Totalitarian China is not what you might think — and it is vital to understand that

From the Cold War the CIA is famed for three things: running death squads, promoting modern jazz, and never foreseeing the collapse of communism.

It’s a history beginning in crime (that’s the death squads, not the jazz, to be clear) and ending in farce. How did it get it so wrong?

The obvious answer is that the entire spy apparatus of the west was filled with idiots, and one gets the same impression from reading the “China sections” in the endless supply of foreign policy websites available today. 

There, WWII is playing right from the start again, with China in the role of the Nazis, bent on world domination. Sometimes a dash of orientalism is thrown in: China is intent on world domination, but for inscrutable purposes.

This construction is based on a mutually reinforcing double argument: that China’s totalitarianism internally has the corollary that any of its actions externally are aggressive and expansionary. This conception lies at the base of the legitimation of both the AUKUS and Quad alliances, the former especially. 

The equation of totalitarian internal policy and aggressiveness abroad is crucial to obscuring the race-based nature of the AUKUS deal and its implicit conception of a mega-civilisational clash between East Asia and everyone else — a racial-civilisational divide 8000 years in the making. 

In contesting our forced march into being an enmeshed, nuclearised sub power, our sovereignty materially surrendered, disentangling our views of China seems vital. We also need to have developed a more sophisticated understanding of recent Chinese history than is purveyed by the think tank commanders. 

That China has returned to a totalitarian form of social organisation after a merely authoritarian period cannot really be denied. It is one of the more surprising developments of the past decade. But comparisons to the cultural revolution seem utterly foolish and misplaced in understanding what this new totalitarianism is. In many ways, it is the opposite of key aspects of the Maoist period. 

The new period of Xi Jinping Thought and a reinterpretation of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” appears to be in service of stabilisation of a society that has made a vast and rapid transition from village agrarianism to urban capitalism in 40 years on a scale never before seen. This is a reining-in of what was a conscious policy in the Deng and post-Deng periods: letting capitalism roar unimpeded, but within a limited field of action, constrained and bounded by the state.

Now, Xi’s leadership is turning towards absorbing the shocks of capitalism’s crisis-tendencies, with new limits not merely on economic inequality — with wealth and inheritance taxes proposed, wage credits and an expanded social welfare system; an evening-up of life conditions between city and country (which were allowed to become highly unequal in order to draw people into the cities). They have also tightened previous restrictions on Bitcoin to a total ban.

But it is also cultural, with a crackdown on the mass culture arising from capitalism, such as the sort of fanatical pop enthusiasm that was a feature of the west in the 1950s and ’60s and is central to East Asian culture delay. The most noted of these was the banning of “effeminate” young men from such pop TV shows, though there were many other rules, including a crackdown on violent animations. 

This has been accompanied by an expansion of the state, of official Chinese and Communist Party history (in the centenary of its founding) into the cultural space. There has been quite a lot of that throughout the Deng period but it was always paralleled by commonly available mass entertainment. Now the ratios are changing, such that the country is getting a nationally engineered culture. 

What are the wellsprings of such new policy? Is it the triumph of a corporate nationalism, which most closely resembles the regime and culture of Mussolini’s Italy rather than Hitler’s Germany — a smooth, efficient technocratic regime combining measured amounts of violence, with notions of cultural and racial superiority? Or is it Marxist in origin, a form of stabilised neo-Stalinism, in which a communist party is dealing with the problems of capitalist-socialist transition?

It would appear to be composed of both, and here is where the historical passages get complicated. The comparison of this neo-Stalinist process with the cultural revolution is particularly misplaced because, among other reasons, there is nothing really Marxist about the cultural revolution, except in the sense that Georges Sorel described Marxism — as a myth of science which gave the aura of historical certainty required for class violence on a mass scale. 

By the mid 1960s Mao was talking about a “communism of poverty” and the prospect that China could become one vast commune. The willed disorder of the Cultural Revolution, in which a pre-capitalist, agrarian, substantially subsistence society was stirred up to internal war between suddenly formed factions, has more to do with pre-Marxist utopian-communist and quasi-mystical philosophy which flowed into it.

Maoism of that period is a mix of Hegel, Nietzsche, medieval utopians, and various Chinese political-religious traditions. Arguably, Marxism departed China in the mid-1950s and returned with Deng’s restoration of capitalist zones in 1979. 

That makes the Xi period utterly different to earlier periods. It is not a renunciation of Deng in favour of Mao, but the expression of continuity with Deng’s policies.

Deng had noted that “the first stage of socialism is capitalism”. Now China would appear to be moving to the next stage of transition. Quite possibly with the threatened collapse of property behemoth Evergrande the state has let the market out too far, corruption playing a major part. This will test the degree to which capitalism can be controlled by any state process, at any stage of its history. 

Needless to say, social credit schemes and banning “girly-boys” from TV didn’t play a big part in Marx and Engels’ sparse writings on the process of transition. But that was why they also avoided such, knowing that the future would throw up unrecognisable situations. Yet these reorganisations appear to be following the Marxist argument that at some point in its development, capitalism ceases to expand production and begins to misallocate resources and invite stagnation.

At that point, coordinated production — if it can avoid the traps of central planning — becomes a superior process. If China can by its current initiatives avoid the traps the West has fallen into it has the capacity to continue to grow its economy in a fully post-capitalist frame. 

Whether or not you call that socialism, it ain’t international socialism. In the Mao period, China was willing to export revolution. Now, not so much.

If the Marxists at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party still see world revolution as arising from historical processes in which they are playing but one part — and that is how they speak — it is now being wrapped in a heavy cloak of nationalism, and Han nationalism at that.

Parallel to Marxism, Chinese state-friendly academics are using “sovereign” concepts from right-wing political philosophers such as Carl Schmitt to define China’s national right, against notions of global law — justifying such on the grounds that “global law” is used by the US and others to mask its own interests with the pretence of a rules-based order from which it excepts itself willy-nilly. 

Thus, if the purpose of the new Chinese totalitarianism is internal stabilisation and defensive control of a local region, and the extension of a single state to the cultural Sinosphere and no further beyond, the construction of it as global aggression — which the AUKUS boosters invite us to do, in the interests of justifying their expansionary visions — is the exact opposite of what we need to understand.

It even obscures our capacity to formulate a moral stance on the new Chinese state: how repressive and lethal would it have to be before we took the moral action of withdrawing trade relations?

Without renouncing vigilance, the prospect of historical shifts or atavistic eruptions of civilisational war, for our own survival we nevertheless need to free ourselves from the logic of a new cold war the think tanks and imperial boosters want to foist on us. And all that jazz.