习近平自述 中国领导人想要什么——以及如何阻止他得到它 作者：Matt Pottinger、Matthew Johnson 和 David Feith 2022 年 11 月 30 日  中国国家主席习近平在北京发表讲话后，2022 年 10 月 王廷舒/路透社 分享 节省 10 月，在中国共产党 (CCP) 的第 20 次全国代表大会上，习近平总书记将自己确立为自毛泽东以来中国最强大的领导人的下一个十年，用一大批忠诚者取代了他最精通经济知识的政治局同事，并将斯大林-毛泽东主义的“斗争”概念作为党章的指导原则。其效果是翻开了“改革开放”的一页，中共用这个词来描述始于 70 年代后期并导致中国经济在过去四十年爆炸式增长的经济自由化。 在党代会上，习近平第三次连任中共最高领导人——这是当代前所未有的发展，也是他努力集权的关键一步。但也许更重要的是大会将习近平在过去十年中在精心制作的官方党内通讯中发展的世界观编纂成法典的方式：中文演讲、纪录片和教科书，其中许多北京故意为外国观众误译，当它完全翻译它们时。这些文本消除了掩盖该政权目标和方法的大部分模糊性，并提供了了解习近平意识形态和动机的窗口：对颠覆的深深恐惧、对美国的敌意、对俄罗斯的同情、统一中国大陆和台湾的愿望，最重要的是，对共产主义最终战胜资本主义西方的信心。他所追求的最终状态需要重塑全球治理。他的明确目标是用以北京为核心的新秩序取代现代民族国家体系。 诚然，与莫斯科一样，北京的抱负可能比其实际能够实现的更大。但习近平，就像他形容为他“最好、最亲密的朋友”俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔普京一样，似乎并不相信他的影响力超出了他的控制范围。世界各地的政策制定者都应该注意这一点。 随时了解情况。 每周提供深入分析。 报名 最好现在就通过协调一致的军事威慑和严格限制中国获取美国及其盟友控制的技术、资本和数据来约束和缓和习近平的愿望，而不是等到他采取了决定性的、不可逆转的步骤，例如攻击台湾，那将导致超级大国冲突。乌克兰战争不断提醒人们，威慑远比“倒退”好。 拜登政府最近采取措施限制习近平使中国成为世界主要半导体制造商的努力——北京在电信设备、太阳能电池板、先进电池和其他关键领域已经取得的地位——标志着美国战略的重要演变。如果国会、白宫和美国盟友迅速采取类似措施，维持中国对其他工业化国家的依赖，这可能会削弱习近平日益增长的风险偏好。 协调一致的行动也具有道义上的必要性，最近几天在中国几个城市爆发的街头抗议活动凸显了这一点，因为人们对带有习近平签名的严厉反 COVID 措施感到愤怒。如果示威势头愈演愈烈，从他的一些更不祥的言论来看，习近平的反应可能会很严厉。无论如何，民主国家应该更多地站在中国人民一边，为他们在中国国内外提供更安全的沟通方式。 满嘴的木屑 阅读中共文件可能是一种残酷的练习。已故的西方最有洞察力的中国观察家之一西蒙·莱斯 (Simon Leys) 将其比作“一桶一桶地吞木屑”。阅读“习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想”作为领导人的官方意识形态，也不例外。北京的许多言论，尤其是针对外国观众的言论，都是令人困惑和模棱两可的。但习近平最具启发性的言论并不是他在达沃斯或在玫瑰园站在美国总统身边时发表的言论。相反，他在向中共最高领导人发表讲话时最为犀利。这些作为对党的忠实信徒的指导的讲话，有时会保密数月或数年，然后才会出现在中文出版物上。但正如莱斯所理解的那样， 习近平的文本反映了他的继承，作为一长串共产主义理论家和领导人中最新的一位，他们沉浸在类似的学说、传统和理想的最终状态中。马克思、列宁、斯大林、毛泽东都可以在习近平思想的文字和精神上看到。习近平并不像一些分析人士认为的那样，与他的更直接的前任有过根本的背离；他的抱负与提拔他的党内抱负大体一致。 然而，这并不是说中共老板可以互换。领导力在列宁主义体系中与在任何其他体系中一样重要。习近平的个人印记遍布北京目前的做法，即使他期望的最终状态与他的前任一致。中国批评家嘲笑他是“伟大的加速器”，声称他正在加速党对权力的垄断的最终消亡。他的拥护者可能会同意他是一个加速器——但在他们眼中，他正在加速实现党的长期目标的进程。无论哪种方式，不可否认的是，如果一个人要了解中国的发展方向和原因，习近平是最重要的观察者和阅读者。 习近平似乎不相信他的影响力超出了他的能力范围。 了解习近平的一个关键是看他对历史的解释。众所周知，普京曾宣称苏联解体是二十世纪最大的地缘政治灾难。不太清楚的是，苏联解体在多大程度上也困扰着习近平，以及它如何作为中国领导人行动的基本指南。 2012 年 12 月，就任总书记后不久，习近平向广东省干部发表了闭门讲话，其节选在 2013 年初被一名中国记者泄露和发表。进入他的世界观的窗口： 苏联为什么解体？苏共为什么会垮台？一个重要的原因是他们的理想信念动摇了。. . . 这对我们来说是一个深刻的教训！否定苏联和苏共的历史，否定列宁、斯大林，否定一切，就是搞历史虚无主义，混淆思想，破坏党的各级组织。 习提到的“历史虚无主义”可能是对苏联领导人尼基塔·赫鲁晓夫的含蓄批评，后者曾指责前任的记录。但习近平讲话中明显的反派是米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫，这位苏联领导人的改革（重组）和公开（开放）改革为苏联的解体奠定了基础。“有几个人想救苏联，”习近平说。“他们抓住了戈尔巴乔夫，但几天之内又发生了逆转，因为他们没有独裁统治的工具。没有人足够勇敢地站起来反抗。” “专政的工具”一词——党尤其是其最高领导人必须控制军队、安全机构、宣传、政府数据、意识形态和经济——在习近平的演讲中一再出现未来十年的演讲和官方指导。  一扇门，上面贴着 2022 年 10 月在北京举行的第 20 次党代表大会的海报 王廷舒/路透社 一个月后，即 2013 年 1 月，习近平向由中国数百名最高级别官员组成的中共中央委员会新委员和候补委员发表了另一次讲话，实际上是一次就职演说。这篇保密了六年的讲话显示了习近平用冷战时期借用的术语指导党国： 有些人认为共产主义可望而不可及，甚至认为不可企及，不可设想，完全是一种幻想。. . . 事实一再告诉我们，马克思、恩格斯对资本主义社会基本矛盾的分析没有过时，历史唯物主义认为资本主义必然灭亡、社会主义必然胜利的观点也没有过时。这是社会历史发展的大势所趋，但道路曲折。资本主义最终灭亡，社会主义最终胜利，必然是一个漫长的历史过程。 三个月后，即 2013 年 4 月，中央委员会发布了 9 号文件，这是一份对党内干部的内部指示，被证明是习时代的奠基性文件——其系统性和战略性的视野，对中国的进程产生了巨大影响。中国治理，深深地敌视西方和西方思想。一直保密到2013年夏天泄露给海外中文媒体，9号文件的正式名称是《关于当前意识形态领域的公报》。它讲述了一个毫不含糊的故事：西方国家密谋渗透、颠覆和推翻中共，所以党必须铲除西方的“错误思潮”，包括宪政民主、西方价值观的普世观念、公民社会的观念、经济新自由主义，新闻独立，对党的历史版本的挑战，以及对党的“改革开放”议程的不同解读。“面对这些威胁，”9号文件告诫说，“不能放松警惕，不能放松警惕。” 苏联解体困扰着习近平，并成为他行动的基本指南。 9号文件还警告了“颜色革命”。这个词起源于本世纪头十年，当时前苏联国家发生的一系列反独裁民众起义被赋予了丰富多彩的名字，包括格鲁吉亚的玫瑰革命（2003 年）、乌克兰的橙色革命（2004 年）和吉尔吉斯斯坦的郁金香革命（2005 年） . 北京开始使用这个词来唤起西方煽动颠覆的无处不在的幽灵。正如9号文件所说，“西方反华势力”将永远“把洋务化、分裂和‘颜色革命’的矛头指向我国”。 In late 2013, Xi required party leaders at all levels to watch a six-part documentary titled “A 20-Year Memorial for the Soviet Loss of Party and Country.” This “internal educational reference film” attributed the Soviet collapse to deep problems within the Soviet Communist Party, including its inability to manage political and economic infiltration and corruption that it blamed on the United States. The film was jointly produced by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal loyalty enforcer. The same year, Beijing’s National Defense University produced a separate documentary, Silent Contest, that was distributed by several party and state organs. The film similarly used the Soviet collapse to rail against the “world strategy” of the United States. This was the opening line of Silent Contest: “The process of China’s realization of the great undertaking of national rejuvenation must ultimately follow from testing and struggle against the system of American hegemony.” Later, the film shows a clip of Putin delivering his now famous remark that the Soviet collapse was a geopolitical catastrophe. WHEN WATER BECOMES ICE Xi’s decision-making can be understood only with reference to Marxist-Leninist theory. In Marxist dialectics, history moves inexorably toward its utopian destination “step by step,” accumulating “quantitative increases that culminate in a qualitative leap,” as Xi explained, paraphrasing Mao, in a speech delivered to high-ranking cadres in January 2021 and published in April 2021. Mao, in turn, was paraphrasing Joseph Stalin’s rendering of Friedrich Engels’s theories about the application of the laws of physics to the processes of societal development. According to Engels, as quoted in Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the Bolsheviks, this process of change is akin to water heating or freezing: The temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice. In the Short Course—the most widely published book in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule and, as the China expert John Garnaut has pointed out, the closest thing to a religious text in 1950s China—Stalin and his co-authors explain that this “science of history” helps the enlightened see patterns and great trends where others might see only “a jumble of accidents and . . . absurd mistakes.” Xi believes that we are today witnessing a “qualitative leap” in world affairs, where China has moved to center stage and the U.S.-anchored Western order is breaking down. As Xi said in his speech published in April 2021: The world today is undergoing a great change in situation unseen in a century. Since the most recent period, the most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, “chaos,” and this trend appears likely to continue.  New Politburo Standing Committee members Xi Jinping, Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, and Li Xi in Beijing, October 2022 Tingshu Wang / Reuters Xi depicts the current historical period as one of great risk and opportunity. It is his “historical mission” to exploit the inflection point and push history along its inexorable course through a process of “struggle,” which includes identifying internal and external enemies, isolating them, and mobilizing the party and its acolytes against them. Xi expanded on these ideas in an impassioned address to the Sixth Plenum meeting of Communist Party leaders in November 2021, lauding Mao’s 1950 decision to send “volunteers” across the Yalu River into Korea to fight the U.S. and UN forces commanded by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur. Comrade Mao Zedong, with the . . . strategic foresight of “by starting with one punch, one hundred punches will be avoided,” and the determination and bravery of “do not hesitate to ruin the country internally in order to build it anew,” made the historical policy decision to resist America and aid Korea and protect the nation, avoid the dangerous situation of invaders camping at the gates, and defend the security of New China. Xi’s speech made an equally strong endorsement of the CCP’s “decisive measures” to crush the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and withstand “the pressure of Western countries’ so-called sanctions” that followed. This saved the party, in Xi’s telling, and today “the CCP, the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese nation have the most reason to be self-confident” of any “political party, country, or nation” in the world. The statements leave little doubt that Xi would be willing to adopt “decisive measures” again today if less violent means to disperse demonstrations failed. Like many of Xi’s most aggressive and important statements, his Sixth Plenum speech was initially kept secret. It was delivered behind closed doors and published in Qiushi magazine nearly two months later. The CCP does not appear to have published an official English translation of it, and the speech was all but ignored by Western news outlets. But just over a year later, its implications have become clear: regardless of near-term economic considerations for China, Xi is being guided by ideology and his firmly held diagnosis that the West is declining and that Beijing, led forcefully by Xi himself, must take risks and act decisively to assert new spheres of influence and build a world conducive to Marxist autocracy. MARXIST MEANS AND ENDS Xi Jinping Thought makes clear that Marxism is not just the means to achieving global supremacy but also the goal of that supremacy. “Karl Marx dedicated his entire life to overthrowing the old world and establishing a new world,” Xi said in 2018 while presiding over Marx’s 200th birthday celebration in Beijing—an event surrounded by weeks of propaganda and publications timed to establish Xi as the designated heir to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Xi called the German theorist “the greatest thinker in human history” and decreed that “Marxism is not to be kept hidden in books. It was created in order to change the destiny of human history.” This phrasing evoked a major foreign policy initiative that Xi has embraced called “A Community of Common Destiny for Mankind,” which aims to shape the global environment in ways favorable to Beijing’s authoritarian model. (The ominous-sounding term “common destiny” is often misleadingly translated by the CCP into the more anodyne English phrase “shared future.”) Xi’s 2018 speech made clear that the initiative and Marx’s vision of a stateless, collectivized world are linked. “Just like Marx, we must struggle for communism our entire lives,” Xi said. “A collectivized world is just there, over [the horizon]. Whoever rejects that world will be rejected by the world.” Ian Easton, an American researcher, discovered a recent set of People’s Liberation Army textbooks focused on Xi’s ideology that elaborate further on the link between Xi’s foreign policy and global communism. These books, edited by top educators and administrators at National Defense University and labeled as “internal teaching materials” for senior military officers, can be taken as authoritative. In China, the military is subordinate to the party, not to the state, and ideological training figures heavily in the education of officers. Xi has described the National Defense University as “an important base” for training China’s officer corps. Xi called Karl Marx “the greatest thinker in human history.” Passages from the textbooks, cited in Easton’s 2022 book, The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, underscore the idea that overturning U.S. leadership around the globe is only one phase of Xi’s plan. Xi also seeks to upend the concept of equal and sovereign states that emerged from Europe four centuries ago and is the cornerstone of international relations, according to the texts. As one of them, Strategic Support for Achieving the Great Chinese Rejuvenation, explains: The Westphalian System was founded on the notion of a balance of power. But it has proven unable to achieve a stable world order. All mankind needs a new order that surpasses and supplants the balance of power. Today, the age in which a few strong Western powers could work together to decide world affairs is already gone and will not come back. A new world order is now under construction that will surpass and supplant the Westphalian System. This and the other textbooks leave no doubt that the system that replaces the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia must be the socialist model made in China. “As we push for the fusion of the world’s civilizations on the basis of developing our nation’s unique civilization, there are several things that must be done,” reads one passage. “[We] must insist on taking the road of development with Chinese cultural characteristics. . . . And we must insist on our principles and our bottom line as we actively engage with others.” Another passage states: “The Community of Common Destiny for Mankind will mold the interests of the Chinese people and those of the world’s people together.” At another point, that same text makes clear who has decreed this approach: “Xi Jinping has emphasized that our state’s ideology and social system are fundamentally incompatible with the West. Xi has said ‘This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.’” The textbook’s authors evidently took the term “very sharp” to mean violent. As the book continues: “To use war to protect our national interests is not in contradiction with peaceful development. Actually, such is a manifestation of Marxist strategy.” In the meantime, the book advocates weaponizing economic dependence and greed: “We must gain a grip on foreign government leaders and their business elites by encouraging our companies to invest in their local economies.” STRUGGLE SESSION Xi further codified this view of China’s mission at the party congress in October, as he adjusted official language to match his vision and made personnel changes to reflect his control of the CCP and the preeminence of his thinking. One way in which this was achieved was through an act of editing: Xi led the congress in unanimously voting to insert the word “struggle” into the Party Charter in several more places. These changes were missed by some foreign observers, perhaps because the CCP’s English-language propaganda selectively mistranslated the word “struggle,” using euphemisms such as “persistent hard work.” But the term now rivals references to “reform and opening” in the charter, signaling that Beijing’s focus will now be even more on confronting perceived enemies at home and abroad and less on growing the economy. The personnel changes at the top of the party suggest much the same. In a difficult-to-parse sequence of events during the proceedings, Xi’s elderly predecessor Hu Jintao was removed, seemingly against his will, from his seat next to Xi on a dais in the Great Hall of the People. That might have been passed off as clumsy choreography or perhaps as a response to some medical issue. But soon afterward, Xi dumped all three of Hu’s allies from the Politburo, replaced them with personal loyalists, and elevated military industrialists and security-apparatus officials in place of officials with national-level economic experience. These changes made Hu’s removal appear more like a public humiliation. Xi’s picks to lead the military—the two vice chairs of the Central Military Commission, of which Xi himself is chair—further signal his disruptive geopolitical ambitions. Xi reappointed Zhang Youxia as first vice chair, despite Zhang’s advanced age (72), which put him well past typical retirement age. (Zhang’s father fought side by side with Xi’s in China’s civil war.) For the second vice-chair seat, Xi selected He Weidong, a 65-year-old with a focus on joint operations and experience on China’s contested frontiers. He commanded ground forces in China’s west during a period of high tension (and some bloodshed) with India, then led the Taiwan-focused eastern theater, where he oversaw a dress rehearsal for war following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August. But to become vice chair, he required a double promotion. In short, Xi’s new leadership team appears tailormade for “the spirit of struggle” and for the “high winds and waves” and “stormy seas of a major test” that he referred to in his work report to the Party Congress. One wonders whether he had Taiwan in mind when he chose those particular words. WARMING UP TO “CONSTRAINMENT” In May, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a major address laying out the Biden administration’s China policy. “We are not looking for conflict or a new cold war,” Blinken asserted in his speech. “To the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both.” The Biden administration avoids using the Cold War term “containment” to describe its approach to China, and Blinken did not use that term in his speech. But what he described echoes the successful approach Washington adopted in its contest with the Soviet Union. As one senior American official explained in a briefing to preview Blinken’s speech, U.S. policy is focused on “constraining Beijing’s ability to engage in coercive practices.” Washington seeks to work with allies to “leverage our collective strength” and “close off vulnerabilities that China is able to exploit.” Blinken summed it up in these terms in his address: “We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system.” This is not quite containment, but it bears a family resemblance. “Constrainment” is the term that one of us (Pottinger) has used to describe it. A policy of constrainment, unlike containment, accounts for the current realities of economic interdependence and seeks to tilt them to Washington’s advantage. Constrainment should seek to puncture Beijing’s confidence that it can achieve its aims through war and sap Beijing’s optimism that it can decisively accumulate coercive economic leverage over the United States and other democracies. The Biden administration avoids using the term “containment” to describe its approach to China. Putin’s belief that western Europe had become too dependent on Russian energy to meaningfully oppose his armored assault on Kyiv appears to have been a significant factor in his decision to re-invade Ukraine. Xi is working to acquire similar coercive leverage—what he calls the “powerful countermeasure” of “international production chains’ dependence on China”—in semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech inputs to the global economy. An allied constrainment policy would avoid falling into this trap, as well as extricate the United States where it has already stumbled into one. Washington and its allies must adopt, in essence, the opposite of Germany’s corporatist, antistrategic foreign policy that tethered European prosperity to the whims of adversarial “Führer states,” to borrow Wolfgang Ischinger and Sebastian Turner’s apt phrase. Rules regarding semiconductors that the Biden administration issued in October take an important step in the right direction. Beijing currently must import hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of chips annually—a dependence that Washington should work to sustain. The most important elements of the new rules are limits on the export of chip-making equipment and U.S. skilled labor to China. If enforced diligently, the rules will foil Xi’s ambition to make China the world’s largest chipmaker and erode its goal of commanding the high-tech supply chains of its trade partners. That dynamic is the essence of constrainment, which should strive to maintain a favorable balance of dependence in a wide range of areas. A policy of constrainment should, for example, strengthen the dominance of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve and trading currency, extending Washington’s ability to monitor and punish money laundering, weapons proliferation, bribery, and other dangerous actions by Beijing. Constrainment should remind Beijing of its dependence on foreign sources of food and energy while reversing the United States’ growing reliance on Chinese batteries, solar panels, and other “green” technology. TikTok represents a potentially powerful instrument for censorship and mass manipulation. Constrainment would also rectify the lead Beijing has, incredibly, opened over the United States in global Internet governance and control of information and data flows. The fact that ByteDance, a Chinese company, controls TikTok—the fastest growing news and video content outlet in the United States—represents a potentially grave failure by Washington to protect democracy and free speech. TikTok’s algorithms, whose source code Beijing has restricted from being transferred out of China, could be modified to suppress or amplify content according to the CCP’s preferences, which would give China the ability to influence the views of tens of millions of Americans. Zhang Fuping, who serves as editor in chief of ByteDance, is also the secretary of the company’s Communist Party Committee, tasked with ensuring the company’s alignment with the CCP’s interests. According to a report in Sina Finance, at a meeting in 2018, Zhang declared that the company should “‘take the lead’ across ‘all product lines and business lines’ to ensure that the algorithm is informed by the ‘correct political direction’ and ‘values.’” And according to a report in Taiwan News, in 2019, ByteDance signed an agreement with the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau pledging to boost “network influence and online discourse power” and enhance “public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility.” TikTok and other content apps based in China or owned by Chinese firms represent potentially powerful instruments for censorship and mass manipulation; Washington should ban their use, just as India’s government has wisely done. If the CCP wants to influence international audiences, it should have to depend on digital platforms domiciled in, regulated by, and accountable to democracies. The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and a century of archivesUnlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline readingSix issues a year in print, online, and audio editionsSubscribe Now MATT POTTINGER is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021. MATTHEW JOHNSON is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. DAVID FEITH is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. From 2017 to 2021, he served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. 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