China remains a repressive dictatorship. And America is becoming more like China. At a remarkable rate.
Sino’ the times in Trump’s America:
PETER HARTCHER, INTERNATIONAL EDITOR, SMH, 25 March 35.
For three or four decades, the fashionable consensus in the West was that China was becoming more and more like the West.
Once the Chinese people enjoyed economic freedom, they’d demand political freedom and hey presto!, the communist autocracy would become a capitalist democracy. A lot like America’s. It was flat wrong. Instead, the exact opposite is happening. China remains a repressive dictatorship. And America is becoming more like China. At a remarkable rate.
The Australian sinologist Geremie Barme observes that there are ‘‘haunting parallels’’ between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. They both possess autocratic personalities. Their signature chants echo each other: Trump’s ‘‘Fight, Fight, Fight’’ and Xi’s ‘‘Struggle, Struggle, Struggle’’ and they share values.
How to measure such a convergence? Helpfully, the Chinese Communist Party complied a checklist for us. Document No.9 was published in 2013, during Xi’s first months as president.
The document lists the regime’s ‘‘seven taboos’’. The encyclical demanded ‘‘intense struggle’’ against these seven ‘‘false trends’’. By outlining what is forbidden, it implicitly tells us what is desirable.
The first taboo is ‘‘Western constitutional democracy’’. Essential to this is the separation of powers. This is the doctrine that puts checks on power. A practical example is that, in a liberal democracy, a citizen can challenge a government decision in court.
But China’s dictators reject this in favour of ‘‘the monolithic leadership of the party’’. And Trump’s America, too, is rejecting the separation of powers under its rubric of ‘‘unified executive theory’’.
For instance. Have you been following the case of Trump’s decision to deport Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador despite a judge’s order that the plane not take off or, if it had already, that it be ordered to turn around?
The administration chose to ignore the ruling. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, said: ‘‘It is without doubt the most unlawful order a judge has issued in our lifetimes.’’ So it’s now the president and his staff who decide which court orders are legal, apparently.
Second, the concept of ‘‘universal values’’ is forbidden. Xi regards human rights as a challenge to the rule of the Party. And Trump? ‘‘The concept that everyone is equal is undermined by the administration’s attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies,’’ says Barme, who has been writing on the growing convergence of US and Chinese values since 2017 on China Heritage.
‘‘They’re saying, ‘we don’t want diversity, we want a monoculture, we don’t want equity because we think some people are more valuable than others’. Trump is basically pursuing a massive re-segregation by race, class, wealth and values.’’
Xi’s third taboo is ‘‘civil society,’’ which Document No.9 describes as a ‘‘serious form of political opposition’’. The Party bans or strictly regulates any effort at citizens’ organising for a shared purpose, whether it’s a charity, trade union or environmental NGO, or spiritual group like Falun Dafa.
Trump seeks to delegitimise and halt civil society movements with which he disagrees. Trump’s defence secretary in 2020, Mark Esper, has written that Trump asked him to order troops to fire into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters: ‘‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’’
Trump pardoned over 1000 people convicted of invading and vandalising the Capitol on January 6, but says people vandalising Tesla cars will be branded ‘‘domestic terrorists’’ by his administration, opening the prospect of severe punishments. ‘‘That’s incredibly familiar territory,’’ says Barme, citing China’s use of the term ‘‘subverting state power’’ to crush protest movements.
China’s fourth ‘‘unmentionable’’ is neoliberalism. Because it’s an idea that undermines state control of the economy by advocating full and free rein of market forces.
Similarly, Trump is leading a retreat from US neoliberalism by applying new tariffs. He is a mercantilist who believes that government should engineer positive trade balances through market intervention.
The fifth is independent journalism. China’s censorship and propaganda machinery is notorious for quashing independent reporting and debate. Xi has said that all media outlets in China share the same family name – ‘‘the Party’’.
In the US, Trump recently gave a speech at the Department of Justice where he said that CNN and MSNBC were ‘‘illegal, what they do is illegal’’ and ‘‘has to stop’’. Their crime? They ‘‘literally write 97.6 per cent bad about me’’. Separately, Trump sues media outlets whose coverage he dislikes. ABC News settled by paying him $US15 million. He’s demanding $US20 billion in damages from CBS for the way 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview. Trump has threatened to revoke broadcast licences and jail journalists. Under Trump, the Federal Communications Commission has launched multiple investigations into media outlets for ‘‘falsification’’ of information.
China’s sixth taboo is what Xi calls ‘‘historical nihilism’’. This is aimed at curbing honest accounting for the Party’s previous mistakes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Criticism of the Party’s past could undermine opinion of its present, he fears.
Barme says that a showcase of the Trumpian equivalent is his opposition to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframed US history around the experience of slaves. Trump set up a committee in rebuttal, the 1776 Committee. He favours revisionist histories of slavery and the Civil War.
The final taboo is against any effort to challenge ‘‘reform and opening’’ as defined by Xi. Barme finds its analogue in Trump’s intolerance for criticism of his executive orders.
The US, of course, remains vastly freer and more contested a society than the People’s Republic. But after a mere two months into Trump’s current term, the trends are all China’s way, seven for seven.
It’s growing harder by the day for Australia and other US allies to claim ‘‘shared values’’ with America under Trump.
