http://www.brookings.edu/researc...

Jeff Bader of Brookings writes on how Xi Jinping sees the world and includes much of value. But he strangely, and quite frustratingly, omits the feature of the landscape that dominates the view out Xi's windows—the feature that ties together so much of the behavior Bader describes on the last three pages of this report.

We need to understand that Xi though sees America as actively supporting peaceful evolution and regime change in all non-democratic states—okay, maybe not Saudi Arabia just yet!—and that China's in its sights. (Many wouldn't argue the contrary). He believes the US to have been behind the color revolutions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as the Arab Spring. He thinks that this project of "liberal hegemonism"—not China's name for American grand strategy, I should note, but one that MIT political scientist Barry R. Posen uses—makes use of human rights activists, non-governmental organizations and other civil society organizations, America's powerful liberal media, Internet freedom, the Gene Sharp Method of Dictatorship to Democracy, universal values proselytization by academics and public intellectuals and more to create fifth columnists in China. He feels under ideological assault, and is responding with ideological campaigns of his own.

Xi naturally encourages the belief that he's the one surgeon capable of performing the necessary operation to remove the cancer of corruption from the Chinese body politic—and wants quiet in the operating theater and for his subordinates to hand him the scalpel when he shouts "scalpel!" He also encourages the belief that the CCP is all that stands between order and growth-destroying chaos. With slowing growth, the Party can't lean on "performance legitimacy" as reliably as it once could; no surprise that it should then be fanning the ever-present embers of reactive nationalism and ginning up a siege mentality—all the while revving up the machinery of coercion to handle the "fifth columnists."

All that behavior that looks so truculent from an outside perspective—it's a depressingly long litany—didn't just come out of nowhere. It isn't just a function of either China feeling suddenly robust and confident, or just worried about its near-term economic prospects. It isn't something particular to Xi (as it clearly was underway well before he assumed the mantle of leadership in 2012–2013). The CCP leadership's perceptions of strategic US intentions are absolutely vital to understanding recent behavior.

Trouble is, it would be mighty hard to convince Xi or anyone else looking out through those same windows that he isn't seeing what he thinks he's seeing.

I'm not suggesting that this is the only feature of Xi's view of the world, and as I said, I believe Bader has identified others that are entirely salient. But this lacuna strikes me as a failure to actually empathize and get inside Xi's head—something we very much need to do right now.