All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 2, 2025 - Epoch Times
01:21:36
How the CCP Dupes the West—and We Keep Falling for It | Chenggang Xu
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
100% of the land in China is state-owned, but the party controls the state.
So there's no separation between the party and the state.
In this episode, I sit down with professor and political economist Cheng Gong Shu.
He grew up amid the upheaval of China's Cultural Revolution and in the 1970s was beaten, imprisoned, and subjected to years of forced labor by the Chinese Communist Party.
When you are not challenging the Communist Party, then sure, you can say whatever you want to say.
The author of Institutional Genes, Professor Xu explains the origins of CCP totalitarianism, which he argues is unique and distinct from any other regime today.
Actually, the Cold War has not ended.
So when people thought that was the end of history, that was a misunderstanding because the Chinese communists are still there.
And now it's a continuation, just in a different format.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanye Kellek.
Professor Cheng Gang Shu, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
Something that is very, very difficult to understand, but I think of critical importance in the relationship of communist China and the free world is the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and how it's fundamentally different from what we think of as conventional institutions.
I've struggled over decades trying to explain this to people, and you've actually come up with a way of doing it.
So please explain to me what you've discovered here.
Right.
So here, actually, if we want to explain that in a very simple way, then the simplest way of telling this story is that the Chinese Communist Party is actually a part of the Soviet Union Communist Party.
So it's a historical fact that it was created by the Soviet Union.
And from the very beginning of establishing the Chinese Communist Party, it followed all the basic principles, basic rules of the Soviet Communist Party.
So any other interpretations of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is just wrong.
And the wrong interpretations actually started fairly early, since the late 1930s, since the Second World War.
So since that time, many American intellectuals were fooled by the Chinese communists.
So since then, they regard the Chinese Communist Party as something else, only with a name called Communist.
And that actually was a story told by Mao Zedong.
So that was a story purposely portrayed a different picture of the Chinese Communist Party that not only fooled the Americans, more importantly, it fooled Chinese intellectuals.
Well, let's get to then what the Communist Party actually is.
Because, I mean, your answer here is basically that the Chinese Communist Party is masquerading as not a Communist Party.
And that's, of course, of critical importance.
But I don't think people understand what a Communist Party is in the first place.
The so-called Communist Party is not a political party in the common sense.
So If we try to understand what is a political party, then the easiest way is to go back to a definition given by Max Weber at early 20th century.
So by his definition, a political party is a party within political competition.
So you have multiple political parties competing to gain the votes for power.
And parties attract people voluntarily into the organization.
But here, a Communist Party is going to violate all of these definitions.
So first of all, a Communist Party does not allow other organizations exist.
So it controls all organizations.
It's not within, it's above.
So all the organizations have to be controlled by the Communist Party.
And also, it's not voluntary.
So entering and exiting from the party, these are not voluntary.
A Communist Party is a secretive political organization from the very beginning till today.
Well, so I want to touch on this because in your book, you describe these secret organizations that are part of the institutional genes of the original communist structure, both in China and the Soviet Union, as being a secretive terrorist organization.
So explain that part to me.
Right.
So to understand the nature of the Communist Party, we have to understand the Leninist principle.
The so-called Communist Party is a creation of Lenin.
But actually, Lenin didn't really create such an important institution from scratch.
Instead, Lenin inherited these principles from those terrorist organizations.
Here, by terrorists, these are not given by scholars.
These are given by themselves, by those organizations themselves.
And here, a leading example is the organization called People's Will.
This People's Will Party, they call themselves as terrorists.
And their core strategy is using terrorist approach to achieve their political goals.
And so here, not only Lenin, but all the main founders of Bolsheviks, all of them were originally from those secretive political organizations or terrorist organizations.
And that is why Lenin could successfully reconstruct all the principles inherited from the existing terrorist secretive organizations using those as principles for communists.
And when the Kom intern, the Communist Internationale, which is a missionary organization of a Soviet Communist Party, when the Kom intern came to China and established their branch in China called the Chinese Communist Party, they actually purposely created the Chinese Communist Party as their branch following all the principles.
And among their first instructions to the Chinese communists is to expand this organization, trying to find all the existing Chinese secretive political organizations.
And we have hard evidence that how they give the instructions.
And concretely, one of the most important secretive societies within China before, so they have long history, long before the creation of the Chinese Communist Party was the so-called Brotherhood Society, which is a nationwide secretive organization.
And this Brotherhood Society indeed has played essential roles in providing a kind of a foundation for the establishment and the growth of the Chinese Communist Party and also as a base for the military of the Chinese Communist Party.
So when people talk about the early history of the Chinese Communists and their regimes, people talk about Jingong Shan as their base and later Yan'an as their base.
But it turns out both of these two bases were based upon the Brotherhood Society, in particular Jing Gongshan.
But the bottom line here, I think what you're telling me that the Chinese Communist Party in its origins is not a political party, but instead it's a secretive terrorist organization, not as a kind of a slander, but actually kind of by actual description, by definition.
Is that what you're telling me here?
Yes, yes.
So literally, substantial proportion of the Chinese Communist Party's founders and cadres, core members, major figures, substantial proportion of those have this background.
For example, nowadays, when people talk about Xi Jinping's father, Xi Jongxin, so Xi Jongxian was one of the major assistants of Liu Jedan.
He created this revolutionary base in that area.
Yan'an is the capital of that area.
So that actually he relied on the Brotherhood Society.
And so he was recruited by the Brotherhood Society.
So he became a leader of that society.
And so with a coalition, formed a coalition with the Brotherhood Society in that area.
And people usually call them as bandits.
So a coalition between the communist and the bandit created that base.
And then they recruited the heads of the local heads of the Brotherhood Society into the Communist Party.
And many of them became the top military leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
When people talk about the factions within the Chinese Communist Party, one of the most important factions is the so-called Prince Lin's faction.
The so-called Prince Lin faction simply means that their fathers were the top communist leaders.
But then we have to further understand who they are.
So what are the principles of the institution?
Normally, the institution is a Leninist institution.
Normally, it's a Leninist principle.
The reality is that in the case of Russia, that's the People's Will Party.
In China, that's the Brotherhood Society.
And then you have many experts within China who understands what is the Brotherhood Society.
So that explains a lot.
It's more than the Marxist principles, more than the usual communist principles.
Thank you for tuning in to American Thought Leaders.
In a world where spin and agendas dominate the headlines, I'm proud to bring you unfiltered insights from the brightest minds in America from a relative outsider Canadian perspective.
To keep this possible and to access even more exclusive content, in-depth documentaries in our daily digital newspaper, consider subscribing to the Epoch Times Today.
It's your way to support independent journalism.
Just hit the link in the description below to subscribe and unlock the full American thought leaders experience and so much more.
You can try it today for just $1 a week.
So just hit the link in the description below.
And now back to the interview.
Well, explain to me the role of violence with the Communist Party because you highlight that as a key tool of the party.
Right.
So actually the brutality of a totalitarian party comes from two major sources.
So one source is the idea that there exists only one truth.
The truth to prevail, for the truth to prevail, you have to eliminate everything wrong.
So that's a pure ideology.
But that ideology is important because that provides justification, provides legitimacy.
Then the other part is in practice.
So in practice, because it's a whole thing developed based upon secretive organizations, based upon this sort of terrorist organizations.
So within, there is a tradition to eliminate your political rivals.
So your political rivals become enemies.
So they will not allow for the existence of anyone who is going to disagree, although the disagreement could be only tactical things.
So even the tactical debates could turn your comrades become enemies.
And that is the reality in all communist parties.
So Soviet Union was the first one, and then the Chinese communist has been practicing in this way.
So within this kind of structure, the political power struggle is a life and death struggle.
And that is why it's so brutal.
You're saying that at its base, the Chinese Communist Party, one, has to have total supremacy.
And two, it views all political engagement as a life or death struggle.
Let me be sure here that I'm getting you right, because this is pretty serious stuff.
Yeah, this power struggles within the party is a life and death matter.
And so in the Soviet Union, the most prominent examples would be the purge, the great purge launched by Joseph Stalin.
So many of his comrades, like Cholsky, so on and so forth, so they were killed in many different ways.
And the same is true in China.
So the most prominent examples would be the cultural revolution.
And even today, the so-called anti-corruption campaign is the power struggle.
So that is an excuse, it's a justification for using the brutal ways to eliminate their political rivals.
But actually, many of those are not really rivals.
So they just could have different views or they were in a different sort of factions.
By the way, the communists would not allow for any legitimate factions.
The so-called all the factions are underground.
So they have to hide themselves.
But as long as there is a suspicion, then all of these hiding factions have to be eliminated.
So whoever tries to organize anything is going to be eliminated.
So within the party, it's already in that way.
And then outside of the party, it's so obvious.
So no one could organize.
So they would not allow anyone for organizing anything, including religious.
So for example, Catholic must obey the communists.
The Buddhist, the temples, they have to obey the communists.
So anyone try to have an independent organization, try to have your own ideas, all of these are going to be eliminated.
So why don't we actually jump into this?
You know, you highlight the difference, the crucial differences between totalitarian regimes and just simply authoritarian regimes.
In fact, a lot of scholars, even quite excellent scholars, kind of don't even understand that distinction in my observation.
And again, for me, it's been a kind of a lifetime of education trying to figure this out.
You lay this out incredibly well using this institutional gene structure.
Can you explain to me the distinction here?
Right.
So this is a very important question because a confusion between totalitarianism and authoritarianism has huge consequences.
So first of all, let's look at the crucial differences between the two.
In an authoritarian regime, usually you have multiple parties.
Even in the case that there is only one party, that party is not dominating in the way of a totalitarian regime.
So Taiwan, before 1988, was an authoritarian regime.
there was only one party, which is Kuomintang.
But Kuomintang was not as dominating as a communist in the sense that in Taiwan they were independent churches.
They were independent temples.
They were local elections.
And they were true private ownership.
So all of this actually lay down the foundation for the later transformation from an authoritarian regime into democracy.
So it's not because of the authoritarian leader all of a sudden want to change.
Instead, it was actually bottom-up process.
And this bottom-up process depends on the true private ownership, depends on the existence of organizations.
And before the transformation in Taiwan from authoritarian into democracy, there was already a quite famous theory called modernization theory.
And it's developed in the 1960s.
According to that theory, an authoritarian regime could transform peacefully into democracy.
And the reason is that in an authoritarian regime, once you have an economic development, and then you have a development of the middle class, and the middle class is going to have a demand for freedom for democracy.
And then this growing, ever-growing middle class is going to push the whole society from transform an authoritarian regime into democracy.
And indeed, Taiwan is example.
And South Korea is another example.
And there are many examples like that.
When we confuse between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, then we had an illusion if we label China, the nature of the Chinese institution as an authoritarian institution.
And then we equate today's China as Taiwan in 1980s.
Then we had an illusion that once China develops, once China start to have a large middle class, and then the large middle class is going to transform China from an authoritarian regime into democracy.
But now everyone finds that this is an illusion.
And so in particular in the recent decade, so what the Chinese Communist Party has done shows to the world that it's impossible.
The reason it's impossible is because the Chinese Communist Party controls everything, including these private firms.
So how could they control private firms?
So here, the way that the communist controls private firms is not by nationalization legally.
But if we look at the reality, actually the Chinese Communist Party controls these firms not through the legal tools, instead controlling the entrepreneurs.
So all the entrepreneurs, they have to submit.
So they have to obey whatever the party requires them to do.
And that is actually part of this agenda associated with this so-called anti-corruption campaign.
So this anti-corruption campaign legitimize whatever they are doing.
So that's only one way of doing that.
Another is that the Chinese Communist Party in the recent decade has made it clear that all the private firms, actually including foreign firms, all organizations, all the NGOs, including the foreign NGOs, as long as you are a large organization operating in China on the Chinese soil, then you have to have a party cell.
The party controls you through that channel.
So they don't have to do the same thing like in the early 1950s to nationalize everything.
So they just by controlling the hats.
So actually in economics, there is an important understanding about property rights.
So this important understanding of property rights is to look at the ultimate control rights.
Instead of looking at the details, you just look at who controls the assets.
So who controls the assets?
Controlling the assets.
Once you control the entrepreneurs, then you control the assets through controlling the hats.
So that's the way.
And so when we look at the Chinese entrepreneurs, they used to have their own organizations.
But the Chinese Communist Party finds this is alarming.
They will not allow for entrepreneurs to organize themselves.
So then even those on the surface looks like these are business organizations.
But these business organizations, they have to make a public announcement that all of our organizations are under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
They submit themselves.
So that's the way to eliminate true private ownership.
You know, I really am enjoying this conversation because it's really reinforcing to me how central the supremacy of the party is to absolutely everything.
Right?
And this is, I mean, it's actually very hard for us in living in a free society to kind of grasp how central, how it sort of insinuates into it into every aspect of society.
Can you kind of build on that a little bit for me?
The way they maintain the supremacy is by controlling everything.
So one of the concrete examples is military.
They are the armed forces of the party.
And then we have to talk about the courts.
So all the courts, all the law enforcement agencies, they are the instruments of the party.
The party completely controls the courts, completely controls the law enforcement.
And then we have to talk about lawmaking.
And again, the lawmaking is another tool of the Communist Party.
So the lawmaking, the party dictates what law is going to be made and what the law is going to be interpreted.
And another important aspect is property rights.
So In terms of property rights, I just mentioned that for private firms, the party controls the private firms through controlling entrepreneurs.
But even just by looking at the nominal property rights, nominal owners, who are the nominal owners of properties in China, there are two most important factors that many people overlook at them.
Number one is the land.
So 100% of the land in China is state-owned.
But the party controls the state.
Read the constitution and in the constitution, all the agricultural lands are owned by the collectives.
So agricultural land is collectively owned.
So the definition of ownership should be the ultimate control rights, not using rights.
So when they talk about agricultural land, they are talking about using rights.
So when the land is used in agriculture, is used for that purpose, particular purpose, then it's collectively owned.
But once you try to convert a piece of agricultural land into something else, the law says that you have to convert that land, you have to nationalize the land first, and then you can control the using right, which actually tells everyone in a very clear way that the ultimate control rights are in the hands of the party state.
So that's land.
And then the next is a financial resources.
So the number one issue is that in China, most of the finance is through banking, not through the financial market.
And then if we look at the banking sector, then nearly all of the banks are state-owned.
So you have just a very small number of non-state-owned banks, but these are collectively owned.
These ultimately are also controlled by the party state in the so-called commanding height sectors.
By the way, the commanding height sector, this wording is by Lenin.
So that's the Leninist word, and that is the explicit party policy since the starting of the economic reform.
So the Chinese Communist Party made it clear that all the commanding height sectors must be state-owned, literally state-owned.
Not only the state controls the entrepreneurs, but even talking about nominal ownership, these are literally state-owned.
Commanding high sectors would include upper stream, mining, and grid, communication, all of those most important things.
So just by state ownership of the commanding height sectors, actually the state can already control the whole economy because all the private firms are operating in downstreams.
They relied on the upper stream to provide the foundation.
And that is the way that the state ownership can squeeze the private firms.
So here we have the party state controls the armed forces, controls the lawmaking, controls the courts, and controls substantial part of the assets, all the land, almost all the banking, and controls the media, controls all organizations.
So then here we can see that in practice the supremacy of the Communist Party is very solid on the Chinese land.
Hiding the true totalitarian nature actually has been the key.
And actually one of the most important strategies of Communist Party is the so-called United Front strategy.
This United Front strategy was created by Lenin.
So from the very beginning, so when the Kom Intern created the Chinese Communist Party, starting from then, the United Front strategy was one of the founding strategies of the Chinese Communist Party.
So at that time, the Chinese, according to the instructions from the Kom intern, the Chinese communists formed a coalition with Kuomintang.
And so for that strategy to work, they have to hide their true intent.
The true intent is to use Kuomintang as an instrument to let communists grow within Kuomintang.
So the Suvet is going to provide aids to Kuomintang, including military.
So the whole military actually was, the military of the Kuomintang was actually created by Suvai Union.
So by doing so, they let the communists grow within Kuomintang.
And then they supported Kuomintang and also directed the Kuomintang in the war, try to seize power.
And then at a later stage of that war, they would let the communists to take over.
So eventually, the eventual power is going to be taken by the communists, not by Kuomintang.
But they hide their intent, and Kuomintang was a food.
So the Kuomintang realized until 1927.
So in 1927, the war supported by Suvai Union was very successful.
The Kuomintang conquered a large piece of the land in China.
And then Stalin made a judgment.
Now it's the time for the Chinese communists to take over.
So then they had uprisings everywhere.
So only at that time, Kuomintang realized that they were food.
But this strategy was still working.
So then in the Second World War, the Chinese communists, under the instructions of Stalin and also Chinese communists, realized how important the United Front is.
So then with the instructions from Stalin and also their own maturity.
So Mao Zedong portrait the Chinese Communist Party as a Communist Party only in the name.
We are qualitatively different from Soviet Communist Party.
He told American journalists in Yunnan and these American journalists wrote books about Chinese communists, portraiting them as a nationalistic party, portraiting them as national heroes, portraiting them as heroes in the Second World War, forming allies with Americans.
And indeed, the American government was fooled by the Chinese communists at that time.
And that is how in 1946, Washington made a huge decision.
The huge decision is that the American government would no longer support Kuomintang anymore.
So when the Civil War broke out, Soviet Union was supporting the Chinese communists, but the American government decided not to support Kuomintang anymore.
So the neutrality of this American government was actually a consequence of being fooled by the Chinese communists.
Only after the Korean War, during the Korean War, the American government realized that the Chinese communists was a true communist.
But then, fairly soon, just a few decades later, they were fooled again.
There was a conflict between the Chinese communists and the Soviet communists.
They thought they could use this, they could edge this.
And then they confused.
So they thought this conflict is related to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
But that is just wrong.
So the Chinese Communist Party, the nature of that party is the same as the Soviet Communist Party.
So strategically using their conflict is one thing.
Confused about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is a completely different thing.
So then that is how in the 1980s the American government decided to help the Chinese.
So at that time, Soviet Union was still there, and so they thought that was the way to in the Cold War.
So that's part of the Cold War strategy.
The full cooperation with the Chinese communists in the 1980s, that was already wrong.
That's a wrong starting point.
And then 1989, the massacres in Tiananmen Square actually didn't wake up Washington.
So just they, the only change of the Washington strategy after 1989 was not to cooperate militarily anymore.
But still, Washington had a hope that what happened in Taiwan could happen in China.
Around 2002, the American government helped the Chinese to join WTO.
And a huge amount of resources poured into China.
And so then the Chinese, the booming of the Chinese economy really helped the Chinese communists.
And the reason that Washington has been fooled by the Chinese Communist Party has many things to do with the intellectual basis.
So scholars, China experts in the United States, a large proportion of them don't understand the totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
So when there is no thorough understanding of the totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party, then you'll have the illusions.
Yeah, I mean, just a disastrous misunderstanding.
And I mean, also, I think, you know, aided by some very influential Americans who, I guess, really either really wanted to believe it was true or were somehow, you know, kind of, you know, engaged financially.
You know, you have written this, you know, sort of deep scholarly work, you know, sort of really digging into all the different dimensions of how the Chinese Communist Party works and how totalitarianism works.
Tell me a little bit about your background.
Like, how is it that you came into this huge body of knowledge that you've developed?
My research about the nature of a communist regime started very early.
So it's actually started in the Cultural Revolution when I was a teenage.
So there were two major things struck me.
One important thing is the nature of the Cultural Revolution.
So the Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao Zedong, and that was, according to the Chinese Communist Party's definition, that was a class struggle.
And the Chinese Communist Party said that the class struggle, in a socialist stage, you always have a class struggle until we enter the communism.
But in my view, in my understanding, this is a self-contradiction because the so-called communism is a classless society.
That's a Marxism.
But if in the whole socialist stage, you have class struggles, but how could you eliminate classes through class struggles?
So I thought that is a self-contradiction.
And that also shows that in a socialist society, you have classes, and the socialist society creates classes.
So then that triggers my curiosity to do a research about why in a socialist society it generates classes.
And by the way, there is a famous book by a Yugoslavia communist called Jilas.
So the title of the book is the New Class.
So that book was banned in China, but the idea was circulating.
So I was among those try to continue this kind of exploration, intellectual exploration about the nature of a socialist society.
Another important event struck me at that time was the Soviet Union's tanks crushed the Prague Spring.
So our understanding at that time was that Soviet Union and China, these are all communist regimes.
But how could a communist regime crush another communist regime by using their tanks?
And the Chinese communists portrayed Soviet Union as an imperialism, called them as a socialist imperialism.
So then I thought that's another contradiction.
So how could a communist regime evolve into an imperialism?
And by learning imperialism is the last stage of capitalism.
I continued this exploration since I came to the United States for my PhD.
So that was in the mid-1980s.
And one of my supervisors, my professors, was Janus Kwonai from Hungary.
So in his lectures, he started from totalitarianism.
So my further exploration about totalitarianism started since then.
And then for the current book, just newly published, I started writing this book since 2012.
Since 2012, when I was experiencing the changes in China and convinced that the peaceful transformation into democracy would not be possible,
so then I decided to write this book to collect all of my faults that have been accumulated in decades of time.
So after more than 12 years, so eventually this is published.
You mentioned you were a teenager during the Cultural Revolution in China.
So were you relocated to the countryside?
What happened to you?
I was in Beijing, and my high school actually was the birthplace of the right guard movement.
This high school affiliated with Tsinghua University.
And from the very beginning of the right-guard movement, person like me was a target of the movement.
And being a target of the movement also played important roles.
So the reason I was exploring new classes in a socialist system is related to that background.
And then I went to the countryside.
So concretely, I went to Heilongjiang province, which is actually my farm was very close to Soviet Union, just 20 miles from Soviet Union.
So I spent 10 years there in the farm.
Since I thought as a teenager, I thought I understood urban Situations in a socialist economy, but I didn't understand rural.
And 80% of Chinese were in rural areas.
So then I voluntarily went to the farm at the end of 1967.
And then because of my research on the classes in a socialist system, I became a counter-revolutionary and I was under arrest.
After more than a year of imprisonment, so the punishment was changed to hard labor under monitoring until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
That experience helped me a lot in understanding the nature of totalitarianism.
So when I emphasized repeatedly again and again that a totalitarian regime would not allow for existence of any organization, actually it's not from the books.
It's from personal experience.
Actually, what I was doing at that time was only reading Karl Marx.
And I wrote articles trying to apply methodology from Karl Marx to analyze the socialist society and mail my articles to my friends.
And then they charged me as organizing a counter-revolutionary organization.
That was completely fabricated.
I didn't do anything like that.
So at the beginning, I thought my thinking was unorthodoxy.
So then they criticized my thinking.
That's understandable.
But actually, they didn't emphasize on that part.
Instead, they fabricated the case.
They said I organized something which doesn't exist.
So when this repeatedly repeated enough, then all of a sudden I understand this is something really serious.
So they can take your life with this kind of crime.
Totalitarianism means that they do not allow for existence of any organization.
So internally and also externally.
And that is why under this kind of a regime, it's impossible to transform peacefully into democracy because democracy has to have a civil society.
Civil society means independent organizations, means citizens have to organize themselves only when citizens organize themselves.
They have the power.
So when no one can organize anything, then no one has power.
So this is actually really the key of understanding totalitarianism.
You know, one of the observations in this famous book, Democracy in America, from years back was that the author believed that the organizing principle, the thing that made America special, the thing that made America successful and unique and had all this opportunity was these, what you described as sort of self-organizing,
mediating institutions that somehow existed between the people and government.
But self-organizing was the critical element.
And it's so fascinating that you mentioned this in this context.
It's almost like this is precisely what for a totalitarian communist regime is completely unacceptable.
I think what the Chinese leadership, the Chinese communist leadership today would say is they would say, well, yeah, you know, maybe we had some of this totalitarian, these totalitarian problems in the past, and maybe there were some excesses.
Of course, they still revere Mao.
He's still kind of in the mausoleum.
People still go and visit him, his corpse and so forth.
But today, look, there's all this prosperity and it's completely changed, right?
And this is why we should be investing.
And actually, it's America that's the warmonger.
The simplest way to understand the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is to look at the relationship between the party and the armed forces and the relationship between the party and the courts and the relationship between the party and the lawmaking.
So just by looking at these three aspects, it's absolutely clear that all the armed forces are controlled, completely controlled by the party.
All the courts are completely controlled by the party.
And all the lawmaking agencies are completely controlled by the party.
And laws are instruments of the party.
And so remember, we just talked about the United Front strategy.
The United Front strategy is a huge strategy.
So Mao Zedong used to say that we have three most important weapons.
Number one is propaganda.
Number two is military.
Number three is United Front.
So the United Front is as important as everything else.
So here, United Front would cover everything, including foreign relations, including religious, including how they deal with intellectuals, how they deal with China experts.
So any China expert involving China would automatically fall into their United Front strategy.
So they are going to create all kinds of confusions.
So this creation is on purpose.
So just let you have an illusion that looks like China is free.
And indeed, if we are talking about the situation 20 years ago, and at that time, since I'm an economist, so many of my colleagues, including a large number of Nobel laureates, when they visited China, and then when they came back to the United States, they report to everyone that China is free.
So in particular, for the Nobel laureates, when they gave a speech, they say that they could say whatever they want to say.
And so in the classroom or seminar room, people raise all kinds of questions.
So in terms of raising questions or comments, they do whatever they like.
They were actually partly true, partly true.
The reason partly true is because of this United Front strategy.
And the United Front strategy is very successful in the sense that once you have already the illusion, you are not going to challenge the Communist Party anyway.
So when you are not challenging the Communist Party, then sure, you can say whatever you want to say.
Particularly for economists, they are not going to call for civil society.
They don't emphasize on civil society.
Most of them even don't care so much about human rights.
So if you don't talk about human rights, you don't talk about the civil society, you don't talk about the self-organization, and you don't challenge the communists, sure, then you say whatever you want to say.
However, even at that time, whoever tried to establish an independent organization with a political goal, political goal doesn't mean you want to challenge communists for the power.
The political goal could be very local, just protecting your own property rights, you are in trouble.
Whoever try to do that, you are in trouble.
But if you self-censored or you have no interest on those issues, then you have a feeling that you are free.
So this is the United Front is the key.
So one must penetrate the United Front strategy to really understand what is the purpose and what is the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
Well, Chang Gang, I want to just touch a little bit on something that you discovered through your work.
And this will just give people the flavor of some of what they may find in institutional genes in your book.
But you highlight in there as the emergence of what you call RADT or RAT.
I don't know how you choose to pronounce it, but regionally administered totalitarianism.
This is a kind of a unique feature to Chinese communism.
And you believe that it's one of the things that's allowed the party to maintain its power alongside the United Front efforts that you just described.
So if you could just briefly tell me a little bit about that.
Right, right, right.
So this regionally administered totalitarianism is a very, very important feature of the Chinese totalitarian society.
First of all, it's a totalitarian in the sense that you have a top-down party control.
It's the central authorities of the party.
So strategically, it controls everything.
So what are strategic aspects?
So the number one is ideology.
The ideology means how you are going to interpret the legitimacy of the Communist Party, how to interpret this dictatorship.
And by the way, dictatorship is not our description.
It's not a negative labeling.
This is in their constitution.
So dictatorship is in the state constitution, it's in the party's constitution.
It's their constitution.
So how to interpret their dictatorship.
So that is a strategic.
And then the party line, that's a strategic.
And personnel matters, the most important personnel appointments, promotions, and the principles of promotions, demotion, things like all of this are strategic.
And also strategically, what the party now is going to push.
So these are the decided top-down.
For all the details, for the technical things, for admin, for resource allocation, all of these are actually distributed to local authorities.
So by local means that you have a provincial level, you'll have a municipal level, and then you'll have a county level.
And below the county level, you have a township level, so on and so forth.
So down to the county level, there are nearly 3,000 of them.
So they are going to figure out details.
So the central authority is going to tell them, you work for GDP growth, but how to facilitate, how to fulfill that goal, the central authorities would say that either you do it or you lost your position.
So you find your way out.
So the central authorities would not care about the details.
So that's one example is the growth.
Another example is the physical stimulus.
So when the global financial crisis hit China, they launched a gigantic physical stimulus package.
So the whole world was astounded by how large the Chinese authorities could mobilize.
But the reality is that the central authority only allocated a small proportion of the resources.
All the rest have to be found out by the local authorities.
The provincial level, the city level, and the county level.
You find your way out.
So that's what the premier said at that time.
And then talking about nowadays the green energy.
So everyone was impressed by how China pushed forward this green energy, this transformation.
How could they achieve that?
Again, by this strategy.
So they just, so Xi Jin said the green mountain is more important.
So you have to find a way for the green mountains.
So that's the green energy strategy.
So the way of solving their incentive problems is actually relies on this particular type of structure.
So under this structure, Almost all the Chinese counties are self-contained.
In that way, the counties are comparable with other counties.
So counties are comparable and cities are comparable.
Provinces are comparable because there's no specialization.
So when they are comparable, the central authorities can organize competition.
competition, regions against the regions, counties against the counties, cities against the cities, provinces against the provinces.
So that kind of a tournament competition provided huge incentives.
So you have high-powered incentives to motivate the local authorities to push forward to fulfill the targets set by the central authorities.
But here there's a key issue.
The key issue is that loyalty is number one.
So you have to loyal to your boss.
And you have this nested nested chain of commands in terms of appointments, in terms of promotion, and in terms of evaluation.
So no one is independent.
There is a confusion in academic work.
The confusion is to confuse this regionally administered totalitarianism into this so-called federal system.
The confusion confused China with the federal.
In a federal structure, you have an independent local elections.
And the local governors, the mayors, they are elected and they have to be responsible to their constituencies.
But in China, all the local cadres are appointed from above and they are only accountable to their bosses.
So they are not accountable to their constituencies.
There is no constituency.
There is no local constituency.
There is no local election.
So this is a totalitarian regime.
This is a top-down totalitarian regime.
But here, the key is that the Chinese version of that is much more flexible and much more resilient than the counterpart in Soviet Union.
But to understand this, where that comes from, we need lots of time.
So in my book, I have several chapters explaining how this whole thing has been evolved.
Well, and I mean, this is, it's very interesting because during the Cultural Revolution, I often will tell people that the communists were of all these kind of attempts at destroying tradition and destroying traditional culture, the Chinese communists were perhaps the most effective, but they also didn't destroy everything.
In fact, they kept some things that were very useful to them, like, for example, Chinese military strategy from Sun Tzu and others in the Warring States period and so forth.
And perhaps some of these structures of, as you write, of kind of imperial organizing and so forth actually proved very useful to them.
They didn't quite manage to eliminate everything and perhaps use some of it.
If our political leaders, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in the US, wherever, they can understand the nature of the regime that they're dealing with, they would probably make different decisions about how to interact, right?
And I just maybe as we finish up, if you could comment a little bit on that, because you're right, the United Front has been unbelievably effective in fooling all sorts of people, including even the Chinese people.
Right, indeed.
The influence of the United Front is everywhere.
So it's including all the foreign governments.
and Chinese intellectuals abroad in particular.
If we are talking to Washington or talking to the leaders of democracies worldwide,
then here really the lesson is that one must understand how the Cold War proceeded and eventually the democracies won the Cold War.
But actually the Cold War has not ended.
So when people thought that there was a final victory of the Cold War or even said that was the end of history, that was a misunderstanding because the Chinese communists are still there.
And now it's a continuation, just in a different format.
So China now is a part of the global trading system.
It's a global market.
And China has controlled substantial parts of supply chains.
This actually can be very, very dangerous when there are wars.
And so when we are talking about the wars, again, here comes to illusions democracies used to have about the nature of the Chinese communists.
So there was an illusion saying that the Chinese didn't have, Chinese don't have intention to expand their power to have power projections outside of their territory.
And usually this kind of assertion has been, is backed up by looking at the Chinese Empire.
So they are saying that, look, the Chinese Empire had a great war, and the Great War itself actually contains the power of the Chinese Empire.
First of all, it's wrong about the Chinese Empire.
Second, more importantly, the totalitarian regime of China is not Chinese, not a traditional Chinese empire.
This is a totalitarian regime.
And then if we look at the matter of facts, then what is the goal of the Chinese economic reform?
The so-called Chinese economic reform started not by using the term of reform, using the term of reform that actually followed the communists in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Really, the Chinese communists, their original wordings for this so-called reform is the for modernization.
Therefore, modernization, one of the key is the modernization of defense.
So military modernization has been a key, has been a goal.
It never ever changed.
So in the 1980s, the American military helped the Chinese military, try to help them in every way to help them to become really a fighting force against the Soviet Union, but they didn't know this is actually a totalitarian army.
This is the Communist Party's army.
This is Communist Party's armed forces.
And so they have been expanding, they have been modernizing, and now you see they are more matured.
So when they are matured, they are going to project powers worldwide.
They are already doing so, and they are going to do a lot more when they are more matured, further matured.
And when war breaks out, and when they at the same time also control supply chains, so that is going to be devastating.
So the impact is going to be a lot more serious than what the Soviet Union could do at that time.
So here, understanding the nature of the regime and taking all necessary measures to eventually decoupling is necessary.
So actually, this is a life and death trade-off.
So this is not just about the profits.
It's so much more than money making, so much more than profit.
So many businesses, even today in Germany, in particular, many businessmen are still talking about investing in China, still have a huge amount of investment plans in China, but they didn't and they don't understand what are going to be the consequences.
So China is a much larger threat than today's Russia.
Russia is shrinking.
The Chinese communists is expanding.
So this is actually no comparison.
And taking necessary measures is actually bottom line.
Why is it so obvious to you, why should it be so obvious to people that the Chinese Communist Party is expansive, has this idea to expand?
Because they always say, we're only interested in our own territory.
We're only interested in maintaining power here.
The way they maintain the power is intimately related to expansion of the power.
In particular, now when they already have the capacity.
When they didn't have the capacity, then so you have Deng Xiaoping said that we should better hide our strength.
So here the key is hiding.
He was not saying that we don't need the strength.
So the key is hiding.
Hiding means misleading, means cheating.
So now they find they are strong enough.
So then there's no need for hiding anymore.
And they thought, in particular, if we are looking at their investments in military, you find they invest hugely.
As long as you see how quick they are able to produce, to produce warships, how quick they are able to produce war airplanes and to produce missiles, to produce nuclear weapons.
So as long as you see how quick they can do all of this, then you know they are in fact converting the economy into a semi-military economy.
So when you are facing that, it becomes so obvious that why they need this.
So if the only thing they care about is within their territory, then they don't need this.
The reason they need this is to project power.
And they are already doing everywhere.
So you don't need arguments.
So you just need to look at the facts.
So the facts already tell us that they are expanding.
And not realizing these basic facts is going to have fatal consequences.
You know, I think the CCP itself and its agents would say something like, look, America is also wanting to have a very large army and expand it and put a lot of money in there.
Clearly, they're looking to have expansion, to the exact same thing you just accused us of wanting to do.
How do you respond to that?
Looking at the American military deployments worldwide, here we have to go back to history.
So this is actually the consequence of the Second World War.
So then since then, there is a world order.
And in this world order, you have to have a world police to keep this world order.
The reality is the United States with its allies together, they keep the world order.
So that's the reality.
So talking about the U.S. alone is just wrong.
This is already part of the propaganda and part of the United Front strategy.
So part of the United Front strategy is to dissolve the allies.
So if the U.S. was alone, if the U.S. didn't have the allies, then indeed there is a good excuse for anyone else to challenge the role that the U.S. has been playing.
But here, really, the key is that U.S. never ever is alone.
So during the Second World War, the United States worked together with the Allies.
So before 1991, the communist camp was the same, right?
So they were not alone, not Soviet alone.
So Soviet Union together with the Communist allies.
So you had two camps.
So one camp was the NATO.
The other camp was the Soviet Union led this Warsaw Pact.
And China used to be part of it.
And then China had conflicts with Soviet Union.
But actually, China continued whatever Soviet Union has done at that time.
And actually, Kissinger had a book talking about the difference between China and the West.
And in his book, he talked about that in the West, long ago, long before the United States became dominant power, the tradition is to have allies.
The tradition is a kind of collective order.
So you have contracts among the allies and allies work together to keep the order.
So this is a Western tradition.
And Kissinger, in my view, his diagonals about China is too much focused on the Chinese empire, too much on the history of the Chinese empire.
So he emphasized on the tradition of the imperial China.
But actually, this is the communist China.
And the reason today is communist China, people might thought that was a continuation of the Chinese empire is because unfortunately from the communist point of view that all the leading communist regimes collapsed.
So that is the reason why China is alone.
And China had conflicts with Vietnam, although Vietnam is a communist regime.
And China didn't have intimate relationships with North Korea.
Otherwise, they are allies.
So it's alone, not by choice.
It's the reality.
But that is a communist regime with the allies, with the democracy allies, the democratic allies.
Chengang, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
A final quick thought as we finish?
To understand how the communist totalitarianism becomes so powerful, I would strongly recommend interested audiences to read my book, since we need lots of backgrounds, we need lots of discussions.
And so in a short talk like this, we simply cannot explain some of those very important things.
So I strongly recommend people to read the book.
I'll second that recommendation.
Professor Cheng Gong-shu, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much for having me to share my views with the audience.
Thank you all for joining Professor Cheng Gong-shu and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
▲
Export Selection