Leaked Communist Party documents suggest that the people ruling China, starting with Xi himself, are deeply paranoid and ideologically hostile to all forms of liberal influence. They see Western notions of constitutional democracy, human rights, free journalism, civil society, and open dissent as weapons that Western powers—above all the United States—use to weaken the Communist Party and China, which party leaders view as one and the same thing.8 “Without the conspiracy of Western liberalism,” Australian journalist-turned-policymaker John Garnaut has written, the Chinese Communist Party
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