780 { China’s Quest
globalization, the powerful global leading role of US higher education—these
and scores of other technologies spread ideas rapidly from one country to
another almost like a highly contagious disease. Sometimes the ideas car-
ried by these technologies are illiberal. Jihadist Islamism today and fascism
and Marxism-Leninism in the past, for example. But it is liberal movements
and revolutions that are shaking and remaking the world. Regimes topple, or
nearly so, right and left. Civil war becomes a real danger, and civil wars some-
times invite foreign intervention.
The CCP Politburo sees the United States as the source of the ideological
onslaught confronting it. While somewhat distorted, this perception is not
entirely unjustified. The immensely powerful and dynamic American repub-
lic does propagate and radiate liberal democratic ideas in scores of powerful
ways. There is also little question that stable liberal democratic countries are
convinced of the superiority of their ways and that some of those democra-
cies (France, Britain, and the United States) sometimes feel compelled to re-
buke the PRC for its failure to live up to modern, global, liberal standards.
And among the liberal democratic countries, the United States feels a special
mission, its historic or even God-imposed duty , to vindicate liberal values
to the whole world. However one feels about this excentric American sense
of mission, one must recognize its powerful influence on the US role in the
world. The United States is, or so it seems to this author, a liberal missionary
country, although it must constantly balance those ideological impulses with
the realities of power.
Since 1989, a diaspora of Chinese intellectuals and activists dedicated to
basic reform of the CCP regime has developed in Europe and North America.
This diaspora is tiny in number and has very limited contact with people
in China. Yet in earlier eras, tiny groups of foreign-based political activists
exercised significant influence on China’s political evolution. In the run-up to
the 1911 revolution, for example, small groups of revolutionary activists in the
United States, Europe, and Japan with only tenuous links to communities in
China played an important role in toppling the Qing dynasty.^31 In the 1930s,
anti-Japanese patriotism among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia boosted
communist growth in China. Today, more and more Chinese trained in the
West return to China, inculcated (perhaps) with a democratic ethos that con-
flicts with the communist creed. These people occupy more and more posi-
tions of influence, and may even enter the party. But their ideological loyalty
to the party, or at least its formal Marxist-Leninist creed, is questionable. As
for China’s entrepreneurs, professionals, middle class, and youth, while it is
true that they do not now call for basic political change, that may be contin-
gent on continuing rapid growth or other contingent factors. Attitudes can
shift rapidly, as they did in China between 1989 and 1993.
The CCP is in a profound quandary. It cannot disengage from the global
economic and technological processes that generate development but also