By Jerome A. Cohen
I was recently asked about China Daily’s use of quotation marks around “communist China” in this piece, which is much more worth reading and thinking about than most of the articles that CD puts out. The article discusses limitations on Chinese journalists in the US, notably calling the US administration a “cabal of wackadoodles” and criticizing the severance of ties between the US and China.
The Trump people’s resurrection of “Communist China” (I am accustomed to capitalization of Communist when linked to China) as the term for identifying the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rings many bells with the old cadre of American China-watchers and is a contemporary attempt to help Americans and other people see the differences between the Party and the people in China. “Communist China” was an early, transitional term that served another function – to distinguish Mao’s regime from that of Chiang Kai-shek’s “Nationalist China” sheltering on Taiwan. It was sometimes considered an upgrade of the earlier, more politically emotive term “Red China” that overlapped with “Communist China” in American policy parlance in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. For example, the Harvard-MIT group of China specialists that sent a memorandum to President-elect Nixon via Henry Kissinger in November 1968 used the term “Communist China”.
I remember how startled the journalist Lawrence Spivak, who ran Meet the Press, was when, in an April 1971 TV interview with John Fairbank and me, I admonished him for constantly using “Red China” at that late date and urged him to clean up his language and recognize that the Communist government was indeed the government of mainland China. I have always liked to refer to it as the PRC, which accords it its self-described name and yet has the ring of a Communist regime. I don’t object to the use of Communist China today, during Xi Jinping’s Party-obsessed era, as I didn’t object to it during Mao’s era, because it is a useful reminder of the distinctive regime that controls the Chinese people. That, of course, is why Pompeo and company are using it today. The term has genuine factual connotations and also serves a delegitimizing function in describing a dictatorial system.