Why Apologies for Xi Jinping Should No Longer Pass

Apologies for the fascism of the Xi Jinping government are now ubiquitous. At the same time, racist, right-wing propagandists gobble hungrily at any criticisms of China (and its imagined agents, including Joseph Biden) to pursue their disastrous lies. As a result, China studies professionals are often paralyzed, hoping to preserve the middle ground by sitting silently on the fence. Unfortunately, fence sitting makes the middle ground disappear. Now pro-Xi and anti-China lies polarize the field of discourse.

There are a lot of us on the fence. In public opinion discourse, both naive and malicious confusion of Xi Jinping with the Chinese Communist Party, and of the CCP with China itself, had placed us in the position of seeing criticisms of any of the three as unreasoned rejection of all three. At the same time, a significant media empire of anti-CCP propaganda gives the impression that any criticism of Xi, CCP or China must necessarily play into the hands of deeply rooted and well-heeled anti-PRC activists. Academics who have distinguished themselves for their praise of historical imperialism now pop up as China critics. And the swirl of malignant associations also threatened every Chinese American, or any American who could be mistaken for a Chinese American.

The effect is a failure to confront the increasingly virulent and fantastic lies of a massive, sophisticated, very well funded international movement of genteel promotion of Xi, accompanied by a howling internet mob denouncing and threatening any who criticize him. The talking points of the apologists are consistent with the narrative promoted by the CCP propaganda programs, including the United Front Work Department, which has influenced prominent Chinese academics and businessmen in positions to be sought by English-language journalistic and opinion outlets. as well as Europeans and Americans who are employed in the Chinese academic establishment, to repeat the half-truths and outright falsehoods generated by the UFWD.

These speakers make the same points, often with the same phrases.

“China has a historical claim to Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and the South China Sea.”

Boundaries are settled by treaty and recognized in international law. Modern sovereign nations do not make historical claims on territory --that went out with Hitler. Italy cannot claim the territories of the Roman empire, Syria cannot claim the territories of the Umayyad caliphate, the UK cannot claim the territories of the British empire, Mongolia does not claim the territories of the Mongol empires. The Chinese people have had two revolutions since the imperial period, and --before Xi Jinping-- made legal and moral distinctions between themselves and the historical dynastic empires based in China.

But even if such claims were worth considering in principle, few of China’s claims are historically valid. No empire based in China had more than indirect control over Mongolia or Tibet (or, for most of Chinese history, Yunnan); Xinjiang was violently conquered by the Qing empire and under a special military administration until it became a province in 1884. Taiwan came under the rule of a state based in China for the first time in 1683, became a Qing province in 1885, a Japanese colony in 1895, and in 1951 came --like other Japanese colonial possessions-- under the administration of the USA; its status remains unresolved today, though in the interstices of history it has become one of Asia’s most successful democracies and economies. There is no credible historical evidence of any “nine-dash line” showing Chinese imperial claims to the South China Sea.

In my opinion, any time China wants to re-engage with globally-recognized territorial discourse, it can make reasonable claims to be recognized as the leading responsible power in the South China Sea, in the same general way as the US in the Caribbean. But the historical claims are fairy dust meant to confuse people who aren’t thinking very clearly.

“China’s sensitivity about the ‘Century of Humiliation’ must be respected.”

Unlike India, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, China was never colonized. It had some very bad experiences with Europeans, including the loss of the brief Opium War; the abominable and criminal sack of Beijing by British troops in a second war to force China to pay reparations from the first Opium War; diminution of its control of tariffs on imports and on its abilities to restrict the travel, activities (including Christian proselytizing) and economic enterprises of foreigners in China (all covered in the forest of “unequal treaties,” imposed largely through gunboat diplomacy). Major coastal cities were affected by European culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but most of the country was unaffected, culturally or economically.

1850-1950 were years in which China experienced uncharacteristically prolonged disorganization, distress and foreign exploitation. The disorganization and distress came from the Taiping civil war --the most destructive war in human history before the twentieth century-- and the failure to recentralize and effectively reform the government thereafter. The foreign exploitation came from Japan, which had a revolution in 1868 and thereafter engaged upon remarkable campaigns of military industrialization and expansion, both of which came to depend in great part upon expropriation of Chinese wealth and territory, leading by steps to the Pacific War that we usually date to 1937-1945.

This was all excruciating for the Chinese population of 1850 to 1950. How humiliating is it now? All countries go through bad times, and at present countries like Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Afghanistan suffer in ways few of us, including in China, can imagine. They can be proud of their survival, or they can nurse some kind of “humiliation” complex. What Xi Jinping means by the “century of humiliation” is that somebody owes China, big. Exactly who owes China what, depends on Xi’s priorities at any particular moment. Does the world really have to indulge this because Xi’s apologists say they do? You decide.

“The China model of meritocratic government made China the world’s greatest economy and culture for thousands of years; it is the hope of the future while democracy is chaotic, inefficient and outdated.”

The roots of this fantasy go back to Singapore president Lee Kuan Yew’s programs in the 1980s to get Chinese academics, particularly those living in the United States, to validate his dictatorship as a modern legacy of “Confucianism.” If you know anything about what they meant by “Confucianism,” you know that the last thing it legitimates is dictatorship.

But these well-funded campaigns worked for a small number of academics, who more or less consciously signed on to a program to claim that Singapore’s economic success was a case study in the effectiveness of traditional “Asian” efficiency and self-discipline. This theme was revived in various forms in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, each of which enjoyed a period of spectacular success in the later twentieth century and rushed to credit “Confucianism.” In the twentieth century, a Canadian scholar of Chinese studies employed by a Chinese university shot to fame by claim that “meritocracy” was the “China model” of effective, honest, specialized achievement (today, by CCP officials) that was supposedly behind China’s stellar economic growth of the late twentieth century and rise to global power in the twenty-first.

The idea has no historicity. Imperial China had a very demanding examination system from the seventh century to the twentieth, by which it credentialed aspiring bureaucrats. It produced an entrenched bureaucratic class (part of what the term “meritocracy” actually meant before its mangling by the authoritarianists of the twenty-first century), but there has never been any evidence that this class was distinguished for honesty, efficiency, or extraordinary competence. China had about the same mix of inherited and self-generated success, of bureaucratic efficiency and inefficiency, of success and failure in the economy, public works and the battlefield as any of the other great land empires of Eurasia. France admired the Chinese examination system and adopted it for a time in 1791, which didn’t produce any more bureaucratic brilliance in France, either, than would happen by chance.

No meritocracy accounted for China’s economic and trade rise in the later twentieth century --that was a combination of the cease of the self-destructive policies of the Mao era; a change in global trade conditions that made many countries richer; a series of wise decisions made by Deng Xiaoping and his successors to exploit the new opportunities rather than ignore them; and consistent support by the USA for China’s access to markets, financing, and admission to WTO.

As for democracy, there is no question --it is indeed chaotic and inefficient. How relevant is that to success? This is a short conversation. As I said above, I credit 30-35 centuries of history to China. But the official line under Xi Jinping is that there are 70, so let’s go with that. In 70 centuries, China did what it did --pretty good. In two and a half centuries, the US did what it did. Which looks more productive: “meritocracy,” or democracy?

More relevant, democracy is not a matter of cultural or national virtue. It is, objectively, the only political system devised by humans that can protect them from predatory government. There is no second. Democracy has produced greater material well-being, national power and scientific achievement in a short period of time, despite its inherent chaos and inefficiency, than any other system. Autocracies, for all their claims to efficiency, produce much less of all those. For the reasons for the difference, ask William James and John Dewey. Democracy is not a culture or a value system, it is an epistemology which is better than political ideology at discerning reality.

“China never tries to push its ideology on others.”

It is certainly true that the US has been very assertive for the better part of a century in lecturing on the virtues of democracy and capitalism, as well as establishing educational and charitable institutions abroad that will continue the message. For the most part these are overt, and anybody is free to turn the messages away, as American propaganda, if they wish. China, on the other hand, established Confucius Institutes for the ostensible purpose of offering knowledge of Chinese language and culture to those who wanted it, like the Goethe-Institut, British Council, Alliance Francaise --garden variety cultural diplomacy, all run through agencies of their own governments, and usually standing independently from local educational institutions.

Instead, Xi Jinping pushed Confucius Institutes to actively interfere in the educational institutions with which they became affiliated --even to the point of trying to influence hiring and firing decisions-- and to monitor organizations of Chinese students for objectionable political discourse. Today, China pays for very extensive and largely covert flooding of social media with pro-Xi Jinping messages, and works actively to undermine the credibility of democracy --especially but not exclusively in the United States. Its ideology of “meritocracy,” and its mythical history of supposed outstanding achievement under CCP authoritarianism is pushed relentlessly.

The wumao who keep the pro-Xi howling going on the internet are paralleled by the genteel intellectuals of the UFWD in denouncing democracy and making bogus claims for meritocracy. Whether from internet trolls or prestigious stooges, these arguments do not harmlessly promote the ideology of authoritarianism, they actively seek to destroy the world’s confidence in democracy --they positively seek to remove from the world’s societies the only protections against predatory government that they have.

“The traditional East Asia system of trans-national peace, under the leadership of China, is the best model for East Asian prosperity and stability in the future.”

This unites two myths of distinct origin. First relates to the great Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He, who in the early fifteenth century sailed through Indonesia to the Indian Ocean, visiting ports in India, the Persia Gulf, and East Africa. In modern Chinese historiography this is prominent --taking a cue from its celebration by English-language global historians, who mistakenly considered it a voyage of exploration. Its significance is stated to be Zheng He’s peaceful mission to convey messages of benevolence from the Ming emperor to the various peoples of the Indian Ocean. In Xi Jinping historiography, this is an allegory for contemporary China’s attitude toward all nations; the same magnanimity that motivated the ruinously expensive voyages of Zheng He can be seen today in the missions of the PRC for economic, scientific and educational development in Asia and Africa.

The main problem here is the actual history of the Zheng He voyages. They were not motivated by magnanimity (though they were motivated in part by the Yongle emperor’s narcissism, which could relate to modern events). The first Ming emperor had closed China to foreign commerce, because during the occupation of China the Mongols had always put the overland trade first. The result was that by the end of the fourteenth century the Chinese economy was dented, and in the first years of the fourteenth century the Yongle emperor wanted to mount an advertising campaign, announcing that China was back in business, soliciting samples of local wares, and offering gifts of Chinese products (and this was indeed accompanied by a benevolent message from the emperor). It worked.

The second motivation for the voyages was to recoup taxes from the millions of Chinese whose ancestors had illegally left China to reside in the many islands that now compose Indonesia. To this end he had a battery of armed marines who, if the demand for back taxes was not met, destroyed settlements, farmland, fishing boats, and killed thousands of people.

The Xi history of Zheng He as a concientiously peaceful and benevolent ambassador is part of the larger myth of the imperial “tributary system.” There was no word in Chinese for “tributary system” --there is now, because of a back-translation from English. The term and the concept were products of the historiography of John King Fairbank. It was based on the fact that the Ming and Qing imperial courts (and presumably many before them) kept lists of countries permitted to send ambassadors to the Chinese capital to perform the elaborate “guest ritual,” and thereafter to be debriefed by Chinese officials on the history and particularly the economic products of their countries.

Fairbank called this a “system” of relations and before long had added to it the idea that Confucian convictions, a veneration of China, and an anxiety to not displease the emperor in China were distributed throughout the embassy states, as well as a refusal to make war on each other.

There is no call to go into the pile of historical evidence showing what is wrong with this idea. Suffice to say that if it were a system of international relations, it would predict the nature of relations between China and each participating polity, but it doesn’t. The coercion persistent in relations with Korea was not like the solicitude in relations with Okinawa which was not like the indifference shown Vietnam, and so on. In addition, none of the empires, from Han to Qing, restricted its foreign relations to the embassy list. All of them had unique and extemporized foreign relations that did not involve embassies or the formal guest ritual. But Fairbank’s fantasy of a “system” has now become a fantasy of political scientists and Xi Jinping historiography. Even if it never existed, is it a model for future benevolent, hegemonic relations between China and its East Asian neighbors? You’d have to ask them.

“China is still a developing country and should not be held to the same environmental and labor safety standards as the developed nations.”

This may seem confusing on its face. If China’s meritocracy has, over millennia, produced technological and economic marvels (over 7000 years), why would China be a still developing country today? The Xi Jinping explanation is the Century of Humiliation --without it, China would be the unrivaled leader in every dimension of global and by now extraterrestrial activity. You can see the world owes China a big debt, which it can partly ameliorate by allowing China all the privileges of a great nation without the obligations.

The still-developing-nation thing has this behind it: Even after raising the average PRC income above the global poverty level at the turn of the twenty-first century, the standard of living in China is still low compared to any “developed” nation. Both rural and urban non-CCP populations struggle to provide themselves nutritious food, safe housing, transportation, medical care and education on incomes ranging (after dramatic reported rises from 2020 to 2021) from about $2000 to about $4000 a year (slightly more than that of one-party socialist Vietnam; 1/2 that of democratic Taiwan; less than 1/4 that of democratic Japan; less than 1/8 that of democratic South Korea, about 1/10 that of democratic USA). The country’s problems of aging, public health, and profound environmental stress are nearly overwhelming, and the current constitution obliges the government to supply social services only in relation to the country’s “level of economic development” (an additional incentive for the CCP to wish China to be classified as a developing nation).

If there is one achievement that the brilliant CCP meritocracy can claim, it is their reported 1,058 billionaires --the US only has 614. Since there has been only modest gains in mean annual income since 2004, this means that China is overtaking the USA Gini co-efficient even faster than it is overtaking the US in any other index.

At present the G7 are permitting China to drive the middle of the road. But there may be good reason to pressure China to get in one lane or another --the developed and world-leading lane accepting responsibility for improving labor and environmental safety, and shouldering burdens for ameliorating global warming; or the developing nation lane, in which there are no pretensions to floating a global reserve currency, making decisions on international trade rules, or claiming to control seas and oceans while its mean household income lingers in the hardship range.

“The United States has always tried to hinder China’s advancement, and is now in a panic of defensiveness and insecurity because China is overtaking it in economic and political world leadership, as well as military power.”

Why Xi Jinping has chosen the United States as the great villain in its nationalist morality play is at first a bit counterintuitive. For the past century and a half, the majority of the time China and the USA have been joined in a vast and stable trade partnership. For three of those decades --1949 to 1979-- there was estrangement, and even enmity as the US defended the anti-communist regime of Chiang Kaishek on Taiwan and went to war to prevent invasion of South Korea, which China portrayed as an existential threat (and the crazy factor supplied by Douglas MacArthur did nothing to allay that impression).

But those decades were a vivid detour from what had otherwise been an American posture of support --for China’s recognition as a modern sovereign nation via the efforts of Anson Burlingame (whose work was obliterated by new racist American laws excluding Chinese); for its territorial integrity via the efforts of John Whitney Hay’s “open door notes”; for its recovery from its many ills via the Boxer educational fund; via the welcome receptions and financial support for Kang Youwei, Sun Yatsen and Liang Qichao; via persistent and growing military and financial support for resisting Japanese aggression in the earlier twentieth century (including World War II); and since 1979 via consistent American advocacy for China’s full access to investment and trade, as well as open access of Chinese students and educators to American universities.

The targeting of the US in Xi Jinping rhetoric appears to be a kind of projection --China sees the US as the main obstacle to its own claims of world leadership, and so invents a theory that the US sees China as the main obstacle to its continued global domination. As a result, the violent language used by Chinese military commanders, diplomats, and now even Xi Jinping threatening foreign individuals and nations with injury and death has indeed provoked unwise, frequently ridiculous responses from American officials.

The idea that the US has been or is an enemy of China is an easily disproved lie. Americans need not be hypnotized by Xi-inspired rhetoric of American decline and panic. China represents no threat to the living standard or well-being of Americans, despite what Xi would like Americans to think. American officials need to behave as the grown-ups they would like Chinese diplomats and officials to behave as.

“The US needs to indulge Xi Jinping’s demands, otherwise Chinese nationalism will become a critical threat to the world.”

Nationalism is a threat to domestic governments. Nationalism rewrites the state. It changes democracies into dictatorships (as the current crop of fascists in the USA would like to do). It changes dictatorships into democracies --a long history of which Xi Jinping is wary. What Xi uses to attempt to consolidate support for his regime is chauvinism, jingoism, xenophobia, racism and fascism, which his messengers merely call by the more glamorous name of “nationalism.” At present Xi finds “the feelings of the Chinese people” is often a useful cudgel for dazing and confusing foreign journalists and officials.

But like others who have attempted to appeal to the worst passions of their supporters, Xi may find that he has uncaged a tiger he can’t ride. Chinese “nationalism” may make a lot of unpleasant noises globally, but it is a greater threat to Xi Jinping than to anybody else. Deng Xiaoping, after all, thought whipping up patriotic fervor for return of Hong Kong was a great way to consolidate support for his reforms. He ended up with Tiananmen. He reluctantly had to crush the movement, but he soon became irrelevant to national political life and the damage to the CCP lingers today. Chinese sticks and s may break our bones (which Xi will remind us of sooner or later), but words will never hurt us. Call this bluff.

“We need China to fight global warming, therefore we need to stop all criticism of Xi Jinping’s policies. ”

Countries that ameliorate global warming conditions are not doing favors for other nations --they are helping assure their own survival. Coordinated action is clearly more effective than individual action.

Xi must understand that it is to his benefit to cooperate. You don’t have to be friends to band together for survival, and you don’t have to be happy all the time with all your partners. The people of China deserve to know that others around the world care about their welfare, and the people’s of democracies around the world need to know that Xi Jinping’s undermining of democracy will be countered wherever it is encountered. As with the “nationalist” threat, this bluff must be called.

“American don’t realize how capitalist China is, and Chinese don’t realize how socialist Americans are.”

This little chiasmus is a favorite line of one of the speakers I am thinking of here. It is not only as contrived as it sounds, but is breathtaking in its intellectual dishonesty.

China is not communist; I think everybody except Mike Pompeo has figured that out. But that doesn’t mean it is capitalist. It is corporatist. The CCP has decided to solve its long-standing problems of unproductive state-owned-enterprises and poorly-matching labor supply and demand by co-opting ostensibly private corporations into state-managed (directly or indirectly) fronts. Profits are a high priority, and are provided by manipulated markets and command production --first for export, and secondarily for domestic consumption.

“CEO”s like Jack Ma are fine as long as they attract international admiration and suggest that China is a wide-open competitive economy in which self-starting individuals can rise to the top of huge companies. But if they get more attention than Xi Jinping likes, or they try to create production or marketing protocols that benefit themselves or their companies instead of the leading families of the CCP, they will be yanked back in line (and it should be enough to make the illusion of “capitalism” in China disappear). And all corporations, without exception, are subject to the comprehensive and stringent demands of the National Security Law. PRC corporations can and should compete in international trade. But they should do it recognized as corporatist extensions (in a variety of forms) of the CCP, not as entities working on the same capitalist assumptions as their international rivals.

As for Americans, they are not “socialist.” Americans by and large want the same social supports that all leading industrial societies have: retirement, health, and educational benefits. Social supports do not make socialism. For that you need, among other things, planned markets and statutory limits on personal wealth. The speaker I am thinking of knows all this very well.

Why say Americans are “more socialist” than the Chinese think they are? Because the right wing in the US uses that word to discredit Biden and the Democratic Party, and Xi Jinping propaganda supports those goals, since they are the best path to returning the American government to the paralysis and decay of the Trump years.

But things are pretty simple. The US is a capitalist economy with an extremely modest framing of social supports. China is a corporatist economy in a one-party state that steadily withdraws social supports from its population.

“China is only fighting terrorism in Xinjiang, and there is no genocide.”

Donald Trump was happy to repeat this. The number of people willing to repeat this because they heard somebody else say it is astounding. They often include claims that the US was itself so deeply concerned about Uyghur terrorism that they are kept Uyghurs at Guantanamo.

This is a particularly cynical bit of spin. Congressional investigation findings suggested that those Uyghurs may have been held primarily as a political favor to China, at China’s request. Moreover, Chinese interrogators were permitted to go to Guantanamo to torture the prisoners (in the style usually used in China now to extract false confessions). In 2005 the Uyghur prisoners were all declared not enemy combatants against the US and released; since they refused to return to China, they were repatriated to Albania.

This is a sorry episode in American and Chinese history, and absolutely does not mean that the US has an abiding fear of Uyghur terrorism.

There have been instances of terrorism in Xinjiang, including attempted airplane hijackings, police station attacks, bombings and vehicular assaults (with a cluster in 2013 and 2014, as Xi Jinping was assuming the presidency). But according to PRC spokesmen, there have been none since 2017 (there are virtually no credible crime statistics supplied by the PRC since 2017).

Many of Xinjiang’s troubles compare to other border areas of China. Some result from the perpetuation by the PRC of policies with a long and ugly history in these regions: forced removal, forced assimilation, the establishment of some identities as permanently suspect. This is not something inherent in CCP history and culture --the early party was respectful of differences in cultural identity and comfortable with them. After 1949, in periods of political radicalization such as the Anti-Rightist campaigns and the Cultural Revolution, the policies changed, and differences became targets of suspicion. In these periods of radicalization --and the current Xi Jinping period is one of radicalization-- the policy is to destroy all cultural differences as a way of destroying all sources of tension in society. The actual result is the sharp rise in tensions as some identities and cultures face total extinction.

In addition, conflicts over land use and security have periodically aggravated the mishaps of political life.There have been incidents of mayhem and murder by disturbed individuals, bloody conflicts with robbers or rapists, and unrest over very local land or property issues. Troubles in Xinjiang that are indistinguishable from troubles that happen in any province are officially labeled “terrorist” by the PRC spokesmen. In fact they strongly resemble troubles in Tibet, where tensions are also high, but which nobody seems to regard as a hotbed of international terrorism.

As for “genocide,” those taking the lead in expressing concerns over CCP policies in Xinjiang have pointed out for some time that the precise criteria in international conventions relating to genocide are not met by the Xinjiang situation. The Xi government is not exterminating Uyghurs as humans, it is systematically destroying Uyghur cultural identity by banning the religion, language, and family structures (including marriage) that living Uyghurs have inherited and that they believe meaningfully connect them to their ancestors --for Mandarin-speaking Chinese, these are the precise institutions that Xi sternly insists must be energetically reinforced. In order to effect this cultural death, huge numbers of individuals are subjected to long and sometimes indefinite detention in re-education centers. “Genocide” is a red herring. These are clear abuses of human rights, and they are confirmed by objective evidence --testimonial, video, and satellite. And while they are intense and demonstrable in Xinjiang, they are present in many forms in other parts of China.

How have these misleading statements by Xi’s apologists come to fill up Youtube, Ted Talks, university speaking, and a certain number of documentaries? Many reasons, but for me the passivity of people who know better is a significant factor. Repudiating this or that dishonesty seems likely to be interpreted as work done for Falungong or Epoch Times, or the rabidly anti-PRC opinionaters who pervade some American think tanks. In addition, anything less than a glowing description of “China” seems like possible fodder to be directed against Chinese Americans. But these are all self-fulfilling fears. The reticence of people who know very well that Xi Jinping is not the CCP, and neither of them is “China,” is leaving a huge void to be filled by malicious sinophobes on one side and apologists for fascism on the other. That void allows extreme claims to be attached to any prejudice and used to hurt anybody the extremists wish to target.

There is also an impression that China specialists muzzle themselves in relation to PRC human rights violations in order to protect their careers. Displeasing the Chinese authorities, it has been demonstrated, can result in visa denial, obstruction of access to research venues, travel bans, detention, and harassment --both physically and by prolonged, vicious internet defamation. This can be a consideration. Untenured professionals near the beginnings of their careers are particularly vulnerable. Tenured professionals have no excuse relating to their careers --that is the purpose of tenure, to allow intellectuals free expression without fear of loss of livelihood.

But for China studies professionals of any rank, the question of hostages is much more relevant. Our “tenured” colleagues in China have no protection of thought or speech, and can be fired tomorrow for connections to us. Our students in China are all hostages, likely to be inconvenienced, pressured or severely punished if they are associated with misbehaving foreigners. This is a profound inhibition on commentary from China studies professionals. Not much can be done to neutralize it except to realize that dangers to our colleagues in China will only escalate if PRC suppression of free inquiry and expression worsens; an over-cautious silence now will not avoid the greedy reach of total censorship later. An enlightened future PRC government will, as past PRC governments have, consider intellectuals with foreign training and connections to be resource, not a threat.

Of course, PRC education officials can demonstrate that they are already enlightened, and make a liar of me, but making no such reprisals against anybody I know.

Restoring a middle ground by venerating fact more highly than the incantations of Xi’s apologists is not merely a matter of valuing truth over falsehood. Democracy is the target of much of Xi’s propagandizing, and this is probably more true for democracy in the United States that for anywhere else. And in the US, Xi’s propaganda is amplified by the rising tide of strident anti-democratic, fascism rhetoric and action. There is a question whether democracy will survive in the USA, and the UFWD is actively working to make sure it doesn’t. To restore a middle ground to China-related commentary and study, a few simple points might be made.

Regarding the stature of China:

American political mythology (as contrasted to historiography) obscures the significance of accumulating PRC power in the later twentieth century. In the American paradigm, the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which was in its turn caused by the financial ruin of military competition with the USA. We have to assume that, first, there was an actual "Cold War" outside US military budget rhetoric, Russian nationalism, and competition for patronage over emerging nations after World War II. But let's suppose there was. The end of it is a distinct event from the dismantling of the Soviet Union (which had nothing to do with Reagan running up ruinopus military expenditures). There is every reason to see the "end" of the Cold War in the 1970s, roughly in association with the surfacing of "human rights" as a theme in US foreign policy. And the beginning of that end lay with the emergence of China as a political force, then as a nuclear power