Chinese Governing Culture Has Deep Roots

I recently read former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s book on U.S. China relations, titled The Avoidable War. He notes how many American policymakers have seen Communism as an aberration in Chinese history, and that mistaken assumption leads to unwarranted expectations that engagement with Beijing can be transformative to China’s political culture.

Good luck with that. Rudd has a nice passage reminding us how centralized state authority in China goes back thousands of years.

In addition to Marxist-Leninist ideology, Chinese nationalism also became a mainstay of the party’s continuing claim to domestic political legitimacy. This began soon after Tiananmen in 1989 and accelerated after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But Xi Jinping made cultivating nationalism an even stronger priority, leveraging an increasingly sophisticated propaganda apparatus that has seamlessly fused the imagery of the modern CCP with the national mythology of a proud and ancient Chinese civilization.

This has included the rehabilitation of Confucianism, once dismissed by the CCP as reactionary and anticommunist, as part of the restoration of the party’s emphasis on the uniqueness of China’s national political philosophy. According to the official line, a long-standing continuity of benign hierarchical governance (as represented by Confucianism) is what differentiates China from the rest of the world. The shorthand form of Xi’s political narrative is simple: China’s historical greatness, across its dynastic histories, always lay in strong, authoritarian, hierarchical Confucian governments. By corollary, China’s historical greatness was never the product of Western liberal democracy or any Chinese variation of it. By extension, China’s future national greatness can lie only in the continued adaptation of its indigenous political legacy, derived from the hierarchical tradition of the Confucian/communist state.

We should manage expectations that the right foreign policy can change China.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.