Can the CCP Achieve Global Dominance?

Aaron Sarin has written an interesting Quillette piece about the Chinese Communist Party and its aim of global dominance coupled to its bouts of totalitarian incompetence. CCP handling of the coronavirus debacle is given as just the latest example of its incompetence directly attributable to a culture of fanatical secrecy and rigidly centralised control structures.

Many of us have woken up in recent years to the threat we face in the Chinese Communist Party. The danger that the Party presents to citizens of China has been well documented for decades, but it is only recently that this danger has been extended to the rest of the world—or perhaps it is only recently that the rest of the world has caught its first alarming glimpse of a long-hidden menace. This menace comes in a variety of forms. In the arena of infrastructure and investment, there is Xi Jinping’s vaunted “Belt and Road Initiative.” The aim is to create Chinese vassal states all over the world by issuing loans that cannot be repaid. This enables the Party to assume control of ports, pipelines, and power plants, and ultimately to gain leverage over indebted governments.

With each move the CCP outflanks its rivals and creeps closer to global hegemony. Indeed, a US congressional report has found that the United States would lose if war was to break out with China tomorrow. China’s leaders no longer hide the fact that they aim to establish a Communist-led world order, with the task due for completion in the year 2049 (exactly one century after the Party first took power).

And yet with all this talk of elaborate Machiavellian plots, it has been easy to forget the sheer incompetence of the Communist Party. Beijing makes careful plans decades in advance, executing some of them successfully, but it also makes the most colossal mistakes along the way. The CCP may give the impression of order and efficiency, but this is order taken to such pathological, inflexible extremes that it frequently results in disorder—from the lethal famine caused by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950s to the massive social unrest caused by Xi Jinping’s Hong Kong Extradition Bill in 2019. Recent history ought to leave us in no doubt. Chaos follows the Communist Party. Now the coronavirus crisis is showing us the very real danger of maintaining close relations with such a regime.

We are familiar with centralised incompetence ourselves, but it is not easy to draw conclusions when trying to assess the CCP version from an outsider's point of view. At least the election of Donald Trump, the Huawei issue and the coronavirus debacle have brought the CCP threat into some kind of focus. Unfortunately the focus may be temporary.