Fateful Embrace of Communism } 13
Three Stages of Domestic-Foreign Linkage
The link between the structures of China’s Leninist state, the PRC, and that
state’s foreign relations differs across three periods. In each of these periods,
certain patterns of cooperation with some foreign states and hostility toward
other foreign states emerged. The three acts, if we can call them that because
of the high drama of each period, are:
Act I: Mao Zedong era, 1949–1978. This act entailed the transfer of a large
and comprehensive package of Soviet economic and political institutions to
China and the launching of a totalitarian attempt to transform China via an
attempt at total control into a totally new type of society—a utopian commu-
nist society—within a short period of time.
Act II: The happy interregnum, 1979–1989: This period saw the quick aban-
donment of Mao’s totalitarian project and the creation of a wide space for
individual freedom. China entered the era of what post-Stalin Eastern Europe
called post-totalitarian communism. Soviet-derived economic institutions
were incrementally discarded, and China began drawing on the inputs of
the advanced capitalist countries via market-based transactions. The key
domestic driver of China’s foreign relations during this period was securing
broad and deep access to inputs from the advanced capitalist countries to
achieve rapid improvements on China’s standard of living, thus regarnering
popular support for continued CCP rule. The possibility of liberalization of
the political system opened during this period because of a plurality of views
within the CCP leadership combined with Deng’s strategy of balancing be-
tween reformer and conservative factions. Liberal ideals exercised a strong
attraction on China’s youth and intellectuals, eventually confronting the re-
gime with a stark threat to its survival in spring 1989.
Act III: The CCP Leninist state besieged, 1990–2015. In this act, the PRC
became deeply integrated into the global economy and transformed that in-
tegration into rapid improvements in standards of living. Yet the world was
swept by democratic movements, the collapse of world communism, and the
appeal of liberal ideas carried by unprecedentedly powerful information and
transportation technologies. The world was also dominated by a coalition
of liberal democratic nations, with immense confidence in the wisdom and
universal validity of their values and possessing historically unprecedented
global power. Liberal democratic powers also showed new willingness to un-
dertake armed intervention in ex-communist countries like Yugoslavia and
Cambodia, or regional challenges like Iraq. These interventions revealed the
vast military superiority of US military forces—along with the continuing
backwardness of China’s military. The geopolitical ballast to the PRC-US rela-
tion previously provided by joint opposition to the Soviet Union was gone, and
Washington was free to press ideological concerns having to do with China’s
internal governance. Perhaps most dangerously, the Marxist-Leninist ideals