The current CPC campaign to improve security, root out corruption and disloyalty are the manifestations of Xi’s drive to tighten totalitarian rule. Mao’s decrees for officials to “drive the blade in” and “scrape the poison off the bone” echo the Yan’an Rectification Movement—the political and ideological purge in the 1940s to root out any disloyalty, consolidate power, and establish his absolute leadership over the Communist Party. In August 2020, the New York Times reported that across China “police officers, judges, prosecutors and feared state security agents have been studying Mao’s methods for political purges, absorbing them as guidance for a new Communist Party drive against graft, abuses and disloyalty in their ranks.”

Selling the Totalitarian Model

Subtly or overtly, China has been sharing its success stories with the world and offering alternative forms of governance to Western liberal democracy with some success. The Economist in December 2020 reported that the CPC “trains foreign politicians” across the world and seeks to “sway tomorrow’s leaders.” Indeed, part of China’s other success has been attributed to the fear of overseas companies losing access to the Chinese market. It is a powerful weapon recognized only too well by the CPC, which continually uses it as a cudgel. In a Wall Street Journal analysis, Richard McGregor explained that then-Vice Minister Wang Qishan once exercised such power in 2009. When responding to a group of concerned European business executives over market access, Wang said that “I know you have complaints . . . But the charm of the Chinese market is irresistible.” The implication, according to McGregor, was that the complaints were largely irrelevant because “the [Chinese] market is so big, you are going to come anyway.” Wang has proven to be correct. 

In the context of coronavirus, Xi presented a specious argument for a model of governance that can deal quickly with problems wherever and whenever they arise. However, it is worth noting that the totalitarianism that so effectively managed China’s V-shaped recovery from the coronavirus is the same totalitarian system that allows its leadership to suppress its dissenters, surveil its population, and lock up over a million of its citizens in Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere for no other reason than that they are an ethnic minority.  

The irony is that the totalitarianism that so effectively dealt with the covid-19 pandemic is the same totalitarianism that so successfully suppressed all the warnings of Wuhan Dr. Li Wenliang about the impending pandemic in the first place. It is a double-edged sword.

Warning to Both Republics

For its part, the United States has not made a strong case for liberal democracy over the past four years—whether protecting civil rights over the decades of racial violence, electoral rights over the long history of voter suppression, or scientific guidance on health and climate change over partisan loyalty and nativism. If anything, the last four years have shown that the American republic is in fact a fragile institution. Unless safeguards are put in place to protect those institutions, it is easy to start on the slippery slope to totalitarianism by a mercurial leader supported by nativists and partisan devotees, much as the Enabling Act of 1933 allowed Hitler to sweep aside the Weimar Constitution and assume absolute powers over Germany. 

Like the inception of the American republic in 1776—as well as the People’s Republic of China in 1949—one needs to reflect on the wisdom of their republican roots. In ancient China, the famous Confucius philosopher Mencius said, “the people are the most valuable element in a nation; the Gods of the land and grain are the next; the ruler is the least.” When Mencius elucidated that “the people are more important than the ruler,” he essentially summarized the Confucian wisdom by saying, “water can float a boat, but it can also capsize it.”  

In 1787, when Benjamin Franklin walked out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention, a lady asked, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Humorous but with a warning, the American Confucius swiftly replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

The 2020 presidential election shows that despite the Republican “attacks” on democratic traditions internally and the Russian cyber “attacks” on American institutions externally, the United States does still have the necessary safeguards in place to protect its founding ideals and Jeffersonian aspirations. Nonetheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that given the margins by which president-elect Biden won—only by eighty-one million votes compared to seventy-four million by Trump—the United States is far from united by the people and for the people. In his book, Democracy in America, the French chronicler Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that “the great privilege of the Americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit.”  

As ordinary citizens let us hope that the political leadership of the United States and China follow the wisdom of these venerated philosophers—Tocqueville and Mencius—who correctly observed the power of the people to avoid sliding down the path of totalitarianism. 

Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor, is a Taiwan fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University as well as a senior fellow of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei. 

Joey Wang is a defense analyst in the United States.

They are alumni of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The views expressed in this analysis neither represents the official positions of the current or past institutional affiliations nor the respective governments.  

Image: Reuters