Long Debate over the US Challenge } 635
CCP leaders continued to fear that mass opinion might quickly shift against
them as it had in spring 1989, or against authoritarian dictatorships in a score
of other countries around the world in the decades after 6-4. The era of the
information revolution is not comfortable for regimes based on control of
information.
Some Chinese leaders went further and asserted that the United States
was prepared to use military force against China (as with the US bombing of
China’s Yugoslav embassy, discussed below), perhaps to precipitate a popular
uprising against the CCP government. Washington might be tempted to use
military force in support of a popular antigovernment movement in China,
perhaps in Tibet. The United States had done something along those lines in
Yugoslavia and Iraq, or at least it seemed in some elite quarters in Beijing. The
policy conclusion of deliberations along these lines was that China needed to
remain militarily strong to deter the United States from adventurism against
China. The United States also needed to be kept at arm’s length to thwart its
subversive efforts, and US policies needed to be “exposed” by China’s media
to inoculate China’s citizens against attraction to notions of liberty and
democrac y.
These fears for regime survival were exemplified by a ninety-minute pro-
gram on the vast US conspiracy to undermine and ultimately topple China’s
CCP government, just as “the West led by the United States” had putatively
done with the USSR. The program, apparently not intended for public use
but leaked and posted on the internet in fall 2013, was produced by China’s
National Defense University and the Institute of American Studies of the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Intended for use in political education
of PLA officers and high-level CCP cadres, the program depicted a sweeping
US strategy modeled after one putatively employed with success against the
USSR and designed to weaken China, abort its rise, and thus eliminate a
roadblock to Western/US global dominance.^1
Ambivalent Chinese interests toward the United States also arose out of
the dynamics of the rise and decline of great powers. With the end of the
PRC-US coalition against the Soviet Union and the sudden disappearance
of the USSR itself, Chinese scholars studied the ways in which new global
powers emerged and become the dominant power, or declined and were
superseded by rising powers. More often than not, Chinese analysts found,
the rise of a new global power resulted in war between that new power and
the reigning incumbent dominant power. This happened, for example, with
Germany, Japan, and the USSR. Rising powers that kept on friendly terms
with the incumbent paramount power were, however, sometimes able to
accomplish a peaceful transition to preeminence; for example, the United
States with the British Empire or, several centuries earlier, Britain with the
Netherlands. War between China and the United States could be immensely
costly to China’s economic development effort. It was also very risky; China