The Great Leap Backward: The ROC: A Tenacious But Transforming Authoritarianism

6
The Great Leap Backward
C hiefly affected by external factors and forces, the ROC (Republic of China)
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started the arduous building of a Han-Chinese nation-state with promising

departures from both the China Order and the Qin-Han polity. A leading design
for that is the San-min Doctrine or Three Principles of the People proposed by
Sun Yat-sen for the KMT (Nationalist Party) that calls for the Chinese to live
as an independent country “uniting with all other nations that treat us equally,”
for democracy, equality and socioeconomic development.1 Yet, the ROC rulers
on the Chinese Mainland were all basically Qin-Han style Confucian-Legalist
authoritarian strongmen, even warlords to varied degrees, from Yuan Shikai to
Chiang Kai-shek. The Westernized and idealistic Sun Yat-sen, who never actually
ruled the country, also quickly adopted the traditional authoritarian, dictatorial style
of personal governance. External forces, especially the comprehensive subversion
and aggression by Russia/Soviet Union and the aggressions by Imperial Japan,
shaped China’s choices. Countless Chinese elites acted as the willing or duped
agents of foreign, mainly Soviet and Japanese, powers at the expense of Chinese
lives and interests (Liu 7-26-2015). China’s state-building and nation-building
were eventually hijacked by the politicized and foreign manipulated nationalism
and populism since the mid-1920s, retarding and distorting the much needed
sociopolitical reforms. With a crafty substitution of the Mandate of Heaven with
the Mandate of the People, the foreign funded CCP (Chinese Communist Party)
under Mao Zedong became a powerful Qin-style totalitarian state during World
War II. With smart ruses, sheer force, imported ideological phraseologies, and
crucial external assistances, the CCP unscrupulously won the Chinese Civil War
to end the ROC on the Chinese Mainland in 1949/50, causing both Chinese
internal politics and foreign policy to take a giant leap backward.
The ROC: A Tenacious but Transforming Authoritarianism
Externally, the post-China Order ROC was content with the unification of the
Copyright 2017. SUNY Press.
Chinese World (mostly the Centralia) instead of pursuing a tianxia mandate
159
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160 The China Order
and gained its major world power statues as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
vision for the post-World War II world order.2 It also actively and positively
contributed to the construction and management of the new world order of
Westphalia System (Loke 2013, 209–26). Internally, the ROC remained tena-
ciously albeit feebly authoritarian. The liberal-turned-authoritarian leader Sun
Yet-sen became “unscrupulous in attempting to achieve his ends” (Liang 1925;
D. Tang 1998, 140–46). His KMT managed, after his death, to take over the
ROC under the more authoritarian military rule by Chiang Kai-shek. Yet, the
weakened and incomplete Qin-Han polity of the KMT-ROC continued to
transform, influenced and nudged by the West, especially the United States.
The comprehensive gains and changes since the late-nineteenth century, outlined
in the previous chapter, became part of Chinese life and were furthered and
legalized constitutionally by the 1912 Temporary Charter and the 1947 ROC
Constitution (Lu 2005, chaps. 3–16). In due time and with sustained and
improved implementation, the ROC was on the seemingly irreversible road
to be ever less Qin-Han-like and more democratic.
However, despite the revolutionary institutional and ideological changes
that were taking strong root, the great tradition and ideation of the China
Order lurked robustly and the elite-pleasing Qin-Han polity died hard. The
“loss” of the Chinese world empire always irritated many Chinese elites. The
Soviet agitation and propaganda powerfully hypnotized and attracted many
to further brew the rather traditional Qin-Han authoritarianism disguised in
nationalism, populism, and socialism/communism.3 Both the KMT and the CCP
have now been wielding the banner of rejuvenation of the Chinese nation over
the past eight decades.4 Idealistic Chinese especially the youth were often like
kids in a candy store for the first time, mesmerized by the competing ideologies
while enjoying liberty. They easily felt dissatisfied and frustrated by the pace
of political reform in contrast with the well-developed democracies they could
easily see in the West. The fragmented and factionalized government, brutally
exhausted and weakened by foreign subversions and invasions, energized the
politically ambitious. The ROC was an ever softer and fading Qin-Han polity,
even the more authoritarian, semi-Leninist KMT-ROC was caught between
a rock and a hard place. On the one side, popular pressure grew for more
sociopolitical reform, human and civil rights, and genuine rule of law—also
strongly supported by the United States, ROC’s major ally. On the other side,
the lethal challenge of the far more authoritarian Leninist-Stalinist CCP rose
with a well-armed military and sophisticated propaganda to disguise the CCP
as democracy fighters and anti-West nationalists—crucially supported by the
Soviet Union, the ROC’s unwilling colleague in the Club of Great Powers that
steadily sought to subdue and subvert China.
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The Great Leap Backward 161
The differences between Chiang Kai-shek’s tenacious but weak (or “nec-
essary” as he saw it) authoritarianism and the United States created serious,
costly, and sometime open friction and mistrust as early as in 1943–44.5 Gen-
eral George Marshall headed the mission impossible to mediate the disputes
between the KMT-ROC government and the rebellious CCP in 1945–47. In
good faith for peace and with genuine and even altruistic goodwill for the
Chinese people, Marshall effectively restricted and chastised the ROC govern-
ment, especially regarding the pivotal battles in Manchuria, while he had little
leverage to affect the CCP (Tanner 2013, 15, 76–105, 192–222). The seem-
ingly promising peace negotiations broke down due to insincerities, mistrusts,
miscalculations, and overreliance on force on both sides. The American effort
for a democratic coalition government in China to contain the Soviet Union
failed and a disappointed Washington inadvertently contributed to the tragic
result of having a worse government in China: the fall of the ROC on Chinese
Mainland and the “loss of China” to Moscow.6
Funded, armed, and directed by the Moscow-based Communist Interna-
tional (Comintern or Third International, 1919–43), the CCP was created in
1921 and started an armed rebellion in 1927–36 against the ROC government.
It was saved by Japanese aggression and grew in 1937–45 by pledging loyalty to
the ROC government. The CCP won the Chinese Civil War (July 1946–June
1950), officially termed Liberation War in the CCP narratives, and toppled the
ROC on the Chinese Mainland, which was mortally weakened and eroded by
internal division, corruption, and betrayal.7 The PRC has been colored with the
imported Stalinist-Communism to radically and totally Westernize China under
a coercive monism of international communism.8 However, it in fact restored
the Qin-Han polity dressed in Marxist-Leninist phraseology. As a tragedy of
epic proportion, the disappointing KMT-ROC was replaced by a much less
democratic and decidedly more authoritarian, even totalitarian, regime of the
CCP-PRC that represented institutionally and ideologically a great regression
of Chinese history.
The Rise of the CCP
The PRC official narratives typically praised the creation of the CCP in late
July of 1921 as a secret grouping of thirteen Chinese Marxists led by Mao
Zedong on behalf of the Chinese proletarian class and the Chinese nation to
fight for China’s salvation and the world communist revolution that “created a
new heaven and earth in Chinese history.”9 Later, as the communist ideology
fizzled and the true facts started to emerge, the CCP’s founding was rebranded
162 The China Order
in the 2010s as the “Beginning of the Great Revival” of the Chinese nation
and Chinese civilization with some foreign (Soviet) assistance, but with little
reference to the communist ideology or the creation by and funding from
Moscow (Huang and Han 2011). The CCP was in fact directly organized
and financed by the Moscow-based Comintern as its branch in China, a
revolutionary conspiracy group, to be a part of Moscow’s clandestine effort to
safeguard the Soviet Russia through instigating revolutions and instability in
the neighboring countries (Y. Jin 2010, 11–12; CCP Central History 2002,
40–42). The crucial Soviet secret payment to the Chinese communists, totally
hushed away in the official PRC narratives, actually started in 1920. In the
first year of its existence (1921–22), the CCP’s total budget was 17,655 silver
Yuan, of which 16,655 (roughly 35,000 U.S. dollars) or more than 94 percent
was from the Soviet Union via Comintern agents. This payment increased
rapidly as the CCP expanded from under 100 to 10,000 members in 1927.
Available yet incomplete data showed that from 1921 to 1931 the CCP got
financial subsidies of 50 to 70 silver Yuan or 250 to 400 (1990) USD per
member every year from the Soviet Union, equivalent to 60 to 80 percent of
the Chinese per capita GDP at the time,10 covering the most of its expenses.
The critical Soviet payment directed the types and intensity of CCP’s activities
and performances during that period and was often the only lifeline for the
whole party (K. Yang 2011, 66–57, 72–75, 89). The Comintern also spent
one million (2012) USD (58,130 ounces of silver or over 1,600 folds of the
Chinese per capita GDP at the time) to train and place each of the estimated
1,300 cadres and agents to organize and lead the Chinese revolutionaries dur-
ing the 1920s and ’30s (Feng and Shi 2014).11
But the CCP was just one of Comintern’s many ventures in China. At
great cost to the Russian people who endured famines and poverty, Moscow
spent even more to support multiple “communist” groups and secretly or openly
bribe and aid several “leftist” warlords such as Feng Yuxiang (and later Sheng
Shicai) to disturb, weaken, revolutionize, and influence China (Liu 3-14-2015).
More importantly, Moscow forcefully backed the KMT in the early 1920s
with arms, funds, and advisors. In 1926, the KMT was actually accepted as
one of the several Comintern branches in China. The CCP, ideologically more
radical and unconditionally pro-Soviet Union as shown with its full support
to the Sino-Soviet agreement in 1924 between Moscow and the Beijing ROC
government—the chief enemy of both the KMT and the CCP at that time—
was instructed to join the KMT as a junior partner to conquer and control
China (Y. Shen 2013). The CCP had such a humble and insignificant start,
mostly as Moscow’s spare tire in China while Moscow was mainly betting on
the bigger, more mainstream KMT that the CCP has celebrated its birthday
since the 1930s on the wrong date—very few cared to record and remember
exactly when the first meeting that started the party was actually held.12
The CCP had a clear duality from its beginning. It was a Chinese
revolutionary movement composed of the politically active and ambitious but
non-mainstream youth influenced by radical sociopolitical aspirations including
Marxism from the West (often via the Japanese translation) and Han-nationalism
that was energized by the humiliation the Chinese elites felt during the fall of
the Qing world empire. It was also a willing tool of subversion funded and
controlled by the Soviet Union in the name of the world socialist and commu-
nist revolution (Brown 2009). It was a foreign-funded and employed resurgent
group grasping for power that also had many idealists, nationalists, political
speculators, adventurists, and “red terrorists” among its members (Liu 3-14-
2015). Many of the founding members including Chen Duxiu (1879–1942),
the General Secretary of the CCP for its first six years, later inevitably went
their separate ways and some became strong critics and nemeses of the CCP
(Meng 2009; Smarlo 2004, 219–32).
After the initial success in unifying China by force, the two Chinese
revolutionary parties, the two branches of the same Comintern, violently split
in 1927 and the KMT-ROC government rejected Moscow (Y. Shen 2013).
The purged CCP became the only Chinese branch of the Comintern. It was
then mobilized by Moscow, went underground, and moved to the remote rural
areas to start armed rebellions just like so many riots in Chinese history but
with crucial foreign support and command. Similar to the Taiping Rebellion
six decades earlier, the CCP built a traditional peasant rebellion on socio-
economic appeals such as wealth redistribution, clan retribution, and power
shifts, specifically land reform (reallocation), under the cover of an imported
Western ideology of Marxism (Wou 1994; Y. Chen 2002 and 2012). Unlike
Taiping’s twisted Christianity that was shunned by foreign powers, however,
the CCP was organized and funded by Comintern and had institutions and
practices that systematically imitated the Stalinist Soviet Union to have a
Chinese Soviet Republic state, violent class-struggles (against the landlords
and “rich peasants”) for mobilization and extraction, and internal purges and
mass executions of tens of thousands of comrades with various accusations
including the groundless Anti-Bolshevik Regiment (AB 团) in order to “elimi-
nate dissenters and nonconformists” (Gong 1978, 353–54, 562–67; P. Wang
1992, 24–27; Zhong 1995, 16–26). The deadly internal violence was perhaps
effective or even inevitable to control the party, but it was indeed “shock-
ingly terrifying . . . and stupidly suicidal,” according to its survivors (H. Q.
Liu 2004, 14–17). Moscow continued to pay the CCP vast sums of at least
60,000 silver Yuan a month in late 1928. Before the channel of funding was
164 The China Order
blocked by the ROC’s victory over the CCP’s Red Army in 1934, Moscow
paid the CCP at the minimum 70,000 silver Yuan (or roughly 150,000 U.S.
dollars) every month, a great addition to the income generated by the CCP
through its own taxation, extraction (physical elimination of all “rich people”),
and some exports (of specialty mineral ores like tungsten) in areas under its
control (K. Yang 2011, 83).
Consequently and unsurprisingly, the CCP adopted a peculiar and non-
nationalist foreign policy stance to first and foremost protect and promote
the interests and wishes of the Soviet Union rather than those of China. The
CCP was literally commanded by a Moscow-sent Otto Braun (1900–74), the
German-Soviet military secret agent (Braun 1982; Y. Jin 2010, 237–50). Dur-
ing this period, the CCP was clearly more of Soviet subversive instrument of
violent insurgence than a nationalist or idealist political movement. The CCP,
for example, called for “armed rebellion to protect the Soviet Union” during
the Sino-Soviet conflict over the Russian railroad rights in Manchuria in 1929,
the first external war fought and lost by the newly united ROC to the superior
Soviet Red Army ironically commanded by none other than the former Chief
Soviet Military Advisor to the KMT-ROC in 1924–27, General Vasily Blyukher
(Galen 加仑) who was later promoted to be a Marshal before being purged
by Stalin (Lensen 1974; Z. Liu 1998, 184–94; Wilson 2002, 24 and 105).
After several rounds of harsh military campaigns, the KMT-ROC gov-
ernment managed to defeat the CCP’s Red Army and the Chinese Soviet
Republic.13 The CCP was forced to run away from its main guerilla bases in
the mountains of Southern and Central China, nearing China’s then political
and economic centers, to zigzag into the remote regions in Southwestern China
and ended up in the barren mountains of Northwestern China with the purpose
of eventually taking refuge in the Soviet Union or the Soviet-controlled Outer
Mongolia. This year-long (1934–35) run on foot during which the CCP lost
about 90 percent of its nearly 100,000-man forces was later self-glorified as
the Long March and became a major source of charisma for the CCP’s politi-
cal legitimacy and a legendary history of heroism and survivability known to
everyone in the PRC.14 In fact, however, the CCP leaders were basically car-
ried by soldiers on stretchers the entire time (Smarlo 2004, 295). The ROC
government made the critical miscalculation to only drive and chase the CCP
away from the center of the Centralia to the Soviet border in the hope of
drawing Moscow into fighting the Japanese and also to fully conquer the entire
Centralia in the process, rather than eliminating the CCP all together when
and where it could (Liu 7-26-2015).
In the middle of the Long March, when the CCP literally lost contact
with the bosses in Moscow, the more native segment led by the sidelined Mao
Zedong rose to seize the top leadership of the military and later the party
from the Moscow-trained and appointed leaders and Soviet advisors in early
1935 in Zunyi. After that, the CCP became more of a native Chinese peasant
rebellion and a military-dependent organization based on the pursuit of “power
comes from the barrel of the gun” than an internationalist Soviet agent.15 The
nativist nature of the CCP started to overtake the communist characters, and
the CCP aimed more at acquiring political power in China through the use
of force and ruses at all costs than promoting an abstract world communist
movement led by Moscow, although the latter remained always a key part of
the CCP’s professed mission and ideological banner for the appealing cultural
sophistication and lucrative Soviet aid. Hoping to use the Chinese to deflect
the rising threat of the Japanese militarism and to preserve the CCP, Stalin
ordered the CCP through Comintern in 1935 to pretend submission to the
ROC government so to form an anti-Japan united front in China—the CCP
released its “August 1st Declaration” in Moscow (without Mao’s input) to
pronounce its new position (B. Wang 2010, 131–32). After the CCP reached
Northern Shanxi in early 1936, closer to the Sino-Soviet-Mongolian border
region, Moscow reestablished links with the transformed CCP and quickly
resumed its financial aid at the average rate of about USD 500,000 per month
in addition to significant weapon supplies so to keep the CCP alive in China
Proper, even just in a very remote part of it, rather than having it run into
the peripheries of Xinjiang or take refuge in the Soviet Union, thus losing its
Moscow-hoped subversive role in the ROC (K. Yang 2011, 80–84).
In December 1936, the CCP was literally saved by the critical Xian
Incident, a mutiny that kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek by the ROC General
Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001) in the name of stopping civil war and form-
ing a Chinese united front to fight the encroaching Japanese Imperial Army.
Zhang, who had already aided the CCP before the Incident, might actually
have been a secret CCP member (Z. Liu 2013, V4, 610–62; K. Yang 2006
A; Zhang quoted in China News 2014). He was powerfully affected by the
Moscow-orchestrated plots and campaigns of the CCP front organizations,
the “non-partisan patriots” of a National Salvation Committee that smartly
utilized the anti-Japanese sentiments to save the CCP and serve Moscow’s new
needs (B. Wang 2010, 131–59, 184–208). The Incident forced the ROC to
stop its final lethal blow against the CCP and became a major turning point
in Chinese history. Zhang later publically regretted his fateful action when
he was under house arrest in Taiwan (Zhang 1956 and 1957). He did not
repeat (nor refute) his repentance after he was released in 1990. The CCP
has praised Zhang as an old friend, a great patriot, and a national hero, but
Zhang’s brother who joined the CCP was persecuted to death under Mao (Fan
166 The China Order
1978). Tellingly, Zhang chose to live in Hawaii in freedom for his last decade
and never returned to Chinese Mainland after 1949, despite the CCP’s many
invitations (Tang and Wang 2002).
The growing Sino-Japanese conflicts, especially the subsequent Sino-
Japanese War (1937–45), rescued the CCP and also empowered it to be a
credible even invincible rivalry with the KMT for ruling China (Mitter 2013).
Japan’s aggression against China in the 1920s and ’30s were reckless, aggressive,
and militarist overreactions to the Soviet-fanned Chinese anti-Japanese move-
ment. It served Moscow well in the Far East and mortally wounded the ROC
and later destroyed Japan itself as the war got out of control to finally draw
the United States in (X. Feng 2014; Liu 7-26-2015). With the new room for
breath created by the war against Japanese aggression and the new legitimacy
granted by the ROC government through the Chinese national united front,
the CCP rejuvenated to become a successful rebellious state within the state.
It left the war for the nation largely to the ROC government which was
weakened steadily in an almost directly reversed co-relationship with the rise
of the CCP power (Xie 2002; Y. Chen 1986).
The CPP first utilized the nationalist cause to obtain funds, weapons,
and equipment. In 1937–40, 58 to 86 percent of CCP’s annual income
came from ROC government appropriations (J. Zhang 2012). Moscow kept
its significant financial aid to the CCP, “5.2 times as much as (CCP’s) total
local revenue in 1937” from its controlled regions with one payment of $1.5
million in November 1937 alone, and was still “1.5 times of the total local
revenue in 1940” (L. Xiao 2014, 73). By 1941, the ROC decided to cut the
unaccountable funding to the rapidly expanding CCP and its military forces.
Moscow also reduced its secret payment to Mao after Nazi Germany invaded
the Soviet Union in June 1941. To deal with this “extremely harsh” financial
condition, the CCP stepped up class warfare and confiscation of the wealthy.16
Over-printing its own paper money quickly led to hyperinflation. An unsustain-
able rate of 35 to 44 percent tax drove many peasants to run away or to take
part in anti-tax riots. The efforts of ordering the troops to produce their own
food and clothing as well as running government mills and factories were only
marginally helpful (Zhu 2012). The CCP then turned to illicit means, including
counterfeiting currency and drug trafficking (Feng 3-11-2013). Farmers and
troops were ordered to reintroduce the banished crop of poppies to massively
produce opium. Secret convoys were organized to smuggle and sell opium to
the Chinese people in the ROC and the Japanese-occupied regions.17 CCP’s
highly lucrative opium trade started in 1941 and continued to as late as 1948
(L. Gao 2013). By 1943, the CCP-monopolized secretive opium business (inef-
fectively banned by the ROC government and the Japanese occupiers) already
supported half of the CCP budget. It contributed a whopping 96.9 percent
of the CCP-controlled region’s total trade surplus by 1945 (Y. Chen 1990).
What is remarkable about the power of the CCP was that the Party launched
and successfully ran a decade-long “revolutionary opium war” against the ROC
and the Chinese people (Y. Chen 1990, 41–117; Chang and Halliday 2006,
268–74), then managed to cover it up well and rooted it out when the CCP
became the new ruler of China in 1949.18
Mao and the Mandate of the People
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) was a bona fide product of the paternalistic agrar-
ian society and traditional Chinese imperial culture from the rural Hunan in
Southern China. He proved to be a very shrewd and effective Legalist prac-
titioner of Qin-Han polity.19 Well-versed in Chinese classics and the Chinese
language and with great ambitions and a penetratingly cynical understanding of
human nature and weaknesses, he was a master of words and ruses for power
and domination (S. Xiao 1993 and 2004; J. Xiao 2013, V1).
With the deliberate cultivation by Joseph Stalin, Mao remained as a
senior factional leader of the CCP despite being marginalized from time to
time by Moscow’s other disciples in “dog eat dog, communist style” infightings
(Pantsov and Levine 2012, 185–288). After the heaven-sent Xian Incident, Mao
managed to rise to be the undisputed dictator of the CCP by 1942–43 via
many ethically challenged maneuvers, plots, bribes, misinformation, manipula-
tions, force and even torture, and murder to subdue and eliminate competitors
such as Wang Ming and Zhang Guotao.20 He used a multi-year Rectification
Campaign of 1941–45 to relentlessly and mercilessly employ the imported
techniques of the Soviet Chaka/KGB-style persecution, purge, intimidation,
and brainwashing—or thought-remodeling or thought-reform in CCP lexi-
con—in combination with the traditional Confucian-Legalist ruses, especially
information control, self-criticism, and submission.21 Stalin’s personal approval
and selection were key to Mao’s rise with the price being that Mao follow and
obey Stalin with great deference until the latter’s death in 1953 (Pantsov and
Levine 2012, 305–99). Mao “unscrupulously and unrestrictedly” “abandoned
all ethics, idealisms, and principles” to turn the CCP into the military vehicle
for pursuing his personal imperial dictatorship that betrayed Chinese national
interests and “had nothing to do with Communism anymore,” observed one
of his former competitors (G. Zhang 1966, V3, 341–47 and 430).
Underneath the powerful and fascinating promise of “loving the people,”
“for people’s happiness,” and “to create a new China” by Mao “the great savior
of the people,”22 the goal that really mattered appeared to be the ambition for
power to rule. For that objective, everything and anything including truth,
168 The China Order
orality, lives, people’s living standard, national interest, peace, and the envi-
m
ronment all became secondary and dispensable, as Mao famously declared that
he was simply godless/fearless and lawless,23 pursuing and enjoying the endless
struggles against heaven, earth, and people.24 The cynical way of Legalist gover-
nance, ends (of ruling) always justifies means, was pushed to an extreme with
the supposedly “scientific” dogma of Marxism and the commonsensical but
empty slogan of “serve the people” replacing Confucian humanism. Ideologi-
cally and for propaganda purposes, the People became the surrogate for God
or heaven and the CCP led by Mao self-declared (and forcefully defended with
all carrots and sticks) to be the sole representative of the People indefinitely. In
a poem Mao wrote in 1945, he was “to be the master with land, godless and
lawless for the people.”25 The mighty concept of Mandate of Heaven in Chinese
tradition and ideation under the China Order was therefore revived with the
Mandate of the People as the mesmerizingly appealing but absolutely specious
source of legitimacy. People’s human and civil rights, freedoms, democracy,
and rule of law were in fact obliterated by the people’s savior in the name of
the people. To many Chinese, “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman
Mao is the people” (H. Yu 2011, 4).
To posture and claim to rule as the people’s representative or servant is
not Mao’s invention, nor is it necessarily immoral or bad. But the CCP led by
Mao, like many other authoritarian and totalitarian rulers, used force and ruses
to make sure that it was the sole, self-appointed and eternal representative of
the people, appropriating and abusing the name of the people for self-serving
purposes. CCP’s duplicity and hypocrisy have indeed rivaled even surpassed the
imperial duplicity and hypocrisy of monopolizing and abusing the Mandate
of Heaven. All PRC government entities and affiliates and the currency have
born the name of “people’s” and Mao’s motto of “serve the people” is liter-
ally carved onto the front gate of the CCP headquarters in Zhongnanhai.26 A
people’s republic by the Mandate of the People is very much the same as the
imperial slogan used by the Qin-Han world empire rulers: a celestial empire
by the Mandate of Heaven.27 In 2015, in the tradition of chanting official
slogans during celebratory parades, the CCP-PRC leader Xi Jinping ended
his main speech with the illuminating mantra “The people shall/must win.”28
Shrewd businessmen cashed in with billboards declaring people as the heaven
and “The Heaven is simply the Party and Government” with the backdrop of
a bright sun rising from behind the Tiananmen Gate.29
Mao and the CCP thus successfully restored the Qin-Han polity as
an autocratic governing system dressed up in new phraseology and imported
ideology. The Mandate of Heaven was replaced by the equally empty Mandate
of the People and the ideology of Confucianism by the more decorative Com-
munism. This new Qin-Han polity exceeded its past versions for it pushed
the Legalism core further, justified by the supposedly ultimate truth of Marx-
ism, acquiring elements of a radical theocracy. It is hardcore authoritarianism
even totalitarianism as it seeks to break the family structure to atomize and
utilize the individual, trashing Confucian norms. As power-fetish Legalists,
the CCP dismisses the appreciation and apprehension of the ancestors, heaven
(the nature or God), and life or afterlife—values at least nominally preached
by the Confucian-Legalist rulers. Human life including that of the comrades’
is dispensable for the leader’s objectives. Tactical advantages and momentary
convenience as such keep its broadly defined secrets, which are indeed vital to
a conspiracy political group (X. Xiao 2012). “[A] Communist Party member
and revolutionary fighter in whatever work he does,” declared a CCP internal
book on secrecy, “must first and foremost think about keeping secrets” (CCP
Central Party History 1994, 113). For example, from the very beginning in
the 1920s, the CCP has always tried to sweep the battlegrounds to collect its
wounded and fallen-behind who could not be carried out and then simply
execute them all under the supervision of political commissars to prevent
the possible “leak of our secrets.”30 During the desperate run of Long March
(1934–35), top CCP leaders including Mao kept having babies but ordered
their babies abandoned on the road so as not to burden or delay the escape
(Salisbury 1987, 151–22, 214). Some CCP officials were praised for selling
their children to finance clandestine work (S. Qiu 2013).
Like the Qin Empire, this bottomless, borderless, and fearless way of
totalitarian polity indeed has the potential to be politically invincible if it has
enough resources (Gu 1988, V6–B, 323). When resources and technology are
lacking, a situation the CCP often faces due to its economic incompetence
and inability of innovation, people’s livelihood and lives are squeezed and
sacrificed in lieu of change, as in the infamous Maoist way of war fighting
with the tactics of “human waves” and the strategy of “people’s war” or total
war,31 and later the Great Leap Forward campaign. When human life was no
issue, institutional constraints were lacking, and inner ethical considerations
did not matter, then the CCP became indeed very powerful, especially when
dealing with opponents who happened to (or had to) value human life and
were bound by laws and moral or religious confines.
With its new Mandate of the People, the Soviet secret payments and
assistance, ROC government’s appropriations, centralized military organization,
high extraction and mass mobilization, and illicit trade of narcotics, Mao’s
CCP built its much treasured tradition of the Yan’an Spirit or Yan’an Model
or Yan’an Way that enabled the CCP to conquer and rule. This hardened ver-
sion of the Qin-Han polity unsurprisingly has had great effectiveness and long
staying power.32 As asserted in an official documentary glorifying that part of
the CCP history, the Yan’an Model is still very much alive in today’s PRC
170 The China Order
as the basic mode of governance and management, socioeconomic programs,

culture and ideology, and even foreign policy (J. Ye 2012). The official CCP-
PRC ideology has always had “Mao Zedong Thought,”33 the refined doctrine
of the Yan’an Spirit, at its core since 1945 (Charter of the CCP 2012, 1). In
fact, today’s rising power of the PRC still demonstrates what the Yan’an Model
is capable of.
Guns, Ruses, and Promises
By the end of World War II when the Allies, mainly the United States, forced
the Japanese to surrender, the mighty totalitarian organization of the CCP
under Mao was ready to create a new Qin-Han polity to replace the ROC
in China. The resourceful CCP expanded to over 1.2 million party members,
occupied a large chunk of Chinese territory (over one million square kilometers
or roughly one-quarter of the Centralia) with a population nearly 100 million
(almost one-quarter of the total Chinese population) to form a powerful state
within the state of the ROC—the craftily named Liberated Regions. The CCP
raised a well-disciplined military force of 1.2 million (nearly one-third the size
of the debilitated and divided ROC military) and an even larger militia of 2.6
million plus a countless conscripted civilian supporting force (CCP Central
History 2002, 396, 407). Mao not only established personal control of the CCP
and especially its military, but also created watertight control of information
internally and smart propaganda externally. Internal dissension and critics were
completely silenced and often physically eliminated as the beheading of the
writer Wang Shiwei illustrates (G. Fu 2007). The rectified party organization,
active networks of secret police,34 and the traditional Qin-Han statecraft of the
hukou (household registration) and mutual responsibility systems all created an
effective centralized control of the people in CCP controlled areas.
Modeled after the Qin-Han rulers in the past, the CCP controlled migra-
tion, trade, and flow of information. It screened carefully all immigrants and
generally prohibited emigration (Editing Team 1997, 38–39, 109; Y. Sun 1994,
29). With tight media control internally, the CCP milked and manufactured
a populist and progressive, even democratic, image in and outside of China
thanks to its effective propaganda efforts (with the great help of many foreign
communists). Some exemplary work through people like Edgar Snow was later
believed by the CCP historians for having directly affected many U.S. officials
and officers including the U.S. State Department and Presidents Roosevelt
and Truman (Liu and Zhang 2011, 125–30). While CCP’s publications were
readily distributed in China and abroad as the ROC government was forced to
allow due to its internal diversity and divisions, the need of anti-Japan united
front and later the American pressure for freedom of speech, tolerance, and
democracy.35 ROC and foreign publications and media, however, were strictly
prohibited in the CCP-controlled areas with jailing and death penalties for the
offenders. The CCP systematically and successfully manufactured and distributed
misleading and bogus but highly effective propaganda publications to discredit
and undermine the ROC government.36
A critical source of power for the CCP was its extensive espionage
networks inside the ROC government and military including infiltration
into the inner circles and high command of Chiang Kai-shek and his field
commanders such as Fu Zuoyi, Hu Zongnan, Tang Enbo, Wei Lihuang, and
Zhang Zhizhong (Xiong 1999, 1–81). The CCP recruited and used family
members and assistants of many ROC officials and officers at all levels including
Chiang’s stenographer Sheng Anna and four of the eight children of Chiang
Kai-shek’s longtime personal secretary Chen Bulei (H. Wu 2010, 58–61; Z.
Meng 2013, 31–33). Throughout the Civil War, Chiang’s top secrets were
basically all leaked almost instantaneously to the CCP and many senior ROC
officials and officers became turncoats.37 Indeed, the CCP has a long tradition
of using spies and subversive agents against all kinds of enemies including the
political exiles overseas during the twenty-first century.38 Tragically, those brave
and invaluable underground agents were often discarded and purged by Mao
when he took over the country.39 A similar fate continued for CCP agents
during the PRC era as well.40 The idealism-appearing totalitarian CCP enjoyed
a lopsided great advantage against the divided, diverse, and forced-to-be-open
and tolerant ROC government. With all that, Mao and the CCP secretly and
confidently decided in 1944, before the end of World War II, that “it is the
time to definitely” topple the ROC and take over the country with force as
soon as possible (K. Yang 1997, 519).
A key to the CCP’s rapid expansion of its military force was its massive
use of former enemy soldiers. As revealed sixty years later by its own documents,
the CCP started to turn POWs (prisoners of war) especially the conscripts of
the ROC government army by the use of force and indoctrination as well as
bribery in 1931. Even before the Civil War with the ROC government broke
out at full scale in July 1946, the CCP enhanced its tradition of turning
POWs and secretly instituted a policy of “basically releasing no POWs” so all
POWs or surrendered enemy combatants were either jailed indefinitely and/
or executed, or forced to join the CCP forces, or at least forced to labor for
the CCP, completely contrary to the CCP’s open official statement of treating
the POWs well and letting them go home freely. Only the “useless” and a few
healthy ones were released “for specific propaganda and united front purposes.”
Later, as the CCP-controlled regions were exhausted with conscription and
extraction, even the “useless” POWs were all kept and forced to work. Those
forcefully recruited, reprogramed, and reorganized POWs were then employed
and deployed in great numbers, with special monitoring and control, in battles
172 The China Order
against their former comrades. The turned POWs or “liberated soldiers” as they
were called by the CCP, actually constituted the majority (60 to 70 percent by
mid-1948 and 70 to 80 percent by mid-1950) of CCP’s People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) (L. Jiang 2012, 96–103; S. Zhang 2008, chap. 1). The CCP also
secretly recruited and deployed many tens of thousands of ex-Japanese officers,
soldiers, and technicians as well as Korean POWs after 1945 to fight in the
Chinese Civil War as critically useful forces (Gu 1988, V6, 472–73; L. Fu
2006). Such an easy and cheap supply of trained troops crucially enabled the
CCP’s swift and effective human-wave attacks.41 The PLA, therefore, despite
its heavy loss of over 1.5 million people during the Civil War, rapidly grew
in size from 1.27 million in July 1946 to over 5 million by June 1950 (PLA
Military Science Academy 1987, 586). During the Korean War in 1953, the
CCP’s commanders forced the fresh American and South Korean POWs to
turn around and shell their former comrades right on the spot of their capture
and later just “proudly laughed at” the U.S. protests for such illegal acts at the
armistice negotiating table in Panmunjeom (P. Wang 1992, 454).
The CCP choreographed extremely well to misinform and mislead the
Americans, which subsequently affected U.S.–China policy. Led by Zhou Enlai
and his extensive team of able propagandists and secret agents under the slogan
of “any means is justified for the revolution,” the CCP and its friends in and
outside of China had a great success.42 The counterproductive role of the U.S.
mediation and U.S. aid (and the lack or withholding of it) was indeed a power-
ful testimony to the crucial role of external influences in the post-China Order
Centralia, together with the secretive but significant support and supply to the
CCP from the Soviet Union, the nominal ally of the ROC. The CCP had a
great play of public relations warfare that bought it critical time, resources,
and support in and outside of China, even in Washington and London. In
addition to embellishing its nationalist (while hiding its communist) credentials
and aspirations for China, the CCP specifically published volumes, for external
consumption only, of craftily simulated often embarrassingly flattering praises of
the United States and its idealistic leaders and made solemn pledges committing
the rising CCP power to promoting multi-party electoral democracy, freedom,
socioeconomic equality, capitalism, and human rights.43 With those promises
that were never meant to be honored, Mao and CCP went out of their way
to please, befriend, and influence Americans from George Marshall down to
U.S. Army soldiers (Q. Hu 2003, 89–92, 335–60, 428–40). The U.S. Army
observer team, for example, was exemplarily influenced by the CCP during
their four-month visit to Yan’an (J. Zhang 2015). Beginning right after World
War II, the U.S. actions and inactions about China, chiefly the permission for
the Soviet Red Army to enter Northeast China, the failed mediation, and the
American credulousness facing Mao Zedong’s “breathtaking deceit” and Zhou
Enlai’s beguiling manipulation, inadvertently improved the odds for the CCP.44
In 1943–44, the CCP, a branch of the Moscow-led world communist
party, declared that the United States shines the light of democracy, science,
and liberty every day and night “to warm all the suffering people and enable
them to feel that this world still has hope. . . . Ever since we were young,
[we] have felt that the United States is a specially lovely country.” And China
and the U.S. “will be forever the friendly partners.” It continued: “the work
of our (Chinese) communists, is the same work done by Washington, Jef-
ferson, and Lincoln in the United States long time ago, and it will certainly
have the sympathy of the democratic United States (Tang 1943, 4; Editorial
Board 1944, 1).
In 1945, Mao Zedong openly announced that he would have “A free and
democratic China with all of its governments including the central government
elected by the universal, anonymous and equal voters, and are responsible to
the people who elected them. It will realize Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles,
Lincoln’s of the people, by the people, for the people, and Franklin Roosevelt’s
Four Freedoms” (Mao 1945, 1).
In 1946, the CCP formally proposed the following and they were accepted
by the ROC Government as the Guidelines for Peaceful State Construction:
End tutoring governance, adopt constitutional governance, com-

pletely implement the Three Principles of People. . . . Political
democratization, military nationalization, and legalization and
equalization of political parties.
People have all freedoms enjoyed by a democratic country: thinking,

faith, speech, publication, convention, assembly, communication,
residence, migration, enterprising, striking, parade, demonstration,
and freedom from poverty and terror.
Immediately hold election. . . . Local autonomy at below the

provincial level.
Unconditionally abolish all censorship of news, press, plays, movies,

and post.  .  .  .  Abolish Party-education, protect freedom of teaching.
Universities governed by the professors. . . . No political party will
be funded by the national treasury.45
Those proposals scored greatly for the CCP but have yet to be implemented
in the CCP-PRC seventy years later. The CCP’s ingenious double-talking and
creative duplicity indeed surpassed most imperial rulers under the China Order.
174 The China Order
Mao’s masterful manipulation of words and narratives sold the CCP propaganda
for liberal democracy while rallying his troops to boldly restore the opposite
Qin-Han polity. For instance, Mao invented the oxymoron of “people’s demo-
cratic dictatorship” to simultaneously address the Marxism-Leninism dogma of
proletarian dictatorship for communism thus to continue the crucial umbilical
cord with Moscow, to tap in the Mandate of People twist of the traditional
Chinese norm of Mandate of Heaven as a source of political legitimacy, and
to attract the democracy-promoting United States and its many liberal-leaning
followers in China who rightfully disliked the fact that the KMT-ROC was not
yet democratic and not democratizing fast enough (Mao 1949, V4, 1468–82).
This Maoist invention of deception and propaganda was powerful and suc-
cessful, and has remained one of the core principles of the CCP-PRC regime
ever since.46 Mao’s nationalist rhetoric and his popularization of communism
through appropriating the ancient Confucian ideal for an egalitarian agrarian
sociopolitical order, the Grand Harmony (Mao 1949, V4, 1468–82), appealed
to a wide spectrum of Chinese, greatly excited and attracted many land-hungry,
respect-deprived, and equality-craving followers (Qian 1998, 5–90).
Therefore, in addition to guns, spies, and external help (from both the
Soviet Union and United States in the opposite directions) and also the critical
safe haven and logistics provided by the then-Soviet-controlled North Korea
(Lü 2013), the CCP’s skillful and duplicitous use of revolutionary slogans cap-
tivated countless Chinese intellectuals including many liberals who might have
deep suspicion about the nature of communism and the CCP but nonetheless
gambled for the perceived nationalist and socialist progressive causes.47 However,
those who decided to stay under the new PRC government, from the CCP
members (or underground members) Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Jian Bozhan,
and Nie Gannu to the less political Ba Jin, Chen Yingque, Feng Youlan, Jin
Yuelin, Lao She, and Shen Congwen were later all purged, abused, enslaved,
or emasculated. Very few intellectuals and writers such as Fu Sinian, Hu Shi,
Liang Shiqiu, Lin Yutang, Chien Mu, and Zhang Ailing saw through the
nature of the CCP and made the choice to either run away with the ROC
government or take exile overseas. In the words of a later purged CCP senior
official, Mao was a good actor and fooled the Americans and Chinese with
his scheme of nationalism and “democracy show” (T. Bao 2013). In the end,
the ROC under Chiang Kai-shek’s incomplete and ineffective dictatorship lost
the Chinese Mainland to the CCP.48
Still, opinion surveys of various sorts in the 1940s (as late as in Decem-
ber 1948) consistently revealed that only a minority of the people polled
supported or welcomed the CCP while a larger group of people wanted to
keep the ROC political system and about half of the respondents wanted a
KMT-CCP coalition government (Pepper 1999, 89–92, 199–228). But it was
proven once again that, like it has been so often in China or elsewhere, raw
force, unscrupulous efforts, smart ruses, and external interferences tend to
prevail over people’s preferences and intellectuals’ reasoning.49 In the end, “one
hundred random events evolved into one inevitability”: to make the CCP the
winner of the Civil War, driving the ROC government offshore to Taiwan in
1949–50.50 The CCP’s improbable but fateful victory may indeed well illus-
trate the assertion that “evil always wins through the strength of its splendid
dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal
innocence and abnormal sin” (Chesterton 1922, 4).
The Chinese people, 20 percent of humankind, driven by their natural
desires for better life, more freedom, and improved political governance while
being over-pushed by the idealistic United States eager to help, fatefully aban-
doned the diversified, restricted, and transforming soft authoritarian government
of the KMT-ROC (a nationalist de facto federal republic accepting the Westphalia
system) for the illimitable, unscrupulous, and hardened authoritarian-totalitarian
leadership of the CCP (a Moscow-created and led world revolution versed in
Qin-Han ruling crafts) (K. Yang 2014; Q. Hu 2003, 135). The CCP, “the
daughter of the Comintern and the granddaughter of World War I” created
the PRC, “the daughter of the Cold War and the granddaughter of World
War II” (Z. Liu 2014, 73–79).
Mao excelled in the powerful Legalist skills to grab power and conquer,
matching the record of some of the most successful founding emperors in
China’s past. The impressive victory of the CCP in the Chinese Civil War in
1949, like the victory of the Qin in 221 BCE, was a turn of history made
with concerted human efforts and errors rather than a historical inevitability
(Westad 2003; Tanner 2015). It was a great triumph of the millennia-old
Qin-Han polity and the traditional Chinese ruses, a personal victory for Mao,
and has been the main source of political legitimacy for the CCP’s one-party
rule of China.51 Mao and the CCP created a new Qin-Han polity and won
spectacularly for themselves. For the Chinese people, however, the attractive
promises quickly faded to usher in a grand tragedy of epoch proportion and
unrivaled melancholy—the “tragedy of the Chinese Revolution” (Bernstein
2014, 385–98). Indeed, before even the formal establishment of the PRC,
widespread mass killings of various “class enemies” already had taken place
in the “liberated regions” to mobilize, extract, and discipline the peasants.
CCP leaders admitted that, in 1947 alone, over 250,000 “landlords and rich
peasants” were executed. In Jin-Sui region, an incredible 25 percent of the
peasants were killed (K. Yang 2009, V1, 49–99). The founding of the PRC
was unmistakably a great victory for the CCP but soon appeared to be an
enormous calamity, an exorbitant detour, and a great leap backward for China
and the Chinese people.
176 The China Order
The PRC: A New Qin-Han State
The creation of the PRC, like so many rebellions in the past, was a serious
bloodbath. To this day, there is still no official death toll of the Chinese Civil
War as the PRC government has not released that information, like all other
imperial rulers in the past. Often times, it appears that the CCP lost equal
even more people than the ROC troops in battles (Zhong 1995, 99–124; Feng
1963, 21–78). The PLA formally recorded that it “annihilated” 10.66 million
ROC military forces from 1945 to 1950 but with no specifications of how
many of that were physical casualties (Z. Wang 2013). In 2016, a top CCP
leader told his audience that at least 3.7 million known CCP members “were
martyred” in 1921–49 (Z. S. Li 2016). In Jiangxi Province, where the CCP’s
main military basis was located in the 1920s and ’30s, population declined by
more than half from 43 million to 21 million.52 At least many if not many
tens of millions of people perished in the Civil War, rivaling if not surpassing
the death toll of the war against the Japanese invasion during World War II.
In Changchun, a key post for the Battle of Manchuria in 1948, for example,
the CCP used a 105-day “military terrorism” to starve to death reportedly
330 to 650 thousand civilians to finally force the ROC commander there
to surrender, more than the 300,000 deaths reportedly caused by the brutal
Rape of Nanking when the Japanese sacked the ROC capital city in 1937.
Similar tragedies took place in places like Yongnian in Hebei Province, where
two years of siege by the PLA in 1945–47 led to the death of 90 percent of
the city’s residents.53
The PRC the CCP created in 1949 has been officially called the “New
China,” a revolutionary departure from the old Chinese history, and ultimate
victory of the Chinese Revolution for national independence started in 1840 so
the Chinese people finally “have stood up” (Editorial Board 2002, 2–4; CCP
Central History 2002, 495, 502–03). The imported ideology and phraseol-
ogy of Marxism-Leninism and the comradeship with the Soviet Bloc added
the impression of newness. Mao and the CCP extensively imitated the Soviet
Union (or simply followed Moscow’s commands) from early on (Bernstein
and Li 2010). Some of the crown jewels in Mao’s political arsenal such as
political control of the military, secret police and informants, party monopoly
of the economy and education, propaganda, class struggles, and manipulated
nationalism and united front all seem to be faithfully copied from Lenin and
Stalin, very much in concert with many recycled Chinese imperial statecrafts
such as the household registration.54 Indeed, the Leninist-Stalinist party-state
and China’s Qin-Han polity seem to be good matches ideologically and prac-
tically. The PRC imitated the Soviet Union in the hope of quickly enriching
and strengthening itself (Kong 2010). Even though Mao privately asserted that
his regime was neither genuinely communist nor a carbon copy of the Soviet
Union, his true ambition was to be in charge of the world in his own way
(Xing 2005, 16–23).
Some China watchers have from early on realized the regressive nature
of the PRC (Walker 1955; Wittfogel 1964, 463–74; Teiwes 1979; Michael
1986, 175–277). The PRC has been essentially a reincarnation or replica of
the Qin-Han polity, a “new Chinese empire,” with some new coatings and
trappings (Terrill 2004). The Maoist reign was in fact a “great leap forward to
the past” to restore and maintain an undifferentiated premodern state of the
Qin-Han polity (Li and Liu 1997, 328; F. Wang 1998b, 93–115). With the
same hardcore of Legalist autocracy, Mao’s totalitarian governance was coated
with a “scientific” ideology of the Maoist pseudo-Marxism that replaced the
family-based Confucian ideology with rigid class divisions and violent class
struggles, and substituted social harmony under the Mandate of Heaven with
the promised fantasia of communism under the Mandate of the People. The
thoroughness, extensiveness, and unscrupulousness of an autocratic polity reached
a new high, matching the totalitarianism seen typically in Qin Shihuang’s Qin
Empire, Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Instead
of the traditional Confucian-Legalism, Mao’s PRC was pseudo-Communism-
coated Legalist despotism. After Mao’s death, over the past three decades, the
CCP-PRC has evolved to be a fusion of pseudo-Communism-coated and
pseudo-Confucianism-coated Legalist authoritarianism (Buckley 2014).
Led by Mao, who promoted a state-mandated personality cult of himself
(P. Hu 2014), CCP leaders were much less genuine believers or practitioners of
Communism or Confucianism but more devotees to a dialectic combination
of Voluntarism, Pragmatism, worship of force and violence, and unscrupulous
use of the traditional Qin-Han Legalist politics and ruses of ruling, almost
exclusively for the political power of an autocracy.55 Mao’s regime was perhaps
“new” in that he never got even close to creating a real world empire and was
ruling just a country that had been transformed by the previous century under
the Westphalia world order, rather than the whole known world. He was thus
condemned to struggle haplessly against the real world powers to build the
dreamed China Order through the only way he knew: endless revolutions and
campaigns for totalitarian control and mobilization. “Before the world was
united, Mao was only a king, even just a bandit king (山大王),” commented
a Chinese philosopher, “he had to rule the country like always in the war.
The so-called ‘exporting revolution’ was just Mao’s strategy to compete for
international hegemon (world leadership)” (Deng 2014).
Therefore, Mao’s reign was exceedingly active, endlessly restive, and
ultra-impacting with disastrous experiments and bloody persecutions to change
China and the Chinese people to prepare and launch a world revolutionary war.
178 The China Order
The Mao era was thus filled with constant tensions, crises, failures, and gross
underperformance (Harris 2015; Walder 2015). The totalitarian governance
fed on nonstop sociopolitical campaigns and mass purges and executions from
the very beginning.56 One study estimated that there were forty-three national
political campaigns against various enemies and opponents or for promoting
party policies just in the first six years of the PRC history, making the CCP
“party’s all-under-heaven” (党天下), termed by Chu Anping, a scholar friend
of the CCP’s who was purged in 1957 and then vanished, “the most unethi-
cal and untrustworthy among all the rulers in Chinese history” (Y. Xie 1999,
54–55; Y. Hua 2015).57
Continuing its practice since the 1920s and even before the end of the
Civil War on the Chinese Mainland, the CCP launched Land Reform in 1946
that became national in 1950–53 and totally wiped out the relatively successful
farmers in China, often physically. It executed an estimated 2 to 4.5 million
“landlords and rich peasants” and their families.58 Then almost immediately,
Mao negated his pledge of land allocation to the peasants who had died by the
millions for his seizure of power. For control and extraction, Mao pushed his
social reengineering idea of “continuous revolution” and forcefully implemented
the hasty and highly destructive nationalization of the economy with the cam-
paigns of Agricultural Collectivization and Urban Socialist Reforms (1954–58)
and the state monopoly and ration of grain and almost all key commodities
(since 1953)—all imported Stalinist statecrafts,59 but very much in agreement
with the tradition of the Qin-Han politics in the past. The establishment of
the PRC hukou (household registration) system since 1950 (formalized in 1958)
restored with unprecedented extensiveness and enforcement the key imperial
statecraft started by Shang Yang in the Qin Kingdom twenty-four centuries
ago (F. Wang 2005, 44–53). People’s land and assets, “means of production,”
basic supplies, and personal mobility were all thoroughly and institutionally
centralized into the CCP-controlled people’s communes, various units (danwei
单位), and agencies so that the urban dwellers directly or indirectly became
powerless state-dependents and the majority of the Chinese (over 80 percent)
in the countryside became serf-like for generations until the early1980s. The
CCP-PRC state has been the only landlord and asset-owner in the country,
in the name of serving the people.60
Simultaneously, the CCP “eliminated,” often physically, about two mil-
lion “bandits” and leftovers of the ROC troops in 1949–52.61 Then it carried
out systematic executions and imprisonment of various “enemies” and “bad
people” in the Suppressing and Eliminating Counterrevolutionaries Campaign
(1950–53). Mao personally set a quota of jailing 5 percent and executing 0.1
percent of the total population for the campaign that killed “at least” 712,000
people (or 0.124 percent of the 500-million Chinese population at the time)
who were mostly members of the ROC elites or employees—many of them

actually critically helped the victory of the CCP (Strauss 2002, 80–105; C.
Li 2005, 41–44; K. Yang 2006, 46–62). In reality, this incredibly murderous
quota was often exceeded by the over-zealous local CCP officials eager to please
Mao: Jiangxi Province executed 0.16 percent of its people and Fujian Province
massively killed 0.26 of its population. In Shanghai and Jiangsu, Mao even
personally and repeatedly telegrammed an order to “to quickly kill thousands
more” so the most cosmopolitan Shanghai organized many mass executions,
including one that publically shot 285 hastily convicted on April 30, 1951,
in the city’s central square.62 The CCP also launched Three-Anti and Five-
Anti campaigns (1951–52) that crushed and controlled the industrialists and
merchants, leading to widespread confiscations, imprisonment, and death.63
Mao immediately used force to establish a totalitarian reform and control
of the Chinese elites and the Chinese mind in the name of “thought reform
of the intellectuals” that started to “destroy China’s elites” (X. Hu 2012).64 It
started with a ban of the movies Secret History of Qing Palace in 1950 and
Story of Wu Xun in 1951. The case of Gao Gang-Rao Shushi Anti-Party Clique
in 1954 and the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign in 1955 started the nonstop brutal
purges against CCP officials and loyalists themselves who showed any sign of
dissention (Spence 1990, 542–67; H. Li 2003, 339–86). In fact, Mao’s CCP
launched merciless ideological and personal attacks and purges to rectify its
ranks and followers in 1947–48, in the CCP tradition started by the Yan’an
Rectification Campaign (peaked in 1942–43), before the creation of the PRC
(Qian 1998, 21–47, 127–47, 245–67). Other than Gao Gang (who committed
suicide) and Marshal Lin Biao who died in his rebellious but mysterious escape
in 1971, just about all of Mao’s countless purge victims were later exonerated
or rehabilitated by the post-Mao CCP (van Ginneken 1976; Zhao and Liang
2008, 18; Z. Li 2011, V2, 765–98, 846–56). Very soon it became obvious that
even in the first few honeymoon years the CCP’s “liberation” and “revolution”
did not bring much “peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story
of calculated terror and systematic violence” (Dikötter 2013, ix).
The worst deeds and best illustrations of the totalitarian autocracy in
Mao’s PRC, also a stunning testimony of a Qin-Han polity’s awesome power
for control and destruction, were the series of events from 1957 to Mao’s
death in 1976 with a despotism of deadliness rarely rivaled in human history.65
Driven by the logic of the China Order for world ambition and trigged by the
Khrushchev Thaw (Ottepel, the post-Stalin political changes) in the Big Brother
of the Soviet Union (Taubman 2004), Mao perpetrated the malicious “open
plot” of Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and the “Anti-Right Tendencies” in
1959 to trash and destroy Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese conscience.66
One half to one million (or as many as 3 to 4 million), or the mandated quota
180 The China Order
of 5 percent of cadres and intellectuals including college students, often China’s

best, brightest, and bravest, were condemned with their extended families as
class (or state or people’s) enemies until 1980 when almost all of the surviv-
ing 100,000 Rightists were “rehabilitated” (Yao 1993; Dai 2000. Y. Xie 1999,
202–322; D. Guo 2009, 12–18).
With only one free mind and one voice allowed—that of Mao—in the
country of hundreds of millions people, great fiascos and disasters were simply
inevitable. Dreaming to miraculously strengthen his Qin-Han state to take over
from Moscow the leadership of the world Communist revolution and from
the United States the world leadership, Mao micro-managed the economy
with extraordinary haste, arrogance, incompetence, absurdity, and brutality in
the so-called Great Leap Forward Campaign that quickly crashed into a great
famine lasting more than three years (1958–62) and killing an estimated 30
to 45 million people (or around 7 percent of the population), the worst ever
peacetime unnatural death in world history and also “the greatest demolition of
real estate in human history.”67 Hunger-driven cannibalism was widely reported
during the Great Leap famine.68
Forced to give up the management of the economy that he knew nothing
about, Mao was mortified about his precarious and challenged position in his-
tory so to conspire with ruses to smash those who dared to reduce his power
(D. Yang 1996; R. Wang 2002, 146–53; F. He 2013). He cunningly delayed
the 9th Party national congress (due five years after 1956 in 1961) to 1969,
after he set fires and traps to launch the Four Cleaning Campaign (1964–66)
and the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–76/7), nationwide purges and civil
war-like mass chaos and violence.69 Mao managed to use those campaigns
of empty and phony slogans and postures to cruelly consolidate his imperial
power by smashing and reorganizing the government he feared of losing control
over and persecuting tens of millions people including his designated succes-
sor and top lieutenant Liu Shaoqi.70 Barely two years after finishing Liu, his
co-conspirator and officially declared successor Lin Biao and his family were
themselves purged and died mysteriously in a desperate run from a suppos-
edly failed palace coup, but possibly as the result of a Mao directed conspiracy
(Gao 2008). The decade-long Cultural Revolution led to massive unnatural
deaths (estimated to be 1.8 to 7.3 or even 20 million), wrongful treatment
of over one hundred million people, and a deluge-like destruction of China’s
antiquity and epic holocaust of Chinese culture (Rummel 1991, 253–63; L.
Xin 2011; Y. Yu 2015). It was Mao’s Nero-like tyranny at the expense of just
about everyone that “institutionally ruined morality and ethics for the whole
country.”71 Hatred-driven cannibalism, public tortures, and group rapes were
reported in many places during the Cultural Revolution.72 These “premeditated
group extermination and crime against humanity” are still whitewashed inside
the PRC as mere “mistakes” and hushed away (Y. Wang 2006).
In an astonishing way, Mao was as dominant and powerful, tyrannical and
murderous, vulgar and selfish, and cunning and unscrupulous as any Chinese
emperor. He was also as incompetent and egomaniacal in managing the country,
especially the economy,73 and as corrupt and unethical in his personal life as
any of the Chinese emperors with an ultra-luxury lifestyle and endless sexual
indulgences (Li 1994). Mao was indeed the “freest” man, the only free man
in a great nation where no one else had much freedom, to experiment at all
costs with his ultra-narcissistic ultimate truth of “science for the fundamental
order of the universe” that was actually recycled ideas of the China Order of
the imperial times (Cheng 2006, 128 and 130; Qi 2013). Toward the end of
his life, as an heirless emperor who failed to have a family dynasty (his only
surviving son was mentally disabled), Mao developed ever more cynical and
antisocial attitudes and acted in a consequentially disastrous way for the sole
purpose of preserving his own power and “legacy” or position in history.74
Mao’s violent and bloody Qin-Han polity (more Qin than Han with a pseudo-
Marxism as its cover) was secretly deemed by its own elites when he was still
alive as a nonstop giant “meat-grinder” that destroyed China, Chinese culture,
and the Chinese people and elites including top CCP leaders (Lin 1971). Later,
a Chinese scholar simply likened Mao’s endless purges to S&M (sadism and
masochism) games for power and gratification (Liu 5-7-2015).
Post-Mao: A Qin-Han Polity Continues with Changes
Mao’s clever effort of making and writing history his way, driven by the mandate
for the China Order at the unspeakable cost, quickly unraveled only days after
his death on September 9, 1976. Having purged all of his designated succes-
sors and fearing a coup and a postmortem trial against him, on his deathbed
Mao picked the weak Hua Guofeng as the caretaker. His final words about
political succession, however, have been kept in secrecy to this day. Some in
the PRC have long asserted that Mao willed to have his nephew, wife, and
even mistress rule the CCP-PRC since he could only trust his inner-family
members, however incompetent they might be, just like those emperors before:
his only sane son was killed by a U.S. air raid in Korea in 1950 and he seemed
to not value his daughters very much.75 The deeply legitimized republicanism
among the Chinese after the Qing (especially since the fiasco of Yuan Shikai)
made an open family dynasty, however, very toxic even in Mao’s PRC. The
imported Communist ideology décor further forced Mao’s hand. He thus
182 The China Order
had to exhaustively play a costly, secretive, complicated, and ultimately failed

game of making a Mao dynasty after his death indirectly through regents and
agents.76 In a rather traditional way, his cronies and coteries betrayed him and
quickly launched a palace coup to sentence his banner-carrier wife to death
(with a two-year suspension and later commuted to life in prison, she finally
committed suicide). The other members of his trusted regents, the so-called
“Gang of Four,” and his young nephew were all put in jail to rot (Spence
1990, 650–52).
Mao’s inept programs and policies were mostly scrapped and abandoned
while his name and his preserved body have been used against his will to provide
legitimacy and continuity to the CCP-PRC regime. To publicly display the
preserved corpse of a former leader, a tradition started with the Soviet Union’s
treatment of the bodies of Lenin and Stalin, however, is actually a major insult
and huge punishment in the Chinese traditional culture (Mao in fact penned
in 1956 to have his body cremated).77 “The entire Maoist project,” concluded
a recent Mao biography, “died with Mao himself ” (Pantsov and Levine 2013,
8). In that way, Mao became also a tragic victim of his own creation, dressed
and mutilated at will by his successors for their political power and needs.
The CCP Qin-Han polity, however, lives on. The party-state evolved
from a one-man totalitarian dictatorship to an autocratic overlord rule of
Deng Xiaoping (1904–97), and to an authoritarian regime by a small group
of appointed, often aristocratic, men. Those leaders, the five to nine members
of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the CCP’s Central Committee
centered around one designated “core-man” plus a few “retired” senior leaders,
are not necessarily biologically linked and rule the vast and diverse country
imperially in the name of the CCP, the only political organization allowed.78
Symbolized by the first peaceful power transition in CCP’s history in 2012–13
(from the Deng hand-picked Jiang Zemin/Hu Jintao team to Xi Jinping), the
party-state has seemingly established a new way of succession that combines
personal appointment by the top leader with an opaque internal selection by
a few and an endorsement by about 400 to 500 senior cadres and powerbro-
kers or “selectorates” (Shirk 1993, 70–82; U.S. Embassy 2014). A mixture
of “political manipulation and the ritual mobilization of formal institutions”
has helped the CCP to govern with the cycle of a party congress every five
years (G. Wu 2015). The stability and effectiveness of an autocracy without a
hereditary emperor, a grand and consequential experiment of the PRC Qin-
Han polity, remain to be seen.79
Less deadly and less chaotic, the post-Mao CCP continued to have opaque
power struggles and purges starting at the very top that include the coup d’état
condemning the Gang of Four right after Mao’s death in 1976,80 the removal
of Mao’s anointed regent successor Hua Guofeng in 1978 and Mao’s chief of
staff Wang Dongxing in 1980, the purge of Deng’s two designated successors
Hu Yaobang in 1987 and Zhao Zhiyang in 1989, and the bloody Tiananmen
Uprising or June 4th Massacre in 1989.81 While Deng still used the Maoist
way of “political mistake” for purges, the post-Deng leaders have instead used
the even more opaque charges of corruption (bribery, graft, embezzlement,
nepotism, and womanizing) or just “violation of disciplines and rules” to get
rid of Yang Baibin in 1993, Chen Xitong in 1995, Chen Liangyu in 2006, Bo
Xilai in 2012, Xu Caihou, Zhou Yongkang and Ling Jihua in 2014, and Guo
Boxiong in 2015. The purge of top CCP leaders (members of the Standing
Committee of the Politburo) continued in the post-Mao PRC with slightly
less intensity. Mao purged five of the total seventeen top leaders in twenty-
seven years, plus blemishing another five former top leaders. In the thirty-eight
years since 1976, the CCP purged eight of the total forty-one top leaders and
disgraced one posthumously.82
Instead of using mass and often chaotic-appearing campaigns to purge
a category of dissenting and opposing or untrusted cadres or intellectuals or
anyone who has the will and/or resources to challenge, the CCP has resorted
to using the seemingly orderly anti-corruption operations by its secret police
arm of Discipline Inspection Committees (DICs) in mostly extralegal ways.83
The Central DIC conducts classic secret police work with “half of the leads
from informants and confessions” and heeds the secret commands from the top
to investigate, detain, interrogate (sometimes with torture), and convict people
before law enforcement and legal aid get involved; and they have long been the
most effective and “deadliest weapon of power struggle inside the CCP.”84 The
purged are no longer labeled or required to admit political or policy mistakes
or anti-party acts and thoughts; they just have to accept the charges on their
ethical or criminal wrongdoings.85 Popular with the people and easily justified
by the need to curb the widespread and rampant corruption inevitably typical of
any Qin-Han-style officialdom, anti-corruption has been thoroughly politicized
and selectively used to purge opponents and challengers, redistribute positions
and rent-seeking rights, and consolidate power at a large scale.
The CCP-PRC officially declared that it had “punished” as many as 4.2
million officials (including rapid-fire executions and numerous “involuntary
suicides”) from 1982 to 2012 on corruption or misfeasance charges mostly
with undisclosed details, on average 140,000 a year.86 This number increased
to over 180,000 in 2013 (including 65,000 “leading officials,” 36 percent
more than in 2012) (Xinhua 1-10-2014). In fewer than three years, out of the
376 members of the CCP Central Committee, twenty-four (or more than 6
percent) were purged (Xinhua 9-11-2016). In the first half of 2016, the cadres
“punished” at the various levels jumped from 76 to 233 percent over the same
time a year ago (CDIC 8-25-2016). The powerful political utility of selective
184 The China Order
anti-corruption perhaps explains why every CCP leader since Mao has been
adamant about eliminating corruption, yet none of them has really tried the
proven successful anti-corruption methods such as an independent judicial
system, free media, publicizing and monitoring officials’ personal and family
assets, and political empowerment of the people through elections.
The PRC Qin-Han state looks and functions fundamentally the same
way as the previous imperial regimes albeit with some peculiarities. The CCP
has been the ladder for political and socioeconomic upward mobility, similar
to the imperial officialdom and imperial exam system in the past. The Party
has grown in size from 4.5 million in 1949 (37 million in 1978) to 88 mil-
lion in 2015, with branches of multiple layers covering all of China’s urban
districts and residential neighborhoods, rural townships and villages, firms and
factories (including foreign-owned and private companies), and cultural and
educational entities (X. Yu 2011; CCP Organization 2015). This world’s largest
and most highly centralized ruling party monopolizes all political power; owns
all of the armed forces, police, and secret police; owns or directs the country’s
media, educational, cultural, financial, and industrial apparatuses; and owns
or controls all the land and the vast majority of the Chinese wealth. Still, like
the imperial rulers, Beijing has to fight endlessly and at great cost against local
“centrifugal” tendencies (Chung 2016).
The CCP members are selected and promoted mostly for their loyalty and
obedience, just like their imperial predecessors. Moreover, they are also made
to vow to “safeguard party secrets, [be] loyal to the party . . . be prepared to
sacrifice everything at any time for the party” (CCP Central 1982; Xinhua
1-27-2016). The PRC ruling elites thus resemble a secret-society autocratic class
for life (very few in the PRC could willingly quit the party without adverse
consequences).87 The CCP-PRC started to replace life-tenure of office with
age-specific retirement for its cadres in 1982. However, retired cadres, especially
senior officials, enjoy full pay, many perks, and various creative titles for life (Q.
Ma 1989, 179). About 5 to 6 percent of the Chinese population, the CCP is
a “red machine” that controls everything and rules everyone everywhere in China
(McGregor 2011, 1–33). The CCP-PRC has at least 640,000 active-duty, all
top-down appointed “leading officials” at or above county-division-regiment
level—less than 0.5 percent of the Chinese population—including 44,200 senior
officials (above the rank of prefecture-bureau-division chief ) and 2,200 at or
above deputy ministry-province.88 A larger group of retired or non-active-duty
cadres at or above those ranks constitute the rest of the CCP autocracy that
rules China today.
The CCP power is ensured by the PLA, the nationally financed and staffed
but the Party’s military that pledges its total allegiance to the CCP and is under
a tight and highly centralized, often personal, control by the CCP top leader
(H. Zhang 2013). When he was alive, Mao required the deployment of just
a platoon to be personally approved by him. Mao also personally interviewed
and appointed all PLA officers down to the division commander level (F. Wu
2006, 731). It now requires the direct approval from the CCP’s top leader to
deploy a company or larger unit.89
Vertically, China is governed by an undifferentiated premodern state at all
levels with the same “seven-office” party-state apparatus of a CCP committee
that makes all key decisions, a CCP discipline inspection committee, a people’s
congress, a people’s political consultative conference, a people’s government, a
people’s court, and a people’s procurator, plus the government-run local mass
organizations such as the Communist Youth League, trade union, women’s
association, and chamber of commerce.90 In a totalitarian corporatist fashion,
the CCP integrated the leaders of all professional and business associations,
social groups, educational and cultural entities, and religious organizations—
to form an elite class with vested interest in the regime (Z. Deng 2011). All
churches, temples, and mosques in the PRC must be registered with the state
and under the monitoring of the state-religious management authority, with
the senior religious clerks commonly secret CCP members and paid as state
employees with official ranks.91 Self-organized religious groups are illegal and
subject to prosecution. The death penalty is used at times to get rid of the
leaders of uncontrolled faith organizations (Liao 2008, V2, 48–73).
Like the Qin-Han rulers in the past, the CCP relies heavily on secret police
to control and govern.92 Other than the well-funded and equipped Discipline
Inspection Commissions all the way down to the township level, there are at
least four other vertical systems of secret police in the PRC, each has extensive
networks of clandestine agents and informants: the Ministry of State Security
(the equivalent of the KGB of the former Soviet Union), the secret bureaus and
divisions of the Ministry of Public Security (the political protection units and
cyber police), the political commissars and intelligence networks of the PLA,93
and the classified investigative reporting by state media and think-tanks such
as the Xinhua News Agency.94 Wiretapping, cyber snooping, and audio and
video surveillance are common in China.95 Local governments and officials have
reportedly set up their own secretive spying networks against each other (He
and Huang 2013, 91–92). This Qin-Han state is further assisted by the fully-
equipped second military of People’s Armed Police (renamed People’s Armed
Garrison Force in 2016) comprised of at least 1.5 million people (Wines 2009,
A6), a massive number of local police station-financed police assistants that can
total two to four times more than regular police officers (Cao 2000, 464–65),
and the regular police force that is the largest per capita in the world.96 When
necessary, the CCP still orders armored divisions of the PLA field army to put
down mass rebellions as it did in Beijing in 1989 (Spence 1990, 738–47).
186 The China Order
The CCP-PRC state has penetrated the society much deeper and further
than any past Qin-Han rulers in order to control and extract directly below
the county even the township levels, down to every rural village and urban
neighborhood. The hallmark social atomization and political marginalization
have surpassed the imperial regimes to replace the de facto local autonomy of
the gentries below the counties with party organizations. The regular, secret, and
armed police forces (and the police assistants) are augmented by a large army
of informants including recruited famous artists, scholars, college enrollees, and
even high school students.97 Those paid or volunteer, but secretive, informants
exist in every community as the so-called “ears and eyes,” “public security team
members/activists” or “information personnel” including the secretly recruited
college students placed in classrooms.98 To control and manipulate the Internet,
the PRC has “at least 2 million” cyber police as online censors (Beech 2015,
50). In addition, the Communist Youth League (CYL), the youth arm of the
CCP, recruits and deploys over 10 million imposter bloggers and posters online,
including hundreds of thousands teenagers.99 Two million hired individuals
include some inmates and the net commentators or web-propaganda work-
ers, who are nicknamed the “fifty-cents” party since every officially deployed/
approved posting is supposedly worth 50 cents RMB (about 0.08 USD) or
more in payment.100 They fabricate and post at least 488 million deceptive
writings and distracting comments on the Chinese websites and social media
every year as directed by the CCP propaganda officials (King et al. 2016). In
one district of Beijing, Xicheng, over 70,000 informants and security assistants
were on the police payroll, and the police there paid more than half a million
RMB in cash rewards to retirees recruited as informants for 753 “valuable leads
and tips” in just four months in 2015 (Chi 2015, A6). All foreigners staying
or visiting China including those state-invited “foreign experts,” as expected,
have been systematically and thoroughly monitored and “managed” (Brady
2003). Anecdotally, a “deeply-trenched” and “useful” police-gangster collusion
seems to exist and function in the PRC and Hong Kong (Sun 2009; Central
News 2014). CCP’s eavesdropping and infiltration also seem to have reached
out to work on overseas Chinese communities (Freitas 2015).
The post-Mao PRC continued the totality of the Qin-Han polity. The
educated, able, ambitious, influential, and the rich who are defiant, not controlled
enough, or connected to the wrong officials and factions are routinely exiled,
destroyed, or jailed even executed with various excuses and often trumped-up
charges. In most if not all countries, the wealthy tend to have more security
and obtain real political power, exemplified by the real estate mogul Donald
Trump and his election to be the U.S. President in 2016. It is a stark contrast
in the PRC. In 1999–2008, out of the list of China’s richest people, forty-nine
were rounded up by the government: nineteen sentenced to jail or death, sev-
enteen investigated, seven disappeared, six died “unnaturally,” and many were
exiled abroad (Y. Wang 2009). “The proportion of those charged, investigated
or arrested after being on the (super rich) list was 17%, compared to 7% of
other entrepreneurs in the same period” (Economist 9-29-2012). Unlike their
peers in other countries, Chinese billionaires like Zhou Zhengyi, the Yuan
Baojing brothers, Huang Guangyu, Xu Ming, the Liu Han brothers, Xu Xiang,
and Yang Bin, regardless of how submissive they might have been politically or
because of their association with the purged CCP leaders (the losers of power
struggles), often ended up in prison or executed with their assets confiscated.101
Successful businessmen like Zeng Chengjie trying to start private banks have
been speedily executed to deter the lethal threat to CCP’s vital state monopoly
of the Chinese banking industry (R. Wang 2013). In 2009–10, the ambitious
party boss of Chongqing Bo Xilai launched a mass campaign of “striking
against gangs” to arrest, confiscate, and jail many hundreds of local business
elites (some quickly executed) (Tong 2011). After Bo’s dramatic downfall in
2012 and theatric sentencing to life in prison in 2013, however, little has been
done to count or return the looted assets (estimated to be hundreds of billions
RMB) (Z. Li 2013). Similar campaigns have also been launched by Bo’s col-
leagues and rivals in places like Guangdong (X. Song 2012). In 2014, at least
twenty of China’s richest 100 were in various troubles with the government:
one executed, seven in jail, eight under investigation, three became fugitives
in exile, and one bankrupted (Sina 2014).
Therefore, both horizontally and vertically, the CCP Qin-Han polity is
more encompassing than most Chinese empires in the past particularly the
late-Qing and the ROC. At its core, this Qin-Han polity consistently relies on
classic Chinese Legalism to govern and now attempts to rule by law as opposed
to rule of law although often just simply a rule of man by will.102 This Com-
munism- (now blending with Confucianism) Legalism creates force-induced fear,
shrewd manipulation of human weaknesses, centralized top-down appointments
and position-related officials-standard perks and corruption, controlled meri-
tocracy and social mobility, active and creative propaganda and tight control
of information, and innovative campaigns of misinformation. The ideological
exterior or coating of the CCP-PRC party-state, however, has unscrupulously
gone through many colorful, often drastic, changes and fusions: from the
imported pseudo-Soviet socialism and communism expressed in Mao’s master-
ful oxymoron of people’s democratic dictatorship or new people’s democracy,
to radical revolutionary totalitarianism and Han-Chinese racist-nationalism
wrapped up in Mao’s class struggles and world revolution, to naked materialism
and, after the moral bankruptcies and “spiritual voids” and confusions created
by Mao and the CCP over the years, to now a revival of pre-PRC values and
ideas, chiefly the well-tested and trusted imperial ideology of Confucianism
188 The China Order
(Osnos 2014, 30–35). In the 2010s, Mao’s successors recycled his doubletalk
to propose a political oxymoron of upholding concurrently three supremacies:
supremacy of (CCP) Party’s interest/cause, supremacy of people’s interest, and
supremacy of the Constitution and laws.103
The relentlessness and excessiveness of the CCP Qin-Han polity in terms
of its power, control, and socioeconomic penetration are logical given Beijing’s
need to survive without the China Order and also its desire to rebuild the China
Order with all the strength it can gather. As a more taut Qin-Han empire,
the CCP-PRC has demonstrated its extraordinary staying power despite all
odds over seven decades. In spring of 2011, the CCP-PRC leaders “solemnly
declared” that their monopolistic leadership “cannot be shaken” and it would
not change the fundamentals of its sociopolitical system, governance structure,
and officially upheld ideology: “We will never have a rotating-governance by
multiparties, nor ideological pluralism, nor checks-and-balances among the
three powers (of executive, legislature, and judiciary), nor bicameralism of
legislation, nor federalism and nor privatization (of property and land owner-
ship” (B. Wu 2011).
Two years later, in 2013, the CCP further issued a stern decree to simply
prohibit the mention and discussion of “seven issues” that range from constitu-
tional democracy, universal values, media independence and civic participation,
neo-liberalism, to “nihilist” examination of CCP’s past (Buckley 2013, A1).
“The banner of Mao Zedong Thought,” vowed CCP leadership, “will be upheld
forever” (Xi 2013). In early 2017, the PRC Chief Justice openly attacked the
notions of constitutional democracy, checks and balances of power, and judi-
cial independence (Zhou 2017). The CCP one-party polity of autocracy, as a
reincarnation of the Qin-Han Confucian (and Marxian)-coated Legalist empire,
has been unabashed and unapologetic while its power is rising rapidly, thanks
ironically to the very Westphalia system (to be analyzed in the next chapter
of this book). This hardened Qin-Han polity appears hard to change without
a costly implosion or explosion. International comparison and competition of
the outside world remain the leading force for change and thus principal threat
to the CCP: the inner logic of the Qin-Han polity has dictated that the whole
world must be controlled under the China Order, in reality or in pretention,
or to be kept away to ensure the regime’s survival and security.
Suboptimal Performance, Rich State, Strong Military
As a Qin-Han regime yet without the mandated China Order, the CCP-PRC
has struggled harder than most Chinese empires through self-strengthening in
order to keep away the competing outside world and to ideally reorder the
world its way. In line with the imperial states in the past, the PRC has had
a barely average, mostly suboptimal record of performance in socioeconomic
development but a rather successful even spectacular achievement of the regime
survival and state power.104 On the one hand, the CCP-PRC state has maintained
an astonishing extraction ability to enrich and power itself with the resource of
a continental country and the output by 20 percent of the humankind. The
Chinese people, cultured to “eat bitterness” by the China Order for so many
centuries, have demonstrated indeed extraordinary industriousness, discipline,
and endurance for hard work and inordinate sacrifices. On the other hand, the
competitive nature of the Westphalia system allowed the PRC to obtain critical
technology, capital, and markets from the outside for the Chinese economy
to survive and grow, especially in the post-Mao era when Beijing scaled back
and suspended its effort of reordering the world.
During Mao’s time, the stagnated and failing economy was squeezed to
the brink of collapse, with mass death and abject poverty. China’s economic
output was 4.7 percent of the world’s total in 1955, but steadily declined to
2.5 percent in 1980 while the Japanese share rose from 2.5 percent to 10
percent during the same time. China’s per capita GDP was about 20 percent
of that in Japan in early 1950s, but shrank to be only 10 percent in 1965
(S. Lu 2003). China’s per capita grain production sank to the lowest point in
1962 with only 207 kilograms. Chinese economy developed very “unspectacu-
larly” and endured long “stagnations and even regressions” several times; PRC
industrialization was low, out of balance, and costly; “People’s living standard
was not improved at all;” Labor productivity, investment-return, and energy
efficiency were all declining; And a great amount of predatory extraction was
basically wasted during the man-made economic depressions of the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution (Tengxun 2014). Still, with the effec-
tiveness of a Qin-Han regime in accomplishing a few chosen mega ventures,
the PRC managed to build some heavy industries, acquire modern military
hardware including nuclear weapons and missiles, and expand its international
footprints even in faraway places like Africa.
The post-Mao PRC has gone back to the late-Qing and ROC route of
economic development with an equally impressive accomplishment. China had
a 9.8 percent annual GDP growth from 1979 to 2012 and became the world’s
largest producer of 220 industrial products and moved up from tenth to the
second place in the world in terms of the size of GDP, and accumulated the
world’s largest foreign exchange reserve of $3.3 trillion in 2013 (Statistical
Bureau 2013a; IMF 2014). Some “frontline” cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and
Shenzhen now resemble mid-level developed countries.105
A full assessment of PRC’s economic record would require another lengthy
book. Four reasons, however, stand out to show that the PRC, even with the
190 The China Order
highly praised boom over the past three decades, has an average and mostly
suboptimal record of socioeconomic development (Ringen 2016, 16–26). First,
counterfactually, according to the British journal The Economist, the Chinese
economy would have been 42 percent larger by 2010 had the ROC continued
to rule the Chinese Mainland, minus the tens of millions of mass deaths and
a long list of atrocities and sufferings.106 Another counterfactual estimate puts
that China’s per capita GDP around $15,000 by 2011, in par with other East
Asian nations, rather than just US$4,000 under the PRC (Q. Zhang 2011;
D. Cai 2007).
Second, comparatively and without even questioning the reliability of
Chinese official data,107 the PRC economy has been underperforming to raise
per capita GDP, living standards, and the human development index (HDI).
By either conventional or PPP (purchasing power parity) methods, per capita
GDP of the PRC was still only about half of the world’s average in 2013 (IMF
2014). China’s HDI scores improved from 1980 to 2012 but its HDI ranking
in the world (just below the world average) actually declined in comparison,
from 81/124 (65 percentile) to 101/187 (54 percentile), while the United
States, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong either basically maintained or
substantially raised their positions in that ranking. The PRC has since 1980
remained a typical developing country in the same third tier (out of four) of
“medium human development” that also include countries like the Dominican
Republic, Bolivia, India, and the Philippines (UNDP 2013, 148–49). Con-
sequently, the real living standard in the PRC remains low in the 2010s as
shown by the Engel Coefficient that measures the portion of income spent on
food. In 2011, China’s official Engel Coefficients were 0.38 for the urban sector
and 0.43 for the rural sector, actually rose due to inflation,108 at roughly the
same level Americans had all the way back in the 1890s, and would require
forty-seven more years of “rapid economic growth” to just reach the average
level (0.15) of the low income OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation
and Development) countries.109
Third, factor-analyses show that the PRC economy, heavily state invest-
ment-driven and export dependent, is clearly inefficient in returns on capital and
energy consumption. Government capital investment projects have accounted
for nearly half of China’s total GDP, more than twice that in a developed
economy, contributing to 72 percent of China’s annual GDP growth.110 This
ratio, too high even by the standard of a developing country, usually signals
great dislocation and inefficiencies such as bad loans and wasteful bubbles.
Chinese economy has limited, declining, even negative gains of total factor
productivity over the past two decades, signaling a systemic and massive inef-
ficiency and misallocation (Economist 10-11-2014). The poorly reasoned and
opaquely managed excessive investment-driven growth, made possible by the
state’s monopoly of the Chinese savings, may have already pushed marginal
return of capital to below the depreciation rate so to literally destroy capital
while starving long-term consumption. Judged by Incremental Capital-Output
Ratio, the Chinese GDP growth is increasingly inefficient when compared to
other Asian economies during their rapid growth, on par with or worse than
that in India (OECD 2013, 280–81). China’s yield of GDP per unit energy
consumed is ranked as one of the lowest, worse than inefficient economies
such as Haiti (World Bank 2014). Burning nearly half of the world’s coal
and emitting 23 percent of world’s carbon dioxide and other pollutants, the
PRC contributes only about 11 percent of world’s GDP (X. Wang 2013; IMF
2014; U.S. EPA 2014).
Finally, the PRC economic growth has been suboptimal due to its breeding
of some of the world’s worst socioeconomic inequality, environmental pollu-
tion, and intellectual property violations. Environmental destruction and piracy
issues aside, the income inequality measured by Gini Coefficient in the PRC
has been among the world’s highest, much higher than its neighbors in East
Asia (Sicular 2013, 1–5). The sporadic PRC official figures of Gini Coefficient
ranged from 0.472 to 0.491 in 2003–13, way above 0.4 “at which a society
becomes vulnerable to social unrest” according to the United Nations (Guo
and Sun 2012; Kuo 2014). Researchers at the University of Michigan estimated
that PRC income Gini Coefficient grew from 0.3 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2014
(compared to 0.45 in the U.S.).111 A group of Chinese scholars reported a very
high Gini Coefficient of 0.61 in 2010 (H. Shen 2012). Researchers at Peking
University concluded in 2014 that PRC wealth Gini Coefficient exploded from
0.45 in 1995 to 0.55 in 2002 and then to the astonishing height of 0.73 in
2012 (Y. Xie 2014).
Yet, suboptimal and underperforming for the Chinese people, the Chinese
economy has been rapidly enriching and strengthening the PRC state due to
its world-record high rate of extraction that is unabated and unchecked in a
Qin-Han polity that has little free media and no democracy. China may have
just circumvented some roadblocks on its way to escape from poverty (Ang
2016). The rise of China, defined as the growth of the PRC state treasury and
military, is already “for real” (Christensen 2015, 15–36).
In 2011, PRC central government revenue (excluding the significant
income from the massive and monopolistic state-owned enterprises and land
sales) was 35.3 percent of the Chinese GDP, and “it has been steadily rising
to have a bigger share of the GDP in recent years” (PRC Ministry of Treasury
2012, table 3.3). Excluding social security-equivalent funds, Beijing’s take of
the Chinese GDP by international criteria was 31.3 percent in 2011, growing
steadily and rapidly every year for twenty years, many times faster than the
GDP growth, and more than doubling from 1994 to 2013 (Xinhua 1-23-2013).
192 The China Order
The PRC government collects nearly one thousand kinds of taxes and fees that
include 47 percent on real estate purchases in Beijing. An average middle-class
Chinese family pays 51.6 percent of total income in many, mostly “hidden”
indirect taxes in the 2010s (Xuan 2010, 24–40). Some local governments even
insatiably collect future years’ taxes under creative names including “preparing
for war with Japan soon.”112 As a comparison, the U.S. federal government
revenue (including social security funds) was 15.4 percent of the GDP (histori-
cally the highest point was 20.9 percent in 1945). If social security funds are
excluded, then the U.S. government’s take of the GDP was only 9.9 percent
in 2011.113 PRC income tax rate (capped at 45 percent) is higher than that
in many countries.114 Chinese employees and employers shoulder the world’s
heaviest burden of six kinds payroll taxes at a combined rate of 40 to 50 (66
in some cities) percent of wages, “higher than that in Germany, Korea, Japan
or the U.S.,” yet the pension plans and health benefits cover only parts of the
population with serious insufficiencies.115
Out of the estimated two-thirds of GDP extracted by the PRC state, the
central government in Beijing gets a disproportionately larger share. The PRC
central government routinely takes in more than 70 percent of the total tax
revenue plus its huge and opaque “auxiliary budgets” income (from the state
monopoly of banking, land sales, numerous fees, and other “flexible sources”) to
increase its total revenue in the 2010s to be as much as 47 percent of China’s
GDP. As a result, extensive tax evasion has been the norm in the PRC since
“if the (Chinese) enterprises all honestly paid their mandated taxes, then 80
percent of them would have gone broke” (T. Zhou 2010).
To enrich the state and strengthen the military (富国强军), Beijing has
become an extractive state with little restrictions to accumulate unprecedented
wealth over the past decades to be now one of the richest governments in the
world. According to some Chinese economists, the PRC has become a “strong
state, rich central (government), and poor people” with three highly irrational
and twisted wealth-transfers “that must be stopped”: from the people to the
government, from ordinary firms to the state monopolies, and from China to
foreigners (through export subsidies and capital flights) (S. Zhang 2011). Just
like all governments, especially the ones poorly monitored, the massive Chi-
nese wealth disproportionately accumulated by the CCP tends to be wasted,
misused, and embezzled. It is revealed that the PRC government only pays
for 17 percent of health care cost in China in the early-twenty-first century,
while the EU governments pay over 80 percent, the U.S. government pays 46
percent, and the Thai government pays 56 percent. Worse, over 80 percent of
that already very small government health care funding for 1.3 billion people
is reported to be only for the 8.5 million CCP-PRC officials.116 The CCP’s
secretive Discipline Inspection committees alone employ 810,000 “inspectors,”

one monitoring every eight state cadres (C. Li 2014; S. Wang 2014).
Given the inescapable mandate for the China Order, the PRC has focused
on spending its new wealth to build a powerful state machine for internal
control and a strong military and a huge cash chest for its ever-expanding
overseas ventures. The PRC state has thus scored the kind of focused effective-
ness and speed a Qin-Han empire is typically capable of delivering. If the rise
of China is still subject to debate and doubts, the rise of the PRC power as
a formidable international competitor is already clear and present. The Chi-
nese military, the world’s largest in size and second largest in budget, has had
budget increases at the speed of twice as fast as the Chinese GDP growth for
two decades. By 2015, the Chinese government had already pledged to spend
$1.41 trillion (or close to half of China’s total foreign exchange reserve) to
build and promote its “soft power” abroad; “in contrast, the Marshall Plan
cost the equivalent of $103 billion in today’s dollars” (Shambaugh 2015). To
strengthen its claims in the South China Sea, Beijing has built seven artificial
islands with an unknown but likely very large budget. Real results and issues
of cost-effectiveness aside, the rise and expansion of the PRC state power have
been among the most massive and speediest the world has ever seen. Based on
its suppression of human rights and environment protection, argued a PRC
scholar, Beijing has forged its “shocking competitiveness” on the international
stage (H. Qin 2016). The PRC Qin-Han polity is still without its mandated
China Order, for now, but has acquired ever more gold and guns to build one.

The Great Leap Backward: The ROC: A Tenacious But Transforming Authoritarianism

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The Great Leap Backward: The ROC: A Tenacious But Transforming Authoritarianism

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