In an absurd but inadvertently informative article for the Global Times on Wednesday, Li Qingqing laments those U.S. politicians who are “stubbornly discussing whether China represents authoritarianism or not.” The authoritarian descriptor is unfair, says Li, because China has a unique governing model.
Before I go on, note Li isn’t writing a simple opinion piece. As the Chinese ruling elite’s primary mouthpiece for Western-focus editorializing, Global Times articles accurately reflect President Xi Jinping’s thinking in each moment. That makes this article notable. After all, it shows that the Chinese government is increasingly uncomfortable with being called out for its authoritarian political identity. And Li tells us why.
Li notes that Washington’s focus on Beijing’s authoritarian nature is a problem because “such an old mindset led to Washington’s tougher policies, or its containment strategy, toward Beijing.” Li then notes the U.S. crackdown on China’s signal intelligence service/technology firm Huawei, calling for a new Western perspective that recognizes the special case of “China’s development experience.”
This call for a special clarification is the tell of China’s vulnerability and, thus, the marker for the U.S. to double down. China’s regime knows it is caught between a rock of authoritarian necessity and a hard place of its own foreign policy. Put simply, Xi knows his power model requires both authoritarianism at home and seizure of market access abroad, but the two are coming into conflict in the eyes of democratic nations, and Xi finds himself stuck. Again, he cannot alter China’s political identity without sacrificing the Communist Party’s total domestic power, but neither can he give up on the means of his ambition for global hegemony: stealing and securing unfair market domination and militarizing the Indo-Pacific.
And so, Xi has to publish pathetic articles such as Li’s: weak arguments that China is being treated unfairly — absurd, in light of how China treats its own citizens and the international order.
