Thread by @d_jaishankar

Are we in a #NewColdWar?

I took George Kennan's Mr X article in @ForeignAffairs from 1947 (The Sources of Soviet Conduct) and replaced Soviet with Chinese, Lenin with Mao, Kremlin with Zhongnanhai, capitalist with democratic, etc.

The results (excerpted below) are 😲:

"{N]o opposition to them can be officially recognized as having any merit or justification whatsoever. Such opposition can flow, in theory, only from the hostile and incorrigible forces of dying democracy."

"When there is something the Chinese want from us, one or the other of these features of their policy may be thrust temporarily into the background...there will always be Americans who will leap forward with gleeful announcements that 'the Chinese have changed.'"

"[I]f truth were to be found elsewhere, there would be justification for its expression in organized activity. But it is precisely that which Chinese Communist Party cannot and will not permit. The leadership of the Communist Party is therefore always right"

"[T]he patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively countered not by sporadic acts which represent the momentary whims of democratic opinion but only by intelligent long-range policies on the part of China’s adversaries."

"The Chinese thesis not only implies complete lack of control by the west over its own economic destiny, it likewise assumes Chinese unity, discipline and patience over an infinite period."

"[T]he possibility remains...that Chinese power, like the democratic world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay."

"Balanced against this are the facts that China, as opposed to the western world in general, is still by far the weaker party, that Chinese policy is highly flexible, and that Chinese society may well contain deficiencies which will eventually weaken its own total potential."

"At each evidence of these tendencies, a new jauntiness can be noted in Beijing’s tread; new groups of foreign supporters climb on to what they can only view as the band wagon of international politics; and Chinese pressure increases all along the line in international affairs."

I realise I'm not the first to have made this explicit comparison. @AaronFriedberg, among others, got there first: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Here's another (thanks to those who alerted me to it - you know who you are): worldaffairsjournal.org/article/new-co…

By the way (and in response to @ryanl_hass), it is fair to detail in which areas the substitution did *not* work:
1. Descriptions of the Soviet economy in 1947 bear no resemblance to China's today.
2. Framing Soviet Communism as a global ideological movement.