Fateful Embrace of Communism } 5
internal arrangements, specifically absence of modern civil society and rule
of law. Yet recognition of that reality would call into question the Chinese
self-image of greatness. It was cognitively easier for Chinese to attribute for-
eigners’ lack of esteem for China to anti-China hostility.
The crux of Chinese nationalism, Pye suggested, was a drive to restore
China to its long-lost but well-deserved and rightful position of eminence
in the world. Three legitimacy narratives corresponding to the three acts of
Chinese foreign policy (described below) propose how this is to be done—and
why, therefore, Chinese should be loyal to the PRC. During the Mao era, the
narrative regarding the path to restored greatness centered around construc-
tion of a Soviet-socialist style political-social-economic system and “correct”
leadership of the world revolutionary camp. During the 1978–1989 inter-
regnum, the narrative focused on rapid economic development, which would
deliver quick improvements in living standards followed by Chinese national
power equivalent to the advanced capitalist countries by the mid-twenty-first
century. During the post-1989 period, the legitimacy narrative of the second
period continued but was supplemented by a struggle against putative hostile
forces who were striving to return China to its pre-1949 condition of weak-
ness, thus depriving it of its rightful place in the sun.
Creation and Maintenance of a Revolutionary State
The revolutionary upheaval of 1945–1949 shattered the institutions of the old
state and formed new ruling institutions dominated by the CCP and in the
form of the PRC. But China’s revolutionary upheaval did not end in 1949. As
long as Mao lived (he died in September 1976), the PRC remained in many
ways a revolutionary state, wielding its power to transform Chinese society,
and even the world, to accord with the utopian vision that had partially in-
spired the revolutionary upheaval. This awesome task of forging a social-
ist society had a deep impact on PRC foreign relations during the Mao era,
moving first into confrontation with the United States and then with the
Soviet Union. Eventually, as with all revolutions, the utopian élan faded and
lost popular appeal. But maintaining the structures of the state created by the
revolution, the PRC, remained a paramount objective. The PRC’s struggle for
survival in China’s post-1978, post-revolutionary era was deeply shaped by the
Leninist characteristics tracing to that state’s gestation and birth, and by the
waning of the Leninist model around the globe.
The creation of the PRC in the mid-twentieth century commingled
two powerful but discrete forces: Chinese nationalism and the quest for a
post-capitalist communist utopia. Chinese nationalism emerged late in the
nineteenth century, when Chinese thinkers began reflecting on the deepen-
ing powerlessness of China and its growing domination by foreign states.