Quest for Modernity and the Tides of History } 781
carry liberal ideas. To withdraw would be to once again shut China off from
the world, as happened to disastrous effect during the late Ming and Qing
dynasties and the Mao era. China’s leaders recognize that its isolation during
those periods was a great blunder, constituting a major reason why China fell
behind the West. China’s leaders understand that self-isolation is the road
to national decline, not national revival. And yet global engagement opens
China to the contagion of liberal ideas.
The CCP’s key defense against this ideological infection has been indoctri-
nation that anathematizes liberal ideals as “Western,” foreign to China’s tra-
dition, and putatively peddled by “the West,” especially the United States, as
part of an aggressive campaign to humiliate and belittle China. In this fashion,
responsibility for foreign disesteem for China’s political setup is translated
from China’s own illiberal domestic arrangements onto foreign powers. The
anger of Chinese people is directed outward. To recognize China’s own illib-
eral political institutions as the root of many of its international status prob-
lems is cognitively difficult, because it calls into question the core belief in the
superiority of China’s tradition.
Combining all these factors yields a specter that seems to haunt the re-
gime and perhaps especially the paramount leader: some “hot transgression”
against China’s honor or interests by Japan or the United States occurs, to
which the government response is seen as inadequately firm, leading to redi-
rection of mobilized and perhaps widespread nationalist outrage away from
the foreign transgressor toward China’s “weak” government. The demonstra-
tions spread from city to city and region to region. Demands on the gov-
ernment shift from the original foreign issues to domestic demands. Once
millions of angry and agitated people are in the streets, former indifference
toward democracy evaporates. Some people in the crowd, protected perhaps
by a sense of anonymity, raise political demands. Others echo those demands.
Demands then escalate and displace the original parochial grievances in im-
portance. Revolutions are almost by definition periods when values and per-
spectives change with great rapidity. In such a situation, would employment
of police force be successful? Or would it backfire? In either case, what will
PLA leaders say and do? Would the PLA remain loyal to the regime? This
creates strong incentives not to trigger such a potentially disastrous chain of
events by being perceived as weak in dealing with foreign powers, especially
Japan and the United States.
Awareness of the possibly catastrophic consequences of defeat in war is
a major restraint on CCP foreign policy moves. While the authoritarian
CCP regime must pose as a forceful defender of China’s honor and inter-
ests, overly assertive moves that involved China in a military conflict that it
might lose could be a disaster for the CCP, possibly precipitating the sort of
snowballing nationalist protests described in the previous paragraph. There
are many cases of lost wars delegitimizing a regime: France in 1791, China