Excerpts from the book “Bully of Asia” Part 3

Communist to all outward appearances, the new Chinese state was Legalist in essence, continuing the autocratic tradition of the imperial Chinese state by:

• imposing an official ideology (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) with interesting functional parallels to Chinese imperial orthodoxy (Legalism-Confucianism);
• concentrating political power in the hands of a tiny minority, often of one, with power deriving ultimately from control of the military and wielded without appreciable institutional constraints;
• treating the penal code and the legal system as tools of governance wielded by the ruler, who acts above legal constraints;
• dominating most, and at times all, aspects of domestic commercial and economic life;
• controlling all forms of social organization outside the nuclear family, which itself is severely restricted;
• engaging in political practices familiar from dynastic times, such as censorship, large-scale persecutions, purges of the bureaucracy, court intrigues, and elite factional conflicts;
• regarding the people as its property, as subjects rather than citizens.

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As an emperor of the Legalist school—that is to say, the hegemon—Mao believed that the Mandate of Heaven gave him license to dominate, well, everything.

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He [Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident]  saw Chinese nationalism as based on an unstable witch’s brew of deep-seated arrogance and conceit mixed with on-again, off-again spasms of inferiority, which are themselves back-handed psychological expressions of the same underlying narcissism. As Liu explained,

When a people like ours, who struggle with feelings of inferiority, have to face the facts of inadequate national strength, or of less than full respect from others, one way we try to feel better is to grab onto any piece of historical material that can make us proud. It is even all right to exaggerate a success wildly, so long as it contributes to an image of “number one” for the group. If it is hard to deny that we are inferior to others materially, we can claim, as Mao did, that we are superior spiritually. If we are not as good as others now, we can build the myth that we are bound to be the most powerful nation someday, because we certainly were in the past.

Liu saw the “China-as-Center Mentality” as a product of China’s extreme self-absorption, based less on objective reality than on blind self-confidence, empty boasts, and pent-up hatred. These insights—which, again, won him a long prison term—help to explain China’s craving for international respect no less than its often undiplomatic—even warlike—rhetoric when it feels itself slighted. China’s extraordinary sensitivity to slights is an outgrowth of the view that the world is divided between civilization (China) and barbarism (everything else). It is bad enough to be insulted by one’s equals, but to be insulted by one’s perceived inferiors is simply intolerable.

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It is worth emphasizing that just because China’s elites are well served by the grandiose view of China’s place in the world that they propagate to the masses, this does not mean that they don’t believe it themselves. For the most part, they are no less in thrall to national narcissism than the schoolchildren that they miseducate, or their forebears in dynasties past, for that matter.

Source: Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream Is the New Threat to World Order (2017) by Steven W. Mosher.