Max Boot Says China is “Nominally a Communist Country

Francis P. Sempa

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In a recent column in the Washington Post, Max Boot writes a sentence that should dispel any remaining doubts as to whether anyone should listen to (or read) his foreign policy advice. In attempting to explain why many Republicans are “tough” on China but “soft” on Russia, Boot writes: “China is nominally a communist country, Russia isn’t.” It is the word “nominally” that should make one pause. Apparently Boot does not think that China is really a communist country.

The word “nominally” means: “in name only; officially though perhaps not in reality.” So Max Boot thinks that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are not communists. And he traces the roots of Republican support for Taiwan and “tough on China” policies to the GOP’s anti-communist past, including what he believes was its wrongheaded “Asia-first” policy of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Boot is a self-professed “Atlanticist” who wants to involve the United States more deeply in the Russia-Ukraine war. In his column he writes that if we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, Russia will become a “greater threat to NATO” and if Republicans’ “Asia-first” policies win the day we will be back to 1940 in a “pre-Pearl Harbor world.” Perhaps Boot has forgotten that it was Atlanticist Franklin Roosevelt and a Democratic congress, not the GOP, that had the nation unprepared for war before Pearl Harbor.

Boot even accuses Republicans of supporting “Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire to wage war on ‘Red China.’” Why does Boot place quotation marks around Red China? Perhaps Boot thinks China wasn’t communist in 1950 either. And it was not MacArthur who wanted to wage war on China--China waged war on the United States when it massively intervened in the Korean War in October-November 1950.

Boot criticizes former President Donald Trump for “revering” Putin while “reviling China,” and he claims that Trump typifies the Asia-first GOP of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But it was on the watch of Boot’s Atlanticists, not the Asia-first GOP, that China fell to the communists, the Korean War ended in a bloody draw, and Indochina fell to the communists. And neither Mao’s China, Kim’s North Korea, nor Ho’s North Vietnam were “nominally” communist.

The “logic” of Boot’s argument is that the United States today has more to fear from Russia than China--perhaps because he believes China is only “nominally communist.” This isn’t the first time Boot has accused Republicans of exaggerating fears about Chinese power. And now Boot accuses Republicans of “anti-Asian racism” for their “tough on China” position. What we have most to fear is the growing strategic partnership between China and Russia--a partnership that emerged and grew, ironically, while Max Boot was busy promoting our endless and futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Boot’s characterization of the CCP as “nominally communist” is belied by both the words and actions of China’s President Xi Jinping, who has called Karl Marx “the greatest thinker in human history,” has told CCP cadres that China “must struggle for communism our entire lives” to create a “collectivised world,” and who predicted the inevitable triumph of socialism over capitalism. CCP approved texts for Chinese students emphasize that China’s communist ideology and social system are “fundamentally incompatible with the West.”

But China’s actions speak even louder than its words. Boot need only consult Stein Ringen’s The Perfect Dictatorship, Steven Mosher’s Bully of Asia, or Josh Chin’s and Liza Lin’s Surveillance State to learn that China is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state that is every bit as communist as Stalin’s Soviet Union was, or that Kim Jong-un’s North Korea is. Perhaps then, like Donald Trump, he, too, would “revile” China.