Ruling authorities in Beijing have a growing sense of “fundamental insecurity” about the popularity of the Chinese Communist Party, according to an assessment from President Trump’s administration.
“In Chinese Communist Party rhetoric, we see increasing expression of the fundamental insecurity that the CCP has about its legitimacy with its own citizens,” a senior administration official told reporters Friday.
Trump’s team regards that putative sense of fragility as “one metric” that the administration’s confrontational approach to China in recent years is paying dividends, the official added. The assessment provides a glimpse of the overall U.S. strategy toward China, suggesting that American officials hope to stoke a domestic political backlash against the mainland Chinese government — an idea sure to touch a nerve in Beijing, where Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping is determined to restrain domestic criticism and maintain party unity.
“Chinese people would never agree to any people and forces who try to distort the history of the Chinese Community Party, vilify the nature and purpose of the Communist Party,” Xi said Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Second World War. “Chinese people would never agree to any people and forces … who try to impose their wills on China, change the course of China’s marching towards, and obstruct the hard work by Chinese people to create a better life.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other American officials have intensified their criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party in the months since the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan and spread around the globe. Pompeo has emphasized ever since the pandemic reached crisis proportions in the United States that “the Chinese Communist Party had a responsibility” to share information that might have saved not only lives in America but “their own people as well.”
That perception has taken root in other Western countries too in the months since the novel coronavirus turned into an international crisis. “Health used to be a very good way for us all to work with China; that now needs some reevaluation,” a senior European diplomat said during a recent interview. “It needs revaluation because the main point about China and COVID was that it was, first of all, an issue about the authority of the Communist Party, then it was an issue about China’s international reputation and standing, and only thirdly, if that, was it an issue about the health of ordinary Chinese people.”
That failure exemplifies a broader trend that drives the intensifying rivalry between Washington and Beijing, according to Trump’s administration. “The nature of their regime … it’s very much about advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, above the interests of the Chinese people or the Chinese state,” the senior administration official said. “So, sometimes, cooperation is hard to come by.”
Xi’s speech was intended not only for his domestic audience but also to rebut such American attacks, according to a senior Chinese diplomat.
“The CPC started with only dozens of members, and today, it has grown into a major party, with 92 million members, and has long been the ruling party in the world’s most populous country,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Friday. “The reason for it is that the CPC represents the fundamental interests of the greatest possible majority of the Chinese people, serves the people wholeheartedly, and keeps being a party by the people and for the people.”
Trump’s advisers regard such protestations as a sign of political weakness that reflects the effectiveness of the tariffs and sanctions that have been a hallmark of the administration’s posture toward Beijing in recent years. “That, certainly, I think, would be one metric,” the senior administration official said of the Chinese Communist rhetoric. “It’s an interesting point, in any case.”
