FasXism Paves the Way for China’s Totalitarian Decline and Fall

Human nature will cause its demise just as it did for all its totalitarian predecessors

Note to readers: I’m taking another break from the serial this week with some thoughts on the inevitable demise of China’s current socio-political system. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

As widely anticipated, the Chinese Supreme Leader, Xi Jinping, became even more supreme at the recently concluded CCP congress. The few in leadership positions who had voiced disagreement with his plans “retired” and were replaced by loyalists. As a result, China’s descent into totalitarianism is all but guaranteed for the foreseeable future.

Xi’s totalitarian recipe is a 21st century version of Mao’s stale old communist ideas with a strong dose of nationalism thrown into the mix, and spiced up with a combo of a government-run, and a privately run but government-controlled, “marketplace.” This will supposedly make the stew appetizing for the Chinese masses by continuously raising the standard of living. Like all totalitarian regimes, Xi’s is driven by fear: fear of disorder, instability, and uprisings and demonstrations for ethnic, religious, and anti-totalitarian reasons. Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and countless other minorities with potential aspirations for independence induce fear of ethnic strife. Tibetan Buddhism, Islam in Xinjiang, and Falun Gong and Christianity all over the place, are religious competition to the faith in the Chinese state. And Hongkongers’ demand for freedom is a threat to the legitimacy of the Beijing ruling class. Hence the obsession with censorship and thought control, surveillance, social credit scores, and ethnic “assimilation” to prevent and stamp out dissent. Xi has concluded that the Tianmen Square uprising, Uighur Moslem terror attacks, corruption scandals, mortgage strikes, movement for better working conditions, and the Hong Kong freedom demonstrations must be met with oppression in the name of maintaining order and stability. What appears to be the most extreme measure to date is the zero-Covid policy and the associated lockdowns which have paralyzed parts of the country for months at a time.

We have a term for this type of totalitarian society: fascism. As I write in “Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right: A 21st Century Citizen Guide”:

“Fascism in its most common form demands the sacrifice of the individual to the nation, its collective of choice. The nation, according to fascists, has rights above and beyond the individual rights of the inhabitants of the country in question.

“Fascists allow citizens to retain the responsibilities of owning property but regulate it so heavily for the “public good” that ownership amounts to little. If you’re not in control of what you own, your individual rights become meaningless.”

China fits the bill. The individual rights of Chinese men, women, and children are violated in the name of the nation’s “public good” as defined by Xi Jinping and his cronies. Despite retaining the CCP label, China is no longer communist as private property is allowed. But as the private property is at the complete mercy of current and who knows what future government regulations, the value of ownership is marginal. Xi’s is a communist Potemkin village obscuring its fascist underpinnings; let’s call his particular flavor FasXism (pun intended).

There’s obviously nothing funny with FasXism; it is creating increasingly severe hardships for the Chinese people. But it will eventually fail as surely as totalitarianism failed for Xi Jinping’s 20th century predecessors Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. And it will fail as inevitably as totalitarianism will fail for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamene’i, Cuba’s post-Castro regime, and Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro. FasXism, like its totalitarian siblings, will meet its demise because of its ultimate, unalterable enemy: human nature.

Reason, or the capacity to think, is the defining characteristic of human nature that constitutes our primary tool of survival. As a human, you’re not wired to feed on nutrients in the ground and sunlight like plants. Nor are you, like an animal, equipped with an instinct that guides your survival. No, you’re wired to think, and to act on your thinking to survive. And, critically, you must be able to keep the fruits of your labor, of your thinking, to thrive.

Another aspect of human nature is that pesky free will which now and then throws a wrench in the machinery. You can force yourselves not to think (or at least not to think in a focused way), and not to act. You’ve probably had a bad day when, rather than going to work, dozing off in bed for no particular reason seems an attractive option. If pursued consistently, this obviously creates a survival problem: no thinking, no action, no labor, no fruits. At the dawn of time, someone who didn’t want to get out of bed had an idea: instead of laboring himself, he (yes, back then, it was a he) forced others to labor for him and provide him with the fruits of their labor. To justify his actions, he initially offered some kind of protection. As civilization painstakingly progressed, his descendants-in-kind eventually came to rationalize their actions claiming it was for the greater good of the group. And just like that collectivism was born—the idea that your life and work belong to somebody else. The collective may sacrifice you and the fruits of your labor in any way it pleases to whatever it deems the good of the group in question, be it the nation, race, faith, class, gender, tribe, caste, gang, family, majority, minority, or some other permutation.

But human nature has a way of quietly asserting itself in the long run. If you can’t keep the fruits of your labor, your incentive to think and to act is reduced. You can be forced to labor, but since you can’t be forced to think, the value of your labor is limited. Hence, as society’s producers gradually stop thinking and laboring, collectivist societies first stagnate, then decline, then fall. For all intent and purposes, it’s a law of nature.

Xi Jinping and the CCP are among today’s direct descendants of that first collectivist who didn’t want to get out of bed. And just like history’s collectivists, Xi presides over a country that will stagnate and decline and eventually fall under its own weight as the FasXist oppression escalates. We are already seeing the signs: slowing economic growth, brain drain (the most talented and productive fleeing the country), massive misallocation of capital caused by central planning, and continued protest like that of “Bridge Man,” despite the tightening controls.

No doubt, much pain may be inflicted on the path to the inevitable fall. During the 20th century an estimated 262 million people were slaughtered, or starved to death, or died from preventable diseases, due to the atrocities of totalitarian regimes, and countless more suffered greatly. Xi has surely added to this total during his FasXist reign. And with his Belt-and-Road initiative and Taiwan “reunification” talk, Xi has advertised his international ambitions. As other countries push back, chances are he will appeal to nationalist sentiments at home to divert attention away from his domestic problems onto “enemies” abroad. Vladimir Putin’s struggles in Ukraine may give him pause, but absent strong deterrence, military conflict is not out of the question.

We can only hope that emerging from the eventual Chinese decline and fall will be a realization that human nature is best served by a capitalist social system that protects our individual rights to think, act, and reap the fruits of our labor, not only in China, but in every country, including our own.