Prolegomenon for all of foreign affairs for the next decade or two

I get accused of writing excessively long posts. Mea culpa. This one is long, but not my writing. I include in full four articles, all coming to me within the last couple of days. Together, they lay out a Chinese plan for the decades, a Sino-Russian plan for the decades, point to the shallowness of American hegemony, and lessons to be learned for America and allies going forward. Yeah, I know, long and a little boring. Altogether, an interesting take on the future most of us will not see. You don’t have to read them all at one sitting.  Enjoy.

One –The Secret Speech of China Defense Minister General Chi Haotian from 2002 or 2003.

From Epoch Times, posted in 2005 and posted in 2019 at Jeff Nyquist’s blog at https://jrnyquist.blog/2019/09/11/the-secret-speech-of-general-chi-haotian/.  Nyquist is the author of Origins of the Fourth World War, The New Tactics of Global War and The Fool and His Enemy.

This speech lays out a perspective for defeating America to become world hegemon. Old, over the top, but fundamentally still the preferred direction, I think. Edited for length, still a little long.

Pertinent quote – The fact is, our “development” refers to the great revitalization of the Chinese nation, which, of course, is not limited to the land we have now but also includes the whole world.

 

Two – What’s Really Going on Between Russia and China – Behind the Scenes, They Are Deepening Their Defense Partnership By Alexander Gabuev.

From Foreign Affairs at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/whats-really-going-between-russia-and-china

Alexander Gabuev is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

Pertinent quote – The participation of the heads of some of the biggest Russian commodity producers indicates that Xi and Putin also discussed expanding the sale of Russian natural resources to China.   Translating, this means Siberia. And Russia has access to the Arctic, which China covets.

Three – The Rise of China (and the Fall of the U.S.?) – Tectonic Eruptions in Eurasia Erode America’s Global Power by Alfred McCoy.

From TomDispatch at https://tomdispatch.com/the-rise-of-china-and-the-fall-of-the-u-s/

McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. I would challenge some facts and I think he is a little over the top here, but the perspective is interesting. TomDispatch has been publishing since 2001 as a “regular antidote” to the mainstream media.  

Pertinent quote – In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently “shallow.”

For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the world’s population and productivity, was always “the chief geopolitical prize.” To perpetuate its “preponderance on the Eurasian continent” and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its “perch on the western periphery” of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of “an assertive single entity” in the sprawling center of Eurasia.

 

Four – What the Bush-Obama China Memos Reveal – Newly declassified documents contain important lessons for U.S. China policy. By Michael J. Green, the CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and Paul Haenle, the director of Carnegie China.

From a recent Foreign Policy at https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/29/us-china-policy-bush-obama-biden-hand-off-transition-memo/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Editors%20Picks%20-%2004292023&utm_term=editors_picks.

Pertinent quote – What are the lessons from Hand-Off going forward? The most important lesson is one the Biden administration already has right: Invest in allies and partners to maintain that “balance of power that favors freedom” …. More responsible U.S. allies like Japan and Australia are signing on to deeper military and intelligence cooperation with the United States. But none of them have any clarity about Washington’s longer-term vision for the relationship with China. Xi’s constant attacks on the United States, democracy, and U.S. allies make it difficult to imagine a happy place in U.S.-China relations. But other than blunting Chinese aggression and coercion, what is this alignment between allies for? What kind of relationship or strategic equilibrium with China is the United States aiming to achieve?

Here goes –

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1.

https://jrnyquist.blog/2019/09/11/the-secret-speech-of-general-chi-haotian/

The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian  September 11, 2019

In 2005, The Epoch Times acquired a secret speech given by Defense Minister Chi Haotian to high-level Communist Party Cadres sometime before his retirement in 2003. Details given in Chi’s speech coincide with previously unpublished defector testimony on Sino-Russian military plans.

The speech follows:

Comrades,

I’m very excited today, because the large-scale online survey sina.com that was done for us showed that our next generation is quite promising and our party’s cause will be carried on. In answering the question, “Will you shoot at women, children and prisoners of war,” more than 80 percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative, exceeding by far our expectations.

My speech today is a sequel to my speech last time, during which I started with a discussion of the issue of the three islands, [where I] mentioned that 20 years of the idyllic theme of “peace and development” had come to an end, and concluded that modernization under the saber is the only option for China’s next phase.

The central issue of this survey appears to be whether one should shoot at women, children and prisoners of war, but its real significance goes far beyond that. Ostensibly, our intention is mainly to figure out what the Chinese people’s attitude toward war is: If these future soldiers do not hesitate to kill even non-combatants, they’ll naturally be doubly ready and ruthless in killing combatants. Therefore, the responses to the survey questions may reflect the general attitude people have towards war.

Actually, however, this is not our genuine intention. The purpose of the CCP Central Committee in conducting this survey is to probe people’s minds. We wanted to know: If China’s global development will necessitate massive deaths in enemy countries, will our people endorse that scenario? Will they be for or against it?

The fact is, our “development” refers to the great revitalization of the Chinese nation, which, of course, is not limited to the land we have now but also includes the whole world.

In discussing this issue, let us start from the beginning.

As everybody knows, according to the views propagated by Western scholars, humanity as a whole originated from one single mother in Africa. Therefore, no race can claim racial superiority. However, according to the research conducted by most Chinese scholars, the Chinese are different from other races on earth. We did not originate in Africa. Instead, we originated independently in the land of China. But now, many experts engaged in research in varied fields including archeology, ethnic cultures, and regional cultures have reached consensus that the new discoveries such as the Hongshan Culture in the northeast, the Liangahn Cutlure in Zhejiang province, the Jinsha Ruins in Sichuan province, and the Yongzhou Shun Emperor Cultural Site in Hunan province are all compelling evidence of the exitence of China’s early civilizations, and they prove that China’s rice-growing agricultural history alone can be traced back as far as 8,000 to 10,000 years. This refutes the concept of “five thousand years of Chinese civilization.”

Therefore, we can assert that we are the product of cultural roots of more than a million years, and a single Chinese entity of two thousand years. This is the Chinese entity of two thousand years. This is the Chinese nation that calls itself, “descendants of Yan and Huang,” the Chinese nation that we are so proud of. Hitler’s Germany had once bragged that the German race was the most superior race on earth, but the fact is, our nation is far superior to the Germans.

We all know that on account of our national superiority, during the thriving and prosperous Tang Dynasty our civilization was at the peak of the world. We were the center of the world civilization, and no other civilization in the world was comparable to ours. Later on, because of our complacency, narrow-mindedness, and the self-enclosure of our own country, we were surpassed by Western civilization, and the center of the world shifted to the West.

In reviewing history, one may ask: Will the center of the world civilization shift back to China?

Comrade He Xin put it in his report to the Central Committee in 1988: If the fact is that the center of leadership of the world was located in Europe as of the 18th Century, and later shifted to the United States in the mid-20th century the center of leadership of the world will shift to the East of our planet. And, “the East” of course mainly refers to China.

Actually, Comrade Lui Huaquing made similar points in the 1980s. Based on an historical analysis, he pointed out that the center of world civilization is shifting. It shifted from the East to Western Europe and later to the United States; now it is shifting back to the East. Therefore, if we refer to the 19th century as the British century, and the 20th century as the American century, then the 21st century will be the Chinese century.

We must greet the arrival of the Chinese Century by raising high the banner of national revitalization. How should we fight for the realization of the Chinese Century? We must borrow the precious experiences in human history by taking advantage of the outstanding fruition of human civilization and drawing lessons from what happened to other ethnic groups.

Today I’d like to talk about the lessons of Germany and Japan.

As we all know, Nazi Germany also placed much emphasis on the education of the people, especially the younger generation. The Nazi Party and government organized and established various propaganda and educational institutions such as the “Guiding Bureau of National Propaganda,” “Department of National Education and Propaganda,” “Supervising Bureau of Worldview Study and Education,” and “Information Office,” all aimed at instilling into the people’s minds, from elementary schools to colleges, the idea that German people are superior, and convincing people that the historical mission of the Aryan people is to become the “lords of the earth” whose right it is to “rule over the world.” Back then the German people were much more united than we are today.

Nonetheless, Germany was defeated in utter shame, along with its ally, Japan. Why?

Specifically, the following are the fundamental causes for their defeat: First, they had too many enemies all at once, as they did not adhere to the principle of eliminating enemies one at a time; second, they were too impetuous, lacking the patience and perseverance required for great accomplishments; third, when the time came for them to be ruthless, they turned out to be too soft, therefore leaving troubles that resurfaced later on.

So, the fundamental reason for the defeats of Germany and Japan is that history did not arrange them to be the “lords of the earth,” for they are, after all, not the most superior race.

Ostensibly, in comparison, today’s China is alarmingly similar to Germany back then. Both of them regard themselves as the most superior races; both of them have a history of being exploited by foreign powers and are therefore vindictive; both of them have the tradition of worshipping their own authorities; both of them feel that they have seriously insufficient living space; both of them raise high the two banners of nationalism and socialism and label themselves as “national socialism”; both of them worship “one state, one party, one leader, and one doctrine.”

Our theory of the shifting center of civilization is of course more profound than Hitler’s theory of “the lords of the earth.” Our civilization is profound and broad, which has determined that we are so much wiser than they were.

Our Chinese people are wiser than the Germans because, fundamentally, our race is superior to theirs. As a result, we have a longer history, more people, and larger land area. On this basis our ancestors left us with the two most essential heritages, which are atheism and great unity. It was Confucius, the founder of our Chinese culture, who gave us these heritages.

This heritage determined that we have a stronger ability to survive than the West. That is why the Chinese race has been able to prosper for so long. We are destined “not to be buried by either heaven or earth” no matter how severe the natural, man-made, and national disasters. This is our advantage.

What makes us different from Germany is that we are complete atheists, while Germany was primarily a Catholic and Protestant country. Hitler was only half atheist. Although Hitler also believed that ordinary citizens had low intelligence, and that leaders should therefore make decisions, and although German people worshipped Hitler back then, Germany did not have the tradition of worshipping sages on a broad basis. Our Chinese society has always worshipped sages, and that is because we don’t worship any God. Once you worship a god, you can’t worship a person at the same time, unless you recognize the person as the god’s representative like they do in Middle Eastern countries. On the other hand, once you recognize a person as a sage, of course you will want him to be your leader…. This is the foundation of our democratic centralism.

The bottom line is, only China is a reliable force in resisting the Western parliament-based democratic system. Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany was perhaps but a momentary mistake in history.

Maybe you have now come to understand why we recently decided to further promulgate atheism. If we let theology from the West into China and empty us from the inside, if we let all Chinese people listen to God and follow God, who will obediently listen to us and follow us? If the common people don’t believe Comrade Hu Jintao is a qualified leader, question his authority, and want to monitor him, if the religious followers in our society question why we are leaving God in churches, can our Party continue to rule China?

The three lessons are: Firmly grasp the country’s living space; firmly grasp the Party’s control over the nation; and firmly grasp the general direction toward becoming the “lord of the earth.”

Next, I’d like to address these three issues.

The first issue is living space.

Anybody who has been to Western countries knows that their living space is much better than ours. They have forests alongside the highways, while we hardly have any trees by our streets. Their sky is often blue with white clouds, while our sky is covered by a layer of dark haze. Their tap water is clean enough for drinking, while even our ground water is so polluted that it can’t be drunk without filtering. They have few people in the streets, and two or three people can occupy a small residential building; in contrast, our streets are always crawling with people, and several people have to share one room.

Many years ago, there was a book titled Yellow Catastrophes. It said that, due to our following the American style of consumption, our limited resources would not long support the population and society would collapse, once our population reaches 1.3 billion. Now our population has already exceeded this limit, and we are now relying on imports to sustain our nation. It’s not that we haven’t paid attention to this issue. The Ministry of Land Resources is specialized in this issue.

But the term ‘living space’ (lebensraum) is too closely related to Nazi Germany. The reason we don’t want to discuss this too openly is to avoid the West’s association of us with Nazi Germany, which could in turn reinforce the view that China is a threat. Therefore, in our emphasis on He Xin’s new theory, “Human rights are just living rights,” we only talk about “living,” but not “space,” so as to avoid using the term “living space.” From the perspective of history, the reason that China is faced with the issue of living space is because Western countries established colonies ahead of Eastern countries. Western countries established colonies all around the world, therefore giving themselves an advantage on the issue of living space. To solve this problem, we must lead the Chinese people outside of China, so that they could develop outside of China.

The second issue is our focus on the leadership capacity of the ruling party. We’ve done better on this than their party. Although the Nazis spread their power to every aspect of the German national government, they did not stress their absolute leadership position like we have.

We have to focus on two points to fortify our leadership position and improve our leadership capacity.

The first is to promote the “Three Represents” theory, stressing that our Party is the pioneer of the Chinese race, in addition to being the pioneer of the proletariat. Many citizens say in private, “We never voted for you, the Communist Party, to represent us. How can you claim to be our representatives?”

There’s no need to worry about this issue. Comrade Mao Zedong said that if we could lead the Chinese people outside of China, resolving the lack of living space in China, the Chinese people will support us. At that time, we don’t’ have to worry about the labels of “totalitarianism” or “dictatorship.” Whether we can forever represent the Chinese people depends on whether we can succeed in leading the Chinese people out of China.

The second point, whether we can lead the Chinese people out of China, is the most important determinant of the CCP’s leadership position.

Why do I say this?

Everyone knows that without the leadership of our Party, China would not exist today. Therefore, our highest principle is to forever protect our Party’s leadership position.

The June 4 riot almost succeeded in bringing a peaceful transition; if it were not for the fact that a large number of veteran comrades were still alive and at a crucial moment they removed Zhao Ziyang and his followers, then we all would have been put in prison. After death we would have been too ashamed to report to Marx.

After the June 4 riot was suppressed, we have been thinking about how to prevent China from peaceful evolution and how to maintain the Communist Party’s leadership. We thought it over and over but did not come up with any good ideas. If we do not have good ideas, China will inevitably change peacefully, and we will all become criminals in history. After some deep pondering, we finally come to this conclusion: Only by turning our developed national strength into the force of a first striking outward – only by leading people to go out – can we win forever the Chinese people’s support and love for the Communist Party. Our party will then stand on invincible ground, and the Chinese people will have to depend on the Communist Party. They will forever follow the Communist Party with their hearts and minds, as was written in a couplet frequently seen in the countryside some years ago: “Listen to Chairman Mao, follow the Communist Party!” Therefore, the June 4 riot made us realize that we must combine economic development with preparation for war and leading the people to go out! Therefore, since then, our national defence policy has taken a 180 degree turn and we have since emphasized more and more “combining peace and war.” Our economic development is all about preparing for the needs of war! Publicly we still emphasize economic development as our center, but in reality, economic development has war as its center! In my view, there is another kind of bondage, and that is, the fate of our Party is tied up with that of the whole world. If we, the CCP, are finished, China will be finished, and the world will be finished.

Our Party’s historical mission is to lead the Chinese people to go out.

What is the third issue we should clinch firmly in order to accomplish our historical mission of national renaissance? It is to hold firmly onto the big “issue of America.”

Comrade He Xin put forward a very fundamental judgment that is very reasonable. He asserted in his report to the Party Central Committee: The renaissance of China is in fundamental conflict with the Western strategic interest, and therefore will inevitably be obstructed by the western countries doing everything they can. So, Only by breaking the blockade formed by the western countries headed by the United States can China grow and move toward the world!

Would the United States allow us to go out to gain new living space? First, if the United States is firm in blocking us, it is hard for us to do anything significant to Taiwan, Vietnam, India, or even Japan, [so] how much more living space can we get? Very trivial! Only countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization.

Therefore, solving the “issue of America” is the key to solving all other issues. First, this makes it possible for us to have many people migrate there and even establish another China under the same leadership of the CCP. America was originally discovered by the ancestors of the yellow race, but Columbus gave credit to the white race. We the descendants of the Chinese nation are entitled to the possession of the land! It is said that the residents of the yellow race have a very low social status in the United States. We need to liberate them. Second, after solving the “issue of America,” the western countries of Europe would bow to us, not to mention Taiwan, Japan and other small countries. Therefore, solving the “issue of America” is the mission assigned to the CCP members by history.

In the long run, the relationship of China and the United States is one of a life-and-death struggle.

Of course, right now it is not the time to openly break up with them yet. Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology, we still need America. Therefore, we must do everything we can to promote our relationship with America, learn from America in all aspects and use America as an example to reconstruct our country.

We also must never forget what Comrade Xiaoping emphasized: “Refrain from revealing ambitions and put others off the track.” Thus we will understand why we constantly talk loudly about the “Taiwan issue” but not the “American issue.” We all know the principle of “doing one thing under the cover of another.” If ordinary people can only see the small island of Taiwan in their eyes, then you as the elite of our country should be able to see the whole picture of our cause. Over these years, according to Comrade Xiaoping’s arrangement, a large piece of our territory in the North has been given up to Russia; do you really think our Party Committee is a fool?

Only by using special means to “clean up” America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there. This is the only choice left for us. This is not a matter of whether we are willing to do it or not. What kind of special means is there available for us to “clean up America”?

Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves. There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio-weapons have been invented one after another. Of course, we have not been idle, in the past years we have seized the opportunity to master weapons of this kind. We are capable of achieving our purpose of “cleaning up” America all of a sudden. When Comrade Xiaoping was still with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focus instead on developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy country.

From a humanitarian perspective, we should issue a warning to the American people and persuade them to leave America and leave the land they have lived in to the Chinese people. Or at least they should leave half of the United States to be China’s colony, because America was first discovered by the Chinese. But would this work? If this strategy does not work, then there is only one choice left to us. That is, use decisive means to “clean up” America and reserve America for our use in a moment. Our historical experience has proven that as long as we make it happen, nobody in the world can do anything about us. Furthermore, if the United States as the leader is gone, then other enemies have to surrender to us.

Biological weapons are unprecedented in their ruthlessness, but if the Americans do not die then the Chinese have to die. If the Chinese people are strapped to the present land, a total societal collapse is bound to take place. According to the computation of the author of Yellow Peril, more than half of the Chinese will die, and that figure would be more than 800 million people! Just after the liberation, our yellow land supported nearly 500 million people, while today the official figure of the population is more than 1.3 billion. This yellow land has reached the limit of its capacity. One day, who knows how soon it will come, the great collapse will occur any time and more than half the population will have to go.

In Chinese history, in the replacement of dynasties, the ruthless have always won and the benevolent have always failed. The most typical example involved Xiang Yu the King of Chu, who, after defeating Liu Bang, failed to continue to chase after him and eliminate his forces, and his leniency resulted in Xiang Yu’s death and Liu’s victory …. Therefore, we must emphasize the importance of adopting resolute measures. In the future, the two rivals, China and the United States, will eventually meet each other in a narrow road, and our leniency to the Americans will mean cruelty toward the Chinese people. Here some people may want to ask me: What about the several millions of our compatriots in the United States? They may ask: aren’t we against Chinese killing other Chinese?

These comrades are too pedantic; they are not pragmatic enough. If we had insisted on the principle that the Chinese should not kill other Chinese, would we have liberated China? As for the several million Chinese living in the United States, this is of course a big issue. Therefore, in recent years, we have been conducting research on genetic weapons, i.e., those weapons that do not kill yellow people. But producing a result with this kind of research is extremely difficult.

Therefore, we have to give up our expectations about genetic weapons. Of course, from another perspective, the majority of those Chinese living in the United States have become our burden, because they have been corrupted by the bourgeois liberal values for a long time and it would be difficult for them to accept our Party’s leadership. If they survived the war, we would have to launch campaigns in the future to deal with them, to reform them. Do you still remember that when we had just defeated the Koumintang (KMT) and liberated Mainland China, so many people from the bourgeois class and intellectuals welcomed us so very warmly, but later we had to launch campaigns such as the “suppression of the reactionaries” and “Anti-Rightist Movement” to clean them up and reform them? Some of them were in hiding for a long time and were not exposed until the Cultural Revolution. History has proved that any social turmoil is likely to involve many deaths.

Maybe we can put it this way: death is the engine that moves history forward.

It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century in which the CCP leads the world. We, as revolutionary humanitarians, do not want deaths. But if history confronts us with a choice between deaths of Chinese and those of Americans, we’d have to pick the latter, as, for us, it is more important to safeguard the lives of the Chinese people and the life of our Party. That is because, after all, we are Chinese and members of the CCP. Since the day we joined the CCP, the Party, life has always been above all else! History will prove that we made the right choice.

Why didn’t we conduct the survey through administrative means instead of through the web? We did what we did for a good reason.

First of all, we did it to reduce artificial inference and to make sure that we got the true thoughts of the people. In addition, it is more confidential and won’t reveal the true purpose of our survey. But what is most important is the fact that most of the people who are able to respond to the questions online are from social groups that are relatively well-educated and intelligent. They are the hard-core and leading groups that play a decisive role among our people. If they support us, then the people as a whole will follow us. If they oppose us, they will play the dangerous role of inciting people and creating social disturbance.

Of course, a few people under western influence have objected to shooting at prisoners of war and women and children. Is everybody crazy? Some others said, “The Chinese love to label themselves as a peace-loving people, but actually they are the most ruthless people. The comments are resonant of killing and murdering, sending chills to my heart.”

The last problem I want to talk about is of firmly seizing the preparations for military battle.

Currently, we are at the crossroad of moving forward or backward. Some comrades saw problems flooding everywhere in our country – the corruption problem, the state-owned enterprise problem, the bank’s bad accounts problem, environmental problems, society security problems, education problems, the AIDS problem, various appeals problems, even the riots problem. These comrades vacillated in the determination to prepare for military battles. They thought: they should first grab the political reform problem, that is, our own political reform comes first. After resolving the domestic problems, we can then deal with the foreign military battle problem.

Now, it seems like we are in the same critical period as the “horses were drinking water” in the Yangtze River days in the revolutionary era, as long as we resolve the United States problem at one blow, our domestic problems will all be readily solved. Therefore, our military battle preparation appears to aim at Taiwan but in fact is aimed at the United States, and the preparation is far beyond the scope of attacking aircraft carriers or satellites.

Marxism pointed out that violence is the midwife for the birth of China’s century. As war approaches, I am full of hope for our next generation.

END

2.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/whats-really-going-between-russia-and-china

What’s Really Going on Between Russia and China – Behind the Scenes, They Are Deepening Their Defense Partnership

By Alexander Gabuev

April 12, 2023

“There are changes happening, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said to Russian President Vladimir Putin last month at the end of a state visit to Russia. “Let’s drive those changes together.” To this, the Russian leader responded, “I agree.”

This seemingly improvised yet carefully choreographed scene captured the outcome of Xi’s trip to Russia and the trajectory on which he and Putin have set Sino-Russian relations. Xi’s visit last month was first and foremost a demonstration of public support for the embattled Russian leader. But the truly significant developments took place during closed-door, in-person discussions, at which Xi and Putin made a number of important decisions about the future of Chinese-Russian defense cooperation and likely came to terms on arms deals that they may or may not make public.

The war in Ukraine and ensuing Western sanctions on Russia are reducing the Kremlin’s options and pushing Russia’s economic and technological dependence on China to unprecedented levels. These changes give China a growing amount of leverage over Russia. At the same time, China’s fraying relationship with the United States makes Moscow an indispensable junior partner to Beijing in pushing back against the United States and its allies. China has no other friend that brings as much to the table. And as Xi prepares China for a period of prolonged confrontation with the most powerful country on the planet, he needs all the help he can get.

Senior figures in the Chinese Communist Party have openly discussed the need for a closer partnership with Russia because of what they perceive as an increasingly hostile U.S. policy aimed at containing China’s rise. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang told Chinese state media after the trip that the partnership with Russia is very important at a time when some forces are advocating “hegemonism, unilateralism, and protectionism” and are driven by a “Cold War mentality”—all CCP code words for U.S. policy toward China. Putting this reason front and center is revealing, and it explains why Xi decided to go to see Putin in person, despite the unfavorable optics of visiting just after the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader. The message of Xi’s trip was clear: China sees many benefits in its relationship with Russia, it will continue to maintain those ties at the highest level, and it will not be deterred by Western critics.

To deflect growing U.S. and European criticism of China’s support of Russia, Beijing came up with an elaborate diplomatic scheme, presenting a position paper on the Ukrainian crisis on February 24, the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The paper is a laundry list of talking points that Beijing has voiced throughout the war, including respect for the territorial integrity of states and opposition to unilateral sanctions. The proposal’s lack of specific details on crucial issues, such as borders and accountability for war crimes, is a feature, not a bug. Beijing is perfectly aware that neither Kyiv nor Moscow has much interest in talking at the moment, since both want to keep fighting to increase their leverage whenever they do sit down at the negotiating table. The Chinese proposal was little more than window dressing for Xi’s visit. The real action took place behind the scenes, in private negotiations between Putin and Xi.

More Than Meets The Eye

At the conclusion of the tripthe Kremlin published a list of 14 documents signed by both China and Russia, including two statements by Xi and Putin. At first glance, these were largely insignificant memorandums between ministries; no major new agreements were announced. Yet a closer look reveals a very different picture, one that Beijing and Moscow have reason to conceal from the outside world.

In a departure from its usual practice, the Kremlin did not publish the list of officials and senior business leaders present at the talks. Their names can be discerned only by going through footage and photos from the summit and by reading into comments made to the Kremlin press corps by Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy aide. A close look reveals that more than half of Putin’s team participating in the first round of formal talks with Xi were officials directly involved in Russia’s weapons and space programs. That list includes former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now Putin’s deputy in the presidential commission on the military-industrial complex; Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister; Dmitry Shugaev, who heads the federal service for military-technical cooperation; Yury Borisov, who runs the Russian space agency and who until 2020 had spent a decade in charge of the Russian weapons industry as deputy defense minister and deputy prime minister; and Dmitry Chernyshenko, a deputy prime minister who chairs a bilateral Chinese-Russian intergovernmental commission and is in charge of science and technology in the Russian cabinet. This group of officials was likely assembled to pursue one main goal: deepening defense cooperation with China.

Although China wields great influence in the Kremlin, it does not exert control.

Even though Beijing and Moscow have not made any new deals public, there is every reason to believe that Xi’s and Putin’s teams used the March meeting to come to terms on new defense agreements. After prior Xi-Putin summits, the leaders have privately signed documents related to arms deals and only later informed the world. In September 2014, for example, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin sold its S-400 surface-to-air missile system to China, making Beijing the first overseas buyer of Russia’s most advanced air-defense equipment. The deal was not revealed until eight months later, however, in a Kommersant interview with Anatoly Isaykin, the CEO of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s main arms manufacturer.

After the U.S. Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in 2017, Moscow and Beijing stopped disclosing their military contracts altogether. This U.S. law led to the sanctioning of the Chinese army’s armaments department and its head, General Li Shangfu (who was appointed China’s defense minister in March). Nevertheless, on rare occasions, Putin boasts about new deals, such as in 2019, when he announced that Moscow was helping develop a Chinese missile early-warning system, and in 2021, when he revealed that Russia and China were jointly developing high-tech weapons.

Arms Linked

China has relied on Russian military hardware since the 1990s, and Moscow was its only source of modern foreign weapons following the arms embargo imposed by the EU and the United States after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Over time, as China’s own military industry progressed, its reliance on others decreased. Beijing can now produce modern weapons on its own and has a clear lead over Russia in many areas of modern military technology, including drones. But to boost its own research and development and production, Beijing still covets access to Russian technology to use in surface-to-air missiles, engines for fighter jets, and underwater warfare equipment such as submarines and submersible drones.

A decade ago, the Kremlin was reluctant to sell cutting-edge military technology to China. Moscow worried that the Chinese might reverse engineer the technology and figure out how to produce it themselves. Russia also had broader concerns about arming a powerful country that borders the sparsely populated and resource-rich Russian regions of Siberia and the Far East. But the deepening schism between Russia and the West following the 2014 annexation of Crimea changed that calculus. And after launching a full-scale war in Ukraine and prompting the complete breakdown of ties with the West, Moscow has little choice but to sell China its most advanced and precious technologies.

Even before the war, some Russian analysts of China’s defense industry had advocated entering into joint projects, sharing technology, and carving out a place in the Chinese military’s supply chain. Doing so, they argued, offered the best way for the Russian military industry to modernize—and without that progress, the rapid pace of China’s own R & D would soon render Russian technology obsolete. Today, such views have become conventional wisdom in Moscow. Russia has also started opening up its universities and science institutes to Chinese partners and integrating its research facilities with Chinese counterparts. Huawei, for example, has tripled its research staff in Russia in the wake of a Washington-led campaign to limit the Chinese tech giant’s global reach.

Junior Partner

Neither Beijing nor Moscow has any interest in disclosing the details of any of the private discussions held during the Xi-Putin summit. The same goes for details on how Russian companies could gain better access to the Chinese financial system—which was the reason why Elvira Nabiullina, chair of Russia’s central bank, was a significant participant at the bilateral talks. That access has become critical for the Kremlin, since Russia is rapidly becoming more dependent on China as its main export destination and as a major source of technological imports, and as the yuan is becoming Russia’s preferred currency for trade settlement, savings, and investments.

The participation of the heads of some of the biggest Russian commodity producers indicates that Xi and Putin also discussed expanding the sale of Russian natural resources to China. Right now, however, Beijing has no interest in drawing attention to such deals, in order to avoid criticism for providing cash for Putin’s war chest. In any case, Beijing can afford to bide its time, since China’s leverage in these quiet discussions is only growing: Beijing has many potential sellers, including its traditional partners in the Middle East and elsewhere, whereas Russia has few potential buyers.

Eventually, the Kremlin may want at least some of the deals reached in March to become public to demonstrate that it has found a way to compensate for the losses it suffered when Europe stopped importing Russian oil and reduced its imports of Russian gas. But China will decide when and how any new resource deals are signed and announced. Russia has no choice but to patiently wait and defer to the preferences of its more powerful neighbor.

Who’s The Boss?

The Chinese-Russian relationship has become highly asymmetrical, but it is not one-sided. Beijing still needs Moscow, and the Kremlin can provide certain unique assets in this era of strategic competition between China and the United States. Purchases of the most advanced Russian weapons and military technology, freer access to Russian scientific talent, and the rich endowment of Russia’s natural resources—which can be supplied across a secure land border—make Russia an indispensable partner for China. Russia also remains an anti-American great power with a permanent seat on the UN Security council—a convenient friend to have in a world where the United States enjoys closer ties with dozens of countries in Europe and the Indo-Pacific and where China has few, if any, real friends. China’s connections are more overtly transactional than the deeper alliances Washington maintains.

That means that although China wields great influence in the Kremlin, it does not exert control. A somewhat similar relationship exists between China and North Korea. Despite the enormous extent of Pyongyang’s dependence on Beijing and shared animosity toward the United States, China cannot fully control Kim Jong Un’s regime and needs to tread carefully to keep North Korea close. Russia is familiar with this kind of relationship since it maintains a parallel one with Belarus, in which Moscow is the senior partner that can pressure, cajole, and coerce Minsk—but cannot dictate Belarusian policy across the board.

Russia’s size and power may give the Kremlin a false sense of security as it locks itself into an asymmetrical relationship with Beijing. But the durability of this relationship, absent major unforeseeable disruptions, will depend on China’s ability to manage a weakening Russia. In the years to come, Putin’s regime will have to learn the skill that junior partners the world over depend on for survival: how to manage upward.

3.

https://tomdispatch.com/the-rise-of-china-and-the-fall-of-the-u-s/

The Rise of China (and the Fall of the U.S.?) – Tectonic Eruptions in Eurasia Erode America’s Global Power

By Alfred McCoy

From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America’s wartime commanders — George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific — knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass. Whether you’re talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.

That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.

And to be blunt, these days, China’s gain is America’s loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington’s presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.

A Cold War Strategy

After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America’s wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.

In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia’s Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts — with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington’s global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.

After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America’s postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas — the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name “containment” and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure. After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China’s subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation — in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term “the bleeding wound,” the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department’s policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase “the end of history.” He argued that America’s liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism… seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture.”

The Invisible Power of Geopolitics

Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently “shallow.”

For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the world’s population and productivity, was always “the chief geopolitical prize.” To perpetuate its “preponderance on the Eurasian continent” and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its “perch on the western periphery” of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of “an assertive single entity” in the sprawling center of Eurasia.

Arguing for Eurasia’s continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior “heartland.” In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive “world island” and offered this bold geopolitical formula: “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.

But today, by combining Mackinder’s geopolitical theory with Brzezinski’s gloss on global politics, it’s possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. Now, let’s try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.

China’s Geopolitical Gambit

In the decades since the Cold War’s close, China’s increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent’s geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washington’s foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” confessed two former members of the Obama administration, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.” In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.

In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports — from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany. In launching what soon became history’s largest development project, 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinski’s fear of the rise of “an assertive single entity” in Central Asia.

Unlike the U.S., China hasn’t spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of them in 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmar’s Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.

Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy). In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent’s underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it’s winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.

Tectonic Shifts Shake U.S. Power

After a decade of Beijing’s relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent’s geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.

First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there. To provide critical air support for its infantry, U.S. jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf — an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the U.S.-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic U.S. retreat in defeat became unavoidable.

Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armored vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. If Putin is to be believed, his “special military operation” was to be a bid to undermine NATO’s influence and weaken the Western alliance — one of Brzezinski’s conditions for the U.S. eviction from Eurasia.

But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xi’s support, a seemingly tall order given China’s decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nations’ relations were “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” and a denunciation of “the further expansion of NATO.”

As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijing’s Winter Olympics. So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30% to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijing’s geopolitical chessboard.

Then, just last month, Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billion infrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing — a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.

Finally, the Biden administration was stunned this month when Europe’s preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijing for a series of intimate tête-à-tête chats with China’s President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced “a global strategic partnership with China” and promised he would not “take our cue from the U.S. agenda” over Taiwan. A spokesman for the Élysée Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that “the United States is our ally, with shared values.” Even so, Macron’s Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that bloc’s ever-closer economic ties to China

The Future of Geopolitical Power

Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwan’s fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the “shock and awe” of aerial bombardments, Washington’s default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure. In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally — first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles — in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.

Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasia’s geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the U.S. strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a “second island chain” from Japan to Guam — the last of Brzezinski’s criteria for the true waning of U.S. global power. In that event, Washington’s leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.

4.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/29/us-china-policy-bush-obama-biden-hand-off-transition-memo/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Editors%20Picks%20-%2004292023&utm_term=editors_picks

What the Bush-Obama China Memos Reveal – Newly declassified documents contain important lessons for U.S. China policy.

April 29, 2023

By Michael J. Green, the CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and Paul Haenle, the director of Carnegie China.

As U.S.-China relations transition from an era of engagement to one of strategic competition, some in the Biden and former Trump administrations have claimed to be abandoning four decades of naive American assumptions about Beijing. Past U.S. policy, they say, was based on a futile view that engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China. This, however, is not only a misreading of past U.S. policies but also dangerous analytical ground upon which to build a new national security strategy.

The fact is that no administration since that of Richard Nixon has made U.S. security dependent on Chinese democratization. Every administration has combined engagement with strategies to counterbalance China through alliances, trade agreements, and U.S. military power. Throwing out all previous U.S. approaches to China would mean throwing out some of the most important tools the current administration relies on to compete with China. And the Biden administration will not get its China strategy right until it is clear about what has worked in the past.

Perhaps the most valuable peek inside what previous U.S. administrations really thought is the newly declassified set of transition memoranda prepared by the outgoing George W. Bush administration for the incoming Obama administration in late 2008 and early 2009. Recently declassified by former President Bush and edited by former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, the collected analysis of the world as seen by the Bush National Security Council is available to the public from the Brookings Institution Press in Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. (Note: We both served in the National Security Council during the Bush administration and co-wrote one of the chapters in the book.)

The transition memoranda on China and Asia knock down the assertion that Bush had a naive set of assumptions about China. Even at a time when China was materially weaker than the United States or even Japan, the White House was actively preparing the toolkit that might be needed should China turn in a more aggressive direction. The administration had already seen this possibility with the crisis caused by a Chinese Air Force collision with an EP-3 U.S. surveillance aircraft within the first months of the new Bush team’s arrival. To be sure, there was less urgency to the China challenge than today. In the early 2000s, China still had a smaller economy and navy than Japan, whereas today, the Chinese economy and military power have eclipsed those of Japan and are challenging the United States. Nor were Chinese leaders Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao anywhere near as aggressive as current leader Xi Jinping.

But the question of how China would use its growing power was still open to shaping, and not just because China had less material power at the time. Chinese leaders Jiang and Hu did not rebuff Bush’s entreaties on human rights, religious freedom, or trade the way Xi and his officials do today. When Washington urged the release of political dissidents at summits in the early 2000s, Beijing often complied. When Bush spoke to Jiang or Hu about religious freedom, they listened and engaged, even if they did not agree. When the United States called for improvements in enforcing intellectual property rights or transparency about the SARS epidemic, there were small but positive changes. And Bush pulled no punches: He told Jiang and Hu that the United States would pursue a comprehensive, constructive, and candid dialogue, accompanied by regular meetings with the Dalai Lama, engagement with Chinese political dissidents, and frequent public references to the priority the United States gave to its democratic allies and its commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act. Chinese leaders would have preferred the more accommodating “strategic partnership” they had pursued with the Clinton administration, but that was no longer on offer.

Instead, the strategic partnerships that mattered to Bush administration were the same ones that form the basis of the Biden administration’s approach to China today. Bush elevated Japan’s standing in U.S. diplomacy to a level it had not enjoyed since the Reagan presidency, with Bush counting Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi among his closest international confidants and friends. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, joining Australia, India, Japan, and the United States was launched in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. And the Bush administration went through the painstaking bureaucratic work of clearing obstacles—mainly having to do with nuclear nonproliferation—to a new strategic partnership with India. All of these were part of what Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “a balance of power that favors freedom.” While the engagement side of U.S. policy is in disrepute today, Bush-era investments in alliances and new strategic partnerships like India have paid off for the Biden administration as it faces a more menacing China.

Economic statecraft backed the geopolitics. Progress with Beijing on China’s predatory trade practices was modest, and the Bush administration and its allies knew that real progress would require the full leverage of the most powerful economies in the world. It was against this backdrop that the administration negotiated bilateral trade agreements with Australia, Singapore, and South Korea and began negotiations on what became the Trans-Pacific Partnership and discussions on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. These agreements combined would have brought the weight of almost two-thirds of the world economy to the table in demanding reciprocal agreements from China. Significant actors within the Chinese economy were ready to use that pressure to move away from an economic model dominated by state-owned enterprise to create dynamism that would benefit Chinese consumers and the private sector at home and abroad based on rules shaped by the United States and its major allies.

That obviously did not happen. One reason was the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, which Beijing wrongly interpreted as proof that the West was declining and the East is rising, as China’s propagandists now put it. Perhaps more significant was the emergence of Xi, whose own penchant for autocratic rule, ideological struggle, and Chinese coercive dominance of the region signaled a shift that was not predicted even by China’s own leading experts, many of whom are now living in fear of his rule. The global financial crisis also broke the political formula in Washington that had allowed successful trade agreements to underpin U.S. grand strategy. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the TPP in 2017, and his successor, President Joe Biden, has made it clear he will never return.

The transition memos in Hand-Off did not predict any of these developments within China—nobody did—but the memos did lay out a strategic framework for minimizing risk and maximizing the opportunities for peace and stability in what we now call the Indo-Pacific. To say this was naive would be to argue for a strategy of strangling China at a time in its development when engagement still had some traction and when, more importantly, U.S. allies and the American public, both of whom mainly saw China as a partner, would not have supported containment and decoupling.

What are the lessons from Hand-Off going forward?

The most important lesson is one the Biden administration already has right: Invest in allies and partners to maintain that “balance of power that favors freedom.” Biden has elevated the Quad meetings to a regular summit, and he graciously credited Bush for starting the Quad when the leaders first assembled in 2022. The Biden administration has also launched one of the most ambitious security partnerships of the past few decades with the Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement (AUKUS) to help Australia deploy and build nuclear-powered submarines. The pact also aims to develop advanced technological capabilities by pooling resources and integrating supply chains for defense-related science, industry, and supply chains.

Second, the administration needs to reconstruct some form of the economic statecraft that underpinned U.S. strategies toward China in the past. Far from helping China compete, agreements like TPP were designed to force Beijing to play by the rules or lose hundreds of billions of dollars in trade as tariffs and market barriers among the rule-abiding economies went down. Now, sadly, it is the United States that is outside the TPP and suffering from lost access, while Beijing aggressively lobbies the signatories to let the Chinese economy into the agreement. The Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is something of a placeholder to show Washington cares, but it lacks market access or binding rules that would influence business behavior and get Beijing’s attention. Multilateral organizations like the World Trade Organization also matter in this context. The Bush administration probably could have done more within the WTO to address China’s cheating on its commitments, but the Trump and Biden administrations have gone too far in allowing the dispute resolution mechanism of the WTO to wither at a time when U.S. allies still see it as an important tool to hold China to account.

Third, the Biden administration has left the world wondering how this all ends with China. French President Emmanuel Macron’s craven comments on Taiwan after his visit to Beijing were short-sighted and very damaging to regional security. More responsible U.S. allies like Japan and Australia are signing on to deeper military and intelligence cooperation with the United States. But none of them have any clarity about Washington’s longer-term vision for the relationship with China. Xi’s constant attacks on the United States, democracy, and U.S. allies make it difficult to imagine a happy place in U.S.-China relations. But other than blunting Chinese aggression and coercion, what is this alignment between allies for? What kind of relationship or strategic equilibrium with China is the United States aiming to achieve? The Bush administration could answer that question to an extent that helped rally allies. Biden would do well to engage with U.S. allies on the proper answer in the current geopolitical environment.

Fourth, resources matter. Some blame the Global War on Terror for convincing the Bush administration it had to get along with China. The authors never heard those arguments in our time in the White House, nor is that alleged tradeoff even hinted at in the declassified memos in Hand-Off. The fundamentals of the Bush administration’s China strategy did not change because of 9/11. What did change was the availability of resources. Even after the Obama administration pledged to pivot to Asia in 2011, resources did not flow into military and diplomatic efforts the way they should have. Continuing struggles in the Middle East, federal budget sequestration, and now Russia’s war on Ukraine have all slowed the long anticipated rebalance of forces to deal with China. Biden and the U.S. Congress need to resource their strategy of competition, and finally make the pivot from the Bush administration’s war on terror real.

 

 No comments from me on this. Obviously there are many other views. But I think all four give us a good sense of realism that moves us away from being the world’s policeman even as we necessarily focus more on moral values and moral freedoms at home. Who are we, and what do we want?

Occupying the UN

– What a Community of Common Destiny will look like

Around 2005, our Chinese government students in Chicago were quite interested in our notions of NGOs. They had a tough time with NGOs like community organizations that received most or all of their funding from the local government, and then sometimes took positions directly opposed to local government proposals. In Chinese terms, WTF?

When they learned that community organizations were legal entities with an elected board of directors, they were flummoxed. Who voted? Who allowed them to vote? Who could be a candidate? How could an organization be legitimate without government sponsorship?

Back then, up to about 2015, foreign NGOs were operating in China. There were government-sponsored NGOs as well. Now, only government sponsored NGO remain. If there are foreign NGOs, they are required to have a government sponsor. Since then China has learned to create dozens of government-sponsored NGOs to push its interests while hoping that no one looks too deeply at funding sources or Party affiliation of NGO leaders.

This sort of bamboozle-ment is far more dangerous than any IP theft or business cheating or balloon brouhahas. I have argued elsewhere that one can view Chinese as a people occupied by CCP. Xi wishes to occupy international organizations as well. It is surprising the extent to which China has succeeded in that occupation. The Wall Street Journal has a good analysis from 2020 –  How China is Taking Over International Organizations – One Vote at a Time.

Xi Jinping has repeatedly envisioned an international system with the U.N. “at its core.” What the U.N. says matters a lot to the Chinese government.

Now comes CCP in response to questions from the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The CCP response – and those of its favorite home-grown NGOs – will obfuscate, lie, and ignore the long list of human right violations, including disappearances, tortures, murders, and threats compiled each year by legitimate non-profits like the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Such organizations are a nasty bump in the road to the world of common future.

From William Nee at The Diplomat –  How China Tries to Bamboozle the United Nations –

Next week in Geneva, on February 15-16, the Chinese government will be testing the international community again – specifically the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) Beijing will seek to defend its compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and its record in protecting these rights since the last review in 2014.

And while there certainly has been some progress in the past nine years, the Chinese party-state will seek to present a happy, alternative reality that denies many indisputable facts.

For the upcoming CESCR review, at least 23 GONGOs or other entities tied to the party-state submitted reports to the Committee as “civil society organizations” – compared with just four such submissions for the 2014 CESCR review.  Like fake Luis Vuitton bags at a bootleg market, these fake NGOs flood the market and diminish the value of the real products. Committee members waste valuable time reading their reports, listening to their interventions, and trying to decipher which NGOs are real and which are fake.

Xi probably doesn’t need to worry too much about the UN Committee’s vote. One of the Committee members is Shen Yongxiang, who holds a position as vice president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS), a key government sponsored organization for external propaganda on human rights issues for the party-state.

This is the Chinese position paper from 2022 on questions posed by the UN Committee –

https://docstore.ohchr.org/SelfServices/FilesHandler.ashx?enc=4slQ6QSmlBEDzFEovLCuW%2BALqOml1btoJd4YxREVF2UN4vziaSAUkFDI34ZtyU3KXNNLaFLn0IOUatJ1Bw2ba5VIjvXw9WPUFRvijSEpx6h%2F%2F%2BVkB4mrg%2F%2BK1aOIso4e

Back around 2005 I thought the interest of our Chinese government students in NGOs was principally academic. Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps they had a much more instrumental interest. I thought we taught them well. But then again – the concept of an NGO is that it is independent of government – a non-governmental organization. I guess we failed at teaching that. Civil society as we know it is not coming to China anytime soon.


N.B. I am reminded that the terms civil, and civil society, can be difficult to render in Chinese.

Richard Madsen tells us

In contemporary Chinese, for example, there are no fewer than four words that are used to translate the civil in civil society. Alternatively, Chinese intellectuals today call civil society shimin shehui, which literally means “city-people’s society”; or gongmin shehui, “citizens’ society”; or minjian shehui, “people-based society”; or wenming shehui, “civilized society.” These are all attempts to name phenomena and to articulate aspirations that have arisen in an urbanizing East Asia linked to a global market economy.

Richard Madsen. Confucian Conceptions of Civil Society. Chapter 1 in Confucian Political Ethics, edited by Daniel A. Bell (2007), p 3. Available at http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8573.pdf 

Perhaps we should lower our expectations for CCP performance in international organizations. After all, we wish to be civil.

Watch the fires burning across the river

Autocrats make blunders. Xi has made some, and Putin … well, ok. But Xi is not the isolated single decider that Putin appears to be. And China seems well-positioned to benefit from the Ukraine fiasco, regardless of outcome, if China simply keeps its head down, as best it can.

So why the unswerving support for Putin? What can the strategy be? Is it just autocrat bromance? You and me against the world?

As is often the case, Chinese policy is to speak out of both sides of the mouth – at home, government support for Russia is solid and the US-NATO is the cause of all the pain. In the world, the Chinese government takes a more nuanced tone, only wishing to seek peace, even as it seeks to supply Russia as best it can and avoid sanctions and also avoiding taking an active role in mediation.

And if the EU buys less oil and gas from Russia, then Russia will sell it to an eager China. Whatever the Ukraine result, China learns more about how to approach taking Taiwan. China could gain international prestige by fostering a peace deal, however reluctantly and late they do it. So why antagonize the west and most of the rest of the world when the gains will come in any case without effort?

Now comes the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a well-respected think tank that provides a forum for international thought leaders to discuss how to achieve peace in the world. Carnegie has a piece seeking to make some sense of it all – China’s Ukraine Calculus is Coming into Focus.

The article by Paul Haenle and Sam Bresnick describes five conflicting goals for Xi – manage public opinion at home, provide Russia with rhetorical support, signal to Asian countries the danger of NATO-like structures in the Indo-Pacific, appear to be a responsible stakeholder in the broader international community by calling for negotiations, and limit the damage to its economic ties with the United States and Europe.

Well and good. I want to propose another element of long term thinking that might figure into Xi’s calculus, and that is to look east, young man – to Siberia and the Arctic. The United States Geological Survey estimates that 22 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas could be located beneath the Arctic. The Arctic holds large quantities of minerals, including phosphatebauxiteiron orecoppernickel, gold, and diamond.

There are five countries that have legal access to Arctic resources, based on their territorial economic zones – Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the US, and – Russia.  China desperately wants in to that group. It has argued for inclusion because it is a “near-Arctic” nation.

China tried to buy an abandoned naval base in Greenland in 2017, but that was turned down. A few years earlier, a Chinese attempt to do a large commercial real estate project – in Greenland –  was also turned down. This could only have been cover for Chinese “near Arctic” ownership claims.

Even closer to Beijing, Siberia is similarly blessed, with mineral resources and coal and iron and rivers for hydropower and lots and lots of wood.

In any case, I am completely speculating. I have no inside information on this. But I can see the natural advantage for China in Siberia and the Arctic. Russia will not have the talent or technology to exploit the huge available resources. Siberia is far, far away from Moscow and China is very close. The deals might not come this year or next, but soon enough. Its just good long term planning, which China knows how to do. So why not keep the Russia bromance alive?

There are pertinent phrases from the ancient Chinese classic Thirty-Six Stratagems that Chinese business and government people all recognize –

Wait at leisure while the enemy labors (以逸待勞, Yǐ yì dài láo)

Loot a burning house (趁火打劫, Chèn huǒ dǎ jié)

Watch the fires burning across the river (隔岸觀火, Gé àn guān huǒ)

Russia doesn’t have to be the enemy. Just the next resource-rich flailing state in need of assistance. We can switch to Latin – carpe diem.

Crash-out

Or D-Day – Disaster Day – minus 7

The original D-Day was salvation for Britain and Europe – even, in its way, for Germany.  This one seems less promising.

Not much to say anymore.   Cue the violins and watch the China moves.

Update at April 28 – Aside from the current delay in the crash-out – From Brexit to Belt and Road by Keith Johnson in FP – Britain’s turn to China for salvation

Read Ives Smith at Naked Capitalism – https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/03/brexit-opening-the-seals.html

She opens with

And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.

And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?

– Revelations 5:1-2

I didn’t know, but this is where the Four Horsemen come from.  And it is the apocalypse.

Right following the Brexit vote in 2016, I thought Britain had voted itself out of being a major world economy.  Now it appears we will see if that was right.  China, of course, will be sympathetic to a now developing country that needs assistance. 

This can only be shuang yin – win-win for China.  Or maybe win-win-win.   Help the Chinese economy, better entre to the EU, more confounding of US policy. 

Shuang Yin Win-Win

 

What Chinese are Talking About (3) – Love Mr. Xi, Love Mr. Trump

Update at August 13 – 

I wrote a bit about Epoch Times in the post below, mostly about Chinese getting their news from China news sources like public wechat.  Epoch Times is most decidedly anti-CCP, and published by organizations related to Falun Gong, the same people who bring you Shen Yun, the extraordinary dance and performance troup that has been wow-ing Americans for a decade.

In the last two weeks, Epoch Times has been bombarding YouTube with two minute (two minute!) video advertising in advance of a video one is watching.  The ads offer subscriptions to the newspaper, promising to expose the lies of the mainstream media in vilifying Donald Trump.  Here is a screen shot from one subscription ad.  “Honest news” is what they tout.

Donald Trump reads it every day.  ‘Nuff said.  Chinese can get their “honest news” from Beijing or Falun Gong.  Truly, only no news here is good news.

What Chinese are Talking About (3) – Love Mr. Xi, Love Mr. Trump

We know that mainlanders, particularly those in CCP, have a fondness for Mr. Trump.  There are several reasons – Chinese historically have been willing to defer to strong leaders, and Trump projects arrogance, if not wisdom.  It was clear before the 2016 election that if Trump won, Mr. Putin would win and Mr. Xi would also win.  Events bear this out.  There is no adversary so easy to fool as one convinced of his own superiority, particularly one with such poor justification.  Flattery and artifice will get you … everywhere.  For Chinese interested in foreign policy, all they need do is sit back and wait.  Trump’s unforced errors – TPP, belittling allies, cozying up to dictators, removing US from environmental treaties, threatening friends and foes alike – make Chinese arrogance and Mr. Xi’s own unforced errors look positively innocuous.  What’s not to love about someone willing to play the fool for you?

There is reason to think that Chinese in the US, whether citizens, long-time residents or new green card recipients, might hold more nuanced views about Mr. Trump.  And, in fact, they do.

But often not in the direction you might think.  Case in point – the Chinese American news, sent around the US on wechat.

You know wechat is the ubiquitous and multifaceted phone app from Tencent that has become indispensable to Chinese lives.  For communication purposes, there are two broad categories – private wechat, which functions like a group email, and public wechat, in which wechat operates as a news disseminator.

The news disseminator is well established in the US.  There is Chicago American Chinese news, New York American Chinese news, and probably a dozen or twenty more channels.  The channels have some local news, and share word for word some national stories.

All the channels function only in Chinese.  Anyone can read the news, if they can read Chinese.  For many Chinese in America, these channels function as a principal news source.  Every Chinese student who is harmed in America gets featured, along with positive stories about inventions and developments in China. The wechat channels function as modern versions of the Polish or German language newspapers our parents or grandparents read. 

But in our new era, the politics are different.  Rather than a pro-worker or socialist bent, the wechat channels exhibit a distinct pro-Trump, pro-Republican bias. 

Some bias among Chinese is understandable – they tend to be opposed to attempts to change university admissions standards, which tends to undercut hard-working and high-achieving Asians.  And they tend to be suspicious of Democratic relaxation of immigrant controls, when so many Chinese sacrificed so much to get here themselves.

One should remember that the wechat stories for consumption in America are mostly unsourced, identical across wechat platforms nationally in the US, and written in China or by Chinese working directly for wechat. Five or six national stories are reported each day, in addition to local news.

The wechat groups can be a useful and positive organizing technique.  Last year, a Chinese immigrant used WeChat to win a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.  Lily Qi raised nearly $150,000 for her candidacy, and did so by contacting non-registered voters directly, with an appeal to change their non-voting behavior.

On the other hand, Australians are worried about fake news stories planted in the wechat groups to steer political views.  The Sydney Morning Herald documents fake news and doctored stories on local wechat groups, and comments  – With less than two weeks until the May 18 election, Chinese social media has become an increasingly powerful tool for all political parties, especially in seats with large numbers of Chinese-Australian voters…

Given its dependence on Chinese trade, and its traditional alliance with the other “five eyes” nations (US, Canada, Britain, New Zealand) Australia has become a prime target for Propaganda Ministry or United Front organizations to influence public opinion. 

Bill Bishop comments at Sinocism – any government should be very concerned over the growing role of Wechat as the primary communications and media consumption tool of the Diaspora. It is after all still controllable and censorable from Beijing.

Wechat is not the only social media platform operating in Chinese, of course.  The political newsletter Popular Information reports on wildly pro-Trump stories in Epoch Times, a media conglomerate with strong ties to Falun Gong, the secretive organization banned in China. A publication with Falun Gong ties is going to be virulently anti-CCP, but they do love Trump.

Epoch Times publishes in Chinese and in English, as well as in other languages. Popular Information reports that Epoch Times “was one of the top three political spenders on Facebook in the last week in April,” outspending every political candidate in the country except Biden and Trump, according to third party research. The money was spent “to promote stories that Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has championed.”  Epoch Times spent almost as much on Facebook ads ($148,937) as did the Trump campaign ($149,610) in early May.  Epoch Times is now featuring hysterical Youtube advertising, debunking the Mueller investigation and directly promoting Trump. 

From the Popular Information story.  Epoch Times is number 4 –

 Also from the Popular Information story, about Epoch Times reporting on the FBI spying on Trump –

if you could read English only moderately well, wouldn’t you migrate to the news in your own native language?  Makes sense to me.  And makes sense to the wechat writers in Beijing, and to the Chinese and English language writers at Epoch Times.  Truly, for Chinese readers in America, no news is good news. 

Shuang Yin Win-Win

Another update at July 24, 2019 – Boris Johnson became Prime Minister today.  From the South China Morning Post –


Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister-designate, said his government would be very “pro-China”, in an interview with a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language broadcaster shortly before he was chosen to succeed Theresa May on Tuesday…

Speaking to Phoenix TV, Johnson backed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s infrastructure-based Belt and Road Initiative and said his government would maintain an open market for Chinese investors in Britain.

Crash out is now scheduled for October 31 – Halloween in the US, when goblins arrive. 

Update at June, 2019 – the March, 2019 crash-out has been delayed, but that does not apply to earnest Britain-China cooperation – Sino-UK dialogue yields dozens of outcomes.

The 10th China-UK Economic and Financial Dialogue has just concluded in London.  China will help Britain in its soon-to-be developing country status by offering openings in financial and banking services, among many other programs to help British companies.  From the short article –

Christopher Bovis, a professor of international business law at the University of Hull, said this round of dialogue signified the importance of the future of Sino-UK trade relations, with an emphasis on large infrastructure projects and financial services.

“Both economic sectors will benefit enormously from Chinese investment in the UK, and China is expected to reciprocate with more market access to its evolving economy,” he said.

Funny, I didn’t hear much support from Britain for Hong Kong protesters in the recent extradition law conflict.

 ——–

______

Shuang Yin  Win-Win    February, 2019

Now that a crash-out Brexit seems all but assured, where will Britain turn for trade deals?  The kind of relationship that the British government wanted – like that of Canada or Norway with the EU – takes years to negotiate, under favorable circumstances.  There has been discussion for more than ten years that the special relationship between the US and Britain – forged from the mid-19th century and cemented between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in World War II – is no longer so compelling.  The EU without Britain is still a huge and attractive market for US trade in both directions.

As of March 29, 2019 – in a bit more than a month – there will be hundreds of treaties and agreements to negotiate, suddenly, quickly, and in great detail.  Some agreements will probably get done – ability of British truck drivers to deliver goods through the Chunnel into EU turf, and ability of airplanes to take off from Heathrow bound for destinations in Europe using parts and crew that, without certification by the EU, would be not allowed.

But where can Britain turn for trade deals, quickly, without years of complicated negotiations?  What large trading partner is willing to set aside the details of complex agreements when mercantile interests, not to mention future geopolitical support, are at stake?  What large trading partner can act quickly, based on personal leadership from a president or prime minister or general secretary?

In October, 2015, a few months before the Brexit vote, Xi Jinping visited the UK, and  demonstrated his prescience –

“The UK has stated that it will be the Western country that is most open to China,” Xi told Reuters ahead of his first visit to the country as president.

“This is a visionary and strategic choice that fully meets Britain’s own long-term interest.”

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking on CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, said the visit would mark a “golden era” in the two countries’ relationship.


Among items looted from the Summer Palace in 1860 – a blue and gold cloisonné “chimera”—a mythic animal with a lion’s body and dragon’s head.  The Garden of Perfect Brightness – Visualizing Cultures, MIT    Could the chimera’s lion’s head be compatible with the British Lion?  


Source: Tracy Ducasse, creative commons license

Politically, China has always been willing to play a long game for economic access, political favor, and “special relationships.”   But in 2015, I don’t think Mr. Xi was expecting such a quick return on the investment in his state visit.

Even in 2015, Britain said little about China’s incursions into the South China Sea.  A bit unusual for the country that used to rule the waves, and administered Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and many more.  Britain has said little or nothing about Chinese cyberthreats or IP theft.  Britain was one of the first countries to join the Chinese counterpart to the IMF, the Asian Infastructure Investment Bank

In tourism, entertainment, and education, England has become a premier destination for Chinese. A 2015 story from CNN – London has become a favorite destination for young couples to take wedding photos and Chinese viewers are captivated in the millions by shows like “Sherlock Holmes” and “Downton Abbey” … Affluent Chinese parents are sending their children to British schools after some of the most notable names in British education have established campuses in China.

Since 2012, I have written quite a few recommendations for Chinese students to study for a master’s degree in England, at Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Manchester.  Only one for a student wishing to study in the US.

China in England to date

China has a one-third interest in England’s first nuclear power plant in three decades, has substantial investments in the Heathrow and Manchester airports, two premier league soccer clubs, and in London’s tallest building.   The UK has been the top EU destination for foreign investment, and is China’s second largest trade partner in Europe.  Huawei is a top supplier to British Telecom, with apparently few qualms on the British side.  Huawei has told British lawmakers that it wants five years to correct identified problems that it denies having in any case.  Ok.   In May, 2016,  London was granted the right to do RMB trade closings  and Chinese government bonds can now be issued in London.   The RMB is now included in the IMF basket of currencies used for calculation of special drawing rights, which can be freely traded for currencies of member countries.  Some big Chinese banks, like China Construction Bank and the Bank of China, have adopted London as their European financial center, although that could easily change.  The nuclear plant deal at Hinkley Point will give two state owned Chinese companies a one-third stake in ownership, with Chinese involvement expected in two future nuclear plants, including a Chinese-designed reactor. 

China in England going forward

Better for China, and worse for negotiators in Britain, is that China will still want strong relations with the EU and will no longer see England as the easy backdoor to the rest of Europe.  In particular, British based banks and investment firms will be representing only Britain, not the rest of Europe.  With regard to the RMB clearinghouse function, Britain will provide access to a market of 65 million people rather than the EU 500 million people.

As the UK economy deteriorates, so will the value of Chinese investments in England, but so will the ability of Britain to strike hard bargains anywhere.  British companies in China have been optimistic about the fallout from Brexit.  But to the extent their concerns are with IP theft or cyberthreats, internet access, or unequal trade practices, they should not expect much support coming from London.  Britain will become a less expensive country in which to invest, British goods will become cheaper in China, but British companies selling in China will find a tougher road.  The British companies are not known for doing well in heavily competitive markets like China.  Supporters of democracy and free speech in Hong Kong should not expect any more moral support from Britain.

Britain will need trade deals quickly, China will not, and in such a balance England should expect to give a little more on political support for Chinese foreign policies and trade policies, despite the early reticence of Mrs. May to Chinese deals.  China will see a weak Britain, the former colonialist, opium supplier and burner of the Summer Palace (yuanmingyuan, Garden of Perfect Brightness) in 1860.  There will be artifacts from the looting of the Summer Palace that China will want returned, but there will be more important concessions demanded.  China will want Britain as a partner in establishing China as the global standard-setter in media relations, internet availability, business practices, finance, and foreign trade.  China might be able to get a good part of that agenda.

win-win

For China, the timing is perfect.  The US will need to consider carefully its special relationship with a Britain that has Huawei internet tools and supports Chinese trade and financial practices.  With Europe worried about the nearer threat from the east, in Russia, China may be able to strike better deals in the remaining EU as well. 

Even without a firm trade deal, China will be ready to help Britain as much as it is to China’s benefit.  Britain, after all, will be another developing economy in need of assistance, and win-win is always the Chinese mantra in such deals.  A win for China in England, perhaps a win for China in the EU, perhaps a win for China in the UN and other international forums.  In 2019 – 70 years after the creation of “new China” – we may see a new Britain as well. 

Money Talks in the Clash of Civilizations

What else would you expect?

You remember Samuel Huntington’s article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 –

The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani’s phrase, the conflict between “the West and the Rest” and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values…. The third alternative is to attempt to “balance” the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

Take a look at the three maps below. 

The first is Huntington’s civilization categories.

The second maps countries that signed letters to the United Nations Human Rights Council in opposition to and in support of China’s ethnic cleansing policies in Xinjiang.

The third maps countries with substantial debt to China, as a per cent of national GDP.

The First Map – Huntington’s Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations according to Huntington (1996), as presented in his book.  Formerly-archived Geography of War, course at Middlebury College. 

The Second Map – Uighurs – Which Side are you on?

Many sources confirm that up to 1.5 million Uighurs in Xinjiang are in concentration camps, with the goal of erasing their native Muslim culture and transforming them into good Chinese citizens.

From SupChina – An extraordinary event in human rights diplomacy happened in the last week: Two unprecedented letters to the president of the UN Human Rights Council were signed by dozens of countries expressing either support for or condemnation of China’s treatment of Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region.

 Photo credit: A visual representation of countries that signed letters to the UN Human Rights Council against and in defense of China’s ethnic policies in the Xinjiang region. Map made by Reddit user Hamena95

 

Twenty-two countries signed the letter of condemnation.  They are in blue in the map above.

The Chinese government responded with a letter of its own. Reuters reports that 37 countries joined the Chinese response, commending China’s remarkable achievements in human rights.  Such counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures as have been undertaken in Xinjiang are to be applauded.  Those nations are in red in the map above.

What stands out is the US failure to condemn Chinese actions, although we understand that to be attributable to the views of our current dear leader.  The US dropped out of the Human Rights council in 2018.

What also stands out is the failure of any of the Islamic world to condemn Chinese actions against Muslims in Xinjiang.  A number of countries, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria signed on to the Chinese response to the original condemnation.  And notice the support for China in Africa where China is doing infrastructure and resource deals, and Russia.

It is easy to see Huntington’s cultural clash in the current US-China conflict. Individualism v collectivism. World hegemon v rising competitor. Modernity and traditionalism. Its surprising how quickly the world alliances have formed.  In the third map, we begin to see why.

The Third Map – Debt and Loyalty

The third map is from a new working paper on Chinese foreign lending by Sebastian Horn, Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch.  They identified nearly 2000 foreign loans and 3000 grants to more than 150 countries totaling about $530 billion from 1949 to 2017.  This is apart from purchases of foreign bonds.

As of 2018, the Chinese government holds more than five trillion dollars of debt of the rest of the world, equal to about six per cent of world GDP.   As I have noted elsewhere, this lending is mostly to low-income developing countries (LIDC), oil exporters, and countries in the path of the OBOR projects. 

From Ives Smith at Naked Capitalism – China: The Covert Credit Superpower –

The regions most indebted to China are Far East Asia and Central Asia, including highly exposed, small economies that are in geographic proximity to China such as Laos, Cambodia and the Kyrgyz Republic …. Next come Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, as well as some parts of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. The debt flows to Eastern Europe are smaller, when measured as a share of debtor country GDP, but the amounts of credit to Europe have been growing substantially over the past five years.

Note the similarities in maps two and three. 

Notably, no Islamic nation condemned China for its treatment of Muslims.  Islamic northern Africa and much of the middle east and the –stans are recipients of substantial Chinese lending.  Even India has failed to condemn China.

No middle eastern or southern Africa country joined in the condemnation. Several southern African countries have more than 25% of their GDP in debt owed to China. 

Nearly all South American countries have more than 5% of GDP owed to China.  None joined in signing of the letter. 

Notably absent from the original UN letter were Italy, Greece, Turkey and all of eastern Europe, all recipients of large amounts of Chinese loans or expected beneficiaries of the OBOR. 

Signatories to the UN condemnation letter were the “west” including Scandinavia and Japan and all the English speaking nations except the US. 

Civilizations, repression, and debt

Samuel Huntington described about ten cultures in his 1994 book.  The big three civilizations he described were the west, the Islamic world, and Sinic, mainly China.  He described potential alliances of these with other civilizations – Russia with China, the Islamic world with China, based on similar thinking about the importance of history and desire to maintain distinction from the west.  Huntington’s categories are broad, and not without critics. 

Critics of the clash theory have pointed out that significant parts of the Islamic or Sinic world have modernized, particularly leadership and business interests. And any one nation, any one civilization, is far too complex to be accounted for in Huntington’s model. The populist uprisings in the US and Britain and Europe certainly point away from modernism. 

Well, ok.  The world is big and complicated.  Capitalism is no friend to democracy.  Huntington did not see a “winner” in the world civilizational struggle in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article.  

But it sure looks as if money speaks much louder than human rights talk, and Huntington was clearly onto something, way back in 1993.

For those of you want a bit more data, below is a listing of countries in Africa that have –

  • Signed on to the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative)
  • Supported China on Xinjiang
  • Supported China in the 2016 South China Sea arbitration
  • Received more than $500 million in loans from China in the period 2000-2017

This is from Sinocism –

The clash is looking less like a clash than a fait accompli.  And money is the root of … something. 

What Chinese are talking about … fake news

You know that China is increasing pressure on every state it can bully.  The bullying is easiest when the victim state has a substantial share of its GDP connected to China, whether as exports or as Chinese FDI coming in.  Now come fake news stories published in China, quoting New Zealand politicians approving of Chinese policies on the Belt and Road initiative.  New Zealand is in a tough spot. 
 
It is one of the “five eyes” countries, those English speaking countries that share some cultural backgrounds and concepts of law and government.  Others are the US, England, Canada, and Australia.  These five share intelligence efforts in some detail.  The US agencies involved include the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA).  Security issues – now, the Huawei 5G business, and related Chinese hacking and theft – are top priorities among the five eyes countries.  Even more than Australia, New Zealand is a western country in Asia. 
 
New Zealand is isolated.  It is more than 1300 miles from Sydney to Auckland and it cannot develop much stronger markets for agricultural goods elsewhere in the world.  China is its largest trading partner, followed by Australia.  Agricultural exports are about 27% of GDP, and food exports are about half of that. New Zealand signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008.
 
A good example of the position in which New Zealand finds itself is the relative lack of police response to the attacks on the home and office of Anne Marie Brady, a scholar at the University of Canterbury, who has written in detail about the means by which China is infecting media and politics and public opinion outside China.  I wrote about these attacks in two places in the last couple of months. It is suspected that the intruders, who have also left threatening phone messages, are some local version of chengguan, the Chinese hired thugs who terrorize street vendors, old ladies who don’t want to leave their homes in the way of demolition, and anyone in the way of growth and development.  A substantial contingent of chengguan were responsible for watching Chen Guangcheng for years before he escaped in 2012.   New Zealand police have found no evidence, it seems, and do not seem too alarmed by the attacks.  There seems no doubt that these despicable attacks are politically motivated.  Brady’s recent article is Magic Weapons: China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping. 
 
What is New Zealand to do? 
 
 
4. Chinese pressure on New Zealand increasing
Fake OpEd on People’s Daily English site by former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley – Foreign Minister Winston Peters slams former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley after China Daily article appears – NZ Herald:
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has launched a stinging attack on former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley after an article appeared in China’s “People’s Daily” under her byline complimenting China on its reforms and the Belt and Road Initiative.
But Shipley did not write the piece, which appears under the Online opinion section. It is headlined “We need to listen to China” and carries Dame Jenny’s byline and on Tuesday night was the fourth best read piece on the website.
She was interviewed by the state-run newspaper in December for a feature article which has run already and was surprised to learn a new piece had been published under her name.

Some economic development issues are similar around the world.   An American local government, faced with declining tax base, ageing population, loss of markets, and little ability to change the course of history is faced with  tough choices.  New Zealand is in a similar spot, with respect to China and the English-speaking west.   But American local governments usually don’t have to deal with fake news stories planted by enemies in the town next door.

Url for the New Zealand Herald article –

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12205347&ref=clavis

School’s Out – What Chinese are talking about … (2)

The cult of Xi – from the Little Red Book on Mao Zedong thought to the nightly quiz show on Xi Jinping thought 

extolling Mao with the little red book; and 

extolling Xi with the tv quiz show 

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-45728131   A nightly tv show features students vying to be the one who knows most about the life, speeches, and travels of the current dear leader and Marxism.  This is a game show,  but there are no prizes for winners.  That must be why tv ratings are so low. 

As you know, I have some acquaintances from the Chinese government, in several different provinces and in some state owned businesses and universities.  All have pretty good jobs, at mid-level or higher.  A few are moving beyond a middle mid-level, perhaps chu bu ji, to higher reaches ting bu ji, as party leaders in districts or counties or university departments. 

Over the last five years, many expressed concerns about the direction of current Chinese governance, in much the same way that Americans look askance at the machinations of the Republican party and the orange-haired baboon (hat tip to Brad DeLong for the descriptor).  A common theme in China is the return to the fears and terrors of the Cultural Revolution.  Most of my acquaintances were born in that era, and have stories from their parents and families and colleagues.  The disappearances, the arrests now for corruption on actions that until recently were standard operating procedure, the personality cult of Mr. Xi, the demands for ideological purity, the lack of procedural rules that makes accessories to crimes out of officials just doing what they are told to do, the double binds that crop up all too frequently – if I do this thing, it will be illegal;  if I don’t do this thing, my career will be over – all are chilling reminders.  I will detail some of these fears in a future post.

The new era affects CCP members in their most cherished place – their families and kids. 

Among the recent developments in the last couple of years is passport retention by the Discipline Inspection Bureau for all mid-levels.  Prior to about 2013, Chinese officials going abroad could use either of two passports – a government official passport, which was always held by the Human Resources Department of their workplace, or their own private passport, which individuals retained, as we would do in the US.  Now, even the private passports are being held by the Discipline Inspection Bureau jiwei for some midlevels and above in at least some places.  I am told this policy is active in Hubei Province; not sure where else as of October.  It was not in effect in Zhejiang in June.  And some of my acquaintances – more than a couple – are worried that they might be unable to get out of China in the future.  Travel to the US is much more restricted on the Chinese side, and this was the case before the US 2016 election.  Chinese with kids in college in the US no longer get automatic approval to go out to see their kid graduate, notwithstanding the further restrictions on students and their families from the American State Department.

So what to do?  This is not a matter of trying to get illegal gains out of China.  These concerns are being expressed by good public servants who wish to retain options for retirement or school choices for their kids. The government has made it more difficult to move money out of China.  For the past twenty years, that was the safety valve for wealthy families- buy the house in London or Sydney or New York or San Francisco or Vancouver or Seattle, let the wife and kids live there, and at some point, retirement or the need to get out, join them (the US has no extradition treaty with China).  In 2012, Lin Zhe, a professor from the CCP’s Central Party School and a member of the National People’s Congress, said that 1.18 million senior officials’ spouses and children had emigrated between 1995 and 2005.

There are still ways to get money out.  Now, getting the people out is becoming more risky on both ends.  It is reported that senior government officials (perhaps at the provincial vice minister level or higher) will no longer be able to send their children outside China for education. Secret order to bar students from going out  China Said to Issue Secret Order Barring Senior Officials’ Children From Studying in US   This article notes that –

At a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on July 24, Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), recommended that the U.S. government impose visa limitations on the children of the CCP elite as a means of economic pressure.

AEI is a fairly right wing organization, and in normal times there would be no reason to think that its recommendations about visa restrictions would be considered.  However, we are not in normal times.  Good thing that Xi Mingze was able to get out of Harvard by 2014.  Today, she might not have been able to go out, or to get in. 

One of the few known pictures of Xi Mingze from her time at Harvard.   Source: https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Xi-daughter-Twitter.jpg

Among many other worries, ability to go out for education is a worry for some smart and thoughtful Chinese officials and business people and academics.   Good thing Canada is still available. 

Intimidation Knows No Boundaries

This direct threat to a New Zealand academic – her office and home invaded –  is part of the intimidation pattern – transition from hard power to soft power to sharp power.  CCP is always watching.  In this case, Anne Marie Brady has studied Chinese politics, and recently wrote a report describing Chinese government infiltration in New Zealand politics, education, and media.

So, another story of direct threat to an academic, this time in New Zealand, by person or persons unknown.  The unknown perps are generally understood to be a Chinese government-promoted foreign version of chengguan – the plainclothes thugs hired informally by Chinese local governments to maintain street order, help evict farmers, provide household imprisonment services, threaten dissidents, and occasionally beat up or murder government objects of disaffection.  In this case, Anne Marie Brady wrote a detailed research report, titled Magic Weapons, describing the means by which Beijing intends to (surreptitiously) influence domestic and foreign policy in foreign countries using the United Front vehicles.  From the Magic Weapons article –

After more than 30 years of this work, there are few overseas Chinese associations able to completely evade “guidance” — other than those affiliated with the religious group Falungong, Taiwan independence, pro-independence Tibetans and Uighurs, independent Chinese religious groups outside party-state controlled religions, and the democracy movement—and even these are subject to being infiltrated by informers and a target for united front work.

 As in the Cold War years, united front work not only serves foreign policy goals, but can sometimes be used as a cover for intelligence activities.

 The Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Public Security, PLA Joint Staff Headquarters’ Third Department, Xinhua News Service, the United Front Work Department, International Liaison Department, are the main, but not the only, PRC party-state agencies who recruit foreign, especially ethnic Chinese, agents for the purpose of collecting intelligence.

 In 2014, one former spy said that the Third Department had at least 200,000 agents abroad.

 Some Chinese community associations act as fronts for Chinese mafia who engage in illegal gambling; human trafficking; extortion; and money laundering. As a leaked 1997 report by Canada’s RCMP-SIS noted, these organizations also frequently have connections with China’s party-state intelligence organizations.

The crisis of 1989 resulted in the CCP government stepping up foreign persuasion efforts (外宣) aimed at the non-ethnic-Chinese public too. As they had done in the past, in this the Chinese government drew on the help of high level “friends of China” —foreign political figures such as the USA’s Henry Kissinger, to repair China’s relations with the USA and other Western democracies. In 1991 the State Council Information Office was set up to better promote China’s policies to the outside world. Reflecting the fact that it is both a party and a state body, its other Chinese-only nameplate is the Office of Foreign Propaganda, 外宣办. Soon after, China Central Television (CCTV) launched its first English language channel. China gradually expanded its external influence activities under CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin (1989-2002). While these activities failed to ameliorate negative global public opinion towards the Chinese government and its policies, efforts to promote a positive image of China’s economic policies had much more success.

John Burge, the notorious Chicago police commander who oversaw torture and intimidation in arrests, had nothing on the chengguan in the way of despicable behavior.

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/can-chinas-hated-local-police-reform-their-image/277202/

Source:Bystanders surround a street vendor beaten by the chengguan, China’s municipal police force (Sohu/Fair Use) in Yueran Zhang. Can China’s Hated Local Police Reform Their Image?  Atlantic, June 25, 2013.

From the New Zealand Herald, quoted in the South China Morning Post (!) –

According to The New Zealand Herald, Brady said her office on campus was broken into in December, and her home burgled last week, with computers, phones and USB storage devices stolen while other obvious valuables were overlooked.

Brady said the latest burglary was preceded by an anonymous letter threatening “pushback” against opponents of Beijing’s interests, with the warning: “You are next.”

And the intimidation is not a new story.  China has always blocked entry to China of scholars and writers it found to speak or write too honestly.  Minxin Pei, Andrew Nathan, and Perry Link are examples.  And –

Intimidation of foreign journalists in China in 2011 (actually, rather a constant)  Intimidation

And – Kevin Carrico, who was monitored in both the US and in Australia  Inside Higher Ed – Monitoring and Scrutiny of Foreign Professors  This Inside Higher Ed story is worth reading.

And you all know of the threat to Cambridge University Press and other academic publishers regarding demands to censor journals.

Foreigners in China, of course, have always been subject to scrutiny and more.  In recent weeks, Christopher Balding (teaching at the Shenzhen Branch of Peking University graduate school of business) has left China  Balding Out   He writes, “China has reached a point where I do not feel safe being a professor and discussing even the economy, business, and financial markets.”   He was threatened in 2015, as was I, although his experience was more extreme than mine.  His office at school was broken into, his apartment also, and he was quite sure his phone was being tapped. 

On to this most recent story  in the New York Times –

Break-ins of Home and Office of New Zealand Academic

Fingers Point to China After Break-Ins Target New Zealand Professor

Ms. Brady’s recent paper, “Magic Weapons,” was published last September. It identified categories of political-influence activities by China in Western democracies, laid out what Ms. Brady said was the Chinese Communist Party’s blueprint for conducting such activities worldwide, and examined New Zealand as a case study of Chinese influence across most spheres of public life.

When Ms. Brady returned home on the day of the burglary, bed covers were rumpled and papers strewn about, but her husband’s laptop was left untouched. She said that it appeared to be a “psychological operation” and the latest in a series of incidents targeting her over her work. She said her computer’s hard drive had been tampered with when she was previously in China, and that Communist Party officials questioned people she spoke with there.

Before the February burglary, she said, she received a letter warning her she would be attacked …..

Do read the original paper,  Magic Weapons China’s Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping

This story is also reported by Bill Bishop today at Axios China