Steve Tsang — What Is Xi Jinping Thought?

Thought experiment: Substitute the US UK where you see China, substitute the ownership class for the CCP, and substitute liberal democracy where you see communism or socialism.

China is criticized for taking steps to isolate bourgeois liberalism and democracy controlled by ownership, just as the US and UK take similar steps to demonize communism, isolate socialism, and cement the bourgeois liberal order that gives the ownership class control in place.

It is natural for those that control a society to attempt to preserve and extend the system.

Interestingly author Steve Tsang's title is "Director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies," which is in effect non-Western studies and non-white studies. The white man's burden and all that.

Project Syndicate
What Is Xi Jinping Thought?

Steve Tsang | Director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies

Bruegel — China’s view of the trade war has changed—and so has its strategy

China’s recognition of the much more structural features of the U.S.-led trade war has also brought about a drastic change in its response to the U.S.

China has shifted from a tit-for-tat tactic based on retaliatory measures on trade to a three-pole strategy: sustaining domestic growth at any cost, finding alliances externally, and accelerating China’s upgrade of its technology capacity.…

All in all, China’s realization of the structural nature of its competition with the U.S. has led the Chinese authorities to a more strategic, rather than tactical, response to the U.S. containment push, which has characterized Sino-American bilateral relations since the beginning of the year.…

The Chinese response is now geared to the realization that China is the US crosshairs, and that the US is committed to "containing" China and ultimately toward taking China down and turning it into a colony of the empire. The response will be all out.

Bruegel
China’s view of the trade war has changed—and so has its strategy

Dong Dong Zhang — How will Xi shake up the CCP?

The 19th Congress is China’s most important political event since 2012, marking the beginning of President Xi’s second term. The new central party leadership will rule China over the next five years, a critical time for realising the vision of China’s development that Xi set out to achieve.

The Chinese Dream has set two centenary goals. The first is to double China’s 2010 per capita income, making China a ‘moderately well off’ society by 2021, the centenary of the founding of the CCP. The second aims to make China a ‘strong, democratic, civilised, harmonious and modern socialist country by 2049’, the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic....

A hundred years sounds like a long time to Americans, where the country is less than 300 years old. But a hundred years is a drop in the bucket for China, whose history extends across millennia.

East Asia Forum
How will Xi shake up the CCP?
Dong Dong Zhang

D.S.Rajan — China: Interconnection Between Tradition And Thinking Of leaders In Modern Era – Analysis

Backgrounder

Asia Review
China: Interconnection Between Tradition And Thinking Of leaders In Modern Era – Analysis

D.S.Rajan | Distinguished Fellow, Chennai Centre for China Studies, Chennai, India

Kimball Corson — China's Developing Thoughts on Statecraft

A short summary of the Chinese history of statecraft and governance from ancient times to Xi Jinping. This is a should-read unless you are up to date on it already. It's short. I think that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are pretty close on this. The US leadership not so much.

 Having studied Chinese martial arts and strategy for some time, I believe that Kimball gets it basically right. Kimball observes that the Chinese integrate various traditions into an ideology and worldview suitable for the contemporary context. Understanding this gives insight into their way of thinking.

Western people tend to adopt a single ideology based on a preferred historical view that they then interpret in contemporary terms. 

This makes Westerners seem simple to the Chinese, and the Chinese "inscrutable" to Westerners. A basic rule of strategy in the martial arts is to understand the opponent so that one knows what he is likely to do, whereas one should be invisible to the opponent, so that he does not know what you are likely to do. Hence, the Chinese have an advantage over Westerners in this regard, since Westerners send signals whereas Chinese don't.

While I am less familiar with Russian strategy, people who are familiar with it say that it is more similar to the Chinese than the Western. Additionally, Vladimir Putin has been a judoka for many years, so he presumably understands this very well.

Wandering the Oceans
China's Developing Thoughts on Statecraft
Kimball Corson