762 { China’s Quest
apparatus of the post-6-4 CCP state seems designed to prevent that from hap-
pening. The abrupt emergence and rapid growth of anti-regime movements
in Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia, the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet
area and the Arab Spring undoubtedly play a role in fostering regime fears,
as may Confucian concepts of loss of the Mandate of Heaven and China’s
own history of not infrequent rebellion. In any case, in today’s China, as in
Wilhelmine Germany, the constant threat of direct dictatorial rule, imposed
as necessary by internal security forces and ultimately the army, stands ready
to repress opposition to the ruling elite’s control over the state.
There are similarities too in terms of the military’s role as protector of
the authoritarian state. The army of Prussia-Germany was a “state within a
state,” virtually immune from governmental direction and loyal only to the
kaiser. The German army was deeply conservative and stood not only as a
bulwark against liberal reform but as an advocate of the development and
utilization of military power in foreign affairs.^5 The PLA, for its part, houses
a political work system tightly controlled by the CCP center and designed
to ensure that “the Party controls the gun.”^6 The primary loyalty of the PLA
high command is to the party center, with state institutions typically formal-
izing and legitimizing decisions already reached by the CCP Politburo or
the Central Military Commission. And as we have seen, since the upheav-
als of 1989–1991 the PLA has been both the ultimate guardian of CCP rule
and a major source of demands for a more confrontational and forceful for-
eign policy backed up by displays of military force. On at least one occa-
sion (1995–1996), the PLA succeeded in translating its policy preferences into
national policy. This is not to say that PLA leaders favor war. Their assess-
ment of the actual military balance between the PLA and, say, Japan and
the United States is probably quite sober and realistic, leading to a desire to
avoid actual conflict. But there are many ways to use military force below the
threshold of outright belligerency.
Still another eerie similarity between Wilhelmine Germany and the PRC
is a strong sense of historically rooted national victimization. China’s narra-
tive of “the Century of National Humiliation” has been dealt with elsewhere
in this book. Regarding Germany, Wilhelm II’s “Weltpolitik” fed upon and
encouraged a belief in Germany’s victimization, a strong sense that Germany
had not been treated fairly by the great powers. The small German states had
been the main battleground for the religious wars of the seventeenth century
known as the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). Powerful armies of the major
European states—Spain, Sweden, Austria, France, and Britain—marched
back and forth across Germany. Foraging by armies, looting, disease, fam-
ine, rape, and war depopulated whole regions, reducing the population of
the German states by perhaps as much as half. French diplomacy fueled
resistance by the feuding German states with the objective of using German
resistance to grind down the strength of France’s major European rivals. In