When Xi Jinping sat across from President Trump in Beijing in May, he reached for a borrowed phrase. Could the two nations, he asked, avoid the “Thucydides Trap”—the ancient pattern, described by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, in which a rising power and a ruling one stumble into war?
It sounded statesmanlike, almost conciliatory. Later this month Xi arrives in Washington for a return visit, and he may reach for the phrase again.
Beijing keeps using it because it works. To understand why, I called Chenggang Xu. A scholar who lived in the Chinese system himself, Xu is the author of “Institutional Genes,” a 2025 book that traces how China fused Soviet communism with its own imperial bureaucracy into a totalitarian system built to resist reform.
Xu’s answer starts with the theory itself. The “Thucydides Trap” is seductive, he said, because it empties the contest of everything that matters. “This is a story borrowed from ancient Greece. In that story there are no different systems—only two powers, a rising one and an old one. The Chinese Communists love it, because they don’t want people to know that they are different.”
Different how? Xu’s life’s work rests on a distinction many in Washington and elsewhere have waved away: China isn’t authoritarian but totalitarian. In an ordinary authoritarian state, however brutal, some independent institutions survive—be they a church, a temple, a nongovernmental organization—so long as they stay out of politics. A totalitarian party allows none of it. Every organization must be controlled by the party.
That distinction matters because it shapes policy. Put something in the wrong category, Xu said, and “you apply a whole set of policy tools in the wrong way.” Call Beijing a normal rising power, and you treat its outward expansion as ordinary great-power rivalry—a competition to be managed, balanced, and split into spheres.
Accepting the framing, Xu said to me, “comes at a tremendous cost” to the West: it lets an outward-pushing party-state pass as an ordinary competitor.
Xu knows this not only as a scholar, now at Stanford University after years in Hong Kong and London, but from experience. He was a teenage “revolutionary rebel” when the Cultural Revolution erupted in the 1960s. By 19, he had been branded the head of a “counterrevolutionary clique.” The charge, he said, was fabricated: He was a student trading ideas with others in different schools and places, accused of leading a network across nine provinces.
His real offense, he came to believe, was the one thing a totalitarian party can’t allow: organized reading and exchanging ideas outside it. He suffered years of hard labor in the Great Northern Wilderness.
Xu argued that today’s China, which he describes as a “totalitarian system with Chinese characteristics,” is a continuation of the Cultural Revolution. In his view, that upheaval was the clearest expression of the party’s founding logic: Mao’s doctrine of permanent revolution, in which the state must keep manufacturing enemies and crushing any organization it doesn’t control. That logic, Xu said, was never repudiated, only suspended during the reform years. Under Xi it has returned. The system that branded him at 19 is, in his telling, the same one governing China today.
Beijing has never allowed a full public reckoning with that era, and under Xi daily life has grown more surveilled and tightly policed—even as the country pours resources into artificial intelligence and the tools of a high-tech state. The instruments are new. The instinct, Xu argued, is old.
He doesn’t speak as an ideologue. A Harvard-trained economist, Xu was for a long time a hopeful man. In the early 1990s, he advised Shanghai’s city government on state-enterprise reforms as a World Bank consultant. He believed, like so many others, that markets might loosen the party’s grip.
“I was very hopeful that China could reform, and that reform could lead to democracy,” he told me. “I was not sure, but I was hopeful.”
Indeed, the private sector grew and civil society expanded, though the party retained ultimate control over society. Xu’s hope even showed up in the scholarly record. In one of his most-cited papers, published in 2011, a year before Xi’s rise to power, he coined a careful, almost optimistic label for China’s system: “regionally decentralized authoritarianism.” Authoritarian, note, not totalitarian. He saw a partial erosion of totalitarian rule taking place.
Then Xi took power. Instead of the reforms many expected, he reversed course—and in doing so, Xu said, made the nature of the regime impossible to ignore. Xu believes that Xi, as a product of the totalitarian system himself, isn’t alone in making such a reversal.
The question is whether Washington will listen to Xu—or to the chorus still insisting that the man arriving in town this month leads a normal rising power.
How should the U.S. think about China—as a rising great power, a totalitarian state, or something else? Write to me at lingling.wei@wsj.com. Include your full name and location, and I might publish your response in a coming issue (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).
This is an edition of the WSJ China newsletter, a weekly dispatch of exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S. and China, brought to you by the WSJ’s top China correspondent. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.
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Reader Responses
Last week, we asked what stands out to you about how tradition is treated in Taiwan or China. Readers shared their thoughts:
“I relished reading the description of your meal in Taichung. I was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. Much of my life has been lived in the comforts of America’s bucolic suburbs. However, I will always look back with fondness and nostalgia at the way of life in Taiwan. This way of living was aptly described by you in your article. I recently made a sojourn back to Taiwan after a 20-year absence. I was completely overtaken by the beauty that exists in its infrastructure, cuisine, and general hospitable, polite culture. Much to my joy, I found the locals friendly and ready to engage with me even though it was evident I was a tourist. This is the Taiwan that continues to draw me back, not just because of the nostalgia that transports me back to my childhood, but because of the way it has flourished in the last 50 years, seeking always to improve and advance the quality of life on Formosa.”—Tracey Dirkin, California
“In Taiwan, whether in a corporate boardroom or a neighborhood teahouse, hosts prepare Gongfu tea with effortless ease. It is a breathing, unpretentious part of daily life—a shared pause to savor the aroma, appreciate the lingering finish, and humanize conversation. On the mainland, however, the refinement of tea frequently tilts toward a display of wealth, rank, and hierarchy. The phenomenon of ‘financial tea’ (jinrong cha)—where vintage Pu’er or rare Wuyi rock tea commands astronomical prices purely as speculative commodities to flip rather than as something to drink—is telling. The anxiety of signaling status through the price tag of what is poured often suffocates the tea itself.”—Shinya Hanamura, Japan
About Us
WSJ China is a weekly newsletter with exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S. and China, brought to you by WSJ Chief China Correspondent Lingling Wei, with help from Zhao Yueling. Reach Lingling at lingling.wei@wsj.com or at @Lingling_Wei on X (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply). Sign up to get an alert every time she publishes an article. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.