Svetski Rat K(orona)

Xi Jinping Is Not Stalin

How a Lazy Historical Analogy Derailed Washington’s China Strategy
By Michael McFaul
August 10, 2020


In a series of speeches this summer, senior officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump have cast the United States and China as antagonists in a new Cold War. Speaking to the Arizona Commerce Authority in June, U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien compared Chinese President Xi Jinping directly to the Soviet dictator in power when the actual Cold War began: “Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor.”

A month later in California, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave a speech about Xi that President Harry Truman could have delivered about Stalin. “General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology,” he said, adding that Xi’s ideology “informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Echoing American policymakers at the beginning of the Cold War, Pompeo framed the fight with Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as one in which only one side ultimately could win: “If the free world doesn’t change . . . communist China will surely change us.” He later repeated his warning on Twitter, writing, “China is working to take down freedom all across the world.”

In fact, Truman did give a similar speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, establishing what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Warning about the communist threat, Truman declared:

   At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Three years later, in April 1950, Truman approved a secret policy paper known as NSC-68, which laid out his strategy for containing communism around the world. Passages from the document sound eerily like Pompeo’s and O’Brien’s speeches:

   The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency . . . The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.

The Trump administration seems intent on resurrecting this spirit in its dealings with China—indeed, a string of sanctions against CCP and Hong Kong officials, bans on Chinese technology and apps, expulsions of Chinese journalists and students, and the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston all seem designed in part to accelerate a Cold War with Beijing. To their credit, Pompeo, O’Brien, and other U.S. officials recognize that China’s rise will be the defining challenge for U.S. foreign policy in this century. They are also right to underscore that U.S.-Chinese competition is not only about power but also about ideology: the United States is a democracy (albeit an increasingly flawed one); China is a dictatorship that has grown more autocratic under Xi. And like the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, both countries use various media, economic and technological assistance, formal alliances, ties with political parties, covert operations, and in the case of the United States, sometimes even military intervention to advance their respective ideologies.

But is Xi really Stalin’s heir, as O’Brien claimed and as other U.S. officials seem to think? The basis for such a comparison is thin. Perhaps Xi and his comrades truly seek to conquer the entire world and replace all democracies with Marxist-Leninist dictatorships—I am not expert enough to judge their intentions nor currently privy to classified intelligence. Maybe Xi has given his blessing to a secret strategy, much like Truman did when he signed off on NSC-68, that elaborates a grand design to impose communist dictatorships everywhere and rule the world. But as Pompeo himself argued, Washington should “act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but how they behave.” And that is where the analogy with Stalin falls apart.

Xi most closely approximates Stalin in the way he rules his country: he could well remain in power for decades and has created a cult of personality that would impress Stalin’s propagandists. The CCP under Xi runs a ruthless and oppressive dictatorship. It stifles individual freedoms, jails dissidents and rivals, and has sent countless Uighurs and other minorities to internment camps in what some experts have classified as cultural genocide. New technologies give the party surveillance and censorship tools that many Cold War communist regimes could only dream of. But “Xi-ism” is still not Stalinism. Stalin’s regime was far more totalitarian in its control over every aspect of Soviet citizens’ lives. Stalin also killed millions and imprisoned millions more, rivaled in brutality only by Hitler and Mao. Xi does not make this list.

Chinese citizens enjoy much greater autonomy over their own economic well-being than Soviet citizens did in the early days of the Cold War—a product of China’s more open, market-oriented, and globally integrated economy. On this dimension, the comparison is not even close.

Look to foreign policy, and the analogy unravels further. Stalin openly proclaimed his desire for a global communist revolution, hoping to create a network of socialist states under Moscow’s rule—and it wasn’t just talk. In the early years of the Cold War, his Red Army soldiers, intelligence officers, and Communist Party agents aggressively imposed communism across Eastern Europe. He provided aid to Mao’s Chinese Communist Party and covert assistance to communists in Greece, encouraged proxy military forces in the Korean War, and supported coups around the world. He dissolved the Communist International, or Comintern, in 1943, when allied with the United States and Great Britain during World War II, but he replaced it with another global Communist Party alliance, the Cominform, in 1947.

Xi, by contrast, has not orchestrated the overthrow of a single regime. Hong Kong comes closest, considering Beijing’s expanding acts of repression there. (Arresting Hong Kong media owner Jimmy Lai for allegedly “colluding with foreign forces,” as Beijing did on Monday, is exactly what Stalin’s thugs in eastern Europe used to do.) But questions of sovereignty cloud the analogy. Beijing has also invested tremendous resources in propagating its ideas, most of which are antithetical to liberalism and democracy, and provided surveillance technologies and economic aid to sustain autocracies in other countries. But Xi has yet to instigate a coup, arm insurgents, or invade a democracy and install a communist regime. Little suggests that he seeks to subvert American democracy. (Russian President Vladimir Putin has been much bolder and more aggressive on that front.) And although the United Front Work Department—one of the CCP’s main agents of influence overseas—warrants close scrutiny, its efforts to export the Chinese system of government seem feeble and ineffective next to Soviet tactics. Promoting a positive image of Xi’s China or proclaiming the economic benefits of its development model is not the same as invading countries or providing AK-47s and Katyusha rocket launchers to communist guerrillas. If Xi and his comrades are actually trying to promote Marxism-Leninism-Maoism around the world, they are doing a bad job of it.

CHINA AS IT IS

Truman and his administration justifiably responded to Soviet aggressions by mobilizing to contain communism. Guided by the belief that “a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere,” as NSC-68 put it, Truman and successive Cold War presidents forged enduring alliances, constructed a liberal international order that has lasted decades, and created a network of governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations dedicated to democracy promotion. Studying these successes could offer valuable lessons on how to deal with China today. But the United States also at times overreacted and oversimplified, seeing every leftist and national liberation movement as an enemy to be defeated. That mindset contributed to some of the worst American excesses during the Cold War, including McCarthyism, the fictitious “missile gap,” the Vietnam War, and support for brutal right-wing dictatorships, including even apartheid in South Africa. (The Trump administration’s current indifference to the communist dictatorship in Vietnam is striking.) And the Cold War was not cold; the scholars David Holloway and Stephen Stedman estimate that 20 million people died between 1945 and 1989 in 130 wars, many of them fueled by superpower rivalry. Mistaking Xi for a new Stalin could lead the United States to repeat those mistakes.


The Cold War lasted 40 years. For most of that period, victory was uncertain. For Washington to be successful in what may be an even longer contest, it must diagnose the severity of the threat precisely and calibrate efforts to contain and deter Beijing accordingly. False analogies from the Cold War hurt both of these efforts. Washington shouldn’t spend trillions on nuclear arms, missiles, and space weapons. It shouldn’t fight proxy wars. And most important, it shouldn’t stumble into a direct confrontation with China. U.S. foreign-policy makers must resist the impulse to check every Chinese move around the world, like Truman believed he had to do with Stalin. This line of thinking compelled U.S. Cold War strategists to double and triple down on the tragic, unnecessary war in Vietnam. Today, Americans know that they did not need to contain communism in Vietnam to defeat the Soviets. (And by the way, Eastern Europeans—Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and many others—played the central role in defeating Soviet communism and ending the Cold War, not Americans.) Threat assessments, in other words, should never go unquestioned. Are freedom and democracy really under worldwide assault if Laos or Rwanda imports Chinese-made Internet equipment? Or if the Chinese develop Belt and Road Initiative projects in Ghana or Italy? Should every Chinese citizen in the United States be treated as a spy? By trying to contain the Chinese everywhere, Washington may undermine containment in areas where its vital national security interests are actually at stake. And as the Cold War showed, success will depend in no small measure on the United States’ ability to improve at home—to boost innovation and R & D and invest in education, health care, infrastructure, and democracy. Washington needs to spend less time trying to trip its opponent and more time trying to become a better athlete.

The United States must understand China “as it is,” to quote Pompeo again, not as some in Washington want it to be. The Trump administration undoubtedly would like a Stalinist leader to be in charge in Beijing, if only to better mobilize and unite Americans against him. But China “as it is” is not ruled by a new Stalin. Asserting otherwise doesn’t change that fact and gets in the way of developing a sophisticated, successful U.S. policy to contain, deter, and engage China over the long haul.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-10/xi-jinping-not-stalin

https://twitter.com/dakekang/status/1334525760850288642

1/ NEW: During 12 fateful days in January, Chinese authorities failed to report any new coronavirus cases, lulling Wuhan residents into complacency.

Why? In part, because of cronyism and secret deals between the China CDC and three Shanghai companies
https://apnews.com/article/china-virus-testing-secret-deals-firms-312f4a953e0264a3645219a08c62a0ad

2/At first the China CDC moved swiftly, sequencing the virus in 24 hours and writing test protocols in 48. The natural next step, experts and CDC staff say, would have been to publish the sequences, distribute protocols and let scientists to test for the virus.

It was not to be.

3/Instead, the China CDC instituted a top-down, rigid disease detection system. They took charge and shoved competing agencies out of the way, demanding all patient samples be routed through Beijing.

One CDC technician told me they made confirming cases “mission impossible”.

4/ Making reagents – the testing compounds needed to detect pathogens – is fairly simple. Scientists and industry executives compared it to “printing out PDFs at a print shop”.

Many firms can make them. But CDC officials turned to obscure ones they had personal ties with.

5/Those three companies were not the best or the biggest. Instead, they were run by people who had ties to Tan Wenjie, a CDC official in charge of testing kits at the beginning of the outbreak.

6/One was run by the ex-chief technician of the Shanghai CDC’s microbiology lab. Contracts and emails I obtain show that for 5 years, she had sold test kits to her *own* workplace via an intermediary – a clear conflict of interest, and a possible violation of anti-corruption law.

7/Instead of publishing information about the virus ASAP, officials at the China CDC sat on it for over a week – even as they sold test kit designs and supplier rights to these three companies.

The price? One million RMB ($137,000), two sources told the AP.

8/For the biggest pandemic in a century, that’s not a high price tag. And there’s likely a good reason for that: Back in early January, nobody really thought this outbreak was going to be that huge. CDC scientists thought it might be like MERS – scary, but not easily spreadable.

9/For limited outbreaks, the CDC commissions firms to make small batches of test kits for routine surveillance. It’s a niche market.

Normally, CDC purchases have to be publicly procured. But there’s a possible loophole: China’s procurement law doesn’t apply during disasters.

10/That makes perfect sense during, say, an earthquake or fire, when you really need to get your hands on things like bulldozers or hoses ASAP.

But for the CDC, it also presents a business opportunity: tap certain companies to make test kits. Steer business to those you know.

11/That's what happened in early Jan. CDC officials in charge of testing kits selected the three Shanghai companies and gave them the test kit designs. They validated their kits in secret evaluations at the Hubei CDC on Jan. 10 and 11, even before publishing the virus sequences.

12/This could work perfectly fine for pathogens that don’t spread easily, like MERS. You select the companies, you get your test kits, you detect the pathogens, they profit off selling a small number of kits for inflated prices since they’re the only suppliers. Everyone’s happy.

13/Well, SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be very different from MERS. It was far more infectious. That assumption that things were business as usual, that this pathogen wouldn’t spread too quickly – that proved to be a fateful mistake.

14/1st of all, since there were no test kits in Wuhan, there was no way to detect or confirm cases. That blinded Beijing to COVID-19's spread. It took a Jan. 13 case in Thailand (!) to jolt them into action, as leaked gov't docs obtained by @AP  showed. https://apnews.com/article/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9

15/Secondly, there were so few companies making test kits that when the outbreak erupted into a pandemic, there were massive test kit shortages and huge lines at Wuhan's hospitals. The few kits available were often faulty, as some of the companies making them lacked expertise.

16/One of those affected was Peng Yi, a 39-year old schoolteacher. He started cough on Jan. 23, just as Wuhan went into lockdown. Days later, he lined up for 8 hours at hospitals, only to be turned away for a lack of tests. When he finally got a test on Jan. 30, it was negative.

17/Peng finally tested positive on Feb. 8. By then he was already in critical condition. He passed away on Feb. 19, devastating his mother.

Here's his mother at his grave on Aug. 12, on what would have been his 40th birthday. One of the saddest videos I've ever seen.

17/The grand takeaway here?

The collusion between the China CDC and the test kit companies deprived doctors and scientists on the ground in Wuhan of a crucial tool to see how the virus was spreading. That delayed recognition that the pathogen was human-to-human transmissible.

18/But for the companies themselves, the pandemic turned out to be a huge boon. As one of their executives put it: “The country and the economy suffered major damage. But for our nucleic acid diagnostics industry, this year has actually been a bonus.”

19/Inevitably the question will come up: Is this proof of malevolent behavior on the part of authorities? The answer is... well, very complicated. There were systemic issues, yes. There were bad actors. But this is not a straightforward story of “China bad”.

20/Rather, it shows how difficult it is to deal with unpredictable events like the coronavirus in our incredibly complex world. Many mistakes here were remarkably similar to those in the US, particularly how CDCs in both countries centralized testing capability - then bungled it

21/There are features of the Chinese system that caused major failures - in this case, the state's ability to gag and muffle scientists. But there are also features of, say, the U.S. that cause failures there - such as politicians actively hyping disinformation during a pandemic

22/Anyways, as a journalist, it's not my place to comment on this too much. Best to leave that to the historians and scientists to take what we've found and sort it all out.

23/One last note: One enduring mystery that has yet to be resolved is WHY the China CDC made confirming cases basically impossible in January. Why require full sequencing? Why force patient samples to be sent to Beijing? Why did Wuhan doctors endlessly report cases to no avail?

24/CDC staff, public health experts I spoke with said the standards for confirming cases were so abnormal that they were convinced someone was *intentionally* blocking testing and artificially suppressing the case count. But we still don't know who or why

25/Was it Wuhan city officials, eager to keep the peace before political meetings? CDC officials eager to publish science papers ahead of competitors? - or - central government officials who thought they could control the situation w/o telling the public, 内紧外松?

26/Why weren't CDC officials more alarmed that among the first 41 cases they identified in early January, 1/3 of them weren't linked to the Huanan Seafood Market? Why didn't they take the possibility of human-to-human transmission more seriously and look for it aggressively?

27/From Jan. 14 on, we know that high-ranking Chinese officials hid from the public how alarmed they were at the outbreak's potential. But the story is hazier before then. The test kits are a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the full story. One day, hopefully, we'll know it all.

Impatience: a deep cause of Western failure in handling the pandemic?

In  October 2019, Johns Hopkins University and the Economist Intelligence Unit published the  Global Epidemic Preparedness Report (Global Health Security Report). Never was a report on an important global topic better timed. And never was it more wrong.

The report argued that the best prepared countries are the following three: the US (in reality, the covid outcome, as of mid-December 2020, was almost 1000 deaths per million), UK (the same), and the Netherlands (almost 600). Vietnam was ranked No. 50 (while its current covid fatalities per million are 0.4), China was ranked 51^st (covid fatalities are 3 per million), Japan was ranked 21st (20). Indonesia (deaths: 69 per million) and Italy (almost 1100 deaths per million) were ranked the same; Singapore (5 deaths per million) and Ireland (428 deaths per million) were ranked next to each other. People who were presumably most qualified to figure out how to be best prepared for a pandemic have colossally failed.

Their mistake confirms how unexpected and difficult it is to explain the debacle of Western countries (where I include not only the US and Europe, but also Russia and Latin America) in the handling of the pandemic. There was no shortage of possible explanations produced ever since the failure became obvious: incompetent governments (especially Trump), administrative confusion, “civil liberties”, initial underestimation of the danger, dependence on imports of PPE…The debate will continue for years. To use a military analogy: the covid debacle is like the French debacle in 1940. If one looks at any objective criteria (number of soldiers, quality of equipment, mobilization effort), the French defeat should have never happened. Similarly, if one looks at the objective criteria regarding covid, as the October report indeed did, the death rates in the US, Italy or UK are simply impossible to explain: neither by the number of doctors or nurses per capita, by health expenditure, by the education level of the population, by total income, by quality of hospitals…

The failure is most starkly seen when contrasted with East Asian countries which, whether democratic or authoritarian, have had outcomes that are not moderately but several orders of magnitude superior to those of Western countries. How was this possible? People have argued that it might be due to Asian countries’ prior exposure to epidemics like SARS, or Asian collectivism as opposed to Western individualism.

I would like to propose another deeper cause of the debacle. It is a soft cause. It is a speculation. It cannot be proven empirically. It has never been measured and perhaps it is impossible to measure with any degree of exactness. That explanation is impatience.

When one looks at Western countries’ reaction to the pandemic, one is struck by its stop-and-go character. Lockdown measures were imposed, often reluctantly, in the Spring when the epidemic seemed to be at the peak, just to be released as soon as there was an improvement. The improvement was perceived by the public as the end of the epidemic. The governments were happy to participate in that self-deception. Then, in the Fall, the epidemic came back with vengeance, and again the tough measures were imposed half-heartedly, under pressure, and with the (already once-chastened) hope that they could be rescinded for the holidays.  

Why did not governments and the public go from the beginning for strong measures whose objective would not have been merely to “flatten the curve” but to either eradicate the virus or drive it out to such an extent, as it was done in East Asia, so that only sporadic bursts might remain? Those flare ups could be dealt again using drastic measures as in June when Beijing closed its largest open market, supplying several million people, after a few cases of covid were linked to it.

The public, and thus I think, the governments were unwilling to take the East Asian approach to the pandemic because of a culture of impatience, of desire to quickly solve all problems, to bear only very limited costs. That delusion however did not work with covid.

I think that impatience can be related to ideologies and corresponding policies that have erected economic success, ideally achieved as fast as possible (“make a quick buck”), as the most worthy objective in one’s life. It is reflected in the role that financialization had in the UK and the United States at first, but then spread elsewhere. Unlike a slow and patient effort to build things, financialization often relies on “tricks”, as shown before and during the 2007-08 financial meltdown. Its main driving force is cleverness and speed, not endurance and constancy. We crave quick success and what is quicker than becoming rich through a financial manipulation?

Impatience is also seen in huge household indebtedness, especially in the United States. A median-income household in Thailand and China saves almost a third of its income. A much richer median-income household in the United States often has negative savings. This is entirely unexpected from an economic point of view: richer households are supposed to save more (as percentage of their income and of course in absolute amounts).

Dissaving is just another way of saying that today’s consumption is vastly preferred  to tomorrow’s. This in turn shows what economists call “pure time preference”—a preference for now as such, even when one can fully account for the uncertainty about the future. Between two equally certain consumptions, one today, another tomorrow, people seem to much prefer today’s. Pure time preference is nothing else but impatience.

Kafka in his Diaries writes that there are two cardinal vices from which all others vices derive: impatience and laziness. But since laziness springs from impatience, he writes, there is really only one: impatience. Perhaps it is time to look at it.

https://glineq.blogspot.com/2020/12/impatience-deep-cause-of-westerns.html

buffalo bill wrote:Hantingtone, ti li si?

Јанош Винету wrote:
Те приче о Русима као Азијатима су из мог искуства или расизам или будалаштина. Централна Азија - то може бити гранични случај, али Русија је децидно европска култура.

Mór Thököly wrote:Mislim, iskoristio bih 1 termin, ali necu zato sto mi je u "pričuvi", plašim se da mi ga neko ne ukrade, treba mi za nesto vaznije 

ontheotherhand wrote:

Mór Thököly wrote:Mislim, iskoristio bih 1 termin, ali necu zato sto mi je u "pričuvi", plašim se da mi ga neko ne ukrade, treba mi za nesto vaznije 

Okcident?

ontheotherhand wrote:

Mór Thököly wrote:Mislim, iskoristio bih 1 termin, ali necu zato sto mi je u "pričuvi", plašim se da mi ga neko ne ukrade, treba mi za nesto vaznije 

Okcident?

Mór Thököly wrote:

ontheotherhand wrote:

Okcident?

Pa ne, dobro, Rusija ne moze biti oćidentale, bar nikako. Nije to

Mór Thököly wrote:

ontheotherhand wrote:

Okcident?

Pa ne, dobro, Rusija ne moze biti oćidentale, bar nikako. Nije to

Ferenc Puskás wrote:

Mór Thököly wrote:

Pa ne, dobro, Rusija ne moze biti oćidentale, bar nikako. Nije to

nije tuđica?