I'm just starting to read this "Longer Telegram" about coping with the rise of China. Just the executive summary raises an issue:
At home, Xi has returned China to classical Marxism-Leninism and fostered a quasi-Maoist personality cult, pursuing the systematic elimination of his political opponents. China’s market reforms have stalled and its private sector is now under direct forms of party control. Unapologetically nationalist, Xi has used ethnonationalism to unite his country against any challenges to his authority, internal or external. His treatment of recalcitrant ethnic minorities within China borders on genocide. Xi’s China increasingly resembles a new form of totalitarian police state. In what is a fundamental departure from his risk-averse post-Mao predecessors, Xi has demonstrated that he intends to project China’s authoritarian system, coercive foreign policy, and military presence well beyond his country’s own borders to the world at large. China under Xi, unlike under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, is no longer a status quo power. It has become a revisionist power. For the United States, its allies, and the US-led liberal international order, this represents a fundamental shift in the strategic environment. Ignoring this profound change courts peril. Xi is no longer just a problem for US primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world. [emphasis added]
The basic description of the dangerous nature of the China threat is useful.
But it is disturbing that China is now a revisionist power given that China has prospered within the existing system that America built after World War II. Why the change under Xi Jinping?
Is it unacceptable to Xi for China to prosper while allowing others to continue prospering? Does revenge for the "century of humiliation" they fixate on trump more prosperity?
Or does Xi fear that China has reached the limits of prospering under the American system? Is the writing on the wall for the end of rapid Chinese growth and the beginning of relative decline?
Does Xi want revenge against defeated foreigners or is he afraid of foreigners who have endured China's best shot?
Or is the revenge or fear question one focused on perpetuating the CCP monopoly of power within China?
Perhaps Xi thinks that China has empowered domestic business tycoons enough to raise China's power but that the risk to the party from supporting those tycoons now exceeds the benefits?
That kind of focus on maintaining the power of the CCP within China would fit with the threat perception of the CCP.
