In this excerpt from Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, China scholar Frank Dikötter discusses China’s inner turmoil, its insecurities, and Western misconceptions about Beijing’s power. Watch the full interview here or listen to it here.
Peter Robinson: This is an absolutely vital point, because it gets to the way we understand China today. There is a notion that in one way or another, the Chinese regime, the Communist Party, has achieved some degree of legitimacy. That we have to grant it some degree of legitimacy because when it came to power, China was poor and backward. And now, after seven decades of the Chinese Communist Party in power, at least half of the country is reasonably well off by global standards. There are some thousands of real entrepreneurs and some thousands of truly rich people, and it has to be granted some legitimacy because it has lifted these hundreds of millions of people from poverty. And Frank Dikötter says, not a chance. All it did was get out of the way enough to permit Chinese to be Chinese, to exercise what seems to be a particular cultural genius toward enterprise. Is that correct?
Frank Dikötter: Yes, if you allow ordinary people to get on with it, they will. But this is not a party that will allow ordinary people to get on with it. In fact, every run-of-the-mill dictatorship around the world from the late 1970s, early 1980s, onward starts allowing farmers to have a private plot, foreigners to invest, and private entrepreneurs to participate. This is how these dictators manage to avoid complete and utter economic collapse.
So, it’s hardly China that is alone in doing this. But the key point is, what is it they wish to achieve? It’s actually very straightforward. Deng Xiaoping puts the four cardinal principles into the party constitution of 1982. These four cardinal principles are repeated time and again by every single leader. What are these four cardinal principles? Very roughly, uphold Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought. Uphold the socialist way of doing things, the socialist economy. Uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat. All the four principles really boil down to two: one is Marxism, the other is Leninism. Uphold the Communist Party is the fourth cardinal principle. What does it mean? It really means uphold the monopoly over power of the Communist Party and uphold the socialist economy. So, this regime set out to reinforce the socialist economy, to transform it, not get rid of it.
Peter Robinson: Our colleague and friend Stephen Kotkin has spent, as far as I can tell, more time examining Soviet archives than anyone else alive. I once said to Stephen, what’s the central finding after all these decades of studying these documents? Can you reduce it to one sentence? And Stephen immediately answered, they were communists, they really believed it. Even when you’ve got the Politburo talking among themselves, at their ease, with no reason to posture for anyone, they still sound like communists. So, China’s a big country, the dialects and the regions are different. The history is extremely difficult through the late nineteenth century, and you could argue it’s still difficult now. You’ve got warlords and the Cultural Revolution, violence. If this is in the living memory of the people who are running the Communist Party today, is it fair to say, who knows what they believe, but what they are saying is we must have order? We will not permit that—the Cultural Revolution, the humiliation of our country by foreign imperialists—we will not permit that to happen again. Or are they true believers?
Frank Dikötter: Well, they are both. Chinese communism is a true communism. And you should listen to what they say rather than try to second-guess or think, “we know better,” or “they must say that.” No, they are true believers.
But what is it they believe in? They believe in the existence of an enemy referred to as either capitalism or the capitalist camp, or the imperialist camp, surrounding. That’s the impression they’ve had from 1949 onwards, when the red flag goes up over the Forbidden City in Beijing, if not before. They inherited the boundaries of the Qing Empire that collapsed in 1911, very much as the Bolsheviks inherited the boundaries of the czarist empire. So, the key geopolitical question here is, how do the communists maintain the boundaries of an empire and not decolonize like most empires have done? Well, by imposing unity, and that is what communism does: one language, one time zone. There’s a firm belief in order imposed from above.
But here’s the trouble, not just with China, but any and every attempt to impose order from above through a monopoly over power. That’s what Leninism is, a monopoly over power. You have a choice in the twentieth century. You can have either the separation of powers—what you and I refer to as a democracy—or a monopoly over power, what you and I refer to as a dictatorship. But the key point is that when you impose order from above through a monopoly over power, you create disorder on a huge scale.
Some of it you can see today. Some of it will only appear the moment that whole projection of stability vanishes, as it did with the Soviet Union in 1991.
Peter Robinson: Frank, is 1989 the moment when China might have turned towards some form of democracy? They might have been able to choose in one way or another to move toward reforms of the kind that might ultimately lead to democracy. They have to choose between the good of the ordinary, common people, restoring some kind of economic order and growth on the one hand, or the power of the party on the other. And they choose the power of the party.
Frank Dikötter: On the Fourth of June 1989, the Poles in Poland, as it so happens, vote themselves out of communism. And that very same day, two hundred tanks and one hundred thousand soldiers crush the population in Beijing. It’s a civil war, no mercy. The key stakeholders here, the party members, overwhelmingly remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
And what happened during the Cultural Revolution? There was an old man called Mao who was afraid. But after having caused tens of millions of people to die during the Great Leap Forward, he will be shown the door. There will be a coup. He will be demoted. So, he thinks very carefully, how can I find who opposes me? I will allow ordinary people to denounce every party member who has doubts about me. In other words, the Communist Party. That’s the culture. In the Cultural Revolution Mao uses the people to purge the party, and then he uses the army to purge the people.
So, every party member has been a victim of the Cultural Revolution remembers this, and is afraid of ever allowing ordinary people to have a say. These tanks send a very strong signal. That signal is very clear, resonating to this very day. Do not query the monopoly of the power of the Communist Party of China.
Peter Robinson: All right, 1989 takes place. Wikipedia says that under Jiang Zemin’s leadership, China experienced substantial economic growth with the continuation of market reforms. According to the conventional wisdom of economic growth, Hu Jintao succeeds Jiang and his signal contribution is to take China abroad. We now have so much capital accumulated in China that the Chinese begin investing abroad and we get a signal moment in 2001. Just at the transition between Jiang and Hu, China joins the World Trade Organization, with the support of the United States.
George W. Bush, president at the time, said, “WTO membership will require China to strengthen the rule of law and introduce certain civil reforms such as the publication of rules. In the long run, an open, rules-based Chinese economy will be an important underpinning for Chinese democratic reforms.” So, as late as 2001 you have the president of the United States believing it all.
Frank Dikötter: And a great many others, too.
Peter Robinson: Did he get any of that right?
Frank Dikötter: No, of course not. And he should have known better.
If you take China in 1976, when Chairman Mao dies, the GDP per capita of China ranks 123rd on the global scale. It’s very low. This is after extraordinary emphasis by the leadership on GDP growth, growth, growth. Twenty-five years later, in the year 2000, the World Bank says China ranks 130th. In other words, it has barely been able to keep up with the rest of the world. That’s the delusion we have lived with. The so-called “decades of double-digit growth” is nonsense. The countryside by 2000 is entirely bankrupt.
In May 1999, NATO accidentally hits the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Jiang Zemin is up in arms. You should read the transcript of what he says to the standing Politburo. I read it in the archives. He says the Americans hate us and we must build up our army. We must join the World Trade Organization but not adhere to their rules. Now, this was not publicly available, but at this point Bill Clinton apologizes several times and the Chinese say, show your sincerity by allowing us to join the WTO. Which Clinton does, a few months later.
Now, why should he have known better? Why should everyone else have known better? Because the People’s Republic of China [PRC] has a leadership which time and again has made it very clear that they are fighting capitalism and wish to maintain a socialist economy.
China was allowed to join the WTO on promises and pledges and has not been required to reform the state enterprises. By 2004, reform of the banking system is put on ice, and reform of state enterprises is postponed forever. In fact, by 2005, some 96 percent of the five hundred largest enterprises in China are in the hands of party members. Yet still, abroad you have those who go on and on about the private sector in China. Now, of course it’s there; there was a private sector under Lenin, right? Communists will always give some leniency to the private sector when they need it—only to clamp down when they believe it is no longer required.
Peter Robinson: I’ll quote you here, from your book China after Mao: “China resembles a tanker that looks impressively shipshape from a distance, while below deck sailors are desperately pumping water and plugging holes to keep the vessel afloat.” Are we too frightened of the Chinese or not frightened enough?
Frank Dikötter: One thing is for sure: they’re damn frightened of you. They’re paranoid. The fear is two things. One, they live in fear of their own people. Why crush Hong Kong? Because there’s always the fear that something might trigger a counterrevolution. And the other fear is of the capitalist camp, from 1949 onwards, if not earlier.
This is a country that sees itself surrounded by the formidable capitalist system. And the conviction is that that capitalist camp is out there to get them, to infiltrate them, to subvert power. That events of 1989 have all been organized by the capitalist camp and insiders. The black hands behind this drama, what happened recently in Hong Kong—it’s the Americans who are behind it all. They’ve been funding it and provoking it.
The notion that the United States was behind the democracy movement in Hong Kong, somehow or other, and that it was capitalists who organized the events in Tiananmen Square, that is delusional.
So, how do we deal with these people if they’re delusional? It’s very difficult, but be very patient, I would say. “Peaceful evolution”—have you heard of that concept? It comes from one of your secretaries of state, John Foster Dulles. We’re talking something very close to “containment.”
Peter Robinson: The Trump administration’s realpolitik, as Niall Ferguson laid it out, is to end the war in Ukraine, tamp down conflicts everywhere else, including the Middle East, and with the war in Ukraine ended, persuade Vladimir Putin to join us in resisting China. Does that make any sense to you?
Frank Dikötter: I would say good luck to you, sir, in particular with the Russians. Good luck to you. It’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, the key point is that if Taiwan were to go, then remember Thomas Hobbes on power: it’s never enough. Not because there’s greater enjoyment, as he said, to be derived from more power. It’s that more power is required to protect the power one already has. There’s no limit within a one-party state. There’s no limit until that opponent, the capitalist camp, is gone.
Peter Robinson: Here we are searching for historical analogies. Containment, the policy that we displayed toward the Soviets for four and a half decades during the first Cold War: it worked. It might not have been as honorable and noble—it may be that we let the Hungarians go down in 1956 instead of going to their assistance. But containing the Soviet Union did force it, in the end, to confront its own internal contradictions, and when the moment came, it just collapsed. Do you advise a similar policy toward China?
Frank Dikötter: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Is this country up to containing China? Can the American people do it again?
Frank Dikötter: There’s been a sea change, and COVID accelerated it. It was difficult to believe how naive this country was about the PRC, and how many people were naive about the PRC, up until roughly 2018–19, and particularly during COVID in 2020. There’s been a complete change. My only fear might be change has gone too far. It is an evil empire, no doubt, but it’s not a superpower. What you find behind it is a very frail empire. Xi Jinping himself lives in fear, not just of the capitalist camp, as he calls it, but of everyone around him.
Don’t underestimate the clout that the United States has, along with a great many other democracies.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
