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 of “win-win” deals with the outside world, a recurring phrase from internal CCP directives proclaims the encounter between capitalism and socialism to be a matter of “you die, I live.”

According to the CCP, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc communist countries betrayed the cause, which compelled China to lead the struggle for socialism. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the emergence of a post-Cold War international order that welcomed fledgling Eastern European democracies, the CCP — though governing the world’s most populous country — saw China as greatly outnumbered in a perilous geopolitical environment. Since then, the accumulation of economic clout and military power have fortified the CCP’s belief that China is socialism’s savior and herald of an alternative world order.

Notwithstanding the CCP’s unswerving professions of fidelity to the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism, decisive features of the PRC’s conduct resist explanation in strictly communist terms. The CCP’s determination to indoctrinate the nation with an extreme theory of Chinese moral and institutional superiority is not drawn from the Marxism-Leninism playbook. While communism aims to create a universal and classless international order, the CCP seeks to export the Chinese model of authoritarian governance and create economic dependence on Beijing in nation-states around the world. And whereas communism envisages the eventual withering away of the state, the CCP has made a paramount national priority of rectifying the indignities and injustices that it believes China has suffered at the hands of the West — starting with the recovery of what the party asserts as the Chinese nation’s rightful rule over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.

These defining components of China’s conduct derive support from the CCP’s hyper-nationalist convictions.

The CCP’s Chinese Nationalism

At no point in its long history has China embraced the idea — assumed by liberal democracies and affirmed by the United Nations — of sovereign equality among nations grounded in respect for rights inherent in all persons. Instead, traditional Chinese thinking about government Rh