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As explained by Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, “The Communist Party of China —CCP— demands from Chinese with foreign citizenship absolute loyalty to the motherland represented by the CCP” because in its doctrine “there is no escape from this ethnic identification based on being descendants of the Yellow Emperor.” Beijing is an ideologically socialist totalitarianism of semi-capitalist management that increasingly clearly identifies race with the concept of nation, while appealing to a supremacist historical myth. Where have we seen such a thing before? Well, in National Socialist Germany: a totalitarian racist supremacism that includes the genocide of minorities is already too overt in Xi’s ideology.
Xi Jinping’s thinking, as an official part of the ideology of Chinese totalitarianism, amalgamates Maoism reinterpreted with authoritarian Confucianism in the imperial myth of the Mandate of Heaven. Tianxia, “Everything under Heaven,” is a Chinese myth to which Xi again appeals. It means that Beijing sees itself as the only truly legitimate government in the world. And it sees all other nations as a tributary and culturally and racially inferior. Xi asserted last month that promoting the great unity of the Chinese people is a historic responsibility of the new era and “to do the job well, we must unite all Chinese, including those living under different social systems.” He uses the euphemism “different social systems” to refer to “other countries” without calling them nations.
What Xi demands of the Chinese of the world is to support Beijing over and against the nations of which they are citizens, regardless of their citizenship, whether they were born inside or outside China, or whether their ethnic Chinese families have generations outside China. Mao already tried to use ethnic Chinese populations outside China, but Xi has more to offer. China is no longer an underdeveloped nation of famine, but a rising power through semi-capitalist “private” management, massive technology theft, and protectionist manipulation of international trade rules.
Xi dreams of making all Chinese worldwide a “patriotically” unified force obedient to Beijing’s totalitarianism. In 2013, diplomat Yang Jiechi was explaining to a group of children at a Beijing-sponsored “tourist” “root-tracing” event in Guangdong that “we all share the same ancestors, history, and culture, we are all sons and daughters of the Chinese nation and descendants of the dragon,” alluding to the popular 1980s song Descendants of the Dragon (a racial call for Chinese unity says “with brown eyes, black hair, and yellow skin, we are forever descendants of the dragon”).
Ethnic Chinese outside China are, for the most part, proud patriots loyal to their nations. Xi will not get all of them to betray them to serve Chinese totalitarianism. But he will leverage reverse racism woke as an ally against efforts to combat their recruitment of agents among overseas Chinese communities. In February, the Justice Department put a stop to the Trump administration’s “China Initiative,” which Democrats called “racist.” But “race” is what Xi appeals to in demanding loyalty to Beijing from “all Chinese” around the world. And PRC flags in Chinese neighborhoods in the United States revealed to Chinese-Americans that there are already Beijing’s useful fools in their communities. Or worse.
In 2019, the People’s Daily, the CCP’s mouthpiece newspaper, declared a “people’s war” against the United States in the face of the tariff dispute. And now that Xi Jinping adds to totalitarianism, economically semi-capitalist and officially “Maoist,” his new racist supremacism based on historical myths and his claims on overseas Chinese threaten both other nations and the security of Chinese communities around the world. That is why Gordon G. Chang, author of the book The Coming Collapse of China, has called on the Chinese community in the United States to “not tolerate displays promoting Chinese communism in our country (…) the People’s Republic of China is attacking it and hoping to use us to take it down.”
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros