Former Chinese Party Insider Calls U.S. Hopes of Engagement ‘Naive’
On the eve of the Communist Party’s anniversary, regime critic Cai Xia urges Washington to take ‘hardheaded defensive measures’
June 29, 2021 8:30 am ET
In her 28-page paper, Cai Xia writes that ‘the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume.’ Photo: Cai Xia
A former Chinese Communist Party academic, now a critic of the regime, is urging the U.S. to abandon “naive” hopes to engage with Beijing, while warning that the country’s leadership is more fragile than it appears.
In a forthcoming paper timed to the party’s centennial Thursday, Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijing’s Central Party School, says that four decades of U.S. bridge-building has merely entrenched a Chinese leadership inherently hostile to the U.S. And under President Xi Jinping, China no longer finds engagement useful, Ms. Cai wrote.
“Wishful thinking about ‘engagement’ must be replaced by hardheaded defensive measures to protect the United States from the CCP’s aggression—while bringing offensive pressures to bear on it, as the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume,” Ms. Cai wrote. Her 28-page paper is slated for publication this week by the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University.
A growing roster of Western politicians and analysts has concluded that U.S. diplomacy with China hasn’t paid dividends. But such views are rarely expressed publicly by sources as highly placed as Ms. Cai was just a short time ago.
The paper, an “Insider’s Perspective,” comes as the party under Mr. Xi rides a wave of approval at home for crushing dissent in Hong Kong and containing the domestic spread of Covid-19. The anniversary event is of momentous importance for the personal credibility of the 68-year-old Mr. Xi, who appears unassailable at the party core in his bid to retain power indefinitely.
Ms. Cai, also 68, had lectured Chinese policy makers on ideology for 15 years at the party’s top training institution until she retired in 2012, the same year Mr. Xi took the party helm. By happenstance, she was in the U.S. as a tourist when the outbreak of Covid-19 frustrated her plans to return.
After comments critical of Mr. Xi and attributed to her circulated online last year, the party expelled Ms. Cai, limiting the likelihood she could safely return to China. In the subsequent months, she has become publicly critical of a regime that in the past relied on her to promote it in rosy commentaries published by China’s government-run media.
She resolved to make a “complete break with the party,” Ms. Cai wrote in a lengthy Foreign Affairs article in January, “after 20 years of hesitation, confusion, and misery.” She singled out what she called President Xi’s “great leap backward.”
Her years spent developing party ideology make Ms. Cai more credible than many other critics of the party outside China, says Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat in Australia who defected to that nation in 2005. “Her attacks on the CPC will damage CPC doctrine, the system, because she’s from the inside,” Mr. Chen said. After all, he said, the party school is “the brains of the CPC.”
Beijing is harnessing the party’s centenary to celebrate Mr. Xi for making China a proud nation with a powerful economy and military. Some Western academics have, like Ms. Cai, used the anniversary to argue that Mr. Xi with his autocratic leadership style is leading the country in a dangerous direction.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is riding a wave of approval at home for crushing dissent in Hong Kong and containing the domestic spread of Covid-19.
“It would be ironic, and tragic, if Xi, a leader with a mission to save the party and the country, instead imperiled both,” Jude Blanchette, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote this month in Foreign Affairs. In a weekend essay for The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Nathan, a political-science professor at Columbia University, wrote, “A generational shift is under way in China, with traditional values giving way to more liberal attitudes, and it does not favor the long-term prospects of the CCP.”
In a statement accompanying Ms Cai’s paper, Hoover senior fellow Larry Diamond said, “For the first time, we have an important figure from within the Chinese Communist Party system courageously confirming what many U.S. scholars of China have recently been arguing.”
In response to critics of the party’s leadership, China says it has popular support. “China is committed to the path of peaceful, open, cooperative and common development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last week. “Zero-sum game and Cold-War mentality are doomed to be discarded by history.”
“Discrediting and bad mouthing” the party is on the rise in the West, as the anniversary approaches, the editor in chief of tabloid Global Times, Hu Xijin, said on Twitter this week. “But CPC’s leadership in China is very successful,” he wrote. “Its ruling will definitely outlive all those who want to see CPC fail, or drive them mad.”
According to Ms. Cai, China is powerful in appearance but riven with contradictions and self-doubt that have become more pronounced under Mr. Xi. “The CCP has the ambition of a hungry dragon but inside it is a paper tiger,” writes Ms. Cai.
She wrote that Washington should be “prepared for the possible sudden disintegration” of the party. While she alleged deep divisions among its 92 million members, she didn’t offer recent evidence of a split with Mr. Xi aside from writing that many party members and elites in society “accept and approve of the American democratic system and freedom as universal values.”
President Biden has said there are limited areas for U.S.-China cooperation. He has compared Mr. Xi’s ideology to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying in March that China’s leader “thinks autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.”
By Ms. Cai’s reckoning, U.S. policy makers have miscalculated at every turn, from restoring relations after Beijing’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square to backing China’s entry into the World Trade Organization—“naiveté” that has emboldened the regime. While U.S. administrations have described China as a competitor, the Communist Party has always viewed the U.S. as a hostile adversary, she argues.
The party internally fears U.S. power, which she says is evident in how China has massaged official policy-speak to avoid confrontation that could threaten the party. For instance, she says authorities replaced a popular description of China seeking a “peaceful rise” with the term “peaceful development” out of concern that “rise” might be construed by Washington as confrontational.
Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com
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