of traditional Chinese thinking to bolster the conviction that authoritarian government undergirds China’s manifest superiority and inherent centrality. That conviction is as basic to the CCP’s self-understanding as is the communist dogma of intractable class conflict until capitalism’s demise.
All of the CCP’s paramount leaders, from Mao to Xi, have affirmed China’s nationalist prerogatives, envisaging China as the “big country” or “major country,” which should not be resisted by “little countries.” In the early decades of CCP rule, however, China’s economy was relatively small and weak. Because of the need to modernize and accumulate wealth and power, Xi’s predecessors tended to balance Chinese assertiveness with accommodation and compromise. Deng famously counseled that China should “bide its time, and hide its capabilities.” Early in the post-Cold War era, the PRC’s growing engagement in regional and international institutions — from the ASEAN Regional Forum to the World Trade Organization — created an image of moderation that encouraged the belief that Beijing would play fair and sometime soon embrace the norms of freedom and democracy.
However, underneath PRC rhetoric lay the CCP’s steadfast belief in China’s status as the “big country” and the need to protect the nation’s sovereignty against foreign influence. In the 1990s, former PLA Navy Chief Liu Huaqing repeatedly told his American counterparts that the problem was not China, the big country, bullying the little countries, but the other way around — that is, the little countries bullying the big country.149 “China is a big country and other countries are little countries, and that’s just a fact,” China’s then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi explained to his Singapore counterpart in 2010.150 Although insisting that China would act benevolently toward “smaller countries” in the dispute over maritime claims in the South China Sea, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated in March 2014 that “we will never accept unreasonable demands from little countries.”151 Similarly, China’s state-run media — most notably the jingoistic Global Times — justifies Beijing’s bellicosity toward its many neighbors as “punitive” actions undertaken to teach the little countries to submit to the big country.152
Xi can be assertive because of the fruits of his predecessors’ patience and determination, and because of the failure of liberal democracies — for fear of damaging commercial relations with the PRC — to put pressure on Beijing for bad behavior. China’s size and recently developed strength enable Xi to energetically pursue “Big Country Diplomacy” (or “Major Country
