The Double Foreignness of the Chinese Communist Party

The Manchu Empire, Soviet Bolshevism, and Beijing’s Crisis of Legitimacy

By Orthogonal Proxy

The Chinese Communist Party faces a historical contradiction resembling that of the Qing Empire, but with an additional layer: it claims authority over territories inherited from a conquest empire, while its own political organization originated within the revolutionary system established by Soviet Bolshevism.

First, the Communist Party inherited the legitimacy problem of the Manchu Empire.

The Qing Empire was established through Manchu conquest and subsequent imperial expansion, bringing the Chinese heartland, Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other regions under a political order that had not existed as a single ancient nation. These societies possessed distinct histories and political traditions, and their incorporation into the empire did not erase the circumstances through which they came under its authority.

The Manchu rulers understood the vulnerability of their position. From the ideological controversies surrounding the Yongzheng emperor to British attempts during the Opium War to exploit the dynasty’s conquest origins, the legitimacy of Manchu rule remained a recurring political question.

The Communist Party inherited much of this imperial territory without resolving the underlying question of political consent. Instead, the modern concept of Zhonghua minzu, prominently articulated by Liang Qichao in 1902, became part of a national narrative that presented the territorial inheritance of an empire as the natural expression of an ancient political community.

The irony is that a revolutionary party claiming to have overthrown the old order continues to defend the territorial assumptions of the empire that preceded it. From the standpoint of political self-determination, inheriting an empire’s borders does not establish an inherent right to govern the peoples within them.

Second, the Communist Party’s organizational origins introduce a separate challenge to its legitimacy.

The Chinese Communist Party was established with the participation of representatives of the Soviet-led Communist International and formally became one of its sections in 1922. The Comintern was not an Asian independence organization but an international revolutionary institution directed from Moscow, created to extend Bolshevik political power and revolutionary ideology beyond Soviet Russia.

From an anti-Soviet Pan-Asian perspective, participation in this system represented a fundamental conflict of political allegiance: Asian revolutionaries accepted the authority of a revolutionary center outside Asia, and the organization they built eventually established its rule over vast territories of the Asian mainland.

The Manchu dynasty originated in Manchuria; the Communist Party’s institutional lineage, by contrast, leads to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Moscow. Its historical relationship with Soviet power therefore adds a second dimension to the challenge posed by its imperial territorial inheritance.

These two histories converge in the modern party-state. The Communist Party maintains a Leninist political structure while invoking a modern national identity to explain its authority over territories assembled through earlier imperial expansion.

The New Qing History challenges the territorial narrative by recovering the distinct political histories of the Qing Empire’s peoples, while the history of the Communist International exposes the Soviet revolutionary origins of the organization that later inherited much of that empire’s territory.

Together, these histories form the basis of a double challenge to the party’s political legitimacy: the absence of an automatic right to rule territories inherited from conquest, and the contradiction between its Soviet revolutionary origins and its claim to embody an ancient national political community.

Neither the conquest of an empire nor the authority of a foreign revolutionary center can, by itself, establish a legitimate and permanent right to rule the societies of Asia.