by Frederick Kempe
Today the Atlantic Council publishes an extraordinary new strategy paper that offers one of the most insightful and rigorous examinations to date of Chinese geopolitical strategy and how an informed American strategy would address the challenges of China’s own strategic ambitions.
Written by a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China, the strategy sets out a comprehensive approach, and details the ways to execute it, in terms that will invite comparison with George Kennan’s historic 1946 “long telegram” on Soviet grand strategy. We have maintained the author’s preferred title for the work, “The Longer Telegram,” given the author’s aspiration to provide a similarly durable and actionable approach to China.
The focus of the paper is China’s leader and his behavior. “The single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping,” it says. “US strategy must remain laser focused on Xi, his inner circle, and the Chinese political context in which they rule. Changing their decision-making will require understanding, operating within, and changing their political and strategic paradigm. All US policy aimed at altering China’s behavior should revolve around this fact, or it is likely to prove ineffectual.”
The author of this work has requested to remain anonymous, and the Atlantic Council has honored this for reasons we consider legitimate but that will remain confidential. The Council has not taken such a measure before, but it made the decision to do so given the extraordinary significance of the author’s insights and recommendations as the United States confronts the signature geopolitical challenge of the era. The Council will not be confirming the author’s identity unless and until the author decides to take that step.
The Atlantic Council as an organization does not adopt or advocate positions on particular matters. The Council’s publications always represent the views of the author(s) rather than those of the institution, and this paper is no different from any other in that sense.
Nonetheless, we stand by the importance and gravity of the issues that this paper raises and view it as one of the most important the Council has ever published. The Council is proud to serve as a platform for bold ideas, insights, and strategies as we advance our mission of shaping the global future together for a more free, prosperous, and secure world. As China rapidly increases its political and economic clout during this period of historic geopolitical crisis, this moment calls for a thorough understanding of its strategy and power structure. The perspectives set forth in this paper deserve the full attention of elected leaders in the United States and the leaders of its democratic partners and allies.
Executive summary
The single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping. China’s rise, because of the scale of its economy and its military, the speed of its technological advancement, and its radically different worldview than that of the United States, now profoundly impacts every major US national interest. This is a structural challenge that, to some extent, has been gradually emerging over the last two decades. The rise to power of Xi has greatly accentuated this challenge, and accelerated its timetable.
At home, Xi has returned China to classical Marxism-Leninism and fostered a quasi-Maoist personality cult, pursuing the systematic elimination of his political opponents. China’s market reforms have stalled and its private sector is now under direct forms of party control. Unapologetically nationalist, Xi has used ethnonationalism to unite his country against any challenges to his authority, internal or external. His treatment of recalcitrant ethnic minorities within China borders on genocide. Xi’s China increasingly resembles a new form of totalitarian police state. In what is a fundamental departure from his risk-averse post-Mao predecessors, Xi has demonstrated that he intends to project China’s authoritarian system, coercive foreign policy, and military presence well beyond his country’s own borders to the world at large. China under Xi, unlike under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, is no longer a status quo power. It has become a revisionist power. For the United States, its allies, and the US-led liberal international order, this represents a fundamental shift in the strategic environment. Ignoring this profound change courts peril. Xi is no longer just a problem for US primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world.
The single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping.
The fundamental strategic question for the United States, under a Republican or Democratic administration, is what to do about this challenge. It is now a matter of urgency that this country develop an integrated, operational, and bipartisan national strategy to guide the content and implementation of US policy toward Xi’s China for the next three decades. Some will argue that the United States already has a China strategy, pointing to the Trump administration’s declaration of “strategic competition” as the “central challenge” of US foreign and national-security policy, as enshrined in the 2017 US National Security Strategy. However, while the Trump administration did well to sound the alarm on China and its annunciation of strategic competition with Beijing was important, its episodic efforts at implementation were chaotic and at times contradictory. At root, the issue is that “strategic competition” is a declaration of doctrinal attitude, not a comprehensive strategy to be operationalized.
The uncomfortable truth is that China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States, and so far this strategy has been implemented with reasonable, although not unqualified, success. By contrast, the United States, which once operationalized a unified strategy to deal with the challenge of the Soviet Union, in the form of George Kennan’s containment, so far has none in relation to China. This has been a dereliction of national responsibility.
Washington’s difficulty in developing an effective China strategy has been accentuated by the absence of a clearly understood strategic objective. At present, articulated objectives range from inducing Chinese economic reform through a limited trade war to full-blown regime change. Kennan’s famous 1946 “long telegram” from Moscow was primarily an analysis of the inherent structural weaknesses within the Soviet model itself, anchored by its analytical conclusion that the USSR would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The entire doctrine of containment was based on this critical underlying assumption. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, has been much more dexterous in survival than its Soviet counterpart, aided by the fact that China has studied carefully, over more than a decade, “what went wrong” in the Soviet Union. It would therefore be extremely hazardous for US strategists to accept that an effective future US China strategy should rest on an assumption that the Chinese system is destined to inevitably collapse from within—much less to make the “overthrow of the Communist Party” the nation’s declared objective. In fact, indulgence in politically appealing calls for the overthrow of the ninety-one-million-member CCP as a whole is strategically self-defeating. Such an approach only strengthens Xi’s hand as it enables him to circle elite political and popular nationalist wagons in defense of both party and country. The present challenge will require a qualitatively different and more granular policy response to China than the blunt instrument of “containment with Chinese characteristics” and a dream of CCP collapse.
The wisdom in Kennan’s analysis was his profound appraisal of how the Soviet Union functioned internally and the development of a US strategy that worked along the grain of that complex reality. The same needs to be done with China. The political reality is that the CCP is significantly divided on Xi’s leadership and his vast ambitions. Senior party members have been greatly troubled by Xi’s policy direction and angered by his endless demands for absolute loyalty. They fear for their own lives and the future livelihoods of their families. Of particular political toxicity in this mix are the reports unearthed by international media of the wealth amassed by Xi’s family and members of his political inner circle, despite the vigor with which Xi has conducted the anti-corruption campaign. It is simply unsophisticated strategy to treat the entire Communist Party as a single target when such internal fault lines should be clear to the analyst’s eye—and in the intelligent policy maker’s penning. A campaign to overthrow the party also ignores the fact that China, under all five of its post-Mao leaders prior to Xi, was able to work with the United States. Under them, China aimed to join the existing international order, not to remake it in China’s own image. Now, however, the mission for US China strategy should be to see China return to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo. There were, of course, many challenges to US interests during Hu’s second term, but they were manageable and did not represent a serious violation of the US-led international order. All US political and policy responses to China therefore should be focused through the principal lens of Xi himself.
Of all the elements commonly missing from discussions of US strategy toward China so far, this is the most critical. While US leaders often differentiate between China’s Communist Party government and the Chinese people, Washington must achieve the sophistication necessary to go even further. US leaders also must differentiate between the government and the party elite, as well as between the party elite and Xi. Given the reality that today’s China is a state in which Xi has centralized nearly all decision-making power in his own hands, and used that power to substantially alter China’s political, economic, and foreign-policy trajectory, US strategy must remain laser focused on Xi, his inner circle, and the Chinese political context in which they rule. Changing their decision-making will require understanding, operating within, and changing their political and strategic paradigm. All US policy aimed at altering China’s behavior should revolve around this fact, or it is likely to prove ineffectual. This strategy must also be long term—able to function at the timescale that a Chinese leader like Xi sees himself ruling and influencing—as well as fully operationalized, transcending the rhetorical buzzwords that have too often substituted for genuine US strategy toward Beijing. Defending our democracies from the challenge posed by China will require no less.
Implementing such a strategy would require a firm understanding of Xi’s strategic objectives, which include the following:
leapfrog the United States as a technological power and thereby displace it as the world’s dominant economic power
undermine US dominance of the global financial system and the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency
achieve military preponderance sufficient to deter the United States and its allies from intervention in any conflict over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or the East China Sea
diminish the credibility of US power and influence sufficiently to cause those states currently inclined to “balance” against China to instead join the bandwagon with China
deepen and sustain China’s relationship with its neighbor and most valuable strategic partner, Russia, in order to head off Western pressure
consolidate the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into a geopolitical and geoeconomic bloc in support of China’s policy ambitions, forming the foundation for a future Sinocentric global order
use China’s growing influence within international institutions to delegitimize and overturn initiatives, standards, and norms perceived as hostile to China’s interests—particularly on human rights and international maritime law—while advancing a new, hierarchical, authoritarian conception of international order under Xi’s deliberately amorphous concept of a “community of common destiny for all mankind”
The Chinese Communist Party keenly understands Sun Tzu’s maxim that “what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy,” and the US should as well. Any US approach must seek to frustrate Xi’s ambitions. That means first clarifying which US national interests are to be protected, together with those of principal partners and allies. This includes the following:
retain collective economic and technological superiority
protect the global status of the US dollar
maintain overwhelming conventional military deterrence and prevent any unacceptable shift in the strategic nuclear balance
prevent any Chinese territorial expansion, especially the forcible reunification with Taiwan
consolidate and expand alliances and partnerships
defend (and as necessary reform) the current rules-based liberal international order and, critically, its ideological underpinnings, including core democratic values
address persistent shared global threats, including preventing catastrophic climate change
Given China’s significant and growing “comprehensive national power,” some may question how this can realistically be achieved. 1 The overriding political objective should be to cause China’s elite leadership to collectively conclude that it is in the country’s best interests to continue to operate within the existing US-led liberal international order rather than build a rival order, and that it is in the party’s best interests, if it wishes to remain in power at home, not to attempt to expand China’s borders or export its political model beyond China’s shores. In other words, China can become a different type of global great power than that envisaged by Xi. The primary way in which the United States can seek to achieve these ends (while also protecting its own core advantages) is to change China’s objectives and behavior. A detailed, operationalized strategy should comprise seven integrated components:
rebuild the economic, military, technological, and human-capital underpinnings of US long-term national power
agree on a limited set of enforceable policy “red lines” that China should be deterred from crossing under any circumstances
agree on a larger number of “major national security interests” which are neither vital nor existential in nature but which require a range of retaliatory actions to inform future Chinese strategic behavior
identify important but less critical areas where neither red lines nor the delineation of major national interests may be necessary, but where the full force of strategic competition should be deployed by the United States against China
define those areas where continued strategic cooperation with China remains in US interests—where such “megathreats” include climate disruption, global pandemics, and nuclear security
prosecute a full-fledged, global ideological battle in defense of political, economic, and societal freedoms against China’s authoritarian state-capitalist model
agree on the above strategy in sufficiently granular form with the United States’ major Asian and European treaty allies so that their combined critical mass (economic, military, and technological) is deployed in common defense of the US-led liberal international order
These seven components should be implemented through a fully coordinated interagency and interallied effort, under the central direction of the national security advisor, underpinned by a presidential directive with the bipartisan political support to endure across multiple administrations.
This US strategy should be developed on the basis of ten core organizing principles:
First, US strategy must be based on the four fundamental pillars of American power: the power of the nation’s military; the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency and mainstay of the international financial system; global technological leadership, given that technology has become the major determinant of future national power; and the values of individual freedom, fairness, and the rule of law for which the nation continues to stand, despite its recent political divisions and difficulties.
Second, US strategy must begin by attending to domestic economic and institutional weaknesses. The success of China’s rise has been predicated on a meticulous strategy, executed over thirty-five years, of identifying and addressing China’s structural economic weaknesses in manufacturing, trade, finance, human capital, and now technology. The United States must now do the same.
Third, the United States’ China strategy must be anchored in both national values and national interests. This is what has long distinguished the nation from China in the eyes of the world. The defense of universal liberal values and the liberal international order, as well as the maintenance of US global power, must be the twin pillars of America’s global call to arms.
Fourth, US strategy must be fully coordinated with major allies so that action is taken in unity in response to China. This has nothing to do with making allies feel good or better than they have. It’s because the United States now needs them to win. As noted previously, China ultimately places great weight on its calculation of the evolving balance of comprehensive power between the United States and itself. The reality is that, as the gap between Chinese and US power closes during the 2020s, the most credible factor that can alter that trajectory is if US power is augmented by that of its principal allies.
Fifth, the United States’ China strategy also must address the wider political and economic needs of its principal allies and partners rather than assuming that they will choose to adopt a common, coordinated strategic position on China out of the goodness of their hearts. Unless the United States also deals with the fact that China has become the principal trading partner for most, if not all, of its major allies, this underlying economic reality alone will have growing influence over the willingness of traditional allies to challenge China’s increasingly assertive international behavior.
Sixth, the United States must rebalance its relationship with Russia whether it likes it or not. Effectively reinforcing US alliances is critical. Dividing Russia from China in the future is equally so. Allowing Russia to drift fully into China’s strategic embrace over the last decade will go down as the single greatest geostrategic error of successive US administrations.
Seventh, the central focus of an effective US and allied China strategy must be directed at the internal fault lines of domestic Chinese politics in general and concerning Xi’s leadership in particular. A fundamental error of US strategy has been to attack China as a whole, thereby enabling Xi’s leadership to circle the wagons within Chinese politics around the emotional pull of Chinese nationalism and civilizational pride. Just as significant an error has been to crudely attack the Chinese Communist Party itself. However, the political reality is that the party is divided on Xi’s leadership where he threatens the lives, careers, and deeply held policy positions of many within its senior political echelons.
Eighth, US strategy must never forget the innately realist nature of the Chinese strategy that it is seeking to defeat. Chinese leaders respect strength and are contemptuous of weakness. They respect consistency and are contemptuous of vacillation. China does not believe in strategic vacuums.
Ninth, US strategy must understand that China remains for the time being highly anxious about military conflict with the United States, but that this attitude will change as the military balance shifts over the next decade. If military conflict were to erupt between China and the United States, and China failed to win decisively, then—given the party’s domestic propaganda offensive over many years proclaiming China’s inevitable rise—Xi would probably fall and the regime’s overall political legitimacy would collapse.
Tenth, for Xi, too, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Short of defeat in any future military action, the single greatest factor that could contribute to Xi’s fall is economic failure. That would mean large-scale unemployment and falling living standards for China’s population. Full employment and rising living standards are the essential components of the unspoken social contract between the Chinese people and the CCP since the tumult of the Cultural Revolution.
The list of core domestic tasks which the United States must address as part of any effective strategy for dealing with Xi’s China is familiar. They are all structural, long term, and with dividends that will only be yielded over a decade or more. They include, but are not be limited to, the following:
reversing declining investments in critical national economic infrastructure including next-generation 5G mobile systems
reversing declining public investment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, universities, and basic scientific research
ensuring the United States remains the global leader in the major categories of technological innovation including artificial intelligence (AI)
developing a new political consensus on the future nature and scale of immigration to the United States in order to ensure that the US population continues to grow, remains young, and avoids the demographic implosions threatening many other developed and emerging economies including China itself, while retaining the best and brightest from around the world who come to the United States to study
rectifying the long-term budgetary trajectory of the United States so that the national debt is ultimately kept within acceptable parameters, accommodating the new expansionary monetary policy without creating an inflation crisis and weakening the role of the US dollar
resolving, or at least reducing, the severe divisions now endemic in the political system, institutions, and culture, which undermine the capacity to agree on, make, and stick to long-term national decisions fundamental to the consolidation of historical strengths and the exploitation of new opportunities
addressing the critical question of future national political resolve to safeguard, build, and even expand the liberal international order, rather than accept or embrace a new wave of isolationism that will inevitably drag the United States inward rather than outward and proving China wrong in its calculation that this US resolve is waning
Deterring and preventing China from crossing US red lines
The United States’ list of red lines should be short, focused, and enforceable. China’s tactic for many years has been to blur the red lines that might otherwise lead to open confrontation with the United States too early for Beijing’s liking. The United States must be very clear about which Chinese actions it will seek to deter and, should deterrence fail, will prompt direct US intervention. These should be unambiguously communicated to Beijing through high-level diplomatic channels so that China is placed on notice. This list of red lines should include these elements:
any nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons action by China against the United States or its allies, or by North Korea where China has failed to take decisive action to prevent any such North Korean action 2
any Chinese military attack against Taiwan or its offshore islands, including an economic blockade or major cyberattack against Taiwanese public infrastructure and institutions 3
any Chinese attack against Japanese forces in their defense of Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands and their surrounding exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the East China Sea
any major Chinese hostile action in the South China Sea to further reclaim and militarize islands, to deploy force against other claimant states, or to prevent full freedom of navigation operations by the United States and allied maritime forces 4
any Chinese attack against the sovereign territory or military assets of US treaty allies
Areas of major national concern
There is a further category of major national security concerns for the United States which also will warrant a US response, but not necessarily of a military nature. These are national security interests of a nonvital, but nonetheless highly significant nature. There are multiple tools in the US tool kit that can be deployed for these purposes that will not only send a message to the senior echelons of the Chinese leadership that a line has been crossed, but also administer real and measurable pain. Once again, these concerns should be communicated in advance through high-level private diplomacy. This list should include:
continued refusal by China, within a defined time frame, to participate in substantive bilateral or multilateral strategic nuclear arms reduction talks, with the object of securing a cap on China’s program of nuclear modernization and expansion
any action by China that threatens the security of US space assets or global communications systems
any major Chinese cyberattack against any US or allied governments’ critical economic, social, or political infrastructure
any act of large-scale military or economic belligerence against US treaty allies or other critical strategic partners, including India
any act of genocide or crimes against humanity against any group within China
Areas of declared strategic competition
Deterring certain Chinese strategic behaviors, particularly in the security domain, is one thing. Punishing other behaviors where other major US national security interests are at stake is another. Allowing for a wider form of strategic competition, particularly in the diplomatic and economic domains, however, also is an important part of a fully calibrated strategy. Having all three categories within a single strategic framework is possible. The rationale for including “strategic competition” is to address those areas where the two countries have clearly conflicting policy agendas but where it is judged that these conflicts can be resolved by means other than the threat or use of force, or by other coercive or significantly punitive measures. It infers that while the interests at stake are important, they are neither existential nor critical in nature. These interests may still involve areas of policy activity that are preparatory to the eventual use of force, such as areas related to long-term military and economic preparedness. Or they may include areas which, by their nature, will never involve the use of lethal means. Nonetheless, the common characteristic for all of these areas of strategic competition must be confidence that the United States can and will prevail, with US underlying strengths and values still providing the stronger hand to play in what remains an open, competitive, international environment. These areas of strategic competition against China should include the following:
sustaining current US force levels in the Indo-Pacific region (because to do otherwise would cause China to conclude that the United States has begun to retreat from its alliance commitments), while also modernizing military doctrine, platforms, and capabilities to ensure robust regionwide deterrence
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