual is more important than any ruler's political or military achievements."
Shi has also expressed the opinion that individual welfare is more important than the form or structure of any nation. 

So he sympathizes with Hong Kong and Taiwan residents who do not identify with China and might advocate independence. 

He sees local identity as an important kind of freedom.
All of these ideas clash with the official Chinese line that a unitary state, rather than a collection or federation of smaller states, is the only acceptable form for China. 

Discussion of alternative forms of statehood is forbidden.

An ideological purge

Shi has never been prosecuted for breaking any law. 

But the Communist Party made clear in a 2013 internal document what ideas it considers taboo and does not want taught on college campuses: constitutional democracy, judicial independence, freedom of the press and an independent civil society – in other words, liberalism.
After being fired, Shi turned for advice to a prominent liberal historian named Zhang Ming, who recently retired from the People's University in Beijing.
Zhang says he thought Shi's firing was unprecedented, and believes it was entirely Beijing Normal University's decision.
"No doubt, politics are veering to the left, and there's an ideological purge going on," he says. 

"But I don't think there's a comprehensive official plan for it all."
For decades, university administrators have been able to ignore or deflect government political campaigns, letting offending academics off with a slap on the wrist. 

But now it appears the political pressure is too intense, and administrators "are afraid of losing their official jobs," says Zhang.
Zhang defended Shi on Weibo, the country's main micro-blogging platform. 

His Weibo account was suspended for three months, apparently as punishment.
Zhang says he advised Shi to protest his treatment and not suffer in silence. 

Zhang's own conservative critics repeatedly called for him to be fired, but his university ignored them.
"If they fire me, then they fire me, it's not like I'm going to starve to death," Zhang sniffs. 

Unlike under Mao, unemployed academics these days can always find work elsewhere, he says.
Indeed, the current campaign pales in comparison to the biggest purge of intellectuals under Communist rule. 

The so-called "anti-rightist movement" launched by Mao in 1957 handed many workplaces quotas of rightists (who, in the Chinese context are generally political liberals) to be identified and punished. An estimated half-million people were persecuted.
Mao distrusted intellectuals because of their independent thought. 

During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, they were denounced and persecuted as a "stinking ninth caste," and students were encouraged to beat and humiliate their teachers. 

From the 1960s through 1990s, college professors were often paid less than manual laborers.

Attempts at censorship
The effect of China's ideological tightening on international scholarship became clear in August, when Chinese censors succeeded briefly in getting the Cambridge University Press to censor articles from an online edition of its influential scholarly journal, the China Quarterly.
The 315 articles were about subjects China's government considers politically sensitive, including Taiwan, Tibet and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The publisher's explanation of why it at first complied was "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market." 

But the move triggered an intense outcry from international scholars concerned about academic freedoms, and the material was restored.
Cambridge University Press' decision to pull the material "was bad not just because it meant that academics in China were deprived of access to state-of-the art scholarship from another part of the world," says University of California, Irvine historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom. 

Worse, he says, it misled people in China "into imagining that a journal was not publishing what it in fact was. So it violated the integrity of the journal."
Chinese authorities also tried to censor another Cambridge University Press publication that Wasserstrom edits, the Journal of Asian Studies. 

But after the outcry over the China Quarterly, the authorities dropped their request.
The current ideological purge and the attempted censorship is a worrisome step backward, says Wasserstrom, after years in which foreign scholars were "more able to have true collaborations" with their Chinese counterparts.
"There's a tendency to think that since Mao's death in 1976, that with some occasional slips back, there's been at least a two-steps-forward, one-step-back pattern, in a kind of lessening of controls on campuses," he says. 

But for the past seven or eight years, things have been moving in the wrong direction, he says.
Beijing Normal University's Shi Jiepeng consoles himself by taking the long view. 

During China's imperial dynasties, he says, intellectuals were often persecuted for what they wrote. That form of persecution is known as a "literary inquisition."
"Back in those days, people's whole families were executed," he says. 

"Me, I only lost my job. So things are much better now."

Axis of Evil

North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to Power
By JANE PERLEZ

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with Liu Yunshan, a Chinese official, at a military parade in Pyongyang in 2015. 

BEIJING — The two men stood together on the reviewing stand in the North Korean capital: a top official in China’s Communist leadership wearing a tailored business suit and a young dictator in a blue jacket buttoned to his chin.
Liu Yunshan, the visiting Chinese dignitary, and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, tried to put on a show of friendship, chatting amiably as the cameras rolled, but just as often they stood silent, staring ahead as a military parade passed before them.
Nearly two years have elapsed since that encounter, the last high-level visit between China and North Korea. 

The stretch of time is a sign of the distance between two nations with a torturous history: one a rising power seeking regional dominance, the other an unpredictable neighbor with its own ambitions.
China has made little secret of its long-term goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia and assume what it considers its rightful position at the center of the fastest-growing, most dynamic region in the world.
But North Korea has emerged as an unexpected and persistent obstacle.

Other major hurdles litter China’s path. 

The United States, despite signs of retreat in Asia under the Trump administration, remains the dominant military power. 

And India and Japan, China’s traditional rivals in the region, have made clear that they intend to resist its gravitational pull.
Yet North Korea — an outcast of the international order that Beijing hopes to lead, but also a nuclear state because of China’s own policies — presents a particularly nettlesome challenge.
China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. 

But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.
At the same time, the strategic location of the North — and its advancing nuclear capabilities — makes it dangerous for China to restrain it.
“North Korea may not be the biggest problem to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task of supplanting America in East Asia,” said Hugh White, a former strategist for the Australian Defense Department. 

“That’s because it is the only East Asian power with nuclear weapons.”
Even if the United States steps back from the region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able to dominate the region as much as its leaders today hope.”
The Trump administration has bet on China to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, shunning talks with Mr. Kim and gambling that Beijing can be persuaded to use its economic leverage over the North to rein it in.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has overseen a number of nuclear tests, defying Beijing.

A New Cold War
There is growing resentment against Mr. Kim inside China, both in the general public and the policy establishment. 

China keeps North Korea running with oil shipments and accounts for almost all its foreign trade. 

But to many Chinese, the young leader seems ungrateful.
A three-day academic seminar in Shanghai last month brought together some critics, who question North Korea’s value to Beijing as a strategic buffer against South Korea and Japan — and warn that the North could prompt them to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
“The cost is to continue to alienate Japan, enrage the United States and irritate South Korea,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University. 

“If Japan and South Korea feel forced to go for radical options like nuclear weapons, it will badly affect regional diplomacy.”
The spread of nuclear weapons, he added, would thrust China into “a new Cold War” in Asia, perhaps with a beefed-up American military presence. 

That would frustrate Beijing’s ambitions for regional supremacy while also leaving it vulnerable to being labeled an enabler of nuclear proliferation, tarnishing its international reputation.
“A balance of mutually assured destruction in Northeast Asia will not be a satisfactory situation for anyone,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former foreign secretary for Singapore. 

“But it will not necessarily be unstable, and it may be of some small consolation to Washington, Tokyo and Seoul that the implications for Beijing are somewhat worse.”
Xi Jinping is said to be aware of such risks and to have privately expressed disdain for Mr. Kim.
But like his predecessors, he has resisted punishing sanctions that might cause North Korea’s collapse and lead to a destabilizing war on its border, a refugee crisis in China’s economically vulnerable northeast, or a unified Korean Peninsula controlled by American forces.
All these possibilities could pose as much a problem for China’s plans for ascendancy in Asia as an arms race in the region. 

And if North Korea somehow survived, it would remain on China’s border, angry and aggrieved.
From Xi’s perspective, a hostile neighbor armed with nuclear weapons may be the worst outcome.

The Chinese dictatorMao Zedong, center, meeting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, right, the prime minister of Pakistan, in Beijing in 1976. The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program can be traced to a deal that China and Pakistan reached that year.

The Pakistan Connection
China has more nuclear-armed neighbors than any country in the world: Russia, India, Pakistan and now North Korea. 

But that situation is one of its own making.
The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program can be traced to a deal in 1976 between an ailing Mao Zedong and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan.
India had tested its first nuclear bomb two years earlier, and Mr. Bhutto wanted to keep up. 

China viewed India as a potential threat; the two had fought a brief border war. 

So it agreed to help.
The particulars were ironed out by Pakistani visitors to Mao’s funeral, according to the account of A. Q. Khan, the nuclear physicist who founded the uranium enrichment program of Pakistan’s bomb project.
In 1982, China shipped weapons-grade uranium to Pakistan. 

And in 1990, it opened its Lop Nur test site to Pakistan and secretly let the country test its first nuclear bomb there, according to “The Nuclear Express,” a book by two veterans of the American nuclear program.
The United States, upset by China’s behavior, including its sale of missile technology across the developing world, pressed it behind the scenes to stop and persuaded it to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992.
But Beijing’s recognition of the risks of proliferation came slowly, and the genie was already out of the bottle. 

In 1998, when India conducted five nuclear tests, Pakistan responded with a public test of its own less than three weeks later.
At about the same time, Pakistan was sharing nuclear enrichment technology with North Korea — including centrifuges, parts, designs and fuel essential for its nuclear bombs — in exchange for Korean missile technology and design help. 

Pakistan later accused Mr. Khan of acting on his own, but he maintains that he had the government’s blessing.
By 2002, the trade was so brazen that Pakistan sent an American-made C-130 cargo plane to North Korea to collect a shipment of ballistic missile parts, a flight that was detected by United States satellites.
Beijing was complicit in the deal, encouraging Pakistan to share nuclear technology with North Korea.

China allowed the transfers to occur through Pakistan to maintain plausible deniability.
“Chinese officials were fully aware of the nuclear trade, given the strong ties between the Pakistani and Chinese nuclear establishments,” said Toby Dalton, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former official at the Energy Department.
“North Korea wouldn’t be where it is today without the earlier trade with Pakistan,” he added. 

“But given Pyongyang’s determination to have nuclear weapons, it wouldn’t be that far behind.”

While China wanted Pakistan to counterbalance India, it is less clear how it would have benefited from the North’s obtaining nuclear technology. 

A picture of Mao Zedong, right, and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, on the Hekou Broken Bridge, which connected China and North Korea before it was bombed by the United States during the Korean War.

Blood and Betrayal
Mao is often quoted in the West as saying that North Korea and China are “as close as lips and teeth.” But his actual words, an ancient Chinese idiom, are better translated, “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.” 

He was warning that China would be in danger without North Korea.
In 1950, Mao sent more than one million Chinese soldiers, including his own son, into the Korean War to help the North fight the United States. 

By the time the armistice was signed three years later, more than 400,000 Chinese troops had been killed and wounded, a sacrifice in blood that one might have expected to forge a lasting loyalty between the two countries.
But there has always been an edge to the relationship, bred at the start by two Communist rivalries — between Mao and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and between Mao and Stalin, who both saw themselves as overlords of the new state created after World War II.
Then Kim showed who was in charge, purging a faction of senior leaders with Soviet connections in 1955 and moving the next year against more than a dozen members of an elite North Korean military group with ties to Mao. 

Several were arrested while a handful escaped to China.
The Soviets urged Mao to join them in retaliating against Kim. 

Chinese troops had not fully withdrawn from the North yet. 

But Mao demurred, according to a recent article by Sergey Radchenko, a professor of international studies at Cardiff University, citing newly declassified documents from Russian archives.
For the most part, Mao tolerated North Korea’s displays of disloyalty because he was afraid of losing it to the Soviet Union, which was the North’s main economic benefactor and provided it with aid that Mao could not match.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, China enjoyed more room to maneuver. 

In 1992, seeking trade, it established diplomatic relations with South Korea, infuriating the North, which was suddenly poorer and more isolated than ever.
From then on, according to Shen Zhihua, a historian of Chinese-Korean relations, “The treaty of alliance between China and North Korea became a piece of scrap paper.”
China now imports more goods from South Korea than it does from any other country, while the South counts China as its largest market for both exports and imports. 

One of Xi’s first foreign policy initiatives sought to take advantage of those ties and weaken the South Korean alliance with the United States.
But North Korea got in the way. 

After the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in early 2016, South Korea’s president at the time, Park Geun-hye, tried to call Xi to ask for his help in restraining Kim Jong-un.
Ms. Park’s aides were unable to arrange the call, according to local news reports. 

Chinese analysts said Xi was unwilling to accept Ms. Park’s demand for “the most severe” sanctions against the North.
By refusing to abandon Pyongyang, Xi lost ground in Seoul.
Ms. Park strengthened relations with Washington and agreed to deploy a missile defense system that Beijing opposed.

President Trump and Xi at Mar-a-Lago in April. 

For more than a decade, the United States has asked China for talks to discuss what each nation would do if North Korea collapses — but China has resisted, worried that agreeing to do so would be a betrayal.
Among the most pressing questions: 

• Where are the North’s nuclear weapons and who would secure them? 
• How would the two countries’ military forces avoid clashing as they raced to do so? 
• And what should the Korean Peninsula look like afterward?

The Pentagon has asked Beijing to discuss such “contingency plans” since the presidency of George W. Bush, but on each occasion, the Chinese response has been silence, according to a former United States defense official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.
“The Chinese are concerned about how the North Koreans would react,” said Ralph A. Cossa, the president of the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu. 

“I think it stops the conversation in the room.”
In a rare departure, Chinese military officials expressed an interest in the subject in 2006, the year the North conducted its first nuclear test, said an American official familiar with the conversations. 

But the Pentagon was suspicious that the Chinese were seeking to learn as much as possible about the United States’ plans without revealing their own thinking, the official said.
As tensions have climbed in recent weeks, questions about what China would do in a crisis remain unanswered. 

But there is a broad understanding that Beijing would be opposed to American forces crossing the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea.
Global Times, a state-owned tabloid that reflects the opinion of some segments of the party elite, published an editorial last month warning North Korea that China would remain neutral if it attacked the United States.
But the editorial also said that China was prepared to stop any attempt by American and South Korean forces “to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula.”
“The common expectation,” said Yun Sun, a scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington, “is that China is prepared to intervene to preserve a functional North Korean government, as well as the survival of North Korea as a country.”
American research institutes regularly convene “tabletop exercises” about North Korea — meetings in which participants are divided into teams representing different nations and asked to discuss how they would respond in a simulated emergency situation.
One analyst who has led these drills said the mutual suspicions run deep: The two teams representing China and the United States often end up shooting at each other.
On occasion, Chinese scholars and retired military officers agree to participate in the sessions. 

But Phillip C. Saunders, the director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University, said they usually emphasized two well-worn points: The North Korean government is stable, and China’s influence over North Korea is limited.