by Nathan Gardels in Noema Newsletter: The momentous change of course in China effected by Xi Jinping baffles the West, which only a decade ago still believed a great convergence was being forged through globalization.
The signs of this shift were hiding in plain sight, eclipsed by the misleading power of the wrong metaphor. Given the ideological cynicism of the nomenklatura in the years leading up to the demise of the Soviet Union, many in the West similarly dismissed the turgid liturgy of Chinese Communist Party proclamations as empty rhetoric no one actually believed in, nothing more than a cover for the raw maintenance of power.
In his new book “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China And The World,” Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and one-time head of the Asia Society who is fluent in Mandarin, seeks to dispel that notion.
As Rudd sees it, Xi is a true believer whose actions are firmly guided by what he regards as the “objective scientific truths” revealed by the Marxist philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism.
It is out of these red threads that “Xi Jinping Thought,” which Rudd defines as “Marxist-Leninist Nationalism,” has been spun. In essence, Xi has reversed the pragmatic “learn from practice” approach of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” and returned to the dominance of ideology that characterized the Mao era.
To understand how China’s leadership sees the world today, you have to look through their red lens, as Rudd does.
Dialectics And Dictatorship
The idea of dialectical materialism is that change takes place when conditions exist in objective physical reality that are in conflict with each other. Those conditions can only be overcome through the reconciliation of opposites that sublates one aspect into the other, creating a new condition. In Darwinian evolution, for example, the conflict between a species and its environment is resolved by adaptation to the conditions it faces, or it goes extinct.
Marx’s idea of historical materialism is that the economic substructure determines the superstructure of politics and culture. History progresses through a resolution of the contradiction between the economic base and social relations. In this way, slavery yielded to feudalism, which yielded to capitalism.
In capitalism, the masses are alienated from their own society because the wealth created through their collective labor is appropriated by the private owners of capital, who also control all political and cultural institutions. That contradiction can only be overcome through class struggle to achieve collective ownership of wealth — that is, communism — which would in turn be reflected in harmonious social relations that serve one universal interest.
Lenin’s contribution was his view that only a disciplined, centralized party cemented by Marxist ideology could organize the otherwise impotent diaspora of the masses to push history forward. It is the instrument for achieving and sustaining a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Xi Jinping Thought
Surveying a spate of speeches, reports and Politburo study sessions over recent years, Rudd culls out Xi’s persistent emphasis on how the “‘scientific truth of Marxism-Leninism’ has saved China from its culture of national ‘passivity,’ resulting in a nation now taking the ‘initiative.’” Marxism, as Xi puts it, is the main force that has advanced “the progress of human civilization.” To this day, “Marx continues to be acknowledged as the number one thinker of the millennium.”
Rudd cites a fascinating address by Xi in 2015 where he enlists ancient Chinese thought as a confirmation of the truths of Marxist methodology. Drawing on this civilizational lineage is what makes Xi Jinping Thought distinct from all previous formulations of Sinicized Marxism.
“Our Party must continue to draw on the wisdom of Marxist philosophy, and more consciously uphold and apply the worldview and methodology of dialectical materialism,” Xi told a work conference on ideology and propaganda. “Adding his own claim to philosophical originality,” Rudd writes, “Xi also pointed to many elements of the Chinese classical tradition which, he argued, reinforced the universality of dialectical materialist precepts. These included Xi’s rendition of ‘Yin,’ ‘Yang’and the ‘Dao’ as underscoring the universal truth of the unity of opposites, the laws of motion and the reconciliation of contradictions within an overall Marxist trajectory of progress. In other words, in exercising his power as China’s new philosopher-king, Xi’s worldview now proclaimed that critical elements of Chinese tradition both predated and separately validated Marxism’s central ideological claims to objective, progressive truth.”
On Contradiction
The key to properly analyzing the world through the dialectical methodology is identifying the “principal contradiction” of a given historical condition and determining whether it can be resolved in an “antagonistic” or “non-antagonistic” way.
How has Xi’s analysis of the dialectical movement of history informed his present policies? What are the contradictions of what Xi calls the “new era” that require dialectical resolution?
From what Rudd can gather, Xi sees the decades of “opening up” and globalization that lifted China to the top ranks of the world economy as leaving in their wake the nascent reemergence of a capitalist class in a highly unequal society where China’s values are being eroded by the spiritual contamination of Western ideas.
On the global level, the very success of China’s rejuvenation has prompted the American-led West to realize its hegemony is slipping away. Following the law of the movement of opposites, its response is to seek to block China’s further rise.
Thus, for Xi, the “principal contradiction” for China domestically is “between an unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing need for a better life” that must be rebalanced. Globally, the “principal contradiction” is the ideological and economic conflict with the U.S. that has taken on an antagonistic cast in the realm of military affairs and national security.
Ideological Readjustment
In some ways, Xi has not so much departed from the Party’s recent past as doubled down on a long-held ideological disposition that veered from its steady course as China got richer.
Back in 1988 in Beijing, I met Hu Qili, the Party’s ideology chief and youngest member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo at the time. He made it quite clear that Deng’s post-Mao reforms must be understood in the context of “the scientific laws of the development of productive forces.”
As Hu put it, “capitalism does not have the patent right over a market economy.” Unshackling market competition was never meant to make China a capitalist society. That was not the end of the road of where it was headed, but only a means to get there. It was just a transitional phase necessary to generate prosperity abundant enough for the wealth to be shared more equally under the next stage of socialism.
More than three decades later, Xi believes that next stage is historically ripe for realization. To that end, he has moved decisively to clamp down on “excessive wealth,” tame market forces and spread the wealth more equitably through what he calls “common prosperity.”
As Rudd describes it, Xi has been explicit that the party needs to “adjust its economic development model to deal with rising inequality, rejecting the ‘marketization’ of everything. Ideologically, Xi has made plain that this shift on income distribution is part of a wider ideological ‘readjustment’ (tiaozheng) in the relationship between the economic base and the social superstructure, or between the factors of production and the relations of production.
In other words, Xi’s concern is that China’s market economic reforms were not only potentially producing a new class of capitalists, but that this class could undermine the politics of the superstructure, where ideological consciousness remained fundamental. This longer-term danger was posed by those demanding liberal-democratic political reforms, or by the corruption of the party’s revolutionary culture, or both.”
Rudd catalogs Xi’s blacklist of “capitalist class concepts” such as “constitutional democracy and separation of powers” as well as “civil society” that would “undermine the leadership of the Communist Party.” Xi also warns of the danger of the concept of universal values that would “supplant the core values of socialism” while “freedom of the media” would challenge scientific Marxist truths. All these Western ideas, proclaims Xi, “aim at changing our country’s basic economic infrastructure and weakening the government’s control of the national economy.”
Along with his Politburo colleague Wang Huning, Xi has argued that a return to China’s traditional civilizational values is a critical bulwark against the influence of mass culture from the West, which has fostered social disintegration, lack of solidarity, nihilist consumerism and individualism.
It is worth remarking here that on another occasion when I met Hu Qili at the leadership compound in Zhongnanhai three years before the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, he already then also warned about the danger of “spiritual pollution” that would inexorably come along with opening to the West.
The Reverse Movement Of History
In the Daoist philosophy of the unity of opposites, one tenet is the principle of “the reverse movement of history.” As we have discussed in Noema, this principle posits that the ascendancy of forces that move history in one direction also nourishes its opposing forces. Over time, each mutually transforms the other. As one force grows strong, the other weakens, and vice versa.
The change of course Xi has charted is itself a manifestation of the Daoist dialectics of change he has embraced to validate his Marxist ideology with Chinese characteristics.
