Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (38 page)

The problem is that we are not dealing merely with social prejudices and inflexible customs. We are also dealing with a world full of countries insecure in their statehood and threatened by contradictory pressures from within and without, and we are asking them to take on board our postmodern notions of diversity when they are wrestling with total fragmentation, if not dissolution. These countries are not accustomed to democracy. They are afraid, or have become afraid, of liberation without order.

Let us not forget the devastating critique leveled by the great author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn against the Soviet system: It was impersonal, secular, and dehumanized, he charged. He believed in Holy Mother Russia, in the Russian Orthodox Church, in Russian culture and humanism. In short, he asserted the primacy of Russia’s site-specific culture—its soul. That is one dimension of the appeal of the new Russian conservatism: It furnishes a tacit excuse for racism and xenophobia and homophobia, as seen in June 2013, when Russia passed its notorious anti-gay bill banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.”
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(The American response was typically weak: President Obama decried the law and sent openly gay athletes Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow to join the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, while the president himself, Joe Biden, and Michelle Obama stayed home—the first time since 2000 that a U.S. delegation has not included a president, vice president, or first lady.
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)

Most post-Soviet countries are not ready for what they see as the utopian dream of open borders, open sexuality, religion devoid of national identity, and the like. In fact, outside the West, most countries associate their religion with the place they’re born. The globalized principle of portable identities began mainly in the U.S., with its founding myth of a nation of immigrants. The utopian ideal of choice in everything, including sexuality, goes against the grain of most of the earth’s non-immigrant inhabitants, who are wedded to the framework of their
patria
. America’s current liberation ethos terrifies them.

This is something we simply don’t understand in the West. Such countries look at us and see an impersonal system, one with a diffuse identity of many component parts but no central core. They look at the Russians and Chinese, and they know what they’re looking at—countries that have a coherent national identity, not least because the Axis forcibly imposes identity on its population.

Ethnic Russians, for instance, have no doubt that their own traditions take precedence in the Russian Federation. The multiculturalism practiced and exported by the old Soviet Union no longer holds sway in the Russian Federation. The KGB is known to be largely of Russian stock, and the power hierarchy gradates downward from there. Citizens, even politicians, who don’t look ethnically Russian are attacked on Moscow’s streets with some frequency by Russian supremacists. Putin has articulated an explicit policy of protecting Russians wherever they may be in the world, especially the “near abroad” former Soviet Republics where Russians live in large enough numbers that Moscow can use them as an excuse to intervene.

Beijing, meanwhile, has transferred millions of Han Chinese into the troubled regions of Tibet and Xinjiang as a way of outnumbering the locals and thus subjugating them. China has also supported the ethnic Burmese generals for years in their war against minority provinces.

The Axis conveys a coherent policy: They have continuity at the top of their leadership, and they have unified nationalist policies. They attract partners around the world with the promise of sharing their muscular approach to unity and coherence. It is an approach that, allowing for national differences, can transfer across borders and even cultures. Its prevailing principle is protection against the destabilizing revolutions of American democracy, such that family and ethnic stability, and cultural and economic continuity, are ensured.

In short, both Axis nations offer a kind of conservatism.

Chinese Conservatism: National Pride and Self-Interest

The Chinese propaganda model relies on two conservative arguments: First, it makes an increasingly aggressive and even crude appeal to nationalism; second, and most vitally, it promises prosperity and peace in exchange for restricted individual liberties and unquestioning loyalty to China’s Communist leadership.

The nationalist variant of propaganda, compellingly demonstrated by the orchestrated anti-Japanese protests, might predominate in the future, especially if China’s economy cools down, as many forecasters predict it will. If that happens, loyalty to Beijing in exchange for an illusory economic prosperity might prove less marketable and the appeal to Chinese glory, à la Putin’s appeal to Russian pride, could become more important.

“The last thing for the party to grab on to . . . might be nationalism,” said Michael Hayden in 2012, referring to China’s current leadership.
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Hayden, a retired four-star general and former director of both the NSA and the CIA, surely knows that the last recourse of corrupt regimes for a century or more has been to appeal to nationalism as an excuse for cracking down on internal dissent. In this light, we can
see the anti-Japan protests as a rehearsal on Beijing’s part, should it need to call more urgently on such forces in the future.

The Chinese leadership has also sought to use nationalism to rally support for the Communist Party and dissuade Chinese citizens from pushing for Western-style reforms, especially the ideas of constitutionalism and human rights. Xi himself made this abundantly clear in August 2013, when the Communist Party with his approval issued Document No. 9 to its members. As the
New York Times
described it:

       
Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.

              
These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.
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Document No. 9 is part of Xi’s broader “rectification” campaign aimed at reinforcing ideological discipline, an effort that has included vigorous defenses of Mao’s legacy. Under Xi’s guidance, the Communist Party is issuing messages through what the
Times
called “a series of compulsory study sessions” throughout the country. The theme of anti-Westernism is sounded regularly. “Promotion of Western constitutional democracy is an attempt to negate the party’s leadership,” said deputy head of propaganda Cheng Xinping, who also warned that human-rights advocates want “ultimately to form a force for political
confrontation.” Another propaganda official, Zhang Guangdong, said, “Western anti-China forces led by the United States have joined in one after the other, and colluded with dissidents within the country to make slanderous attacks on us in the name of so-called press freedom and constitutional democracy.” The
People’s Daily
chimed in: “Constitutionalism belongs only to capitalism,” read one commentary, while another held that constitutionalism was merely “a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system.”
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The vigor with which the Communist Party is pursuing this nationalistic and ideological strategy suggests that its leaders feel vulnerable, perhaps because of the Chinese economy’s less-robust performance of late, at least in comparison with its high standard. And yet, China’s economic growth continues to outpace the world’s, despite its recent problems. Beijing’s economic might is, in itself, a powerful propaganda tool, one that it has used skillfully to build alliances around the world, especially with nations that share its skepticism about Western democracy.

China’s implicit message is that everyone should play along with Beijing’s suppression of freedoms and periodic crackdowns on dissenters, because China has found the secret to wealth creation, and ultimately all will benefit: Keep quiet, keep your head down, and leave the political decisions to us, and you’ll grow rich. That’s the Chinese message to its own citizens, and it explains why Beijing props up despotic regimes abroad. Too much freedom equals chaos; chaos hurts the bottom line. In contrast with America, which equates freedom with prosperity, China urges a surrender of freedom in exchange for prosperity.

It isn’t the American approach, which holds that democratic freedoms entail and can weather occasional political upheaval, and that
markets work better when free. Rather, China operates by dirigisme applied to all things moral, political, social, and religious. If you do business with China, you will get rich, the message goes. You will hold on to your political power, whether you’re a private individual or an African statesman, whether you are corrupt or choose to close your eyes to the corruption of others. Beijing promises prosperity with order. Radical change will bring only suffering and hardship.

Of course, America has always emphasized wealth; it’s part of our system’s appeal, as embodied by mega-wealthy industrialists and by shoppers prone to conspicuous consumption. But America emphasizes equally the freedoms that allow the enjoyment of wealth through self-expression and individual rights. China’s counter to this is simple: American-style freedoms destroy stability in other countries, and in the U.S., they have led to immense debt and the banking collapse. China’s approach is superior, it claims, as evident in its ever-increasing wealth.

The Chinese pitch to potential allies goes something like this: We will not tell you how to run your country, your morals, or your culture. Those are indigenous, idiosyncratic phenomena. Only America tells you your faults and forces you to become more like America. China will collaborate with you to keep your system going, whether you’re North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, or an American company. There is only one catch: China needs more room to grow, and its claims on world resources will only increase.

Events around the world in recent years have seemed to confirm this Chinese thesis that people can have either wealth creation or chaos, but not both. The regime is confident that its people will continue to opt for the model that says: stability now, freedom later (or never). And Beijing is in a position to demand that the rest of the world respect the smooth functioning of Chinese procedures as well, because, more and more, the world’s wealth depends on it. China is now the world’s top consumer of luxury goods, and alliances with other countries underpin
Chinese wealth. In short, China is too big to fail. If we don’t want the global economy to collapse, we must acquiesce in Chinese power.

Thus, Beijing is inexorably corrupting the political principles in countries across the globe in exchange for the affluence China disseminates—and this applies also, sadly, to American investors in China, including top computer companies and our largest banks and car manufacturers. We are all complicit in human-rights abuses in China, because China purchases our debt.

It’s important to note that this message—conveyed by political speeches, controlled media, censored Internet content, foreign-language broadcasts, and the like—is not aimed only at domestic audiences. The audience is global. A threat to China Inc.’s smooth functioning constitutes a threat to the world. Everybody must invest in the Communist Party’s continuity. And every regime can take a version of that message and apply it internally—if only the version that equates the U.S. with revolutions and chaos.

And disturbingly, the message seems to be persuasive.

Russia’s New Conservatism and the Appeal to Stability

Ironically, it’s precisely the cultural depredations issuing from the global economy that Russia exploits as it seeks to regain control over former satellites that had strayed toward the West. A quiet new ideology now emanates from Russia that can be disseminated in virtually every country, much as Moscow once deployed Marxism, to subvert pro-Western systems and ideas. It is a new, reactionary brand of conservatism that stands squarely against the Western model of personal freedom, multiculturalism, and social and economic dynamism.

Here’s what it’s about: In espousing the rather foggy notion of “stability,” Russia along with China presents an us-versus-them, polarized worldview in which America represents political disintegration
and social fragmentation. This is convincing in part because the U.S., as lone world leader and champion of democracy, can be associated, one way or another, with the problems of every failed country in the world. And no doubt the us-versus-them belief draws strength from the Western media’s tendency to blame the U.S. for everything from genocides in Africa to the debacle in Assad’s Syria. If we didn’t cause the problem—any problem—we should at least have done more to stop or alleviate it.

Our adversaries can point to a string of instances where the U.S. helped topple a presiding order and then bugged out, leaving the outcome to chance; where, on the other hand, we stayed with the task, we’re blamed for all the ensuing problems. So, for example, we are held responsible for the wholesale collapse of socialist regimes in South America during the post-Soviet 1990s and the economic strife that followed. That blame game helped fuel the anti-American dogma of Hugo Chávez and other neo-socialist leaders in Latin America. Russians also remember the Wild West, post-Soviet conditions of the Warsaw Pact zone, in which untrammeled free markets displaced regional economies and gave Mafia oligarchs control of national assets. Then came the Iraq War, the Color Revolutions, and finally, the Arab Spring.