Diplomacy”). Such diplomacy is bolstered by party propaganda and growing international influence,153 and champions the nationalist privileges and prerogatives to which the CCP remains dedicated.154
Even as the CCP proclaims China’s supremacy among nations and indoctrinates the people with a belief in the PRC’s paramount status, the party has for decades fostered in China an acute sense of historical victimhood and national shame. The CCP traces the nation’s grievances to the concessions the British imposed on China in the mid-19th-century Opium Wars. While seeing itself as the rightful heir of China’s ancient and storied civilization, the CCP resents the Qing dynasty’s failure to modernize, which it blames for China’s territorial losses and other disgraces at the hands of Western imperial powers during the so-called “century of humiliation” (1839-1949).155 Notwithstanding its destruction of major parts of China’s magnificent cultural heritage, the CCP stokes popular indignation by promulgating the belief that, for a protracted period, smaller and morally and intellectually inferior countries deprived the Middle Kingdom of its rightful status. The refusal of the United States to recognize China’s exalted position as the CCP understands it provides ammunition for the party’s narrative of China as a victim.
For the CCP, pride in China’s inherent centrality and resentment at its mistreatment by the West reinforce one another. This potent mix of pride and resentment nourishes party members’ conviction that China is endowed with incontrovertible title to rule in a loose system in which other countries enjoy considerable autonomy provided they recognize their place and submit to China’s socialist norms. At the same time, the combination of pride and resentment weakens China’s inclination to compromise and cooperate. Built around defeat at the hands of the West, the CCP’s founding myth disposes China to dwell on settling old scores and righting historic wrongs.156
Xi’s Synthesis of Communism and Chinese Nationalism
All five Chinese Communist paramount leaders — Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping — have affirmed the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism
