23just like that,” he said in a 2012 speech.
“Proportionally, the Soviet Communist
Party had more members than we do,
but nobody was man enough to stand up
and resist.” China had studied the
collapse o the Soviet Union intensely in
its immediate aftermath. Nearly a
quarter o a century later, Xi was wor-
ried enough about the state o the party
to make everyone from senior leaders to
rank-and-le ocials go back to class
and learn the lessons o the Soviet
collapse again. “To dismiss the history
o the Soviet Union and the Soviet
Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and
Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is
to engage in historic nihilism,” he said in
another 2012 speech. “It confuses our
thoughts and undermines the party’s
organizations on all levels.”
Leadership rivals and ideological rot
spurred Xi into a frenzy o action.
During his rst 200 days in oce, he
covered an extraordinary breadth o
policy areas and implemented changes at
an astonishing pace. Within weeks, he
had attached a brand—“the Chinese
dream”—to his administration, established
strict new rules governing the behavior
o ocials, and laid down markers on
what ideas could and couldn’t be discussed,
cracking down on a liberal newspaper in
southern China over its promotion o
“constitutionalism,” a dirty word in a
single-party state. He also started locking
up the party’s critics. Activist lawyers
who had carved out a small space to
protect citizens’ rights were rounded up,
one by one, by state security. Ocials
questioned or detained about 250 o
them in a methodical campaign. The
accused languished in jail without trials,
sometimes for years. The last o the
prominent human rights lawyers, WangChina ́s entry into the World Trade Organization
in 2001 was heralded as historic, and for good
reason: the world ́s most populous nation was
joining the rules-based system that has governed
international commerce since World War II. But
the full ramifications of that event are only now
becoming apparent, as the Chinese economic
juggernaut has evolved in unanticipated and
profoundly troublesome ways.TWO TITANS
CLASH OVER TRADE.
COMING 10 SEP 2019CIGI Press books are distributed byand can be found in better bookstores and through online book retailers. McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup.ca)FA 23_edit_ad.indd 1 7/19/19 11:31 AM