NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} prospective “new cold war,” this time between America and China, has been war-gamed to death in the media ever since the original Cold War ended. But Western commentators of all ideologies get lost in the 5,000-year haze of Chinese history, unable to draw definitive conclusions about what competition with this nation might mean.
President Xi Jinping has restructured Chinese institutions, which seemed to be tentatively democratizing under his immediate predecessors. He shored up the change with a new state ideology (“socialism with Chinese characteristics”), a more aggressive stance in foreign affairs, and implementation of shock-and-awe tactics against his own populace. All this while explicating a “China dream” (a remixed pastiche of the American dream) and extolling Chinese goals (even as Western media struggle to comprehend what they are).
Conventional analysts maintain that China’s deflating economy will starve out Xi’s regime over the course of decades. Many on the upstart, antiestablishment New Right disagree. They treat a Chinese victory as inevitable. In not-so-grudging tones, they say that China’s totalitarian model inculcates a traditional, patriotic ethos of national solidarity of a sort that liberal Americans have deconstructed and cast aside in our own country.
This couldn’t be more wrong. The conventional economic analysis may not answer cultural questions. But be assured: China has its own culture crisis of decadence and nihilism, and it’s worse than ours.
China is (unlike the former USSR) a fully Eastern nation with conceptions of virtue and vice, church and state, success and failure completely different from our own. America will have to reckon with China’s differences if it wants to curtail the CCP. Instead, some New Right thinkers have decided that now is the time to denounce the “China hawks.”
Take Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin: “Americans should beware of mindless China hawkism. . . . We should also find areas of cooperation, exchange and shared interests, seeking to avoid any future wars and instead communicating with mutual respect for a civilizational equal” (emphasis added).
But many New Right thinkers go beyond this more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger foreign-policy critique. Ahmari’s own valuation of China is more holistic. In other publications it is clear that his dovishness is grounded in a deeper-felt instinct that China is just doing all sorts of traditions and cultural norms right.
Ahmari explains his newfound bonhomie for China’s regime through his “personal experience”:
My father-in-law recently celebrated his eightieth birthday. . . . He’s Chinese-born, so is my mother-in-law, so is my wife, actually. . . . What struck me is the degree to which mainland Chinese culture fostered under the rule of the Dread CCP — you know, sort of as American conservatives see it — is profoundly conservative, profoundly traditional, compared to anything we would encounter in the ‘conservative’ United States. . . . For example, the kids get a little red envelope from grandpa — for his birthday he gives gifts to the kids. . . . The kids line up in front of him and kneel, and bow in front of him, and then he hands them the [envelopes] with a little bit of cash in them. That gesture struck me as so deeply, first of all, ancient, second of all, genuinely conservative and traditionalist. [And] the Chinese Communist Party is working really hard to sustain those kinds of things.
Convenient that the family in question doesn’t live under (the pejorative that Ahmari sarcastically puts in the mouths of its critics) “the Dread CCP.” They live in New York. Presumably it’s for good reason they’re not in China.
There’s also reason to believe that these norms are not all they’re cracked up to be anyway. Habi Zhang, a political scientist at Purdue University and a Chinese dissident, says that it’s typical for Westerners to resort to ignorance or orientalist kitsch to explain China. Zhang argues that the quality of thought is just very low among China’s most ancient thinkers and that Westerners impute meaning where there is none. China has always been “extremely utilitarian,” Zhang said.
“You know, Aristotle is concerned with showing individuals how to live the good life,” Zhang said. “There is nothing remotely like that in Confucian thought,” China’s dominant political philosophy throughout its history. “Modern Chinese are abandoning so many traditions. They don’t really put value on family. There are so many examples — just look at the divorce rates in China.”
The only thing that cooled off the divorce rate was, as with every social problem in China, a central diktat from the CCP. Before the party put stopgaps in place to slow down the legal process for divorce, it was more rampant than in the States. Now, as the Times reports, divorces are down but, concomitantly, marriage rates have plummeted at world-historic speed.
Zhang sees no evidence of a pro-tradition or pro-family culture in the divorce story. “To say that China is somehow more respectful of its past than Westerners are of theirs is just mistaken, and I find it odd that these thinkers don’t know that, given the evidence.”
While America’s conservatives and liberals debate originalism versus living constitutionalism, China has a much narrower gap between acceptable political ideas, and almost all policy disagreements play out like the divorce legislation. Chinese policies are more like a set of post hoc social-engineering programs designed to minimize fallout from personal choices the party finds undesirable.
People do what the party says in China because will-to-power is the only true basis of the law — especially among the political class trained in “legalism,” an even more arbitrary and cruel framework layered on top of Confucianism. “The law’s substance is irrelevant,” as Zhang says. The only virtue of the law is how coercive it is.
The only tradition left in China is this legalistic submission, not any shared rituals. Old habits die hard, and it would take a miracle to break 2,500 years of a Chinese tradition that is happy to dispense with competing social norms (such as marriage) when they cease to be socially expedient.
In this context, it is difficult to imagine what Ahmari et al. mean when they call China a “civilizational equal.” Certainly they must not mean that such a society holds the same values or goals as does Western civilization, given the former’s lack of personal, religious, or familial rights?
Maybe they simply mean “equal” insofar as it is a kind of “equal and opposite” force to the Western world? Maybe they don’t believe in liberty or independence as we do but with similar intensity believe in security and conformity.
Ahmari’s point seems to be that there would be nothing wrong with that. What appears to us as security and conformity might from China’s perspective instead be called social cohesion and national solidarity. He positively quotes CCP bigwig and political theorist Wang Huning on this point.
Huning made waves in the West with the translation of his book America against America, which was the result of a long tour around many different parts of the country, on an apparent fact-finding mission to get a grasp of American policy, culture, and social structure. The resulting book is fascinating, not often polemical about America, and overall harsh but fair.
Ahmari quotes a more fiery passage of America against America, to the effect that the “ruling classes” of our country can’t deal with the many domestic “crises on their radar” because of, in Huning’s words, “a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.”
As Ahmari demands that we “witness” Huning’s critique of our pathetic American leadership, his implicit lament is that we are too navel-gazing to reach the analytical heights of Huning. He singles out Generals Mark Milley and Jo Clyborne, along with “‘nat-sec’ elites,” for “mockery,” comparing then unfavorably with their equivalents in China. Our people are too clueless (“blabbering about ‘white rage’” and “French manicures”) to understand our great-power competitors the way that Huning understands us. But the reason Huning is effective is that he has worked to understand America, and from his book it is clear that he indeed “gets” this country, at least to some degree.
Commentators such Ahmari would like to believe that this description applies to themselves as well — that they’re more attuned to the global situation than are the conventional analysts or China hawks. But what specifically do they “get” about China that the rest of us in the West are missing? Ironically, if they really knew anything about the country, they would drop this romantic tone of praise for China as a supposed bastion of New Right priorities — e.g., family, preservation of traditional culture, and social cohesion or solidarity — all sorely lacking in China.
We’ve already seen the ways that China eradicates families and traditional norms, without even mentioning the one-child policy (more on that later). All that’s left is to see China’s disregard for these vaunted aspects of the “common good” that the New Right cares so much for: solidarity and cohesion.
Not all is as well as it seems in this regard. Chinese youth are at the forefront of China’s rapid decay in public trust. And it’s not even because they’re righteously indignant for all the honorable reasons we’d hope they’d be. In fact, they are almost identical to our own Gen Zers. And as with them, the complaints of young Chinese range from the disturbing and serious to the somewhat frivolous, often expressed in equally cliché language on social media.
This subject is indeed a rare instance of true “civilizational equality” between China and America — the troubles with our young people. And like America’s Gen Zers, China’s are conversely the victims and the perpetrators of social decay, depending on the issue and on one’s perspective.
Cheryl Teh at Business Insider states it plainly: “China’s Gen Z is flat broke, and they have the receipts to prove it.” On China’s Twitter alternative, Weibo, 300 million accounts have viewed a thread called “My real savings at 26.” Across “hundreds of posts,” twentysomethings in China posted screenshots of their bank statements. Representative examples showed working-age people with savings as high as $67 USD and as low as $0.14. According to Teh’s translations, the commentary accompanying these screenshots reads as if it had been tweeted out by hundreds of Anglosphere social-justice activists:
“I’m 26 this year too. Savings? What savings? . . . Doesn’t everyone just live paycheck to paycheck and spend their entire salary?”
“The students who’ve just graduated are now feeling the true pain of having their asses kicked by Chinese society and the workplace.”
“Before the pandemic, people were flexing and saying ‘A 30-year-old without a million yuan can’t be considered a person’ and ‘a man in a big city who doesn’t own a house doesn’t deserve a wife.’ Now that you guys have faced reality, and realized that money is hard . . . to earn — how does it feel to eat your words?”
These low payouts are the consequence of a broken job market in China. Teh points out that unemployment for 16- to 24-year-olds in China was at 20 percent in April 2023. To the Western outsider, though, the most shocking part of this story is that we even know about it in the first place. No matter how you slice it, this kind of behavior is riskier in China than in the States; American Zoomers don’t have social-credit scores that can precipitously decline in real time as they lash out on social media. Chinese youth do.
But Zhang implores the reader not to forget the iron law of Chinese culture: The Chinese people are utilitarians. The youth will not be rising up to protest their conditions, seeking to change everything about their treatment as if they’re the Molly Maguires.
“Their anger is simply that the government hasn’t provided consistent personal or financial security in quite a few years, and they only protest because they want that back,” Zhang said. “You know, the Tiananmen Square generation of the ’80s — they really were outlier idealists. Pretty much every generation of youth both before and since aren’t.”
The idealism divide is a troubling question in many recent protests, from the so-called White Paper Revolution (where protesters publicly denounced Xi and the Party over a psychotic zero-Covid policy) to the “lying flat,” antiwork movement, which chin-stroking Western outlets love. Zhang says “revolution” is the wrong word. “If you understand that a lack of security or even a lack of hedonistic pleasure is the true catalyst here, you see that this is more like when children lodge a complaint against their parents.”
So Chinese Gen Z complain that they, like American youth, suffer a lack of security rather than a lack of freedom. These two groups of young people, separated by continents, share political concerns and even terminology. The “Tangpingist [lying flat] Manifesto,” of dubious origin, even uses phrases that would be familiar to any American on Twitter. It’s filled with microwaved Marxist, social-justice language about gender equality and whatnot. It could be counterpropaganda or it could be genuine; either way, the manifesto’s author thinks that the Western language of inclusion and equality could speak to Chinese youth as it does to our own.
But Americans also have a spiritual legacy of bootstrapping, of hoofing it until you’re able to make it work. As Zhang indicated, the Chinese have no historical prophylactic against personal insecurity. “Even though something like the American dream addresses a baseline of material security, the understanding is always that you have to work hard to attain it,” Zhang said. “In China, people don’t really view work as a virtue. If money could fall from the sky, they would be happy with that.”
Its creation of a sense of security — financially and otherwise — has enabled the CCP to exercise absolute control, like the dynasties before it. Chinese citizens have been relinquishing autonomy since the Bronze Age so that the state can make them safe and secure. This outlook even appears in the Mandarin terms used to explain modern politics. Xi is often called an emperor of the “Red dynasty” rather than the chairman of a political party. An all-powerful, parental regime has been impressed so deeply on the national consciousness that the Chinese have difficulty imagining what an alternate system even looks like.
None of this is to deny our own problems. In the Western situation, every parent is on average more conservative than their children. The temptation may be to lament and despair as younger people drift away from views that defined normalcy in prior generations. But the idealism of Western youth is preferable to the outlook that persists in China. The pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams of young progressive kids across the Western world indicate at least an impulse to strive, whereas the people’s apathy in China may end up letting the state ruin itself through entropy.
For all the talk about traditions on the New Right, its adherents struggle to compare the national character of China with America’s. The attitudinal tradition of America is curiosity, hyperactivity, and a hope-beyond-hope for improving the status quo. While the typical Western progressive is oriented in the wrong direction, their attitude can be channeled down better paths through the power of persuasion. The burden of proof is on China’s New Right admirers to show that the world would be better off with a Chinese attitude toward life, culture, and statecraft — with, that is, a selfish apathy toward issues of social importance.
In reckoning with certain New Right feelings about a cold war with China, the uncomfortable truth comes through. While some in racist publications, attempting to prove their point, hem and haw over videos comparing Chinese military advertisements (selling an image of sheer patriotic masculinity) with our own (which advertise social-justice agendas), the reality is that they have been taken in by foreign propaganda. Through nothing more than CCP marketing, many on the American right have been bamboozled into believing an ahistorical vision of China as the Mystic East, abundant with ancient tradition and martial honor.
The one-child policy never comes up in this picture — nor its 2015 revocation. The CCP deigned to allow family self-determination again because they had been getting demographic data on the disastrous yet inevitable population collapse. But it was already under way, and only now is China bearing the brunt of it.
One can’t imagine something less conservative or traditional than a eugenics policy using forced medical sterilization. The introduction and then the sunsetting of the policy were both purely utilitarian — another example of China’s post hoc approach of waiting for something terrible to happen and then putting a Band-Aid on it. This approach is found everywhere and especially on the issues that some on the New Right proclaim to care about the most.
Take Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism,” or the vaguer insistence on the common good’s overall importance to conservatism. “Common good” is defined differently depending on who’s talking (frequently Vermeule and also Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen), and many hundreds of thousands of words have been inked in an effort to square this circle. Ahmari and other New Right thinkers seem to believe that all the authoritarianism of the “Dread CCP” is aimed at preserving a Chinese definition of the common good. But that definition is thinner than it appears. Zhang goes so far as to say that “there’s no Chinese sense of the common good.” She continues: “That’s why the ‘China Dream’ is so odd. It carries this emotional aura of patriotic love. . . . But it’s an empty concept. Xi never concretely defines the term beyond ‘rejuvenation’ which, as far as I can tell, is simply a call for more allegiance to the state.”
The American understanding of patriotism would be foreign to most Chinese. The uncanny, fake quality of the China Dream could be a result of overall apathy on the part of the country’s Gen Z. China’s younger generations become less and less idealistic the further removed they are from “the Tiananmen Square generation,” as Zhang observed. One need only look to the controversies around elite-level, English-language-immersion programs at top Chinese universities to see the age divide on issues of patriotism.
While China’s youngest top performers go into such programs, allowing them to have flourishing careers in the Western world, Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang exemplify the older scholarly class from whom most of the resistance has come. They call the English-only Yenching Academy a “self-betrayal” of Peking University, the mainland’s premier higher-education institution, which runs the academy. Both men (old enough to be Baby Boomers in our parlance) attended the University of Chicago in their youth and returned to China and achieved high-level academic posts.
Chinese culture seems split on the question of English-language education. While Xi cracks down on it for nationalistic reasons (a kind of “Speak Mandarin or Die” campaign) that would be understandable to Xiaofeng and Yang, evidence even from within Chinese social-media networks is that private individuals still want their kids to learn it out of purely careerist motives. And the youngsters are still winning out in that fight. There are as many Chinese English-speakers as there are Americans currently living; it’s hard to recork the bottle on 350 million people.
Xiaofeng and Yang’s nationalistic impulses — their concerns that Peking University commits “suicide for Chinese civilization” by teaching English, that it signifies the loss of an “independent,” “autonomous academic tradition,” and, most crucially, that it implies that China is “not a great cultural power” — don’t mean much to the average Chinese family. If one assumes that people vote with their feet and wallets, the growing mass of English-speakers in China leads one to conclude that the increased earning potential from doing business in English or going abroad far outweighs the abstract patriotic concerns of Xiaofeng and Yang.
This potential brain drain may be especially frightening for the two Chinese academics who studied abroad decades ago; they call the crops of newly Anglicized students a kind of “foreign concession,” who may not return home to pursue careers in China. After all, if they’re better prepared to adapt to English-speaking cultures because of the explosion of language education, what “carrot” can the Chinese regime provide for these unpatriotic, practically minded Gen Zers?
My conversations with Chinese graduate students in America confirm this suspicion. While some, after a long American or European sojourn, want to return home to take care of aging relatives or to see friends, they generally don’t care about China as such and would never go back out of “love” for it. For the most part, if nothing ties them to China, their plan is to make a name for themselves here — because there’s more money to be made, there are more career opportunities, and, simply, it’s exciting and novel. In my discussions with students in fields from STEM to art and literature, not once has a love of country come up as a motivation for going home, if they wanted to go back at all.
That may be why the China dream feels so wrong, and why Xi in speaking on the topic omits any concrete definition, instead referring vaguely to “optimism and tenacity.” Xi is trying to invent national pride wholesale, free from all context and historical baggage, and against the natural inclinations of China’s working-age population, whose eyes seem to glaze over when the older generations talk about replicating this pseudo-American sense of patriotism.
All of this suggests that, whatever America’s own problems with listless confusion may be, China’s are worse. As the Cold War came to a close, the apathy of the Soviet people contributed greatly to the regime’s collapse. Life felt so terrible for so many. But there would be no repeat of October 1917 — the energy for a revolt just wasn’t there. After decades of successful containment by the Western bloc, the thing could be allowed to crumble under its own weight. In this potential new cold war, many of the same social conditions are at play. America and the West remain more vivacious, chaotic, and idealistic than China. The best among us wouldn’t have it any other way. Despite our internal strife, our opponent in this conflict is a nation with an abyss at the center — not only with a decadence problem to compete with ours but with a nihilism problem, too.
America is a long way off from implementing a Chinese-type autocracy. But going down that road would require one to be sold a bill of goods by China — to come to the belief that its government has virtues we lack and that our responsibility is to get on their level or beat it at its own game. But as always throughout our history, America’s strength is that we don’t adopt the frame of our enemies in that way. There is no reason to start now.