This belief has been embedded by over 2000 years of imperial rule and legitimised by Confucius, China’s most irrepressible political and social philosopher. Confucius aspired to design the perfect consensus for the enlightened management of societies of people. His prescription emphasised hierarchy and order, and he provided guidance on why and how the representatives of each strata in society should be content to honourably perform their role.

Confucius also had a great deal of advice on the qualities or virtues that a Prince (an Emperor or a President) needed to have or to acquire for the system to work at full effectiveness but he did not question the absolute necessity for an all-powerful Prince. Socialism was a tolerable imported ideology because it shares with Confucius the conviction that perfection is an attainable state in the arena of governance, and that it mandates an all-powerful leadership. China’s Communist Party is not simply authoritarian: It is also, by decree, the only permissible government. China may be the only major state in the world that declares the first mission of its military forces to be protecting the communist party’s monopoly of political power.

An institution that claims (and protects) a permanent mandate to rule must project the belief that it embodies a working approximation of the ideal form of governance. A permanent government cannot readily concede fallibility. Such a government may earnestly aspire to the ideal but it will also prefer to simulate this condition rather than see its shortcomings exposed and its citizenry contemplating whether alternative arrangements might be preferable. Compared to the China of Mao Zedong (and to other Socialist states), contemporary China has struck a new and enlightened balance in favour of attracting and encouraging compliance but none of the capacities for coercion, nor the state’s authority to use them, have been abandoned or significantly weakened.

Protecting the image of perfection remains a daunting task that attracts Beijing’s ceaseless vigilance. Contemporary versions of the Confucian model still demand permanent, pre-emptive coercion to keep the national narrative within manageable boundaries and conceal systemic flaws. There is a constant focus on preserving the secrecy of the State’s internal processes, maintaining strong control over the media (and aspiring to do the same with the internet), retaining judicial processes that are opaque and subject to adaptation and supporting an internal security apparatus large enough to provide a ubiquitous presence; all facets of governance reinforce the idea that compliance is rewarding and resistance futile.

Beijing seeks to ensure that it alone dictates the national narrative. In our contemporary globalised world, the central importance of internal compliance spills over to the international arena. Beijing cannot countenance any suggestion that a core element of its national narrative is contestable. If China’s government declares its peaceful intent and depicts every military development as benign, that there are no valid grounds for ethnic tensions within China, that its territorial claims are simply restoring what was normal in the past, that the National People’s Congress is a key part of the machinery of government, such declarations cannot be contested because it could threaten harmony within China.

It is not easy for states that regard ‘ideal’ governance as an impractical dream to deal with those who insist they living the dream. Above all, the protection of internal harmony drives Beijing to deny as absolutely as possible foreign knowledge about and influence over its internal processes. The government in Beijing cannot concede anything to foreigners that it dare not concede to its own citizens. But harmony between states is rather fundamentally grounded in perceptions of balance and reciprocity. This obviously does not mean balance in terms of power and political weight, but in terms access and opportunity to be heard.

It is precisely the Chinese government’s determination to preclude a level playing within its own borders with its own citizens that makes it difficult for Beijing to build genuine confidence about its foreign and security policy settings. The two go together. China’s insistent message that it is committed to ‘peaceful development’ and to contributing to international harmony may be substantively genuine but the deliberate impenetrability of its internal processes makes others cautious and inclined to compensate for the relative lack of checks and balances inside China through supporting external checks and balances.

China is all but certain to become the most productive economy in the world by mid-century and to possess commensurate military capacities. This will mean that its pre-eminence in East Asia in particular will be literally absolute. Beijing will possess, and manipulate, levers of power and influence that even states as big as Australia will find very hard to resist or deflect. This power and influence may, at one level, be as legitimate as it is inevitable. But Beijing’s notion of harmony could, equally, become elastic and require forms of deference to China’s interests that we prefer not to indulge.

Australian governments will have to strike an on-going balance between recognising and responding to China as the comprehensively pre-eminent state in East Asia and the hesitations we might have because of China’s determination to minimise access and influence for external actors and its ‘requirement’ that foreign actors not question the means it employs to protect the government’s permanent mandate to rule.

Ron Huisken is Senior Fellow, Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.