Chapter 18: Huntington Overlooked That Communism Remained the Primary Enemy, 1992–1996 (Part III)

Fukuyama’s neglect of the Chinese Communist Party had a profound impact on strategic thinking within the American intellectual community. If the communist demon had already come to an end, if the world had settled definitively on liberal democracy and universal peace, then all that remained was to draw the CCP into the free world. This line of thinking reached the highest levels of American politics. In 2000, President Clinton granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (most-favored-nation status), and in 2001 supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, allowing the CCP to “make a fortune in silence” through globalization. The United States hoped that China would automatically and peacefully evolve into a democratic country.

By 2015, the now well-fed CCP giant lion smugly invited Fukuyama—an intellectual with enormous global influence—to visit Beijing. On April 23, Wang Qishan met with him, and on November 3, Xi Jinping also received him. What was discussed was not publicly reported, but judging from Xi Jinping’s already well-publicized thinking, Xi criticized the collapse of the Soviet Union on the grounds that at the critical moment there was “not a single real man” who stood up to resist. He clearly did not accept the idea that the Soviet collapse marked the end of totalitarianism in history.

Fukuyama is a third-generation Japanese immigrant, born in Chicago and raised in New York, with little influence from Japanese culture. He is a very serious political scientist with many publications, and his academic views are widely respected. In 2016, Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president prompted Fukuyama to pay close attention to the rise of populism. He pointed out that populism is a nonviolent version of fascism and is deeply troubling. Presidents elected through populism tend to be arrogant and self-absorbed. He likened Trump to a five-year-old child who had obtained a license to enter the White House and was recklessly driving a massive truck at full speed. Fukuyama harshly criticized Trump as narcissistic, ignorant, and a political clown. Coincidentally, far away in China, legal scholar Xu Zhangrun also solemnly warned in 2016 that American elections had suddenly become shrill and shamelessly polarized, leaving people deeply distressed, and cried out: Has democracy reached its end?

Fukuyama warned that populism must not be allowed to gain the upper hand. He soberly pointed out that the majority of the public lacks both the knowledge and the time to understand complex politics, and can only be manipulated into voting through simplistic slogans. Direct democracy, he argued, cannot function properly; representative government is superior to direct democracy. Fukuyama objectively stated that representative systems are better than direct voting. In fact, throughout thousands of years of human history, it has always been about 5 percent of elites who create history; the modern world is no exception. The remaining 95 percent largely follow along—even if they formally cast a “sacred vote,” it does not truly represent their genuine “individual will.” Street protests or online voting as forms of “direct democracy” are unworkable because most people lack the knowledge and time to understand extremely complex policies and their future consequences; in the end, they can only be manipulated by simple slogans, which in turn means manipulation by media owners. “Direct democracy, as a form of government, is completely unworkable.” By contrast, “as disappointment with redistribution continues to spread, populism will dominate elections in many countries, strongman politics will become attractive to many people in Europe, America, or Japan, and the China–Russia model—especially the China model—will hold appeal.”

In the twentieth century, communism was able to run rampant and spread globally into the greatest disaster in human history precisely because communist parties used populism as a tool. Through agitation and propaganda, they drove ignorant masses to follow violent revolution. Mao Zedong’s famous slogan—“The people, and the people alone, are the driving force of history”—was nothing more than flattery designed to win over the masses, making them willingly obey his command to rebel. In the end, countless deaths and injuries were suffered by ordinary people who had been deceived and incited by populism. Today, the CCP still exploits populist nationalism to incite and manipulate the Chinese people, directing hostility toward “American imperialism” in order to deceive the uninformed masses and preserve its autocratic rule—the last major totalitarian system in the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 demonstrated that communism poses a threat to human civilization far greater than that of any ancient civilization. Yet in explaining the global spread of the virus, Fukuyama did not seek the root cause in totalitarian institutions. Instead, he argued that such systems are highly effective at responding to emergencies and even praised the Chinese model as successful in handling the pandemic. He further claimed that there is no absolute connection between authoritarian or democratic systems and pandemic response, and that pandemics are unrelated to democracy. Clearly, Fukuyama paid little attention to the fact that the Chinese government relied on the most primitive methods of control, confining people like livestock within sealed communities and massively expanding the deprivation of freedom and rights during the pandemic. If social stability is built upon the deprivation of people’s rights and happiness, then praising such methods of pandemic control is an insult to civilization.

Zhong Wen concludes: Pope Francis has advocated dialogue among different religions, mutual respect, tolerance, and cooperation in building world peace. Clearly, the Pope is far more perceptive than Huntington. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory obscures the greatest threat facing today’s world—the embodiment of communism in China, sustained by transfusions from capitalist globalization and transformed into the world’s second-largest economy. Communism is a form of political religion; when combined with a totalitarian political system, it produces the world’s largest fusion of political and religious authority. Its threat to humanity surpasses that of any other narrow religious belief. That Huntington’s student Fukuyama lavishly praised the Chinese government’s extreme methods of pandemic control reveals the superficiality of their understanding of communism’s essence. It is imperative to recognize that communism, as the most dangerous ideology and political system of our time, is the greatest enemy of human civilization. Only the end of communism will mark the true end of history.