TWO VIEWS OF XI JINPING’S CHINA DREAM
Through a Political Lens
Xi Jinping is challenging the West, especially the United States. What type of challenge is this, what is motivating him and what he is trying to accomplish? Such understanding requires a look at the historical background of China’s relations with the West as well as the ideological differences. These factors, though, are always subject to interpretation which takes place within a particular global context and is carried out by the leading actors on the world stage. In the case of China, this means Xi above all. So it is important to understand the filters through which Xi makes sense of the ways that the conflict between China and the United States is being played out.
How we view Xi Jinping and China depends to a considerable degree on our politics. The two most intellectually thriving and resilient political orientations are liberalism, dominant in the West, and socialism, inflected by nationalism. They have been the main lenses through which the events of the past few centuries have been given meaning. The political philosophy of liberalism, which goes back to John Locke, has spawned the institutional form of liberal democracy. For a state to be a liberal democracy, three factors must be present: a strong and effective state, the rule of law, and political accountability. A socialist perspective that has more adherents in China than in the United States is that of the new left. From this critical perspective, the ideal is a society where class differences are minimized and equality is achieved while satisfying the basic material and cultural needs of the population.
It is important to be clear that neither Western liberalism nor new left socialism is the dominant Chinese ideology, since most people probably subscribe to some form of the regime’s state capitalist brand. The liberal view has an uphill battle in China because it is labeled a foreign ideology by the regime and its standard bearer is the United States. Furthermore, China has achieved considerable success over the past few decades so alternatives to the current system are not being eagerly sought. The new left has an extensive and well-developed political tradition of socialist thought to fall back on, although socialism’s worldwide following is far less than what it once was. In addition, although the government prefers the new left to the liberals, it has shut down new left websites, withheld conference funds, monitored its activities, and censored its writings.
The contrast between liberal democratic and new left views broadens our horizon and allows new insights into Xi’s worldview and politics. In particular, the new left view is helpful for those who have hardly been exposed to commentary on China from outside the liberal perspective. It enables us to see what the liberal view tends to pass over. On the other hand, the liberal view is useful for asking hard questions about claims that new left adherents tend to make. Each tradition has its blind spots. To give a very simple example, liberals tend to ignore problems characteristic of a market economy such as increasing inequality and worker exploitation, whereas the new left often overlooks the dangers of giving power to the state.
The Liberal View: Xi’s Political Stance
I will first introduce a well-informed and characteristically liberal view of Xi Jinping’s China. Kevin Rudd wrote The Avoidable War (2022) to give Western people clues about Xi Jinping and his political stance. Rudd is a former prime minister of Australia and a sinologist since university days who recently wrote his doctoral dissertation at Oxford on Xi Jinping’s worldview. For Rudd, entering the mental universe of Xi Jinping is the key to understanding China, since Xi is China’s supreme leader and is likely to be in power for a long time to come. Rudd declares his liberal faith at the very outset when he writes: “We must not only maintain the peace but also preserve the national and individual freedoms that our forebears fought to secure over the many centuries that have passed since the Enlightenment.”
Xi’s highest priority, as Rudd sees it, is to remain in power and to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in control. This goal can be best accomplished through achieving the China Dream which Xi defines as a China that is strong in every way, a civilized China that highlights equity and justice, moral and cultural excellence, a harmonious China that maintains amicable relations among social and ethnic groups, and a beautiful China which values environmental sustainability. In addition, the expanding reach of China’s economy will influence many countries to support China’s overall aim of replacing the United States as the world’s hegemonic power. This would be a vindication of the CCP’s absolute political control over the nation.
The CCP also believes that it is only through their decisive and firm leadership that China can be a great nation. Otherwise, the country would experience, as it often has in the past, disunity and internal conflict, leading to weakness. In addition, a continuity with the past represented by Confucianism, with its benign form of hierarchical leadership, distinguishes China from other civilizations. Along these lines, Xi, together with other CCP leaders, claims that liberal Western notions of democratic elections, the rule of law, and human rights are alien to the Chinese tradition and must be rejected.
Rudd judges that Xi no longer adheres to the CCP policy of focusing on economic growth while keeping a relatively low profile in international politics. This shift had already begun to take place after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the holding of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But Xi’s far more active and assertive approach reflects a sea change in posture, since he no longer accepts China’s subordinate status both militarily and economically.
Xi’s other major innovation is that ideology plays a more central role than it did for previous leaders from Deng Xiaoping onward. Political concerns also have become paramount, which seems closer to Mao Zedong’s approach than that of the reformers. Instead of striving to liberalize the economy as much as feasible, the state-owned firms are taking on increased importance as Xi tries to redistribute income and narrow the gap between social classes and between the rural and urban areas. His concern is not what the rich entrepreneurs think, but the response of the working class and the lower-middle class to his policies. He wants to address their anxieties over the cost of living, the lack of equal opportunity, their lack of decent work, and their social malaise.
Rudd finds it hard to understand, though, why Xi is turning away from a strategy that served his predecessors so well, leading to a moderately prosperous China and a nation whose overall strength has been clearly increasing. In his view, Xi’s most important political challenge is whether to keep politics in command or to give up some political control in order to go back to the successful economic policies of the reformers that produced high growth by maintaining business confidence. Otherwise, Rudd surmises, Xi is unlikely to realize the China Dream, since economic growth and the cooperation of the business world are required to ensure the people’s livelihood, modernize the military, protect the environment, and provide social welfare.
Economic growth rates have already declined and business confidence has been shaken. This situation puts in danger the implicit social contract that people will tolerate an authoritarian political system so long as their material livelihoods are improved. Part of the issue, however, Rudd asserts, is the changing international environment in which the United States takes measures to limit China’s economic and military power such as severely restricting China’s access to vital semiconductor chips. These moves lead China to double down on its economic nationalism as it takes a more mercantilist and protectionist approach while increasing state intervention in the economy. But Rudd wonders whether such pursuit of self-reliance will create a self-fulfilling prophecy that increases China’s isolation from the West.
Liberal Approaches to Protest and Liberal Democracy
Another area of great interest in the West is the characteristics of Xi’s authoritarian regime, especially its attitude toward protest. A fine example of a liberal view on this subject is Bruce Dickson’s The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century (2021), a thorough and fair-minded study, distinguished by its breadth of coverage. The author is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Although Dickson, unlike Rudd, makes no profession of his liberal faith, it is clear from his choice of subject matter and his sources that he is writing within the liberal tradition.
As his central example of how protest is addressed, Dickson focuses on the events of 2011 at Wukan, a village in the southeastern region of China. The villagers’ protest was in response to the sale of their farmland by elected officials to developers without reasonable compensation. The local leaders then used riot police to occupy the area and a tense standoff existed for several months during which time one of the small number of protestors arrested for attacking officers died in custody and had likely been tortured.
Dickson points out that such incidents are not all that uncommon in China but the outcome was surprising. The provincial leaders stepped in to investigate the claims, fired the village officials, and held new elections. A protest leader was elected as the new village chief. Yet, a few years later, the new chief was himself charged with corruption and jailed. It is not clear whether this was retaliation for his protest or the result of his giving in to the ever-present temptation to take advantage of his position.
As Dickson explains, there is a built-in tension between officials who are rewarded by the central government for promoting economic growth and for increasing investment in their local area and the needs and interests of the residents themselves. On the other hand, there is also the desire of high-up officials to maintain stability and social order, which has been an important policy direction of the CCP since the early 1990s. So they will intervene in order to head off social unrest. But they will only go so far in allowing protest: anything that challenges their monopoly of power will not be tolerated.
The Wukan example is used to illustrate national government policy toward protest and its evolution. Dickson calls the Chinese system “responsiveness without accountability.” On issues that deal with material matters like environmental degradation or inadequate compensation for land sold by officials, the government may take action to redress the wrongs. But on political issues, there can be no dissent. Investigative journalists may be censored or imprisoned and civil society groups that criticize the government are suppressed. Thus the government may either choose to respond to public demands or repress them. Dickson makes the point that leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao were more responsive and resorted less frequently to repression than Xi Jinping. He comments that repression may promote stability in the short-term but there is a risk of backlash in the long run leading to greater social unrest.
In Dickson’s view, Chinese people give higher priority to material prosperity, a stable society, and a unified nation than to democratic rights and freedoms. He thinks that democratization will not occur unless the CCP loses power. After all, Deng Xiaoping totally rejected the possibility of introducing Western-style democracy into China and soon after Xi Jinping assumed the top position, there was a ban on discussion of Western ideas, particularly constitutional democracy. The CCP is unlikely to lose power in the foreseeable future but it could happen if there is a serious economic crisis, division among the leaders, greater public support for advocates of democracy, or a resounding setback on the international scene damaging to national pride.
The New Left Critique of China’s Reform
The liberal view of China, dominant in the West, is eclipsed intellectually within China by the new left movement. The Chinese new left arose during the early 1990s as a critique of the liberal economic policies that led to the Chinese economy’s integration with global capitalism. An authoritative account of this political perspective that is close to the outlook of China’s new left is Daniel Vukovich’s Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People’s Republic of China (2019). Vukovich, who teaches at Hong Kong University, sees the Chinese new left as similar to the old European and Chinese radical socialist movements rather than to anarchist and countercultural movements or Occupy Wall Street. Even though it is not itself a revolutionary movement, the new left is attached to the revolutionary past and a socialist vision of equality coupled with anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and class analysis.
The new left does not believe the continued existence of what Vukovich calls “illiberal China” is a bad thing. The Chinese people themselves do not desire the end of the CCP government, and China’s illiberal regime presents a challenge to the alleged universality of the liberal values and political forms that largely prevail in the West. Yet the new left has many negative things to say about the CCP regimes from Deng’s time to the present. They all promoted depoliticization, nationalism, and patriotism in addition to economic growth. In particular, they introduced neoliberal economic policies, increasing inequality and destabilizing worker conditions.
A serious claim of the new left is that depoliticization takes away the possibility of meaningful change coming from ordinary people. Xi has talked about the China Dream but does not mention the socialist goal of equality, nor does he refer to the existence of classes within China. His goals for China are extremely conventional: wealth and power. Vukovich thinks that Xi is creating a society where political participation is less than before, so any change must come about through the government’s decision to respond to protests. But there is no political activity and creativity from the bottom up because it is stifled by Xi’s government. And political dynamism within the intellectual sphere is also threatened by Xi’s increasing use of censorship to restrict the circulation of politically unorthodox notions.
Vukovich’s attitude towards Xi’s CCP leadership is ambivalent. Although it represses dissent and engages in too much policing of speech, it does stand for a strong state capacity that can promote people’s livelihood and higher standards of living rather than profit for its own sake. Therefore, the CCP rejects political liberalism which it views as the dominance of the political world by money and interest groups. In addition, it is opposed to imperialism, not just economic exploitation but also ideological dominance in the name of the false universalism of liberal values.
According to Vukovich, these days, the key battles of the political wars are fought in the realm of ideas as much as the domains of money and power. On the ideological plane, the People’s Republic has the evidence on its side of outperforming all other nations whether industrial or not in providing for people’s livelihood and bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet, the liberal condemnation of China’s political system is often strident which Vukovich attributes to defensiveness, since neoliberalism has very little to offer. He laments the disappearance of almost all mass democratic and egalitarian politics in the world and the rejection of state power in favor of rule by a small economic elite.
Vukovich does not agree with the liberal evaluation of Xi’s current economic policy. An effective economy from the new left perspective is one that is sufficiently developed to provide for public welfare but focuses on distribution of wealth and income and not just growth. Since there has been rising inequality and increasing class tensions, Xi’s efforts to increase the ideological legitimacy of the CCP government by harking back to revolutionary socialism and embracing more populist policies are welcomed by the new left. They will help to preserve social order and stability, a key goal of the CCP since Deng’s time. A sole focus on economic growth means giving freer rein to the entrepreneurial class which would make social harmony ever more difficult to attain.
Whereas Rudd considered the desire of the CCP to remain in power to be the center of Xi’s worldview, Vukovich is less cynical. Rudd’s view appears to view the contents of the China Dream, a strong, civilized, harmonious, and beautiful China, as instruments for achieving Xi’s ultimate goal: maintaining power. And even before Xi’s accession to power, the CCP had already decided that China would remain a one-party state, although the degree of authoritarian control might change according to circumstances. The implication is that an authoritarian government is oriented toward holding on to power; in contrast, a liberal democratic regime protects individual freedom.
Vukovich does not agree with this analysis. The Chinese state “is concerned primarily with livelihood and not merely staying in power as the meaning or purpose of the state and the point of deploying market-based or capitalistic economics. It is a vaguely communitarian or socialistic ethic that clearly harkens back to the collective era and Sun Yat Sen beforehand as well as to a nebulous but undeniable Confucian tradition.” In other words, there seems to be a value difference between the United States and China that underlies their different political systems: American individualism versus China’s communal ethic.
This difference is important because Xi emphasizes very strongly that China’s political path must be consistent with its culture and that Western cultural values and political norms are alien to China. Vukovich supports Xi’s rejection of the American notion that the liberal political tradition is universally valid. He also considers the new left position to be closer to political Confucianism than liberalism, since they both want to preserve China’s difference. They also recognize the centrality of people’s livelihood. But they also diverge in an important way. The new left emphasizes the more socialist and egalitarian aspects of the Confucian tradition but sees Confucian traditionalism, like liberalism, as failing to promote the political participation necessary to achieve radical equality. It shares with the liberal West a depoliticized approach.
Vukovich believes that all governments are authoritarian. Yet an authoritarian system that responds positively to protest and confronts social problems is superior to the present-day liberal democracies where the state is weak or ineffective. He is saying that without an active and effective governing body, the deeply rooted social issues faced by all developed economies will fester and lead to paralysis. Under such conditions, how valuable are the formal freedoms of liberal democratic systems? In addition, in these societies when protests occur, they are ignored by the government, the fate, in his view, of the Occupy Wall Street movement and Black Lives Matter in the United States.
The New Left on Protest and Liberal Democracy
In the new left view, what is most worth protesting is not the lack of liberal democratic forms and procedures. The “negative freedom” of liberalism only means that outside forces cannot restrict a person’s ability to express and act. It is true that in a liberal democracy, workers are free to sell their labor, but this transaction occurs within the context of a capitalist economy where power mostly resides with the wealthy. It is only through unions or state intervention that the power of capital is not absolute and worker’s livelihoods can be improved. Otherwise, Vokovich notes, the worker is “free” to choose the particular circumstances of his or her exploitation at the hands of capital.
The new left insists that democratic forms and procedures are not enough to ensure a decent livelihood. What is missing is the achievement of the goals that Xi has enunciated for China: a sustainable moderate prosperity that is humane. If we look at the Wukan example that Dickson highlights, the major problem, Vukovich asserts, is not the lack of a legal right to protest; it is the state policy that Xi is only starting to reverse which places economic growth within a capitalist economy as the overwhelming priority. In other words, economic criteria rather than political considerations determine policy. New left socialism turns this around by viewing the economy as political and affirming the need for the economy to serve the people rather than for people to serve the economy, the Chinese reality during the reform era.
So it is not surprising that local officials sell off farmland in order to stimulate the economy and, not incidentally, further their own careers. Such actions may increase the wealth of well-situated players within the economy and benefit local officials, but the environment is destroyed, inequality increases, farmers’ livelihoods are damaged, and humane treatment disappears. Vukovich sees China as having largely succumbed to laissez-faire or neoliberal capitalism. He does not hold out hope for a move to egalitarian socialism but he believes the progressive liberalism of the social democratic movement that has been in retreat in Europe could gain strength in China. These days, many people feel betrayed because their livelihoods are subject to the vagaries of the market rather than protected by the state.
Vukovich highlights the long tradition of protest in China. The population has always been far from passive. “From the legacy of Maoist right to rebel, to what has been termed the long tradition of rightful resistance dating back to the Qing Dynasty, political protest and intellectual contention are simply as much a part of the PRC as its various cuisines and transport systems.” His point is that China’s political order does not lack participants and is not in danger of overthrow any time soon. There is a highly vibrant civil society and far from an apathetic public.
But Chinese politics does have its own logic, one that is not in accord with liberal democratic assumptions, since the state may take action in response to protest, which in turn strengthens rather than weakens the state’s legitimacy. Recent examples of such responsiveness are enforcing laws that protect the environment and providing more opportunities to receive higher education.
On the issue of government attitudes toward protest, Vukovich largely agrees with Dickson’s analysis. He also thinks, like Dickson, that Xi has clearly upped the level of repression compared with his predecessors. But he rejects the liberal notion that freedom of speech and assembly are absolutes. His new left perspective is that restrictions on thought and action are justified when a socialist regime is in danger of subversion from the outside, the prevailing situation during the earlier days of Mao’s rule. But it makes no sense today to invoke a threat coming from the activities of intellectuals like human rights lawyers and dissidents who hardly command a wide following. Xi’s stance is authoritarianism, plain and simple.
Rudd’s liberal perspective is that the CCP considers bourgeois liberalism more threatening now than at any other period except for 1989. In his view, Xi’s fear of liberalism is the main reason why ideology divides the US and China more than anything else. Rudd appears to imply that the attractiveness of bourgeois liberalism is due to its ability to meet Chinese people’s needs more than any of the competing brands, a position that the new left strongly rejects. From a new left perspective, if political liberalism can appear to be a threat, it is due to its hegemony in the West and, therefore, in the world in general.
Xi’s Challenge to the West
In what way according to the new left can Xi be viewed as challenging the West?
After all, the distance between Xi’s thought and policies is nowhere near as distant from that of the West compared to Mao Zedong, although it is increasing. But in Xi’s statement of 2013, he asserts that seven ideological threats must be guarded against, all of which emanate from Western liberalism. These threats include neoliberalism, constitutional advocacy, Western-style journalism, civil society, and universal values. Thus ideological combat is a major concern of his as China struggles against Western hegemony in the realm of ideas. Political values, however, are not the only targets of Xi’s concern, since he also wants to keep China strong in the face of US attempts to weaken the country. In addition, China’s difference must be asserted, despite the homogenizing thrust of globalization emanating from the West.
Rudd’s liberal analysis of the international scene is not so different from the new left version. There is an increasing likelihood of war between China and the United States mainly due to ideological struggle, although he sees China, more than the United States, as the main instigator. For Rudd, China’s increasing strength is the main reason why Xi has departed from the more low-profile approach of his predecessors. In his view, Xi wants China to achieve preeminence in the world in all major areas from the military to the cultural. Vukovich, on the other hand, does not speculate about Xi’s ultimate aim but is resigned to Xi’s lack of commitment to the ideal of egalitarian socialism. He is gratified, though, by China’s emergence as an alternative voice in the international community, a nation whose power ensures that what it says and does will not be ignored.
The major disagreement is over the likely success of Xi’s economic policies. Rudd doesn’t think that Xi’s departure from the economics-first policies of previous reformers will be successful. In his view, Xi needs to edge closer to Western economic thinking and to allow China’s economy to converge more with that of the West. Intensified economic nationalism will only weaken China. For Vukovich and the new left, Xi’s move toward social democratic thinking is humane and will contribute to greater social harmony. They criticize a single-minded focus on economic growth and embrace nationalist policies only as defensive measures. The new left believes that a more equal and just society will give China the edge in its ideological competition with the West. The realm of ideas is where international rivalries have mainly played out over the past three decades, and, they think, this situation can be expected to continue.
How does Xi’s challenge to the West compare with Mao’s confrontational policies? Mao, too, placed importance on ideological competition with the West but revolutionary socialism’s appeal faded during the later Cold War period. Decolonization had run its course and ideology made room for national and ethnic aspirations. Economic development became the overwhelming priority as the era of revolution ended and capitalism gained new vigor. The main fissure appeared when first Japan, and then other East Asian nations, introduced the developmental state, an expression of difference from the prevailing American capitalist orthodoxy. The Japanese challenge withered, but the economic and military strength of Xi’s China has disrupted US dreams of a homogenized world modeled on the American political economy. Difference has made its appearance in an unprecedented way, bringing great instability in its wake.
From Rudd’s liberal standpoint, there is no question that the values of the Enlightenment must be upheld. He makes clear that the dominant Western and Chinese political approaches are incompatible. It is vital to preserve peace which means that China’s power should not be underestimated and China should be understood on its own terms. But Rudd does not enable us to understand the depth of Xi’s distaste for the West, a sentiment that other CCP leaders, including Deng Xiaoping have shared. Xi is the first Chinese leader with sufficient national power and confidence to give vent to these emotions but he is hardly unique in having them.
History must be given its due. A Western person will not find it easy to understand the humiliations, despair, doubts, and suffering that Chinese people have endured on their way to national recovery. How can a person whose civilization has been on top since the 16th century enter the world of those who have had to scrape their way up from the bottom, a location where one’s own self-perceptions find little resonance? Under such circumstances, the arrogance of those with a severely critical outlook toward China becomes hard to bear.
The new left has emphasized how Chinese were viewed by Western imperialists and how Western feelings of superiority toward China have never disappeared. Today most Western journalists and some academic writers treat China’s political institutions as less desirable than those of the West, and their main concern is to determine whether China is on course to converge with the West. In recent years, the answer has been largely in the negative which gives dark undertones to current Western accounts of China.
It is not surprising that Xi’s China actively combats such interpretations, even though, as Vukovich argues, the influence of liberal universalism within China is not very great, the major exceptions being some universities and media groups. After all, Xi’s China can now defend itself against Orientalist interpretations of its civilization that were once very powerful indeed. So it has taken an active and vigorous stand against such writing at the expense of the open exchange of ideas. The government also seems to assume that a liberal stance means taking the side of Western powers in opposition to China, just as Western people tend to believe that any writer on Chinese politics who has something positive to say must have been bought off or intimidated by the Chinese government.
There may be a very simple answer why Xi has taken a much more aggressive stand against the West and its liberal politics. It is to prove that China has now overcome almost all the ills that once kept it down and allowed the West to trample on it. The best way to do this is by demonstrating power. If the West cannot resist it, then the case has been made. But this course of action can also be the result of overconfidence masking insecurity. Japan followed the same pattern, taking on the Allied powers and China militarily in World War II. This effort came up short, and predictions of Western decline were premature, but China is in a far stronger position now than Japan ever was.
