China’s Ideological Affinity With Russia Is Over:
What, though, do the Chinese themselves think of the latest events out of Russia? If Beijing ever placed any stock in the idea that Russia and China were together defending the virtues of authoritarianism against an unending onslaught of what is fancied as Western liberalism and democracy, any such illusions by now must be cold and six feet under. There is no longer any possible way to understand or interpret Putinism that could make China comfortable with a close ideological pairing or even comparison.
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But China’s history holds even older reasons to feel repelled by Russia’s unrelenting decay under Putin. For decades prior to the CCP victory in 1949, the country was constantly riven by warlordism. Here is where the spectacle of today’s Russia comes most sharply into critical focus. As if pursuing history in reverse, Putin has increasingly relied on warlords and militias to shore up his power and pursue strategic goals.
The Russian Communists model of control was always a sort of decentralized or federated authoritarianism: the leaders of the former USSR were members of the Communist Party, which set goals for which those leaders were to enact in their own countries. But they were still leaders of their own countries–coordinating action via the Communist Party according to Marxist-Leninist lines towards a hypothetical ideal–but they still had sovereignty within this umbrella.
The Chinese model, however, has always been imperialistic: the form of the Chinese Communist Party may have all the trappings of the Russian Communists, complete with elections and a central committee and pretensions of debate–but make no mistake: President Xi is emperor in all but name of China. And to the Chinese, what is “communist” is what serves the Chinese Communist Party–even if it looks like and has the trappings of capitalism.
Wars tend to stress societies and show their differences and highlight their flaws–and the flaw of the Russian ‘federated authoritarian’ model is that you have a lot of very powerful people who may decide the guy on top (in this case, Putin) is not the right man for the job. More eyes may help you see more options–but that also means more people who can overthrow your lofty position–and suddenly the unthinkable happens overnight, as the Russian Royal Family learned one fateful night in July of 1918.
Imperial models are also subject to the same royal intrege, but one so thoroughly centralized as the Chinese Communist Party tends to suffer a different problem: underlings tend to like so as to make their bosses look good. Information flow within an Empire tends to be poor at best; even in today’s modern computerized age, we still have “garbage in, garbage out.” And fewer minds muddling over a problem tend to produce fewer options and tend to have a harder time ‘thinking outside the box.’
Meaning if China ever found itself at war, information flow problems and problems with centralized decision making would mean Chinese troops would become inefficient as individual soldiers are unable to take the initiative outside of a very narrow set of options.
Neither wishes to admit to the Western model of thought about such things, however, because the Western model–for all its flaws, including the public choice issues of regulatory capture and rent-seeking, including the capture of institutions by individuals who bend those institutions to their own purposes, even as groups insert themselves as the arbiters of merit–we are still fundamentally a merit-based model.
And in a merit-based model, power is decentralized and often is driven from the bottom-up. Culture, rather than a strong-man, is what defines the contours of daily life–and often the concerns of a people become rather mundane and banal. After all, how can one achieve the lofty goals of a Russian-led Marxist revolution leading to Utopia on Earth if one is more worried if the baker down the street carries gluten-free bread, or if one is more worried if the price of electricity is low enough to make air conditioning your home affordable.
Utopians of all sorts–those on the Left, and the growing utopian movement on the Right, which underpin authoritarianism–tend to forget the little things, because their eyes are set up on high trying to create a paradise in their own image: one where we all instinctively know each other’s pronouns and one where money and accounting and tracking imbalance of trade is replaced by some sort of universal love.
Even if it means a few people can’t have their gluten-free bread: once we sort out universal brotherly love, we can resume the shipment of gluten-free bread.
And the Western model seems so utterly banal and pointless and powerless: Napoleon could not invision how a “nation of shopkeepers” could come to best him on the field.
But the Western model, by empowering all members of society, can become a very powerful force–even on the battlefield. It may not be fashionable to say this, but Western values of individual empowerment have always had an advantage, especially when it comes to devising new ways to kill your opponents.
Just as it gives an incentive for shopkeepers to keep their customers happy by carring all sorts of products–including gluten-free bread: because their individual welfare is directly affected by it.