Editor’s note for Wednesday, September 30, 2020

My thoughts today:

I have occasionally written about my fears of war breaking out between China and the U.S. in the last few months. Perhaps I have been hyperventilating, the result of reading too much news in our 24/7 tweet-fed information environment.

But one thing is for certain: In the long term, relations between China and the West, and particularly the U.S., are going to feel every kind of pressure imaginable. This will affect everything from politics to business, technology to diplomacy. Plumbers, bankers, soldiers and generals, consultants, teachers of English and Chinese — everyone will be affected.

Here is a one piece of proof for that argument. Jiàng Shìgōng 强世功 is a Peking University law professor, and, according to scholar David Ownby, “an important spokesman for China’s New Left, and a major apologist for the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 regime.”

Ownby recently translated an essay by Jiang titled “Ten Crucial Years” (Chinese original is available here). In his introduction, Ownby notes:

The main purpose of his essay is to convince these Chinese intellectuals, many of whom are liberals of one stripe or another, and who are worried about the current state of Sino-American relations, that what has happened is inevitable, and is a good thing.

He alternately hectors them, in language with clear Maoist overtones, accusing them of having gone soft as their lives have gotten easier, and soothes them with blandishments concerning the freedom that will accompany the post-American era.

Another comment on the essay from scholar of Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy Joseph Torigian, via Twitter:

This new piece by Jiang Shigong is remarkable for several reasons. It claims that the U.S. plot to achieve “peaceful evolution” was actually working precisely as D.C. hoped – engagement created a materialistic pro-U.S. class that wanted privatization and democratization…

Jiang argues peaceful evolution failed because these liberalizing forces created a counter-reaction in society, a “social self-defense mechanism,” whose victory was facilitated by lesson of collapse of USSR.

Jiang attributes China’s triumphs to a sort of “middle path” between regime change and “being closed and dogmatic.” In that sense, he stresses continuity, yet in key ways he makes points that are a clear break in precedent.

One last point — Jiang justifies removing term limits for Xi as “tantamount” to the failure of peaceful evolution, as it eliminated the ability for the U.S. to intervene “in Chinese politics through a change in generational leadership.”

Our word of the day is ten crucial years (关键十年 guānjiàn shí nián).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief