Old habits die hard, especially among elites who mistake nostalgia for strategy.
In Washington, Brussels and several European capitals, there remains a persistent, albeit diminished, belief that the Chinese Communist Party can still be coaxed into a grand bargain — that Beijing can be persuaded to “help” end wars in Ukraine or the Middle East, to stabilize global markets, or to correct the trade imbalances and intellectual property thefts that it has spent decades perfecting.
China, in this telling, is implied not to be a principal source of disorder but an indispensable partner whose cooperation must be patiently cultivated. This belief survives not because it is supported by evidence but because abandoning it would require acknowledging that one of the central assumptions of post-Cold War engagement with a morally and ideologically unredeemable communist government has failed.
International order rests on a simple proposition: that law restrains power. Treaties matter only if states accept that rules bind them even when compliance is inconvenient. China’s record demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party rejects this proposition outright. Communist China is not a state that occasionally breaks rules. It is a serial, deliberate and structural violator of international agreements.
The cause is neither cultural misunderstanding nor diplomatic friction. It is communism itself. Across every major domain — trade, security, human rights and regional diplomacy — the pattern is unmistakable.
China signs agreements to gain entry, legitimacy, time or advantage.
Once those benefits are secured, the obligations are reinterpreted, diluted and eventually discarded. This is not drift. It is doctrine. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 was hailed as a triumph of integration. It was premised on sweeping commitments: market opening, transparency, nondiscrimination, and meaningful limits on state intervention.
Twenty years later, the results speak for themselves. State subsidies dominate entire sectors. The party sits inside firms. Technology transfer is coerced. Regulation remains opaque and political.
For China, WTO rules were never intended to discipline the party; they were used to enrich and empower it. The same cynicism governed Hong Kong.
The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration was not a vague political statement; it was a binding, registered international treaty guaranteeing autonomy and civil liberties until 2047.
Once sovereignty was secured, Beijing declared the agreement obsolete and dismantled Hong Kong’s institutions piece by piece. This was not an unfortunate breach. It was a calculated abandonment.
Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, China accepted binding arbitration and then rejected a lawful ruling in 2016 that invalidated its South China Sea claims. It continues to militarize contested waters and coerce its neighbors.
In bilateral agreements with India, China pledged restraint and confidence-building measures along the Line of Actual Control, but then deployed forces and altered the facts on the ground.
In refugee and torture conventions, China accepted non-refoulement obligations. It then continued to return vulnerable populations to persecution and committed crimes against humanity and genocide in places such as Xinjiang, Tibet and other regions within Beijing’s sovereign domain.
These are not isolated failures. They are a consistent operating method: sign first, benefit immediately, comply selectively, deny accountability indefinitely. Apologists respond with a familiar refrain: All countries violate treaties. This argument is not only false in practice but also evasive in intent.
Democracies and communist regimes violate agreements in fundamentally different ways.
When democracies breach obligations, violations are contested, constrained and reversible. Courts intervene. Legislatures investigate. Governments explain themselves, lose cases, pay penalties, amend laws, or withdraw openly from agreements they no longer wish to honor.
Violations are treated as failures within a system that still accepts the rule of law.
China’s violations are different in kind. Under Marxist-Leninist rule, the party is supreme. Law is subordinate. Treaties are not constraints on power; they are tools to be used against others. When enforcement arises, Beijing does not adjust its behavior. It denies jurisdiction, rewrites obligations or simply refuses to comply.
This is why moral equivalence collapses. Democracies occasionally break rules they believe bind them. The Chinese Communist Party constantly breaks rules it never accepted.
For decades, Western policy toward China was built on wishful thinking: that participation would moderate behavior, that promises reflected intent, that tomorrow’s China would honor today’s commitments. That hope has failed, decisively. China’s rhetoric is calibrated for reassurance. Its actions are calibrated for control.
As Ronald Reagan understood in dealing with the Soviet Union, peace with adversaries is not built on trust but on verification — and consequences.
Mike Pompeo updated that logic for Beijing: distrust and verify.
Even verification, however, is meaningless if violations carry no cost. Agreements based on goodwill and ambiguity do not restrain communist systems. They reward them.
The conclusion is unavoidable. The world must never again take China’s words for granted. Statements, communiques and white papers are not evidence. Behavior is.
Nowhere is this lesson more urgent than in decisions about China’s place in international institutions. China’s entry into the WTO was granted on the basis of what China might become, not what it was. The result was not convergence but corrosion of the system itself.
That mistake must not be repeated.
China’s membership, privileges and leadership roles in international organizations must be grounded exclusively in demonstrated conduct. Where compliance cannot be enforced, access must be denied. Where obligations are ignored, privileges must be withdrawn. This is not hostility. It is prudence.
Communism is incompatible with a rules-based international order because it rejects the sovereignty of rules. In Beijing’s logic, the party is sovereign, and the law is conditional. Agreements bind others, never itself.
The international system can tolerate diversity of governments. It cannot survive systematic bad faith. Engagement without enforcement is not diplomacy; it is illusion.
The task ahead is to stop fantasizing about the CCP’s transformation. It is to deal with China as it is, clear-eyed, conditional and grounded in reality. That was the lesson of the Cold War. It remains the lesson today.