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There’s nowhere I particularly need to drive through tonight’s snowstorm, and I don't have any new insights on Buzzfeed and Michael Cohen. So indulge me while I think out loud for a bit. <thread>
2. @sbg1 has a thoughtful piece in The New Yorker that is partly about Trump’s Washington today, and partly about Putin’s Russia in 2001. newyorker.com/news/letter-fr…
3. Glasser was a reporter in Moscow then, and relates how some people there didn’t quite know what to make of this former KGB officer and his nostalgia for the Soviet police state. Would he try to bring it back? He certainly sounded as if he wanted to. But was that possible?
4. Not entirely, as it turned out. Putin couldn’t bring back the Soviet Union he knew. But he’s restored some of its worst features: all-powerful security services, reckless adventurism beyond Russia’s borders, lethal responses to internal criticism.
5. Point is, believe someone is what he tells you he is. Don’t assume the right mixture of carefully calibrated incentives and persuasion can nudge him into becoming something else.
6. We could say the same thing about Donald Trump; he is what he has always shown that he is. Many people more eloquent than I have done this, and I won’t walk that trail again here. I was thinking tonight of something else.
7. There’s no question Russia is capable of causing a lot of trouble, but the geopolitical challenge of our age is China. Where does its leadership want to take it? What is it telling us about what it is?
8. Veteran Australian China observer @jgarnaut offered a depressing, and depressingly persuasive theory a couple of years ago. nb.sinocism.com/p/engineers-of…
9. Xi Jinping and the other heirs (the word can in many cases be interpreted literally) of the Mao period’s Communist Party leadership see themselves as the latest in a long line of Chinese imperial dynasties,…
10. … one that has divined the key to avoiding the decay & eventual overthrow that plagued all their predecessors. That key is – wait for it – Marxism-Leninism, specifically the Communist theory Mao inherited from Stalin.
11. Can that be possible? Isn’t the entire course of recent Chinese history – in particular the explosive growth of a Chinese economy dependent on the global marketplace – a decisive refutation of Marxism-Leninism? Well, from an economic standpoint, yes it is.
12. But Marxism-Leninism’s selling point, outside of the classroom, is not economics. It is instead as a doctrine justifying centralization of power in all of society, eliminating potential competitors to the political leadership and thereby ensuring its survival.
13. In the later Soviet period Marxism-Leninism was powerfully attractive to revolutionary Third World leaders, who after risking their lives to attain power were naturally loath to give it up, or risk giving it up. Mao was the first and most consequential of these leaders.
14. Mao believed what Stalin had believed: the revolution is never complete, but must always renew itself through unending struggle against its enemies, internal and external. In practice this meant (in both Stalin’s time and Mao’s) bloody purges and upheavals that allowed…
15… the Party leadership to suppress challenges to its authority before they happened. It also meant a Party leadership with enough power to make policy changes that could convulse the entire country, as Stalin did in the 1930s and Mao did in the 1950s and 1960s.
16. Finally, it meant imperial foreign policies that interacted with other nations either as adversaries or as the dominant party exercising authority over a subordinate one. In each respect, the Marxism-Leninism Mao inherited from Stalin promised control.
17. Each respect in which Marxism-Leninism promised a path to control had some precedent in China’s long history, otherwise it would not have been adopted. But the theory, and Stalin’s example, promised a path to not merely control the subject people but to change them.
18. Communist party leaders could be “engineers of the human soul,” able to create enthusiastic, willing subjects dedicated to the political leadership and its perpetuation. This promise was the foundation of some of the worst episodes of human suffering in the 20th Century.
19. It can seem impossible, to us, that anyone would want it back. @jgarnaut argues that it not only is not impossible, but is actually happening in China today. Concentration camps and an omnipresent surveillance state have emerged, in historic terms, overnight.
20. Why? For the same reason Stalin purged the Soviet Communist Party, and Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. China, led by one of the Cultural Revolution’s victims, Deng Xiaoping, seemed to have stepped away from utopian totalitarianism back in the 1970s and 1980s.
21. Garnaut argues that the events of 1989 – the Tien An Men incident and the collapse of the Soviet empire in Europe – prompted a rethinking of how much control the Party could afford to give up. Xi Jinping, faced with a slowing economy, a changing international environment...
22…and able to purge his opponents within the Party, has done so, & now feels able to step back toward Mao and engineering the human soul. The much greater relative power of the Chinese nation in the world today gives this development serious implications beyond China’s borders
23. I think this is a fair overview (by Twitter standards) of the argument Garnaut made. I’d very much like to believe he is mistaken. Many of the most serious challenges to the human project globally can best be met by nations pursuing common objectives.
24. A China returning to the errors of Maoism and armed with all the (in Churchill’s phrase) “lights of perverted science” would make this close to impossible. And a China resolved to battle enemies beyond its borders would create them.
25. The long peace that has made China’s current prosperity possible would be at risk. But because the course Xi appears to be on looks dangerous and unwise does not mean he is not determined to take it. As with Putin, we should believe him when he tells us what he is. [end]
