China’s pursuit of global preeminence and drive to remake world order flow from the CCP’s overarching sensibility. That sensibility is authoritarian, collectivist, and imperial. Two streams of ideas nourish it. Seminal CCP writings and speeches proclaim cardinal tenets of Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by successive Chinese communist leaders beginning with Mao Zedong, CCP chairman from 1943 to 1976 and the PRC’s founding ruler. CCP writings and speeches also espouse an extreme interpretation of Chinese nationalism. The result is an ideological stance that is neither strictly communist nor purely nationalist, but resolutely authoritarian, collectivist, and imperialist.
Although both communism and nationalism are compatible with authoritarianism, collectivism, and imperialism, communism and nationalism are generally seen as opposing ideologies. Communism, as Marx taught, culminates in a single, worldwide, classless society. In pursuit of that goal, communist parties have tended to be authoritarian, collectivist, and imperialist. Nationalism emphasizes a particular people and its distinctive traditions and sense of political destiny; it varies as customs, practices, and political experiences vary. Accordingly, national traditions can be drawn on to justify repression and conquest but also to vindicate the claims of freedom and democracy — as, for example, in the United States, whose founding principles and constitutional system revolve around individual liberty, human equality, and government grounded in the consent of the governed. The CCP reconciles the conflicting imperatives of Marxism-Leninism and its extreme intrepretation of Chinese nationalism by assigning to China the dominant role in interpreting the ultimate configuration of, achieving, and administering international socialism.
Neither the communist authoritarianism the CCP has imposed on the people in China nor its hyper-nationalism are inevitable. Indeed, prominent alternatives to CCP authoritarianism have prospered in the region. No less steeped in Confucian traditions than the population of the People’s Republic of China, the people of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea embraced freedom and democracy.
Nevertheless, because the Chinese Communist Party calls the shots in China, the party’s ideas about communism must be well understood. So too must the traditional political ideas that the party draws on be taken into account.133 Grasping both brings into focus the authoritarian, collectivist, and imperial synthesis that drives the CCP’s conduct.
