Is Our Competitor ‘China’ or the Chinese Communist Party? – By Jimmy Chien (Defense One) / Oct 3, 2022
We should carefully choose the words we use when discussing our strategic competitor.
Words, chosen deliberately, can strengthen or weaken nations. Too often, we conflate “China” and the “Chinese Communist Party,” bolstering the authoritarian regime at the expense of our own strategic goals.
Understanding why requires a bit of linguistic and cultural history. “China,” written 中國, was likely first used during the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) to refer to the central states of the Yellow River valley. During the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), it came to describe the civilization at large. The nation-state, however, was not called 中國, but took the name of whichever dynasty was in power at the time.
The dynasties are gone, but this tradition endures. In 1949, control of the traditional territory of “China” passed to the People’s Republic of China (中華人民共和國), a state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. As understood by Chinese people, the PRC is the political power that controls the civilizational territories of China. Many Chinese-language speakers refer to the PRC as 中共 (pronounced zhong-gong), not 中國 (zhong-guo), emphasizing the second character 共, because it denotes the Communist Party.
The CCP has long aimed to eradicate this distinction between country and party. Current leader Xi Jinping, even more than his predecessors, has striven to condition the people of China to view themselves not as members of the ancient Chinese civilization, but as cogs in the CCP machine. As explained by BBC’s Shanghai correspondent, “the Communist Party strategy has been to try to morph the Party and the machinery of government and the perception of the nation of China into one.”
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