Fascism With Chinese Characteristics- Part 2 Update

As Mussolini’s Italy served as the model for 20th century Fascism, Xi’s China has fashioned itself as the model of 21st century Fascism.

In 1991, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was rocked to its core and settled on a trajectory that is still causing reverberations around the world over forty years later. The cataclysmic event did not come from within China. In fact,  its reverberations materially benefited China significantly, but, in closed party circles, it was viewed as the herald of something existential. This was the collapse of the Soviet Union, a government the CCP considered its “principal contradiction” for decades ^[1]. This raises a significant question: why would the CCP treat the collapse of a rival nation as a near-death experience? The dissolution of the Soviet state was perceived by the party elite as a harbinger of what was to come for China if they did not act quickly. The party promptly embarked on what may be the longest political autopsy in history. From 1993 to 2004, the Party dissected and studied the Soviet dissolution, an endeavor that culminated in the Party charting a course that metamorphosed China into the 21st century’s archetype of a Fascist state. 

The Change in Course

The 1993 to 2004 period was a task of immense strategic significance as the party sought to understand what caused the Soviet Union to collapse and how the CCP could avoid a similar fate. This was an effort that brought the bulk of the Chinese institutions to bear and resulted in the development of two major schools of thought: the Ideological Betrayal and the Structural Realists. The Structural Realists paid attention to fundamental issues with the Soviet system; their root cause analysis focused on issues like overcentralization, failure of economic institutional reform, and the brittleness of the centralized decision-making apparatus within the USSR^[2]. This school of thought identified many problems, all of which could only be solved by the diffusion of state power. This reality and the scope of their prescriptions shifted influence to the other major school of thought, the Ideological Betrayal, whose analysis determined that the Soviet collapse was not due to any structural deficiencies of single party authoritarianism, but from its leaders' betrayal of ideological purity which corrupted the system from within.

The Ideological Betrayal stipulated that each Soviet leader since Khrushchev had progressively bled their administrations of their core Marxist-Lenninist principles, eventually leading to rot at the very foundations of the system. Li Shenming described the relationship between ideological purity and success as follows: 

“The painful lessons of the Soviet Union show that firm ideals and beliefs are of great significance to a Marxist party and to a socialist state. In a certain sense, whether the ideals and beliefs are firm or not is directly related to the life and death of the party and the state, and we must consistently uphold and strengthen the party’s ideals and beliefs education. Ideals and beliefs are the political soul and spiritual pillar of Communists, and the ideological guarantee for overcoming all difficulties and securing all achievements” ^[3].

According to this school of thought, Soviet leadership failed even to safeguard its own mythology. The idea of "Historical Nihilism” emerged to describe the practice of current leadership repudiating past leadership and narratives. Allowing the media and the public to question party narratives— starting with Khrushchev and exacerbated by Gorbachev —was a fatal error of leadership in the Ideological Betrayal's analysis ^[4]. In more recent times, this fear of "Historical Nihilism" has manifested itself with actions like the 2018 law which made “criticizing revolutionary heroes and martyrs illegal” in China ^[5]. The final Soviet betrayal in this analysis culminated in the leadership losing touch with the people through their corruption. This is also viewed as a post-Stalin problem and stipulates that the party “had disengaged from the people and indulged in formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism, and extravagance, which corrupted party conduct, the political climate, and social morality, and ultimately led the party to be abandoned by its people” ^[6]. Also key to the Ideological Betrayal school of thought is that of a western “Fifth Column” that through cultural exchanges, economic activities, and personnel exchanges subversive ideas and culture were planted and sustained up to the highest levels of government. This idea is so pervasive it is a common belief in academic circles that Gorbachev was a product of United States “Fifth Column” operations ^[3]. The prescription precipitating from this school of thought is that the system was not the problem, it must be preserved and ideological purity must be enforced at all costs.

What makes the simplistic and puritanical Ideological Betrayal school of thought so intriguing is that it was not done in a vacuum. The Structural Realists were not the only alternative being explored in the 1990s; at senior party levels there was serious interest in exploring a pluralist Westernized social democracy. Trusted foreigners, such as Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, were allowed to participate in secretive studies to see if the party could survive liberalizing instead of calculating in a single-party system ^[7]. These studies were always kept small in scope and were never allowed to enter open debate. What little possibility this initiative had ended in 2004 with the Central Committee’s Decision on Strengthening the Party’s Governing Capacity. The policy document doubled down on single party rule and focused on purging corruption from the party, ideological cohesion, and building trust with the people ^[8]. The hard pivot in the early 2000s ended the more open experimentation of the 1990s and the more simplistic and less self-reflective path of the single party absolutists became the only frame through which to view China’s future. Dr. Martin Dimitrov in 2023 commented on the termination of other schools of thought with the following:  

“The end of communist rule in the Soviet Union is seen as a single case that has a single explanation. The complexity of a historical phenomenon has been reduced so that a clear message about the lessons to be drawn from it can be transmitted to domestic audiences.” ^[9].

The deliberateness of this direction cannot be overstated. The 2004 declaration marked an official "closing of doors” on the self-reflection and reform that was shuttered internally in 2001 ^[7]. It served as a reshuffling of priorities so that all actions became subordinated to the survival of the party. The decision to simplify the failures of the Soviet Union and to infantilize its corrections meant a shift from building international communism to preserving the absolute dominance of the party-state.

The Foundations of Fascism

Fascism at its simplest, stripped down to its core, is the absolute supremacy of the State. The individual only exists insomuch as they align to the interests of the state. Mussolini and Gentile’s The Doctrine of Fascism outlines that supremacy as follows:

“The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people” ^[10]. 

The State, in the Fascist worldview, is what creates the nation and imbues it with a political, moral, and spiritual unity. Xi Jinping’s rule of China embodies this essentialization of the State. Since his ascendancy in 2012, Xi seeks “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” through totalitarian control of the state, to restore the nation to its central role in world affairs it had held for “five thousand years of continuous history” ^[7]. This vision of the Chinese nation, the Zhonghua Minzu, is a state-manufactured construct to subsume all ethnic, cultural, and individual identities into a monolithic Zhonghua Minzu. 

On the front of rejuvenation Mussolini describes that the “... Fascist doctrine is that best suited to the tendencies and feelings of a people which, like the Italian, after lying fallow during centuries of foreign servitude, are now reasserting itself in the world” ^[10]. The mythos of China’s "Century of Humiliation” is used to create a need for a resurgence, or a rebirth. Roger Griffin describes this as “palingenetic ultranationalism,” the idea that the enforcement of “a homogeneous national identity within a reborn national community and integrated national culture, wipe away decadence and weakness however it is conceived, and make the nation or race “strong” again by marginalizing, excluding or exterminating those forces alleged to be undermining national, ethnic, or racial strength” ^[11]. This mythos is echoed strongly in Xi’s 2012 “Road to Rejuvenation” address:

“Through 170 years of continuous struggle since the Opium Wars, the prospects for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation are great. We are now closer to realizing this great national rejuvenation than at any previous period in history. … I believe the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has now become the greatest dream of the Chinese race in modern times.” ^[12]

Under Xi, the Great Rejuvenation, the Century of Humiliation, and the sacred reunification of Taiwan is palingenetic ultranationalism, even as Marxist-Leninist vocabulary is retained as institutional scaffolding. The 2018 constitutional amendment embedding CCP leadership as the “most essential feature” of Chinese socialism completed this doctrinal migration. The Party no longer exists to build communism, it exists to achieve national rebirth.

The anomaly of self-proclaimed Marxist-Lenninists displaying Fascist attributes can be a confusing concept, but Fascist credos are ideologically schizophrenic. Each one is extremely unique and depends on its “host” nation’s existing mythologies and proclivities. In Umberto Eco’s essay Ur-Fascism he describes 20th century Italian Fascism as follows:

“Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones” ^[13]. 

He further describes it as “philosophically out of joint”. Fascism, per Eco, is not a strict orthodoxy, but exists as a “family of resemblances". The CCP merger of dialectical materialism and a Confusian hierarchy while deploying cutting edge AI surveillance networks to enforce entho-nationalist blood myths encapsulates the Fascist syncretic collage Eco describes. What Umberto Eco is most known for is his “14 traits” to describe Fascism. These traits are caveated by Eco as a list of features that are typical for things that fit the Fascist “family of ideas”. He further clarifies that these “... features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it” ^[13]. What is distinguishing about the CCP is it clearly exhibits all 14 of Eco’s fascistic features.

This high level overview of Eco’s list serves to make the point that the CCP on all fronts is presenting Fascist under Xi Jinping thought. This characterization of the nature of the CCP shows that it is operating under the same base ideological framework as other Fascist states while still maintaining its uniqueness in manifestation.

21st Century Fascism

The greatest distinction between the fascist regimes of the 20th Century and the CCP’s syncretic amalgamation is how 21st Century technology shapes the organs of the system. State corporatism, mass surveillance, and cults of personality are all transformed thoroughly by the technological landscape of the present. Mussolini had Piazza Venezia. Xi Jinping has a 700-million-camera closed-circuit network, a social-credit blacklist of 15 million citizens, and a state-television drama titled When Marx Met Confucius. At the core of the transformation of the appendages of the party-state is the digital panopticon that has defined and colored the whole regime. Historically fascist states have used large paramilitaries, secret police, ministries of culture, mass rallies, and a sprawling and redundant bureaucracy to enforce the will and essence of the state. The technological revolution has not replaced these mechanisms, they have evolved them.

This “digital panopticon” has been developed gradually though the decades but has had moments that stand out.

The general trend has been to further digitize and bureaucratize all spaces. Systems like Social Credit— while not as blatantly orwellian in character as is often the western assumption —have been used to restrict civil liberties that the panoptic bureaucracy has deemed subversive (exemplified in the 2020 report by the Supreme People’s Court that reported some 15 million “dishonest” people were blacklisted barring them from such ‘luxuries’ as air travel, high-speed trains, and holidays until they discharged their obligation to society”) ^[12]. Chen Yixin of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission illustrates the intent of the programs with surprising clarity:

“Focusing on political security, we will build an iron wall to prevent infiltration, subversion and sabotage by hostile forces outside the country, eradicate the soil that affects political security.” ^[12]

This exemplifies the iconoclastic belief established in the late 90s and early 2000s that the party-state must be protected above all else and that the threat of foreign subversion is ever present, ever an existential threat. 

The evolution of digital controls, aided by US tech companies, has not only increased the control on individuals, but also on the levers of power that operate the entire economic apparatus of the nation ^[15]. The sprawling digital grip of the CCP over enterprise has allowed the private economic landscape to be so thoroughly integrated with party cells and digital controls that the “bureaucratisation of the economic activities of the nation” have reached a corporatist model Mussolini could only dream of. While Mussolini's corporatism was analog and inefficient, Xi's is networked, datafied, and enforced through an algorithmic social credit system.

Perched atop the pinnacle of this whole evolved state apparatus is Xi Jinping. The Fascist state mandates a figurehead to embody the national identity that the state imbues on the people. In 2020, the Central Committee declared that “Comrade Xi Jinping as the core of the Central Committee of the CCP, and the pilot at the helm at the core” —the culmination of his transformation into the embodiment of the state ^[16]. He has crafted a mythos that, for as Mussolini so aptly phrased with minor alteration, “the [Chinese], after lying fallow during centuries of foreign servitude, [is] now reasserting itself in the world” ^[10]. This reassertion places Xi front and center as the great restorer to an imperial greatness long lost. Xi has made himself indispensable to China’s national identity and to the Party-State’s future.

“Under Mao Zedong, China ‘stood up.’ Under Deng Xiaoping, China ‘got rich.’ And under Xi, China will ‘become mighty again.’” ^[17]

Xi’s Imperial-Han Dynasty

Paramount to the mythos of national rejuvenation has been the establishment of the Han ethno-nationalist project. It is the source of the most perfidious of the transgressions of the Party-State and has the potential to cause the most damage to the people of China and the broader global community. This uptick in nationalistic jingoism can be seen in the uptick in language alone. From the 90s to the present the General Secretary of the CCP has seen an uptick in the usage of nationalistic terms from the early Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) of in the early 1900s under Sun Yat-sen. This increase has been cataloged up to 2024 by Dr. Rudd:

This has not stopped at language. Mainstream civic movements like the Imperial Han (Huang Han) faction intertwines contemporary national pride with the glory of Han-majority dynasties, excluding the non-Han dynasties. It has also pushed territorial expansion and assimilation of non-Han ethnic groups in such a fervor that it has begun to bleed into CCP policy. Its growth has in large part been a result of Xi’s co-option of Han-nationalistic mythos into his Leninist single party mythos ^[18]. 

This has not stopped at early early 20th Century revivalism, there has been a concerted effort to rewrite and repurpose the Han identity going back millennia. In some of the most brazen historical revisionism of the modern era by a major state.

“He [Xi] has in effect appointed himself China’s historian in chief, crafting a story — retold in museums, on television shows and in journals — that casts his authoritarian, centralizing agenda as a fulfillment of values rooted in antiquity… Every ethnic group must fuse into one indivisible China with a shared heritage dating back over 5,000 years” ^[19]

What is effectively happening is that all groups within the current Chinese borders (and some beyond) are being construed as the zhonghua minzu gongtongti (“community of Chinese nationhood”). A state-constructed identity imposed on the 56 officially-recognized ethnic groups and is used to imply that all these ethnic groups are rooted from the same people. This ethnic revisionism has been used as the underlying justification for the practice of biopolitical assimilation. 

In Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Hui Muslim regions the enforcement of the State mandated Han ethnic identity is being enforced. What sets Xi Jinping Fascism apart from many traditional examples of historical Fascism is that it seeks ethno-national purity not by extermination or expulsion, but by forced assimilation and conversion. In March 2017 the “De-Extremification Regulation” initiated the large-scale involuntary detention campaign. This was followed up by the June 2017 Regulations on Religious Affairs which mandated “Sinicization” of all religious practice under party supervision ^[12]. In Xinjiang the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities have been placed under a mass program meant to forcibly change their cultural and ethnic identity to be aligned with Xi’s vision of Han nationalism. The 2022 Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report investigating the abuses in Xinjiang concluded the following:

“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” ^[20]

The report documented the mass detention of over a million minorities in so called “Vocational Education and Training Centres”, evidence of mass sterilization of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim women through mandated IUDs, destruction of religious sites and surveillance enforced clampdowns on religious practice, and persecution transnationally of Uyghur diaspora abroad ^[20]. This intent to forcibly sever cultural and ethnic identity of minorities is also practiced in Tibet where nearly a million Tibetan children are separated from their families and placed in state-run residential boarding schools where religious participation is forbidden and there is an overarching effort to sever the linguistic ties between the new generation and the past ^[21]. This practice has also extended to the Inner Mongolia regions where not only language but architecture is forced to change to traditional Han designs ^[12]. This practice, made priority in 2017, has not abated and has seen further codification in the Chinese legal code as evidenced by codification of these practices into law ^[14]. This effort is far from over and as Xi announced in his new year speech at the beginning of 2026 “The people of China must be united like seeds of a pomegranate sticking together” ^[22]. 

This dissent drive for a uniform entho-nationalist identity under a single Party-State is best exemplified but the Party’s and, in particular, Xi’s fixation on Taiwan. Taiwan serves as both the greatest roadblock and the capstone of Xi’s paleogenetic project. As a capstone it serves as the ceremonial completion of Xi’s Weidafuxing (Great Rejuvenation) where all the Han people would be under one nation, reforged and ascendant on the world stage ^[12]. But Taiwan also serves as a foil, considered by Xi to be an even greater threat to the Fascist project than even the minorities and foreign influence. Taiwan serves as a living and stark manifestation of a people in Xi’s Han ethno-nationalist umbrella that not only exists separate from the Party-State apparatus, but thrives despite it. A thriving and functioning democratic Chinese society is something the CCP cannot tolerate. For Xi personally the reunification with Taiwan is seen as the culmination of his national project and his legacy. As Dr. Rudd aptly stated:

“To become the CCP leader who finally achieves national unity by bringing Taiwan into the fold would be to achieve a level of political immortality in the eyes of the party and country that rivals Mao’s. It would also be an accomplishment that would permanently solidify his political legitimacy against any other internal criticism.” ^[7]

This sense of urgency has created a self imposed deadline by Xi for reunification by 2032. This has led to the removal of clear “red lines” for their reunification program as Xi seeks to allow more room for action and ambiguity in his efforts ^[12]. While the intent is alarming it is important to stress this is not an inevitable outcome that violence will outbreak over Taiwan. Dr. Kevin Rudd outlines that with credible and effective deterrence establishing a real risk to Xi that he would lose a military engagement for reunification opens the door to sidestepping a crisis as Xi and his national project cannot risk a failure of that magnitude ^[12]. But regardless the intent is real and as Xi stated recently in his New Year address: “We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!” ^[22]

The metamorphosis of China from a Marxist-Lenninist authoritarian state to Xi’s Fascism with Chinese characteristics is a fascinating lesson on how these ideologies crystalize and more importantly how Fascism can happen anywhere. It's like a coronavirus, it's broad in scope and manifestation, but it evolves to the environment that incubates it. What happened in China serves as a cautionary lesson that when times of great instability and perceived threat exist there will exist pressures seeking to co-opt the myths, fears and insecurities of a nation to create the Totalitarian State. Fascism is interesting as it does not seek to truly create. It cannabises what surrounds it and wears it as a perverse syncretic cloak. Vasily Grossman on writing of the betrayals and failure of the Russian Revolution expressed this vividly:

“The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.” ^[23]