WTH: The Chinese people have had enough
Plus Chinese military modernization and how to beat Xi Jinping...
Three things from this week’s pod with AEI’s Dan Blumenthal:
The perfect police state that is Communist China isn’t that perfect after all.
The United States has missed opportunity after opportunity to undermine the regime in Beijing and strengthen civil society.
Ukraine and Iran aren’t distractions from China; victory there is a direct path to weakening Xi Jinping.
The widespread demonstrations that the world just saw around China — protests against zero-Covid, censorship, and the growing power of the Xi Jinping state — make clear that the draconian police state Xi has built is not impregnable. He has gone too far, and driven the Chinese past their limits. The regime is unlikely to fall, but the blow to Xi cannot be underestimated.
And there’s more. Notwithstanding arguments being made in certain Washington quarters, the war in Ukraine and the Iranian people’s battle for freedom are both frightening Xi. He has acknowledged as much. Putin thought his military could crush Ukraine; he was wrong. Could that happen in China? The Iranian people are shaking the foundation of the Iranian dictatorship. Could that happen in China? In both instances, the United States has an interest in ensuring Xi is indeed afraid, which may temper his adventurism and his tyranny.
Of course, diplomatic and political strategery is not all that’s required. The United States has been falling behind as China pulls ahead, particularly in naval power. More must be done in Asia to strengthen ties and deter China’s pressure. More must be done to help Taiwan help itself. China is very far from victory, but if the United States continues to dither about resourcing the military and supporting freedom fighters, victory in Asia and complete totalitarianism at home will be closer at hand for the Chinese Community Party. And that’s not in anyone’s interest.
HIGHLIGHTS
What is happening in China?
DB: One thing that's really striking is we thought that Xi had perfected this censorship surveillance state, but Chinese protestors and clever Chinese citizens have punctured the great firewall and got many of these videos out through Twitter and through social media. So we know a lot more about, or we've seen a lot more about these protests than was supposed to be possible in this quote, unquote "perfect" police state.
Why has Xi so adamantly clung to zero-Covid?
DB: Well, he made it so. He made it so in removing any pretense of consensus in the decision-making at the elite level of politics in China. He's made himself responsible for an accountable only as one man, personalized. And he personalized the response to Covid, and he said, it became part of Xi Jinping thought, that Covid zero is the policy, it's the correct policy. They had theory about why it is, in true Marxist Leninist fashion, the correct policy, why it's the scientific policy, why it's the more humane policy than what the West is doing.
And when you get to that level of CCP doctrine, there can be no break A break from that is an admission that your theory of the case is incorrect, and that can be very dangerous in CCP politics. And he also had to prove that the East was rising, and the West is faltering, as he says, that the Chinese response to Covid is better than the US response. All of this also had to do with what we know is huge embarrassment about the fact that people know that the virus originated in Wuhan. So he elevated this to be at the level of warfare with another nation, and he could not be wrong. And that's why you're seeing these sort of appalling scenes and people upholding the Covid zero, even against resistance, just basic resistance, basic human resistance.
Why is Covid so persistent in China?
DB: The failure of the Sinovac vaccine, I guess is not as surprising really as the fact that they didn't use these mass lockdowns to also do mass vaccinations. It's a big surprise to me at least. And even with, as you say, a much inferior product, Sinovac, than what we have, mRNA vaccine
But just the failure to immunize is really just incredible. And I guess we now know that it's another reason that they were so devoted to this lockdown policy. But it is a huge problem. It's not for lack of trying that they weren't able to form an mRNA vaccine. They're certainly trying to steal it. They're trying to recruit as many virologists as they can in the United States and elsewhere. But again, another embarrassment, China, according to Xi Jinping doctrine is supposed to be surpassing us in many respects. And here we are with a vaccine that is doing so much better than Sinovac.
Can Xi keep down the protests?
DB: I think unfortunately he can, at least in the short term. What we're picking up in what he's saying about the response to the protests, while this is something that's extremely important that he, and not unlike other dictators that you watch, Dany, and then you watch, Marc, but what he says in Chinese is quite different than what's published in English. In English, there's a lot coming out in the press now about how they're going to back off from some of the more draconian policies in order to contain the anger, and I think they will. But in Chinese, he's making ominous threats about what he's going to do in response to these protests and how much more work needs to be done to perfect this police state.
Our colleague, Sheena Greitens has done an excellent job talking about how during Covid, Covid has been a good excuse to expand the power of the Ministry of State Security. So that Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security, everybody has to have a phone equivalent of an iPhone now with an unbelievable amount of data that is put into that phone, tracks people and so on. So the answer is going to be an even greater expansion of surveillance, of censorship, of draconian measures to control, try to control people.
Isn’t part of the problem China’s economic decline? The original compact of your freedom for a Fendi bag is no longer achievable…?
DB: I’m a little skeptical about the initial compact. I think people did get rich, much richer. That's absolutely true. But I see Xi as less a massive discontinuity and massive change [and more] as someone who was strong enough to implement better some of the policies put in by his predecessors. So there was a police state beforehand, without a doubt. China was growing at faster rates before him, without a doubt. So people had less reason to hit the streets and so forth. But I think a lot of the elements that we see today were in place for some time. In the West we were paying [less] attention.
How about Taiwan? Is he about to invade to distract from trouble at home?
DB: On the Taiwan question in particular, I've been watching that closely for some time. This past week was the release of what seems like a kind of boring Washington event. The release of the Chinese Military Power Report… the Chinese Military Power Report was actually forced upon the Department of Defense in the late parts of the Clinton administration by Republicans in Congress. People already saw that the Chinese were modernizing the military at a rapid clip.
But the fact that this goes back to that time needs to be said because if you wanted to look you could see that the Chinese were building up their power and wanted to change fundamental elements of the world order and threaten Taiwan and other neighbors even back then.
So if you go back to 2002, you can look and see, if anyone wants to do that, many of the things that the PLA is doing today and has been able to acquire today, were initially analyzed and hinted that this is the direction that they were going even back then. But now we have a situation where more people are paying attention so these reports get a lot more news coverage throughout the major newspapers. And it's pretty scary. I mean, the Chinese capabilities and resources to be able to invade and occupy Taiwan, the amount of shipping they have, the amount of amphibious capability they have, the amount of missiles and air power they have is really quite extraordinary, [as well as] the size of their Navy. That doesn't mean that they're on the precipice of attacking and invading Taiwan for a number of reasons, but it does mean that their capabilities have improved across the board and in ways that deeply and profoundly affect the balance of power in the region.
So we can’t take on the Chinese over Taiwan?
DB: On the one hand our capabilities are excellent. I mean, the US military has combat experience, the US military officers have run major campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, people might say that's not relevant, but of course it's relevant. I mean, they've actually fought wars. They've had to deal with things going wrong. They've been trained and equipped and so on. At one level, we're quite capable of dealing with quite a few different scenarios. At another level, we're very under-resourced. In order to demonstrate to China that we are serious about defending our interests in the Taiwan Strait and throughout the region, not just the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, other places, they may challenge us, Korea. We need more capability and we need just a larger Navy and better relationships throughout the region.
What else are the Chinese doing in the region?
DB: When it comes to the Taiwan Strait as well as other, let's say strategic and military interests throughout the region, the Chinese are using their military every day to intimidate, to coerce, to habituate. You look, for example, at the types of things they did when Speaker Pelosi said she wanted to go to Taiwan, and afterwards, it's to create a psychological impact in the United States, to erode our relationships and the regional relationship with Taiwan, to make us question our judgment. It's a very important psychological course of campaign. We have to be able to undermine that, and we have to be able to say that the Chinese aren't going to succeed in using military intimidation to change our fundamental political relationships throughout the region or define what we're allowed or not allowed to do with Taiwan or with other countries throughout the region.
So fundamentally, we have to realize that what we're looking at is not a binary choice between the Chinese start at a point where they're not doing anything against Taiwan, and then they go and invade Taiwan, it's something different. It's an ongoing escalation of diplomatic, psychological, informational, legal tools that they're using to impose a certain reality in the Taiwan Strait that we just cannot accept.
What do we need to do militarily?
DB: The other kinds of things I think that we need to be doing are, look, it just gets to a certain point where the Chinese Navy and the Chinese Coast Guard and the amount of ships they can mobilize, and we've seen them do in the South China Sea and the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, just the volume of them, there just comes a certain point where if we don't adequately resource the national defense strategies that we keep putting out, it just doesn't look credible anymore. So those are two areas where we really could do much better.
And politically? Diplomatically?
DB: Dany, you mentioned the Iran protest. Let me just make a comment about another thing I think that I've witnessed recently in the US strategic community, which is to try to say we can't be focusing on helping Iran or fighting Russia or helping others fight Russia because we're so behind in this competition rivalry with China that we have to put all resources in China. But guess who disagrees with that? That's Xi Jinping himself. In the 20th Party Congress, in the lead up, he was saying that the strategic environment was shifting against him. He was making these mentions albeit obliquely, of the fact that there were Iranian protests and that the Ukrainian resistance and NATO's help for Ukrainian was much stronger than he thought. The number one thing we can do, frankly, is actually defeat Putin in Ukraine, that's Xi Jinping's best friend
We read what Xi Jinping says very carefully, and the fact that Putin didn't get good information from the military makes Xi Jinping think that he doesn't get good information from the military. The fact that his military wasn't actually able at the end of the day to, forget all the equipment they had and the doctrine they had, wasn't actually able to execute very complicated campaigns in the face of counter threats, effects Xi Jinping as well. Because very few people in the PLA have any combat experience.
So all these things matter a lot, and the rest of the world doesn't hermetically seal off regions. Putin is affected by what happened in Afghanistan and Xi is affected by what happens in Russia. So that's to say that if we look like we are supporting the Iranians right now, Xi Jinping will have to, that imposes a cost on Xi Jinping. He will think that the United States is going to put more efforts into undermining regimes that are its enemies, and that means he'll have to put more efforts into protecting his own regime. And if he does that in a situation where China has finite resources, he can do less to be aggressive abroad.
Should we be helping the Chinese demonstrating against the CCP?
DB It is a bit of a tragic situation. We had opportunities before Xi Jinping to do more to help the Chinese develop civil society, do more to help the Chinese, to be clear with the Chinese that we weren't going to accept this complete crackdown on civil liberties and so forth. Now we do have a means, certainly we've seen a lot of Chinese people break the firewall themselves, so it's not a perfect firewall. As Marc said, they do creative things like using dating apps to get videos out to the west. They use fake Twitter accounts and so forth. So there are technologies that are out there that we can help with that break the great firewall to get information to the Chinese.
What were the missed opportunities?
DB: We would've wished we had taken a lot more risks in terms of what we do with Taiwan, training Taiwan, actual training of Taiwan military, which we self deter from doing. For the most part, we would wish that we had troops that were ready to deploy onto Taiwan, which of course we don't do because of the self deterrence. We would wish that we had pushed our allies harder in the Philippines to ensure that we were back and able to operate from the Philippines, very close to Taiwan, complicating China's problems. We will wish that we had many, many more of the kinds of munitions that we can't seem to make enough of in the Ukraine situation. We'll look back over the last 20 years and look at our debates, look at the work of our colleague Mackenzie England and say, why did we not do that? We were squabbling over, what are we talking about here in terms of the size of the US economy, a little few rounding errors to get ourselves more naval capability, more submarines that can't be... that the Chinese can't find, these sorts of things. We will have wished that we had challenged the Chinese a bit more aggressively like we used to do with the Soviet Union when the Chinese do these bomber navigations around the Taiwan Strait so they took us more seriously. The list goes on and on
Is the regime in danger?
DB: Well, I guess the way I would answer that, and this goes back to the fabulous book by Will Inboden, [about Reagan] is we've never tested it really, right? And I don't mean losing our minds and having a full on strategy of regime change and so on, but challenging the legitimacy of the CCP, doing other things that are in that book on Reagan, actually taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, having economic strategies ourselves that essentially engage in actions that challenge them more directly. We don't do that, so we haven't really tested how brittle they are, and we can do that, and for all kinds of different reasons we can say if we find those weaknesses and those vulnerabilities and we start pushing on them, we can say we'll keep doing this unless you stop challenging Taiwan. Whatever policy outcome people decide on, but the point is challenging them directly is not something we've actually done much of at all.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
China Military Power Report Examines Changes in Beijing's Strategy (DoD, November 29, 2022)
CMPR Executive Summary (DoD, November 29, 2022)
China’s lockdown protests: What you need to know (CNN, November 29, 2022)
Some COVID restrictions have been eased in China after widespread protests last week (NPR, December 4, 2022)
Zero-covid protests in China have rattled global markets (Time, November 29, 2022)
Chinese authorities seek out protesters (Reuters, November 29, 2022)
China sends students home, police patrol to curb protests (AP News, November 29, 2022)
Twitter searches for China protests bombarded by spam and porn, raising alarm among researchers (CNN, November 28, 2022)
Memes, puns, and blank sheets of paper: China’s creative acts of protest (NYT, November 28, 2022)
Biden administration reacts with caution to China protests (Politico, November 28, 2022)