China’s scared, too: Behind every power, domestic insecurity lurks

Ethan Lou is the Opinion Editor in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business.

In the TV show House of Cards, a fictional Russian president tells his American counterpart that, despite not being a democracy, Moscow, too, is answerable to the people.

“You don’t understand Russia,” Viktor Petrov tells the U.S. president. “If people don’t like the job you’re doing, they vote you out of office. If they don’t like the job I’m doing, they topple statues. Blood is spilled. Chaos takes over.”

In fact, not only is the cost of political defeat greater, such defeat is also harder to foresee. When you have regular elections, it’s akin to small forest fires every few years – they keep the big fires at bay. Without them, the kindling builds, and you may not be aware of from where a spark may come. The end of an empire arrives as bankruptcy does in Ernest Hemingway’s world: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Whoever rules Russia plays a dangerous game.

And as it is in Moscow, so it is in Beijing.

For nearly 2,000 years in China, governance has been reflected in the following saying: “The king is a boat and the people are water. Water can carry the boat and overturn it, too.” “If the ruler did not perform his duties well, he would lose the mandate to rule,” the scholar Dingxin Zhao writes. “This kind of mentality inspired thousands of peasant rebellions throughout Chinese history … rising to rebel against an unfit ruler had a legitimate position in Chinese political culture.” Beijing knows that, and it fears that. This is what we must understand about China.

President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Washington on Thursday. It’s a follow-up to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing this year. These visits mark two important milestones: One is China’s fighting the U.S. to a draw in their recent trade-war brinkmanship. The other is China’s filling of voids left by the United States, lowering tariffs, upping aid and casting itself in a world leadership role.

Undeniably, China is ascendant in the world. Among all the factors behind it, the most underrated one, and therefore the one from which we gain the most by understanding, is the internal one. This idea of global China must be understood as reflective of domestic insecurities.

How is power maintained? “People comply when faced with brutal coercion,” the scholar Mr. Zhao writes. “Yet, such compliance often entails the high costs of surveillance, resistance and low efficiency. To generate genuine co-operation, the state power has to be seen as legitimate.” In a democracy, the source of this legitimacy is easy – free and fair elections – which is arguably the chief virtue of this form of government. But how does a ruler otherwise find legitimacy?

Various Muslim monarchs have claimed that they descend from the prophet Muhammad. The Germanic Merovingian dynasty claimed descent from a sea-beast. Adolf Hitler called his empire the “third” Reich, positioning his as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, which itself claimed to be a successor state to the real Rome, which itself had a mythical founding story involving twins raised by a wolf (and descended from the god Mars). In Game of Thrones, the spymaster Varys says: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall.” To base legitimacy on connection to myth or antiquity – in China, it went out of fashion a long time ago.

In 1,046 BCE, the rebel King Wu defeated Di Xin at the Battle of Muye, ending the Shang Dynasty. A model Confucian, King Wu knew that he had no claim to the throne at all, other than conquest. So while there was still an element of the supernatural, he no longer followed the old script.

“The founders of the Western Zhou Dynasty,” Mr. Zhao writes, “argued that the Shang rulers had once possessed a sacred mandate bestowed from Heaven, but now Heaven has taken away the mandate and passed it onto the Zhou people because of the bad rule of the last Shang king.”

This is an important distinction: A man’s identity is intrinsic and unchangeable. But a Mandate of Heaven is transferable. This gave birth to what scholars call “performance-based state legitimacy,” that virtuous rulers are those that have delivered – and that failure can see that Mandate of Heaven revoked.

It’s a simple idea, but an enduring one. For 3,000 years since the establishment of the Zhou, China saw more than 20 dynasties. It wasn’t always an internal rebellion that caused one to fall. But no conquest succeeds without internal help. In the 17th century, a peasant rebellion caused Ming Dynasty general Wu Sangui to defect, turning the tide for the invading Manchus. The invaders set up the Qing Dynasty, and centuries later, it was another peasant rebellion that weakened the Qing and contributed to its demise.

The X-Men supervillain Apocalypse says, “Every empire’s fall begins with a peasant’s hunger.” It’s not an exclusively Chinese idea. In France, the empire fell because of the price of bread, so the truism goes. Every ruler everywhere is kept awake by fears of pitchforks in the shires. But the idea is particularly strong in China.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Beijing embarked on economic reform. It was a new era, characterized by the slogan, “To be rich is glorious.” The party “made GDP [gross domestic product] growth one of the ‘hard targets’ that local officials had to accomplish in their annual evaluations,” Bruce J. Dickson of the George Washington University writes. “The Chinese government “promotes economic growth – and more importantly raising standards of living … in order to create support.”

Living with Western comforts, one might not be able to fathom why the Chinese accept Communist rule and the relatively more restricted society. The answer is simple: Prereform, per-capita GDP, which is reflective of living standards, was US$186 a year in 1978, and the restrictions were even worse (Canada’s was roughly US$9,000 at the time). While in the postwar years many countries knew poverty, in China that carried on into 1970s and ’80s and arguably through the turn of the millennium, too.

A Chinese person today might still have memories of the black-humour joke of a family sharing one pair of pants, or that of a man who slathers pig fat on his lips to pretend to others he eats meat every day, only for a child to publicly reveal his secret. But look at the sheer speed of growth: Even people born as late as 1995 (US$600 per-capita GDP) would have seen a roughly 20-fold rise in living standards in their lifetime (more than US$14,000 per-capita GDP today).

Of course, while filling people’s bellies is a part of it, it is not the only part. A regime that survives is one that feeds its people in more ways than one. The Communist Party has long framed itself as the saviour that would deliver the country from its “Century of Humiliation,” a nationally defining period in the 19^th and 20^th centuries when it repeatedly lost wars and sovereignty.

The academic Lei Zhang writes: “Through often very sophisticated and entertaining formats, such as movies, music, museums, television shows, and red tourism, which take people to visit revolutionary places, the CCP constantly reminded the public of the party’s saviour role in wiping clean national shame” – and indeed that latter term, guochi, has taken a life of its own. From leaders’ public remarks to even the Chinese constitution, the government drills this point home.

Why is this all necessary? It is not just the history and people’s psyche, the theorized threats to regime stability. There are the directly observable ones, too. More than 100 military officers have been purged since 2022. And who can forget the year-long disappearance of Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma in 2020? These incidents reflect unease and instability within some corners of the government, of long knives being sharpened in the shadows.

Outside the government, the unease festers, too. It began with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a crisis moment that led Beijing to double down on its performance legitimacy. That incident saw a parallel in 2022, when China’s strict COVID-19 lockdowns sparked what multiple sources have characterized as “unprecedented” protests.

Meanwhile, China set a gross-domestic-product target of 4.5 to 5 per cent in 2026, the first time it has set a figure of under 5 per cent since 1991. Growth has been sputtering for a long time, and as the scholar Minxin Pei writes: “A prolonged period of mediocre economic performance … could severely reduce the level of popular support for the CCP.”

Indeed, youth unemployment numbers got so bad in 2023 that China stopped publishing them, saying it wanted to tweak the methodology. So not only must China try to fix the economic issue, it also has to lean more on nationalism.

Nothing is ever caused by one thing, and motivations, which exist only in people’s heads, are ultimately unknowable. But if we were to read China’s global ambitions in a domestic context, a lot of things make perfect sense.

To see China’s performance legitimacy in action, look no further than the case of Taiwan, which China fiercely covets. The island was first lost to Japan in 1895. Not only considered a breakaway province, Taiwan is also the sum and symbol of the Century of Humiliation from which the Communist Party has promised it would deliver its people.

Susan Shirk of the University of California San Diego writes that patriotic education in China has long nurtured “an expectation that Taiwan would soon be reunified as a way of strengthening public identification with the Communist Party.” Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury writes that this extends to soldiers, too, whose “early socialization in the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is marked by teachings that Taiwan presents the last unfulfilled mission.”

The party has used Taiwan to fan nationalist flames, but it has also created a disincentive for it to not pursue Taiwan. Beijing has drilled into its people the importance of Taiwan so successfully that the tail now wags the dog. After the independence-leaning Democratic People’s Party won the Taiwan presidency for the first time in 2000, a Chinese poll showed that 95 per cent supported war if Taiwan declared independence.

The academic You Ji writes that military officers “would regard it as an enormous loss of face if Taiwan were to declare independence and the PLA were unable to do anything.” UC San Diego’s Ms. Shirk writes, “It is widely believed in China and abroad that if the Communist regime allows Taiwan to declare formal independence without putting up a fight, the outraged public will bring down the regime.”

Along with Taiwan we can group the South China Sea claims, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. The ability to defend China’s perceived territorial integrity, writes Hardina Ohlendorf of Mahidol University, “has become the ultimate base of legitimacy for the CCP.” And if we were to extrapolate on that thought, we can easily see how Canada’s detention of the technology executive Meng Wanzhou, which Ottawa deemed routine, touched such a raw nerve in the East. That was territorial integrity encapsulated in a person.

Another manifestation of China’s performance legitimacy is its outbound investment, which has grown tremendously in the 21^st century. This draws from the same well as the long-standing fears of Chinese overproduction, commercial dumping and manufacturing prowess; it’s why Ottawa followed Washington in enacting tariffs on China in 2025. China’s outbound investment, spurred by the government’s “going out” policy, reached US$100-billion a year by 2015, up from almost zero at the turn of the millennium. A direct result of that is the Belt and Road Initiative, the development of trade infrastructure westward of China.

China’s economic growth had been fuelled chiefly by two pillars of the economy – export and investment – and both were losing steam. China needed to boost domestic consumption, the third pillar of the economy. But that was difficult. China’s consumption levels are notoriously low, with its proportion of GDP lagging global averages by about 20 percentage points. That is paired with another notable problem, which was China’s overcapacity across the economy – in great part the result of a 4-trillion-yuan stimulus that came after the financial crisis, which largely boosted the economy via infrastructure projects.

Enter the Belt and Road Initiative. Its officially stated goals have already been put plainly: accelerating economic growth through stronger infrastructure linkages that reduce transport costs and time.

But it is the less obvious ones that we should pay more attention to: simply sustaining economic growth and absorbing Chinese overcapacity. The Belt and Road Initiative would stimulate demand across the world for Chinese industry.

So, Beijing shifted some of its capacity abroad, diverting overseas the companies that had been involved in intense infrastructure building domestically for years. How successful the Chinese government has been at this is debatable. But success at diverting its overcapacity had undoubtedly been the aim, as has been mentioned explicitly by Chinese officials.

Taiwan and the Belt and Road represent opposite sides of China’s global-ambitions coin. And there is an irony in that the two sides lie in tension. To stoke nationalism China must be harsh and aggressive. To raise its living standards requires China to prove itself a predictable trade partner that respects rules. It’s the Wolf Warrior versus the world leader. That is the quandary for Beijing.

There have already been manifestations of this contradiction. Italy had once been a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but it withdrew in 2023. China’s reputation was no doubt a factor. One might point even to an earlier example: Mahidol University’s Ms. Ohlendorf writes that by simply pursuing its performance-based legitimacy, Beijing eroded its pre-existing claim to power: “Market-oriented reforms undermined the credibility of communist ideology.”

In The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy, the authors write that conditions within a country are a “critical determinant” of strategies employed in great-power rivalries. Add it all up, and we have what the scholar Brian C. Carlson calls the vicious circle of confrontation with the United States: Domestic problems and dissent causes the government to appeal to nationalism for legitimacy, which raises tensions with the U.S., which becomes the argument for the party leadership to remain in power, which results in repression to neutralize domestic political opponents – which leads to more domestic problems.

At the heart of international relations theory, after all, is that a state’s most basic goal, before one can pursue anything else, is to exist and to continue to exist. In that way, China is not unlike any other state, and not unlike Canada, where for decades the criticism has been that foreign policy operated with domestic politics in mind.

Many governments, including Ottawa, are now forging closer ties with Beijing, as the United States turns inward and hostile and as the world order unravels. Regardless of how polarizing these decisions are, in the current world – the one that is and not the one we want it to be – such decisions will continue to be made. China may well run the world one day. Other countries must keep in mind the domestic political order that drives its external ambitions. For when you know a man’s fears, you also know what he loves and what he covets. And when you must make deals with such a man it behooves you to know all three.