One of the Communist Party’s outstanding feats, one of its greatest successes, is the creation of an intangible, terrifying impression of a vast invisible force, a monster in the next room. It has no name, no identity. It is the spirit of the party, the ghosts of the “Revolutionary Martyrs.” Even the leaders themselves are afraid of it. If you cannot give something a name, you cannot speak to it or reason with it. All you can do is fear it.

The system thrives on fear. Yet the party is itself very afraid — of the people. Hence the censorship and punishment of those who dare to speak out.

Now the party’s monster is striking fear into the Western world. It controls the only hope, as the leaders of the West would have it, for the world economy. It must be appeased. Yet leaders of Western governments and major corporations rail against the censorship, the repression of writers and thinkers and human rights. Such double standards delight the Chinese Communist Party. It has co-opted the West into playing by its own rules, where hypocrisy is Rule No.1, where everyone is guilty to some extent and can be held to account at the convenience of whoever is in charge.

And the world is putting China in charge. It is a very old and very clever Chinese political maneuver. To the party, Chinese supremacy is only natural, a reversion to how things should always have been, if not for the Industrial Revolution and a few other blips in world history. China is the rightful leader of the civilized world.

As did the suzerain states that surrounded it centuries ago, the world again sends tribute in the hope that China will treat it with favor, and the party takes that as confirmation of its elevated position, takes the tribute for granted and sees the donor as weak, while the foreign government or corporation congratulates itself on being promised access to the Chinese market, or Chinese investment in its country or companies. They forget, or ignore the fact, that the Chinese market is for the Chinese, and so are the profits.

At the APEC conference in Beijing in early November, China censorship, how it works, how it should be stood up to, and how Western governments could deal with it came together in one brief moment at the final press conference. A New York Times journalist asked President Xi Jinping about the issuing of China visas for foreign correspondents. The New York Times has had difficulty getting visas since it ran a story about the private wealth of senior party members, the same topic Bloomberg wanted to rethink. Mr. Xi all but ignored the question. President Obama, standing to one side, turned to the media, raised his eyebrows, smiled and shrugged.

Let’s hope that was a shrugging off, and not a gesture of acceptance.

Mark Kitto, a publisher in Britain, is the author of “That’s China: How a British Rebel Took On the Chinese Propaganda Machine,” which was published in November.