Explain more about this, please. You picked an obviously ridiculous example as a comparison to show how absurd this idea is.
Here is a quote, one which reflects what the media has been reporting for years. Ask ChatGPT, google this, whatever. You can find an endless number of similar quotes.
Despite these significant honours, Xi’s legacy will still not be secure.
Only showing the ambition to take Taiwan will cement Xi’s place as a remarkable person in China’s history.
Failure to do so could make him vulnerable to retaliation from his inner-party rivals and leave him facing an uncertain fate.
This is what the media reports, China experts (which I’m not) and other political scientists (which I’m also not) say. There are scores and scores of reports like this. Anyone following this (which I am) knows that this is commonly accepted as mostly likely to be true.
But you have an insight which the experts have overlooked.
Can you explain why China experts are wrong and why it’s absurd?
The official North Korean announcement of the execution on 12 December of Chang Song-thaek, the North’s second most prominent official and uncle of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is a brutal but potentially politically risky move by Mr Kim to assert his political primacy and a shift towards an increasingly centralised and personalised system of rule.
Mr Chang’s swift and bloody elimination (unconfirmed reports talk of him having been executed by machine-gun), some four days after he was shown on state television being dragged out of a meeting of the politburo, is relatively rare in a country where the leadership, notwithstanding its past authoritarian crackdowns, has tended to remove political opponents with limited fanfare. Today’s announcement appears to be a throwback to the 1950s, when such uncompromising personal purges were more commonplace.
(Bolding in original)
If, in fact, old age or illness would be the only possible reason for Kim Jong-un to lose his dictatorship, then having a potential rival shouldn’t be a problem, right?
What would be other possible reasons for the brutal murder? (It’s not every day that political rivals get executed by machine guns. Why would this happen?)
Let me repeat what I said earlier - China is a civilization that has been around for 2000+ years. During that time, strong governments expanded to take what they perceived as part of China. When the government was weak, the peripheral provinces spun off as loosely attached vassal states and independent kingdoms. This was particularly noticeable with the decline of the Qing in the 1800s and early 1900’s. They lost Taiwan, they lost Tibet, Europeans marching into China, they were forced to allow drug dealing by Britain, forced them to hand over (‘lease”) Macau and Hong Kong and even the foreign zones in Shanghai as independent enclaves. Japan took over the country and brutalized it.
In a country and culture that’s all about “face”, ceding any part of your extended territory is a sign that you are a weak government like all China’s past failures, and retaking wayward provinces or enclaves is a sign that your government is strong. Beyond politics and power grabs, it’s also about saving face - not allowing parts of their alleged historical homeland to be independent, don’t be weak. Make China Great Again.
The MAGA idea naturally resonates with a hefty fraction of the US populace, and it’s easy for jingoistic propaganda to enlist an additional hefty fraction. MCGA works just as well over there, in fact better. Because there is rather little opposing public information and no opposition party bleating about the historical lies and the drawbacks to a shooting war.
One of the legit challenges each Chinese leader faces is they need to be a little more nationalistic than their populace to be seen as “strong”. But it’s real easy for that to turn into a positive feedback loop where staying ahead of public opinion forces them into ever more bellicose pronouncements.
But the interesting bit to me, is that China’s ambitions do not extend beyond it’s traditional limits. They’ve had the size and power, for example, that they could effectively militarily occupy Indochina, or Myanmar, or any other surrounding nations, much as the USSR did with eastern Europe or Russia with central Asia, or the USA with the Philippines and Puerto Rico (or coveting Greenland and Canada), sending large forces to assorted nations etc., or the British and other European colonial ventures. But China has generally stuck to itself, to traditional parts of the previous Chinese empires, with the exception perhaps of the South China Sea. They have no problem with expanding diplomatic influence and commercial/financial endeavours, but not military. It seems to me to be a different mindset rather than a lack of ambition.
Well, yeah - China has gone through expansionist phases. Both Burma (Myanmar) and Nepal paid intermittent diplomatic tribute to the Qing empire after 18th century border wars. What held the Chinese up in the south was a combination of disease, unfavorable terrain and tenacious defense by highly militant states then at the height of their strength. Ming China in the 15th century at its height was about 2.5 million sq. miles. The Qing state in the course of the 17th-18th centuries more than doubled that to a peak of about 5.7 million sq. miles. Modern China is about 3.7 million sq. miles.
Where did that missing 2 million sq. miles go? Mostly Russia as well as now independent countries like Mongolia and Taiwan.
In part because it was large and varied enough to have most of what it needed and enough trouble within its borders to keep it busy. And an economy that was not based on constant growth and expansion and thus new markets, labour, and resources.
The NY Times was wetting its pants today over the military threats faced by the US and its inability to adapt, innovate, supply itself with the tools and machinery of war, and develop flexible new strategies. China was seen as a principal threat. The attached map of US military bases around the world suggested the US may still be a threat to world peace.
At the core of this, you need to understand Han Chauvinism. The way modern China has been built, there’s a belief that nobody but the Han could successfully integrate into it without becoming sand in the gears, gumming up all the works.
Significant parts of China run under the assumption of a uniformity of operation that is consensus nationwide. For example, nearly all Chinese High Speed Rail stations are from a common book of templates. You pick which one suits your layout, make a few minor modifications and plonk it down. Same with the rails themselves, subway stations, subway cars. This extends fractally across all of China, from education to language to healthcare to cultural values etc.
The extant ethnic minorities in China have been begrudgingly grandfathered in but have undergone a process of “Sinicization” where they are expected to adapt themselves to the “China OS” and not the other way around and their minority status is largely reduced down to caricatured costuming and exotic food & dances that can be monetized for tourism purposes for the curious Han majority.
I’ll never forget, I was in a museum somewhere in China in an exhibit about the diverse ethnical multiculturalism of China’s 56 ethnic minorities and there was a giant photo with a member from all 56 minorities posing, 55 of them in traditional ethnic garb and the Han guy standing there in a football jersey and shorts. It was such an emblematic example of what people are really thinking.
One of my favorite quotes about this is:
The unique arrogance of the Americans is they believe everyone can become American. The unique arrogance of the Chinese is they believe nobody else can become Chinese.
And that Han are fundamentally a master race inherently superior to all others. A superior race living a superior culture in a country with the largest population while lead by an authoritarian with megalomaniac tendencies. What could possibly go wrong?
I think that’s the least charitable way of looking at it. While there are definitely some people who go about operating under these assumptions, a far more common worldview might be that the Han are best at being Han. Foundational to much of Chinese geopolitics is the belief that there’s no point exporting the Chinese system because the Chinese system simply won’t work anywhere else. Instead, each nation state should find a system that works for them and the Chinese is in support of the concept of “sovereignty” which is that each state must decide for themselves which systems work.
Of course, like any concept in geopolitics, it’s more observed in the breach but it’s helpful to understand the intellectual conditions which gives rise to such beliefs.
OK? And? The entire point of Han Chauvinism is even if placed in that situation, all they care about is extracting tribute and favorable trade relationships. Everyone else is left to go about their lives as before because the Chinese are too arrogant to bother influencing their lives in any other ways.
Revanchism is usually less about actually wanting whatever it is that you feel is missing and more about not letting something that’s “rightfully yours” be with someone else.
Yes, the issue isn’t that Xi Jinping wants to utilize the resources and industry of Taiwan to the greatest benefit to China possible with the utmost efficiency (if that’s what he wanted, he could normalize relations with Taiwan and come to an amicable agreement, or even just maintain the status quo which includes being their #1 trading partner).
The issue is that China claims that Taiwan is a rightful part of China, and they lack de facto control over Taiwan, which is to someone like Xi Jinping a national embarrassment of the highest order.
You see the same thing with Hong Kong. Cracking down on Hong Kong has already started and will continue to destroy everything that makes it valuable to China as a commercial hub, but they’re doing it anyways, because the point isn’t the material benefit that Hong Kong can provide as a center of international commerce, it is about what China’s leaders viewsas the restoration of China’s national honor and sovereignty.
You’d hope they’d not be so stupid as to repeat the Empire of Japan’s disastrous mistake.
In fact, I’m fairly confident he isn’t nearly that stupid. If Xi attacks Taiwan, it will be because he judges that the United States is divided enough to fail to respond (and he’s certainly doing his best to make sure that is the case, what with the flood of propaganda that is TikTok).
The concept of a Chinese polity that goes through cycles of legitimacy (and as a result growth) and illegitimacy (and as a result fragmentation) goes back 5,000 years. While that is officially not a notion that the CCP subscribes to, the idea the legitimacy of a state is drawn from its performance (rather than the consent of the governed, as we in the democratic parts of the world believe) is still popular in China, and while performance is measured on multiple metrics (including economic growth and a rising standard of living) territorial integrity is also absolutely a major part of the story.
But I’m surprised you say you find it hard to understand from an American perspective specifically. Remember Manifest Destiny? Unlike Taiwan, the American West was never part of the United States.
Jerry Rawlings was the military dictator of Ghana who took power in a coup, then democratized over the years and continued as a democratically elected president. He was term-limited by the constitution he had put in place, so when his term was up he retired and let somebody else be elected. He got out of the dictator biz. That’s the sort of thing they call “exception that proves (i.e. challenges) the rule.”