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Jude Blanchette is one of the country’s most respected China scholars, and currently holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. His work has focused on China’s political environment, the workings of the Communist Party and its impact on foreign companies and investors. His 2019 book, China’s New Red Guards, examined the revival of support for Maoism and nationalism in contemporary China. Blanchette hosts a regular podcast, Pekingology, in which he discusses Chinese politics with a variety of scholars. In this lightly edited interview, he discussed the leadership of Xi Jinping, as well as the realities of researching Chinese politics in the current climate.

Q: How did you come to work on China? Is there a particular anecdote which encapsulates your intellectual engagement with China?

A: I spent a year studying abroad in China in 2001 right before the WTO [World Trade Organization] accession. The question that interested me at the time was looking at what seemed to be a nominally communist country move towards integration, normalization, and I think at the time, yes, some degree of liberalization. When I returned to live in China between 2006 and 2012, that coincided with what felt like a marginal shift — but now in retrospect, was clearly a much more substantive shift — preceding Xi Jinping, which is at the end of that brief 2000s period of relative opening under the Hu administration. That period just fascinated me because you saw the Olympics and what was really the beginning of the “China model” debate. 

Then the big thing for me, which got me interested in focusing more full-time on China, was what ended up becoming my book, China’s New Red Guards. I began engaging with young leftist nationalists who had some degree of symbolic or substantive affinity for Mao Zedong. If I had to pinpoint an event which captured all that and and which I still find interesting to this day, it is visiting the Utopia bookstore — Utopia is a neo-Maoist organization – near Renmin University in 2011 when Bo Xilai was on the rise out of Chongqing and had become a folk hero for many of the neo-Maoists. 

Sitting in that bookstore, in modern-day Beijing, surrounded by a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings, all discussing the merits of the Cultural Revolution was this jarring cognitive dissonance for me, because it upended many of the absurd observations I’d had about China moving inexorably towards a more liberalized, modernized system. And it made me think: I don’t know as much about China as I thought I did. Engaging with this puzzle of a modernizing country that is also much more heterodox in its political orientations became an enduring intellectual puzzle that I’m still wrestling with today.

How do those intellectual puzzles figure now, as the CCP has just celebrated its 100th anniversary? How would you assess the CCP’s health at this significant point?

There’s a distinction to be made between ideological discussions within the party and ideological discussions within society more broadly. There’s a tendency now to see the party as a subsuming entity, where the party defines ideology, and we therefore tend to see ideological discussion through the lens of what the party is talking about. Of course, if viewed that way, there’s not much ideological discussion. Even when we talk about, quote-unquote “ideology,” it’s party-speak propaganda and relatively shallow; and it’s purely about preservation of the status quo, not about what sort of new worlds the Communist Party wants to create. The tendency for bureaucratic communism, whether in the Soviet Union or now in China, is about erecting and perpetuating the architecture of power. 

Below that, though, within society, it’s important not to confuse the relatively barren landscape of ideological discourse within the party for China at large. The reason it seems like there’s a narrow band of discussion within China is because the bounds of permissible discussion are closing, not because Chinese people have stopped caring about the future of their country or have stopped having different opinions. So, I find myself less and less interested in ideological discussions in the party qua ideological discussions, and I find myself more interested in thinking about ideological discussions in the party purely as a mechanism for preserving the status quo. 

Tracking ideological discussions within society at large has, now that I’m out of China, become more difficult. Because I’m no longer there, I have to recognize that there’s a lot about intellectual life and discussion that I just don’t have any sense of, rather than it’s not there. And that seems to be, again, something we need to be very clear about as the system continues to tighten, which it will, so long as Xi Jinping is in power. We need to remember there’s 1.4 billion people with intellectual agency, and that the party doesn’t speak for them all.

Access to China is an obstacle facing many scholars at the moment. For most of the pandemic, it has been impossible; that’s obviously an impediment to the “boots on the ground” knowledge you were just describing. How are China scholars meeting these emerging obstacles in research? Are new methodological approaches being adopted? And how much can we truly know about China from this type of research? 

We’re in an important transition moment for thinking about China’s political system. Because even though, beginning in that 2008-2009 period, the intellectual and research climate in China began to get more difficult, you still had a pretty robust amount of cross-border engagement and research collaboration between Chinese and American scholars; Chinese scholars were coming to the United States, and U.S. scholars were doing field study in China. And although reading the People’s Daily tea leaves has always been important, it could be supplemented with on the ground qualitative discussions with interlocutors over dinner tables in Beijing, which helped refine — or at least blunt — some of the more simplistic interpretations of what’s going on in Beijing. Most of that has now evaporated. A lot of us have left China. 

Now, of course, with Covid, we’ve had this year and a half period where travel to China hasn’t been able to occur, and this is likely to endure for some time. The intellectual climate has restricted significantly over the Xi period, so academic study is becoming far more difficult. What that’s leaving is this pivot — an over-pivot, I think — to extreme Kremlinology, where we’re making fairly bold pronouncements about China’s political system and where Xi Jinping is taking the country based on, in some ways, an over-interpretation of the official documents, and outside of a contextual understanding of how those documents are created and what they’re meant to serve. Ultimately, what we’re left with is quantitative analysis of datasets and tea leaf reading Pekingology, both of which are important tools, but need to be heavily qualified without the qualitative on the ground sense. 

…[W]ith Covid, we’ve had this year and a half period where travel to China hasn’t been able to occur, and this is likely to endure for some time… What that’s leaving is this pivot — an over-pivot, I think — to extreme Kremlinology, where we’re making fairly bold pronouncements about China’s political system…

We had a generation of China scholars who — especially after the warming of relations — were able in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s to do a lot of on the ground work. Although the newer generation has really good academic pedigree, studying in master’s programs and PhD programs that put a heavy emphasis on quantitative skills, many of them don’t have long living experience in China. It’s not to denigrate this skill set — it’s going to yield important insights — it’s just to say that the worry is, the more distant the U.S. and China become, the more we lose something important from a deep tactile sense of being on the ground. Looking at a government document or policy pronouncement, if you can’t immediately sense how that document emerged, how it’s likely to be interpreted or misinterpreted by cadres, you may give it weight that it doesn’t necessarily merit. You couldn’t know that without interacting with real life, flesh-and-blood cadres. 

Another issue, as the system becomes more centralized, is an over-interpretation of what centralization looks like in practice. It’s the difference between living in Beijing and taking the subway out 30 minutes to Tongzhou, and seeing just how quickly the facade of centralization can evaporate when you move a few steps from Zhongnanhai. That’s not to belittle what I do think is the pronounced move of China towards a dictatorship, but it is to say, for our methodological lens, we are losing something very important by not being able to visit, travel and study in China.

How has this situation impacted your own research and thinking?

Two things have been helpful for me. One is, I always start my day remembering that Chinese officials put their pants on one leg at a time. What that means to me is, I always try to situate myself in the office of a local cadre, or even a senior official in China. As I’m thinking about a policy pronouncement, a speech that Xi Jinping gives, or a five-year plan, I begin to think: okay, which highly evolved mammals, similar to myself, put that together? What were the incentives that they experienced? Where might they have their own agenda that may affect how that document was put together? And when these pronouncements are made, what is the realistic process by which orders get filtered down through the system? What do these two-legged mammals do when they get these orders? 

And, assuming that they’re all like myself — lazy, path-dependent, have a good degree of pettiness — how does that affect how these policies are actually implemented? That’s the first point for me, remembering that this is a system populated by human beings. Often, as external observers, we get caught up in this neo-orientalist mysticism that China is planning 17,000 years into the future, or that Xi Jinping is able to stomp his foot and send a command down the line with perfect fidelity.

The second is, as the system tightens up, I’ve found comparative research helpful to think through how an existing authoritarian bureaucracy operates. Part of that is doing comparisons with my own life in thinking about: what do I notice about incentives within bureaucracies that I inhabit now and how can I imagine those might operate, if we scale them up. I’m also increasingly looking to the literature on other authoritarian political systems to understand this and, without being too controversial, I find myself reading more and more on the Soviet Union to understand the operating realities of a bureaucratic Marxist-Leninist system. 

That’s not to say China is the Soviet Union — the comparison can fall off the rails — and you need to remember that China of 2021 is not the Soviet Union of 1961; Xi Jinping of 2021 is not is not Stalin of 1951. But reading their experience closely and trying to see how incentives were structured under dictatorships, and what that might tell us about the limits of analysis, or the limitations on cadre behavior in contemporary China.

Recognizing the fallibility of people that inhabit the system frustrates that mystic, monolithic understanding of the CCP, but the common analysis at the other end of that pendulum is that the CCP is perpetually on the brink of collapse. Where do you situate the CCP on that spectrum now? Is there utility in both arguments for understanding the CCP today?

The dominant framing right now is alternating between poles of collapse or domination. It’s interesting that’s the way we think about the party, in a way that we don’t think about other organizations so starkly. For example, we talk about the United States in terms of its failures to live up to stated ideals, the dysfunctionality of existing institutions, or polarization. Except at the margins, we don’t talk about the United States as either on a linear ascent to the heavens or on a straight-line path to disintegration. Think about any other organization, whether it’s the Catholic Church or the European Union, we understand that the important questions are unique to the institution, and wouldn’t fit if every conversation about the EU or the Catholic Church was about collapse or eschatology. It would be an odd discussion. 

It seems to me that the CCP is neither on the precipice of collapse, nor on the launch pad to a heavenly ascent. Instead, it’s about what are the strategic choices that the Communist Party as an entity will face over the next 10 to 15 years? How will it respond to them? How well are the existing institutions within the Communist Party operating to solve the challenges that the party feels it needs to solve? Will it muddle through? And what new tensions are going to begin to pull at the party that will deflect it from some of the clearly stated goals that the Xi administration has for the country? 

To me, those questions are more interesting than: will it collapse or dominate? Because I think the answer to that question at this point is: well, neither. So, we need to find a new paradigm with which to think through China, even if we recognize you always need to be looking for signs of inherent or emergent fragility in a system; you should do that whether you’re looking at Amazon, the United States, or the European Union. 

You wrote recently in Foreign Affairs about Xi’s “gamble” over the next 10 to 15 years. It was an interesting title because I don’t think the word “gamble” then appeared in the body of the text. What is Xi’s “gamble” and how does it relate to the central tensions facing China in the next 10 to 15 years you just alluded to?

If I had editorial control over the headline, I would have likely titled it: what’s driving Xi’s sense of urgency? For me, standard explanations for the Xi administration’s behavior over the past several years had fallen short in a way that was meaningful enough to bite into. Discussions about rejuvenation, or 2049, are far too abstract to be functionally meaningful in terms of how senior officials actually plan. I imagine that the idea of “rejuvenation” is about as operative in current Chinese planning as the idea of “liberty” is in terms of how the Department of Defense or White House thinks about U.S. global strategy. There may be an ideological component to articulating a set of overall values, but it won’t have much purchase in day-to-day government planning meetings or strategy sessions. 

So, if I don’t think that’s really what’s driving them, then what is? And I became interested in this year 2035, which we saw as central to a proliferating number of planning and policy documents. That felt to me like a framework which authoritarian political systems, such as the one that Xi is leading, might be able to orient towards, because it’s really talking about the next 10 to 15 years, a timeline within which Xi Jinping will likely be alive and maybe still even in power. That was combined with seeing that when you start thinking about this next 10 years, first of all, a number of the long-standing challenges that China has been able to can-kick, mitigate or constrain through rapid economic growth — debt, demographics and declining productivity — are now going to come to bite in a way that they haven’t yet; and that the international environment is clearly undergoing an important shift that will constrain the development space that China has had. 

With, admittedly, a little bit of analytical imagination, I then began to think this makes sense, or this explains better the drive and urgency behind the Xi administration; there’s a window of important opportunities to gain an edge in areas that the United States is either immature or distracted. But this is also a critical window for finally making headway on solving some of the challenges that previous leaders felt like they had more time on. That element of time had, to me, been missing from a lot of the strategic discussion about China; it had been more about goals. But goals absent of time are just meaningless concepts. 

We’re powerless to know the answer to this question, but do you have a sense of how unconstrained Xi truly is now? What influence do other elite politicians have? How synonymous are China’s broad strategic goals with the wishes of Xi Jinping?

The flippant answer is, of course, we don’t know and China’s a black box. But I find that too nihilistic. Of course, we don’t know what Xi Jinping’s breakfast routine looks like, and we can’t get inside his mind. But I do think we can make some prudent analytical judgments based on what we know about organizational theory, bureaucratic politics, and, again, with the help of some comparative examples of other dominant political figures in authoritarian systems, by understanding how they interpreted their power, where their strength lay, and where there may have been weaknesses. 

It’s clear that Xi Jinping is the dominant political actor in China’s system, who has extraordinary amounts of authority to shape politics and policy in a way that he didn’t 10 years ago, and in a way that that previous leaders — Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, and maybe even Deng Xiaoping — didn’t quite have. But Xi Jinping has the same limitations that any autocratic leader has, which is, at the end of the day, they rule through control of coalitions and leverage over bureaucracies. Xi Jinping likely feels that, unlike a democratic leader, who gets into office through a process which then gives them authority over a term without having to worry about that being taken away, an authoritarian leader is essentially running for office on a daily basis because they’re having to keep the coalition happy.

Furthermore, Xi Jinping faces the limitation — and all dictators do — of information. They don’t have all the information about how the bureaucracy is running and so rely on key individuals to keep them informed on what’s happening. And they know well that those individuals have power insofar as they control that information. 

The interworking of elite-level bargaining, negotiation, misdirection, rumor, innuendo, backstabbing, those will all continue to exist, and indeed likely get more pronounced, the more centralized and personalized the dictatorship becomes.

Xi Jinping is extraordinarily powerful, but he’s not all-powerful, because he faces the same information deficit that any dictator faces, and that leaves them, to some extent vulnerable, because that information is critical to the effective running of a bureaucracy; hence the need for other stakeholders in your administration under your power. Xi Jinping, I don’t think will ever, in a structural way, overcome that limitation and thus will always feel some degree of vulnerability. That lens is how I interpret some amount of politics as it exists within even a dictatorship; the interworking of elite-level bargaining, negotiation, misdirection, rumor, innuendo, backstabbing, those will all continue to exist, and indeed will likely get more pronounced, the more centralized and personalized the dictatorship becomes.

Going back to 2012-2013, do you have any sense of how this process of centralization was achieved? And from that, just how sui generis is what we have now? Who are those key stakeholders within elite politics now and are they different from the pre-Xi era?

The two dominant explanations for how Xi became so powerful, so quickly are mandate and mendacity. Mandate is the argument that if you look at where the party was by 2012, you had an almost untenable number of problems within the bureaucratic system and organizational structure. And then, throughout Chinese society, there was growing distrust [of the CCP], the role of technological tools like Weibo to foment and transmit dissent and dissatisfaction, corruption within the party, Bo Xilai, the Arab Spring, color revolutions, you name it. Xi Jinping was handed a mandate by senior leaders and retired leaders to essentially rectify the system. That gave breathing room for Xi to move in a way that Hu Jintao did not have when he could feel the breath of Jiang Zemin on the back of his neck. 

The other argument is mendacity, namely, Xi Jinping leveraged that sense of crisis within the system, and moved to weaponize institutions like the CCDI [Central Commission for Discipline Inspection] to essentially asymmetrically grab power and move an agenda in a way that no-one was predicting. A combination of the two makes sense to me, insofar as he clearly had the mandate which he then pushed farther than the status quo expected. And once he had essentially figured out some of the effective tools, then began the centralization that we see today. 

The reason I think the mandate explanation is insufficient is if it had been known how far Xi Jinping was going to push, then, of course, individuals like Xu Caihou and Zhou Yongkang, would never have accepted the mandate and would have raised holy hell at the beginning. You had a whole senior and sub-elite tier of the party who had their iron rice bowls smashed by Xi. And as far as we can tell, they didn’t have much by way of warning that they were targets, because if they had, you can imagine that the pushback would have been more visible and fierce than it was. 

So, it’s some combination of, never let a crisis go to waste, combined with Xi being a much more effective bureaucratic actor and far more Machiavellian once ensconced in power. This, then also transcending the mandate by a fair degree makes more sense to me as an explainer than either one of the extremes of, “Oh, it was mandate” or “Oh, it was mendacity.” Both of those have shortcomings. 

And what about now? Do we have any sense of what motivates Xi Jinping now? Is it still a sense of historical mission? Personal ambition? Or is centralization Xi acting out of anxiety about his own position?

You’ve got ambition, prestige, and anxiety as maybe the three main flavors of leadership. Prestige is about your sense of historical legacy; ambition is about your own success relative to your peers; and anxiety is the sense that you have to cling to power for fear of overthrow. Of the three, anxiety is the least persuasive to me, because it could really only explain Xi Jinping today. Because, of course, Xi Jinping moved up the leadership ladder, assumed power and pushed forward, right out of the gate in 2012-2013, clearly not out of a sense of anxiety. 

If you think about the historic leaders of political systems, it’s almost always a mixture of legacy and ambition. Whether we’re talking about Stalin, Napoleon or Thomas Jefferson, you have to have a perverted sense of your own self-worth to want to be a leader of a country to begin with. And it is quite natural to be subsumed with a sense of an inevitable greatness about your tenure and a desire to be the next Qin Shihuang [first emperor of the Qin dynasty] who has etched a new chapter in your nation’s history. So, that’s a quite natural selection bias. Anyone who went through the struggle and sacrifice to become the leader of a nation is obviously motivated by something that you and I don’t have; you have to be on another level to want to lead a country. 

It’s undoubtedly a sense of ambition and prestige which motivates Xi Jinping. And you don’t have to reach too deep into the orientalist toolkit to see his desire to have his face on China’s Mount Rushmore, alongside Deng and Mao. But it’s not just that. As Lord Acton said, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It is about the trappings of power; it’s about the base human desire to dominate, which sits very uneasily against the desire to cooperate. That’s always a struggle and power always brings out one over the other. 

This is why we usually try to ensconce power within internal and external limitations, because once you gain unchallenged political power, it usually brings out the worst in people. And so, this is why we should have a great deal of concern about where Xi Jinping is taking the country and how he, as a leader, will operate as he becomes increasingly unconstrained, leading a country which has extraordinary military, diplomatic and economic capabilities.

What are the long-term ramifications of this coalescing of power around Xi? What happens after Xi?

You can think about the change that China underwent after the death of Mao, which I think surprised almost everyone in how quickly — within a matter of four years or so — it moved towards official normalization of relations with the U.S., and the beginning of this extraordinary campaign of economic reform. So that’s always possible. But I think it depends on the circumstances in which whoever inherits the mantle from Xi assumes that power. On the one hand, you can imagine a leader now assuming power that no previous Chinese leaders had, because Xi Jinping has redefined what the position of the General Secretary is in China, in a way that has returned to the level of authority that it hasn’t had since Mao.

On the other hand, Mao was a singular leader who was not commanding a very strong bureaucracy. Xi has centralized power and personalized power, but at the same time, tried to reforge the Leninist organizational integrity of the Communist Party. That combination of a supremely powerful general secretary and a now far more organized Leninist party bureaucracy is a combination I don’t think we’ve seen yet in CCP history. How does a future General Secretary wield that power? 

Clearly, the hope we’ve typically had — that the external forces of modernity will shape China’s choices in a way that makes it assume democratic market-based liberalism is the northstar — won’t prove to be the case. We also have to understand that this future leader may be taking control of China in a global environment where liberalism is not the norm and illiberalism is the status quo. In which case, China may be leading the way if our democratic domestic politics continue to malfunction and be dysfunctional. 

The hard-headed base assumption is that China is heading increasingly towards a dictatorship. And that Xi Jinping has created a model that a future leader will inhabit and emulate. Now, black swans can, of course, change that and there’s no predetermined destiny here for any country. That’s another lesson we’ve learned: contingency matters greatly over preordained historical forces shaping where a country is going. So in the same way that the death of Mao provided space for a break in China’s trajectory, so the inevitable death of Xi Jinping could open up an opportunity for China to reevaluate its policy choices and orientation. The tragic thing is we don’t want to wait for the death of Xi Jinping to see that sort of reevaluation of the direction that China is heading. But authoritarian leaders all seem to live to be 178, so we may be dealing with the Xi administration for a very long time.

If we do have this China moving closer and closer to outright dictatorship, how should that shift perceptions of opportunities and challenges for other countries’ engagement with China? Is ‘opportunities’ even the right word if China is on the road to dictatorship? What should engagement with a Chinese dictatorship look like?

That’s a hard question. It’s a great question. That is the question. When people argue that this is not a new Cold War, the key plank of evidence is, of course, because we’re so integrated with China. And I hate to say that, anyone pretending to have a playbook for this is, I think, blowing smoke, because we have a moral imperative to support the success of China. By that I mean 1.4 billion people who have an inalienable right to dignity that every other human being has; reducing the future of 1.4 billion people to great power competition with the Communist Party is an ethically compromised position. 

On the other hand, we live in a world in which nation states are the dominant international political actors. Thinking about foreign policy as tragedy is the starting position for how we negotiate this world. And thinking about foreign policy as tragedy, by the way, is helpful insofar as it steers us away from fantastical notions about the cleanness of regime change, or the ability to spread values globally, which has been how the West has for centuries thought about one of the functions of foreign policy. 

Foreign policy as tragedy means we are a planet of imperfect human beings prone to monstrous deeds as well as great demonstrations of empathy and cooperation. Trying to navigate our way through this great moral test by using the imperfect element of the nation state as the way to organize ourselves internationally, given all its limitations, how it often draws us into tribalism that clouds our moral judgment about the right of dignity of all members of the planet, I think that is the great struggle and I don’t have any good answer for that.

We should strive both to be as engaged with China as possible, while also recognizing that the political system — which does not represent the Chinese people, but nonetheless is the de facto, de jure leader of the People’s Republic of China — is heading in a very, very dark direction that is going to require this kind of dual-sided moral clarity from the U.S. and other like-minded partners. Which is to say, how do we respond to the Communist Party of China while maintaining clarity that we want China and 1.4 billion Chinese people to succeed and claim the mantle of dignity which they deserve?

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