The world is currently reeling from US President Donald Trump’s desire to “Make America Great Again.” The MAGA movement and Trump’s second turn at the American presidency is a populist response to years of rising income inequality and social upheaval in the US. Long before Trump came up with MAGA, however, Communist Party of China (CPC) General Secretary Xi Jinping had come up with his call for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
While imagined hurts are useful for governing elites in both countries in directing their respective population, what separates the two is that China has not lost sight of scientific rationalism in its development agenda or of either realism or reality in its internal and external politics. For these reasons, the CPC’s calls for national rejuvenation are weightier and more consequential than MAGA.
The Chinese Model
Xi is not the first Chinese or CPC leader to give the call to ‘Make China Great Again,’ – national rejuvenation has been a political theme since at least Sun Yat-sen.
While it is difficult to discern public opinion in China, its communist leaders have been talking of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation for decades. For long, the idea was ingrained in the Chinese people by the negative example of the ‘century of humiliation’ – a period in history from the Opium Wars in the 1840s to the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when Mao Zedong had explicitly declared that “the Chinese people have stood up”.
Some decades later, however, as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” covered for the decline of equality and of opportunities, and ‘red capitalists’ and corruption rose in an ostensibly communist state, Chinese leaders decided that they needed external targets for the disaffection and ire of ordinary Chinese people and the idea of the “century of humiliation” made a comeback. It particularly targeted Japan for its atrocities in China during World War II, conveniently ignoring the period until the late 1990s when this was not an issue and Japanese investment and technology were much sought after. Also targeted was the West, as Chinese economic and geopolitical interests came into increasing conflict with the West and fundamental differences could no longer be hidden.
Under Xi, the concept of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, however, aims to convey also a sense of progress in achieving China’s goals. It is not surprising that he should aim to shift the narrative from a focus on only the negative to one that is more positive, highlighting what has been achieved. The CPC celebrated its centenary in 2021, and it would have been strange if after a century of striving there were no achievements to talk about and only criticism still about the colonialism and imperialism of the past.
America appears to be at war with itself with the government seeing enemies in those who disagree with it – a characteristic of authoritarian states – and threatened by knowledge and expertise – a characteristic of backward states. China’s Party-state, by contrast, while losing none of its drive to bend its people to its will, is also ready to look its problems squarely in the eye and to do what it takes to both resolve them and maintain its hold on power. It is now the authoritarian Asian state that is best using Enlightenment’s gifts of science and reason to craft necessary public policy
But—and make no mistake—there is also much that is left undone in the foreign policy domain in China’s quest for rejuvenation – the integration of Taiwan, for example. Thus, while the label has changed the sheet music has not. The concept of national rejuvenation in China is still seen in zero-sum terms as necessarily coming at the expense of other powers in the world, whether or not they acknowledge this reality.
