… is that I have recently launched two other websites that are taking a lot of my time:
UndecidedIn5.com – Key facts for undecided voters, five minutes at a time
InequalityIn5.com– Understanding US economic equality, five minutes at a time
But this China blog was my first love, and I hope to get back on a more frequent schedule soon for releasing China posts regularly. Thanks for reading this blog. — Jim
The Chinese are spying on us. Which seems only fair, since we are spying on them too.
You probably remember last year’s journalism hysteria when a Chinese surveillance balloon floated over the US, and the Air Force shot it down off the cost of South Carolina. In the big picture, that was a mere kerfuffle, a foofaraw.
But don’t be fooled. Chinese espionage offers plenty to be worried about. In a 2020 speech, FBI Director Chris Wray called “the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China… the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality.”
Since 2020, it’s only gotten worse. Last October, the heads of intelligence from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand – the Five Eyes Alliance – held “an unprecedented joint news conference to warn of… a ‘breathtaking’ Chinese effort to steal technology and economic intelligence and to influence foreign politics in Beijing’s favor.” According to the FBI’s Wray, the purpose of this first press conference in the organization’s 80 year history was to warn that the threat from “China’s espionage… has only gotten more dangerous and more insidious in recent years… The FBI currently has over 2,000 investigations in progress that are linked to China.”
At the same conference, Ken McCallum, the Director General of Britain’s MI5 spy agency reported several examples of his own, including the fact that “suspected Chinese agents have approached over 20,000 people in the UK over professional networking sites like LinkedIn, in order to try to cultivate them to provide sensitive information.”
There are two main reasons why it is very difficult for the West to keep up: China devotes more resources to espionage, and they are playing by different rules than we are.
Regarding resources, Wray testified before a US House committee on January 31 that, “If you took every single one of the FBI’s cyber agents [and] intelligence analysts and focused them exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1.”
Chinese hackers work not just as government employees, but also for private Chinese companies that specialize in spying. A few weeks ago, leaked documents from the Chinese security firm I-Soon recently revealed a price list of what they charged. If you want to hack Twittter/X accounts and run a disinformation campaign, for $100,000 I-Soon will sell you specialized software to make your targeting and lying more efficient. Do you want a huge database of personal information entered by unwitting users of Facebook and Telegram? For $278,000 that too can be yours.
In addition to devoting greater resources to espionage, China’s authoritarian government is also playing by different rules. Harvard’s Calder Walton summarized key differences in a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine: “Unlike those in Western democracies, China’s intelligence services are not held to account by independent political bodies or the public, nor are they subject to the rule of law… Thanks to successive national security legislation passed under President Xi Jinping, Chinese businesses are required to work with its intelligence services whenever requested to do so… [In addition] facial recognition, phone apps, and CCTV all make China an infinitely harder target for Western agencies to collect intelligence on than Chinese services’ targets in open Western democracies.”
And if that’s not enough, according to David Vigneault, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Chinese laws require its citizens “anywhere in the world to provide information to Beijing’s intelligence services.”
Just a few weeks ago, the FBI’s Wray updated Congress on one major cyber operation which he described as part of “the defining threat of our generation.” In the Volt Typhoon project “Chinese hackers [have targeted] critical infrastructure in the U.S., such as water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil and natural gas pipelines and transportation systems.”
The result of operations like Volt Typhoon, according to Congressional testimony by Jen Easterly, Director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is that “A major crisis halfway across the planet could well endanger the lives of Americans here at home through the disruption of our pipelines, the severing of our telecommunications, the pollution of our water facilities, the crippling of our transportation modes all to ensure that they can incite societal panic and chaos and to deter our ability to marshal military might and civilian will.”
The primary methods behind this particular operation relied on human flaws “by exploiting vulnerabilities in small and end-of-life routers, firewalls and virtual private networks, often using administrator credentials and stolen passwords, or taking advantage of outmoded tech that hasn’t had regular security updates – key weaknesses identified in US digital infrastructure.”
If you have an old Cisco or Netgear router running your home or small business network, it may have been infected by “KV Botnet malware” planted by the Chinese. If so, your router was “chained together [with other infected routers] to form a covert data transfer network supporting various Chinese state-sponsored actors including Volt Typhoon.”
Yikes. Your innocuous little home network could be helping the Chinese to hide the origin of an infrastructure attack someday, since “the botnet’s distributed nature makes the activity hard to trace.” This is a prime example of the way “state-sponsored cyber actors are seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive… cyberattacks against US critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis.”
In December, the FBI fought back with a court-ordered action to “delete the KV Botnet malware from the routers.” But if you restarted your router after the cleanup, your server will once again be vulnerable. This is one of several reasons that experts say “the legal action is bound to be a only temporary disruption.”
To put it another way, the potential effects of Chinese espionage continue to rise.
In an article entitled “Spycraft and Statecraft,” William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that “This is a time of historic challenges for the CIA and the entire intelligence profession, with geopolitical and technological shifts posing as big a test as we’ve ever faced. Success will depend on… adapting to a world where the only safe prediction about change is that it will accelerate.”
To address the China challenge, Burns reported that the CIA has more than doubled “the percentage of our overall budget focused on China over just the last two years. We’re hiring and training more Mandarin speakers while stepping up efforts across the world to compete with China, from Latin America to Africa to the Indo-Pacific.” The New York Times reported that, “The C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency have [also] set up new centers focused on spying on China. U.S. officials have honed their capabilities to intercept electronic communications, including using spy planes off China’s coast.”
Meanwhile, the American and Chinese economies continue to get more intertwined. At the height of the Covid epidemic, many Americans learned for the first time that the US depends on China for things like surgical masks, personal protective equipment, respirators and many other medical products needed to fight the disease. In the early stages of the pandemic, when world supplies were short, China wouldn’t share them.
The top ten products the US imports from China today include lithium batteries, display monitors, smartphones, digital automation systems, pre-dosed medications and data processors. Good luck to all of us if access to these and other Chinese products was cut off during a crisis.
So, at the same time that we continue to compete with China politically and economically, we must simultaneously cooperate and work together to tackle existential challenges to the human race including climate change and avoiding nuclear war.
Last year, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Thomas L. Friedman visited China for the first time since covid to try to get a grip on what all this means. Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, said to him: “You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you… [But] you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”
Based on this and many other interviews, Friedman concluded: “I believe that [China and the US] are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.”
Since at least 1945, international relations have been dominated by the “liberal world order,” a set of global rules defined by the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and other groups. As the world’s largest and most powerful nation, the US has played a leading role in establishing and enforcing these rules. For all of us who lived through Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and more, the last eight decades have not always felt peaceful. But from a big picture view, the 80 years since World War II have been one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history.
To some countries, this “liberal world order” now feels outdated and “ill equipped to handle pressing global problems such as climate change, financial crises, pandemics, digital disinformation, refugee influxes, and political extremism.”
Chief among the critics is China, and for the last several years Xi Jinping has been promoting a vision of an alternative “new world order.” In many ways, it is based on the approach that China itself used to lift 850 million people from poverty and become the second largest economy in the world.
Among other things, the Chinese model holds that “developing countries have a right to focus on feeding, housing and giving jobs to people, rather than fussing about multi-party elections.”
As I wrote five years ago in one of the first posts in this blog, “For countries that are still stuck in poverty, democracy is not a priority. As William Overholt put it in his book China’s Crisis of Success (p. 8), ‘If you are malnourished and ill and illiterate and your children are at risk, participating in an election doesn’t help much…. [In India’s democracy], a malnourished illiterate 12 year old girl whose mother died in childbirth… and whose father is crippled by air pollution far more debilitating than China’s, who has never seen a toilet and who was forcibly married to an old man, will have the right to a vote, but is that really what’s most important to human dignity?’”
Perhaps the most important difference between China’s vision of world order and that of the West is the very definition of the phrase human rights. Beijing argues that “governments’ efforts to improve their people’s economic status equate to upholding their human rights, even if those people have no freedom to speak out against their rulers.” To put it another way, “Xi seeks to flip a switch and replace [Western] values with the primacy of the state. Institutions, laws, and technology in this new order reinforce state control, limit individual freedoms, and constrain open markets.”
One result of this position is that “China has pushed to strip UN resolutions of all references to universal human rights.” And when Westerners criticize China for sending as many as one million Muslim Uighurs to prisons and re-education camps, China has two replies: 1) the West is defining “human rights” in a way that does not apply to the third world and 2) our internal matters are none of your business.
As Yun Sun, the director of China programs at the Stimson Center, put it: “What the Chinese are saying … is ‘live and let live.’ You may not like Russian domestic politics, you might not like the Chinese political regime — but if you want security, you will have to give them the space to survive and thrive as well.”
China also argues that when the UN was formed more than 70 years ago, undeveloped countries had little power and little influence. Nobody asked them how they defined “universal human values,” and different civilizations actually have different perceptions of human values.
Last March, at Beijing’s “Global Civilization Initiative,” Xi Jinping gave the keynote address to 500 leaders from 150 countries, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Iran, Russia and Uganda. (The US, UK, Germany, France and other leading Western powers were conspicuously absent and presumably not invited.)
Xi explained how China is working to “bring new hope for all nations to consider together on how to escape the trap of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and find a path that can help the world sail through the current turbulence.” In China’s new world order: “Countries wouldn’t impose their own values or models on others.”
Tufts political scientist Michael Beckley noted in Foreign Affairs, that “China is [now] positioning itself as the world’s defender of hierarchy and tradition against a decadent and disorderly West.” Beckley went on to point out that “the strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals… Fear of an enemy, not faith in friends, formed the bedrock of each era’s order… [and alliances] tapped into humanity’s most primordial driver of collective action… ‘the in-group/out-group dynamic.’”
Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations calls China’s new world order “an audacious strategic bet [preparing] for a fragmented world… that allows other countries to flex their muscles. [This] may make Beijing a more attractive partner than Washington, with its demands for ever-closer alignment. If the world truly is entering a phase of disorder, China could be best placed to prosper.”
In a sign of China’s attempt to promote their alternate version of world order, Xi chose not to attend the summit of G20 presidents and premiers from the US, UK, France, Germany – including Joe Biden. As the headline of an article in the Atlantic put it: “Snubbing the G20 is just the beginning. China wants to replace it.”
Just a few weeks before G20 meeting, Xi Jinping did travel to South Africa for the annual meeting of BRICS, a group of 150 developing nations that represents over 40 percent of the world’s GDP. It was founded by Russia in 2009, and excludes the US, UK, and other Western powers. China said that “Countries should ‘reform global governance’ and stop others from ‘ganging up to form exclusive groups and packaging their own rules as international norms.’”
The best example of how this new world order is playing out today may be the war in the Ukraine. A few days before Russia’s invasion, as Russian troops assembled along Ukraine’s border, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that “Sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected and safeguarded.” One week later, after the invasion occurred, China changed this view to “defend Moscow’s actions, in the name of ‘legitimate security concerns.’”
While China has carefully distanced itself from military action in Ukraine, the economic sanctions against Russia have led them to switch “from the West to China for everything from cars to computer chips.” As a New York Times headline put it a few weeks ago, the “War in Ukraine has China Cashing In.”
In the world of Realpolitik, if you examine what China and the US have actually done in recent years, as opposed to what they have said, neither side is living up to its public statements. Despite China’s theoretical commitment to each nation being left alone to pursue its own course, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to the US, noted in Foreign Affairs that even before the war in Ukraine: “China has embarked on a series of island reclamations in the South China Sea [despite territorial disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei] and turned them into garrisons, ignoring earlier formal guarantees that it would not. Under Xi, the country has carried out large-scale, live-fire missile strikes around the Taiwanese coast, simulating a maritime and air blockade of the island… Xi has [also] intensified China’s border conflict with India… and embraced a new policy of economic and trade coercion against states whose policies offend Beijing and that are vulnerable to Chinese pressure.”
Actions like these have “undermined [China’s] push for leadership. A survey of Southeast Asian experts and businesspeople found that less than two percent believed that China was a benign and benevolent power, and less than 20 percent were confident or very confident that China would ‘do the right thing.’”
Many countries believe that the US is just as hypocritical: “the West has applied its norms selectively and revised them frequently to suit its own interests or, as the United States did when it invaded Iraq in 2003, simply ignored them. For many outside the West, the talk of a rules-based order has long been a fig leaf for Western power.”
At a meeting last April with the president of the European Council, Xi Jinping stressed how colonial powers treated China in the 19th and 20th century, including forcing China to cede territory and set up separate enclaves for Europeans that lived in key Chinese cities. Not to mention World War II atrocities such as Japan’s 1937 massacre of up to 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanjing. This type of aggression “left the Chinese with strong feelings about human rights, [Xi] said, and about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.”
The most fundamental question about China’s vision is one which only the future can answer: “Is China really trying to promote multipolarity — or does China just want to [become a] substitute [for] US influence over the world?”
As explained in my previous post, China is in trouble. A recent CNN article summed it up like this: the economy “is stalling… a real estate crisis is deepening and exports are in a slump. Unemployment among youth has gotten so bad the government has stopped publishing the data.”
One of the factors that is holding the economy back is that Chinese households save too much: about 46% of their disposable income. This is more than ten times higher than the US household saving rate of roughly 4%. According to Forbes, “the high Chinese household savings rate has no peer among major economies.”
Wait a minute. The Chinese save too much? My parents, who grew up during the Great Depression (1929-1941), would have thought that impossible. But according to John Maynard Keynes’ “paradox of thrift,” when people don’t spend enough, demand decreases, production decreases, and the entire economy slows down.
As a result, according to many economists, “Unleashing domestic consumption is the surest path for China to achieve its goal of becoming the world’s largest economy, anchored by the world’s largest middle class, by 2035.”
Why are Chinese saving habits so different from our own? As I have often argued in this blog, the answer begins with cultural differences. According to the Tao Te Ching, written about 400 BC, “the three greatest treasures one can have are love, frugality, and generosity.” Confucius also wrote about the benefits of being cheap, when he said: “He who does not economize must agonize.” If you think writings from 2,400 years ago are irrelevant to current behavior, consider the fact that Zhou Xiaochuan, former Governor of the People’s Bank of China (2002-2018), has said that “his country’s high saving rate as in large part the product of Confucianism, which values thrift, self-discipline, moderation, and an aversion to extravagance.”
In modern times, just as my parents learned the importance of saving during the Depression, many Chinese parents and grandparents learned to save during the famines and economic uncertainty of life under Mao, and in the rapid changes rooted in the marketing reforms initiated by Communist party leader (1978-1989) Deng Xiaoping.
You might think Chinese citizens should be less worried about money today, since Deng’s reforms have lifted 850 million people out of poverty. But, according to an August New York Times article, “Chinese consumers [are still] afraid to spend, due in part to the government’s years of inattention to building an adequate safety net for seniors, the jobless and others in financial stress.”
The article goes on to argue that safety net problems were made worse by China’s strict and expensive “zero covid” policies, given the high cost of testing, surveillance and quarantines. “Many local governments have been cutting residents’ health benefits this year after anti-Covid measures depleted municipal health insurance funds in 2022. Health coverage reductions have triggered street protests in cities like Wuhan, Guangzhou and Dalian.”
Economic challenges are also common for the elderly. “Faced with a rapidly aging society and a national pension fund that is expected to run out of money by 2035, the central government has also cut back on increases in payments to seniors.”
Many economists had predicted that when the covid lockdown ended, China would experience the same kind of revenge spending seen in the US, where people bought much more than usual after the restrictions of the pandemic were lifted. But, like many other economic predictions, this turned out to be wrong.
With the wisdom of hindsight, two think tank economists wrote in July that “Chinese households seem even more worried about their jobs and income now than during much of the pandemic. When asked whether they would consume, invest, or save more in the coming weeks, 58 percent of Chinese depositors said they would save more, according to the People’s Bank of China’s depositor survey for the second quarter of 2023.”
Economic uncertainty also affects the marriage prospects of young adults.
Among many Chinese, “to be considered as a suitable candidate for marriage, you should be financially stable. And the more money you have, the better the prospect you become.” For example, one woman raised in China recently reported that “the first time she introduced her fiancé to her parents… almost immediately, they asked three questions: ‘What does he do for a living, how much does he make, and how much property does he own?’”
Economic barriers to mating have also been increased by the fact that there are too many males and not enough females. Specifically, there are between 107 and 116 males per 100 females (depending on their age between 15 and 35). According to Forbes “A variety of factors conspire to produce the imbalance. For one, Chinese parents often prefer sons. The availability of ultrasound makes it easy for parents to detect the gender of a fetus and abort the child that’s not the ‘right’ sex for them.”
Yikes. That’s still going on in the 21st century?
One result of all this is that “Nearly 35 million young men in China will hardly ever find a real date or even have sex in their lives.”
Double yikes. Still another reason to be glad I don’t live in China.
Is the problem of too much saving in China likely to be solved soon? Nope.
For decades, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and prominent economists have been urging the Chinese government “to do more to support its consumer economy, and to stop relying on growth built on speculative construction of apartment towers and heavy public investment in infrastructure like roads and high-speed rail lines.”
Specifically, economists recommend changes like this:
But Xi Jinping has different priorities. According to Foreign Affairs, Xi “appears much less interested in organizing the economy for growth than his predecessors did. Instead, he is optimizing it for security and resilience.”
And, if that’s not enough, Xi “has a well-known aversion to any social spending, which… he believes might erode the work ethic of the Chinese people… [In one famous speech], Xi said ‘we must not aim too high or go overboard with social security, and steer clear of the idleness-breeding trap of welfarism.’”
Opposition to social spending feels like a very odd position for a Communist leader to take. Then again, in today’s China, Communism is whatever Xi Jinping says it is.
China’s economy is in trouble. It was just a few years ago that I wrote a post about how China had “lifted 850 million people out of poverty” with a sizzling growth rate of about 9% for the first two decades of the 21st century. But these days, the picture is very different. The official GDP growth target for this year is “around 5.5%,” and many in China are worried the final number will be even lower.
As the New York Times summed it up a few weeks ago: “Consumers are gloomy. Private investment is sluggish. A big property firm is near collapse. Local governments face crippling debt. Youth unemployment has continued to rise…” The Washington Post added a list of some immediate results: “Teachers say they’re not getting paid. Motorists say they’re paying more for parking. More and more cities are even auctioning off public services like school lunches, shared bicycles and operating rights for vendor stalls and sightseeing carts.”
For the last few months, op-ed writers have been elbowing each other out of the way to express conflicting opinions about what this means. Some fear the consequences, like the Washington Post opinion columnist who predicted that “China’s economic slowdown could cause Xi to pursue more authoritarian and militaristic policies — even an invasion of Taiwan — to contain rising domestic discontent.” I side with the more optimistic view expressed by Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: “America’s exposure to a potential China crisis is surprisingly small.”
Today’s economic challenges are a result of the strategy China used to propel its rapid growth: borrow and build. When the economy slowed down, the government simply underwrote construction of more airports, more highways, more shopping malls, and more cities. Not to mention the longest high speed rail system in the world (over 1,400 miles), and more.
But they got a little carried away. The best known examples are China’s “ghost cities,” with “at least 65 million empty homes — enough to house the population of France.” China also “has enough unused factory capacity to make more than 10 million cars (sufficient to supply the entire Japanese car market—twice).” At least 100 of their airports “are grossly under-utilized… and many highways are mostly empty of traffic.”
How did they pay for all this? The same way many people in the US have paid for their remodeled kitchens and exotic vacations: they borrowed. According to the International Monetary fund, China’s $47.5 trillion total debt now represents about 250% of GDP, which is similar to the US. Even more troubling part is the fact that local governments owe $9 trillion in “off-balance sheet debt.” These are “non-performing loans” (a polite term bankers use when borrowers stop making payments). The solution with Chinese characteristics has been to make banks look more solid, hiding these nearly worthless loans by moving them “to the balance sheets of entities specifically created to absorb non-performing loans.”
“At the core of China’s current economic trouble is real estate…” according to the New York Times. “[It] represents a quarter of the country’s economic output and at least three-fifths of household savings.” But in the last two years “companies accounting for 40 percent of Chinese home sales have defaulted, according to Reuters. As a result, many homes have been left unfinished and suppliers and creditors left unpaid.” That may not mean a lot to the global economy, but it is a matter of financial life and death for many citizens. As a result, “Protests broke out in more than 100 cities last year as mortgage owners demanded that developers finish the apartments they had already paid for, sometimes years in advance.”
Demographic trends represent another fault line that threatens China’s future. According to one Washington Post columnist: “Last year, the country’s population fell for the first time since 1961… The United Nations projects that the country’s head count will plummet from today’s 1.4 billion to below 800 million by century’s end. You have to go back to the plagues and famines of the late medieval period to find a loss of population so severe.”
With fewer workers, the economy will grow more slowly. In addition, the columnist continued, people are living longer, and the number of elderly people represents a growing portion of the population, who will need more government support. The columnist went on to note that protests have already begun, including “this year’s street protests against medical insurance reforms by tens of thousands of seniors in Wuhan and Dalian.”
At least part of this demographic predicament was self-induced. In 1980, China tried to reduce the number of hungry mouths to feed with a strict “one child policy” which was harshly enforced. By 2016, the harmful effects were so obvious that they finally changed this to a “two child policy,” and in 2021 to a “three child policy.”
But the damage had been done, especially when it was combined with the fact that China has become “one of the world’s most expensive places to raise a family… [creating] legions of stressed young couples who don’t want to make babies.”
And that’s not the only stress faced by young adults. In June, the unemployment rate for this group hit an all-time high of 21%. In a shocking turn of events, in August “a spokesman of the National Bureau of Statistics of China announced that the publication of age specific unemployment data, including youth unemployment data, would be temporarily suspended.” The official explanation was that the statistical methodology for analyzing this data needed to be improved. The unofficial explanation was that the government is lying. One Peking University professor “estimated that the unemployment rate among youth ages 16 to 24 could be close to 50 percent, more than twice the official figure.”
And for those who do find a job, life is not exactly a bed of roses. Another Washington Post columnist recently wrote that “Young people who do find work are often subject to grueling 72-hour workweeks and burnout. A rash of media stories reports that many 20-somethings are dropping their careers to become ‘full-time children,’ meaning they’re exiting the formal job market and receiving a stipend from their parents to focus on chores and other filial duties… [In response], Chinese leadership has basically told young people to stop whining and ratchet down their expectations. In the words of Xi Jinping, young people must learn to ‘eat bitterness’ (an idiom that roughly means to toughen up by enduring hardship).”
How did this happen? According to Axios, “the high unemployment among urban youth is caused in part by a ‘college bubble,’ meaning there are more young people earning college degrees than there are skilled jobs for them to fill.” Hmm. Where have I heard that before?
Another downward economic force is the fact that most Chinese are not consumers by nature. Rather, the culture favors saving. As a result Chinese banks have assets of $50 trillion, which equal 300% of its GDP. This savings rate is four times larger than in the US, where bank assets equal 75% of GDP. (This is such a fascinating cultural difference that it will be the topic for a separate “five-minute summary” in the next post in this blog.)
So what does this all mean? If you live in China, it’s not good.
Since Mao died in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party has promised its citizens increased prosperity if they just toe the Party line. But for the next few years or decades, it looks like that deal is no longer on the table. “Instead,” according to The Guardian, “the government is offering a nationalist, security-based vision of stability, with the economy paying the price if necessary.”
If you don’t like that deal, according to a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “The China Model is Dead,” the government’s “message to the public is, essentially, ‘suck it up.’” Or, as Xi himself more diplomatically put it in a recent speech: “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress.”
For those of us lucky enough to live outside China, there is little threat that China’s economic problems “will spill over in a major way to the rest of the world [including] the United States.” again according to Paul Krugman. “Big as China’s economy is, America has remarkably little financial or trade exposure to China’s problems.”
Some experts, like the Washington Post columnist quoted at the beginning of this post, fear that if things get bad enough, the Chinese government may invade Taiwan to distract people with a wave of patriotic fervor. Sort of like the plot of the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog.”
Fortunately, President Joe Biden is not one of them. Two weeks ago, at a press conference at the G20 summit meeting, he said that “One upshot of China’s economic downturn [is that]… Beijing is [actually] less likely to invade Taiwan” due to its reduced capacity.
I sure hope he’s right.
In 2013, a New Yorker article described how comedy clips from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show had gone viral in China, complete with Mandarin subtitles added by fans for jokes like this:
What do you call 100 residents of Taiwan in a bathtub? Chinese citizens.
Author Evan Osnos argued that Stewart’s viral success “bodes well for the future of satire in China.”
Has his prediction proven correct in the decade since? Nope.
If you have any doubts, just ask Chinese stand-up comedian Li Haoshi. A few months ago, he told a story onstage about his two dogs chasing a squirrel. The punchline was a well-known phrase that Chinese leader Xi Jinping often used to describe the Chinese military: his dogs “fought to win and forged exemplary conduct.” Soon after, according to the BBC, “State media… condemned [this joke] as a ‘serious insult’ to the Chinese army. Li was detained, and the company he worked for… was fined over $2 million.”
A mainland Chinese comedy writer described the barriers to satire this way:“The industry needs to spend 80% of its energy to create content, and then 500% of its time and energy to deal with censorship.” Sheng Zou, a Hong Kong scholar of popular culture, has compared stand-up comedy in China to “dancing with shackles.”
If you Google a phrase like “Chinese jokes” you will find countless examples which (may) appeal to a Western sense of humor, like these:
I asked a friend what it’s like living in China. He says he can’t complain.
A small boy asked his father: “Dad, how much does it cost to get married?” The father replied: “Son, I’m not sure. I’m still paying.”
Kim Jong-Un called Xi Jinping at 3 AM one morning. Xi: Why are you calling me in the middle of the night? Jong-Un: Because I am going to launch a nuclear missile at South Korea. Xi: When? Jong-Un: 10. Xi : 10 what? Days? Weeks? Months? Jong-Un: 9…
But if you travel in China, you will hear few if any jokes like this. The lack of such jokes cannot be blamed just on Communist censors. The Chinese sense of humor is different from the Western sense of humor. According to a scholarly paper sub-titled Cross cultural perspectives on humor by Hong Kong professor Xiaodong Yue, some of these differences are based on the Confucian tradition which holds that “the way of a gentleman requires restraint from laughter to demonstrate dignity and social formality… the Chinese feel that they should laugh only at certain times, in conjunction with certain subjects, and only with certain people.”
“Humor suggests indecency and may harm social relations… [as a result] people refrain from jokes and frivolous entertainment.” As Xiaodong summed it up: “for the past 2000 years [humor] has been devalued under Confucianism…”
In fact, while many Westerners perceive a healthy sense of humor as a positive personality trait, the Chinese do not. For example, Yue Qian — an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia – conducted a study comparing online dating preferences of native born Canadians vs. immigrants who had been born in China. She found that “81 per cent [of native Canadians] used humor as a primary screening criterion in evaluating potential partners online, saying things like ‘I just want to be with someone who is fun to be with’… In contrast, less than 20 per cent of Chinese immigrants mentioned humor as something important.”
Xiaodong’s review quoted several other studies along these lines, including one that “found that Chinese students tend to consider themselves as being less humorous than Canadian students, and they tend to use less humor to cope with stress… [Another study showed that] American students rated sexual and aggressive jokes as funnier than Singaporean Chinese students who preferred harmless humor… These findings support the claim that Chinese prefer a ‘thoughtful smile’ to ‘hilarious laughter.’”
And when native Chinese people do tell jokes, they avoid many mainstays of Western humor including “sarcasm, irony, and self-deprecating jokes… [Instead] Chinese humor mostly relies on linguistics and deadpan comedy.”
In China. linguistic jokes are of course told in and based on Mandarin words, which can make them awkward to explain to English speakers. Consider this example:
When Chiang Ching-kuo (the president of Taiwan from 1978 to 1988) was on his deathbed, advisors gathered around to ask who his successor should be. Chiang said, “Nee Denghui”, which means “you just wait a moment” in Mandarin. However, since Chiang had a Southern accent, advisors thought he had said “Li Denghui,” who was one of the candidates. As a result, Li Denghui became Taiwan’s president for the next 12 years.
If you don’t consider this a knee-slapper, I’d have to agree. This is a common reaction. “Many foreigners don’t find Chinese jokes hilarious” due to cultural differences in humor.
Those of us who do not speak Mandarin can get a slightly better sense of linguistic Chinese jokes from English plays on words, like these:
What do you call a Chinese man with one leg? Tie Won Shu.
Why was the Chinese laundry joke not funny? It had no irony.
An ambitious young ingenue met a general at a party. As the conversation turned flirty, the young woman asked the general “When was the last time you had sex?” “1945,” he replied. “Oh my God,” the woman replied. “Do you want to have sex right now?” The general looked at his watch and said: “No thanks. It’s only 2030.”
I saw a naked Chinese man take the elevator… It was wong on so many levels.
The other main category of Chinese humor – deadpan or “cold” jokes – consists of “jokes that are so bad that they are actually funny… [they] are intended to be bad, corny, or just downright lame. Think dad joke, but somehow worse.” For example:
What is the greatest lifelong regret of a panda? That it cannot take a color photo.
Linguistic and deadpan jokes are not the only categories of Asian humor, but they do make the point that Westerners and Chinese have very different ideas of what is funny.
The most important conclusion from this brief review is that humor provides another example of the “dramatic differences in the nature of Asian and European thought processes” which I discussed previously in a two part post entitled “Are the people of mainland China just like Americans?” The short answer is no, they are not. East and West would find it easier to co-exist if we developed a mutual understanding of our cultural differences,
On a more practical level, if you travel to mainland China, be advised that “jokes about social influence, authority, and the government are a big no-no. Topics about personal life and anything that could cause a person to ‘lose face’ should also be avoided.” So, while in China, be sure you do not tell any jokes like this:
According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the best-selling book of all time is the Bible, with five billion copies sold. The Chinese may disagree with this, since they estimate that up to six and a half billion copies were distributed of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong – better known as the Little Red Book. Xi Jinping is now working on a collection of his own quotes to update Chinese political thought. The title will be: “That’s what Xi said.”
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This alarming warning is a direct quote of a statement released six weeks ago by leaders in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI).
This was preceded by a longer statement in March, which had been signed by an even larger group of AI experts. It recommended a “six-month pause” in research on the most powerful AI systems to provide time to study their risks.
When I wrote in this blog about China’s race to become the world leader in AI technology last year, the topic felt a bit esoteric. But since then, public interest in AI has skyrocketed, largely as a result of the success of two new releases of an experimental program called ChatGPT (version 3.5) or GPT-4 (for version 4.0) which answers any question users ask.
For example, a college student can type in a request like “Write a ten page term paper on the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739),” and the program will. GPT-4 is free, and it quickly became “the fastest-growing consumer software application in history.” This led to a stream of white papers and op-eds written by both experts and amateurs who began clutching their pearls about the risks of AI.
For example, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, as many as 300 million jobs could be threatened by AI. The two categories of jobs most at risk are “office and administrative support jobs” (46% of tasks can be automated) and legal work (44% automatable). The risk to lawyers may not be surprising since GPT-4 “recently passed a simulated law school bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers.” AI has even become an issue in the ongoing strike of Hollywood writers, who are afraid of its ability to generate new content, and fear that technology is “coming for their jobs.”
If you haven’t played with GPT-4 yet, you really should. Anyone can sign up for the free program and start getting answers in less than five minutes. I guarantee that if you try this experiment:
My favorite description of the current state of ChatGPT came from my brother: “It’s like talking to a brilliant person who has memorized the entire internet. Only sometimes she’s really drunk.” But the program is constantly learning from its errors, and gradually sounding more sober.
Many of the people who have been breathlessly writing about AI risks focus on programs that aim to be at least as intelligent as you and me, called AGI – artificial general intelligence. As I explained in last year’s AI post, there’s just one problem with AGI – it doesn’t exist. Many experts believe it never will.
The AI programs that do exist like GPT-4 fall into a completely different category: they are designed to do just one single thing, like play chess, recognize faces, or evaluate mortgage applications. However, even today’s limited applications come with some risk.
In China, the biggest risk of AI is that it will work too well. According to NBC News, “A lack of privacy protections and strict party control over the legal system have resulted in near-blanket use of facial, voice and even walking-gait recognition technology to identify and detain those seen as threatening, particularly political dissenters and religious minorities.”
AI is the technology behind China’s emerging social credit system, which rewards “well-behaved citizens” with a wide range of benefits including discounts on heating bills, skipping hospital waiting rooms, and even getting more matches on dating sites.
Due to generous government support, China “produces more top-tier AI engineers than any other country—around 45 percent more than the United States… It has also overtaken the United States in publishing high-quality AI research, accounting for nearly 30 percent of citations in AI journals globally in 2021, compared with 15 percent for the United States.”
Meanwhile, the government is using cell phone data to track users’ location at every minute, not to mention everything they type into their phones.
Of course, programs that invaded privacy like this would be strictly forbidden in the US. But that doesn’t seem to bother Chinese citizens. According to a survey conducted by Ipsos last year “China [is]… the most optimistic country in the world when it comes to AI, with nearly four out of five Chinese nationals professing faith in its benefits over its risks.” In contrast, according to the same survey “only 35 percent of Americans” agree.
The US’ list of risks is quite different from China’s. When the US Senate held hearings on AI risks in May, Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, identified the top AI risks as “weaponized disinformation, housing discrimination, harassment of women, impersonation fraud, voice cloning… [and] workforce displacement.” Similarly, when Sam Altman, president of the company that created ChatGPT, appeared before a House committee, he said one of his areas of greatest concern was “the potential for AI to be used to manipulate voters and target disinformation… especially because ‘we’re going to face an election next year and these models are getting better.’”
In my opinion, the greatest risk by far is an accidental war started by an error in a military AI application. “An accident involving AI could be particularly risky [since] it could be difficult to determine whether an incident was deliberate or not.”
According to a white paper published by the Center for AI Safety, AI has been the subject of many military experiments including a program that “outperformed experienced F-16 pilots in a series of virtual dogfights… [with] aggressive and precise maneuvers the human pilot couldn’t outmatch. (p. 13)” According to the same paper, the firstknown use of AI in battle came in Libya in 2020 when “retreating forces were hunted down and remotely engaged by a drone operating without human oversight.” Such applications are likely to multiply in an AI arms race as “ubiquitous sensors and advanced technology on the battlefield… [provide a tremendous amount of] information. AIs help make sense of this information, spotting important patterns and relationships that humans might miss.” (p. 14)
If you wanted to maximize the risks of a military accident getting out of hand, you would start with an authoritarian society where people are afraid to criticize their bosses, and the government refuses to acknowledge mistakes. Oh look. I just described China’s approach to AI.
A few weeks ago, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled “China is flirting with AI catastrophe” which argued that “from Chernobyl to COVID, history shows that the most acute risks of catastrophe stem from authoritarian states, which are far more prone to systemic missteps that exacerbate an initial mistake or accident.”
AI does indeed involve risks, but many are simply based on human aversion to change. In the 18th and early 19th century, groups of workers in UK cotton and wool mills known as Luddites destroyed industrial machines that threatened their jobs. It didn’t work; they still lost their jobs. To add insult to injury, the word Luddite has become a perjorative term that describes anyone opposed to technological advances.
So what’s the bottom line? How much should you worry about AI?
Unless your job is threatened, my answer is not at all. Most people have already got enough problems to worry about, including health, money, relationships, and whether the Red Sox will still be in last place when the baseball season ends. If you’ve still got the bandwidth to worry about more than just personal challenges, I’d put climate change first, then accidental war, then the growing gap between rich and poor, and the next pandemic, in that order.
So in my opinion, whether you are in the US, China, or somewhere else, when it comes to AI risks, I would follow the advice from the old song: Don’t worry, be happy.
We don’t trust China, and they don’t trust us. Which makes it very difficult to find solutions to diplomatic disputes. Our deep mutual suspicion is based on a history of misunderstandings and broken agreements between the two most powerful countries on Earth.
Last year, I wrote a post describing seven cultural differences that complicate US-Chinese relations, including “the relativity of truth.” The key to understanding this difference was summarized by Robert Conrad in his book Culture Hacks (p. 166): “China has one set of [ethical] rules for conduct within the extended family or clan group and a much different set of rules for those outside of the group.”
One area where it is particularly easy to see the effects of this cultural difference is in education. For example:
Differences in the definition of truth that are troublesome in the classroom become much more serious when they are involved in foreign policy. For example, consider what happened when China was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001.
While negotiations were underway, both sides saw this as a win-win.
Hu Jintao, then President of China, said China wanted “access to new trading partners… raising prospects for improved living standards domestically and giving China a seat at the table in a globalizing world… This “major strategic decision [was taken] to push forward China’s reform and opening-up.”
On the US side, President Clinton seemed even more enthusiastic in describing this as “an agreement which will open China’s markets to American products made on American soil.” He went on to predict the agreement would lead to “a China that is more open to our products and more respectful of the rule of law at home and abroad.”
How did that turn out for us?
Not well, according to most experts. In 2018, the White House issued a report with the ominous title “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World.” It documented China’s many violations of WTO rules, including “physical theft, cyber-espionage, evasion of U.S. export control laws, counterfeiting, [forcing] technology transfer from foreign companies, typically in exchange for limited access to the Chinese market… and talent recruitment of business, finance, science, and technology experts.” (page 2)
I summarized some of the effects of this cheating four years ago in one of the first posts in this blog: “The biggest theft in human history.” The title was based on a quote from the director of the US National Security agency describing how China steals as much as $600 billion per year by ignoring international law protecting patents and trademarks.
For example, according to former FBI special agent Kevin Brock, in America, “we pay for software licenses, the lifeblood of today’s economy. In China, 99 percent of Microsoft licenses are counterfeit and unpaid for.” The result, he continued is that since China “didn’t have to recover the considerable sunk costs of R&D or pay for valuable products, [they] could undercut prices and build massive trade imbalances in their favor.”
Another example of diplomatic deception can be seen in one of the key flashpoints of the relationship: the South China Sea. Since 2014, China has been building artificial islands on top of rocks and reefs, identifying them as Chinese territory, and using them to defend its broad claims over international shipping waters.
When President Obama and Xi Jinping held a summit in 2015, Xi stood in the Rose Garden and said: “Construction activities that China [is] undertaking in the… Nansha Islands do not target or impact any country, and China does not intend to pursue militarization.”
Again, that’s not how things turned out. “China has fully militarized at least three of the islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment and fighter jets.”
The result of these and many similar experiences is that there is a “long-running view formed over many generations among American officials… [that China] is not only opaque but also has zero moral compunction about actively lying to foreigners whenever its political needs so dictate.” (Paul Rudd, The Avoidable War, Kindle loc 1141)
So, from our perspective, it’s easy to see why the US doesn’t trust China. But why don’t they trust us?
“Americans typically believe,” Rudd also wrote in his book (Kindle loc 999), “that [our] approach to China has been driven by high ideals in defense of democracy, free trade, and the integrity of the global rules-based order.” But the Chinese government sees things differently. According to Stanford researcher Thomas Fingar, they have “decided that we’re out to get them, and that we will not tolerate China’s rise to a point at which it could be a peer competitor, let alone displace us as king of the mountain.” China also believes, according to the South China Morning Post, that “the US is manipulating the concept of national security to conceal its true agenda of containing China’s rise… [and] it is the US that is provoking military tensions in Asia, particularly over Taiwan.”
Chinese diplomats often point to the US hypocrisy which justifies such wars as Iraq and Afghanistan efforts to build democracy while we simultaneously embrace dictatorships which are allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. (You have to admit, they’ve got a point on that one.)
As Xi Jinping summarized this view in a speech last March “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented grave challenges to our nation’s development.”
Given this fundamental mutual mistrust, what can be done to begin to thaw relations between the countries?
In the 1980s, when President Reagan was negotiating arms reduction with the Soviet Union, he frequently quoted the old Russian proverb: “Trust but verify.” In 2013, when US Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated to a treaty to destroy Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons, he went a step further and said that “President Reagan’s old adage about ‘trust but verify’… is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard here that says ‘verify and verify.’”
That is exactly the approach that the US and China could use today. For now the diplomatic motto in both countries could be: don’t even try to trust each other. It won’t work. But do engage in diplomatic discussions in areas of mutual interest such as climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and the global economy. And when you reach an agreement, make sure that it can and will be verified.
In February, US-China relations may have hit a new low when “a 200-foot-tall Chinese airship, which U.S. officials said was a spy balloon designed for eavesdropping, traversed the U.S. for several days before it was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet.”
This led US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a planned visit to Beijing. Even worse “more than 100 communication channels between different government ministries and agencies are dormant, depriving each side of mechanisms that can defuse smaller disagreements and disputes.”
As Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale’s China Center put it: “If a balloon can derail this relationship the way it did so swiftly, it just tells you how damaged and distrustful the two nations are of this relationship.”
But there is hope. Last week at the G7 meetings, President Biden predicted that tensions with China are going to “begin to thaw very shortly.” Let’s hope he’s right.
There is an enormous amount of controversy about if and when China will invade Taiwan. “In one recent poll… of top specialists on China… 63 percent of respondents believed an invasion to be ‘possible within the next 10 years.’” Note that this survey did not ask whether it was probable, just whether it was possible. So, by implication, over a third of this group of experts (the remaining 37%) thought that invasion was NOT POSSIBLE in the next decade.
While many experts do think an invasion is coming, they disagree strongly about when. At one extreme, Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan was in the headlines a few months ago when he a released a memo arguing “that China cannot be deterred from invading Taiwan. ‘My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.’” At the other extreme, many point to 2049 as the final deadline, since it’s the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Revolution.
Still, if current threats to world-wide peace could be ranked, Taiwan would probably be #2, just behind the Ukraine. The basic issues of the conflict have remained the same since I wrote my 2021 post on “The Taiwan Conundrum.” What’s changed in the last two years is that the temperature has gone up.
A Taiwan-China war is harder to predict than most conflicts for two reasons. The first is the lack of transparency into Chinese politics, making it hard to define the gap between what Chinese politicians say, and what they may actually do. The second is the United States’ longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity.” Under this purposely vague policy, the US strongly supports Taiwan both politically and militarily, but does not guarantee that it will help defend Taiwan if it is attacked.
In contrast, there can be no doubt about China’s long-term intentions. At the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last October, the 2,300 delegates voted to add these words to the Party Constitution: “resolving the Taiwan issue and achieving the complete reunification of the motherland is a historical task to which the Chinese Communist Party will never relent.”
So the key question is not about China’s goal, but rather about whether it will lead to war. Some Taiwanese political parties favor a peaceful re-unification with the mainland. However, their popularity declined dramatically a few years ago, after Hong Kong’s freedoms were slashed when the island was forcefully taken over by Beijing.
Still, as Kevin Rudd wrote in his excellent book The Avoidable War (Kindle loc 1318): “Xi’s objective is to secure China’s territorial claims in… Taiwan without ever having to fire a shot.” Similarly, a recent CNN article put it this way: “The Chinese are going to do everything they can… to avoid a military conflict with anybody… To challenge the United States for global dominance, they’ll use industrial and economic power instead of military force.”
Let’s hope CNN is right on this one, because if the US and China ever do go to war, the effects would fall somewhere between disastrous and the end of the world.
In January, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a fascinating white paper with the ominous title The First Battle of the Next War. It summarizes the results of 24 elaborate war games that simulated a Chinese amphibious assault of Taiwan, with the US and Japan coming to its defense. The headline conclusion was “China is unlikely to succeed in an invasion of Taiwan in 2026.” (p. 83) But the cost is extremely high to both sides. China would suffer tens of thousands of casualties, plus similar numbers of prisoners of war, and its navy would be left “in shambles.” (p. 3)
Taiwan would suffer even more. “While Taiwan’s military [would be] unbroken, it [would be] severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services.” (p. 83) As a result, Taiwan’s economy would be crippled for years.
Finally, the report concluded, “The United States might win a pyrrhic victory, suffering more in the long run than the ‘defeated’ Chinese… In three weeks, the US would suffer about half as many casualties as it did in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (p. 4) We would also lose dozens of ships and hundreds of aircraft.
Given that both sides would prefer not to fight, at least in the next few years, what could spark a US-China war? Grandstanding politicians. For the most prominent recent example, see the post I wrote last year entitled “The Sheer Stupidity of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.” In August, while still Speaker of the House of Representatives, Pelosi became the first speaker to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich toured the island in 1997. In a Washington Post op-ed, Pelosi described the purpose of her visit as “reaffirming that the freedoms of Taiwan — and all democracies — must be respected.”
China considered this an insulting and hostile act, and responded by “holding its largest military drills in decades and, in a first, sending a missile over the island.” The Taiwanese public weren’t exactly grateful for the trip, they were scared by it. Taiwanese surveys conducted soon after the visit found that “respondents overwhelmingly believed that Pelosi’s trip and the large-scale People’s Liberation Army exercises created a serious threat to Taiwan.” In another sign of trouble, “Goldman Sachs’ Cross-Strait Risk Index, which gauges the intensity of geopolitical risk between Taiwan and mainland China, hit a record high last August after… Pelosi’s trip.”
So what have American politicians learned from this fiasco? Nada. Not to be outdone, current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in Los Angeles on April 5. Which was followed by another increase in Chinese military drills around Taiwan.
All this activity has increased the chances of accidental war. According to Taiwanese professor Chieh Chung, “Chinese air and naval forces have occasionally acted in a more provocative manner — such as with aggressive midair maneuvers that force Taiwanese fighter jets to jockey for advantage — ‘and there is no cross-strait mechanism or communication channel on how to avoid military accidents.’”
Even worse, according to classified documents recently leaked by Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, “China’s intensifying military activity around Taiwan is undermining the intelligence community’s ability to accurately track what is normal and what is escalatory, raising the risk of accidents and miscalculation.”
As Paul Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to the US, put it in The Avoidable War, it seems “less and less a question of if Beijing will have to handle the operational and diplomatic consequences of an unintended collision between Chinese, American, or Japanese military vessels or aircraft in the future, but when.” (Kindle loc 5809)
As explained in my post “Avoiding a US-China war,” Rudd’s book contains numerous detailed suggestions to reduce the risk of war over Taiwan, accidental or intentional. “First, the United States and China must both develop a clear understanding of the other’s irreducible strategic redlines in order to help prevent conflict through miscalculation,” Rudd wrote. Then China and the US should “channel the burden of strategic rivalry into a competitive race to enhance their military, economic, and technological capabilities.”
This great power rivalry is unlike any in past history, and not just because of the ultimate threat of nuclear war. As Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago: “Neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other… [the two] nations have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule.”
But these days, he continued “Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly… that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come from this… [In fact], the smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.”
The hawkish statements now increasing in both China and in the US certainly aren’t helping. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the fear of war can actually increase its likelihood. As one Rand consultant put it, “An exaggerated sense of danger can exacerbate tensions and aggravate perceptions of hostile intent.” What we need is more communication, better communication, and a sense of calm.
As to the question of inevitability, I agree with Friedman’s conclusion: “I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.”
Xi Jinping has been called “the most powerful person in the world” by Forbes Magazine. Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to the US and the author of “The Avoidable War” put it this way: “Mr. Xi has in effect become the ‘Chairman of everything’ across the machinery of the [Chinese] state, the party and the military.”
As another expert said in “The Prince,” a recent series of podcasts on Xi’s life: “The future of China’s 1.4 billion people, and maybe world peace, hinge on the mind of one man.”
When that one man was born in 1953, his father Xi Zhongxun was China’s propaganda minister. Like almost all senior leaders in China at that time, Xi’s father had fought under Mao Zedong in the Chinese Revolution. That gave the younger Xi a unique privileged position as a potential leader of the next generation, what the Chinese call a “princeling.” He lived in an affluent private community, and went to a school where students “compared one another on the basis of whose father had a higher rank [and] whose father rode in a better car.”
All that began to change when Xi was nine, and his father was accused of supporting a novel about the Chinese revolution that was not sufficiently enthusiastic about Mao’s role. The elder Xi was purged from senior leadership and sent to manage a tractor factory hundreds of miles away from his four children.
Four years later, when Xi was 13, life got worse again at the start of China’s “Cultural Revolution” to root out intellectuals and enemies of the people who threatened the socialist revolution. Mao said that many senior leaders and intellectuals had become bourgeois, and he urged China’s students to rise up against them. Which they did, with a vengeance.
Many students formed groups of Red Guards to enforce Mao’s wishes by attacking everyone they suspected for any reason, no matter how flimsy. They gleefully shut down schools and attacked first their professors and personal enemies, and later attacked other competing Red Guard groups. It was a dream come true for teenaged bullies and anyone with a grudge. The military stood aside and it seemed there were no longer any adults in charge.
Hundreds of thousands of people, or maybe millions, were killed in the ensuing chaos; no one will ever know the true death toll. Countless others, including Xi Jinping’s father, were publicly beaten, tortured and humiliated in “struggle sessions” in which they were forced to describe their crimes, real and imagined, while large crowds shouted slogans and taunted them.
Xi Jinping’s entire family was targeted so frequently that, according to the New York Times, one of his sisters committed suicide. Xi himself became the target of struggle sessions with crowds shouting ‘Down with Xi Jinping!’ His own mother was sometimes required to attend and when the crowd “yelled, his mother was forced to raise her arm and shout the slogan along with everyone [else].”
The impact on Xi was overwhelming. “When the pandemonium of the Cultural Revolution erupted, he was a slight, softly spoken 13-year-old who loved classical Chinese poetry. Two years later, adrift in a city torn apart by warring Red Guards, Xi Jinping had hardened into a combative street survivor.”
By 1968 the entire Cultural Revolution had spun out of control. To avoid further disorder “Mao ordered the Red Guards and other students to the countryside, to be ‘reeducated by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.’” Xi was sent to Liangjiahe, a small village in northwest China where he “lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads.”
The story of Xi’s years of back breaking peasant labor in Liangjiahe have become a key to the myth of Xi Jinping, protector of the peasants and man of the people. Patriotic tourists now flock there on vacation to see such sites as “an underground chamber that Xi is said to have hand-dug, a place to ferment human and cow feces into natural gas.”
The Cultural Revolution led many Chinese at home and abroad to question their faith in Communism. Xi went in the other direction and re-dedicated himself to the CCP. “When I went to the countryside as a 15-year-old, I was perplexed and lost,” Xi wrote in a 2002 essay. “By the time I left at the age of 22, I had a clear life goal and was filled with confidence.” As one analyst summed it up in The Prince podcasts, Xi “does not want the chaos he saw as a young person to return to China, and he sees the Party as the one institution that can prevent that from happening.”
When Xi was still in the countryside, he applied to join the Communist Youth League of China and was rejected due to his father’s history. So he applied again. And again. On his eight try, he was accepted. His path to becoming a full Party member was no easier, with nine applications rejected before he finally became a member in 1974 on his tenth try. From there, his rise in the party proceeded slowly and steadily, including a series of increasingly important political posts around the country.
In his personal life, at the age of 33 Xi married Peng Liyuan, one of the most famous singers in China. It was the Chinese equivalent of Joe Biden marrying Beyonce or Taylor Swift back when he was a virtually unknown junior senator from Delaware. (An aside: for historical realism, a better analogy might be to say it was as if Biden had married Stevie Nicks or Dolly Parton, since they were both famous when he was 33. Neither Beyonce nor Swift had been born yet.) These days, both Xi’s wife and his daughter and only child keep a low public profile. The daughter – Xi Mingzhe – currently lives in the US. She earned a BA in psychology from Harvard in 2014 (using a pseudonym), then returned to China until 2019, when she re-enrolled in Harvard’s graduate program.
Back in the world of politics, Xi ascended to the national stage in 2002, when he became a member of China’s 200 person Central Committee. In 2007, Xi was elected to the highest political group in China, the CCP Politburo, which then had nine members, and in 2012 he ascended to the top position.
A few years later, a profile in the New Yorker described Xi’s “essential project as a rescue: he must save the People’s Republic and the Communist Party before they are swamped by corruption; environmental pollution; unrest in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other regions; and the pressures imposed by an economy that is growing more slowly than at any time since 1990.”
Xi has also been obsessed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and avoiding a similar scenario in China. In 2009, he commissioned a study of the topic, which included this joke: When Leonid Brezhnev was one of the last General Secretary’s of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he proudly gave his mother a tour of his Kremlin apartment, his limousine, and his many luxuries. “I’m so proud of you, Leonid Ilyich,” his mother said, “but what happens if the Communists find out?”
This is one mistake Xi will not make. Instead, he has “associated himself with an earthier generation of Communists, a military caste that emphasized ‘hard work and plain living.’”
When Xi first took over the country’s top position in 2012, the Chinese constitution limited the presidency to two five year terms. So Xi had the constitution changed, and on March 10 he was officially elected to an unprecedented third term by the National People’s Congress by a vote of 2,952 to 0.
As a recent Foreign Affairs article summed up the current situation: “Now, as under Mao, China is a one-man show.”
Who will come after Xi, and how will it affect China and the world? The US may have to survive several decades of co-existing with Xi before we find out. There is no sign that he has chosen a successor, and “as a lifelong student and practitioner of Chinese politics, he knows full well that if he did leave office, he and his family would be vulnerable to retribution from his successors. So Xi is likely to lead the country for the rest of his life.”
At “just” 69, Xi is younger than 1/3 of the members of the US Senate. If he lives as long as his 96 year old mother, it could be the 2050s before there is a change in leadership.
Understanding China, five minutes at a time 