The release of a manifesto titled “US Hegemony and its Perils”  by Communist China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signals Beijing’s interest in winning not just trade wars and maritime skirmishes, but the battle of ideas. In hoping to conquer the future, the communists are doubling down on rewriting the past. 

One hundred and seventy four years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto,” their purported heirs in the Far East are back on the propaganda beat. The new manifesto was issued two days ago on the English-language web site of the communist ministry.

The broadside comes at a strained moment in America-Sino relations, with balloons overhead and backroom diplomacy over arming Russia. It runs to more than 4,000 words and will no doubt be echoed in coming seasons by the increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist diplomats and editors.

Beijing asserts that “since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars.”

The Chinese accuse America of deploying a “hegemonic playbook,” and offer this report to “expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields.” In particular, the report identifies the International Monetary Fund, Bretton Woods, and the Marshall Plan as engines of control.

Part of that control, China alleges, is America’s imposition of “double standards” when it comes to freedom of the press. The ministry points not to its own mouthpieces but efforts to “bar mainstream Russian media such as Russia Today and the Sputnik from their countries.”

The constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees “freedom of speech” and of the press, but that is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Reporters Without Borders calls Communist China the “world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”

President Xi’s functionaries cover the cultural dimensions of American influence, as well. When “Hollywood movies descend on the world,” they write, those films “scream the American values tied to them.” America, Beijing believes, “skilfully exploits its cultural diversity to appeal to various ethnicities.”

The report’s authors appear to be attentive readers of the Twitter Files, arguing that the “U.S. government strictly censors all social media companies and demands their obedience.” Like good historical materialists, though, they maintain that the “hegemony of the U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy.”

In a stylistic nod to its Confucian past, the Communist Party notes that “while a just cause wins its champion wide support, an unjust one condemns its pursuer to be an outcast.” To this end, it chides that the “United States must conduct serious soul-searching” as to its conduct on the world stage.  

Communist China, on the other hand, “opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs.” America, it urges, must “let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.”