What Does the West Really Know About Xi’s China?

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium What Does the West Really Know About Xi's China?    Figuring out how policy decisions are made in authoritarian regimes has always been hard.  Winston Churchill famously referred to Soviet policymaking as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—and he was not much wrong. Observers in the West could see the policy output of the Soviet Union, be it under Joseph Stalin or Leonid Brezhnev, by what those leaders said publicly and how they acted. But it was not easy to figure out what was going on inside their regimes, because access to information was so limited and fear prevented insiders from communicating even what they thought outsiders ought to know. In spite of occasional intelligence breakthroughs, U.S. policymaking was severely handicapped by a lack of understanding of how policy was made on the other side. A similar situation is now taking shape with regard to China. Insights into decision-making in Beijing are harder to get than they have been for 50 years. The main reason for this is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is more authoritarian and less open than it has been at any point since Mao Zedong was in charge. People close to power are more fearful, and access to information is less widespread, even within the higher echelons of the regime. Outside observers therefore know much less than they did in decades past about how the party’s leaders arrive at their conclusions with regard to foreign policy. People in China are not yet experiencing the degree of fear and secrecy that they did under Mao, but they are getting there. The big issue for foreign policy analysts is to figure out what they can know with some certainty about Chinese decision-making and what they cannot. And in establishing this knowledge, they need to watch out for common analytic errors, including forms of “past dependency” and mirror imaging. The former relates to the belief that patterns of the past will somehow be repeated in the present. The latter assumes that all governments and all politics tend to function in the same way, although within different settings. Some U.S. presidents have assumed that Chinese leaders’ view of the world will change very little and that they therefore will make decisions consistent with those of the past. Other U.S. leaders have tried to deal with their Chinese counterparts as if they were senators from the opposing political party or reluctant business partners. Such approaches have generally ended very badly. Continued here

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