Former NED board member Francis Fukuyama
While we need to understand that Xi’s China is a totalitarian power, we should temper that understanding with the realization that this is not a necessary or inevitable future for China. The regime is totalitarian in aspiration, but not necessarily in reality, argues Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama.
What Americans need to keep in mind is that their enemy and rival right now is not China, but a Chinese Communist Party that has shifted into high-totalitarian mode, he writes for the American Interest:
We are not dealing with the China of the 1990s or even the 2000s, but a completely different animal that represents a clear challenge to our democratic values. We need to hold it at bay until some point in the future when it returns to being a more normal authoritarian country, or indeed is on its way to being a liberal country. That will not necessarily eliminate the challenge that China represents; a more liberal China could easily be more nationalistic. But it will nonetheless be easier to deal with in many ways.
The CCP’s aspiration toward total control unfortunately now reaches into liberal democracies around the world through the exercise of what the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has called “sharp power,” he writes. RTWT via @aminterest
