China is Weaker Than Xi Will Admit
The Chinese strongman and the U.S. security establishment both profit from pretending the country is a bigger threat than it is.
July 8, 2021|
12:01 am
Ivan Eland
Xi Jinping, China’s strongman leader, recently gave a strident speech on the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Predictably, he focused on achievements of the Party and left out significant blemishes—for example the catastrophic Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, the sanguinary Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and the suppression of democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He also obliquely threatened the interventionism of the United States and the West by saying that foreign powers would “crack their heads and spill blood” if they tried to stop China’s rise. Yet Xi’s bravado hides significant weaknesses that afflict his country.
Ironically, much of the U.S. foreign policy and national security establishment is also using Xi’s speech to help the Chinese leader magnify China’s strengths as a threat to the United States and minimize that country’s weaknesses. What more could a potential adversary ask for? Curiously, in the American political system, interest groups need a potent threat, whether domestic or abroad, to attract public attention and therefore extra cash to their proposed policy program. As during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. foreign policy establishment is happy to overstate the threat that China poses to American security while minimizing U.S. strengths and China’s weaknesses.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/china-is-weaker-than-xi-will-admit/
