Crossroads with Joshua Philipp
We’ve been hearing about Xi’s coming purge among Party members, about the regime’s strong-arm tactics in diplomacy, and about its various programs using spies to rob and subvert the west. But what we hear less about is the actual goals of these systems.
In its 2020 report to Congress on military and security developments in China, the Pentagon outlined the national strategy of Chinese leaders. It describes the regime’s plans of hiding its true agendas while quietly building capabilities and strengths, its views on the United States as its main strategic competitor, and its goals to build China into a powerful country dictated by socialism.
In official propaganda, it latches the identity and the objectives of the government with that of China overall, and so the statement of the “Chinese Dream” means the dream of the communist party. And according to the report, the regime’s national ambitions and statecraft can’t be characterized accurately without considering the communist political system that is “underpinned by the Party’s theory of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the Party itself as the essential feature.”
We’ll be taking an in-depth look at this strategy, in this episode of Crossroads.