The long-term goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is world economic dominance in all spheres: manufacturing, trade, control of natural resources, policy, legal, technology, and more. With economic dominance comes geopolitical and military dominance.
Deng’s strategy involved penetrating, coopting, and leveraging international institutions in order to gain access to resources, foreign direct investment, advanced technology, and Western know-how. The strategy also involved waging war on the post-World War II order established by the U.N. and the Bretton Woods international monetary framework, as manifested in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT—later the World Trade Organization).
Thus, authoritarian capitalism is ultimately defined by state control in a totalitarian system.
A better phrase to define the CCP economic system, especially in terms of its global objectives, is “predatory mercantilism.” Beijing provides cheap loans and subsidized products to developing countries in Asia and Africa in order to achieve long-term strategic objectives, expand power, create long-term dependencies, and influence geopolitical outcomes through debt-leveraging. Predatory mercantilism is at the heart of the BRI.
How did China transition from a developing country devastated by decades of communist purges to “the world’s largest producer of over 220 types of industrial products, including vehicles and computers,” according to People’s Daily? Little did U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger know that when they “opened communist China” to the rest of the world in 1971 it would become an industrial giant, with many U.S. and multinational production facilities relocating to China during the past five decades.
Communist China Corrupts Bretton Woods
The CCP’s onslaught against the international system began with the corruption of Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT. Originally established to help rebuild post-war Europe, the purpose of the World Bank morphed over the years into functioning as the world’s “poverty fighter” by providing developmental assistance to selected developing countries. And China, with a paltry gross domestic product per capita of $165 in 1976, was a perfect candidate for investment in the minds’ eyes of Western capitalists and politicians. In comparison, U.S. GDP per capita in 1976 was $8,592.In 1970, the CCP was on the outside of this international system, thanks to the bipartisan anti-communist political coalition in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Nixon and Kissinger believed that communist China could be “brought into the family of civilized nations” through the democratization and integration of the country over time with its inclusion in these international institutions. The U.S. political class was convinced that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could be peacefully brought into the global system through open trade policies and access to world markets and Western technology. The Nixon–Kissinger “opening of China” led to the below chronology, paving the way for CCP corruption of Bretton Woods and the international system of free trade.
China replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name) as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council in 1971.
The PRC’s representation at the World Bank began in 1980, and its first project loan was approved in 1981.
China’s association with the IMF began in 1980, although the yuan wasn’t officially designated as a foreign exchange reserve currency until October 2016.
The trifecta was completed when China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
Conclusion
China’s financial system and economy are opaque, Byzantine, and authoritarian capitalist in nature, serving the CCP’s arbitrary priorities first and foremost. In justifying current crackdowns on ultra-wealthy Chinese industrialists and tech giants, the CCP has promulgated the latest in a series of slogans that masks its authoritarian economic controls: transformation from a capital-centered to a people-centered economy.The CCP’s goal is to corrupt, undermine, and ultimately control—through proxies or directly—the existing international framework and organizations. This would profit and benefit the Chinese economy while replacing free enterprise and laissez-faire capitalism with a government-managed authoritarian capitalist economy, replete with predatory mercantilist practices.