[China’s Communist Party is
pushing the narrative that the pandemic has proved the superiority of its
authoritarian model. The muscular message is finding fans at home.]
This triumphant vision has
resonated among Chinese.
The sci-fi digital
illustrations by the artist, Fan Wennan, caught fire on Chinese social
media in recent months, reflecting a resurgent nationalism. China’s
authoritarian system, proponents say, is not just different from the West’s
democracies, it is also proving itself superior. It is a long-running theme,
but China’s success against the pandemic has given it a sharp boost.
“America isn’t that heavenly
kingdom depicted since decades ago,” said Mr. Fan, who is in his early
twenties. “There’s nothing special about it. If you have to say there’s
anything special about it now, it’s how messed up it can be at times.”
China’s Communist Party, under its
leader, Xi Jinping, has promoted the idea that the country is on a trajectory
to power past Western rivals.
China stamped out the coronavirus,
the messaging goes, with a resolve beyond the reach of flailing Western
democracies. Beijing has rolled out homegrown vaccines to more than a million
people, despite the safety concerns of scientists. China’s economy has
revived, defying
fears of a deep slump from the pandemic.
“In this fight against the
pandemic, there will be victorious powers and defeated ones,” Wang Xiangsui, a
retired Chinese senior colonel who teaches at a university in Beijing, averred this month. “We’re a victor power, while the United
States is still mired and, I think, may well become a defeated power.”
The firm leadership of Mr. Xi and
the party has earned China its recent success, say newspapers, television
programs and social media.
“Time to wake up from blind faith
in the Western system,” said a commentary in the state-run China Education
News last week. “Vicious partisan fighting has worsened in certain Western
countries, social fissures have deepened, and a severe social crisis is
brewing.”
The theme of China as triumphantly
vindicated against critics also has real public appeal these days, including
among the youth, as reflected in a stream of online commentary and the work of
artists like Mr. Fan, who has described
his style as “People’s Punk.” In Mr. Fan’s
depiction of communist Manhattan, displayed on the
ArtStation website, a caption describes a tour guide as saying that Asia
and Europe are where the future is.
“To take in the changes of history
and feel the afterglow of the imperialist era,” the guide says, “head to North
America.”
China’s current swaggering mood
could add to the challenges facing Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he takes office as
president. President Trump’s defeat in the election has done little to ease
Chinese suspicion of the United States, said Li Jianqiu, a businessman
and online
commentator, in a telephone interview.
“I think China has gained the
psychological edge,” said Mr. Li, in his 40s, who described the pandemic as a
turning point in his attitudes. “The performance of the West was completely out
of my expectations and shifted my thinking even more — the facts prove that the
American system really has no superiority.”
Combative national pride surged in
China in the run-up to the Beijing
Olympics in 2008, and after the United States bombing of the Chinese
embassy in
Belgrade in 1999. Now there is a sharper sense that the Western powers are
in perhaps irreversible decline, and that the pandemic has confirmed China’s
ascent.
“Most ordinary Chinese people
previously were more admiring of the United States, but in recent years, the
advantages of the Chinese system have become clearer to them,” said Jin
Canrong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing
who has become a popular commentator under the nickname
“Commissar Jin.” “There’s greater self-confidence.”
China’s diplomats and its state-run
media have responded to criticism from Western governments with scornful
disdain. Chinese supporters of a more muscular foreign policy call for hitting
back against Western critics, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
Le Yucheng, a Chinese vice minister
of foreign affairs, said
in a speech last week that China was not spoiling for fights, but he
also warned other governments not to underestimate its resolve to push back
against criticism.
“Faced with this suppression and
containment without scruples,” Mr. Le said, “we’ll never swallow our pride or
stoop to compromise.”
Critics worry that hubris could
lead China to overestimate its strengths and misjudge how far it can push the
United States and other Western countries.
“These ideas aren’t sealed off in
the halls of Zhongnanhai,” the Communist Party leaders’ headquarters in
Beijing, said Julian Gewirtz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations who has written about Chinese
perceptions of American decline.
“Their triumphalism is shaping both
popular nationalism and official diplomacy,” he wrote in an email. “It is
fueling ever-sharper demands for deference to China’s wishes.”
Online, Chinese commentators have
plumbed the depths of history to capture the current moment. Some likened the
United States to the crumbling British Empire of the last century,
overstretched and exhausted.
Others are reaching back further,
comparing America to China’s own Ming dynasty, which crumbled in the 1600s
under the weight of corruption, insurrections and invasions. In this view that
spread online this year, China should take the role of the “barbarian” Manchu
armies who — in the commentators’ vivid, not-always-accurate retelling — swept
over the Asian steppes, breached the Great Wall, and crushed the Ming rulers.
Modern-day China must act like the
Manchu forces, advocates of the analogy say, and prepare to “break through” a
ring of geopolitical hostility by dominating vital seas around China.
Geremie R. Barmé, a Sinologist in New Zealand who has
followed the rise of “breakthrough studies” — rùguānxué in
Chinese — says the historical comparisons reflect anxiety “about China’s great
nation status and its place in the world.”
“The underpinning is that China is
morally superior — we the Chinese people under the Communist Party — because we
have none of the failings of America,” he said.
China’s leader, Mr. Xi, has not
commented on the recent pronouncements of American decline. But he sees China
and the United States as locked in ideological rivalry. Since coming to power
in 2012, he has called for Chinese schools, textbooks and websites to inoculate
youth against Western values that could erode party rule and the country’s
“cultural self-confidence.”
“Our schooling must never nurture
wreckers or gravediggers of socialism,” Mr. Xi said in a speech in 2018 that
was recently published in a book of his comments on ideology
Some warn that China risks underestimating the strengths of the United
States. In recent months, Chinese scholars have debated how Beijing should
handle the post-Covid world, with a good number urging restraint as the best
way to win lasting influence.
“China’s high-volume nationalism at
home is making the United States feel that China is getting aggressive,” Xiao
Gongqin, a historian in Shanghai wrote in an
essay that was published last month, prompting wide discussion.
The United States is far from the
only country feeling the lash of official and public anger from China.
Australia has drawn China’s ire for criticizing Beijing, initiating laws aimed
at reducing Chinese government influence-building efforts in Australia, and
urging an investigation into the origin of the pandemic — a touchy subject in
Beijing.
Last month, a Chinese foreign
ministry spokesman tweeted a Chinese artist’s fabricated image of an Australian
soldier poised to slit the throat of an Afghan child. Australia’s prime
minister, Scott Morrison, demanded
an apology from China over the image, which was a reference to an
inquiry by the Australian military that found that its troops had unlawfully
killed more than three dozen Afghan civilians.
The Chinese foreign ministry
scoffed at Mr. Morrison’s demand, and the artist who created the image, Fu
Yu, created another one mocking the Australian leader. Mr.
Fu, who works under the name Wuhe Qilin, had made a reputation with his scathing images of
the United States as a blood-soaked, irrational medieval realm.
“Chinese values and American values
are totally at odds,” Mr. Fu said late last month on a Chinese online talk show broadcast last week. “These
values are in fundamental conflict.”
Amber Wang contributed research.
