The US trade and tech wars with China have their ups and downs as Trump goes back and forth. China’s view of the game, though, is clear. Beijing is in it to win it. Observers raise questions what if any goals President Donald Trump has. Xi Jinping is engaged in a determined struggle.
Long-established Maoist terms made their appearance early on in Trump’s second trade war. The Beijing Daily’s social media referred to the need to revisit Mao Zedong’s On Protracted War. Most importantly, in its April meeting, the CCP’s Politburo referred to the need to ‘coordinate domestic economic work and international economic and trade struggle’ (统筹国内经济工作和国际经贸斗争). We need to look beyond the martial implications of such word choice and engage in a little pekingology.
Pekingology – deduction from people, events, and phrases – is an increasingly relevant tool for European policy makers to understand China now Beijing blocks more and more data sources. The tool has also grown in importance since Xi reemphasised the structures of China’s Leninist party-state through many years of ‘party-building’. To determine the EU’s response, Brussels needs to understand what it means that the CCP frames the trade war as a ‘trade struggle’.
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For Beijing, this conflict with the US did not begin yesterday. Fighting American ‘containment’ slowly returned to focus from the late eighties onwards. The trade war component has been on-going since Trump first took office in 2017. Lessons obtained through ‘struggle’ have presented as a benefit of this process. In a commentary introducing the recurring phrase that China should focus on ‘taking good care of its own stuff’ (办好自己的事), a People’s Daily commentator states that over the past eight years of trade war, Beijing ‘accumulated rich experience in struggle’ (积累了丰富的斗争经验).
The classical studies of Leninism continue to help us understand modern-day China. One seminal work is Philip Selznick’s 1954 book The Organisational Weapon. The RAND publication describes the Soviet Union to explain cogently how a Leninist party functions as the mobilisation mechanism for concerted struggle by loyal cadres towards a shared goal. The instruction set to steer the mechanism? Ideology.
To understand what ‘ideology’ entails in the PRC, we refer to Franz Schurmann’s 1966 classic Ideology and Organization in Communist China. Maoist thinking was distinct from the Soviet approach in several ways. Mao Zedong famously ‘sinicised’ Marxism. He did so by adapting it to ‘local conditions’. What does that mean? Schurmann explains this through the important distinction between ‘theory’ (理论 lǐlùn) and ‘thought’ (思想 sīxiǎng).
‘Theory’ is the unchanging truth of Marxism-Leninism: the dialectical materialist worldview of a History that eventually leads to communism through class struggle. ‘Thought’ is the ideology that serves as a guide to action in the face of the contradiction of this Moment in History. ‘Thought’ is not derived from arm-chair philosophising by the intellectuals that Mao hated and persecuted with fervour. It is produced through practice. What is that practice? It is struggle (斗争 dòuzhēng) with the contradictions in the real world.
That means ‘thought’ is updated as History moves forward. Of course, the reality of ideological development in the CCP is more political than this ideal view allows for. As recent historiography by scholars such as Julian Gewirtz and Joseph Torigian makes clear, ‘ideological’ discussions at the start of the Opening and Reform period about such issues as the mantra ‘practice is the sole criterion of the truth’ were about a struggle for political power. But their form is revealing. As the contradiction of class struggle form the Mao era was left behind, new ‘thought’ was necessary to guide aimless party cadres to action.
This is the impetus behind Deng-era phrases such as ‘crossing the river while feeling the stones’ (摸着石头过河 mōzhe shítou guò hé) and even his hiding and biding (韬光养晦 tāo guāng yǎng huì). China’s industrial and foreign policies – which have led to the successes and contradictions at the heart of Beijing’s domestic challenges and trade tension with the world today – are the product of a struggle with reality, executed day-to-day by various parts of the party-state.
Local governments’ relative independence in struggling is another unique feature of the Chinese party-state. The Party is a strict hierarchy of territorial party committees and control institutions for different arenas. This pyramid of ties comes together in the person of the General Secretary. However, there are too many local governments to keep a close eye on. That gives local leaders leeway for roaming around – within a certain degree. Elsewhere I have called this control mechanism the ‘Leninist leash’.
Beijing is not capable of giving exact commands that perfectly suit local conditions. Instead, the Centre launches slogans in public that signal to all cadres what the policy priorities are. Lower bodies then rush to implement them, incentivised by discipline inspectors and quantitative evaluations. This process leads to a large amount of experimentation and competition between provinces and counties. Eventually, successful examples rise to the top to be singled out for praise while mistakes are taken care of as warning to the others.
That slogan-to-practice process is the concrete struggle that produces Chinese policy. Hence Premier Li Qiang complains to his EU counterparts that China’s success stems not from subsidies but from hard work. Xi Jinping’s New Development Pattern (新发展格局 xīn fāzhǎn géjú) aims to deal with domestic economic contradictions and international challenges by leapfrogging to high-tech manufacturing the technologies of tomorrow. That focus was the product of the struggle of countless central cadres, local government officials, and of course Chinese labourers that led to the Chinese manufacturing prowess that allowed considering such an approach to begin with.
The ‘thought’ of this New Development Pattern is related to the epochal revision of the ‘principal contradiction’ (主要矛盾 zhǔyào máodùn) at the CCP’s 19th National Party Congress. Maoist thinking sees History progress through the act of struggling with the most important contradictions of the Moment. That means it is vital to identify the contradiction with the highest priority. In 2019, Xi Jinping said the new priority was ‘the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life’.
This overall contradiction guides all work. Within specific arenas, there may be specific contradictions relevant to that particular constellation of forces. In the international arena, this about the US. When the trade war restarted under Trump 2.0, commerce minister Wang Wentao and state-linked social media such as Yuyuan Tan Tian presented a clear narrative about a contradiction between declining US hegemonism versus a rising developing world with China at its core. Resolving this contradiction favourably is required to overcome China’s economic constraints that have caused its ‘unbalanced and inadequate development’. It thus is something that must be won. Ultimately, the Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation depends on it.
When the CCP talks about the trade war as an ‘international economic and trade struggle’, we should understand what this implies in Leninist terms. It is not just the martial nature of the language matters. Ultimately, struggle is creative practice that produces the ideology that guides the cadres to achieve the Party’s ‘theoretical’ aims. In the era of the Chinese Dream, achieving ‘communism’ has expanded to subsume the Great Rejuvenation.
Maoist thinking holds that the contradiction becomes more intense the closer it gets to its resolution. Beijing by no means denies the risks and challenges of this process. However, its essentially structurally optimistic belief in China’s material strengths is visible from expressions in trade war-related statements about the opportunities that exist amid growing international challenges.
Of course, local cadres nowadays are no perfect Maoists. However, ‘international economic and trade struggle’ ultimately still serves to teach Chinese officials what the effective policy is to move forward in History. The lessons from struggling with the contradictions through practice are then distilled into ideology, circulated in the form of Xi speeches and People’s Daily commentaries. These are the documents that Chinese officials pore over in their weekly study sessions. This offers opportunities for outside powers too.
If the EU wants to matter to Beijing at this Moment and shape what lessons cadres across the great country imbibe, Brussels needs join in the struggle. Practice is not immutable. Party cadres well-read in the tumultuous history of the CCP are aware that the outcome of the struggle between competing forces is up to its participants. In the international arena, other countries are also players in this battle of the systems. EU policy makers need to take that worldview to heart. How successfully Brussels ‘struggles’ with both Washington and Beijing directly shapes the CCP ideology that steers the party-states’ actions on its way to Beijing’s end-goals.
Correction: Jake Wright pointed out that I had mistakenly written about a ‘historical materialist view of history’, when I should have referred to a ‘dialectical materialist view of history’, which is of course what historical materialism is.
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