Chairing the meeting was Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in American history to earn an M.D. Blackwell knew that her nation’s medical infrastructure was not prepared to deal with the tide of blood and illness the war would unleash. The convention brought together representatives from various relief associations across Yankeedom to coordinate their efforts in the war to come. 

To meet the anticipated needs of the Union armies, the women gathered in New York decided to create an organization—the Women’s Central Association for Relief—that would raise funds for the medical care of the wounded and train as many women nurses as possible. Eventually, the fast-growing organization would rebrand as the United States Sanitary Commission and bring in influential male doctors as national officers. Thousands of Sanitary women mobilized to provide meals and shelter for furloughed soldiers, work as nurses, inspect servicemen measures against cholera and food poisoning, and drum up all kinds of supplies. By 1863 it had 7,000 local chapters across the Union. This made the Commission the largest civic association Americans had yet formed. In the entire country, the only institutions with a larger membership were the Republican Party and the U.S. Army. 

The federal government found the Sanitary Commission’s work so useful to the war effort that Congress officially authorized it to act as a quasi-government arm, subsidized its operations with public funds, and ordered the doctors of the Army Medical Bureau to work in tandem with the nurses and officers of the Commission. They would continue to do this until the end of the war. The work done by 3,000 women to self-organize in the service of their country had done its part to save the Union. What makes their story remarkable is that almost none had any special qualifications beyond the small-scale civic and religious responsibilities they had before the war. This undistinguished body believed that if its members worked in concert, they could do a better job than the federal government itself. They were right. 

But while their actions seem remarkable now, their instinct to respond to the problem of war with self-organization was the common one in the U.S. of the nineteenth century. The Sanitary Commission was exceptional only in its scale. 

In just the city of New York, prominent citizens responded to the civil war by building dozens of new voluntary institutions. The list includes the New York Association for Promoting Colored Volunteering, which recruited and equipped an African American regiment for the U.S. Army; the Loyal Publication Society and Loyal League of Union Citizens, which published more than 900,000 pamphlets for the Union cause; and the Union Defense Committee, which raised several regiments, provided financial aid to the families of poor soldiers, and sent repairmen southward to repair Union railways sabotaged near the frontlines. Like the Sanitary Commission, this last committee provided a set of services so useful to the government that it became an authorized quasi-government arm, dipping into public funds, and eventually authorizing any travel from New York City to the battlefront.

The institution builders of the Civil War embodied a type of excellence that foreign observers of their era described as characteristically American. The jurist Francis Lieber, who emigrated to the United States in 1827, credited this excellence to the fact that America had not “create[d] or tolerate[d] a vast hierarchy of officers, forming a class of mandarins for themselves.” A nation governed by a centralized mandarinate “can summon great strength upon certain occasions, as all [centralized systems] can; but it is no school of strength or character.” 

But less than a century after the Civil War, American life did become dominated by centralized and professionally managed bureaucracies. The two world wars only served to entrench this way of life in business and politics. The population, in response, became increasingly conditioned to lobbying for centralized decisions instead of self-organizing. Those who introduced managerial bureaucracy to American life understood the “great strength” bureaucratic tools would grant them. But these tools destroyed the conditions that made them so adept at institution building in the first place. The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?” 

The old “school of strength and character” is gone. The nineteenth-century pattern of life that created it no longer exists. But the features of its social fabric demonstrate what an agentic society with a recognizably modern set of technologies and institutions looks like. This culture was upstream of organizations like the Sanitary Commission, making possible the agentic behaviors of those who founded them. Three features are especially prominent: the aspirational ideal of public brotherhood, a commitment to formality and discipline in self-government, and organizational structures that combined decentralization with hierarchy. These are the same patterns any future culture of high-agency self-government will also have to cultivate in themselves and their neighbors. 

A Portrait of the World Before Management

When nineteenth-century Europeans journeyed to the United States, they were struck by the many peculiarities of what they called “American civilization.” In their eyes, the pretensions of upper-class Americans were ridiculous and the manners of lower-class Americans were disgusting. For some of these visitors, the distinguishing feature of American life was a reckless disregard for decorum; for others, it was a restless quest for gain. But if European visitors generally depicted Americans as caught in a precarious balance between boorishness and barbarism, they afforded one consistent compliment to their hosts: awe for their boundless can-do spirit. 

For some, American optimism bordered on self-parody. A characteristic account comes from British naval officer Basil Hall’s narrative of his 1827 journey from Albany to Boston. As his party wound their way through the Berkshire escarpments, Captain Hall’s American companions enthused about a proposed plan to build a railway through the mountains. Scoffing at the admiration his American guides felt for “this visionary scheme” to link Albany and Boston by rail, Hall wrote:

The same reasoning might be applied to a hundred other projects in the United States, many of them not less impracticable, but which, although existing only on paper, are, nevertheless, assumed as completed, and cast into the balance of American greatness, till the imaginary scale, loaded with anticipated magnificence, makes the old World kick the beam, to the great satisfaction of the inhabitants of that country, and the admiration of distant lands, who know nothing of the matter.

Five decades after the Albany-Boston Railroad finished construction, the Englishman James Bryce reported that the Americans still “seem to live in the future and not the present…they see the country not merely as it is, but as it will be twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence when the seedlings have grown to forest trees.” His fellow countryman James Muirhead described the spirit of America as one of “illimitable expansion and possibility; [theirs is] an almost childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and the future.” For Hebert Spencer, American self-confidence could be seen in their physiognomy. He told one journalist that “I perceive in American faces a ‘do or die expression’” that betrayed a “power of work exceeding that of any other people.” 

When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities.

These American attitudes were a function of both culture and circumstance. The social obligations of the New World fundamentally differed from those found on the European scene. American citizens were rarely embedded in large clans and their leadership did not hail from a lineage-based aristocracy. Neither their identities nor obligations were grounded in elaborate ties of kinship. The colonists who settled the future United States came from one of the few spots in Europe that embraced the nuclear family as an aspirational ideal: England. At marriage, adult children with the means to do so were expected to leave the homes of their parents to form their own independent households. Key features of this system—such as placing the legal right to choose a spouse in the hands of children, not parents—were enshrined in law. 

The result was a country whose citizens generally had no extensive kin network to rely on. Despite not sharing blood, people worked with colleagues and strangers on the basis of shared, socially enforced norms of behavior, as well as moral codes that privileged behaviors like truth-telling, honest effort, and fairness. The dominance of this system ensured that immigrants from more clannish backgrounds had difficulty reproducing their ancestral family system in the United States.

The frontier nature of the country, especially its western regions, was another source of communal self-reliance. The federal government might have waged war on hostile Native American tribes but its reach into the daily lives of pioneer citizens was limited. If settlers pushing to the edge of the frontier required government help, they were responsible for creating that government themselves.

Between the end of the Civil War and Arizona’s ascension to statehood in 1912—the last of the lower 48—thirteen new states joined the Union. Each new state entailed the creation or integration of dozens of new counties, townships, or cities. Creating these new governing units meant chartering school districts, police forces, and governing councils, then constituting and staffing them on the ground. Western expansion is a story told with images of wagon trains, telegraph poles, and railroad spikes. The assembly hall and the courthouse were just as vital. 

For this generation of state-builders, the distinction between “state” and “society” so central to the modern conception of the public sphere felt awfully thin. Little wonder that nineteenth-century Americans resorted to vigilante violence so readily: there was little outward distinction between turning a criminal over to their community’s police forces, judicial officials, and jurymen on the one hand and turning a criminal over to their neighbors on the other—the two groups of people were exactly the same. To the frontiersman, civic associations, religious congregations, and state organs would have all drawn on the same set of individuals, just organized differently to solve their own distinct set of problems. 

This attitude towards government stayed with Americans long after the frontier receded. As one Chicagoan put the matter during the restoration of public order after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the legal authority behind any state action mattered far less than whether a given action had “the force of public opinion behind it.” As with the United States Sanitary Commission and the Union Defense Committee of New York City, citizens could start solving critical problems as they arose and worry about getting their solutions adopted as part of an official government response later. 

A shared set of organizational tools helped Americans nourish cross-domain organizational competence. Successful political parties, fraternal orders, labor unions, religious conferences, and mass membership associations were all ordered along similar lines: the largest organizations in each category were federations of local chapters or lodges that spanned the whole country. The decentralized nature of this “lodge democracy” allowed Americans to preserve the frontier spirit of self-rule, even when the social conditions which originally necessitated this culture of communal self-reliance began to fade away.

In addition, the nation-spanning hierarchies that held these chapters together, and the powerful loyalties they inspired in the masses who joined their ranks, allowed them to successfully shape political and social outcomes for the country writ large. These organizations shared a common framework for conducting meetings, arbitrating disputes, and selecting leaders. Manuals of parliamentary procedure—such as Henry Martyn Robert’s 1876 guide, Robert’s Rules of Order—provided a rule set that governed deliberation in both society and state. 

This was well-understood at the time. Per an 1894 promotional for the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal order that then had hundreds of thousands of members across the Midwest, any man who attended the meetings of his local chapter would “become better qualified to discharge his duties as a citizen of the republic” as “the proceedings of a [chapter] are conducted in conformity with the rules prescribed for the deliberation of congress, and familiarity with the affairs of a [chapter] qualifies a man for any public business.” The national head of the Sons of Temperance made a similar point, proudly boasting that the 250,000 young men who attended weekly Sons of Temperance meetings were not just furthering the temperance cause, but mastering the arts of “popular [democratic] debate and eloquence. Accordingly, our young men…go out into the general field prepared to do themselves, in whatever cause they may espouse, full and honorable justice.”

As the nineteenth century rolled forward, Americans were increasingly faced with the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization. In response, they went on an associational building spree. The number of fraternal orders and mass membership organizations founded in the final decades of the Gilded Age has no peer. Many of these institutions are still stalwart pillars of American life. The NRA, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the American Bar Association, the Sierra Club, 4-H, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the United Way, the American Legion, and the ACLU make up just a fraction of the organizations created in this period. In any given year, millions of people held leadership positions in organizations like these. They thus formed both a training ground for and a reservoir of organizational competence that could be drawn on in times of need.

These experiences cultivated flexibility in the face of crisis. Religious, civic, business, and state leaders, whose meetings shared similar procedures, whose memberships overlapped, and whose institutions were often the work of their own hands, had little difficulty coordinating together to solve shared crises or create new institutional solutions to common problems. Within days of the first Spanish Flu cases in their localities, states and cities organized emergency commissions to coordinate pandemic relief and quarantines. These committees were not created by federal order, but by the initiative of local leaders alarmed by the pandemic’s spread. They typically included a collection of government officials, prominent businessmen and clergymen, hospital administrators, and the leaders of local associations in their upper councils. 

In comparison to the COVID-19 pandemic a century later, the speed with which these committees were assembled is striking. But those organizing them were doing nothing unusual: these same leaders had successfully built and manned a different set of emergency committees just two years before in order to sell war bonds and rally the home front. 

Perhaps most remarkable is that despite the multitude of such groups founded by Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they did not leave behind an unwieldy institutional mess. Such instruments were not preserved past their use. When the emergency ended, so did the committees. They were wrapped up or disbanded so their leaders could focus on whatever new tasks were at hand. In today’s age of professional managerial staff, setting up a committee or a bureaucracy all but guarantees that the structure will continue to exist long after the reasons for its founding have ceased to be relevant. 

The Social Fabric of Action

In the face of suffocating managerialism or institutional decay, it is easy to lionize the outputs of previous eras like the nineteenth century. Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, and to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness,” similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities. Three virtues in particular made this culture operate effectively and distinguished it from modern managerialism.

First, institutions cultivated a sense of public kinship and brotherhood, sometimes formalized by sacred oaths. Just as citizens took oaths to the republic or upon the Bible, social and political associations took their bonds of loyalty no less seriously. The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. They required earnest oaths that committed their members to a life of charity, public service, brotherhood, and the betterment of their fellow men. Lodge leaders developed these rituals and treated their oaths with great solemnity. This required their culture to have a functional role for solemnity and seriousness at all. When irreverence becomes a universal norm, attempts at seriousness degenerate into performative role-play.

The famously irreverent Boomers were the first generation of Americans born in the shadow of the new managerial society. The “New Left” counterculture of the 1960s was, in turn, the first attempt to break the shackles of bureaucracy and conformity. New Left radicals condemned the “bewildering dependence” of Americans on “inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate” and identified the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” as “the greatest problem of our nation.” Their movement ultimately failed, however, to create viable counter-communities capable of agency.

A central reason for their failure is that for all of their talk about “participatory democracy,” the radicals of the New Left were not interested in the discipline, formality, and commitment to reasoned debate that made the actual participatory democracy function. Associating rationalism and rules with the suffocating bureaucratic structures that they rebelled against, New Left radicals ended up mounting a titanic effort to liberate themselves from the very intellectual and organizational tools that successful institution builders use to assert their agency. The cause of self-liberation ended up in conflict with the cause of self-government.

The nineteenth century, by contrast, emphasized the personal discipline that self-government took. The second of its virtues was a strict code of formality and procedure, adhered to by members of all kinds of institutions. While modern institutions have plenty of procedure, the adherence and care given to general procedural norms even in small local affairs created a culture in which the culture of ownership of institutions was widely shared, not centralized. 

Self-government meant a deep commitment to an otherwise mundane set of tasks. The engines of communal self-reliance were humdrum activities like reading through Robert’s Rules of Order and taking detailed minutes of all comments made at organization meetings. Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule. Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action. 

The temptation faced by those alienated from majority institutions is to place self-affirmation above action. This sort of “liberation” is a recipe for impotence. The brotherhood of builders only succeeds if their institutions demand the formality, discipline, and clearly delineated lines of responsibility that such building requires.

Another target of the 1960s counterculture was the hierarchy they saw as reinforcing and reproducing systems of oppression within institutions. Often, this became an attack on hierarchy as such. In practice, many found that maintaining an egalitarian culture was only possible on an extremely small scale. This informed a strongly localist tendency that lionized organization and action at “the human scale.” Modern criticisms of industrialism and centralized power continue to echo these ideologies.

The third virtue was, instead, an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level. The identification of “human scale” with smallness or localism was a false conflation. The reality proved by the nineteenth-century experience is that neither hierarchy nor scale is inherently opposed to agency. Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems. 

These chapters thus not only served as vehicles of self-rule at the lower level but also prepared leaders for successful decision-making at higher levels of a hierarchy. Wielding authority at the lower levels of a nineteenth-century organization closely mirrored the experience of wielding authority in its highest echelons. Absent such training, leadership does in fact become the impenetrable closed circle that disturbed the advocates of “human scale.” Centralization, not hierarchy, caused the demise of local dynamism.

Many of the modern institutions which have most successfully retained their nineteenth-century commitment to decentralized local leadership—such as the LDS church or the U.S. Marine Corps—have famously rigid hierarchies. These institutions integrate clear chains of command with a structure and culture that encourages initiative and independent problem-solving by leaders at the lowest level of the hierarchy. The leaders of these institutions understand that the only way to train someone to effectively lead large organizations is to give them practice acting autonomously on a smaller scale. Empowering people down the chain to make mistakes lets their leaders up the chain prevent them from happening at a larger scale. Great lessons usually involve making some mistakes, so it is better that the damage be limited. 

The reality is that the thriving localities were not actually localist in their ambitions. The nineteenth-century institution-builders dreamed and built on a grand scale. Ambitious people in other countries often wasted their talent learning how to climb calcified bureaucratic ladders. The ambitious American of the nineteenth century did not have that option. The only way he could realize great ambitions was by directly confronting the problems of his day. The “school of strength and character” was a culture that cultivated immense ambitions, fueling the development of cities, literature, industry, and politics.

The norms developed by this highly agentic period allowed its people to function at an extremely high level of competency. They remain powerful norms for those building institutions or agentic cultures today. Ideals like public usefulness, formalist discipline, and agentic hierarchy can be cultivated when a culture or institution actually has use for them. Those who built the organizations that won wars, secured the frontier, and developed society were motivated by useful and ambitious goals. To achieve them, they acted according to those norms and social forms they knew were effective. Such functionality may be rare in a more managerial age, but it is always within the power of human will and action to pursue it.

We are founding CST in the wake of two revolutions that have shaken the field of China watching. Either could compromise the coherence of contemporary China studies as an intellectual community; together they threaten to upend this community’s influence on international relations altogether. 

The first crisis is methodological: in Xi Jinping’s “New Era,” many of the tools China specialists relied on to understand communist politics have become outdated. The second is sociological: as Chinese ambitions have grown, interest in these ambitions has grown too. Today, Western capitals are flooded with politicos who have little understanding of a country they place at the center of their political programs. This must change. We need new institutions to equip statesmen and scholars with the tools they need to interpret the intentions of the Chinese party-state. 

This has been done before. At the height of the Cold War, the United States built a vast information ecosystem to understand the communist regimes of Europe and Asia. Institutions such as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service were founded to translate documents, articles, and speeches by the hundreds. From the Ivy League down to state colleges, America was dotted with centers for the study of communist economies, policy, and rhetoric. In a time of great need, these tools helped Western leaders understand otherwise closed societies. 

The need has returned. The tools have not. As the communist bloc dissolved, so did many organizations devoted to the study of communist regimes. Most were never reconstituted. Many experts who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s graduated from academic departments where quantitative methods and formal models were the focus of training. For the smaller cadre of scholars still interested in qualitative assessments of China, the old arts of open-source “Pekingology” held less luster than in days past. After all, field surveys and personal interviews with party officials were only a plane ride away. 

This worked during the ‘90s and the aughts, the heydays of Reform and Opening. This open interregnum has now ended. Field surveys in China are no longer possible. Archives have closed. Officials no longer give interviews. In the age of Xi Jinping, the tools that a generation of “China hands” relied on to understand communist politics no longer shed light. This means that the West contests the future with a country we lack the means to understand.

But this is only half the problem. Xi’s New Era has elevated China policy from a niche concern managed by a small community of specialists to a centerpiece of national debate. Over the last six years, we have witnessed an influx of new voices in these discussions. Some of these newcomers come to China policy with a deep background in fields like finance, trade law, or military operations; others come to China policy as true generalists, having made their name as pundits or politicians. Most of these newcomers lack the language skills, advanced degrees, or in-country experience that distinguished the China hands of yore.

Established experts will always be tempted to respond to this influx with displeasure. It is frustrating to spend decades of one’s life building a fine-grained picture of a complex system only to be sidelined in favor of outsiders whose interest in the topic will last only as long as it is at the top of the White House’s agenda. Though understandable, this reaction is short-sighted. A narrow band of specialists can dominate the field without interference from policy generalists only when their chosen specialty is so niche that no one but themselves can muster any interest in it. China hands like myself made a career out of watching China because we believed that the intricacies of Chinese politics mattered not just for China, but for the rest of the world as well. Now, for the first time, we find that the rest of the world agrees with us. 

For countries like Australia or the United States, there is now an obvious China angle to every diplomatic initiative. China policy can no longer be the province of narrow expertise. Those impacted by China policy demand a say in its goals and execution—and they have gotten it. The challenge facing the China hands of the twenty-first century is to integrate these new entrants into existing debates. 

But that injunction leaves us with a puzzle. The obvious solution to the field’s methodological problems is to use the same sort of open-source textual analysis that defined China watching back in the days of the Cold War. But embracing the old tools of Pekingology threatens to make the field even less accessible to outsiders than it already is. Solutions to one problem seem to come at the expense of resolving the other.

* * *

To understand the value of textual analysis for understanding modern China, we must start with a basic reality of Chinese politics: commanding the Communist Party of China is hard. Central authorities must work their will through a sprawling bureaucratic labyrinth. Some 96 million people claim party membership—more than the populations of California, Texas, and Florida combined. Inducing this colossal mass of committees, groups, divisions, and departments to pull in the same direction is the most difficult task facing any General Secretary. One might call the Communist Party of China the world’s largest coordination problem. The central leadership cannot solve this problem without a measure of openness.

Open coordination comes by way of slogan. Central authorities lead the party by condensing their plans, goals, and assessments into slogans designed to ceaselessly cycle through official speeches, party directives, guiding regulations, and daily propaganda. Through this omnipresent whir of words, the leadership instills a shared conceptual vocabulary that individual party cadres can then adapt to their particular circumstances. A tremendous amount can be learned by studying these slogans and the documents that they appear in. Unlike interviews and field surveys, there is little worry that Western analysts will be cut off from these documents. Because they are central to the workings of the party-state, the party apparatus promotes them with feverish intensity. 

Yet drawing conclusions from these documents can be difficult. Simon Leys, one of the masters of the Cold War art of “Pekingology” once quipped that “reading Communist literature is akin to munching rhinoceros sausage, or to swallowing sawdust by the bucketful.” The sawdust eater: 

must know how to milk substance and meaning out of flaccid speeches, hollow slogans, and fanciful statistics… he must crack the code of the Communist political jargon and translate into ordinary speech this secret language full of symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings. Like wise old peasants who can forecast tomorrow’s weather by noting how deep the moles dig and how high the swallows fly, he must be able to decipher the premonitory signs of political storms and thaws, and know how to interpret a wide range of quaint warnings—sometimes the Supreme Leader takes a swim in the Yangtze River, or suddenly writes a new poem, or sponsors a ping-pong game: such events all have momentous implications.

To provide a contemporary example, consider a bit of phrasing uttered by General Secretary Xi Jinping last month that caused a stir within China watching circles but has yet to make much of an impact outside of them. The 20th Party Congress concluded three weeks ago. The primary purpose of a Party Congress is to confirm personnel changes in top leadership. But these meetings, convened once every five years, also have a coordinating function. At each congress, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China gives a long “Political Report” that summarizes the accomplishments of the previous five years and then makes programmatic statements intended to guide Chinese policymaking for the five years to come. In this context, Xi told the party membership the following:

The world has entered a new period of turbulence and change.

 

At home, we face many deep-seated problems regarding reform, development, and stability that cannot be avoided or bypassed. In our efforts to strengthen the Party, and especially to improve conduct, build integrity, and combat corruption, we are confronted with many stubborn and recurrent problems. External attempts to suppress and contain China may escalate at any time.

 

Our country has entered a period of development in which strategic opportunities, risks, and challenges are concurrent and uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising. 

At first glance there seems to be nothing especially significant about Xi’s proclamation that China has entered a “new period” where “strategic opportunities, risks, and challenges are concurrent.” Yet the phrase has deep implications for China’s approach to the external world. Understanding these implications requires a brief tour of party history.

For many decades it has been the custom of party secretaries to formulate strategic directives on the basis of explicit assessments of the international environment China faces. Party members of Xi’s generation will remember Mao Zedong’s judgment that the international environment of his day was defined by the forces of “war and revolution.” From this judgment flowed many of China’s most important policies, including PRC aid to Maoist guerrilla revolutionaries abroad and the “third front” economic policy, which aimed to build industrial centers in deep inland China so that the Chinese industrial base might survive a new world war.

Deng Xiaoping had a more sanguine view of the world. He officially revised Mao’s judgment in a 1984 address where he declared that “we now think that although there is still the danger of war, the forces that can deter it are growing.… The two really great issues confronting the world today, issues of global strategic significance, are: first, peace, and second, economic development.” 

In party documents, Deng’s assessment was soon codified with the phrase “the theme of our times is peace and development.” By codifying this assessment into party dogma, the party’s central leadership signaled that economic modernization should take priority over military modernization, that economists deserved a seat inside party councils, and that joining existing international organizations, not fomenting world revolution, would bring greater returns to the Chinese people.

The first great challenge to the Dengist line came in 1999, shortly after the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. That summer the diplomatic and security apparatus of the People’s Republic formally debated whether aggressive American hegemony meant that the party needed to rethink its approach to diplomacy, defense, and development. The party eventually reaffirmed that, despite America’s armed interventions abroad, “peace and development are still the theme of our times.” China’s ascension to the WTO and the promise of a more cooperative relationship with America after 9/11 seemed to vindicate this judgment. At this point party leaders began including an additional sentence to their assessment of global trends: “for our country, the first two decades of the 21st century is a period of important strategic opportunity for development, which we must seize tightly.”

The new judgment implied a window for consolidating China’s national strength. It was up to party leaders to take advantage of globalization before this window closed. Their task was to integrate China into the world economy and invest the gains of the growth that would follow into modernizing their military power, scientific apparatus, and technological expertise. This assessment of the international scene, complete with language about “peace and development [as] the theme of the times,” was endorsed by three different General Secretaries in the four Party Congress reports issued between 2002 and 2017. This assessment was the starting point for both Chinese industrial strategy and international diplomacy over this entire period.

That period is officially over. Xi’s new phrasing intentionally echoes–and subverts–the old assessment. The ultimate meaning of the phrase “a period of development where strategic opportunities, risks, and challenges are concurrent” will not be clear until the new line is fleshed out and operationalized by lower-level bureaucracies. But when juxtaposed against past formulations the significance of the term is clear: the party no longer believes that global economic integration is the theme of the times. 

This means that policy can no longer be predicated on a peaceful international environment; globalization’s low-hanging fruit has all been plucked. Yet if the period of strategic opportunity has ended, Xi has not pushed his party back to the Maoist formulations of revolution and war. Instead, he contrasts opportunities with “risk” and connects failed domestic reforms to political opposition abroad. Party policy on defense, diplomacy, and political economy must adjust to this new period, a period where threats to the party’s political legitimacy demand just as much attention as opportunities for economic growth.

* * *

Expositions like these could be delivered for a hundred different phrases used in the most recent Political Report. Terms like “period of strategic opportunity” are rarely defined explicitly in everyday language. Their meaning is discerned by juxtaposing official definitions against unofficial commentary by Chinese intellectuals and academics, carefully tracking which other slogans appear alongside them, contrasting how various parts of the party-state deploy them for their own purposes, and reading current terms in light of their historical predecessor and past use. 

This kind of analysis is too much to demand of most people engaged in debates over diplomacy and defense. This is not because parsing the tea leaves requires special genius. Quite the opposite: these directives are intended to guide the behavior of millions of party members, many of whom are neither especially learned nor particularly clever. In this sense, we might compare party-speak to the cloud of acronyms and doctrinal terms that burdens anyone working in the Pentagon. Though opaque to outsiders, these words must be conceptually simple enough to be operationalized by 20-year-old lieutenants. Understanding American defense jargon does not require brilliance, but it does require patience. The same is true for the jargon of the Communist Party of China–though in this case, patience must also be paired with historical knowledge and a working fluency in written Chinese. Most newcomers to China policy do not have either.

This is the challenge of wise China policy: how do we structure an information environment when our understanding of Chinese politics increasingly relies on textual analysis of stilted and opaque party directives, while still keeping policy debates accessible to researchers, businessmen, and opinion shapers who have never been nor will ever be trained to read the sources on which our analysis is based?

As a writer who covers Chinese politics for popular audiences, I have had a first-hand view of this problem. My work often boiled down to reading the steady flow of academic monographs and think tank reports published by Western China watchers, then condensing their ideas into more approachable 2,000-word pieces. Most of the research I have summarized was written with the expectation that only other China specialists would read it. But the conclusions these scholars reached have obvious relevance to the world beyond professional China watching. My role was to package these conclusions in a form accessible to those with little existing expertise in Chinese politics. 

The drawback of this method is that anyone who read one of my pieces was separated from the original sources by at least two intermediate layers of analysis: my writing was a gloss of other people’s research, which itself was a summary of multiple sources in Chinese. This way of doing things is no longer sufficient. To resolve debates over China policy, all participants need to read what the Chinese are saying in their own words. Wise China policy will not be made until the generalists are able to access the same sources as the specialists.

The Center for Strategic Translation is an answer to this problem. Our mission is to locate and translate speeches, essays, directives, and manuals distributed by party authorities, as well as less authoritative commentaries on these themes by Chinese academics and public intellectuals. We are not the only ones to take on this challenge. The teams behind DigiChina, CSIS Interpret, the China Aerospace Studies Institute, Reading the China Dream, and the Center for Security and Emerging Technology have all reached similar conclusions about the necessity for translation. With our translations we hope to join this august company.

However, we also believe that translation is not enough. To understand documents of historical or strategic value, readers must also understand the context in which these documents were produced, the biographies of their authors, and the authoritativeness of what is being translated. Readers must have a way to grasp the history and broader meanings of the slogans they encounter in their reading. Otherwise there is a risk that even in translation, the speeches, explainers, and directives issued by the Chinese party-state will only be accessible to the same narrow band of experts who could read these documents in their original language. 

To meet this challenge, we attach extensive footnotes and an introductory essay to every piece translated. They contextualize the document and highlight points of importance that might otherwise be lost in a storm of stilted jargon. Every piece is crosslinked with an official glossary whose entries summarize the history and meaning of slogans used in party speech. This glossary currently contains only the terms used in the first batch of translations. It will grow with each new document translated. In time, it will become a critical resource for experienced researchers and interested laymen alike.

This is our solution to balancing the field’s competing needs for methodological rigor and generalist accessibility. Policy must be built on a foundation of open-source analysis. That means making primary source documents accessible and understandable to the generalists who by necessity are involved in crafting China policy. 

Our first set of published translations centers on another slogan whose significance may not be grasped at first glance. For five years, Xi Jinping and other members of the party’s central leadership have declared that the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century.” This phrase is another assessment of the international order–in particular, the changing role of American hegemony in that order. 

In 2019, two Chinese think tanks hosted a panel to discuss the relevance of this concept to Chinese diplomacy and Sino-American relations. The discussion that followed was remarkably frank, wandering from Chinese assessments of Trumpism and social justice politics to Chinese predictions about the future of technological change over the next century. You can read an introduction to this round table and find translations of each of the roundtable’s six pieces on the CST website.

In the weeks to come, more material will be published on “great changes unseen in a century.” To follow our work and read these translations when they are published, you can subscribe to CST’s newsletter and Twitter feed. 

We have much more material in the works. CST will soon be publishing chapters from a textbook published by the National Security Commission of the Chinese Communist Party that outlines the threat that “color revolutions” pose to party rule, a contrasting set of intraparty regulations meant to guide the behaviors of party members in the Deng and Xi eras, studies that draw out the lessons Chinese have learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a series of Chinese language essays on the origins and history of Chinese cybernetics. These translations move us one step closer to the intellectual ecosystem the West needs to navigate its relationship with the People’s Republic of China.

Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

David B. Edwards, Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

If there’s one thing Americans have always known about the Taliban, it’s that they are relics of a dying past.

In 2001, The Atlantic contended that the Taliban’s “program of medieval stultification” justified liberal support for America’s invasion of Afghanistan. Failure to pose tough in the face of this “mob of medieval ragheads,” Salon argued a year later, lost Democrats control of Congress. At the height of the surge, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince would describe the Taliban as “barbarians” with “a 1200 A.D. mentality.” His language was echoed by politicians, generals, and op-ed writers a decade later, who described the victorious Taliban as “a medieval band of degenerate savages,” “a marauding and medieval religious cult,” and a retreat “back to the stone age.” Only two months ago the Middle East Institute concluded that attempts “to soften the Taliban’s extremist ideology by exposing them to modernity” through years of diplomatic engagement had failed, for “their medieval thinking remains just as rigid” as it has always been.

This language of medievalism and modernity is natural to Americans, who have long equated the U.S. with the frontline of the future. The debates between the Americans who disparaged and who defended the intervention in Afghanistan were conducted entirely inside this frame. Both sides assumed that the United States had embarked on a grand project of liberal transformation to drag Afghanistan into the future. Those on one side argued that American-led modernization was either a defense necessity or a moral obligation. Their critics described any attempt to liberalize Afghanistan as an exercise in futility. 

But both arguments were premised on a fantasy: the most successful modernizers were on the other side of the conflict. The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan spent two decades shoring up faltering traditionalist remnants against political modernity. It was the men of the Taliban that fought and died for a revolutionary future.

Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History is the first history to adequately capture this story. Malkasian deployed as a civilian officer in Kunar and Helmand provinces in the aughts, and then returned to Afghanistan as an advisor to General Joseph Dunford in 2013, and stayed at Dunford’s side through his tenure on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian speaks Pashto fluently, traveled widely across Afghanistan conducting interviews, and participated in the Trump era negotiations with the Taliban.

Malkasian’s account of American error builds on these personal experiences. His catalog of American mistakes and miscalculations is long. There was the Bush administration’s refusal to negotiate with the elements of the Taliban who attempted to surrender between 2001 and 2003 while simultaneously refusing to resource an Afghan Army capable of defending the country from these same Taliban; the years wasted fighting in the remote mountain valleys of eastern Afghanistan even as the Taliban gained ground in their traditional southern heartland; the Obama administration’s embrace of a counterinsurgency strategy that—while successful in stabilizing the areas that received a surge of troops—reduced U.S. support for the war effort; that same administration’s subsequent decision to restrict the use of American airpower during the critical Taliban offensives of 2015; and, finally, the Trump administration’s unwillingness to keep troop levels in Afghanistan stable while negotiating with the Taliban, thereby removing the only leverage U.S. diplomats had at the negotiating table.

Malkasian’s judgments on all of these points are incisive and persuasive. But a singular focus on American error fundamentally misreads the course of the war. Most accounts of the conflict are one-sided portrayals of the American experience in Afghanistan. Malkasian’s fluency in Pashto allows The American War in Afghanistan to escape the limitations of the genre. Entire chapters are built on Afghan sources that other histories of the war ignore. From their perspective, the U.S. war in Afghanistan was not really American at all. Over the last two decades, it was Afghans, not Americans, who have done the majority of the killing, bleeding, and dying. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a civil war. Any account of the Taliban’s victory must start with what each side of this civil war was fighting for.

Remaking Afghanistan

There was a logic to the Afghanistan that existed before the Taliban, the Mujahedeen, the Soviet invasion, and communist usurpation. In this Afghanistan, the king reigned but did not rule. The state was stable but its reach was short: public order was preserved by the leaders of the village and the tribe. Tribal life mattered most to Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. The Pashtuns esteemed those who lived according to Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of honor. One conviction coursed through the social world of Pashtunwali: A Pashtun bows to no man. 

In this system, the job of the village elder and tribal khan was to provision their clans, secure their womenfolk from outside eyes, and resolve disputes without slighting or belittling the other men of their community. Elaborate customs of hospitality and lengthy council meetings allowing every man equal say were the main tools khans used to quash quarrels and share honor. Failure to resolve a quarrel through council led to resolution by feud. Tribesmen had no compunction exchanging eyes for eyes. The goal was less punishment than parity: feuds would end when both sides had equal red in their ledger. Experienced leaders balanced the demands of corporate honor with the urgency of ending the violence before it engulfed the entire tribe. Abstract moral rules did not guide their decision-making. As Malkasian comments: “Whatever was in the interests of the tribe was right: Pashtun realpolitik.” 

Under the traditional order young men sought distinction through acts of courage and daring. Old men, in turn, were distinguished from their peers by demonstrating the wisdom, foresight, and persuasive power needed to constrain their young men from taking reckless action. Neither stage of life found much value in martyrdom. A man’s renown was measured by the deference his presence produced in other men—a reward that can only be enjoyed by the living. But such distinction was not durable. The Pashtuns were levelers: any man that climbed too high above his fellows would be pulled by his peers back down to earth. What was true of men was also true of tribes: no tribe could be allowed to grow too strong without consequence. The kings of Afghanistan would use this impulse to their advantage, playing one tribe off of the other to secure their power. The savviest tribal leaders would intentionally curb the ambitions of their kinsmen before any leveling was necessary.

Sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists have identified “honor cultures” with similar sensibilities across the Earth. Only rarely do the honor-bound tolerate strong state structures or develop integrated market economies. The ethos of honor tends anarchic. Formal hierarchy is an anathema to the reputation-obsessed. Large-scale cooperation is difficult if society is divided along narrow clan lines. Such societies are predisposed to a patchwork politics where autonomy is celebrated, authority is diffuse, and identity congeals around dozens of separate kinship groups.

This describes the traditional Afghan order neatly—with one prominent exception: the village mullahs, traditional pillars of Afghanistan’s religious establishment. A mullah began his career in a village as a stranger. Madrassas enrolled children from all social classes and sent their graduates across the country. This was by design: a mullah’s outsider status kept his mosque independent from village feuds. His loyalties transcended the local. Where the tribesman bowed to no man, Afghan religious students began their spiritual journey with an oath of obedience to their teachers. This oath, the bayt, bound student to teacher for life. As students of prominent teachers taught their own students, vast multi-generational networks of allegiance spread across Afghanistan. The mullahs were the only representative of a national institution living at the village level. Their influence and reach rivaled that of the central government. 

It was from the world of the mullahs that the Taliban was born. The war with the Soviets left two million Afghans dead—almost ten times the number that perished over the course of America’s war in Afghanistan. The scale of the violence destroyed the Afghan state and uprooted the traditional communal structures used by Afghans to maintain order absent strong centralized government. Terrific violence followed the Soviet retreat. The Taliban movement was organized by mullahs and religious students (talib) to end this violence—and cleanse the moral sickness that led Muslims to kill their fellow Muslims in the first place.

The movement’s strength reflected its origins. Where the ex-mujahadeen warlords were distrustful of their own subordinates and prone to infighting, the talib fought with the same commitment to hierarchy, unity, and religious purpose that had guided mullahs across Afghanistan for decades. One Taliban account of this era describes how new fighters were, in an echo of the traditional bayt, required to “swear obedience to his emir or commander, distance himself from tribal, party, and communal prejudice, and serve only the will of Allah and the goodwill of the people.”

One did not become a talib for the sake of tribal honor or personal renown—and the talib made sure that the forces they led did not fight for these things either. Instead, they fought for a unified Afghan nation. They saw Islam, the one source of authority that cut across tribal and ethnic lines, as the only sure foundation of new national order. The austere regime they imposed to realize these ideals elevated village mullahs over village elders, emphasized Sharia over customary law, and placed restrictions on all sorts of traditional customs, including dress and music. Justice, obedience, and oneness were the motive virtues of this new order. 

The commitment to unity, hierarchy, and self-sacrifice that defined Taliban rule would not survive the American intervention—except among the remnant Taliban themselves. The 2001 invasion gave partisans of more traditional values a chance to reset the clock. Hamid Karzai was a throwback to the world before the Soviets: his father and grandfather had served as prominent royalist politicians, and as a member of the Popalzai tribe, Karzai claimed kinship with Ahmad Shah Durrani, founding king of Afghanistan. Three centuries before Ahmad Shah had been put in power by a ground council of prominent tribal leaders known as a loya jirga; the same institution would select Karzai as president and affirm the new Afghan constitution. 

Once again power was dispersed among a decentralized patchwork of competing centers of authority. At the center was Karzai himself, a master consensus builder who governed through the traditional art of face-to-face persuasion. In true Pashtun style, he was also a master leveler. “It is the policy of Karzai and his appointees,” one khan reported, “to try and break up all tribes to keep them weak.” Karzai’s policy was successful. As one governor appointed by Karzai admitted to Malkasian, “I can solve a tribal split in one day but I will not—because then my position would be weaker.” Karzai took a similar approach to the Afghan state itself, continually maneuvering to limit the power of any governor, general, or police commander whose effectiveness might invite a future challenge.

The contrast with the Taliban, centralizers and state builders par excellence, could not be greater. This was a contest between two different visions of authority in Afghan society. Each of these visions grew from a different conception of Afghan manhood. These differences would be resolved on the field of battle. The Afghan national government brought an unwieldy structure to the war. One of the government’s most effective commanders explained his frustrations with this structure like this: “The government has no loyalty to a single leader. There are thirty-four provinces, each with its own leaders: a governor, army commander, police chief, and NDS [intelligence] director. The Taliban do not have these different organizations. Taliban are just Taliban.” The history of America’s war in Afghanistan is rife with battles where Afghan police, army units, or tribal militia fought against the Taliban alone, lacking the coordination or the will to fight in unison. 

Infighting among the various branches of the Afghan national government and between the anti-Taliban tribes was incessant. Enormous amounts of American energy were spent mediating these conflicts—most prominently in 2014, when Secretary of State John Kerry directly intervened in an election dispute that threatened civil war. The Taliban never dealt with such dissension.

Only once did conflicts between Taliban commanders threaten to derail the war effort. This occurred after Mullah Omar, founding emir of the Taliban, died in 2013. The two-year coverup of his death scandalized many in the Taliban. A small number revolted against Akhtar Mansour, who had been leading the Taliban behind the scenes. But the revolt never spread. “All Taliban accept unity, oneness, no matter who is the leader,” one Taliban memoir recalled. “This is the Taliban strength,” Time and again Taliban commanders buried private resentments for the sake of the greater cause. As one Taliban representative boasted to Malkasian: “The Taliban follow an emir. Our system is of obedience. We must do as he says. We are not like other Afghans.” 

This distinctive Taliban trait extended down the ranks. At the level of the common soldier, Taliban unity was less a matter of organization than ideology. Mullah Omar motivated the movement with declarations that freely mixed faith with nationalist fervor. In a typical 2009 proclamation, he declared that “The enemy upon our soil will not be content as long as we do not completely accept being their slaves. Freedom from slavery is the only path that the Quran has shown.” No matter what tribe they hailed from or what part of the country they served in, the Taliban insurgents knew they were engaged in the same project as their fellow Taliban: national liberation and jihad. 

The presence of foreign soldiers made it difficult to build any comparable sense of nationalist consciousness among the Afghan Army and police. Survey data shows that only ten percent of Afghans believed their soldiers joined the army out of patriotism. This caused a recurring crisis of morale: most men in the Afghan Army did not wish to serve far from hearth and home. The most determined anti-Taliban forces tended to be the tribal militias tasked with protecting their home neighborhoods. These Afghans warred with rare ferocity. Things could hardly be otherwise: their family, their honor, and their tribe’s autonomy were at stake.

Here the values of the old order did buttress the war effort—but their impact was limited. Tribal militias were fierce but brittle. The Taliban could replace their losses in a critical front with reserves drawn from anywhere in the country. The local militia had no reserves: they could draw only on locals. If enough local tribesmen were killed to break local resistance to Taliban rule, their resistance stayed broken. This was one way the Taliban’s ideological fervor hastened tactical success. 

The New Cult of Martyrdom

Nothing encapsulates the ideological commitment or modernizing tendencies of the Taliban better than the suicide bomb. In the early days of the American intervention, it was assumed—by Afghans and outsiders alike—that no Afghan would ever kill himself for the sake of holy war. The code of the Pashtuns honored the living, not the dead. A man who killed himself forfeited the esteem of his peers. He abandoned, shamefully, his responsibilities to his kin. The taboo against suicide was so strong that when in 2004 the Taliban succeeded in setting off a car bomb outside of a government ministry in Kabul, the Taliban released a statement proclaiming that the bomber had detonated his charge by remote control. The official government description of the bombing as a suicide attack was denied by Taliban spokesmen as a slander against their movement. 

The Taliban’s aversion to suicide bombing would soon change. Through a collection of Afghan poems, songs, online videos, Facebook posts, and personal interviews, anthropologist David Edwards was able to patch together the story of this transformation. His Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan also begins in the world before the Soviets. Afghan poetry of that era lionizes battle with bolt-action rifles. This was the weapon of choice for feuding tribesmen. Each shot of a bolt-action rifle involved carefully aiming the gun and deliberately pulling its trigger. Feuding was less about violence than balance: bolt-action heroics did not just give young men the chance to gain renown, but also allowed tribal councils to keep the score.

Machine guns are not made for keeping score. When the Soviets invaded, Afghan fantasies of individual heroics were dashed against the brutality of industrial war. Edwards compares the Afghan reaction to Soviet artillery bombardments and carpet bombing to the shock that English poets experienced in the trenches of the First World War. In the age of mechanized warfare, death is random and indiscriminate. The role of the individual shrinks: personal prowess or courage means little when the bombs start falling. As Afghans died in the millions, Afghan war poetry changed. It stopped celebrating heroes and started honoring martyrs. 

The American way of war was far less destructive than the Soviet’s industrial manslaughter, but it too eroded the values of the traditional Afghan order. The American war machine was risk-averse: its preferred operation was stealthy and surgical. This meant drone strikes from the air or raids of suspected Taliban households by American forces late at night. The latter was especially humiliating—night raids involved foreign soldiers forcing their way inside women’s quarters—but both tactics imposed upon Afghans a deep sense of shame and vulnerability. Under the traditional schema, the man dishonored at home could restore the balance by dishonoring his enemy at his home. But how to dishonor a drone? The longer war dragged on the less relevant traditional ethics of honor became.

The path of martyrdom provided one solution to this problem. Those following this path could replace the unceasing hunt for worldly honor with something simpler and purer. Instead of the esteem of men, the Taliban offered the glory of God. Taliban thinking on this point would be powerfully shaped by both the rhetoric and operations of Al-Qaeda. The ideologues of Al-Qaeda celebrated the suicide attack as the most magnificent form of martyrdom. The martyrs of the Soviet war, they pointed out, had chosen their cause but not their fates. The moment of their death was decided by the enemy. The suicide bomber was different. His death was an act of his own choosing. This message appealed to hundreds of Afghan men who believed that mechanized war had stripped them of their agency—and represented a fundamental shift in Afghan conceptions of purpose and honor.

The Taliban’s embrace of suicide bombing reflected a newfound engagement with the global jihadist movement. As awareness of other Islamist organizations spread throughout Afghanistan, the Taliban faced powerful pressures to measure up to the competition. Nowhere was this truer than with the Islamic State. Spreading one viral video at a time, Islamic State propaganda had a special appeal to Afghan youth raised in disordered urban centers like Kabul and Jalalabad. By 2017, large numbers of these young men were blowing themselves up. Afghan adherents of the Islamic State were adept propagandists of their own right, staging and streaming extreme acts of brutality that the Taliban would never countenance. Most notoriously, the Islamic State released a video that showed their fighters forcing a group of village elders to kill themselves by kneeling on improvised explosives. It was a gruesome portrayal of the traditional order’s eclipse by a revolutionary Islamic future.

The Islamic State posed a direct threat to the legitimacy of the Taliban. Extremists could now choose which master they would serve. The Taliban was desperate to keep jihadist hardliners within their fold. Malkasian describes the contest that followed as a “free-market competition in terror.” The Taliban defeated Islamic State detachments in several pitched battles—and then unleashed a wave of bombings to appease their own extremists. The campaign culminated with Hibatullah Akhundzada, emir of the Taliban, sending his 23-year-old son to Lashkar Gah in a truck loaded with explosives. Taliban spokesmen celebrated his attack as a success. Much had changed since the days when the Taliban viewed association with the suicide bomb as slander.

“Willing to Kill and Be Killed”

Suicide bombers represent the outer edge of a broader trend. “Every Taliban commander is willing to die,” one Taliban religious scholar told Malkasian. “How can the army and police compete with the Taliban?” A religious leader in Patikya had a similarly dismal view of the government forces: “I hear every day of an incident where police or army soldiers are killed. This means they are fighting, but it does not mean they are good at fighting. They seem well equipped… but I do not know if they are committed to fighting the Taliban. Many of the police and soldiers are there only for dollars. They are paid good salaries, but they do not have the motivation to defend the government.” 

These judgments were widely shared. One in five Afghan soldiers surveyed admitted that they served primarily for the pay. When the general population was polled, one in two Afghans stated that they believed the majority of policemen and soldiers were fighting only for money. “Taliban morale is better than government morale,” one Afghan commander admitted. “Taliban morale is very high. Look at their suicide bombers. The Taliban motivate people to do incredible things.”

In war, greed is a poor motivator: the self-interested will gladly fill the ranks where success seems sure, but have little incentive to stick things out when the outcome of battle looms uncertain. It is for this reason that the story of modern warfare is closely entwined with the development of modern nationalism. The charnel house of industrial war was not possible until millions of people embraced shared identities worth dying for. Modernity relegates mercenaries to the margins.

This same story played itself out over the last two decades of Afghan history. The tale can be told through statistics. By every measurement, Taliban fighters were willing to experience greater hardship, expose themselves to greater risks, and suffer greater casualties than their opponents. Afghan government forces required 1,800 soldiers to safely hold Sangin; the Taliban controlled the town with less than 800. The government needed 3,000 men to garrison Zharey. The Taliban, only 600. When the U.S. Marine Corps partnered with the Afghans to recapture the village of Marjah in February of 2010, the last Taliban were not cleared out until December. One in five Taliban in Helmand died in the fighting—and the rest retreated in good order. 

In contrast, the Taliban operation to retake the city in 2015 lasted only one week. After a breach opened up in the defenses, hundreds of soldiers and police abandoned the frontlines, leaving their heavy machine guns and armored Humvees to be captured by the enemy. Other defeats were even more embarrassing: when 500 Taliban assaulted Kunduz City that same year, the 3,000 soldiers and policemen defending the city fought for a mere 12 hours before a disordered retreat.

Popular explanations for Taliban success do not adequately explain these failures on the battlefield. Ultimately it was these failures—not the Taliban’s safe haven in Pakistan, or the corruption endemic to the government—that explain the course of the war. The contest between the two visions of Afghan society was decided on the field of battle. The Taliban control Afghanistan today because on that field their men fought longer and harder than their opponents. Malkasian attributes Taliban hardiness to ideological commitment. “More Afghans liked the government than the Taliban,” he concludes. “But more Afghans were willing to kill and be killed on behalf of the Taliban.”

This is an old story. The conquest of weak kingdoms and tribal orders by unitary state builders, fielding armies full of nationalist fervor and religious passion, was central to the West’s own journey to modernity. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. saw the same process repeat itself in Afghanistan—and fought it every step of the way. But American money and manpower could never have saved the old Afghanistan. In 2021, disciplined and united Taliban forces swept through the country. It was the end of the U.S. experiment in bringing the liberal order to Afghanistan. As Taliban fighters entered city after city, they arrived as the forces of a new and very different modernity.

The story beats charted out in the 1950 film Panic in the Streets have been repeated in every disaster film that has followed it. Experts discover a looming catastrophe of incredible proportions. They race to solve the problem as covertly as possible; to do otherwise would invite a panic more disastrous than the disaster itself. If they fail, audiences get to see images of an unnerved public up close. Society descends into a Hobbesian scramble for resources or open riot against the powers that be. The lesson is clear: the key to disaster response is ensuring the public does not feel fear. Normal citizens who understand the danger they are in will pose a threat to everyone else in calamity’s path. Panic is the true disaster. Disaster management is thus, at its core, a problem of narrative control.

This understanding of disaster is not limited to Hollywood blockbusters. Over the last year, we have seen the consequences of prioritizing panic prevention over disaster response in one country after another. The pattern was set early in Wuhan, China. There, provincial and municipal officials muzzled early warnings of a novel respiratory illness from doctors, virologists, and health officials. They feared what might happen if normal citizens became aware of the disease. “When we first discovered it could be transmitted between people, our hospital head, chairman, medical affairs department, they sat and made endless calls to the city government, the health commission,” wrote one Wuhan nurse in January of 2020. “[But] they said we still can’t wear protective clothing, because it might stir up panic.”

Similar concerns prompted China’s National Health Commission to issue a confidential notice forbidding labs that had sequenced the new virus to publish their data without government authorization. Even as China’s top health official warned the Chinese health system to prepare for the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003” and ordered the Chinese CDC to declare the highest emergency level possible, public-facing officials were still reporting that the likelihood of sustained transmission between humans was low.

The Chinese continually stalled WHO teams trying to gather information on the pandemic; it was not until the last week of January that Chinese health officials told the WHO the reason for their stonewalling. These officials conceded to the WHO team that they required help “communicating this to the public, without causing panic.” The WHO was sensitive to Beijing’s concerns and delayed its declaration of a global health emergency for several days. “You’ve got to remember this was a novel virus,” one member of a WHO delegation then tasked with the China response would say. “You don’t want to push the panic button until you’ve got reasonable confidence in your diagnosis.”

Unlike Chinese news sites, ordered to censor sensitive words in their reports to prevent coverage of the new disease from fomenting “societal panic,” American newspapers did not operate under the purview of an official censorship regime. But they too were afraid to “push the panic button.” With titles like “Should You Panic About the Coronavirus? Experts Say No” (The LA Times), “The Flu is a Bigger Threat” (NPR), “The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About the Coronavirus” (Bloomberg), and “The Pandemic Risks Bringing out the Worst In Humanity” (CNN), American magazines and newspapers led the charge to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak and delegitimize fear of it. In a piece from The New York Times titled “Beware the Pandemic Panic,” Farhad Manjoo described the reasoning behind this push: “What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic.”

This attitude was widely shared by the public servants responsible for preparing America for the pandemic to come. Most famously, Donald Trump was aware that the coronavirus was more dangerous than the flu, but refused to raise the alarm because, as he told journalist Bob Woodward, “I don’t want people to be frightened, I don’t want to create panic, as you say, and certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.”

But Trump was hardly the only politician to take this stance. As New York City became the center of the American pandemic, the city’s health commissioner successfully argued against lockdowns on the grounds that if New Yorkers became “fearful due to messaging, we could have more permanent harm than we currently have with Covid-19.” That same month, California public health officials argued against wearing masks for fear they might “add to a climate of alarm.” This same argument would reappear a month later when White House officials worried that a mask mandate “might cause panic.”

Perhaps they remembered attacks levied at them by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot a few weeks earlier: “I will candidly tell you that I was very disappointed with the comments of the CDC yesterday and members of the Trump administration around coronavirus,” she remarked after the CDC announced that Americans should prepare for the worst. “I want to make sure that people understand they should continue to go about their normal lives…we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and suggest to the public that there’s a reason for them to be fearful.”

Why this fear of panic? What would have been wrong with allowing the public to feel afraid? Contrary to Lightfoot’s reassurances, there was a reason for the citizens of Chicago—and the rest of us—to “be fearful.” Yet leaders on both sides of the Pacific, at both the local and national levels, among both the politicians and the opinion-makers, were determined to keep their people as far away from fear as possible.

Events proved the anxieties of these elites unfounded: when cities in China, Europe, and finally the United States descended into lockdown, there was no mass panic. There was fear, yes, plenty of it—but that fear did not lead to irrational, hysterical, or violent group behavior. Our fear did not lead to looting, pogroms, or unrest. The fearful of Wuhan did not rise up in rebellion against the Communist Party; even when Italian doctors began rationing medical equipment and supplies, the fearful of Milan did not loot stores or disrupt the medical system; the fearful of New York did not duel each other to the death over toilet paper rolls.

The social “panic” that disturbed mayors, presidents, columnists, and Communists never materialized. It never does. Time and resources that could have been devoted to combatting a very real pandemic were wasted combatting an imaginary social phenomenon. In 2020, we all learned the perils of the myth of panic.

The Fear of the Crowd

Acute fear of the mass of common men by the elites who govern them is not novel. To one extent or another, such distrust exists in any society divided by lines of class and caste. But as a great sea of humanity poured into the new industrial centers of Europe and America in the late 19th century, a distinctly dark vision of mass behavior took root. No work captured this vision more completely than Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. By the time Le Bon published The Crowd, he was already regarded as a pioneering figure in social science, famous for his anthropological accounts of India and Arabia. Violent industrial strikes and the bloody course of the Paris commune turned the focus of his studies back towards his own people. In the concept of “the crowd,” Le Bon found an explanation for the troubles of his country. This explanation was enormously influential with Western intellectuals in the early 20th century. It took root just as disaster response began to be studied as a discrete field—and it still stalks us today.

For Le Bon, a crowd was any group of individuals overtaken by a common purpose or emotion. This “does not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot,” he wrote, for “thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions—such, for example, as a great national event—the characteristics of a psychological crowd.” The chief psychological characteristic of a man caught up in a crowd was the loss of rational, independent judgment. Members of a crowd “feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act, were he in a state of isolation,” for the “critical spirit” and “conscious personality” of an individual will be lost once they are “sublimated” into a crowd’s collective conscious.

In this irrational and impulse-driven crowd-state, humans are vulnerable to what Le Bon labeled “contagion in the brain.” Infectious emotions like rage, fear, or a spirit of heroic self-sacrifice would race through the collective like a disease, leaving crowds of men “at the mercy of all external exciting causes…the slave of every impulse which they receive.” Merely by joining a crowd, Le Bon’s most famous passage argues:

[A] man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

While Le Bon allowed that courage and heroism could be found in man en masse, he saw undirected mass behavior as a fundamentally destructive force. Civilized order requires “fixed rules, discipline… forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of these conditions that crowds have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.” Thus in a society where order and authority have been weakened, actions by the masses will invariably affect society the way a secondary bacterial infection “hastens the dissolution of enfeebled bodies.” This graphic metaphor captured Le Bon’s great fear: unleashed masses may not be the ailment that sends a social order tottering, but “it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.” For weakened authorities fearful of usurpation, it is not the liberated individual that poses a threat, but the collective consciousness of the crowd.

This pessimistic conclusion was taken seriously by one of the first groups to devote real attention to the problems of disaster management: military strategists responsible for defending civilian targets from the ravages of the air-raid. In the aftermath of the First World War, air theorists understood that the potential of aerial campaigns had barely been explored. These men turned to Le Bon’s ideas for guidance. The early air war theorists saw the bombing run as a way around the terrible attrition campaigns of the Western front. In the next war, they predicted, military aircraft would wreak devastation upon civilian targets mere days or hours after hostility began. These attacks would be enough to end the war altogether.

In the words of military historian Lawrence Freedman, Le Bon’s work provided a “quasi-scientific basis” for this new theory of destruction. The strategists, tutored on Le Bon’s grim view of the crowd, proposed that civilians unused to military discipline would surely meet the destruction of their cities with “panic on such a scale [that] their governments would have to abandon the war.” British strategist J.F.C. Fuller described their visions of future warfare vividly: “if a fleet of 500 aeroplanes” came to London, he wrote, it would “throw the whole city into a panic within half an hour of their arrival.” For several days, London would become “one vast raving Bedlam,” where “the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, [and] the homeless will shriek for help.” As for the government, “it will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate his terms, which will be grasped at like a straw by a drowning man.” For elites, the disastrous element of this hypothetical panic would be the loss of political control over the masses.

This belief was soon entrenched in militaries across the world—at least those militaries that had no firsthand experience as a target of enemy bombing. Great Britain’s Marshal of the Royal Air Force channeled the new airpower consensus when he argued in 1937 that the Royal Air Force must reorient itself around air defense. There was no other defense against the potential “panic [caused] by indiscriminate attacks on London.” If Britain could not defeat enemy bombers before they released their payloads, he wrote, “we might possibly be defeated in a fortnight or less.” Similar beliefs drove the RAF’s offensive thinking. The purpose of the British bombing campaign of German cities and civilian targets, commanding officer Arthur Harris wrote in a 1943 memo to his subordinates at Bomber Command, was “the breakdown of morale at home and on the battlefront by fear.”

Washington defense planners made similar assumptions about the power of mass panic. As Rebecca Solnit chronicles in her history of disaster response, it was the invention of intercontinental missiles that forced Americans to contemplate the possibility of homeland attack for the first time. The Truman-era civil defense initiative known as Project East River concluded that “the prevention and control of panics in the time of attack are important tasks of civil defense. For the possibility always occurs that where people panic under attack, more death and injury may occur from that cause than from the direct effects of military weapons.” Eisenhower’s chief of the Federal Civil Defense Administration made clear exactly what “military weapons” the threat of panic outclassed:

Like the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known. If there is an ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panic—not the A-bomb. Mass panic—not the A-bomb—may well be the easiest way to win a battle, the cheapest way to win a war…Just as a single match can burn a dry forest, so a trivial incident can set off a monstrous disaster when the confusion and uneasiness of the population have reached tinder point.

The extraordinary claim that panicked Americans were more dangerous than an actual nuclear attack had powerful purchase in America’s Cold War culture. Soon it was influencing not only civil defense plans, but popular depictions of mass behavior and disaster planning for non-military crises. By the 1980s, both Hollywood directors and disaster management professionals were convinced that every city in America was only one catastrophe away from barbarity.

Unveiling the Myths of Fear

The first man to question the myth of panic was Charles Fritz. As an observer for the United States Army Air Corps during the Blitz, Fritz watched how the English responded to the bombing of London. He discovered that the air theorists drawing on Le Bon were wrong: in the face of death, the British public had not been reduced to hysteria. When Fritz was pulled into the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—a commission created to assess the failures and success of American bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan—a few years later, he came to a similar conclusion. Fire-bombing may have had important economic effects on the enemy war machine, but it did not result in mass panic. The survey’s field research suggested the opposite: many bombed cities had higher morale than those spared attack.

Fritz continued this line of research once he returned to America. Ensconced as associate director of the University of Chicago’s Disaster Research Project, Fritz poured over accounts of one natural disaster and industrial accident after another. He concluded that disasters “result however temporarily in what may be regarded as a kind of social utopia.” “While the natural or human forces that precipitated the disaster appear hostile and punishing,” Fritz observed, “the people who survive become more friendly, sympathetic, and helpful than in normal times.” In disaster scenarios, shared fear and suffering create “an intimate group solidarity among the survivors.” When the world suddenly falls apart, people do not grow more selfish, violent, or irrational, but more altruistic, caring, and calm.

Modern disaster sociology was born out of Fritz’s research. Surveys conducted since then confirm his results. One literature review concludes—after describing the results of multiple surveys covering hundreds of building fires and floods, as well as dozens of hurricanes, tornadoes, airplane crashes, and terrorist attacks—that “systematic studies of human behavior in disasters have failed to support news accounts of widespread panic…Rather than panic or irrational behavior, what they found was that occupants became involved in protective activities such as warning others, calling the fire department, and rescuing or assisting others.” Victims and bystanders of disaster tend to rush towards disaster zones, not flee mindlessly away from them; the greatest challenge facing many disaster response teams is not terrorized crowds, but an overload of volunteers who arrive to aid the response.

If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged.

Further, the high morale and solidarity that citizens exhibit during a disaster dissolve the individualist outlook that elites have long learned to control and maintain. The seemingly positive and prosocial solidarity response of the population is itself a threat to the mechanisms of elite power in our society. Just as disasters empower normal citizens on the ground, who have no choice but to take fate into their own hands, they leave elites feeling distant and helpless. Chess and Clarke call this state of affairs “elite panic:” a fearful distrust of the populace that prompts leaders to restrict information, over-concentrate resources, and use coercive methods to reassert authority in the face of temporary breakdowns in public order. This style of response poses an active danger to disaster survivors and, ironically, creates the very resistance to authority that leaders fear most. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of epidemic response.

On August 14th, 1918, Royal S. Copeland, New York City’s health commissioner, told The New York Times that there was not “the slightest danger of an epidemic of Spanish influenza in New York.” Copeland would further reassure the public that Americans, whose health put them in favorable contrast with the malnourished masses of Europe, need not worry about the disease. Copeland maintained this jolly tone over the next few months. On October 1st, well before the epidemic had reached its highest point in the city, Copeland announced that it “had been checked” and “warned the public against undue alarm.” The close to 2,000 new cases announced over the next two days had him once again reassuring the newspaper that the flu would in no way “swamp” the city’s medical system.

On October 4th, he downplayed the 999 new cases announced that morning with his own announcement that “there are no alarming symptoms about the spread of influenza in New York.” Notwithstanding his reassurances, by October 6th the rate of daily new cases hit a new high of 2,070 flu cases in the preceding 24 hours. Copeland again called for public calm: “Considering the population here,” he told the Times, ” I do not consider that the city is stricken.” It would be another week before Copeland would finally admit that the city had reached an official state of emergency and requested that an Emergency Advisory Committee be formed to coordinate a response to the virus.

In her history of the Spanish flu’s march through America, Nancy Bristow narrates this story to illustrate a broader pattern: over the course of the epidemic American newspapers, political leaders, and public health officials “did not exploit what might seem the most obvious message for motivating the public—the direct expression of the danger posed by influenza and the seriousness of the burgeoning epidemic.” Pamphlets and government releases described the disease in milquetoast language that did not invoke “the horrible scenes witnessed as the epidemic struck” or “the appalling symptoms that had frightened even the most experienced physicians.” Most officials were determined to mobilize the public to fight the disease—but not if that meant the possibility of panic.

Epidemics differ from other disasters in an important way: in an epidemic, strangers do not just share grief and trauma—they also share diseases. Whether the sunny verdicts of disaster sociology apply in a social context where strangers may be the vector for another’s death is a fair question. Disaster sociology literature reviews frankly admit that this is a question the field does not yet have the data to answer. For that answer, we must turn to the field of medical history.

Samuel Cohn’s 2019 work Epidemics: Hate and Compassion From the Plague of Athens to AIDS is the most comprehensive attempt to address the problem. Cohn surveys hundreds of epidemics over 2,000 years of Western history, using digital tools and search technology to scour hundreds of annals and thousands of newspapers for every reference to plagues and pox that can be found in the Western historical record. Cohn finds that with the sole exception of the Black Plague—and there only in Germany and the Low Countries—no premodern epidemic spawned violence, persecution, or chaos. Instead, historical records speak of the normal compassion, solidarity, and self-sacrifice the sociologists find in most post-disaster communities. Only in the 19th century do epidemics become associated with civil disorder—and then only with three specific diseases: the bubonic plague, cholera, and smallpox.

More important than the diseases themselves may have been the treatments. Public health was a 19th-century innovation; a scientific understanding of pathogens spread was a 19th-century discovery. These parallel developments transformed epidemic response. If past centuries endured epidemics as acts of God, 19th-century elites decided to use ambulances and centralized hospitals, segregation camps, district and neighborhood quarantines, inspection teams, and inoculation campaigns to contain and curtail the threats posed by disease. Violence arose in the communities contained and curtailed by these new public health tools.

The 63 plague riots that rocked British India between 1896 and 1902 are a case in point. The British officials in charge of plague control did not speak any native languages, had little respect for Hindu religious beliefs, and little knowledge of local burial customs. In their fight against the plague, male doctors would burst into local houses for inspections regardless of whether the family’s menfolk were home. Sanitation campaigns would result in the wanton destruction of Indian property; those found sick with the plague would be whisked off to segregation camps on the spot. In plague-struck areas, the disruption to daily life caused by inspections and seizures were as unnerving as they were unending. Nothing the British did, one Pune newspaper complained, “interfered so largely and in such a systematic way with the domestic, social and religious habits of the people as the enforcement of the measures adopted for stamping out the plague.” Soon, Indians were assassinating public health commissioners, attacking hospitals, and mobbing doctors.

This disorder mirrored the enormous cholera riots that shut down Russian, English, Italian, and American cities earlier in the century, as well as smaller incidents of smallpox-related disorder, such as the month-long Milwaukee smallpox riot of 1894. But this violence was not a product of mass panic or an expression of irrational terror. The 19th-century riots were a strategic expression of their anger: rioters used violence to prevent the forced separation of the sick from their loved ones and the imposition of medical practices the population did not understand or trust, and to dissuade state officials from violating their privacy, property, or religious norms. It was the disease response, not the disease itself, that led to attacks on the social order.

The Uses of Fear

Historian Judith Leavitt finds a lesson in the different outcomes of Milwaukee’s riot-spawning smallpox outbreak and New York City’s orderly response to a smallpox outbreak fifty years later. The latter was able to contain the disease quickly and vaccinate six million New Yorkers in four weeks. Leavitt credits New York’s success to the transparency of its public health officials, who kept the entire system informed of every new case found as soon as it was identified. “Leaders themselves must respect the public’s need to know,” Leavitt concludes, “and provide the kinds of knowledge people need. The more they try to hide, the more suspect they will become.”

A commentary published on the WeChat account of the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China came to a similar conclusion. Reprimanding Wuhan police for silencing doctors for “spreading rumors” in December and January of 2020, the account notes that “It might have been a better way to prevent the novel coronavirus if the public had believed the ‘rumor’ then and started to wear masks and carry out sanitary measures.” Here was a belated recognition that lives were lost because of undue worry over panic.

Post-hoc admissions like these have a hollow ring. We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance.

This principle applies just as well to regimes as to the individuals who comprise them. The wisdom of the Chinese sages who identified the loss of Heaven’s Mandate with natural calamity echoes this sentiment. They understood that crises sift the worthy from the base. It is natural for a leader to fear such a test. It is dangerous for him to deny that such a test is taking place. This is the temptation of disaster: to retreat from disaster management into perception management and to worry more that the people fear than about the dangers the people face. The source of temptation is not hard to spot: it is easy for a governing class to take credit for preventing panic when panic so rarely takes place. It is easier to define success in terms of emotional states: those are intangible and unmeasurable. Lives lost and dollars spent are different matters. Few men are eager to gamble their personal authority or the legitimacy of their regime on something so easily assessed.

Yet the test cannot be wished away. As the world discovered in 2020, perception management only goes so far. If disaster blooms into catastrophe, governing elites focused on panic prevention find their disaster response effort suddenly dependent on the very public they are frightened of. What is needed then is honesty and leadership. Leaders then have no choice but to rely on, assist, and lead the uncoordinated, self-directed efforts of the masses. What these efforts need to succeed is information and good strategy—and the trust that they will use this information well.

The people must be trusted with fear, and the governing class must be comfortable with leadership during times of crisis. Fear is an unpleasant emotion— but at times, a useful one. Fear lends urgency to action. Fear forces the afraid to focus on that which matters. This is the great lesson of the 2020 coronavirus: We should have been allowed to fear. Alas, our leaders feared our fear more than they feared our deaths. The world bears the consequences of this stark faith in the myth of panic.

To build peace in Cambodia, the UN planned on staffing a full-sized interim government, pouring money into development and state capacity projects, and arranging a fair election to decide who would govern the country after the UN mission had departed. For the UN, this was a high stakes endeavor. As Sebastian Strangio describes it in his newly revised book, Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond, this was an opportunity for the body to finally “fulfill its foundational promise as the embodiment of a singular ‘international community’” and set the tone for a new era where “peace could be engineered, democratic institutions molded, and human rights implanted in the DNA of nations emerging from bloody conflict.”

That was three decades ago. To most foreigners today, Cambodia is a small and insignificant kingdom, remembered, when remembered at all, as the site of horrific Cold War massacres. Little is asked of the Cambodia that came after the killing fields. There are numerous reasons for this neglect. Cambodia’s markets are underdeveloped and unimportant to international commerce. It has never been a hotbed of terrorist activity. For most of the last three decades, the kingdom stood at far remove from great power geopolitics. 

All of this has allowed us to forget the role Cambodia played in the creation of the post-Cold War world, when it was subject to one of the largest international interventions of our age. The kingdom’s subsequent fate shines a dark mirror on the international order. This is another reason Washington gives so little thought to Cambodia: to think hard about the country is to confront unpleasant truths about the nature of the world the West made. Behind the intervention in Cambodia was a belief that human affairs had their own telos. Democracy was everywhere triumphant. History was propelling mankind towards a liberal future. It was in Cambodia that this liberal teleology first shattered. It was there that the world rediscovered that history is no slave to liberal values—and that so much liberal statecraft is less a serious attempt to build a liberal world than it is an attempt to shore up our own moral credentials. 

Cambodia is an ideal introduction to the problems posed by the Cambodian experience. Strangio is a talented writer, and his book is a brisk and incisive tour of Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge history. Drawing on the decade Strangio spent reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia begins with an unusually honest set of reflections on that experience: 

As journalists in Cambodia, our main frame of reference [for understanding the country] was the global human rights regime…We worked closely with the country’s human rights groups and NGOs, the other beneficiaries of the UN mission. Together, we formed an informational symbiosis, generating huge quantities of data, much of it detailing Cambodia’s persistent failure to live up to its international human rights “obligations.” But there was something curiously abstract about the freedoms we enjoyed. No matter what we and our Khmer colleagues wrote, little seemed to change. The rich and powerful remained a law unto themselves, as they had been for as long as Cambodians could remember…The human rights groups had their own name for all of this. They called it “impunity.” But the word was so frequently deployed, and so bleached of cultural and historical context, that it soon lost much of its force.

The story of that missing context begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War antagonisms. 40 years before, America had demonstrated that it was possible to build a durable, liberal-tilting order out of the ruins of great power conflict. That new order was built through great effort and careful statesmanship. The efforts of those early order-builders were vindicated in the last decade of the Cold War, when one country after another blossomed in democracy. In Europe, the iron curtain fell; in Asia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan all transitioned peacefully from dictatorship to democracy. A liberal tide was rising, and wise statesmen believed they had the chance to harness its power to once again refashion the international order. 

The key moment in this transition fell between the years 1991 and 1992, when George Bush articulated his vision of a “New World Order,” the Soviet Union fell apart, and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali presented his report, “An Agenda for Peace.” The world was hurtling towards a new liberal consensus: with America as its leader, an international concert of powers would devote itself to maintaining the common peace, open up the globe to joint trade and shared development, and use the machinery of multilateralism to strengthen democracy and human rights across the world. 

The martial aspect of this new ethos found its expression in the first Gulf War. Using multinational forums like the UN, America built a vast international coalition to contain the aggression of Saddam Hussein. That war was explicitly conceived as an attempt to use military force to set the ground rules for the new post-Cold War order. The flip side of that coin—Boutros-Ghali devised the neologism “peacebuilding” to convey it—faced its first test in Cambodia. Just as the international community had built a broad-based coalition to fight a war, now a similar coalition would come together to end one. Arms had played their part in crafting the new order; now, peace-building would be given the chance to do the same. 

From the viewpoint of 2021, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) foreshadowed the more familiar Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq a decade later. But in contrast to the invasion and occupation of Iraq—the illustration of American arrogance and unilateralism par excellence—the 1992 intervention that produced UNTAC was done the “right” way. The intervention was the product of two years of diplomatic negotiation, a consensus agreed to by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council and all of Cambodia’s neighbors. It was not only conducted under the auspices of the UN but employed 20,600 UN personnel from over one hundred countries. The UNTAC chief was not a white man, but a fellow Asian—Japan’s Yasushi Akashi. This $2 billion dollar mission was then the largest peacekeeping operation the UN had ever conducted. From the beginning, Akashi was given a clear mandate to use that $2 billion dollars to bring stability, democracy, and human rights to Cambodia. 

When Akashi left Cambodia in 1993, he declared that UNTAC was “a striking demonstration to the world that an intractable conflict can be resolved and seemingly irreconcilable views can be reconciled.” Unfortunately, Akashi was lying through his teeth. The “peace plan,” as Strangio notes, “was a product of superpower compromise [that] bore only a vague resemblance to the political realities inside Cambodia.” The UN presence could pressure Cambodia’s warring parties into accepting a temporary ceasefire, but it could not make them accept the legitimacy of the UN-imposed government. 

The Khmer Rouge was one of the first factions to test the limits of the UN mandate. They withdrew from the ceasefire agreement, refused to disarm, and threatened to attack any UN force that entered their territory. Unwilling to fight a war on Cambodian soil without additional authorization, the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge to do as they wished. On one infamous occasion, Akashi’s motorcade encountered a Khmer Rouge roadblock—a single bamboo pole laid across the road, with a few young soldiers left to man it. “Refused” entry to the road, Akashi ordered his armed convoy to turn around.

Strangio quotes King Sihanouk’s sharp judgment of the scandal that followed: “The Cambodian people believed that the UN blue berets were like Jupiter threatening to unleash lightning against the Khmer Rouge. What do the people see? When the Khmer Rouge advances, UNTAC pulls back.” 

The lesson was not lost on other actors in the Cambodian political system. The sitting Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)—which would eventually disarm the Khmer Rouge by bribing their commanders to switch sides—concluded that the UN was toothless and that there was no need to comply with the standards it imposed. Soon, they were using violence and assassination to keep control of the polls. With that, the last pillar of the UN’s mandate–to arbitrate a fair election–went up in smoke. But the UN, knowing that the world’s leading powers would rather pretend they had achieved their stated goals in Cambodia than pay the costs necessary to achieve those goals, packed up to prepare for its next project. 

The legacy of UNTAC was thus not the democracy, stability, or peace the UN had promised, but something else—a pattern that runs the length of Cambodia’s post-Cold War history. Always too marginal to great power politics or international commerce to justify the sort of authoritarian accommodations the West granted to states like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, Cambodia was instead subjected to a foreign policy putatively built around “values.” To support these values, the self-declared “international community” would dangle donor money and other forms of outside support to Phnom Penh, conditional on good behavior and meaningful reform from the Cambodians. In order to keep donor money flowing, powerful Cambodians would feign to be committed liberals. Donor organizations, charged with making the world a better place, would in turn pretend that the Cambodian playacting was the real deal. 

Beneath the façade, the country continued being governed through the same patterns of patronage and violence that dominated its politics for the last three centuries. Rather than undergirding a new democratic regime, all liberalism did was create a new framework for these actors to prove their legitimacy to outside powers.

No one mastered these tactics better than Hun Sen, the savviest of Cambodia’s strongmen. Beginning his career as a low-level cadre in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge and then switching sides to join the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea, Hun Sen was skilled at wearing whatever suit the situation required. It was easy for him to play the part of a duly and democratically elected Prime Minister. Nevertheless, Hun Sen’s liberal commitments were never more than skin deep. Each step in this self-declared democrat’s consolidation of power was founded on atrocity: opposition party workers shot while registering voters, rallies and strikes disrupted by grenade attacks, journalists doused with acid after inconvenient investigations, lands expropriated from the peasants who opposed important developments, newspapers and radio stations shuttered for reporting the truth, opposition politicians jailed when they became too popular, and so forth. 

Only rarely was Hun Sen directly implicated in any of this violence, but it was clear that even if he had been, there was little outside observers could do about it. Their powerlessness seems surprising: for the first two decades of his rule, three-fourths of Hun Sen’s governing budget came from foreign loans and aid packages. The keepers of the liberal world order seemingly had all the leverage they needed to guide the Cambodian system towards liberal democracy. But they soon found that the only effective agent of change in Cambodia was the strongman himself. Hun Sen had made himself the indispensable man of Khmer politics, the sole force that held the system together. In these early years, nothing could be done without him—including the reforms anti-corruption watchdogs and human rights organizations constantly called for. 

Hun Sen was responsive to these calls. When aid money was siphoned off in its millions to private pockets, or when a prominent innocent died in an outbreak of political violence, Hun Sen would appear before the cameras and declare a new reform campaign to save Cambodia and pacify his liberal donors. But Hun Sen was canny: he ensured that these reform schemes would be implemented so gradually as to not occur at all. Donors were willing to accept the appearances for realities. Besides, their attention was divided. Once international attention shifted to some other global crisis, both their demands for reform and Hun Sen’s promises to implement them would be forgotten as the international community gathered to save some other part of the world in need.

Part of the problem was that there was no reliable liberal counterweight to Hun Sen for anyone to support. The UNTAC elections forced Hun Sen into a shared power scheme with the royalist party FUCINPEC, headed by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, son of Cambodia’s constitutional monarch Sihanouk. But Ranariddh was no more a democrat than Hun Sen was. Having grown up in France, Prince Ranariddh was adept at speaking the kind of language Western ears like to hear. But Strangio presents the prince as he spoke in his less guarded moments. This Ranariddh described democracy as “just a phrase to be talked about in idle gossip,” concluding that “discipline is more essential in our society.” Ranariddh’s deeds matched his words. FUCINPEC was just as committed to siphoning off government funds into their own pockets, just as happy to squish other opposition parties out of the government, and just as reliant on extra-governmental patron-client relationships to maintain their power as Hun Sen’s CPP was. 

Like Hun Sen, Prince Ranariddh maintained a personal militia to buttress his power. Also like Hun Sen, he planned on using violent force to remove his rival. But Hen Sen struck first. The 1997 slaughter of FUCINPEC’s armed forces has been called a coup. In reality, as Strangio argues persuasively, “the fighting was the culmination of months of mutual escalation between two rival centers of power bent on maximizing their own control,” more “mini-civil war” than “coup in the ordinary sense.” If the slaughter was one-sided, it was not because a faction of peaceful democrats had been victimized by a norm-breaking authoritarian, but because the losing faction was simply so much less competent than their rivals at authoritarian power politics. 

With FUCINPEC defeated, Westerners dissatisfied with Cambodian autocracy rested their hopes on Sam Rainsy, the new leading light of the anti-CPP opposition. Rainsy, at least, was not corrupt: he made his name as a finance minister devoted to exposing crookery in both FUCINPEC and CPP finances. Rainsy’s activism had a cost: he lost first his ministry, then his parliamentary seat, and finally his membership in the existing party system. But if Rainsy’s stance on corruption left him with no actual power in Cambodia, it made him spectacularly popular in Western activist circles abroad. 

Yet once again Westerners found themselves perpetuating an illusion. When addressing English-speaking audiences abroad, Rainsy would speak about the opposition’s political program in terms of democracy, accountability, and respect for universal human rights. When speaking in Khmer, Rainsy’s message was different. To Cambodian audiences, he presented himself as an ardent nationalist, spewing forth venomous attacks on Cambodia’s Vietnamese minority, and calling for a militantly anti-Vietnamese foreign policy. Sam Rainsy’s political allies would go a step further, peddling conspiracy theories that blamed Vietnamese agents for the Khmer Rouge massacres. It is difficult to tell which Rainsy—the liberal cosmopolitan or the vitriolic nationalist—was real and which was the act. Perhaps both were roles designed to appeal to their chosen audience. The gap between the two is telling. Despite Western wishes to the contrary, the poor and largely rural Cambodian electorate was far less inspired by liberal values than by revanchist territorial claims and anti-Vietnamese prejudice. 

Strangio describes parallel gaps between the expectations of the “international community” and Cambodian realities in multiple domains. He recounts how Western aid money is funneled directly into private pockets, and how foreign development plans saddled Cambodia with schools and medical stations without providing the country with the teachers or doctors to man them. He devotes a chapter to the thousands of foreigners employed in the NGO-aid complex, a complex whose main effect is hobbling indigenous state capacity—a phenomenon which scholars have documented across the world. 

Strangio also narrates the bizarre story of the UN’s Khmer Rouge Tribunal, whose trials were supposed to stand as a symbol of universal justice levied against tyrants guilty of “crimes against humanity.” But in Cambodia, humanity mattered far less than local political realities. Hun Sen manipulated the trials to ensure that his own cronies escaped culpability for past crimes, and to save face, the UN “took a series of messy political accommodations and concealed them behind a mirage of justice.” They did so under pressure from Australia, the U.S., and other Western nations who did not want the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’s $200 million price tag to climb any higher. “The fact is,” Strango observes, “supporting the [the trials] was a useful way for Western governments to bolster their moral credentials while supporting an undemocratic status quo.” 

Those words are an accurate gloss on the larger Western project to transform Cambodia. Conceived in the birth-pangs of the post-Cold War order, this project was a product of that moment’s unique triumphalism. In those heady years, it was easy to believe that liberal democracy was both a historical inevitability and a moral necessity. This strange cocktail of determinism and moralism would not only set the terms of Cambodia’s engagement with the “international community”—but also undermined that community’s attempt to remake Cambodia in the liberal image. 

Cambodia exited the Cold War a poor and broken country, economically isolated from the wider world, scarred by forty continuous years of war, unable to exercise sovereignty over its own territory, and still suffering from the depredations of the totalitarian experiment that killed around one-fifth of its people. Bringing this country in line with the purported international standards of democratic liberalism was a titanic task. It could never have been accomplished except through colossal expenditures and unceasing attention on the part of liberal powers. 

But in a world where liberal democracy was an inevitable product of history itself, that sort of investment was never thought necessary. The guardians of the liberal order were caught in a trap: driven by moral strictures to support Cambodia’s liberal development, liberal powers could not accept a Cambodia that fell below their standard. When presented with the actual costs of bringing the kingdom up to this standard, they balked and looked for ways to remove Cambodia’s problems from the agenda. Confident that history would do the job they could not afford, the “international community” uncritically accepted and paid for any faux-reform or fake democrat that made it look like Cambodia was finally moving towards liberalism. A more recent equivalent to their mindset might be found among 2000s-era Bush administration officials who believed that an extended American presence in Iraq was unnecessary because of the local readiness for a democratic regime. Yet, in both cases, history never did its part. The illusion would soon pop, and the whole cycle of moralism, hypocrisy, delusion, and waste would begin anew.

The failure to remake Cambodia into a peaceful, prosperous democracy contrasts sharply with past experience in liberal nation-building. The process of developing the German, Japanese, and Italian empires into a network of democratic, U.S.-aligned states was the unspoken template for many of the nation-building projects of the last three decades. But those interventions were unusual. They followed a destructive war that discredited existing ideologies and elites; in contrast to Cambodia, where the UN tried to build a coherent political system out of an artificial ceasefire, the devastation of the Second World War and the uncompromising terms forced on the Axis in surrender had genuinely wiped the old slate clean. The threat posed by the Soviet Union, in turn, forced the Americans to compromise on ideological purity: they were willing to tolerate distinctive models like Europe’s Christian Democratic parties or Korea’s state-led development of markets if it brought stability—and thereby, legitimacy. 

Most important of all, however, was the commitment Americans brought to the task of building a new order. The American post-war intervention in East Asia and Western Europe were open-ended commitments to rebuilding the pillars of the old order on American lines. Having just suffered from the failures of interwar diplomacy, American statesmen were not afraid to ask their leaders—and even their populations—to shoulder the terrific responsibility of ensuring that those failures did not recur. The stakes were never so high in the Cambodian case, and the international commitments were correspondingly low. From the beginning, UNTAC was designed as an interim solution to Cambodia’s problems. In contrast, American forces still garrison bases in Germany and Japan some 75 years later.

The democratization of South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines occurred with far less effort on the part of the “international community.” Having occurred just before or during the UN’s intervention in Cambodia, they were another source of hope for the Westerners who dreamed of building a democratic Cambodia. Yet the differences between those three nations and the Cambodia of 1992 are instructive. All three were decades removed from large-scale war. All three were key American allies; for two generations, their ruling classes had sent their children to American schools, and their business classes were enmeshed in the markets of the liberal world system. By the early 1990s, two of these three had successfully industrialized, and even in the more rural Philippines, politics was centered on Manilla’s urban core. Cambodia, in contrast, was almost entirely rural. 

In other words, these countries possessed both local actors and elites who could really build up functional and aligned regimes, and the material and social prerequisites for the U.S.’s favored regime type of a market-oriented liberal democracy. Notably, it was precisely in states like Saudi Arabia or mid-century Singapore—neither of which obviously had these prerequisites—that the U.S. relaxed its demands for conformity. When faced with similar obstacles in Cambodia, though, the UN and its major allies more or less shrugged their shoulders and abandoned the project.

While American diplomacy was critical to securing each of these democratic transitions, democracy was an internal development in all the success stories. Decades of organizing and resistance had created genuine popular movements for democracy. America did not conjure these forces, but instead pressured the leaders of Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, who understood they were dependent on American favor, to back down before them. None of these conditions—peace, high rates of urbanization and literacy, market integration, a popular democracy movement, and geopolitical dependence on a liberal hegemon—held in the Cambodian case. Most still do not. It was foolish to expect Cambodia to follow in their footsteps, and unfair to condemn it for failing to do so.

When placed against these examples, what seems most distinctive about the international community’s intervention in Cambodia was a strange intolerance for illiberalism married to a general unwillingness to shoulder the true costs of liberalization. The closest parallel to Cambodia’s post-Cold War development is thus America’s ill-fated attempt to remake Iraq and, especially, Afghanistan. There too, a liberal power sought to transform lands torn by war and state terror into model democracies. There too, we find well-meaning Westerners assuming that historical necessity would do most of the hard work of liberal development. There too, we find outsiders passing off Potemkin reforms as moral victories. There too, we find foreigners unwilling to accept illiberal realities caught in a cycle of delusion. 

The difference—in terms of the post-Cold War political spectrum of the liberal world order—is that the “international community” did not precede its interference in Cambodia with invasion. In Cambodia, American soldiers were never the instrument of liberal reform. Yet these reforms failed anyway. Perhaps then, invasion and militarism bear less responsibility for the failures of 21st century statecraft than is commonly thought. Cambodia’s experience suggests that America’s defeats in the Near East were not merely failures in the use of military force, but something altogether more fundamental. Having overthrown a geopolitical enemy, the Western alliance did not possess the singular goal of building a functional and aligned regime that actually corresponded to local conditions. 

For Americans, this may be the most useful lesson to take from Strango’s Cambodia. Our error was not in the tools used, but in the aim pursued and commitment to it. In both Cambodia and Afghanistan, we had faith that history moved with us. Decades later we realize the truth: our attempt to remake the world in our image did not make us history’s handmaidens, but history’s fools. 

From the beginning, this initiative has been less about using economic tools for geopolitical ends than using political, diplomatic, and propaganda tools to shape the global response to China’s growing power. It is against this benchmark that the successes of BRI must be judged, and on these grounds that its failures are most apparent.

All grand campaigns pursued by the Chinese party-state flow from the declared mission of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party’s central task is to bring about the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” an injunction to return China to the prosperity and glory Chinese associate with the empires of their past. This is a competitive endeavor. As the leader of an unapologetically Leninist regime, Xi Jinping believes that China’s return to glory requires “build[ing] a socialism that is superior to capitalism” and thereby “lay[ing] the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.” These grand goals place special demands on Chinese foreign policy: “It is vital that China proactively create a favorable national security environment,” Xi has explained. In other words, the grand strategy must focus on changing the norms of global institutions themselves, rather than just adapting to or violating them. As he would note on a later occasion, “the Chinese Dream can only be realized in a peaceful international environment and a stable international order.”

When Xi came to power in 2012, the international security environment did not look favorable. The United States was a close military ally with many of China’s neighbors and had just declared its intent to pivot its military posture to Asia. Washington was negotiating a regional free trade pact that would exclude the Chinese. Observers in Beijing feared the specter of containment. Equally disturbing was Western “discursive power”—party-speak for the hold that Western ideas and ideals had on the international stage. Party leaders identified liberal patterns of thought as a threat to their rule; they feared that an international order with thoroughly liberal operating norms would destabilize China and undermine its drive to move “closer to the center stage” of world affairs.

To thrive, the Party would need to push the international order into a “fairer and more reasonable” direction. Party leaders imagined a future where their socialist system held a place of honor, where hostile liberal hegemony had been replaced by a world governed by “a new model of international relations featuring cooperation and mutual benefit,” and in which Western alliance systems would be supplanted by “a partnership network that links all parts of the world.” In such a world, the party could rest easy, knowing that China’s rise to the top had been safely guaranteed. The only question was how to bring that world about.

The BRI is Xi Jinping’s personal attempt to enlist China’s infrastructure-industrial complex into the party’s quest to reshape the international order. Only a few years before Xi came to power, China had relied on this complex to power its way out of the Great Recession. Local governments partnered with SOEs to build new infrastructure on a gargantuan scale, funding projects through low-interest loans offered by China’s major policy banks. But by the early 2010s, this local government-SOE-policy bank nexus was in a state of crisis. Stimulus money was gone, returns on domestic infrastructure were trending negative, overcapacity exceeded 30% in industries like iron, cement, and aluminum, and Chinese banks had some $3 trillion USD in unused foreign exchange reserves. The only way to sustain its profits was to find new, paying customers abroad. “The lesson China learned [in the recession],” notes economist Andrew Batson, “is that debt is free and that Western criticisms of excessive infrastructure investment are nonsense, so there is never any downside to borrowing to build more infrastructure. China’s infrastructure-building complex, facing diminishing returns domestically, [applied] that lesson to the whole world.”

The globalization of the Chinese infrastructure-industrial complex was already well underway when Xi decided to describe it as part of a 21st century Silk Road. Many of the initiative’s largest and most prominent projects were announced, negotiated, or began construction years before the BRI’s official launch, and were simply rebranded after the fact to curry favor with the party leadership. As we shall see, Xi’s directives have had a limited influence on the decision-making process of the firms involved in Belt and Road activity since then.

Despite exercising little personal control over SOE decision making, Xi has gone to unusual lengths to associate their projects with his personal grand strategy. Xi has held two major international forums devoted specifically to Belt and Road, each bringing delegations from more than 40 countries to Beijing. Xi uses meetings with foreign heads of state to announce a new BRI Memorandum of Understanding and to publicly boost the effectiveness of the initiative’s “win-win” approach.

One catalog of major speeches about the BRI finds that Xi has given more addresses on the topic than all other members of the Politburo. The BRI has been reaffirmed as a central plank of “Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Affairs”—a set of principles and guidelines that all of China’s foreign-facing officialdom is supposed to memorize, internalize, and implement—and was given a prominent place in Xi’s Political Work Report to the 19th National Congress. That Congress saw Xi’s signature initiative endorsed and enshrined in the constitution of the Communist Party of China.

There are two apparent rationales for Xi’s decision to claim the globalization of the SOE infrastructure-industrial complex as his personal brainchild. The first is that Xi hoped that this framing might shape the contours of future outbound investment and construction, bending them towards his personal diplomatic priorities. Xi has made clear what these priorities should be: transportation and energy infrastructure in strategic locales. Guidance documents from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s premier development coordination agency, instruct project managers to prioritize six “economic corridors” with China’s neighbors. As one analyst notes, the corridors “conspicuously bypass the maritime chokepoints that China has hitherto (by necessity) relied upon American naval capability and benevolence to secure.” Xi emphasized that the BRI must “give priority to projects of strategic importance,” and that

Infrastructure connectivity is the foundation of development through cooperation. We should promote land, maritime, air and cyberspace connectivity, concentrate our efforts on key passageways, cities and projects and connect networks of highways, railways and seaports. The goal of building six major economic corridors under the Belt and Road Initiative has been set, and we should endeavor to meet it.

Reducing complex political processes down to bland slogans (“belt and road”), numbered lists (“six major economic corridors”), and overly broad policy guidelines (“give priority to projects of strategic importance”) is a strategy of control that Chinese communist leaders often turn to. They lead a party-state whose members number in the tens of millions; most individuals working for it find themselves subject to overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, lines of authority. True centralized direction of this morass is not possible. To form order from chaos, party leaders rely on propaganda and sloganeering to communicate directly to the cadre on the scene. Party leaders dispense with detailed directives that foresee every contingency in hope that cadres will grasp the principles of the party’s guiding ideology and then develop their own path for implementing these principles in their unique situation. When Xi declares that “whether we succeed in our pursuit of peaceful development to a large extent depends on whether we can turn opportunities in the rest of the world into China’s opportunities,” he does so knowing that his statement will repeated and reprinted in state publications that diplomats, SOE managers, military officers, and party bureaucrats must read. It is their responsibility to turn broad and bland platitudes into individual plans of action.

Most party rhetoric is like this, intensely focused on its internal audience of party members and state employees. The Belt and Road rebranding, however, has a second, larger audience: all the world outside of China. Loudly calling attention to SOE projects and investment abroad allows Xi to subvert hostile narratives surrounding China’s rise. Christening foreign development projects as the central plank of Xi’s grand strategy was an attempt to legitimize China’s return to superpower status. “Promoting BRI, boosting win-win cooperation between China and other countries, and pursuing common development,” Xi informs his diplomats, means “tell[ing] the world China’s success stories, [and through these means] promot[ing] mutual understanding and friendship between China and other countries.”

The legitimizing mission of the Belt and Road is seen in Xi’s invitation to “welcome others to join China’s express train of development.” This was an intentional bid for prestige: China was openly offering “a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization” on terms not set by the West. Xi made this clear in 2017 when he declared that “the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics is now flying high and proud for all to see,” and that the party was

Blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. [The Chinese example] offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.

This sort of rhetoric changed the terms of SOE engagement with outside clients. What would have been understood as business deals between individual SOEs and governments who purchased their services have been transformed into diplomatic endorsements of the “Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” Each Memorandum of Understanding signed by a foreign government would legitimize the Chinese development path—and the Chinese Communists who pioneered it.

It was a fine strategy, but one with a double edge.

Transforming SOEs cash-cow projects into handmaidens of China’s national rejuvenation had unanticipated consequences. Americans who might have dismissed these projects as an ad-hoc series of bilateral investment agreements now saw them as a challenge to America’s global leadership. Reactions in Tokyo and New Delhi were just as hysterical, and from the Chinese perspective, just as preventable. The natural reaction of the world’s dragon-slayers to BRI publicity was to hunt for BRI projects they might discredit—a task made far easier by the consequences of Xi’s branding campaign.

In the words of one economist, Xi’s decision to associate SOE firm strategy with his personal diplomatic brilliance “gave the SOE infrastructure-complex carte blanche to pursue whatever projects they [could] get away with.” Poor investments that would have once drawn criticism, or at least extra scrutiny, by observers in China were now given a free pass, as few Chinese would risk tarring an initiative the General Secretary had invested so much of his personal prestige into. Outside China, in contrast, critics would now credit sloppiness or malfeasance not to the failings of individual SOES or financial consortiums, but to the malevolence of the Chinese government. Anything that went wrong with any project would now be laid directly at the feet of Xi Jinping.

Thus, the long string of BRI related incidents that have elevated what were essentially commercial or financial disputes into crises in the diplomatic relationship between China and various BRI host countries. BRI projects have been enmeshed in corruption scandals or political controversies in Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic, Italy, Australia, and the Maldives. The worst of these disputes have swept anti-China political parties into power. Their leaders condemned the Belt and Road “as a big cheat,” denounced the CPC for its “new colonialism,” and maligned Beijing’s efforts as an attempt to ensnare their nations with “debt-trap diplomacy.”

There is little evidence that Beijing ever intended any of its projects to become debt-traps, nor that they would even have the ability for this level of central strategic action. Yet haphazard project selection was an inevitable outcome of Xi’s decision to make the SOEs and policy banks—domestic actors that face no incentive to take the party’s long-term foreign policy priorities seriously—the foundation of his grand strategy.

The key actors in this system are the host governments of Belt and Road member countries (who generate most of the foreign-facing project proposals), municipal and provincial government officials (who generate the rest of the proposals, have responsibility for international projects where domestic connectivity plays a part, and sometimes act as middlemen), large SOEs (who provide the actual goods and services tendered), and PRC policy banks (whose loans fund the projects). Proposed projects are then passed up to the National Development and Reform Commission—notably, not the more centralized and foreign-oriented Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Ministry of Commerce—for approval and review. This mirrors the project development process of the PRC’s recession spending spree. Extending the process to new shores is an excellent way to subsidize the state contractor-policy bank nexus, but a questionable foundation for a coherent foreign policy.

Xi’s strategic visions and the Belt and Road realities bear but a measly semblance to each other. One analysis of 173 BRI projects concludes that, apart from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, “there appears to be no significant relationship between corridor participation and project activity.” When participation is measured through dollars invested, the skew is even greater: approximately 30% of the $148 trillion invested in BRI countries between 2014 and 2018 went to three countries: Singapore, South Korea, and Israel. None of these three are in the six strategic economic corridors; each is already considered a developed economy.

Projects can work at strategic cross-purposes: in 2013 officials in Guangxi and their SOE allies financed a multi-billion dollar investment in a port, cross-country railway, and industrial park in Malaysia’s Pahang state; two years later, officials in Guangdong province signed a rival agreement with Malacca to fund its own multi-billion dollar industrial park and port. “There is little economic rationale for developing two world-class ports on the Malay Peninsula,” note political scientists Zeng Jinhan and Lee Jones, “These projects reflect not a coherent master plan but rather competitive, sub-national dynamics in both countries. Moreover, these micro-level dynamics clearly do not–indeed, cannot–add up to a coherent, macro-level network of infrastructure.”

The distribution of dollars invested and projects constructed puts to question whether Chinese SOEs are behaving any differently than they would have without the BRI framework. At least one researcher who interviewed dozens of decision-makers in Chinese SOEs reports that considerations of profit, not politics, is driving project selection. Little surprise, then, that as the number of countries nominally involved with the BRI has grown over the last three years, actual money spent on foreign projects has not risen. Having used their excess foreign reserves in the first half of the 2010s, funding from policy banks to start new projects peaked in 2017 and has fallen drastically since. Bankers and businessmen are simply not willing to go into the red to fulfill Xi Jinping’s intentionally vague directives.

Xi did not create the infrastructure-industrial complex’s decentralized project selection and development process. He inherited it. Branding this inheritance a central plank of Chinese foreign relations was his mistake. The actors were too various, and their relationships too complex, for a simple system of centralized control. This left Xi with little choice but to rely on the propaganda and ideology apparatus to try giving the Belt and Road strategic direction. These tactics for guiding cadre behavior are powerful in the absence of other incentives—but when there were billions of dollars to be made, the siren call of those other incentives sounded far louder than the exhortations of Xi Jinping Thought. The irony is that foreigners did pay attention to Xi’s exhortations. Xi then found himself paying costs for a strategy he could proclaim but could not implement.

The future of the BRI branding project is uncertain. The initiative is entangled with Xi’s personal prestige. It is hard to imagine Xi’s signature initiative falling away unless Xi himself falls first. More likely then, is that both international attention and party focus on the initiative will slowly taper off as the true motive force behind its projects, SOEs looking for easy money will determine that foreign money is no longer so easily made.

This may already be happening. The coronavirus crisis has crashed foreign demand, excess foreign reserves have already dwindled, and under the aegis of “dual circulation” the government is set to offer financial incentives to firms that reorient towards Chinese domestic consumption or move up the manufacturing value chain. The pageantry of the Belt and Road will live on. But if foreigners still quake at Chinese economic power at the end of this decade, it will not be because of Chinese road-building abroad, but instead the bounding strength of Chinese industry at home.

“History always moves forward according to its own laws despite twists and turns, and no force can hold back its rolling wheels. The tide of the world is surging forward. Those who submit to it will prosper, and those who resist will perish.”

—Xi Jinping, Speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (2013)

To understand the foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China, first understand this: Xi Jinping believes in “laws of history”—and he requires his diplomats to believe in them too.

No country’s foreign relations can be reduced completely to the personal ideology of a single man, no matter how prominent or powerful. But in the case of General Secretary Xi Jinping, this is not for want of trying. Xi constantly reminds the men and women who staff China’s embassies that their first loyalty is the Communist Party of China and their first duty is to implement the directives of the Central Committee (that Xi himself leads). Just as a U.S. president will fret that the “blob” frustrates his diplomatic design, so must Xi deal with an aimless foreign policy apparatus whose parts are content to move to their own tune. But unlike his American counterparts, Xi has taken dramatic action to tame the machine.

Communicating his precise foreign policy vision preoccupies Xi: no General Secretary has delivered more speeches on foreign affairs than Xi. New offices and coordinating bodies have been created to whip the bureaucracy into shape, all with Xi at their head. Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative, The Belt and Road, has been written into the Communist Party’s constitution. Twice Xi has summoned the full Politburo, the general staff and regional commanders of the PLA, the leading cadres of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Front Work Department, and all of China’s serving ambassadors to Beijing to listen to his personal instruction. At the second of these two meetings he unveiled “Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Affairs”—a set of principles and guidelines that all of China’s foreign-facing officialdom is supposed to memorize, internalize, and implement.

Xi Jinping began both of these meetings by reviewing the “underlying trends” of our times. “We should not allow our views to be blocked by anything intricate or transient,” he told the leader’s of China’s foreign policy apparatus in 2014. “Instead, we should observe the world through the prism of historical laws.” Xi has given similar advice on many other occasions. One of the earliest came on a May 4th commemoration in 2013, when Xi took advantage of the anniversary to advise China’s rising generation to:

…base your ideals and convictions on the rational recognition and acceptance of scientific theories, on a correct understanding of the laws of history, and on an accurate understanding of the basic national conditions; keep enhancing your confidence in the Chinese path, theories, and system; have more faith in the Party’s leadership, and always follow the Party in upholding Chinese socialism.

Xi was not breaking new ground when he tied together “scientific theory,” “laws of history,” and “faith in the Party leadership.” For a generation the Constitution of the Communist Party of China has opened its justification of Party rule with the declaration “Marxism-Leninism reveals the laws governing the development of the history of human society.” The vanguard Party’s ability to discern these laws and develop them into coherent “theories” of action validates the Party’s paramount role in Chinese life. Xi explained this line of reasoning on the 95th anniversary of the Party’s founding. “Adopting Marxism as our guide to action,” he said, both allowed China’s communists to “free [themselves] from the limitations of all previous political forces, which focused on pursuing their own special interests” and “enabled us to hold onto the materialist dialectic view.” Xi makes clear that the version of materialist historical analysis that guides Party policy has “not remained static” since the days of Marx. This is a “scientific theoretical system that keeps up with the times.” As such, “we should believe that the theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics is the right theory to lead the Party and the people towards realizing national rejuvenation.”

Xi constantly repeats—and presumably believes—that as stewards of a “scientific,” materialist mode of analysis his Party is uniquely placed to discern the laws of history. Few other governments, whose vision are corrupted by class or partisan interests, can be so confident that they have “grasp[ed] the pulse of the times.” This need to discern the “pulse,” “trend,” “direction,” or “tendency” of the times is asserted so often in the speeches of Xi Jinping (and the official exegeses of Xi Jinping Thought) that the rest of this piece could consist of nothing else but quotations on the theme. It is much harder to find explanations of just how cadres are supposed go about using historical dialectic materialist theory in practice. Politburo member and former head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi’s attempt to explain this aspect of Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Affairs remains vague and impractical:

We must accurately grasp the great trend in the development of the world and the China of the New Era. [In 2018] General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that to grasp the international configuration, we must be able to accurately see affairs from the perspective of history, the perspective of the overall situation, and from the perspective of the role [of China within the whole].

Just how one analyzes an issue from the viewpoint of history, the existing order, and the country’s role within the whole remains unclear. Yang instead launches into a summary of Xi’s assessment of each of these three questions. Yang does not show how Xi reached these conclusions so much as celebrate that the Core of the Party has managed to do so. Xi is a statesman who sees the tides of history; Xi Jinping Thought prepares the Party-state to ride the wave.

General Secretary Xi consistently describes this wave with a phrase that has now become an official Party slogan: “the modern world is experiencing great changes unseen in a century.” Various Party commentaries have tried their hand at decoding this phrase. A century ago, the mantle of power and the engine of global economic growth moved from Great Britain to the United States, these commentaries remind us, meaning that changes of equal significance must now be occurring. The heart of the global economy shifts from the developed world to the developing, they note, and the center of global power moves from West to East. This tide cannot be turned. As Xi Jinping explained to the Chinese diplomatic corps in 2014:

The growing trend towards a multi-polar order will not change. We should be fully aware that the ongoing global economic adjustment will not be smooth sailing; we also need to recognize that economic globalization will not stop. We should be fully alert to the grave nature of international tensions and conflicts; we also need to recognize that peace and development are the underlying trend of our time, will remain unchanged.

In address after address, Xi teaches that the arc of history bends towards “multi-polarization,” “globalization,” and “peaceful development.” Each faces its own obstacles (in Maoist fashion, he describes these obstacles as “contradictions” linked to the productive forces that create the trends themselves) but those obstacles cannot overturn the general trend. After all, as Xi instructed in 2018, “the development of the world has always been the result of contradictions intertwining and interacting with each other.” More important is for cadres to have “a deep appreciation of the essence and overall situation” lest they “get lost in a complex and changing international situation.” The key is to identify the forces of history that transcend any individual crisis and ensure that the Party-state moves with, not against, their development.

As any proper Marxist would, Xi identifies these forces of history as powers unleashed by the material productive forces of our age. These forces are independent of human will, the product of material developments no individual can hope to control. One of his most direct statements of this very Marxist belief was delivered, ironically enough, to the capitalists collected at Davos for the 2017 World Economic Forum:

From a historical perspective, economic globalization is a result of growing social productivity, and a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress—not something created by any individuals or countries…. there was once a time when China too had questions about economic globalization, but… we came to the conclusion that that integration with the global economy is a historical trend.

…Whether you like it or not, the global economy is the great ocean from which you cannot escape. Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital technologies, products, industries, and people between economies and channel the waters of the sea back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible. It runs counter to the historical trend.

Does it matter that Xi Jinping believes that there is a telos to the times? It is possible this is all just talk. If you cannot convince the world to like you, you can at least convince the world that you are inevitable. And for a General Secretary worried about the flagging “faith” of Party cadres, asserting that the Party has mastered the laws of history has ideological allure. But dismissing all of this as mere rhetoric is hard to square with the settings in which Xi appeals to “the pulse of times.” One does not call every ambassador to Beijing just to bore them with the latest propaganda hacks. Xi calls these meetings because he has an exact idea of how he wants his diplomats, bureaucrats, and generals to do their job. Addresses like these are less like stump speeches on the campaign trail than they are like instruction manuals.

There are also clear links between the forces Xi believes govern the future and the strategies he has endorsed to shepherd China’s rise to power. Like all Party leaders since the days of Deng Xiaoping, Xi has declared that the “historical mission” of the Communist Party is to return China to its position of pre-modern eminence. The Chinese communists have long believed that this will require transforming the nature of the international order. They state quite openly that any order whose governing structures and moral underpinnings are intertwined with liberal ideas and ideals cannot safely accommodate a Leninist power. To safeguard China’s rising star, Xi must find a way to increase China’s wealth and power while creating an international environment that is “fairer” to Chinese communism than the one that now exists.

Xi Jinping has called his solution to this problem “the path of peaceful development.” Neither the phrase nor the strategy it evokes is new to the Xi era—indeed, every instance Xi used the phrase in the 2010s was a subtle reminder that China had not gone to war in forty years. But “the path of peaceful development” is not just a decision to avoid war with foreign powers. It is a quest to build up Chinese power and reshape the global order through “interconnected” or “win-win” development. This formula implicitly rejects the revolutionary agitation of China’s Maoist days and sets itself in opposition to America’s military interventions in the Middle East. But why has the Party decided that military tools are of limited use in bringing about their preferred world order? Xi offered his answer in a 2013 seminar on diplomatic work: “The path of peaceful development is the Party’s strategic choice in line with the times and aligned with the fundamental interests of the country.”

In other words, “peaceful development” was a deliberate, strategic decision by the Party. It was adopted because our era is defined by two irreversible trends: international economic integration and the rise of developing economies. In such an era, linking China’s development “with the common development of other developing countries” and building an economic and technological “partnership network that links all parts of the world” to China is the most effective way to increase Chinese power and influence. In this environment open violence is a poor tool to grow either national power or international influence. As Xi said in one of his very first addresses as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China:

The tide of history is mighty. Those who follow it will prosper, while those who resist it will perish. Looking back on history, we can see those who launched aggression or sought expansion by force ended in failure. That is a law of history. A prosperous and stable world provides China with opportunities… whether we succeed in our pursuit of peaceful development to a large extent depends on whether we can turn opportunities in the rest of the world into China’s opportunities.

From this belief stems many of the hallmark features of Chinese foreign policy in the age of Xi Jinping. In his discussion of Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi makes this connection between the trends of the time and Xi’s foreign policy program explicit:

Viewed from the perspective of the overall [international] situation, peace and development are still the theme of our times. We [thus] must continue to hold high the banner of peace, development, and win-win cooperation. We must [continue] building a new type of international relations and the community of shared destiny for humankind.… [and] we must firmly adhere to the path of peaceful development, participate more actively in global governance, and play a greater role in international affairs. …Grasp accurately the new laws that govern the interaction China’s interactions with the world, and actively control the new direction of China and the world.

Yang Jiechi’s explanation favors opaque Party shorthand. Phrases like “build a new type of international relations,” construct “the community of shared destiny for humankind,” and “participate more actively in global governance,” and “actively control the new direction of China and the world” denote a wide range of policies the Party-state has pursued over the last decade. A short list of these policies might include:

•       The trillions invested in the “Belt and Road” initiative, which uses infrastructure projects to tie the future of the developing world to the Chinese economy.
•       Beijing’s push to reform existing international institutions or found new ones entirely (e.g. the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank)
•       Beijing’s decision to reject formal military or political alliances in favor of economic and technological “partnerships.”
•       Xi Jinping’s directive that the Party must adopt a “holistic approach to national security” that puts threats to China’s “ideological security,” “economic security,” and “cultural security” on the same plane as traditional military threats.
•       China’s campaign to provide the next generation of digital and high-technology infrastructure for the globe, and a corresponding attempt to influence the “global governance” of the internet and industry standards of emerging technology sectors.
•       The rising profile of “United Front” work, where Party agents and organizations attempt to directly forge relationships with individuals in foreign political parties and civic organizations (often with bribes) in hopes of using them as pawns for the Party’s cause.
•       The weaponization of China’s economic ties with the outside world, with the Party-state confiscating foreign property, cutting foreigners off from the Chinese market, or boycotting foreign goods to punish behavior or speech outside of China that it finds threatening.

As that last item suggests, the Party’s commitment to a strategy of peaceful development is not a commitment to abandon coercion. Xi Jinping knows one of the boons that comes from “work[ing] hard to form a highly-integrated, mutually beneficial network through extensive economic, trade, and technological cooperation” is that it allows the Party-state to replace bloodshed with less messy forms of coercion. Xi understands that “as China has increased its dependence on the world and its involvement in international affairs, so has the world deepened its dependence on China.” He believes the Party must use this fact to its advantage. When the “global trend [is] towards multipolarity and economic globalization,” not only development, but corruption and economic coercion are valued means of national restoration.

But what if the global trend changes? Will those means change as well? This cannot be predicted before the fact. The Communist Party of China is not ideologically prepared for a future where Xi has misread the tea-leaves. What happens if the “trends of the times” no longer allow the Chinese Party-state to accumulate power and exercise influence through these tools is an open question. If interconnected economic development and targeted economic coercion lose their utility, we do not know what tools the Party will turn to in their stead.

What we do know: China’s commitment to peaceful development rests on its leader’s belief that globalization and economic integration is an irrevocable historical law. In days of depression and pandemic this is an unsettling thought.

Of late, this question has much vexed the Communist Party of China. Over the last year we have witnessed a string of campaigns, slogans, speeches, and study sessions meant to reinforce the importance of the Party’s Marxist heritage. It is clear that continuity ranks among the highest priorities of the Party. Its leadership is wary of the impacts which growing wealth and an increasing Chinese diaspora might have on its political foundations.

The speech translated below is part of this effort. It was originally given shortly after Xi Jinping became General Secretary, on January 5th, 2013, to the Party’s then-newly elected Central Committee. An extremely abbreviated version of it was published in Xi Jinping’s first book, The Governance of China. Two months ago the Party’s premier ideological journal, Qiushi, published a much larger version. This is the version that has been translated below. The original speech was given behind closed doors; we do not know what changes have been made to its text between then and now. This is what we can be certain of: the version published here is seen by Party leadership to be particularly relevant to the challenges China faces at the current moment.

One of the most striking aspects of this speech is the language Xi Jinping invokes: party members must have “faith” (xìnyǎng) in the eventual victory of socialism; proper communists must be “devout” (qiánchéng) in their work; and Party members must be prepared to “sacrifice” (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood, for revolutionary “ideals that reach higher than heaven” (gémìng lǐxiǎng gāo yú tiān).

Behind this religiously charged language is a man deeply worried that the cadres of his generation are not prepared to make the sort of sacrifices their parents and grandparents did for China’s revolutionary cause. Xi’s verdict is that such people do not have enough faith in the “eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism.” Their “views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism,” leading them to doubt that “socialism is bound to win.” This has practical consequences. The cadre without communist convictions will act “hedonistically” and “self-interestedly.” Worst of all, he might begin to believe “false arguments that we should abandon socialism” altogether.

For Xi, this would be a grave betrayal of the Party’s heritage. The Communist Party of China is tasked with “building a socialism that is superior to capitalism” whose economic and technological prowess will give it “the dominant position” in world affairs. And though Xi asserts that this is inevitable, “the road will be tortuous.” Party members must fiercely fend off ideological attacks on socialism with Chinese characteristics. The most pressing ideological problems identified in this speech are two ‘false arguments:’ First, that the mass death, cruelty, and poverty of Maoist China undermines the credibility of the Party leadership today, and second, that socialism with Chinese characteristics is not really socialism at all.

However, readers should note that Xi offers very little in the way of classical Marxist exegesis to justify his claim that “an economic system in which publicly owned enterprises are the principle part” and the “political system of the National People’s Congress”  are the natural extension of Marxist theory to current world conditions. The claim is asserted more than proven; one suspects he would rather not have the readers of Qiushi thinking too hard about the details of classical Marxist texts.

More significant than Xi’s use of Marxist theory to justify any particular policy is his conviction that he leads an ideological-political system distinct from that of the capitalist world. Threats to this system are not framed in military or economic terms, but ideological ones. The Soviet Union fell, he declares, “because ideological competition is fierce.” If the faith of its cadres remains fervent, Xi believes his Party will succeed where the Soviet Union could not.

The footnotes below detail the context and sources behind some of the language Xi uses in his speech. They vary from Chinese historical texts to work by Deng Xiaoping and the CCP, as well as Marx himself.

Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Xi Jinping

First of all: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is socialism. It is not any other sort of “ism.” The foundational, scientific principles of socialism cannot be abandoned; only if they are abandoned would our system no longer be socialist. From first to the last our Party has emphasized that “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” adheres to the basic principles of scientific socialism and is imbued with characteristically Chinese features bestowed by the conditions of the times. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, not any other ‘ism.’

Which ideological system a country implements depends on one crucial issue: can this ideology resolve the historical problems facing the country? In the days when the Chinese people were poor, weak, and at the mercy of others, all sorts of ideologies and theories were attempted. The capitalist road was tried and found wanting. Reformism, liberalism, social Darwinism, anarchism, pragmatism, populism, syndicalism—they all were given their moment on the stage. They all failed to solve the problems of China’s future destiny. It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought that guided the Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night and established a New China;[i] it is through socialism with Chinese characteristics that China has developed so quickly.

Now from the moment China’s opening up and reform began—and especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes in Eastern Europe—international public opinion has continuously railed against China. There has been no end to the different flavors of “China collapse” theory. Yet China has not collapsed. To the contrary, our comprehensive national strength increases day by day. The living standards of the people are constantly improving. “The scene before us is unique in its beauty.”[ii]

Both history and our present reality tell us that only socialism can save China—and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China.[iii] This is the conclusion of history, the choice of our people.

In recent years there have been a few commentators—both at home and abroad—that have asked if what modern China is doing can really be called socialism. Some have said we have engaged in a sort of “capital socialism;” others have been more straightforward, calling it “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic capitalism.”  These labels are completely wrong. We say that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism. No matter how we reform and open up, we should always adhere to the socialist road with Chinese characteristics, the theoretical systems of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the structure of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the basic requirements put forward by the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China for a new victory of socialism.[iv]

These include: the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of China, grounding policy in national conditions, putting economic construction at the center, adhering to the “Four Cardinal Principles”[v] and to the program of reform and opening up, liberating and developing productive social forces, building a socialist market economy, socialist democratic politics, an advanced socialist culture, a harmonious socialist society, and an ecological socialist civilization.[vi] It includes promoting the comprehensive development of the people, gradually realizing the common prosperity of all the people, and building a modern, prosperous, strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious socialist country—including adhering to the fundamental political system of the National People’s Congress, a Communist Party led system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation, a system of regional ethnic autonomy, a system of grassroots self-government, a legal system with Chinese characteristics, and an economic system in which publicly owned enterprises are the principle part, which develop side by side with diverse forms of ownership.[vii] These features embody the basic principles of scientific socialism under our new historical conditions. If we lose these, we lose socialism.

Comrade Deng Xiaoping once made a profound observation: “Our modernization must flow from Chinese realities. No matter if it is revolution or construction, we should pay attention to, learn from, and borrow from foreign experience. However, copying other countries’ experiences and models has never been successful. We have learned a lot in this respect.”[viii]

In the past it was impossible to import the Soviet system full-scale; today it is just as impossible for us to import the Western system full-scale. After the conclusion of the Cold War many developing countries were forced to adopt the Western model. The consequence of this has been party feuds, social unrest, and peoples left homeless and wandering—all of which have, to this day, been difficult to stabilize.

I recall the story written in Zhuangzi’s ‘Autumn Floods:’

“Perhaps you’ve never heard about the young boy of Shouling who went to learn the Handan Walk? He hadn’t mastered what the Handan people had to teach him when he forgot his old way of walking, so he had to crawl all the way back home.”[ix]

We must not ever “go to Handan to learn to walk and forget our native stride.” Instead, we have taken Marxism and Sinicized it. That is socialism with Chinese characteristics.

In recent years, with the rise of China’s comprehensive national strength and international status, there has been much international discussion and study of the “Beijing Consensus,” “China Model,” and the “China Road.” Among these studies there is no shortage of praise. Some foreign academics believe that the rapid pace of China’s development has called Western theories into question. A new form of Marxist theory is overturning the traditional theories of the West!

Yet from beginning to end, we have maintained that every country’s road to development should be decided by the people of that country. The so-called “China model,” the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics, was created through the Chinese people’s own struggles. We firmly believe that as socialism with Chinese characteristics develops further, our system will inevitably mature; it is likewise inevitable that the superiority of our socialist system will be increasingly apparent. Inevitably, our road will become wider; inevitably, our country’s road of development will have increasingly greater influence on the world. We need just this sort of confidence—confidence in our theories, confidence in our system, and confidence in our road. We will truly be what the poets called “like cliffside bamboo, standing strong despite countless hardships, beaten about by gales on every side.”[x]

Secondly: Our party has led the people two historical periods of building socialism: before the “reform and opening-up” and afterwards. These are two periods are interrelated. They also had significant differences, but in essence they were both practical explorations made by our Party in leading the people in socialist construction. Socialism with Chinese characteristics was first initiated in the period of reform and opening up. However, it was during the New China era that the basic socialist system was built, and socialism with Chinese characteristics could only have been initiated on this twenty-year foundation of socialist construction.

To correctly understand this issue, we must grasp three points. First, if our party did not decisively decide to implement reform and opening up in 1978, unswervingly promote reform and opening up, and staunchly grasp the correct direction of reform and opening up, socialist China might not be in the favorable situation it is today. It may be facing serious crises—perhaps even the sort of crises faced by the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, crises which brought about the death of their parties and their states. Yet if New China was never established in 1949 and we did not pursue socialist revolution and construction at that time, then the prerequisite ideological, material, and institutional wherewithal needed to smoothly implement reform and opening up would never have accumulated. We needed those experiences—both the positive and the negative ones.

Second, even though the guidance, policy, and actual work of building socialism in these two historical eras had large differences, they are by no means cut off from each other, much less inherently antithetical to each other. In the midst of building practical socialism, our Party put forward many correct propositions. But at that time these propositions were not implemented. Only after the reform and opening up were they fully carried out. In the future these concepts will need to be both adhered to and further developed. Like Marx said long ago: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[xi]

Third, we must correctly evaluate the historical period that came before reform and opening up. We cannot use the post-reform period to repudiate the pre-reform period. Nor can we repudiate the post-reform period with the history of the pre-reform era. The exploration of socialist practice before reform and opening-up created the necessary conditions for the exploration of socialist practice after reform and opening-up. Our explorations of socialist practice in the post-reform era are a continuation and development of what came before. Thus, in regard to the exploration of socialist practice before reform and opening up, we should adhere to the ideological line of seeking truth from facts, clearly distinguish the essential from the nonessential, adhere to truth, correct errors, develop our experience and draw lessons from it. On this foundation we can continue to push forward the cause of the Party and the people.

The reason why I emphasize this problem is because it is a major political issue. If it is not handled well, it will have serious political consequences. As one ancient said: “To destroy a people, you must first destroy their history.”[xii] Hostile forces at home and abroad often write essays on the history of the Chinese revolution or of New China, doing all in their power to smear and vilify that era. Their fundamental purpose is to confuse the hearts of the people. They aim to incite them into overthrowing both the Communist Party of China’s leadership and the socialist system of our country.

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

Comrade Deng Xiaoping pointed out: “The banner of Mao Zedong Thought cannot be discarded. Throwing this banner out negates the glorious history of our Party. Generally speaking, our Party’s history is still a glorious one. Although our Party has made some large mistakes in its history, including in the 30 years since the founding of the People’s Republic, even mistakes as large as the Cultural Revolution, in the end it was our Party that made the revolution successful. China’s status in the world was significantly improved after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Only the founding of the People’s Republic of China enabled us, a big country with a population of nearly one fourth of the Earth’s total, to stand up and stand strong in the world.”[xiii]

He also emphasized, “The appraisal of Comrade Mao and the exegesis of Mao Zedong Thought does not solely touch upon the personal issues of Comrade Mao. These things cannot be cut away from the entire history of our Party and our country. To grasp this is to grasp everything. This is not just an intellectual issue—it is a political issue. It is a great political issue, both here and at home.”[xiv]

This is the vision of a great Marxist politician. Just think: if at the time of reform Comrade Mao had been completely repudiated, would our Party still be standing? Would our country’s system of socialism still be standing? And if it was not still standing, what would we have? A world of chaos.

Therefore, correctly handling the relationship between socialist practice and exploration both before reform and opening-up and after cannot be seen as a mere historical issue. It is a political one. To better understand this, I recommend you all take the time to read the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.”[xv]

My third point: Marxism always develops along with the social realities and technology of the times. Marxism cannot stagnate. After the start of opening-up, socialism has only continued to advance. Upholding the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics is much like a great book. To establish foundational principles and ideas, Comrade Deng Xiaoping etched his part in. The Party Central Committee’s third generation, with Comrade Jiang Zemin as its core and Comrade Hu Jintao as general secretary, added their own brilliant chapters to this book. The responsibility of this generation of Communist Party members is to write the next chapter of this great work.

More than 30 years have passed since socialism with Chinese characteristics began; in that time, it has succeeded in many a grand endeavor. This is besides the accomplishments made in the founding of New China, a foundation that has allowed China to stand tall and stride far. Our understanding of socialism, and our grasp of the laws that govern socialism with Chinese characteristics, have reached unprecedented heights. This is unquestionably true. Yet at the same time, we should also recognize that the socialism of our country is still in its infancy. We still face many problems that we have not grasped clearly and dilemmas that have not been resolved. It is also unquestionably true that our understanding and handling of many significant issues is still deepening. Understanding anything requires a process. We have only engaged in socialism for a few decades. Our grasp on these things is still very limited; in practice, we must constantly develop further.

To uphold Marxism and socialism, we must take the perspective of development. We must take the practical problems of China’s modernization and reform and put these things we are doing at the center of our vision. Then we must focus our view of them through the perspective of Marxist theory, the sort of theoretical thinking that addresses practical problems, and through the new practices and forms of development that result from this. We have said that there is no one-size-fits-all path of development for the entire world. There also is no path of development that does not require change. Our past achievements in theory and practice will help us better face the problems of our forward march. However, we cannot let them become an excuse for arrogance and complacency, or even worse, a weight that drags this march down. As our cause advances and develops, the situations we encounter will be less familiar, the challenges and risks we face will grow greater, and we will meet with a growing number of events that cannot now be foreseen. We must become more alert to potential misfortune. We must prepare for danger in a time of peace.

Liberate your mind. Seek truth from facts. Keep pace with the times. This is the living soul of Marxism. These are the fundamental ideological weapons for adapting to new terrain, understanding new things, and accomplishing new tasks. Yet first and foremost, all Party cadres at all levels must adhere to the Marxist viewpoint of development, insist that practice is the only criterion for testing truth, bring into play historical initiative and creativity, and clearly perceive both continuity and change in the Party, the country, and the broader world. We must always have the spirit of “opening roads where we find mountains and building bridges where we meet rivers.” We should be enterprising, bold, and daring as we analyze and answer the pressing questions of real life and issues of mass ideology. We will continue to deepen reform and opening up, continue to discover, create, and advance, and continue to promote institutional, theoretical, and practical innovations.

Fourth: From beginning to end our Party has always adhered to the lofty ideals of communism. Party members, especially leading cadres, should be firm believers and faithful practitioners of the lofty ideal of communism and the common ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Faith in Marxism, a socialist and communist conviction, is the political soul of the Communist Party member. They are the spiritual pillar that give him the strength to undergo any test.  The Party Constitution clearly stipulates that the Party’s highest ideal and ultimate goal is to achieve communism. At the same time, the Party Constitution also clearly stipulates that the high ideal of communism can only be realized by a highly developed socialist society.[xvi] To pause for a moment or two and then suddenly enter communism—that isn’t realistic.

Comrade Deng Xiaoping said that the consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history. He said it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations, or perhaps even tens of generations of communists. Tens of generations—that is a long time! From the time of Confucius to the present day we have not seen more than seventy generations. Looking at the problem in this way is a real demonstration of the soberness of the Communist Party of China.

We must recognize that our labors today and the unceasing work of so many generations in the future are paired together, all moving towards the ultimate goal of achieving communism. If we throw away our Communist Party’s lofty ideals, we will lose our direction and become coldly utilitarian.  At the same time, we must recognize that the realization of communism is a very long historical process. We must ground ourselves in the struggles of the present moment and keep our work down to earth.

Socialism with Chinese characteristics is our Party’s most fundamental, unifying program. The program of socialism with Chinese characteristics is, in a nutshell, to build a prosperous, strong, democratic, civilized, modernized and harmonious socialist country. Not only is this program based on the basic national conditions in which our country is now in, and the primary stage of socialism in which it must remain in for a long time—it also does not depart from the highest ideals of the Party.

Thus we must tread the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics with resolve. We must keep the sublime ideals of Communism in our hearts, and with unswerving conviction implement the Party’s basic line and program for the primary stage of socialism. Every job we do must be done well.

Revolutionary ideals reach higher than the heavens. Without lofty ideals, you do not reach the standards of a Communist Party member. Yet those who abandon their work in the real world to vainly preach such ideals also do not reach this standard.  In our Party’s ninety years of history, one generation of Communists after another did not hesitate to shed their blood and lay down their lives for the independence and liberation of the people. They did this by relying on their faith and ideals. Even though they knew that their ideals would not be realized by their own hands, they firmly believed that as long as the generations to come continued laboring, as long as the generations to come sacrificed for this goal, then their sublime ideals would be realized.

Today, there are objective criteria to measure whether a Communist Party member or a leading cadre aspires to the lofty ideals of communism. Will he devote his whole heart and purpose to the service of the people? Will he suffer hardship first and postpone enjoyment until later? Will he work diligently and perform his duties honestly? Is he willing to dash ahead regardless of danger, fight, and consecrate his entire spirit, his entire life, for these ideals? Every hesitant, undecided conviction, every hedonistic way of thinking, every self-interested behavior, and every style of inaction is incompatible with these ideals.

There are people who believe that communism is an unattainable hope, or even that it is beyond hoping for—that communism is an illusion. This touches upon whether historical materialism or historical idealism is the proper frame through which to view world affairs.[xvii] The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism. We should educate and guide cadres and the broader mass of Party members so that we can unite our the common ideal of practicing socialism with Chinese characteristics together with our lofty ideal of securing Communism. Our actions must be devout, determined, profound, and sincere.  With firm ideals and convictions, we will stand taller, our vision will grow wider, and our mind will grow broader. We will be able to adhere to the correct political orientation, stand without arrogance in victory, without despair in adversity, enduring all sorts of risk and adversity, consciously resisting the corrosion of decedent philosophies, forever fostering the political essence of a Communist.

Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’ analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win. This is an inevitable trend in social and historical development. But the road is tortuous. The eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism will require a long historical process to reach completion.  In the meantime, we must have a deep appreciation for capitalism’s ability to self-correct, and a full, objective assessment of the real long-term advantages that the developed Western nations have in the economic, technological, and military spheres. Then we must diligently prepare for a long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems in each of these domains.

For a fairly long time yet, socialism in its primary stage will exist alongside a more productive and developed capitalist system. In this long period of cooperation and conflict, socialism must learn from the boons that capitalism has brought to civilization. We must face the reality that people will use the strengths of developed, Western countries to denounce our country’s socialist development. Here we must have a great strategic determination, resolutely rejecting all false arguments that we should abandon socialism. We must consciously correct the various ideas that do not accord with our current stage. Most importantly, we must concentrate our efforts on bettering our own affairs, continually broadening our comprehensive national power, improving the lives of our people, building a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.

From this analysis, we gain a deeper appreciation of the fact that the ideological road we choose to follow is the central problem that will determine the victory or defeat of our Party’s work, the very fate of the Party itself. As Comrade Mao Zedong once said: “A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses. In revolutions, there has never been a revolutionary party that led its people onto the wrong road whose revolution did not fail.”

Our Party, in the time of revolution, construction, and reform, has adhered to the national conditions of our country, explored and formed a new democratic revolutionary road, a road of socialist transformation and construction. This is the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics. This spirit of exploration, this resolution to stick to our own road, is the true reason this Party has always been able to reawaken itself after set-backs and spring from triumph to triumph.

The great writer Lu Xun coined a famous saying: “Even if there is no road, when enough people walk through, a road will be made.” Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the dialectical unity of the theoretical logic of scientific socialism and the historical logic of China’s social development. It is a scientific socialism rooted in China’s soil, one that reflects the aspirations of the Chinese people, and one that is adapted to the conditions of progress in our times. It is the only way to comprehensively build a prosperous society, accelerate socialist modernization and realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. As long as we stick to our own path and unswervingly adhere to and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics, we will surely be able to comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society by the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, and a prosperous, democratic, civilized, modernized, and harmonious socialist country by the centennial anniversary of the founding of New China.

Notes:

[i] “New China” is a rhetorical term for the People’s Republic of China, designed originally to highlight the revolutionary nature of the new regime. It has a strong Maoist flavor, and the phrase “New China Era” is often used as a shorthand for the era Westerners would label “Maoist China.”

[ii] The quotation is from a 1937 poem written by Mao Zedong (“Huichang”) often played to orchestral accompaniment.

[iii] Variations of the phrase “Only socialism can save China” have been used since Maoist times; the “develop” clause was added in the Dengist era. Xi first used it as General Secretary just a few days after his new role as Genera Secretary had been announced (see Xi Jinping, Governance of China, vol I, p. 7).

[iv] The 18th National Congress was convened in 2012. The various work reports produced by the conference can be accessed here.

[v] The Four Cardinal Principles are: 1) Adhering to the socialist path, 2) the people’s democratic dictatorship, 3) The supreme leadership of the Communist Party of China, and 4) Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

[vi] Each of these terms are enshrined in the Chinese constitution’s “basic line”. The five categories listed—economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological—have become standard frames through which policy, political campaigns, and even threats to the regime are understood. On that last one, see  Samantha Hoffman, “Programming China: the Communist Party’s autonomic approach to managing state security,” PhD diss, University of Nottingham (2017), chapter 2

[vii] No clause in this sentence is of Xi Jinping’s invention; each and every part is a sloganized summary of a policy platform or institutional arrangement of the China’s party-state. Timothy Heath explains why Party leaders communicate through staid slogans like these:

[In the Chinese theory system there are many] specialized concepts designed specifically to drive policy on very specific issues. For example, “socialist harmonious society.” There’s a major strategic concept. It is a very important term that the Chinese identified as an ideal that had the Marxist vetting and was grounded in Marxist theory needed to­­­­­ allow their bureaucrats to develop policy to address social welfare issues: healthcare, retirement, education. That’s all wrapped up in this word ‘socialist harmonious society.’ It is designed primarily for bureaucrats, officials and decision makers. It is not really designed to mobilize the people. In fact most people ridicule, deride, and make fun of these archaic sounding Marxist concepts. But here is the thing: the Communist Party does not really care all that much. What they really care about is that their officials get it. That they understand what to do with these concepts, how to develop them into policies, and how to implement them. That is really where a lot of the CPC’s energy is focused on today. Informing the bureaucratic elite instead of mobilizing the entire people.

From Timothy Heath, “China’s New Governing Party Paradigm,” speech at the USC U.S.-China Institute, Feb 19, 2015. This speech can be seen on youtube here.

[viii] Deng Xiaoping, Address to the 13th National Congress, 1987.

[ix] The Zhuangzi was a work of Daoist philosophy from the Warring States Era. This translation of the passage is taken from Burton Watson, trans., Zhuangzi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 111.

[x] The line comes from Zheng Xie’s (1693-1765) poem, “Bamboo Amid Rocks.”

[xi] Karl Marx, “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” (1852) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.html. It is not surprising that Xi does not quote the sentence that follows: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

[xii] A line taken from Gong Zichen’s (1792-1841), Ding An Collection, “Discussing History and the Present.”

[xiii] Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol II, p. 298.

[xiv] Deng Xiaoping, “My Opinion of the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party,’” address given on October 25th 1980, accessed at http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64184/64186/66692/4494734.html

[xv] This resolution was formally adopted by at the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on June 27, 1981. It was a decisive landmark in the Party’s decision to shift away from Maoist political economy and towards “reform and opening up.” Among other things, this resolution condemned the Cultural Revolution for “conform[ing] neither to Marxism, Leninism nor to Chinese reality,” blaming Mao personally for the disaster. The resolution honors both Mao and the Party for its earlier revolutionary achievements, but concedes that the Party now recognizes that “[China] was not fully prepared, either ideologically or in terms of scientific study, for the swift advent of the new-born socialist society and for socialist construction on a national scale.” It contains explicit guidance on what elements of Mao Zedong thought were to be retained by the Party moving forward, and which were to be discarded.

The full text of the resolution can be found at: https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm

[xvi] The relevant text of the Party constitution (18th Congress version) reads:

The Communist Party of China is the vanguard both of the Chinese working class and of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. It is the core of leadership for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics and represents the development trend of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The realization of communism is the highest ideal and ultimate goal of the Party.

The Communist Party of China takes Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development as its guide to action.

Marxism-Leninism brings to light the laws governing the development of the history of human society. Its basic tenets are correct and have tremendous vitality. The highest ideal of communism pursued by the Chinese Communists can be realized only when the socialist society is fully developed and highly advanced. The development and improvement of the socialist system is a long historical process. So long as the Chinese Communists uphold the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism and follow the road suited to China’s specific conditions and chosen by the Chinese people of their own accord, the socialist cause in China will be crowned with final victory.

“Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” English Edition of Qiushi Journal, Vol.4 (2012), No.4.

[xvii] Timothy Heath’s short primer on the way these terms are used in Party discourse is useful:

Materialist conception of history. The CCP retains the Marxist notion that history operates according to certain inherent natural laws, and that the most essential of these laws concern economic production. As one theorist explained, the most essential “driving force for social development is the production of material and material productive forces” (Wang H. 2004). One implication of this view is that the CCP prioritizes the development of economic production as the greatest enabler of the development of the social, cultural, and political life of all people.

Dialectical view of history. CCP theorists also emphasize the idea that history moves through the resolution of contradictions. Theorists define the dialectical view of history as the repeated, progressive manifestation of contradictions between forces of production and between the economic base and superstructure. The dialectical view directs CCP theorists to discern evidence that economic development has begun to outpace developments in the political and social life of a people, since it is the resolution of these contradictions which brings progress (Wang H. 2004).