There is a daily cacophony of voices in the world’s media that focus on communist China.
The categories discussed are as many as the stars in the sky, from topics of major significance, such as the property sector woes, ongoing Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan and the Philippines, and continuing Chinese human rights violations, to those of a lighter nature, including the Chinese New Year, Chinese cuisine, and commentary on Xi Jinping’s latest pronouncement.
Particularly galling is a category that offers sincere advice to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on solving (“correcting”) self-made problems. Such advice borders on that given by communist fellow travelers from the Soviet Russia days.
Let us examine the issue.
Fellow Travelers
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a “fellow traveler” is “a person who sympathizes with and often furthers the ideals and program of an organized group [such as the CCP] without membership in the group or regular participation in its activities.” The pejorative came into wide use during the Cold War between the United States and the USSR from the end of World War II until the Soviet Union collapsed in August 1991.
Naive and sympathetic foreign intellectuals, diplomats, and media figures flocked to Soviet Russia in the early years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, with many ignoring the ghastly crimes of the communists at the hands of Joseph Stalin’s executioners while singing the praises of “the brave new world” that Soviet communism was supposedly building in Russia.
Perhaps an example of a fellow traveler was New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 while defending Stalin’s “collectivization” of Ukraine, which led to a famine that starved to death an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians in 1932–33.
As NPR noted, Duranty shlepped communist-approved words and phrases like malnutrition (instead of famine) and justified Stalin’s use of force by stating, “To put it brutally, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” And while those millions were starving in August 1933, Duranty wrote this for The New York Times: “The excellent harvest about to be gathered shows that any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
Duranty earned his Pulitzer by enabling Soviet genocide in Ukraine, and The New York Times has never revoked his prize.
Fellow Travelers in 2024?
It is perhaps understandable that heavily CCP-influenced media, such as the South China Morning Post, convey articles and commentary that are “soft on communist China” and/or cheerleading (for example, here, here, and here).
However, it is a head-scratcher to read an article in London’s Financial Times—a premiere pro-capitalist business and economic media thought leader in the Western world—that offers advice to the CCP’s economic planners and policymakers in navigating the continuing disaster in China’s property sector.
To review, China’s residential and commercial property sales are in a prolonged slump, with new home sales dropping 6 percent in 2023 and new residential property development falling 58 percent from 2019 through 2023, as reported by Zerohedge. One consequence was $125 billion in bond defaults among Chinese real estate firms from 2020 through 2023, with the Hong Kong court-ordered liquidation of highly leveraged Evergrande, once China’s largest developer, roiling not only the property sector but also the overall Chinese economy.
The advice of that FT article is classic capitalism: to “inject transparency into the market—and bank balance sheets—by trading bad assets in a way that would establish a ‘floor’ for their values.” In short, let the market work by deleveraging the property sector and trying to get ahead of the increasingly “deflationary psychological mood” sweeping the country.
But is this advice altruistic or self-serving, aimed at helping prop up the CCP and preserving British/foreign investments in China at the expense of average Chinese citizens? Increasingly, Xi is ratcheting up and expanding the use of the national security law to increase controls on businesses and individuals according to ideological diktats of the Party.
This represents a continuation of CCP persecution and worse since seizing power in 1949, with an estimated death toll of between 18 and 55 million people during the Great Chinese Famine that was precipitated by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958–61), which was aimed at “rapid industrialization and collectivization” of the Chinese economy. The results were unsurprisingly similar to the results of Stalin’s forced collectivization of Ukraine!
Those fellow travelers in the West who have supported the integration of communist China into the world’s economic system since 1980 are eerily similar to Walter Duranty, as the CCP’s barbarous behavior toward Chinese citizens has not ameliorated as predicted by China engagers, who have supported decades of massive foreign direct investment in China (see here and here and exposed here).
A paramilitary police officer stands guard in Tiananmen Square after a plenary session of China's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress, in the adjacent Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 11, 2018. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
Under the guise of Xi’s signature “anti-corruption campaign,” The Epoch Times reported last month that Xi is purging CCP officials, opponents, military leaders, and others in a wide-ranging effort to consolidate political power in Xi and the CCP. Rigid communist orthodoxy is the way of the future in Xi’s China, with business executives and political figures who don’t toe the Party line continuing to “disappear,” as The Wall Street Journal reported in December.
Will Xi and his economic planners follow the advice freely given by helpful Westerners who represent foreign investors in China?
Injecting transparency and market forces into China’s property crisis would be a risky move. The dilemma for Xi is to maintain the appearance of stability and economic growth to continue to justify the CCP’s claim to political power. The embarrassing liquidation of Evergrande is a big chink in the CCP’s armor of “economics with Chinese characteristics.”
What will Xi do?
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Stu Cvrk
Author
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.
