Page:The Elements of the China Challenge (November 2020).pdf/9



To understand the character of the contest for supremacy launched by the CCP, it is necessary to grasp the major features of China’s conduct. These include the PRC’s brand of authoritarian governance, its use of economic might to surpass the United States in influence in every region of the world as well as in international organizations, and its development of a world-class military designed to counter and eventually surpass the U.S. military. These features have been studied in isolation and each is well-known to experts in one field or another. Their comprehensive and interlocking character, however, is not widely appreciated. Considering them together brings into focus the CCP’s paramount geopolitical aim: to achieve global preeminence by reorganizing the international order around the party’s understanding of socialism.

Authoritarianism at Home

China’s conduct in world affairs stems from the CCP’s form of authoritarian government. In line with 20th-century communist dogma and the precepts and practices of Marxist-Leninist regimes, the CCP exercises repressive, single-party rule over some 1.4 billion people. Recently, the party amended the PRC constitution to remove term limits on the presidency occupied by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping.

In the decades after the violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the CCP intensified internal repression and fortified its control over the country by expanding the systematic use of indoctrination, censorship, disinformation, high-tech surveillance, forced disappearances, and other brutal means. To erase the ethnic and religious identities of Xinjiang’s nearly 11 million Turkic Muslims, the party has damaged and destroyed mosques; imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs in so-called “re-education” camps that subject prisoners to indoctrination, compulsory labor, forced sterilization, involuntary birth control, and other heinous abuses; and implemented mass surveillance, DNA collection, and other forms of coercive social control. As part of China’s national policy to forcibly integrate minorities, which is sometimes referred to as “stability maintenance,” the CCP has Rh