Rogue Nation

Xi Sets China on a Collision Course With History
By MAX FISHER

Xi Jinping, front row center, at the closing ceremony of the Party Congress in Beijing last year. 

There was always something different about China’s version of authoritarianism.
For decades, as other regimes collapsed or curdled into dysfunctional pretend democracies, China’s held strong, even prospered.
Yes, China’s Communist Party has been vigorous in suppressing dissent and crushing potential challenges.
But some argue that it has survived in part by developing unusually strong institutions, bound by strict rules and norms.
Two of the most important have been collective leadership — rule by consensus rather than strongman — and term limits.
When the Communist Party announced this week that it would end presidential term limits, allowing Xi Jinping to hold office indefinitely, it shattered those norms.
It may also have accelerated what many scholars believe is China’s collision course with the forces of history it has so long managed to evade.
That history suggests that Beijing’s leaders are on what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once called a “fool’s errand”: trying to uphold a system of government that cannot survive in the modern era.
But Xi, by shifting toward a strongman style of rule, is doubling down on the idea that China is different and can refashion an authoritarianism for this age.
If he succeeds, he will not only have secured his own future and extended the future of China’s Communist Party, he may also establish a new model for authoritarianism to thrive worldwide.

The Harder Kind of Dictatorship
If Xi stays in office for life, as many now expect, that will only formalize a process he has undertaken for years: stripping power away from China’s institutions and accumulating it for himself.
It helps to mentally divide dictatorships into two categories: institutional and personalist.
The first operates through committees, bureaucracies and something like consensus.
The second runs through a single charismatic leader.
China, once an almost Socratic ideal of the first model, is increasingly a hybrid of both.
Xi has made himself “the dominant actor in financial regulation and environmental policy” as well as economic policy, according to a paper by Barry Naughton, a China scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

Xi in Beijing, in October.

Xi has also led sweeping anti-corruption campaigns that have disproportionately purged members of rival political factions, strengthening himself but undermining China’s consensus-driven approach.
This version of authoritarianism is harder to maintain, according to research by Erica Frantz, a scholar of authoritarianism at Michigan State University.
“In general, personalization is not a good development,” Ms. Frantz said.
The downsides are often subtle.
Domestic politics tend to be more volatile, governing more erratic and foreign policy more aggressive, studies find.
But the clearest risk comes with succession.
“There’s a question I like to ask Russia specialists: ‘If Putin has a heart attack tomorrow, what happens?’” said Milan Svolik, a Yale University political scientist.
“Nobody knows.”
“In China, up until now, the answer to that had been very clear,” he said.
A dead leader would have left behind a set of widely agreed rules for what was to be done and there would be a political consensus on how to do it.
“This change seems to disrupt that,” Mr. Svolik said.
Xi, by defying the norms of succession, has shown that any rule could be broken. 
“The key norm, once that’s out, it seems like everything’s an option,” Mr. Svolik said.
Factional purges risk shifting political norms from consensus to zero-sum, and sometimes life-or-death, infighting.
And Xi is undermining the institutionalism that made China’s authoritarianism unusually resilient. Collective leadership and orderly succession, both put in place after Mao Zedong’s disastrous tenure, have allowed for relatively effective and stable governing.
Ken Opalo, a Georgetown University political scientist, wrote after China’s announcement that orderly transitions were “perhaps the most important indicator of political development.”
Lifelong presidencies, he said, “freeze specific groups of elites out of power. And remove incentives for those in power to be accountable and innovate.”

What Makes Authoritarian Legitimacy
In 2005, Bruce Gilley, a political scientist, wrestled with one of the most important questions for any government — is it viewed by its citizens as legitimate? — into a numerical score, determined by sophisticated measurements of how those citizens behave.
China, his study found, enjoyed higher legitimacy than many democracies and every other non-democracy besides Azerbaijan.
He credited economic growth, nationalist sentiment and collective leadership.
But when Mr. Gilley revisited his metrics in 2012, he found that China’s score had plummeted.
His data showed the leading edge of a force long thought to doom China’s system.
Known as “modernization theory,” it says that once citizens reach a certain level of wealth, they will demand things like public accountability, free expression and a role in government.
Authoritarian states, unable to meet these demands, either transition to democracy or collapse amid unrest.
This challenge, overcome by no other modern authoritarian regime except those wealthy enough to buy off their citizens, requires new sources of legitimacy.
Economic growth is slowing.
Nationalism, though once effective at rallying support, is increasingly difficult to control and prone to backfiring. 
Citizen demands are growing.
So China is instead promoting “ideology and collective social values” that equate the government with Chinese culture, according to research by the China scholar Heike Holbig and Mr. Gilley. Patriotic songs and school textbooks have proliferated. 
So have mentions of “Xi Jinping Thought,” now an official ideology.
Xi’s personalization of power seems to borrow from both old-style strongmen and the new-style populists rising among the world’s democracies.
But, in this way, it is a high-risk and partial solution to China’s needs.
A cult of personality can do for a few years or perhaps decades, but not more.

‘Accountability Without Democracy’
China is experimenting with a form of authoritarianism that, if successful, could close the seemingly unbridgeable gap between what its citizens demand and what it can deliver.
Authoritarian governments are, by definition, unaccountable.
But some towns and small cities in China are opening limited, controlled channels of public participation.
For example, a program called “Mayor’s Mailboxes” allows citizens to voice demands or complaints, and rewards officials who comply.
The program, one study found, significantly improved the quality of governing and citizens’ happiness with the state.
No one would call these towns democratic.
But it felt enough like democracy to satisfy some.
This sort of innovation began with local communities that expressed their will through limited but persistent dissent and protest.
Lily L. Tsai, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar, termed it “accountability without democracy.”
Now, some officials are adapting this once-resisted trend into deliberate practice.
Their goal is not to bring about liberalization but to resist it — to “siphon off popular discontent without destabilizing the system as a whole,” the China scholars Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton write in a new book on governing in China.
Most Chinese, Beijing seems to hope, will accept authoritarian rule if it delivers at least some of the benefits promised by democracy: moderately good government, somewhat responsive officials and free speech within sharp bounds.
Citizens who demand more face censorship and oppression that are the harshest in the world.
That new sort of system could do more than overcome China’s conflict with the forces of history.
It could provide a model of authoritarianism to thrive globally, showing, Ms. Shue and Ms. Thornton write, “how non-democracies may not only survive but succeed over time.”
But Xi’s power grab, by undermining institutions and promoting all-or-nothing factionalism, risks making that sort of innovation riskier and more difficult.
When leaders consolidate power for themselves, Ms. Frantz said, “over time their ability to get a good read on the country’s political climate diminishes.”
Such complications are why Thomas Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist, wrote on Twitter, “I’m no China expert, but centralizing power in the hands of one leader sounds like the most typical thing that a decaying authoritarian state would do.”

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.”

Dances with Wolves: Does Justin Trudeau get China?

China is not just an economic opportunity, but also an absolute dictatorship, a threat to the world order this country helped build, and under which we have long prospered
The Globe and Mail

Canada has never had to deal with a problem quite like China. 

Managing its rise, and our relationship with this superpower that is both aggressively capitalistic and unapologetically anti-democratic, will be one of Canada's biggest challenges in the years to come.
Does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government understand this? 

Does it get that China is not just an economic opportunity, but also a threat to the world order this country helped build, and under which we have long prospered? 

China is cast as the glittering business case at the top of every Davos PowerPoint presentation and the pot of gold at the end of every Team Canada trade mission rainbow, but the reality of China is a bit more complicated.
Throughout our history, our closest allies and trading partners have been nations with whom we largely agree about how the world works, and how it should work. 

With Great Britain, the United States, the European Union and post-war Japan, we have long shared a common culture of democracy and the rule of law. 

We fought two World Wars and a Cold War against opposing views. 

But in the early 21st century, things are different.
The week, the Global Times, an arm of the People's Daily and owned by the ruling Communist Party of China, called this editorial page "irritating and ridiculous" after we described China as an "absolute dictatorship."

But the Communist Party of China is, absolutely, a dictatorship. 

There's no free press, no free speech, no rule of law and no elected government. 

The CPC regime will tell you this is what the Chinese people want.
But Hong Kong and Taiwan, both of which are considerably more prosperous than mainland China, operate under very different systems. 

Hong Kong still has a high degree of freedom and rule of law, and Taiwan is democratic. 

There's no guarantee the CPC will rule forever.
But for now, and likely for a long time to come, Canada must get along with the unelected, unaccountable dictatorship of the hard men of Beijing. 

They rule over 1.3-billion people. 

They preside over the world's second largest economy, soon to be the largest. 

Their level of control over that economy's is high, as their personal financial stake in its businesses. They run an increasingly aggressive foreign policy. 

Some Canadians may be sentimental about Norman Bethune; they are not. 

These men (and the governing Politburo Standing Committee's seven members are all men) are not our pals.
But neither should Canada set out to make them our enemies. 

Ottawa has no choice but to try to get along with them as best it can, neither antagonizing them unnecessarily not bending to their will; neither picking fights with them nor shying away from defending Canada's values and interests.
Which bring us back to the question raised and left unanswered by Mr. Trudeau latest Chinese adventure: Does he get who he's dealing with?
It was assumed that he was going to China to kick off talks on a free trade deal; instead, he found himself left at the altar, with his International Trade minister sent back to try to reschedule a wedding. We and the Global Times can agree on this much: Beijing just put on an impressive demonstration of negotiation martial arts.
Canadians still don't know precisely what the Trudeau government was seeking this week, or what it wants for the future. 

We do not know what it hopes to get out of a so-called free trade agreement with China. 

For the Chinese, it's not so much about trade – their exports here mostly move freely already – but about issues like giving state-owned enterprises the freedom to invest unhindered in Canada.
We also don't know how serious the Trudeau government is about its talk of insisting on clauses on environment, labour standards and gender parity in all trade agreements.
The words play well with a key Liberal constituency, but is there substance behind the politics? 

Is this a pantomime for Canadian voters? 

A way to score domestic points with trade negotiations that, like NAFTA, appear headed for failure?
When doing international diplomacy, a government can't always publicly say what it means, or mean what it says, lest it give away the game to those on the other side of the table. 

But Canada being a democracy and all, Canadians deserve to know what their government is up to with China.
They deserve to know whether the government is as naive as it appears – or whether what happened to Mr. Trudeau in China this week shows that he is trying to avoid getting too far into bed with Beijing, without provoking the ire of an easily offended partner.