China is a communist country. No doubt about it. You can tell, because it says so. Communism, or Marxism/Leninism, with Chinese characteristics. (The commies always have had a way with words.) These days it’s communism with Chairman Xi’s 11 special herbs and spices.
So, yeah. Definitely a communist country. But it’s also clearly a very different sort of communist country than most of the others have been. Its raging economic success has been the measure and the validation of this fact. Consider the other pathetic communist or quasi-communist remnants – North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. Each of these is an economic basket case, as were the old-style communist states. Though the CIA and most of the American establishment were unable to see it even after Hedrick Smith had pretty much made the fact public, Soviet-style communism simply couldn’t manage a workable economy.
After all, within just a couple of years after the institution of communism, Lenin had to start backpedaling, introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP) that allowed for private property and some private enterprise. As soon as he did, up sprang a whole forest of NEPmen who brought the economy back to life to exactly the extent that Lenin allowed them to pursue free-enterprise untrammeled.
After Lenin died, Stalin of course took over, and Stalin didn’t at all mind everyone else living in misery, poverty and terror – or starving to death – so that he could ensure his absolute control. He cancelled the NEP, instituted five-year plans, collectivized farms, and instituted an astonishing reign of terror. The results: the economy fell apart again. His terror was necessary to keep the peoples enslaved by communism from rebelling.
Stalin and communism were saved for a while by the Second World War. This is not because of the absurd trope that war is good for economic development, but because the USSR – floated on a vast sea of British and American supplies – won the war in the east and then systematically stripped all of the countries it conquered and kept of all their productive machinery and as much of their intellectual property (including kidnapping scientists and engineers) as it could get.
This theft kept things just about ticking over for a while, but by the 1970s anyone with sense (so not the CIA, obviously) could see that communism couldn’t keep up with freedom, not even the sclerotic, hobbled, eviscerated market freedom of the grim 1970s. The only thing that kept the lights on in the USSR in the 1970s and early ‘80s was high oil prices, as even communism could manage basic resource extraction, and Russia has lots of resources. But when oil prices fell in the ‘80s, and Reagan and Thatcher partially re-freed the competitor western economies, the stark realities – in communist terms, the inherent contradictions – of communism could no longer be avoided. By Christmas day of 1991 it was all over.
China and Chinese communism followed a very different path – or, it did after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping recognized the failure of the communist economic system and opened up the economy. By 1989 the Chinese people were beginning to prosper, though from a low base: mass bicycle ownership was an immense and genuine achievement of free enterprise. And so when Deng tyrannized the protests in Tiananmen Square that summer, the people more-or-less acquiesced, the unofficial deal being that if the communist government could keep prosperity booming by dropping market communism, the people would continue to go along with government communism.
That deal lead to the absolute, astonishing, decades-long boom in China. Exactly to the extent the economy was freed, it has succeeded wildly. Where government management has intruded, it has failed and wasted massive amounts of capital, as by the ghost cities.
Xi unquestionably is moving away from that successful model. He has in effect made himself dictator for life, and he has begun threatening and imprisoning, rather than celebrating, China’s freest and most successful innovators. But at least so far he has not put on a Stalin mask, outlawed the new NEPmen, and collectivized the economy. Nor has he initiated a new Cultural Revolution or any other such destabilizing step.
Xi could of course be heading in that direction. But if he does, he will kill the Chinese economy, stone dead. This could very easily result in revolution or at least overthrow of the regime: the recreation of the ‘80s Soviet economy bringing on the ‘80s Soviet outcome. But if he does that, he’ll also kill stone dead the Chinese ability to be a superpower. Whatever Putin’s Russia is – Nigeria with nukes? – it is not a superpower. But if Xi still recognizes the central need to keep the economy humming, then he can only blow up China’s world relations so much, which limits his aggressive abilities.
None of this is to say that the United States need not remain strong, capable and diligent. Peace through strength works, as we found out in the last go-round. We must have a strong and competent military of which Xi is afraid – especially in the next decade or so, which will see China’s last surfeit of young men, and so its last opportunity to fight any type of conventional world war. And that of course means disposing of Thoroughly Modern (General? Non-Binary Spirit Guide?) Milley and all of his poisonous woke baggage and supporting personnel.
We’ll also have to compete forever in the technological arms race, as a surfeit of young men becomes increasingly irrelevant to how future wars are fought. But that’s exactly why Xi’s aggressive options are limited: if he does what he’d need to do to make naked aggression possible now, he’d destroy his ability to be successfully nakedly aggressive, now and in the future.
