I've been planning to write this piece for at least two years. I've thought for almost as long as that about what I should choose for the title.
"On China" came so smoothly in mind, but then I realized that this is the title of Kissinger's book, which explains why it was coming up so readily. Then for a short time, I entertained the not-very-original
"Will China own the 21st century?" But it was both more and less than what I wanted to say. I don't have an oracle, and I wanted to put into words
a lot of what I think about China instead of concentrating on a single topic. So then came the
"How to think about China?", but I dropped that too, eventually, for being too pretentious. The way I think about China is not necessarily
"the way" to think about China.
Finally, a surely celestial inspiration hit me. The Chinese have a childish fascination, or rather obsession, with numbers (The Gang of Four, The Three Jewels, The Three Evils, The Four Great Inventions, The Six Harmonies, ... google them), so it's fitting to write about them in kind. Thus was born the title Five Persistent Myths About China, which are the following:
- China is a communist state
- The Chinese is a superior form of government (superior to liberal democracies, that is)
- China is a peaceful giant that merely wants to take its rightful place in the world and to be a good neighbor to the (geographically unfortunately located) countries around it
- The Chinese leadership possesses the distilled wisdom of a millennia-old empire and they plan ahead for centuries
- The 21st century will be the Chinese century
All of these statements are wrong and in the following, I try to show why. But first a super-brief history of China.
The Chinese is one of the most ancient civilizations on Earth which reached its relative zenith compared to the rest of the world around the sixteenth century. It was a technological, cultural, and military powerhouse at the time when Europe was a fragmented backwater. Yet it threw its advantages away when it chose isolation and stagnation while the rest of the world rushed through the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment. By the nineteenth century, China was as backward as it was weak, an easy plunder for the avaricious Europeans. The tumultuous twentieth century saw the Emperor overthrown, a bloody civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists, the Communist victory followed by thirty years of Mao's nightmarish rule, then the rise of the pragmatic China in more or less the form, if not the power, we see it today.
And now to the myths.
China is a communist state
This myth is shared by the fewest people outside of China, constituted mostly of tiny communist parties and Marxist westerners like Richard Wolf - to whom the 2008 financial crisis was a "collapse" but Soviet gulags merely a "social problem". The rest of the world realized at least two decades ago that the People's Republic of China is a hybrid state, where a single party of plutocrats rules over a more-or-less free-market economy. There is no universal healthcare or cradle-to-grave social welfare programs. No social equality, not even attempts at that. The socialist part is reduced to one-party rule, Marxist-Leninist slogans, and political oppression (to tick all the wrong boxes).
China started its meteoric rise exactly when it ceased to be a communist state. After the death of Mao, whose legacy was the killing of tens of millions of people under the flags of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution - making him the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever seen, eclipsing even Stalin or Hitler -, a pragmatist took over the helm and slowly started to open the economy to domestic and international markets. The less communist China has become, the richer it got, and we might see the reversed course one day.
The Chinese form of government is superior to democratic governments
This notion was fueled by the average 9% annual growth of GDP in the last 30 years, not inexplicably. But the reason for the spectacular multi-decade ride wasn't that the Chinese Communist Party has turned into a group of economic savants overnight some day in the eighties. Instead, it is a combined effect of multiple factors.
One is the international liberal order that guaranteed free and safe trade and transfer of technical and managerial know-how. By entering the international network of trade and becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, China has been the greatest winner of the post-WWII order. Like it did to Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea, economic integration with the world pulled China into the community of developed countries, and hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty.
The second is the increased freedom of internal markets that allowed entrepreneurial Chinese people to create and invest with less overbearing governmental supervision.
The third is scale. The vast size of the population enabled the government to allocate huge amounts of resources for strategically important purposes. This wouldn't have been constructive if not for the fourth point, which is that, to their credit, the Chinese leadership really proved to be competent in large-scale economic management. And large-scale management is one thing a centralized decision-making system can do really well in the case of the last but not least important factor, which was...
...the utterly miserable starting point. This might sound surprising, but in reality, it is not. Mao left China in a wretched state. If a dirt-poor country with eighteenth-century infrastructure doesn't do more than start building a modern road system, and basic agricultural and industrial infrastructure, it will multiply its GDP. And this is what happened. China entered the international trade system, copied (then stole) first-world technology and know-how, and ceased to be a nightmarish dictatorship. This is enough to rise to a middle-income country level in time if the rest of the world around you keeps pulling you up. It's not that post-1980 China has been run by geniuses. It just stopped being ruled by a madman.
Nevertheless, the scale of changes the size of China made possible has been stupifying. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of deep poverty in the span of mere two generations.
Amazed the by greatest material improvement program in history, many started to see China's state-run capitalism as a model for the future. Some with naive interest, some with fear, and some with longing. Cracks in the new modern Chinese image only started to appear after 2020 when China unleashed the virus that killed around 10 million people worldwide and caused a global economic throwback. Even after that, the picture of a brutal but effective regime, that welds people in their houses if necessary, was shared with something very close to admiration. The sudden abandoning of that approach in 2023 (without a properly vaccinated population) was less awe-inspiring.
Peaceful giant
The story the CCP likes to tell about China is of a peace-loving, benevolent empire nation that strives to live in harmony with its neighbors and merely wants to occupy its natural place among the great powers.
This is part fairy tale, part misunderstanding (the Chinese interpretation of natural place is not what liberals mean by that idea). First of all, empires have never grown peacefully. A country doesn't get to cover millions of square kilometers and host one-fifth of the world's population by gently accepting willing immigrants. China, like all its big peers, is built on past wars of conquest. Its history is marred by violent civil wars that were no less bloody that the European wars of the ancient and middle ages. With regard to the present time, China is not a conqueror, but a bully. Every single neighbor of hers seeks American protection from Chinese influence, not the way around. That the only exception is North Korea tells all.
China doves in the West often make the point that historically China has never had any ambition for world domination. This is a sloppy argument. At the height of its power, China believed itself the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom. It dominated all its surroundings and demanded tribute from its smaller neighbors. If it did not care for Africa or the Americas, it was because there were far away and had no relevance to it. But the world has shrunk since then, and decisions made on the other side of the globe influence everyone. China's position hasn't changed. It still wants to have its say in only what can affect her, but this time that means the world from the Arctic to Africa. And it's not just about natural resources or security.
When Mercedes used a quote from the Dalai Lama as an advertisement slogan, China threw a tantrum that forced the German giant to issue a cringy apology. When Australia raised the question of a deep inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, China immediately slapped tariffs on its Australian imports and its leading newspaper called Australia "gum stuck to China's shoe". When Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, China responded by arresting random Canadians (the two Michaels) on flimsy accusations, practically taking them hostage. It's worth pointing out that while Wanzhou was merely under house arrest and could move freely around with supervision (the Canadians being civilized people), the two Michaels sat in prison cells where the Canadian ambassador could visit them biweekly to bring some books.
Hysterical nationalism can manifest in curious ways. In the past years, a Chinese MMA fighter, Xu Xiaodong has gained notoriety by challenging and soundly roughing up self-proclaimed kung-fu masters. The media lambasted him for humiliating China by Western methods and the authorities lowered his social credit score (the soft arm of the CCP) to barr him from buying property or even long-distance domestic train or plane tickets.
These are not merely cherry-picked incidents. Around 2017 China announced the "Wolf Warrior diplomacy", named after a popular Chinese action movie in which the local special forces hero dispatches evil Westerners. This is not a joke (actually, it is). It is as if Americans were running around a world thumping their chest and boasting about "John Rambo"-diplomacy. And the world still likes to think of the Yanks as rednecks and the Chinese as refined Machiavellians...
The Chinese approach to engaging with the outside world is not restricted to verbal aggression. In recent years, it's been revealed that China maintains illegal "police stations" around the world to harass or sometimes kidnap its dissidents. So much for their much-touted respect for territorial integrity - which also shows in their communication over the Ukraine war.
Finally, if you want to assess how a country would behave with its neighbors if its power over them was unchecked, it's a useful proxy to look at how it behaves with its minorities. Over one million of the twelve million Uyghurs have spent time in "re-education" camps in the last five years. Stories of organ harvesting, torture, and forced sterilization are abundant. Parallel to the prisons, the CCP conducts a gentle genocide by artificial birth control. And often by something uglier. To the families where the man has been taken to re-education internment camps, the state often sends male officials to live with the family to provide them guidance and education. It doesn't require reading between the lines to recognize state-mandated rape. It is a system that is beyond disgusting. They make the Russians look good.
Maybe one more point on this, made by a Chinese leader himself. Deng Xiaoping had a motto for foreign policy: "Hide your strength, bide your time". Bide your time for what?
China is a giant. But as peace-loving as the Soviet Union was. It is an insecure, paranoid, ultranationalistic bully. Despite its constant whining about the antagonistic West and its "century of humiliation" - when other powers forced their will on her - Chinese leaders believe might is right. But only as long as they are the mighty.
Oriental wisdom: playing the long game
In common imagination, China is cloaked in some kind of Oriental mysticism. Many are prone to see her as one continuous, ancient empire whose roots reach back thousands of years. With its access to the distilled wisdom of past millennia, it's wiser, more sophisticated, and more manipulative than our puny, infantile modern states.
This is frankly the most laughable myth of all. That Westerners, who are generally credulous to the stories of the exotic, believe it, is not very surprising. But the fact that even the Chinese leadership does, it's positively hilarious.
The Chinese has a reputation of an ancient civilization whose leaders, unlike fickle Westerners, measures times in centuries. One source of this belief is an entertaining story. When the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in the early 1970s was asked by Henry Kissinger what he thinks of the French Revolution, his pithy answer was: "Too early to say". This conveyed the image of the Oriental statesman whose eyes are firmly focused on the grand arc of history. But this is not what happened. His translator told later that he simply misunderstood the question and thought it was referring to the 1968 Paris riots. Nevertheless, the lie was perpetuated by Kissinger, who always admired his enemies more than his allies, and who perhaps wanted to elevate his own importance by overselling the wisdom of his interlocutor.
In fact, the wisdom of long-term planning is conspicuously missing from Chinese history. China has been invaded, conquered, and ruled over by foreigners multiple times in the past millennia. In the times between foreign conquests, civil wars were more the rule than the exception. After reaching their cultural, technological, and military zenith in the sixteenth century, they chose isolation and opted out of the Industrial Revolution, leaving them in the rear-view mirror of European powers. By the 20th century, China became a poor and backward country. Then came the Japanese occupation and the civil war followed by thirty years of terror under Mao. Then Deng Xiaoping replaced the system of one-man dictatorship with the rule of the party, then Xi Jin-Pin is changing it back right now. The last hundred years were constant zig-zags and u-turns.
The latest is on demography. Mao introduced the one-child policy fifty years ago and put his country on a trajectory of halving its population by 2100. Maybe Peter Zeihan is exaggerating when he claims that China is done in ten years, but China has got onto the trajectory of becoming the most aged society on Earth in the span of two generations. This is an economic catastrophe and it's not clear how China can avoid it.
Regarding geopolitics, the image is even poorer. Instead of building up a network of allies as a path to eventually challenge the US, China has resolutely done the opposite. With the aforementioned Wolf Warrior diplomacy, it managed to alienate every single neighbor of hers. For a couple of barren rocks in seas and mountain ridges, it picked up diplomatic fights with Japan and minor but real ones with India. It reacted with extreme rudeness to the Australian request for an open inquiry. It is in constant territorial disputes with the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brunei. It achieved that the famously hostility-averse European Union in 2019 changed its reference to China from "strategic partner" to "systemic rival". It united the US's Republican and Democratic parties against itself, whose divison on every other issue is at its historical highest.
These are not the actions of cunning master strategists playing the long game but erratic and ham-fisted reactions of geopolitical autists.
The records on domestic policy don't lead to a different conclusion either. Let's look at another recent event. How did the Communist Party handle the pandemic? First, they suppressed all information about it, harassed, jailed, and "disappeared" journalists who were trying to ask questions. Then they closed down their whole economy for years. Instead of using that time to vaccinate their population, they spread lies about the Western vaccination and touted their own ineffective one. They opened up in 2022 for a short time, before closing again at the outbreak of the Omicron variant. Then after being spooked by protests, they took a complete U-turn and canceled the lockdowns overnight.
The Xi Jinping administration proved that in matters of extreme national importance, it doesn't know what it will do in two weeks let alone two centuries.
Does China own the 21st century?
From Hollywood movies and pundits alike, the general message of the early 2000s has been that America is on the decline, and China will take over its place as the biggest economy of the world, then the leading superpower in every respect. I personally know people who have had their kids learn Mandarin from an early age, I suppose to prepare them for the unfriendly future.
As is probably obvious from the previous points, I think that it is also an unlikely one, for many reasons. Despite its incredible economic journey in the last forty years, China is still a developing country with a GDP per capita on par with Mexico. To break out of the gravitational field of the middle-income trap, it would need to maintain the escape velocity instead of its current deceleration. I think autocratic politics put a heavy brake on economic development after a certain level, and China is closing to that point while already slowing down in the process. This would be a long topic, so I just leave it with a reference to an earlier article about a great book on the subject,
Why Nations Fail.
Aside from the limitations imposed by its political structure, China has enormous social challenges as well. Despite the dazzling cities, most of the population still lives in the rural countryside. As mentioned earlier, China has a very underdeveloped welfare state. This problem will only get worsened by the next problem, which is the demographic situation.
China is on the road to becoming the most aged society that ever existed. Even Chinese sources predict the halving of the population before the end of the century, and the Communist Party's attempts to reverse the course the disastrous one-child policy put China on don't seem to work. The specter of declining population looms over most other countries as well, but China is in a uniquely bad position. The US and, to a lesser extent, Europe still act as immigrant magnets. The influx of young people from less-developed countries can set off the effects of the dwindling birth rates. China doesn't have this option. Mandarin is a famously difficult language to learn, and Chinese culture is less than welcoming to foreigners. This is a country where the message of the superiority of the Han people and the maliciousness of the West (and Japanese, and ....) are constantly declared by state propaganda.
The idea that China can take over the role of the military superpower from the US is similarly lightly rooted in reality. The last war China fought (and lost) was more than forty years ago. It can churn out warships and fighter jets that equal in amount to the US's output, but it doesn't have the personnel to command them. Its military leaders own their positions to political connections, not experience. Russia is demonstrating in plain sight how effective the military of a deeply corrupt state usually is.
Countries don't have to rely only on their own resources, of course, if they have allies to support them during military or economic hardships. But instead of creating a network of them, the CCP spent the last ten years inspiring its neighbors to build alliances up against China.
The more probably future for China is a long struggle with mounting social problems and a deglobalizing world, which will turn the Communist Party ever more belligerent and xenophobic.
And with this last rebuttal, we are done.
