Under the proud motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Washington Post’s editors have run a Communist authoritarian defending his party’s attack on democracy and subjugation of the state to the Communist Party.
On Monday, the Post published Chinese venture capitalist, Eric X. Li’s endorsement of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent eradication of term limits for his office.
And by goodness is it an endorsement.
Xi’s lifetime centralization is “institutionally fusing the party and the state. This reform is good for China,” says Li, “simply because the party has developed into the most competent national political institution in the world today.”
Think about those words.
They matter not just in their avowed moral disinterest in democratic accountability, but in what they tell us about the Chinese communist notion of power. Namely, a notion that is the absolute inverse of what U.S. Founding Fathers advocated.
Where Li sees greatness in the Chinese communist party’s ability to know what’s best for the people and implement those ends without delay, the Founders saw greatness in the ability of competition within a democracy to check the worse impulses of those in power.
Though George Washington’s purported description of the Senate as a saucer to cool legislation is likely apocryphal, Thomas Jefferson was absolutely convinced that “for good legislation two houses are necessary.”
Regardless, the entire system of U.S. federal power is situated on political competition and the legally enshrined balance of powers between three branches. This op-ed in the Post posits that Beijing knows best.
It’s an important note to make, because Li isn’t speaking simply for himself, he’s representing the Chinese agenda he devotedly (and lucratively) serves.
That agenda is focused on two key components.
First, a reconstruction of the free trade based international rules of commerce to a feudal-patronage system in which all nations bow to Beijing. Second, China’s military dominance of Asia and Australasia in its entirety. On that latter point, Li has previously argued that China has “performed brilliantly” in militarizing vast swathes of international waters in the South China Sea.
I disagree. I believe they represent profoundly immoral challenges to the better lives of billions of people. Fortunately, I’m not alone. As Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recognizes, the U.S. must deny China these objectives.
Nevertheless, Li’s monologue for capital-communist destiny is just getting started.
Li continues by explaining that “the party has developed into one of the most elaborate and effective governing institutions in the world and, I would argue, in history. It is responsible for achieving what’s known as the greatest improvement in standard of living for the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time.”
Here we see the familiar Chinese propaganda line that it was the hammer and the sickle that brought hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty and not progressive market liberalization.
Still, the central theme of Li’s argument is its most telling: absolute deference to China’s leader-eternal Xi Jinping.
Xi’s establishment of his personal theory into constitutional code, says Li, is majestically “extending the wording of party leadership from the preamble to the body of the constitution.”
Again, think about that. It’s anathema to the U.S. constitutional system’s protection against individual authoritarianism.
Li then brings out the big trumpet.
“I dare say,” the venture capitalist expounds in British high society terms, “that Xi has done more for China in five years than Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama combined did for the United States in 25 years. On the watches of those three American leaders, with slow and incompetent reforms…”
Perhaps this is true. Perhaps not. But again, the exigent point here is not the attack on American presidential personalities, but rather Li’s adoration for Xi’s ability to avoid “slow and incompetent reforms.” Or put another way, to avoid the slings and arrows of democratic accountability, and instead take up glorious arms against the sea of those who value freedom.
A sea measured in the tens of thousands of political prisoners who languish in Chinese prisons.
We should bear heed to this Chinese narrative. From Xi, Li and all the other Politburo loyalists, the Chinese authoritarians are determined to replace the U.S. democratic global order.
But we should also be aware of just how effective the Chinese government has been in its effort to win respect and station from western elites. Take Li’s article, for example, which was published in coordination with an otherwise liberal media outlet, “the World Post”, which was itself established by the quite pleasant and moderate German-American internationalist billionaire, Nicolas Berggruen.
Or take the British government’s ongoing supplication to China.
If the Post is right that democracy dies in darkness, we must shine a close light on Li’s words. For he and his boss mean every word of them.
