ROBERT DALY
Welcome, China Watchers. This week’s guest host is Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center. He served as cultural exchange officer at the American Embassy in Beijing in the late ’80s and early ’90s and has spent 12 years in China. He has testified before Congress, interpreted for Chinese and American leaders, and worked on China programs at Syracuse, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. He is a board member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a member of the Asia Society’s Task Force on U.S.-China Policy. Over to you, Robert. — John Yearwood, global news editor
In five years, the United States will mark its sestercentennial. There will be patriotic bluster, fireworks, rock anthems and apple pie, but there will also be introspection about America’s missteps and debates about what the Spirit of ’76 meant, whether we’ve upheld it and whether we should. Many Americans will go about their business without noticing the milestone.
In China, which celebrates the centennial of its Communist Party’s founding today, questioning the significance of the anniversary is not an option. General Secretary Xi Jinping’s speeches, the loyalty awards he confers, the televised mass choreography and martial music, the drumbeat of propaganda, and the joyous events in schools and workplaces are impossible to escape.
The party is using its birthday to hammer home the message that only the CCP could have saved China from the poverty and humiliations of its past and that only continued fealty to the party and Xi can ensure China’s continued economic development and global status.
In the run-up to the centenary, Chinese and foreign critics have pointed out that the CCP’s triumphalist narrative omits key details: inner-party mass murder campaigns in the revolutionary phase; the killing of up to 2 million peasants in the early 1950s; the Anti-Rightist Campaign; the Great Leap Forward; the Cultural Revolution; the Tiananmen Massacre; and the ongoing suppression of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Are the people on board?
It’s not clear that Chinese people under the age of 40 know about this bloody history or think it matters. They focus on their own prospects, which are far better than their parents’ and inestimably brighter than the violence and privation that their grandparents endured. Most young Chinese people seem to view the CCP as inevitable, irreplaceable, and as deserving of gratitude for bringing China from medieval poverty to global economic and technological prominence in the course of a single lifetime.
This intimate connection between China, party and people is poorly understood in Washington. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke of the Chinese people as “enslaved” or "imprisoned." In a 2020 speech, Pompeo implied that the U.S. might inspire the Chinese to rise up against the CCP and establish the democracy they desperately desired.
This good people/evil government thesis has a long history and many adherents in the U.S. It’s a delusion. There are thousands of brave dissidents and free thinkers in the PRC, but there is greater unity of purpose between China’s rulers and their 1.4 billion subjects than Americans usually admit. If it were a nation of evil emperors and captive masses who secretly agree with us, China would be relatively easy to deal with. It isn’t. China is a complex, ambitious, aggrieved nation — a government and a people. It will believe what it believes and do what it does regardless of our wishes. This relative unity of purpose is one of the major themes of the centenary.
Unity does not mean the people are always passive, however. The Chinese expect the party to address their changing needs. Young people defy government exhortations by marrying later and having fewer children; the elderly push back against government demands that they delay retirement; white-collar urbanites decry long hours and advocate for digital privacy; young people give up on the rat race altogether by “lying flat”; and women fight sexual harassment and patriarchal culture through street protests, stand-up comedy and rock ballads.
China is not ripe for revolution. Its people report high rates of satisfaction with their improving lives. They are not demanding Western-style human rights, but they are asking that China be more humane. The lesson for the United States is that China is still changing. Washington can’t direct that change, but it should understand and respond to it through continued engagement. Calling the Chinese people “slaves” and “prisoners” when most of them seem to feel more enabled than constrained by their government will not win them over.
The Morning After
The party has earned its birthday bash, but it can’t rest on its laurels. Xi has said that China’s greatest remaining “contradiction” — that’s code for “biggest problem” — is uneven development amid rising expectations. Continued development is threatened by corruption, debt, pollution and environmental damage, water shortages, an aging population, a poor social safety net, and hundreds of millions who still live in poverty. After 72 years in power and historic increases in living standards, Beijing hasn’t convinced people in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan that it is in their interest to be part of the PRC. That is a stunning failure.
China’s foreign affairs docket is just as troublesome: The U.S. and its allies are increasingly hostile, global public opinion of China has plummeted, the Belt and Road Initiative is slowing down, and Chinese tech companies are being shut out of international markets and supply chains. The list of disappointments and dangers is growing.
What Does China Want?
It has become commonplace in Washington to claim that China is leading a coalition of authoritarian nations to defeat democracy and make the world safe for autocracy. Wrong. China doesn’t care enough about other countries to mind what sort of politics they practice, and it doesn’t want to be burdened with other nations’ problems. China is out for China.
To remain in power, the CCP must continue to enrich the Chinese people, which means that China needs to continue to import vast amounts of energy, food and natural resources. It needs access to foreign markets, technology and capital. The CCP, in other words, must integrate to survive, which means it must either adapt to existing global norms and systems or alter them to suit Beijing’s needs. Xi is trying to do both at once. China adopts global rules and practices when it benefits from them, as it often does, and seeks international influence to transform rules and institutions it dislikes. It’s a two-pronged strategy that China must pursue gradually, lest alarm over Chinese aggression restrict its access to foreign imports and markets.
Xi’s great error may prove to be his rejection of gradualism. He showed his hand when he built and militarized islands in the South China Sea and flouted the International Court of Arbitration’s ruling against China’s regional claims. Beijing’s subsequent treatment of Uyghurs, Hong Kong and Taiwan caused the narrative across much of the globe to shift from “China is rising; What’s in it for us?” to “China is dangerous; What can we do?” As a result, Beijing now faces pervasive distrust. Xi knows this and is preparing the Chinese people for a more contentious era. That is why he told the CCP’s propagandists and government spokespeople in early June to "be both open and confident but also modest and humble, and strive to create a credible, lovable and respectable image of China."
The Big Question
China is rightly proud of its historic achievements, but it is also struggling with profound dislocations caused by the speed and scale of its rise. Fragility and confusion were papered over for decades by rapid growth, but they can’t be ignored much longer.
The key question concerns the party itself. Can an organization conceived to meet the needs of an ancient, isolated, impoverished, agrarian civilization adapt to meet the needs of a modern, internationalized, wealthy, urban nation-state that operates among other nation-states of equal status? Can the party adapt again as it has in the past? Deng Xiaoping, who led China from 1978 until the late ‘90s, made the PRC a developmental state after decades of Maoist class warfare. Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Deng, invited China’s capitalists into a party of workers, peasants and soldiers.
The direction of change under Xi has been back toward Maoist methods and enthusiasms. He is using technology to turn China into a surveillance state, as Mao would have done if he’d had the same tools. That may not be the trajectory that young Chinese people desire, however, and may not even be the preferred course of most party members.
It is clear that the Chinese want richer, more humane lives, and it’s clear that Xi wants as much control as possible over those lives, but no one knows for sure what most of China’s registered Communists envision for their country. The party, formed in secrecy 100 years ago, remains a black box. When it comes to expressing personal opinions, most party members function as tiny black boxes within the big one.
On this key point, the bright spotlights and fireworks of the centenary have illuminated very little.
And now, back to your regular China Watcher programming…
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— U.S., TAIWAN HOLD TRADE TALKS: "The United States and Taiwan held trade talks on Wednesday for the first time since 2016, brushing aside China's objections to the renewed dialogue," POLITICO’s Doug Palmer reported Wednesday. "Specifically, the two countries have agreed to work together to strengthen supply chains and address a number of other concerns, including workers' rights, climate change and wildlife trafficking. The U.S. move to strengthen trade ties with Taiwan comes at a time of tensions between the U.S. and China over Beijing's trade policies, military ambitions, human rights record and treatment of Hong Kong. Many members of Congress favor launching free trade negotiations with Taiwan, but that's not an expressed goal of the Biden administration."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin fired a warning shot earlier this month about the bilateral trade talks by urging the Biden administration to “discontinue all forms of official interactions with the Taiwan region, avoid sending any wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ forces to avoid undermining China-U.S. relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
— BANNED HIKVISION GAINS LOBBYISTS: What can you do with a Chinese state-owned company that is implicated in providing security cameras for Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang and the U.S. government bans U.S. investment in due to its links to the Chinese military? If you’re former U.S. Rep. Anthony “Toby” Moffett, currently at Washington, D.C.’s Mercury Public Affairs, you go to work for it. That’s the scoop Friday by The Washington Post through close tracking of the publication of Moffet’s Foreign Agents Registration Act filing. The filing reveals details of Moffett’s lobbying for Hikvision. Moffett’s new Hikvision gig and the company’s links to Chinese policies that both the Trump and Biden administrations have characterized as “genocide” stand in stark contrasts to Moffet’s impassioned April l0, 1975 evocation of Turkey’s genocide against the Armenians on its 60th anniversary.
— CHINA’S GROWING CYBER THREAT: China is currently a “second-tier” cyber power inferior to that of the United States. But that’s likely to change and the national security implications of a growing China cyber threat are profound, warns a new report published Monday by the Washington, D.C.-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. China is the country “best placed to join the U.S." in the first tier of cyber warfare capability and it’s undertaking a breakneck effort to grow its digital technology industrial base, IISS concludes. The report implicates the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese intelligence agencies in past successful hacks of commercial and U.S. government networks that "may also have shed light on vulnerabilities that could be exploited during wartime.”
— FLYING TIGER MEMORIES: The IISS report and the even more sobering most recent U.S. Threat Assessment Report released in April paint a gloomy picture of the state of U.S.-China relations and the worrying direction they’re moving. So it was uplifting, if only briefly, to be reminded by Chinese state media last week of the U.S. and China’s history as allies against Japanese fascism during World War II. Specifically, the China Daily lauded the American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force, or Flying Tigers, that fought in the skies above China against the invading Japanese. The group was celebrated at a gathering in Livermore, Calif., dedicated to “drawing inspiration” from that alliance.
TRANSLATING CHINA
CPP ANNIVERSARY PROPAGANDA-PALOOZA: It’s near-impossible to escape from state propaganda lauding the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on any form of media in China this week. Out on the street, it’s the well-choreographed flash mobs of Chinese anthem-singing citizens. Meanwhile, What's on Weibo editor-in-chief Manya Koetse is tracking CCP anniversary commemoration online video gems that range from a 15-minute compilation of 100 Chinese hip-hop artists belting out a homage to the party to rapping cops in Anhui province crooning their fealty to the party, with a somewhat sinister backdrop of assault rifle-brandishing SWAT-team colleagues conducting a training exercise.
— CHINA BILLIONAIRE BUDDY INDEX: China’s billionaires — all 698 of them — are jostling for invitations to today’s festivities marking the centenary of the founding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, writes Bloomberg’s Shuli Ren. That impetus to party with The Party is reflective of much more than those financial titans’ joie de vivre reflex. Who is or isn’t on the guest list is perceived as a litmus test of the degree to which the Chinese government favors — or not — specific billionaires and their business operations. Recent history — the fall from official grace of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma last year and the chastening this year of tech firm giant Meituan’s founder Wang Xing — has been a painful reminder to China’s financial oligarchs that great wealth provides little protection from punitive party responses triggered by perceptions of hubristic overreach. “You may be incredibly wealthy but, these days, even a billionaire has to be seen on the good side of the government in order to prosper,” Ren observes.
— SWIMMER SUN YANG, SEMI-REDEEMED: The June 22 decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to reduce Chinese Olympic champion swimmer Sun Yang’s suspension from international competition to four years, three months from an original eight years seized Weibo over the past week. Within days, a hashtag for the sentence reduction had garnered more than 800 million clicks. Sun’s troubles began in September 2018 when he refused to cooperate with World Anti-Doping Agency officials seeking blood and urine samples. CAS handed down the original eight year suspension in November 2019. Subsequent revelations that one of the members of the three-person CAS panel had posted racist, anti-Chinese content on social media prompted the Swiss federal court to overturn the suspension. The June 22 CAS decision, retroactive to February, will keep Sun out of competition until May 2024.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
— CHINA’S VACCINE (DENIAL) DIPLOMACY? Ukraine was all-in on signing a United Nations Human Rights Council statement in Geneva on June 22 along with 44 other U.N. member states demanding that China “allow immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang” by the UN’s High Commission for Human Rights. Until it wasn’t. Two days later, Ukraine removed itself as a signatory due to what the Associated Press says was nothing less than a bald-faced threat by the Chinese government to block Ukraine’s access to Chinese coronavirus vaccines if it signed on. In a Saturday statement welcoming Ukraine’s decision, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs attributed Ukraine’s change of heart to its government’s “spirit of independence and respect for facts.”
— UN HINTS AT XINJIANG PROBE: The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, suggested last week that after three years of hitting a brick wall in trying to get Chinese government permission to access Xinjiang to assess the region’s human rights situation, her patience was wearing thin. Bachelet on Friday expressed hope that her long-awaited official invitation from the Chinese government to conduct such a probe would come by end of 2021. But she bracketed that by indicating that she was prepared to undertake an assessment of Xinjiang’s human rights situation regardless of access.
— THE ITALIAN JAB: Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi also had Chinese coronavirus vaccines on his mind last week. But not the way the Chinese government would prefer. On Friday, Draghi dismissed China’s Sinovac vaccine as “inadequate” due to the apparent need for a third booster shot in countries including Chile that have relied heavily on the Sinovac formula. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Draghi’s dig on Monday with an uncharacteristic absence of threatening invective. Wang didn’t mention Italy or Draghi by name and instead referenced surveys in unspecified foreign countries that “show full confidence in Chinese vaccines among local residents.”
— CHINA’S LONG ARM DOWN UNDER: Australian universities are failing to protect both academics and students from surveillance, harassment and intimidation by pro-Beijing students and Chinese government representatives. That’s the conclusion of a new Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday. The report documents how such surveillance resulted in three cases in which Chinese police back in China approached family members of Chinese students who had expressed pro-democracy sentiments while studying in Australia. The report warns that these abuses are encouraging self-censorship among both faculty and students and calls on the Australian government and educational institutions to develop “new measures to safeguard the academic freedom of these students and staff.”
Thanks to: Ben Pauker, Phelim Kine, Doug Palmer, Luiza Ch. Savage, Matt Kaminski and editor John Yearwood.
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