Nathan Levine
Leaders in both China and the United States appear genuinely interested in trying to stabilize their relationship, which is now at its rockiest point in 50 years. Both countries recognize that the tension between them has become so acute that they face a real and growing risk of war. In recent months, Beijing and Washington have worked to renew dialogue by resuming regular diplomatic visits and setting up new high-level communications channels; in July, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry suggested that China and the United States may arrange a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden to coincide with this November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders Meeting in San Francisco. Such a meeting could offer Biden his only significant opportunity to put the U.S.-Chinese relationship on firmer footing before the distractions of the 2024 presidential election campaign set in.
But a fundamental issue stands in the way of truly solidifying this progress: the two countries lack a mutually acceptable narrative to define their relationship. U.S. leaders, in their diplomatic engagements and public remarks, routinely assert that the United States and China are engaged in a great-power “competition.” Fundamentally, the Biden administration’s approach to China is premised on the idea of “managed strategic competition,” a theory that requires both sides to accept the prospect of engaging in sustained and steady strategic competition for the long term. This strategy demands that each party be transparent about its redlines in order to keep competition from spiraling into conflict and to make room for necessary cooperation. It cannot function if one side refuses even to accept that long-term competition is an inevitable and legitimate state of affairs.
But China’s leaders will not let “competition” define the U.S.-Chinese relationship. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it in an Asia Society speech last year, Beijing sees “so-called strategic competition” as a “win-lose” dynamic that brings “tremendous uncertainty” to the relationship and pushes the two powers further toward “confrontation and conflict.” China instead demands that the United States commit to describing the relationship in terms of “mutual respect,” “peaceful coexistence,” and “win-win” cooperation. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Xi in Beijing in June, Xi demanded that neither country “try to shape the other side” and declared that “peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation” is the only “right way” forward.
This is no mere semantic squabble. China demands the “coexistence” concept out of a deep anxiety regarding what “competition” could mean for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—a view that the U.S. side does not fully understand. Practically, the disconnect has frustrated even such straightforward steps as establishing effective military-to-military crisis communications and dialogue on nuclear arms control.
The truth is that current U.S.-Chinese tensions and distrust cannot be reduced to any specific flash point such as Taiwan or technology. Nor are these tensions the necessary result of some inevitable rivalry between two great powers. They stem from profound differences between China and the United States on the issues of worldview, ideology, and regime legitimacy. This idea may come as a surprise for many in the West, who prefer to think about China in economic and military terms and who often see Beijing as laser-focused on its national self-interest rather than distracted by ideological considerations. The role of subconscious ideological assumptions in the U.S. approach to China has also been badly underestimated. But these differences reveal themselves in the dispute over how to describe the relationship—and they must be considered carefully, lest the misunderstandings degenerate into open conflict.
YOU WIN OR YOU DIE
When U.S. leaders press Chinese leaders to permit “competition” to be the conceptual basis for their countries’ relationship, they are drawing on a specific conception of what competition entails, one based on the ideals envisioned by classical democratic liberalism. In this vision—core to the liberal tradition of political philosophy—political competition is competitive in the sense of a sporting match: a contest of ideas that may be waged with great passion but that, at the end of the day, can be resolved peaceably, even amicably. Both competitors know the outcome is not final and the loser has the right to return and compete again. Political competition is, if not a game, at least not a matter of life or death.
This understanding of competition could not differ more from the vision of politics held by Xi and the CCP leadership. While the modern CCP has tried to leave behind aspects of Mao Zedong’s legacy—by reforming and opening the economy after 1979 and loosening its collectivist ambitions—Mao’s Marxist-Leninist view of political “competition” remains central to its thinking. This vision presented politics as precisely the life-or-death struggle the democratic liberal ideal claims it is not. In this view, political competition is a raw struggle for power between groups or factions that can only be a prelude to the eradication of one’s competitor; indeed, the history of Leninist politics in China is replete with purges, prison camps, and political murders. As Mao framed it, political competition comes down to “Ni si; wo huo” (You die; I live).
Xi was raised during the brutal factional violence of the Cultural Revolution; his father was purged from the CCP’s leadership and imprisoned when Xi was nine years old, and to him the zero-sum view is the only conception of political competition that is not fatally naive. In 2000, Xi reflected in an interview with the Chinese Times that “people who have little experience with power, those who have been far away from it, tend to regard [it] as mysterious and novel,” and unserious. “But I look past the superficial things … the flowers and the glory and the applause,” he went on. “I see the detention houses [and] the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.”
Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-ranked leader, has claimed that Western rhetoric has “stoked ideological prejudice and hatred” such that China is now “seeing acts of encirclement and oppression.” In the West, these kinds of references to ideology frequently go unnoticed or are dismissed as mere propaganda. This is a mistake. In fact, from the perspective of the top leadership of the CCP, ideology is the central arena of conflict, and the United States is mainly driven by a desire to wield its own Western, liberal ideology to subvert and overthrow their regime.
Understanding the CCP’s view illuminates Beijing’s problem with the “competition” frame. Whereas the Biden administration’s liberal vision of politics allows it to see “managed competition” as a way for both sides to survive, and even to thrive, while avoiding conflict, the CCP’s leadership reads the concept as a papering-over of the real, existential struggle—and a way to trick China into tying its own hands. The Chinese leadership is therefore fundamentally skeptical of any U.S. assurances that the two countries’ competition will actually remain bounded.
PARTY LINE
No one has expressed these views more consistently and forthrightly than Xi himself. In a speech delivered to top party leaders months after he took office in 2013, Xi declared that in China, Western “hostile forces” were “doing their utmost to propagate so-called universal values.” Their objective was “to vie with us [on] the battlefields of people’s hearts … to overthrow [China’s] socialist system.” Though “invisible,” the “extraordinarily fierce” ongoing struggle in the ideological sphere was, he warned, “a matter of life and death.” He has not swayed from this conviction: in 2016 he declared that Westerners regard “China’s growth as a threat to Western values,” and thus “they have not for a moment ceased their ideological infiltration of China.” In 2017, he affirmed that “ideology is about the heart and soul of a nation,” and this July, he warned the assembled leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that they all must be ready to resist Western-instigated “color revolutions.”
Western analysts and policymakers often attribute this growing emphasis on ideology to Xi’s personal understanding of power. But some of the most knowledgeable political observers inside China argue that Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, initiated the country’s intensified focus on ideological and geopolitical struggles. After Mao’s death, the CCP experimented with easing off ideological rhetoric to facilitate economic growth and build profitable ties with the West. But its deep-rooted ideological convictions remained dormant, ready to reassert themselves, especially during times of turbulence or perceived danger.
So when, in December 2008, over 300 prominent Chinese lawyers, intellectuals, and activists unveiled the “Charter 08” manifesto—which advocated for comprehensive liberalization of the regime—the CCP’s leadership saw in it a confirmation that Western influence posed a direct challenge to its legitimacy. Charter 08 became a decisive factor in convincing the party’s leadership that it had to change course fast. A leaked 2013 internal party communique called “Document 9” reflected the CCP’s renewed conviction that “Western anti-China forces,” driven by liberal ideology, were dead set on forcing “Westernization, splitting, and color revolutions” on China in order to overthrow the CCP and make the country into a democracy.
This growing belief in a fierce ongoing ideological struggle has supercharged the CCP’s distrust of Washington’s intentions. Ideology helps underwrite the legitimacy of regimes, and a regime’s legitimacy is likely to determine whether it survives. Combined with the CCP’s view of politics, this belief makes ideological competition between regimes in fact the ultimate “matter of life and death” that Xi has described. Indeed, Xi and other top CCP leaders understand that political defeat, including from regime change, could put their own lives at risk.
TWO TO TANGO
To many Americans, absorbed by their own democracy’s weaknesses, the idea that “Western anti-China forces” are on a crusade to overthrow the CCP may sound irrational, even paranoid. But it is crucial also to consider the fuller nature and history of Western liberalism as an ideology. Many Westerners are, by now, so acculturated to liberalism that they do not perceive it as an ideology at all. They swim in it like fish through water. But Document 9 also identified liberalism as a missionary faith that claims its values “are the prevailing norm for all human civilization” and must apply universally “to all humanity.” And as practiced abroad by the United States this is, in fact, true—not only in theory but in practice.
After World War II, the United States began to embrace a maximalist strain of liberalism that came to view the existence of illiberal societies anywhere as a threat to liberty everywhere. This conception, rooted in Hegelian universalism, takes a view of historical progress that sees liberalism as history’s natural endpoint and the destiny of human government. It cannot permanently tolerate any illiberal societies, as their existence undermines its claim to universality. Accelerating after the end of the Cold War, this conviction helped underwrite ambitious U.S. attempts to reorder other societies along liberal lines, such as in Iraq and Libya—interventions that, notably, left those countries’ regimes destroyed and leaders dead. In the CCP’s view, this is precisely the impetus now driving U.S. hostility toward China.
U.S. politicians have, in recent decades, provided no shortage of rhetorical fodder to reinforce that perception. Under President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the United States must “engage and empower the Chinese people” to enact regime change, claiming that “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.” Biden has publicly avoided any such hawkish calls for regime change in China, but he has made the promotion of liberal values a core foreign policy priority around the world and frequently speaks of an ongoing global “battle between democracy and autocracy.” This perceived imperialistic pressure is occurring precisely when Chinese leaders feel increasingly insecure at home.
The CCP is genuinely worried about its legitimacy. It faces a slowing economy with alarmingly high youth unemployment as well as a weakening of the unspoken bargain between the government and the people: that a lack of political liberalization would be offset by steadily increasing economic prosperity. Precisely because of their ideological worldview, Xi and other top CCP leaders understand that any serious economic setback could further open the door to liberal ideas and pose an existential threat to their rule.
Xi hopes to resolve this legitimacy problem by seeking to revive the Chinese economy and promoting “common prosperity” to address inequality. He is also trying to instill Chinese “cultural confidence,” as he puts it, by promoting Chinese nationalism and focusing on national security issues. Most important, he is attempting to forge a new social contract by stressing a continuity between China’s triumphal, pre-Marxist past and the present era under his leadership.
When Xi speaks of creating a “multipolar world,” he does not only mean making China a military and economic power equal to the United States. He seeks to assert that China is and will continue to be a great civilization that has a right to exist on its own terms, without conforming to Western liberalism. He hopes to bolster the CCP’s perceived legitimacy at home as well as abroad precisely by positing that Chinese civilization serves as a counterexample to liberalism. This is the message he delivered, for example, in a recent speech in which he spoke of making the world safe for a “diversity of civilizations.”
Hence, from Beijing’s perspective, it is vital, not trivial, to demand that Washington accept “coexistence” with China. For the CCP, “competition” implies that one side or the other will be destroyed. In truth, the party is not very confident about which side that would be.
TAKE THE FLOOR
Neither China nor the United States can easily accept the other’s proposition for how to understand and approach their relationship. This creates a hard ceiling to what diplomatic dialogues and stabilization efforts can accomplish. In practical terms, the ideological disconnect makes Beijing hesitant to embrace any mutual “guardrails” intended to prevent escalation in a competitive environment. Recently, for example, Beijing has refused to accommodate Washington’s request for dialogues on nuclear strategic stability and arms control. Because of its ideological suppositions, Beijing assumes these are traps laid for its destruction, not genuine attempts to maintain stability. Even potential collaboration in areas of shared interest such as climate change, global food security, and international macroeconomic stability are now typically seen by China as a vehicle for one party to impose its will on the other.
Ultimately, what China wants is for the United States to explicitly agree to an end goal for the relationship: peaceful coexistence or something similar, in which the CCP’s right to rule remains permanently off limits. This sounds easy enough: Washington already claims that it accepts the CCP’s legitimacy and will not try to overthrow the Chinese regime. But Beijing does not trust Washington’s protestations, as it does not believe that American liberal ideology can ever truly accept this scenario.
Changing that belief would likely require the United States to substantially shift course from how it approaches the world, abandoning any claims to liberal universalism and cultural superiority and explicitly adopting a worldview and a foreign policy more strictly centered on national sovereignty—in other words, a worldview more like China’s. For the United States, “coexistence” also implies ceasing all competitive pressure on issues such as technology, trade, and human rights. This is not something the United States is likely to be willing to do. The American ideological tendency toward a crusading international liberalism runs very deep on both sides of the domestic political divide—just as the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist instinct does in China.
Thus the two countries are at a serious impasse: an ideologically driven security dilemma. Washington seems to have not yet fully recognized this impasse. It is most likely that the United States and China will remain trapped in a tense and uncomfortable rivalry for the foreseeable future, with the mutual desire to avoid outright war serving as the last remaining floor for the relationship. The fact that the ideological dispute is unlikely to be resolved only makes buttressing this increasingly fragile floor especially crucial. Reinforcing it demands persistent, concerted, and extensive efforts from both sides. There are simply no other options left, at least until a time when the United States, China, or both are willing to adjust their worldviews and find a way to share the same world.
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