Dressed in a Mao-style gray tunic, Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping marked the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on July 1 by saying in a congratulatory speech to the 95 million party members that the system of reformed communism which led to China’s economic success is now shifting to more hard-line Marxist policies.
“Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our party and country are founded. It is the very soul of our party and the banner under which it strives,” Xi said.
Xi also issued confrontational language for unnamed foreign countries that he said were trying to keep China down: “The Chinese people will absolutely not allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or enslave us, and anyone who attempts to do so will face broken heads and bloodshed in front of the iron Great Wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
Xi's speech spotlighted a system that is not just authoritarian but featured a "new dimension" that is "neo-totalitarian" in its control of the country, Cai Xia, a former communist and part of the class of offspring of senior CCP leaders known as “princelings,” noted in a report made public last week by the Hoover Institution.
Cai noted that more than 40 years of U.S. trade and economic engagement with communist China has failed to produce a more benign system or a responsible global power.
“Looking at it objectively, the Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental interests and its basic mentality of using the U.S. while remaining hostile to it have not changed over the past seventy years,” Cai stated
Cai noted that Xi has stepped up the implementation of communist ideological principles that resulted in increased repression, including the imprisonment of her friends who spoke out against the regime. Xi has removed another major check on his power by eliminating the term limits observed by his predecessors.
“[China’s] combination of ideology and extreme repression make it a totalitarian regime, and the sophisticated digital nature of its surveillance and repression has given totalitarian control a new dimension. All of this makes China a more dangerous adversary for the United States,” Cai stated in the report.
U.S. corporate media and many China analysts frequently describe the Beijing government as an “authoritarian” system, but Cai said the CCP regards China’s foreign and domestic policies as integrated and aimed primarily at keeping the party in power.
International engagement and economic, trade and financial relations “failed to soften the political character of the CCP regime,” Cai said.
The U.S. policy toward China, Cai said, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the CCP’s nature and its long-term strategic goal, which Beijing hid to gain benefits from the United States and others in the West.
“By contrast, since the 1970s, the two political parties in the United States and the U.S. government have always had unrealistic good wishes for the Chinese Communist regime, eagerly hoping that the People’s Republic of China under the CCP’s rule would become more liberal, even democratic, and a ‘responsible’ power in the world,” Cai wrote.
Cai said Americans are too naive about her native country: “One basic cultural tradition of Americans is not to lie, to obey the rules and to respect the spirit of contracts. In Chinese culture, deception is in our blood. There is no spirit of the contract, no sense of fairness, and people often say different words to mean the same things under different circumstances.”
In his speech marking the CCP's 100th anniversary, Xi reiterated a vow to reunite democratic Taiwan with the mainland. He announced that “complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment” of the CCP.
U.S. military commanders "warned Congress recently that China could attempt to seize the island by the end of the decade," Washington Times security correspondent Bill Gertz noted in a July 1 report.
Under Xi, "China has largely abandoned the approach of post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping, who sought to hide China’s communist system while quietly building national power," Gertz noted.
Xi on July 1 also called for speeding up China’s already-rapid military buildup of conventional and nuclear arms.
“A strong country must have a strong military, as only then can it guarantee the security of the nation,” Xi said. The military, he added, is “a powerful force for protecting peace in our region and beyond.”
Biden administration officials declined to comment on Xi’s remarks.
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