Totalitarianism
The exposition above is to show the mental and behavioural entrapment of monolithic regimes in the world if citizens allow the free market to atrophy. Soviet Russia and China, despite tremendously intelligent functionaries and entrepreneurs that rivalled Western counterparts, had to go through what they did because of the government’s ideology. The road to serfdom is not due to tradition, race, social structure, or any factor that appears to be associated with the character traits of a people. It is due to deliberate adoption and absorption of an ideology, the belief system of those that carry no doubt about them being right and others wrong, that they are morally superior to those who disagree with them, and that others must submit to their views and practices lest torture or death be visited upon them. It’s the last demand and threat that usually lead to war.
Ideology establishes and enforces mandatory personal behaviour and socio-political economic structure. These enforcements suppress any inherited culture with vicious efficacy. German efficiency was hijacked in the late 1930s by a monolithic ideology whose proponents unleashed brutally on the citizenry through divide-and-conquer, segments of society accusing and killing one another. China’s thousands-year old culture meant nothing when children were brainwashed and incited by Mao’s Red Guards to prosecute and persecute their parents and grandparents for bourgeois sins. Only when culture is rescued and allowed to be exercised in a free market open society that it can aid a community to flourish – such as Chinese culture in Taiwan, Singapore, pre-2019 Hong Kong, and in diaspora communities in the West. Even Trotsky’s treatises on Marxism retained his totalitarian view of the world even though he classified them as anti-authoritarian, which was only anti-Stalin. Deng Xiaoping, for all his genius in seeing that collectivism could not work despite being bred and fed in that bubble of collectivism himself, still managed to fall back onto violent suppression of dissent instead of allowing Chinese protestors at Tiananmen Square to have a voice.
In his book The Proto-totalitarian State: Punishment and Control in Absolutist Regimes, Dmitry Shlapentokh uses the term “absolutist” to describe regimes with totalitarian characteristics. He argues that these “brutal absolutist” states, like France in the 14th to 16th centuries, emerged to quell social disorder and share features with modern totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and China. He emphasises that the drive for order, rather than ideology alone, led to repressive control, challenging the notion that totalitarianism is solely a modern phenomenon. Shlapentokh does not explicitly include ideology driven states such as Iran’s ayatollah regime or radical religious orders that have attained government power in his definition of “absolutist” regimes within his book. His analysis centres on secular absolutist states and their proto-totalitarian characteristics, driven by the need for order rather than ideological or religious motivations.
Yet, Shlapentokh’s framework – emphasising centralised control, repression, and punishment to maintain order – could theoretically apply to regimes like Iran’s theocratic government, where a radical religious order enforces strict control. The characteristics he ascribes to absolutist regimes (centralised authority, suppression of dissent, extensive punishment systems) could be paralleled with Iran’s ayatollah-led government, though he does not make this connection explicitly. Is there a definition that better describes totalitarian regimes with a penchant for control beyond just order and stability, that encompasses ideology and belief system like Fascism, Marxism and Islamic Caliphate as a whole? Better still, that can also describe the petulance of “the Left” as characterised in the West?
In A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell assigns absolutist tendencies (without saying so) to his Unconstrained Vision, as opposed to the Constrained Vision, side. This differentiation describes the two types of regimes more fully than Shlapentokh’s. Totalitarian regimes are often defined in ways that emphasise not just the pursuit of order and control but also the central role of a comprehensive ideology that justifies and drives the total domination of society, economy, and individual life. One prominent definition comes from Hannah Arendt in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she describes totalitarianism as a form of government that seeks absolute power through terror, propaganda, and a monolithic ideology that claims to explain all of history and reality, aiming to create a “new man” or perfect society.
This ideology is not merely a tool for stability but a pseudo-scientific or pseudo-religious doctrine that mobilises the masses, eliminates opposition, and justifies pervasive control over all spheres of life, including private thoughts and behaviours. Arendt explicitly applies this to Nazi Germany (Fascism/Nazism) and Stalinist Soviet Union (Marxism-Leninism), highlighting how both used ideologies to atomise society and enforce total loyalty. This definition extends beyond mere order-seeking by incorporating the transformative, utopian elements of ideology. Fascism under Mussolini and Hitler promoted a nationalist, racial, or corporatist ideology that glorified the state and leader as embodiments of historical destiny, demanding total subordination for societal regeneration. Marxism, as implemented in communist regimes, relies on dialectical materialism as an all-encompassing ideology promising classless utopia through proletarian dictatorship and state control. Similarly, Islamist regimes or movements aspiring to an Islamic caliphate (ISIS, Taliban or Iran’s theocracy) fit this framework, as they impose a totalitarian interpretation of sharia and jihadist ideology to enforce moral purity, global dominance, and societal restructuring, often through terror and idea indoctrination.
Scholars Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski further refined this in their “six-point syndrome” of totalitarianism: an official ideology; a single mass party led by a dictator; a system of terror; monopoly over mass communications; monopoly over weapons; and a centrally directed economy – all geared toward ideological goals rather than just stability. This provides a more comprehensive lens than Shlapentokh’s focus on fear of disorder, as it integrates ideology as the engine for control. Sowell’s distinction between the “constrained” and “unconstrained” visions of human nature offers an even broader, more wholistic way to categorise the underlying philosophies that can lead to different types of regimes, including totalitarian ones. The unconstrained vision assumes human nature is malleable and perfectible through reason and intentional design, leading to beliefs in utopian solutions, moral progress, and the ability of “anointed” elites to reshape society without inherent trade-offs. This often manifests in ideologies like Marxism, which envisions a classless society engineered by centralised planning, or certain strains of fascism, which seek to create a new being through state-imposed nationalist collectivism. In contrast, the constrained vision views human nature as inherently flawed and self-interested, favouring evolved traditions, markets, and checks on power to manage limitations, which aligns more with limited-government systems like classical liberalism that undergird Western free market open societies.
Sowell’s framework describes the unconstrained vision further: It’s the belief in human perfectibility that justifies total control to eliminate flaws and achieve ideological ideals, encompassing fascism’s racial/nationalist rebirth, Marxism’s economic determinism, and Islamist caliphates’ ritualistic order. However, Sowell’s focus is quite different from Shlapentokh’s. Sowell examines broad philosophical visions underlying ideological conflicts across history, emphasising human nature’s role in shaping politics without delving deeply into specific historical regimes or mechanisms of control. Shlapentokh, conversely, concentrates on historical “proto totalitarian” absolutist states (eg, early modern France) driven primarily by pragmatic fear of chaos and disorder, where ideology plays a secondary role to repression and stability. While Shlapentokh’s analysis is more grounded in empirical historical patterns of punishment and control, often de-emphasising ideology as the primary driver, Sowell’s unconstrained vision, coupled with Arendt’s monolithic ideology inclusion, theoretically and pragmatically explain the ideological zeal in modern totalitarianism. Taken together, these three views of totalitarianism provide us with an abstract, descriptive and explanatory anchor of ideological origins and uncompromising regime operations.
For free societies, therefore, teaching or proposing absolutist, monolithic ideologies bathed in an unconstrained vision of humanity should be seen as criminal. For, on the one hand, we have had a few thousand years of history of how humanity has evolved, against tremendous odds, to form the most humane, free and meaningful societies that ever existed. On the other, we also have a half-millennium record of how totalitarian ideologies and regimes have abused human beings in the most inhumane fashion, in meticulously detailed accounts. But for our respect for liberties, there is no reason, given empirical evidence and case precedents, why we should keep allowing these ideologies to be freely propagated.
As Western economies developed, suffrage was introduced in many forms and angles. Recognition of native populations, low-income males, unemployed citizens, women, minority groups, came in gradually, with the result that the West became stronger and richer with increasing access to full contribution from all segments of its population. The caveat here is that such liberation was brought about with advance in free market capitalism as an economic system. The free market gives societies three basic efficiencies that authoritarian regimes cannot match:
Technical efficiency
Productive efficiency
Allocative efficiency
These efficiencies free all market participants from artificial trappings such as ethnicity, background tradition, social caste, personal preferences, religion.
The first efficiency refers to the ability of all individuals to learn and apply the same knowledge. This is proven by the spread of science and uptake of knowledge across the globe with the advent of means of transportation and communications. Off-shoring, on-shoring, moving locations for logistical purposes and supply chains, in international trade shows this to be true. Even lack of opportunities doesn’t prevent success in the world of free market. Well-to-do youngsters learning from gated estate clubhouses or poor household youths doing schoolwork late at night in the street to use free lamp light and escape the indoor heat, they both can acquire a valuable trade or get to the top at a top university at home or abroad – in a meritocratic system.
The second efficiency refers to the ability of people to organise mass production and commercialisation of their knowledge. Small business, large business, all types of enterprise can flourish and have flourished, across the world as Western socio-economic standards and codes are adopted and adapted – eg, from making motorcars to designing red lights and traffic rules. Steve Jobs’ establishment of Apple in the U.S. is as legendary as Terry Gou’s set-up of Foxconn in Taiwan and China. In today’s world, fierce competition among nations and firms testifies to the productive efficiency of all people.
The third efficiency refers to the freedom that the market has in responding to consumer needs. Individuals and firms take the market price, the most accurate and immediate signal that consumers give to producers, to tell the latter to increase or decrease supply of which goods or services. This efficiency is the most difficult to achieve and differs significantly between societies. It is the arbiter of whether a society is free or controlled unduly by government, which has all the temptation to tamper with price to swing national resources to where they want a society to be. For the third efficiency, a free market, liberal democracy wins hands down as productive resources are mobilised to satisfy social needs and wants much more accurately than a controlling government would want or be able to do based on its own wants and needs. Since government is just a group of privileged individuals, any lack of transparency in how government authority is applied inevitably leads to corruption and abuse of power and a waste of valuable resources. This is why a monolithic, absolutist ideology foisted on a society will lead to its demise with the atrophy of allocative freedom and thus eventual misdirection of technical and productive efficiency. The Soviet Union provides the clearest evidence of a totalitarian regime losing to the West not on the universal technical and productive talents but on the economic political structure of its society. The CCP governance system corroborates this evidence with its own experiences of inbuilt political and financial corruption amid economic success through integration with the capitalist world.
Learning from the Soviets and China’s own horrific experiences under Mao, Deng Xiaoping played a completely different game by moving allegiance from communist doctrine to a hybrid single-party state with a partially free market for the masses. This transition ceased Marxism as we knew it and turned China into a fascist-capitalist system with Chinese characteristics. But it was good enough in the short term as it returned the correct incentive structure to workers – they would have some private property rights, and they could keep much of what they produced. A far cry from state piracy of all their output under Mao.
The other critical lesson taken by China from the Soviet era was not to operate in separation from the capitalist world as the Soviet Union did, since China needed allocative efficiency without turning itself into a liberal democracy. China eagerly took up the U.S.’s offer to become part of the West. This integration helped China resolve somewhat the third efficiency challenges by using Western proxies for price signals. The teams of Western economists at the World Bank and IMF acting as canaries in the mine for Beijing helped feed price signals relatively efficiently from the West’s consumer market to Chinese producers. Mega trends and micro trends from the former are sent to the latter via both monetary and fiscal policy. If supply and demand were misaligned in China for whatever reason, Beijing would receive warnings from Western sources, which had access to China’s economy’s full information base. Western experts provided China with all forms of modelling and policy advice and project capital, a partnership that proved extremely successful for China. Over time, the proxy canaries became more populous with business-to-business connections as well as person-to-person relationships with oceans of transactions between the economies.
Under the PRC Company Law (Article 19, enacted in 1993 and amended multiple times), all companies operating in China – including foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and joint ventures (JVs) – must “support the work of the Communist Party of China” and provide facilities for CCP activities if there are three or more party members among employees. This often leads to the establishment of CCP “party committees” or “cells” in firms, particularly in sensitive sectors like finance, where the CCP exerts influence through oversight and ideological alignment. Foreign firms, including Western financial JVs (eg, Goldman Sachs with China International Capital Corp, or BlackRock partnerships), frequently host such committees, and employees may face pressure to join the CCP for career advancement. By parking cells and committees in foreign JVs inside and outside China, and foreign companies operating in China, Beijing managed to go around the allocative efficiency barrier. This applies particularly with Western top-tier financial firms, which usually have comprehensive economic analyses for China to plug in for free.
PRC laws including Company Law, Foreign Investment Law (2019), Sino-Foreign Equity Joint Venture Law, CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission) regulations, and foreign investment guidelines do not mandate tying CCP membership to top economic roles or executive positions in JVs. JV governance focuses on board composition, capital contributions, and decision-making rights, with foreign partners often holding veto powers on key appointments. However, the CCP influence is unmistakable. JVs’ party cells advise on policy alignment with the PRC government routinely and the JVs’ Chinese partner (often state-linked) can insist on legal rights to top position hires if they insist. The practical realities in finance JVs are that CCP membership is common (and sometimes de facto expected) for senior roles in China-linked firms, especially in state-owned banks or regulated sectors, due to career incentives and networking. For instance:
Anecdotal claims suggest high CCP membership rates among Asian chief economists (up to 95% per Hayman Capital’s chief Kyle Bass), but this is not a legal rule and it applies broadly, not just to JVs.
In firms like Ernst & Young or Mercedes-Benz China, party members may display badges, but non-members hold executive roles.
CSRC chairs and regulators are CCP members, but this doesn’t extend to JV executives.
De facto pressures are visible in that, while the CCP’s “United Front” strategy embeds influence in private and foreign firms via 2018-21 regulations strengthening party cells, membership remains voluntary for individuals. Foreign partners can negotiate JV contracts to protect hiring autonomy, though compliance with CCP “guidance” is often pragmatic to avoid regulatory hurdles. Non-compliance risks scrutiny though no blanket executive membership mandate exists.
With this pervasive informal influence and intelligence at the economic and financial system policy level, the command economy could then function with a market in the lower half to engender private sector incentives and productive efficiency like in a free market. The top half of the economy would still run as a pretend Marxist state, where the dictatorship is that of the elite cabal rather than proletariat, just like in any other dictatorship. The top 0.1% of China’s population that belonged to the CCP’s outer circles formed the largest centripetal “pyramid” scheme that ever existed. While about 7% of China’s population is registered to belong to the CCP, most of the members act as cannon fodder for the upper echelons, like mules in drug rings. They are liaison rank and file that cop foremost the resentment of the populace should anything go wrong. But over time, they will move inwards to the outer layer, then towards the centre, each layer offering additional privileges, a centripetal investment structure that ensures their loyalty. Since Mao’s era, it’s been the multi-generational membership class in the CCP that is distributed privileges and that enforces the single-party power structure through its control of the military, determination of local and national goals to serve the party, the laws and regulations to achieve those goals, the adjudication of disputes, direction for economic production, assignment as political commissars in private and commercial entities, and the distribution of wealth. Unlike armies in the West that swear allegiance to Constitution and country, China’s military swears allegiance to the CCP.
Without outward exchange of learnings, the CCP regime would have come to a dead end due to gradual loss of allocative efficiency – if it weren’t for Western canaries in the mine. Being part of the supply chain in the West enabled the CCP to navigate China’s economy safely. Left to its own devices, China’s economy would slide to a permanent state of disequilibrium and eventually collapse under the weight of its imbalances. Decoupling from the West is not something that China’s dictatorship could survive. By offering economic integration, with the hope that China would turn into a Germany or Japan with economic growth, the U.S. inadvertently helped China sustain its fascist regime. Such hope of a democratised PRC, in hindsight, is exceedingly naïve. Unlike other countries that had been aided by the U.S. to transit successfully to democracies, the CCP has never denied its core ideology as communist as per its namesake. At various junctions of history, the U.S. could have pressed China to take the right step forward, such as during Tiananmen Square, but it didn’t. By being sensitive and diplomatic, the U.S. and the West deliberately distanced themselves from the millions of Chinese people who wanted reform and liberty. This played out again in 2019 with the West’s acceptance of the CCP’s bludgeoning of Hong Kong democracy – 27 years early since the handover was predicated on 50 years of one country-two system existence. The clear signal was, you can be communist or fascist, but if you can supply us with quality products at low prices, we’ll ignore your internal atrocities.
The argument that the West should not assume the right to interfere with other countries’ sovereignty is a facile and confusing one. Hiding behind this excuse can make us unstuck in our dealings with a variety of issues around the world. Who gives us the right to call out China on the subjugation of Tibet and Uyghurs or sanction Russia for invading Ukraine? To issue U.N. arrest warrants for Israeli officials for self-defence against terrorists, or sign away sovereign citizens’ rights to the WHO in emergency pandemic response? Australia makes routine calls on various issues of sovereignty of other countries at international forums, sometimes superficial and sometimes material, eg in support for two-state solution in Palestine. There is no reason why it shouldn’t condemn formally illegal or inhumane activities in China. If there is a standard for human rights, it should apply to all and not some, regardless of national borders. Human rights cannot be preserved only for the rich capitalist societies. If this sounds too idealistic for international relations, then let’s do away with the U.N. and bring all the money back to spend on national matters only. Maybe that is what we should be advocating as an option. This course of action might lead the world to a more cohesive West, more cohesive nation states.
The China Cartographer
China is a unitary socialist state. There are two overarching strata to the Chinese system of government – the nation’s government proper (called the PRC’s Central Government) and the Chinese Communist Party with the latter being senior. There is no formally recognised analogue to this structure in the West, so it is worth understanding China’s Government and the procedure by which directives from the summit are executed on the ground.
The nation’s Government is comprised of a unicameral legislative body, called the National People’s Congress (NPC), headed by its Chairman, Zhao Leji – somewhat analogous to the Speaker of the House in the United States Congress. The formal executive branch is the State Council, led by the Government’s chief executive, Premier Li Qiang. This position is de jure (though not de facto) analogous to the office of the President in the United States. As with the legislative and executive branches in the West, the NPC legislates and the State Council acts. The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) rounds out the third branch of government. The SPC is headed by its president, Zhang Jun, and its Judicial Committee is manned by judges. Note that unlike in the Anglophonic democracies, neither the President of the SPC nor the other judges possess the authority to invalidate laws passed by the NPC that run counter to a higher constitution. That power is vested in the China Communist Party’s Standing Committee.
The Chinese Communist Party is superordinate to the Central People’s Government in all respects. Of the three strata of the Party, the Central Committee is the largest and lowest. 205 full members and 171 alternate members sit this chamber with many also holding seats in the NPC and State Council, entrenching a tight coupling between Party and State. Each year, the Central Committee convenes a Plenum to discuss policy and play a consultative role for the higher rungs. From the Party’s Central Committee, an elite council of 24 high-ranking Party members are elected to the Party’s Politburo (a portmanteau of “Political Bureaucracy") to wield greater and more centralised power. Whereas the broader Central Committee assembles once per year, the Politburo gathers regularly to conduct its work. This body engages in more executive functions than the dialogical Central Committee and takes charge on implementation. The final rung is the Standing Committee, comprised of the seven hierarchs that hold suzerainty over all of China. At its apex sits Xi Jinping: General Secretary of the CCP and autocrat to 1.4 billion individuals. Thus, we have a delineation between the bodies of the State and the Party organs that stand above the State. The NPC (legislature), State Council (executive), and Supreme People’s Court (judicial) go about their dutiful business of managing the country for the Standing Committee. The next question concerns the mechanisms by which the CCP exercises control. How are directives from on high implemented below?
The default protocol sees policies formulated in the Politburo or Standing Committee, then handed down to the NPC for encoding in explicit legislation, and finally delivered to the State Council for action, but there also exist more flexible instruments. Central Leading Groups, Joint Party-State Bodies, and Party Committees in Enterprises represent three distinct aparati available to the Party. Central Leading Groups (CLGs) form from high-ranking Party officials, members of Government, military figures, and other movers-and-shakers within China. CLGs are somewhat ad hoc bodies that are convened around a particular policy area and play a key role in formulating and coordinating policy (for example, the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms). They sit high in the hierarchy and are strategic in nature. This coordinating aspect makes them rather interesting to foreign eyes. These fora of Party technocrats and stakeholders from the breadth of society engage in broad and centralised decision making that lesser structures carry out. Unaccountable to the citizenry of China, they rule like a Curia Regis.
Joint Party-State Bodies (JPSBs) are more formal and long-lived arrangements than the ad hoc CLGs but sit subordinate. Similar in modus operandi to leading groups, Joint Party-State Bodies are stood up to translate Party desires into state policy. Besides formality and longevity, the difference between CLGs and JPSBs seems to be in scope – CLGs are strategic in nature whereas JPSBs engage with the structures of national Government (the NPC and State Council) to ensure compliance with Party objectives. For more nuanced control, the Party leans on Party Committees in Enterprise (PCEs). Employ three CCP members and a company will establish a Party Branch. Employ forty members and a Party Committee is set up. The role of the PCE is to keep Party wishes forefront in corporate decision-making. Corporate activities should align with the broad societal objectives invented by the Leading Groups and to this end, PCEs keep the company ‘honest’ (or humbled, at any rate). But the input of the PCE extends beyond ensuring corporate actions align with Party dictates – PCEs also carry weight in corporate governance and personnel decisions. It’s not enough to abide, a firm must embody. So, we have a high-level view of the totalitarian system that reigns in the People’s Republic of China. Three branches of Government form the nation’s body and a solitary Party commands it. Through Central Leading Groups, the Party generates far-reaching strategy for the nation. Through Joint Party-State Bodies, these decrees are codified into the explicit structure of society. Through Party Committees in Enterprise, corporations are compelled to align with Party standards of societal ideals, corporate governance, and personnel selection.
This is the structure under another name based on which absolutists in the West, together with transnational plotters, want Western society to be formed for their own benefits. They have spent the last few decades patiently capturing vital institutions, putting thoughts into school children, who have grown up believing in a devilish system coated in terms of compassion, fairness, inclusion, equality, while building, block by block, the tyrannical end game they long for. For once individual liberties have been extinguished at the altar of a greater collectivist good, there will be nothing left to gird critical thinking and counterargument against conformity, to keep tyranny in check and away.
And the kicker is this:
Indoctrinated school children that grow up to be “socialist” adults tend to see the end-game tyranny through rose-coloured glasses because they usually envision themselves belonging to and participating in the dictatorship – or at least not being negatively affected by its arbitrary or corrupt decisions. Reality is that 99.9% of the populace would be serfs under such a regime because most of us do not have the capacity to be amoral or immoral or live a double life.
Long term, collectivist dictatorships always fall, leaving behind a country in anarchy. Large government fails, and the larger it is the more complete it shall fail. The only question is how long it would take for it to fall.
Both outcomes point to the futility of absolutists’ effort in turning a free market liberal society into a monolithic regime. The irony is that they may succeed in executing this turn, but their goals will never materialise. Their children would never be able to enjoy any of their false dreams, their legacy could only be ruins and mass graves, like the Cambodian Killing Fields.
