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  Our guide showed us where the last royal occupant of the Forbidden City, Emperor Puyi, was stripped of power in 1911, at the age of five, during China’s Republican Revolution. He remained in the old Imperial apartments at the back of the palace until 1924. Puyi abdicated in the midst of the “century of humiliation,” a period of Chinese history that Chairman Xi had described to President Trump and those who joined the two leaders for dinner at Mar-a-Lago six months earlier. The century of humiliation was the unhappy era during which China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost wars, made major concessions to foreign powers, and endured brutal occupation. Humiliation began with Great Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. It ended with Allied and Chinese defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 and Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.9

  As the tour ended, I was even more convinced that our dramatic shift in policy was needed and long overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and return as the Middle Kingdom. But for me, it exposed the fears as well as the grand ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond and regain the honor lost during the “century of humiliation.” The party was obsessed with control because control was necessary to allay its fears and fulfill its ambitions.

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  THE HISTORY that our Chinese hosts omitted was as revealing as the history they promoted. The two leaders and their wives preceded us into the Hospital for Cultural Relics at the National Palace Museum. As we observed craftspeople restoring artifacts, it was clear that Xi was resurrecting what Mao had tried to destroy: historical memory of China’s Imperial past. Mao was an iconoclast; Xi was a nostalgic. Mao destroyed order and invited the chaos of continuous revolution; Xi evoked Confucian moral order to maintain control and encourage conformity.

  The 1.5-ton portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong that hung over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, facing Tiananmen Square, was impossible to miss. But our guide did not mention it; nor did he make any mention of Mao, even though the square occupies the space between that great portrait and the mausoleum that holds Mao’s crystal coffin and his embalmed body. It was at the Gate of Heavenly Peace that, on October 1, 1949, Mao announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He and his fellow revolutionaries believed that the state had to be torn down to save it. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia seemed a workable model. By the time Mao gave his speech in 1949, the Chinese people had endured fourteen years of brutal Japanese occupation after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and a costly civil war that followed from 1945 to 1949.

  Xi repeatedly spoke of Japan’s brutal occupation of China and portrayed the Chinese Communist Party as a savior that had liberated the Chinese people from Japanese oppressors. Even as we looked out at Tiananmen Square, our hosts cast their efforts to achieve “national rejuvenation” as the party’s triumph over the century of humiliation. But as I looked upon the square’s gray vastness, my mind could not help but replay images of fanatical Red Guards from Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 or the tanks that brutally repressed the student demonstrations of 1989.

  Chairman Xi dwells on the century of humiliation for another reason: to gloss over the first decades of party rule that followed, which were even worse. The application of Maoist theory between the end of the Civil War in 1949 and Mao’s demise nearly three decades later killed tens of millions of Chinese through misrule, policy-induced famine, and political purges, to say nothing of the disastrous Maoist-inspired revolutions in other parts of the world.

  Six years after National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger orchestrated President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution and forced to work in a tractor factory, succeeded Mao as paramount leader. Deng gradually dismantled Maoist policies. From 1978 to 1989, he focused on economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy. In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”10 Under Deng and his successors, such as Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012), the rejection of Maoist economic policies and political excesses was explicit. But that changed when Xi Jinping assumed the premiership in 2012.

  To master the past as a means of securing his future, Xi cultivated a more benign interpretation of Chinese Communist Party history, one based on three phases of progress. First, Mao Zedong ended the century of humiliation. Second, Deng Xiaoping and his successors generated wealth. Third, Xi Jinping returned China to greatness. Xi’s portrayal of Mao as savior rather than tyrant represented more than a manipulation of history; it required the suppression of personal trauma. Xi and his family suffered physical and psychological abuse during the Cultural Revolution. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior party official and veteran of the revolution, was imprisoned and tortured. The Red Guards ransacked his childhood home and forced his family to flee. One of Xi’s sisters died from the hardship. Xi was brought before a jeering crowd during a “struggle session,” a humiliation ritual used during the Cultural Revolution, where his own mother denounced him. Like many of his contemporaries who are now at the top of the party, Xi was forced to work in the countryside. He rarely speaks of the horrors inflicted on his family at the outset of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1968. Instead, his propaganda apparatus portrays his seven years of hard labor as an uplifting coming-of-age story that explains his resilience as well as his empathy for the hardships suffered by the less fortunate people of rural China. Xi’s reluctance to criticize Mao and the Cultural Revolution is more than a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which victims develop positive feelings toward their captors and sympathy for their causes. Xi is unwilling to renounce the Mao era mainly because he understands that any historical questioning of the Communist Party past could morph into skepticism of and opposition to the Communist Party present. Contemplation of the Maoist period’s failures might raise doubts about the party’s ability to deliver on the China Dream through absolute control. Losing control of the past is, for autocrats, the first step toward losing control of the future.11

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  MANIPULATING THE collective memory of the Chinese people requires ever greater feats of censorship and nationalistic education under Xi. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms generated prosperity, but they also caused ideological incoherence. The contradictions between Communist orthodoxy and a highly globalized economy were starker than ever thirty years after Deng said, “Let some people get rich first” and “Getting rich is glorious.”12 Authoritarian capitalism created ample opportunities for corruption and produced a bourgeois class larger than any other self-proclaimed Communist country has ever seen. When he assumed leadership of the party in 2012, Xi was determined to reemphasize the ideological underpinning of CCP rule but to couch it in a rhetoric of Chinese chauvinism and national destiny. In speeches, he revived Mao’s claim in his Little Red Book (a collection of 267 of the dictator’s aphorisms) that it was “an objective law independent of man’s will [that] the socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system.” In tandem, he has promoted a “community of common destiny for mankind,” a bid for global leadership that strongly echoes his dynastic forebears, based on the idea that China reigns supreme over tianxia—“everything beneath heaven.”

  Xi was the consensus pick to lead the party in 2012, a bona fide member of what Australian journalist John Garnaut has labeled the “princeling cohort.” The princelings, direct descendants of the party elders who fought and won the revolution in 1949, share existential angst that they may succumb to the historical cycle that destroyed every dynasty that came before them. For Xi and his contemporaries at the top of the CCP, maintaining control and achieving national rejuvenation can be matters of life or death.13

  Thi
s attitude was further reinforced by the Tiananmen Square protest. In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square to demand democratic governance, free speech, and a free press. Within a week, many of the protesters began hunger strikes. The Chinese government declared martial law and dispatched mechanized PLA units to the capital. On the night of June 3, the PLA closed in on the center of Beijing, firing live ammunition into crowds of people on the streets. The army stormed the square at 1 a.m. on June 4. Estimates of civilian deaths ranged from several hundred to ten thousand. The massacre generated global outrage. As I glimpsed Tiananmen Square, I remembered that history and thought once more about the paradox of China’s growing power and fragility.

  For the CCP’s leaders, the lesson of Tiananmen was never to loosen its grip on power. Xi and the party see 1989 as a period during which the Chinese Communist Party might have joined the Soviet Union in collapse. As with Putin and the Russian Siloviki, party leadership viewed Mikhail Gorbachev as weak. Gorbachev, who visited Beijing amid the Tiananmen Square protests to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Soviet-Communist China relations, lost faith in the primacy of the Soviet party elites and compromised. Xi and his cohort believe that Gorbachev’s effort to make the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a “party of the whole people” was misguided and led to the Soviet Union’s demise.

  While obsessed with party purity and order at home, the CCP is determined to advance its system of authoritarian capitalism abroad to expand Chinese power and influence at the expense of countries that adhere to democratic principles and free-market economic practices. On the morning of the second day of our visit, we stood on the steps of the Great Hall of the People as the American and Chinese leaders, clad in overcoats against the brisk autumn air, reviewed a People’s Liberation Army honor guard. Off to one side was a throng of Chinese and American elementary school children leaping up and down and enthusiastically waving the flags of the two nations. The kids, who had been cued to begin their cheering too soon, were visibly exhausted by the time the two leaders passed in front of them to enter the Great Hall and begin the day’s talks. Pottinger (who wouldn’t be stopped from attending the second day’s meetings) leaned over and deadpanned into my ear, “The children are getting an early start on their social credit scores.” Such bits of humor were what made our intense schedule feel tolerable—and would have landed a Chinese blogger in jail.

  The ceremony and the tour of the Forbidden City left me with the impression that the party’s leaders believe that they have a fleeting window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor. To seize upon this opportunity, the CCP integrates internal and external efforts to expand its comprehensive national power. Internally, realizing the so-called China Dream requires unprecedented economic growth, popular support for national rejuvenation, and tight control of the population. Externally, satisfying the narrative of national rejuvenation renders a dramatic expansion of Chinese economic, political, and military influence indispensable. The CCP’s strategy relies on co-option and coercion to influence China’s population, other nations, and international organizations to act in the party’s interests. The party also attempts to conceal its intentions and its actions to preclude competition. This strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment integrates a range of cultural, economic, technological, and military efforts. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous, not only to the United States and the free world but also to China’s citizens deemed a threat to the party’s ambitions, is the integrated nature of the party’s effort across government, industry, academia, and the military.

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  TO MAINTAIN its exclusive grip on power in the post-Mao period, the party strove to meet the population’s rising expectations mainly through increased economic opportunity. Since Deng’s reforms, the Chinese people achieved an astonishing rate of growth, which pulled more than 800 million people out of poverty. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, China’s middle class grew by 203 million people. China became the world’s second-largest economy and the largest exporter. Infrastructure and construction projects transformed China’s harbors, airports, railways, and roads, connecting the Chinese people to one another and the world to an unprecedented degree. By the early 2000s, half the world’s cranes were building gleaming skyscrapers in China’s rapidly expanding cities. The party’s goal was to double income levels between 2010 and 2020. This proved unsustainable. Since 2015, China has marked less than 7 percent growth every year, and by 2020, China’s leaders saw this key pillar of their legitimacy, economic growth, fracturing. Policies designed to maintain high rates of growth generated long-term frailties in the economy.14 Vast debt fueled inefficient growth but did not produce profitable returns. Overinvestment in particular sectors led to overcapacity and losses. By early 2020, economic growth had decelerated to the lowest rate in twenty-nine years as capital investment by Chinese firms dropped. To boost the decelerating economy, China cut banks’ reserve rates to free up $126 billion for loans. But then the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in early 2020 and the associated quarantine and travel restrictions affected nearly half of China’s population, slowing China’s economy further. It seemed possible that China’s economic policies designed to keep the party’s exclusive grip on power and allow China to sprint to catch up to the United States might risk what party leaders feared most: internal dissent based on a failure to meet the peoples’ rising expectations.

  The logical way to continue the economic growth that began with Deng’s reforms in the 1980s would have been to reform markets even further, unleashing free enterprise and deemphasizing large, inefficient state-owned companies that lacked incentives to increase productivity and pursue innovative technologies. Instead, under Xi, the party strengthened the primacy of state-owned enterprises (SOE). Although SOEs are inefficient and major sources of waste and corruption, they are critical to maintaining the party’s control over the economy and co-opting the population. SOEs are also foundational to the party’s plans to shift the economy toward high-end manufacturing and dominate critical sectors of the emerging global economy. Xi moved to “strengthen, optimize, and enlarge” state companies, directing more than $1 billion in mergers to create national champion industries such as railway, metals, mining, shipping, and nuclear energy.15

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  UNDER THE party’s strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment, China’s authoritarian system has become ubiquitous. To ensure their grip on power even if they fail to meet their goals for improved standards of living, party leaders emphasized propaganda and accelerated the construction of an unprecedented surveillance state that is more intrusive than that imagined by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Indeed, the party invented the term brainwashing, and today’s efforts have their roots in the thought reform movement that Zhou Enlai initiated in 1951 and the CCP perfected during the Cultural Revolution. Twenty-first-century brainwashing has been upgraded with new technology. For 1.4 billion Chinese people, government propaganda is a seamless part of everyday life. Chinese television news follows a regular agenda: ten to fifteen minutes on Chairman Xi and other CCP leaders, five to ten minutes on Chinese economic achievements, and five to seven minutes on the failures of the rest of the world. There is also routine coverage of the theme that the United States wants to keep China down. Students in universities and high schools must take lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the chairman’s fourteen-point philosophy that emphasizes the party’s “people-centric” approach to governance and the many benefits of the CCP’s supreme leadership over everything. Xi Jinping Thought is the subject of the most popular app in China. The app, whose name translates to “Study Strong Country,” requires users to sign in with their mobile numbers and real names before earning study points through reading articles, commenting daily, and taking multiple-choice tests about the party’s virtues and wise policies.16
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  The social credit score is one of the party’s many tools for co-opting the population into conformity and coercing recalcitrant individuals. The party uses its control of the internet and all forms of communication in combination with artificial intelligence technologies to monitor activities and conversations. The resulting social credit score is meant to determine eligibility for almost all social services, such as loans, internet access, government employment, education, insurance, and transportation.

  Like its dynastic predecessors, the party leadership is particularly concerned about dissent in China’s border regions. The party has acted most aggressively toward the ethnic minority populations and in territories annexed in recent history. In western Xinjiang, for example, where the ethnic-majority Uighurs mainly practice Islam, the party has engaged in systematic repression designed to coerce the population into forswearing their religious and cultural identity in favor of the party’s nationalist ideology. By 2019, the party had detained at least a million Uighurs in concentration camps where they are subjected to systematic brainwashing. Uighur families are forced to house loyal party members so their progress in reeducation can be monitored. The CCP has demolished historic mosques. Ethnic Han have been forcefully resettled into Xinjiang to dilute Uighur culture. Xinjiang has become a testing ground for maintaining ideological purity and psychological as well as cultural control. In Xinjiang’s concentration camps, prisoners begin the day with a flag-raising ceremony; they pass time singing Communist Party songs, praising the party and Xi Jinping, and studying Chinese language, history, and law. The CCP responded to international criticism of these repressive tactics with denial, but evidence mounted. In November 2019, the New York Times uncovered a startling cache of documents allegedly leaked by a member of the CCP. The more than four hundred pages of records revealed party orders to crush all minorities’ opposition, imprison more than one million people in concentration camps, and carry out systematic brainwashing and cultural control. Included in the documents were internal speeches by Chairman Xi directing officials to show “absolutely no mercy” as they crack down on minority populations. He also directed follow-up efforts to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China. Local officials who resisted the party’s orders were purged; a county head in southern Xinjiang was jailed for quietly releasing more than seven thousand inmates.17 The CCP is also repressive, albeit more subtly, in Tibet, and it has continuously chipped away at local autonomy and individual rights in the former colonial territories of Hong Kong and Macao.