China Is Touting Its Totalitarianism Taming of the Coronavirus Over U.S. Democratic Failure
For months, President Donald Trump and his White House advisor Larry Kudlow continually touted that the United States was on a V-shaped economic recovery, suggesting a swift upward turn to pre-pandemic levels in the midst of his administration’s failure to manage the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. In June 2020, Trump said that “this is better than a V. This is a rocket ship. This is far better than a V.” In late September, Kudlow again argued that a V-shaped recovery does not depend on another round of federal financial relief. Yet, even as Congress passed the second stimulus package in late December, the Trump administration’s claims that the United States was on its way to a V-shaped recovery have thus far proven to be illusory. In fact, what is “really occurring” is a K-shaped recovery in the American economy.
Meanwhile, China has managed a “V-shaped recovery” from the coronavirus, which illustrates the enduring power of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and its ability to conquer a pandemic that brought worldwide activity to a virtual standstill. As evidence indicates that China has successfully managed the Wuhan-borne virus and its economy, the Economist magazine reported the gross domestic growth of 4.9 percent in the third quarter of 2020 and the International Monetary Fund projected China’s GDP growth to be 8.2 percent in 2021.
The American Midwest, in the meantime, is trapped in the throes of the coronavirus as Trump continues to claim that “it’s a hoax. There’s no pandemic.” His followers were encouraged to hold super-spreader events such as the ten-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. It became worse when his gullible acolytes began to self-medicate by drinking household cleaners after Trump inquired at a White House briefing in April whether “disinfectants could treat the coronavirus.” Others around the world attributed the coronavirus to “5G and microchip” conspiracies that “5G mobile phone signals either transmit the virus or reduce our defenses to it.”
In contrast to the meaningless rhetoric of the Trump administration, China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a model which adopted “the guidance of Marxism-Leninism” to Chinese conditions, has demonstrated the superiority of its system to bring into submission anything that may challenge its authority and infallibility regardless of whether it is natural, such as the coronavirus, or supernatural, such as its ability to convince the Vatican to formally renew its 2018 bilateral agreement over the appointment of Catholic bishops. The Vatican accord with Beijing came after the pope’s unprecedented refusal to meet with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had tried to stop the renewal.
Given the events of late, it begs the question: Has the CPC clearly demonstrated a superior and lasting form of governance over the evolving American model?
Beijing’s Hard Right Turn
Much of China’s history throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century was beset with turmoil. Too weak politically and too fragile economically, it was under constant threat of being carved up by its neighbors and Western powers. It was not until the latter part of the 1970s that Deng Xiaoping would successfully lead China to embark on the four modernizations: modern agriculture, modern industry, modern defense, and modern science and technology. Combining economic reforms with political reforms, China’s opening-up under Deng is the foundation of China’s explosive growth that averaged nearly ten percent over the course of three decades since its opening.
In recent years, however, President Xi Jinping appears to have taken the CPC on a hard right turn toward totalitarianism.
In 2016, for example, Xi demanded “total loyalty from state media” to the Communist Party, declaring that “all the work by the party’s media must reflect the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority, and safeguard the party’s unity.” Xi, also the general secretary of CPC, then instructed that “they must love the party, protect the party, and closely align themselves with the party leadership in thought, politics and action.”
In 2017, China’s military was ordered to pledge “absolute loyalty” to Xi. The world’s largest armed forces under the Central Military Commission (CMC) is technically the armed force of the ruling Communist Party. Unlike the United States, China’s military serves the Party, not the state. Xi is also the chairman of the commission. The consolidation of such power as the president, the general secretary, and the chairman has not been seen in China since Chairman Mao Zedong. Like Mao, Xi also has his own political philosophy, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” written into the CPC constitution.
In 2018, the National People’s Congress, which was largely considered a “rubber-stamping exercise,” allowed Xi to consolidate his power by removing the term limits and by granting him to remain “president for life.” Also in 2018, Xi again called on China’s military to demonstrate “absolute loyalty” to the ruling Communist Party, declaring that “we must . . . cast the ideological foundation of the [People’s Liberation Army, PLA] army’s absolute loyalty to the party.”
In 2020, the CPC demanded a show of “greater loyalty” from the growing private sector by citing the need to manage mounting “external risks” emanating from the open American hostility to the coronavirus pandemic. Xi then installed CPC officials inside corporate boardrooms to demand “executives tailor their businesses to achieve State goals.” In what was clearly a shot across the bow of China’s private sector, Xi personally intervened to cancel the initial public offering of Jack Ma’s Ant Group—a deal in which investors around the world had already committed to “paying more than $34 billion” for its shares.
Effective on January 1, 2021, the new National Defense Law removed the “war powers” policy and decisionmaking power from the State Council—i.e., China’s cabinet—to the CMC, headed by Xi, who now has the unparalleled authority to mobilize the PLA forces in defense of national interests at home and abroad. The new legislation, which comprised one hundred stipulations in fourteen chapters, empowers Xi to build a nationwide coordination mechanism by mobilizing state-owned and private enterprises to participate in applied research for defense technology in the conventional and nontraditional domains of electromagnetics, cybersecurity, and space exploration.
The CPC’s Dualist Pedigree
In his book, “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, Richard McGregor wrote that “China retains many of the formal institutional trappings that give it a superficial resemblance to a pluralist system, with executive government, a parliament and courts.” However, the ubiquity of the party’s presence in the government means that in any deliberations, the party’s interests come first. According to McGregor, this includes “key think-tanks, the courts, the media, all approved religions, and universities and other educational institutions, and maintain direct influence over NGOs and some private companies.”
Quoting the then Peking University Law Prof. He Weifang, McGregor further confirmed that “as an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law” adding that “the Party exists outside the legal system altogether.” In the Brookings Institution’s report on Party Leadership and Rule of Law in the Xi Jinping Era, Professor Jamie Horsley wrote that the CPC “has largely observed a technical, de jure separation between itself and the state, including the legal system;” in practice, however, the party controls every aspect of the state. This dualist system is hardly new, and while a number of countries such as the former Soviet Union come immediately to mind, one, in particular, would set the world ablaze.
In his opening statement at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal on Nov. 21, 1945, Justice Robert Jackson described “the consolidation of Nazi power” and the political structure of Nazi Germany as follows: “we find at this period two governments in Germany—the real and the ostensible. The forms of the German Republic were maintained for a time, and it was the outward and visible government. But the real authority in the State was outside and above the law and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.”
In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that a dualist political structure and authority between state and party “is one of ostensible and real authority, so that the government machine is usually pictured as the powerless façade which hides and protects the real power of the party.” Referring to the Third Reich, Arendt quoted the then Czechoslovak statesman and philosopher Thomas Masaryk, who opined that “even an expert would be driven mad if he tried to unravel the relationships between Party and State.”
History Repeats Itself?
Similarly, PLA fealty to Xi also has a precursor in Nazi Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, a law amalgamating the offices of president and chancellor enabled Hitler to assume the title of “Leader and Chancellor of the Reich.” Hitler also became the “commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht,” whose members were required to swear “an oath of allegiance to him personally and no longer to the Weimar Constitution.”
Xi’s notion that the army must swear an oath of loyalty to him personally no doubt also has some Maoist roots. Zedong is known today to have uttered the quip that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” but it is actually incomplete. In his book, The Search for Modern China, Professor Jonathan Spence wrote that what Mao had actually said was: “political power grows out of the barrel of the gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun shall never be allowed to command the party.” No doubt, CPC cadres today would remember that at the time, there were tensions between the party and the army, and as the army was gaining new capabilities, it was not clear whether the party was going to control the army, or the army was going to control the party.
The current CPC campaign to improve security, root out corruption and disloyalty are the manifestations of Xi’s drive to tighten totalitarian rule. Mao’s decrees for officials to “drive the blade in” and “scrape the poison off the bone” echo the Yan’an Rectification Movement—the political and ideological purge in the 1940s to root out any disloyalty, consolidate power, and establish his absolute leadership over the Communist Party. In August 2020, the New York Times reported that across China “police officers, judges, prosecutors and feared state security agents have been studying Mao’s methods for political purges, absorbing them as guidance for a new Communist Party drive against graft, abuses and disloyalty in their ranks.”
Selling the Totalitarian Model
Subtly or overtly, China has been sharing its success stories with the world and offering alternative forms of governance to Western liberal democracy with some success. The Economist in December 2020 reported that the CPC “trains foreign politicians” across the world and seeks to “sway tomorrow’s leaders.” Indeed, part of China’s other success has been attributed to the fear of overseas companies losing access to the Chinese market. It is a powerful weapon recognized only too well by the CPC, which continually uses it as a cudgel. In a Wall Street Journal analysis, Richard McGregor explained that then-Vice Minister Wang Qishan once exercised such power in 2009. When responding to a group of concerned European business executives over market access, Wang said that “I know you have complaints . . . But the charm of the Chinese market is irresistible.” The implication, according to McGregor, was that the complaints were largely irrelevant because “the [Chinese] market is so big, you are going to come anyway.” Wang has proven to be correct.
In the context of coronavirus, Xi presented a specious argument for a model of governance that can deal quickly with problems wherever and whenever they arise. However, it is worth noting that the totalitarianism that so effectively managed China’s V-shaped recovery from the coronavirus is the same totalitarian system that allows its leadership to suppress its dissenters, surveil its population, and lock up over a million of its citizens in Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere for no other reason than that they are an ethnic minority.
The irony is that the totalitarianism that so effectively dealt with the covid-19 pandemic is the same totalitarianism that so successfully suppressed all the warnings of Wuhan Dr. Li Wenliang about the impending pandemic in the first place. It is a double-edged sword.
Warning to Both Republics
For its part, the United States has not made a strong case for liberal democracy over the past four years—whether protecting civil rights over the decades of racial violence, electoral rights over the long history of voter suppression, or scientific guidance on health and climate change over partisan loyalty and nativism. If anything, the last four years have shown that the American republic is in fact a fragile institution. Unless safeguards are put in place to protect those institutions, it is easy to start on the slippery slope to totalitarianism by a mercurial leader supported by nativists and partisan devotees, much as the Enabling Act of 1933 allowed Hitler to sweep aside the Weimar Constitution and assume absolute powers over Germany.
Like the inception of the American republic in 1776—as well as the People’s Republic of China in 1949—one needs to reflect on the wisdom of their republican roots. In ancient China, the famous Confucius philosopher Mencius said, “the people are the most valuable element in a nation; the Gods of the land and grain are the next; the ruler is the least.” When Mencius elucidated that “the people are more important than the ruler,” he essentially summarized the Confucian wisdom by saying, “water can float a boat, but it can also capsize it.”
In 1787, when Benjamin Franklin walked out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention, a lady asked, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Humorous but with a warning, the American Confucius swiftly replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The 2020 presidential election shows that despite the Republican “attacks” on democratic traditions internally and the Russian cyber “attacks” on American institutions externally, the United States does still have the necessary safeguards in place to protect its founding ideals and Jeffersonian aspirations. Nonetheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that given the margins by which president-elect Biden won—only by eighty-one million votes compared to seventy-four million by Trump—the United States is far from united by the people and for the people. In his book, Democracy in America, the French chronicler Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that “the great privilege of the Americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit.”
As ordinary citizens let us hope that the political leadership of the United States and China follow the wisdom of these venerated philosophers—Tocqueville and Mencius—who correctly observed the power of the people to avoid sliding down the path of totalitarianism.
Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor, is a Taiwan fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University as well as a senior fellow of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei.
Joey Wang is a defense analyst in the United States.
They are alumni of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The views expressed in this analysis neither represents the official positions of the current or past institutional affiliations nor the respective governments.
Image: Reuters