In 1991 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was rocked to its core and settled on a trajectory that over 40 years later is causing reverberations around the world. 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” ^[1]. That begs the question of why would the collapse of what the CCP considered its “principal contradiction” be treated 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 them if they did not act quickly. The party promptly embarked on what very well may be the longest political autopsy in history. From 1993 to 2004 the Soviet dissolution was dissected and studied, culminating in the Party charting a course that metamorphosed the Chinese state into the 21st century’s archetype of Fascism. 

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 a similar fate could be avoided by the CCP. 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. Things like overcentralization, failure of economic institutional reform, and the brittleness of the centralized decision making apparatus were what they focused on in their root-cause analysis ^[2]. The Structural Realist school of thought identified problems that the solutions necessitated diffusion of state power. This reality in their analysis and the scope of their prescriptions shifted influence to the other major school of thought, The Ideological Betrayal. That the Soviet collapse was not due to the structural deficiencies of single party authoritarianism, but from its leaders' betrayal of ideological purity and corrupting the system from within. 

The Ideological Betrayal stipulated that each Soviet leader since Khrushchev had progressively bleed-off Marxist-Leninist principles which dismantled 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].

The failure of the leadership from this school of thought extended to safeguarding its mythology. The idea of "Historical Nihilism” emerged as the practice of current leadership repudiating past leadership and narratives. The allowance of the media and the public to question party narratives starting with Khrushchev and exacerbated by Gorbachev was seen as a fatal error by leadership ^[4]. In more recent times this fear of "Historical Nihilism" has manifested itself with actions like the 2018 law which “criticizing revolutionary heroes and martyrs illegal” ^[5]. The final betrayal 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 on growing 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 from 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 self-reflection and reform. It served as a reshuffling of priorities so that all actions are 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 communism to preserving 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 they outline 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 world view, is what creates the nation and imbues it with a political, moral and spiritual unity. Xi Jinping’s model and vision of China embodies this essentialization of the State. Xi seeks “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, to, through totalitarian control of the state, 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]. 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 that is true of all Fascist ideologies. They are extremely unique and depend on their “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” ^[12]. 

He further goes on to describe 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” ^[12]. What is distinguishing about the CCP is it clearly exhibits all 14 of Eco’s fascistic features.