China is desperate for foreign powers to recognise the “legitimacy” of its Communist Party
China want from the world? Some things are obvious: natural resources, foreign markets and nifty stuff, from high-end computer chips to top-notch airliners, that China cannot yet make. Then there is China’s ambition, at once reasonable and terrifying, to become so strong that no other power will thwart its core demands. China has less obvious wishes, too. A surprisingly pressing one is a demand for foreign powers to recognise the “legitimacy” of its Communist Party.
If this seems an obscure fight to pick, history teaches the world to beware. A well-connected Chinese scholar who lives and teaches in Europe, Xiang Lanxin, has written a book ascribing centuries of East-West tensions, including several crises in relations, to Westerners who condescendingly dismiss China’s rulers, whether imperial or communist, as “oriental despots”.
Those Jesuit scientist-adventurers reported to Rome that China was a brilliant civilisation whose traditions of ancestor worship and Confucian ethics were not pagan religious rites, but customs compatible with Christian monotheism. With disastrous results for those envoys, hawks back in Europe disagreed.
That does not make Mr Xiang or grumbling Communist Party officials correct, though. They urge the world to judge China’s rulers by their achievements, not their political system. But that is exactly what most foreign governments do, to a fault. Even in the immediate aftermath of the murderous suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1989, America’s then-president, George H.W.
Chinese demands for respect are in part a ploy, a passive-aggressive bid to browbeat foreign critics into silence. But to meet officials in Beijing is to hear a regime talking itself into a funk about how America and its allies cannot bear to let a system like theirs succeed. That is mostly bogus. The problem is China’s actions, not the fact that it has a politburo. But the risks of a rupture are real.
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