Trump’s visit to Japan

Khattar Singh opens by asking whether Takaichi maximized the opportunities presented by Trump’s visit. Kiba notes that Japanese media gave the summit strong reviews, crediting Takaichi for her energy, visibility and political poise. Simultaneously, she stresses that the agreements Trump and Takaichi highlighted on rare earths, tariffs and defense were not new. They had been “prepared even before Takaichi was elected,” she explains, drafted by bureaucrats under the preceding administration of former Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

Even so, Kiba argues that the diplomatic choreography mattered. Takaichi had just completed back-to-back visits to Malaysia for ASEAN and to South Korea for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation before hosting Trump in Tokyo. The sequence created an impression of momentum and international readiness despite her recent inauguration. However, it is too early to conclude what tangible outcomes Takaichi can deliver from this surge of activity.

Takaichi’s policies

Global media have quickly branded Takaichi as a right-wing, defense-forward leader. She has pledged to increase Japan’s defense budget, but Kiba questions whether such ambitions are fiscally realistic. Takaichi has simultaneously promised to preserve high-quality social welfare and explore tax reform. As Kiba wonders aloud, “What is the source of the budget for the defense budget?” Even former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s pledge to expand defense spending came without a concrete financing plan.

Japan’s signaling, Kiba explains, targets two distinct audiences. To the United States, especially under “Trump 2.0,” Tokyo wants to show that it is meeting alliance expectations and carrying its security burden. To its Asian neighbors, the message is different: Japan’s growing military posture is not destabilizing but is instead tied to its commitment to a “free, open and rule-based international order.”

China’s stance

The optics of Takaichi’s warm rapport with Trump quickly went viral across East Asia. Yet Kiba highlights that she moved directly from hosting Trump in Yokosuka, Japan, to holding a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. Despite Takaichi’s reputation in China as a conservative and ally of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Kiba says she “toned down her very hard stance toward China,” and Beijing has already taken note.

Their summit was pragmatic. Takaichi voiced concerns over China’s rare-earth export controls, while both leaders agreed to strengthen communication between defense authorities and ensure effective crisis-management mechanisms. Japan’s approach is to deepen cooperation with the US while simultaneously using diplomacy to maintain predictability in relations with Beijing.

The Trump–Xi meeting

Japanese analysts watched the Trump–Xi meeting with particular concern. The moment Trump used the term “G2” — referring to the hypothetical Group of Two relationship between the US and China — Japanese media amplified it instantly. For Tokyo, the concept suggests two dominant blocs dividing the world into opposing spheres of influence. Japan, Kiba argues, rejects this binary framing. “We maintain autonomy in our own diplomacy,” she says. Japan does not want a world in which the US and China alone set the rules.

Japan and other Group of Seven partners support the liberal international order but are not aligned with Washington on every issue. A rigid US–China condominium would leave little room for middle powers to maneuver. Tokyo instead prefers a multipolar system with diverse, multinational actors — an environment more compatible with Japan’s strategic interests and its preference for consensus-driven diplomacy.

ASEAN is watching closely

While US allies such as Japan, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines welcomed the outcomes of Trump’s tour, ASEAN’s reaction has been noticeably subdued. Kiba says Southeast Asian governments are in “wait and see” mode. They are neither enthusiastic nor alarmed; rather, they are calibrating their positions amid a fast-shifting strategic landscape.

ASEAN states remain skeptical of US commitments, still critical of Washington’s handling of the Israel–Hamas conflict and wary of what Kiba describes as the erosion of “so-called democratization” under Trump’s return to power. At the same time, they recognize the practical benefits of continued US engagement, especially in defense and supply-chain resilience.

Looking ahead, Kiba believes Japan will widen its multilateral initiatives across the region, including in emerging areas such as energy transition, climate cooperation, supply-chain governance and intellectual-property protection. More “minilaterals” and tailored coalitions built around specific issues will define the next phase of Asian diplomacy.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: What Does Trump’s Japan Visit and Meeting with Xi Jinping Mean for the Indo-Pacific? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Rohan Khattar Singh, 51łÔąĎ’s Video Producer & Social Media Manager, speaks with Saya Kiba, an associate professor at Japan’s Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, regarding the resignation of former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. They explore why Ishiba stepped down, the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) leadership race, the top contenders and the challenges awaiting Japan’s next leader, from economic strain to a rising wave of right-wing populism.

Why did Ishiba resign?

As Kiba explains, Ishiba resigned on September 7, 2025, after the LDP suffered a string of electoral defeats. Under his leadership, the party lost three major elections: the lower house election shortly after he took office, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election in June and the upper house election in July. These losses shattered the party’s dominance and triggered anxiety among LDP lawmakers who feared for their own seats.

Ishiba’s downfall was less about public opinion than internal revolt. Many within the LDP concluded he could not lead them to victory again. Lawmakers, worried about losing their constituencies, decided they needed a change in leadership before the next general election. His departure thus reflected a survival instinct within the party more than a change in national sentiment.

What’s next for Japan?

Japan will choose its next prime minister through an internal LDP leadership contest. The contest was held on October 4. In this contest, party members and parliamentarians shared the vote equally. The winner must be confirmed by the Diet to become prime minister. As Kiba explains, this parliamentary step is largely ceremonial — a “confirmation” rather than an election.

Once the LDP selects its new leader, the transition of power will be swift, with the new prime minister expected to take office quickly. But beyond the formalities, Khattar Singh and Kiba agree that this vote is highly impactful to Japan’s direction on both domestic and foreign policy, particularly given the split between the party’s liberal and ultra-conservative wings.

Top contenders and a winner

Kiba outlines five candidates for the LDP leadership but emphasizes three frontrunners.

The first is Sanae Takaichi, the only female contender. At 64 years old, she is known for her staunch conservatism and her close alliance with the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Takaichi has opposed same-sex marriage and progressive gender policies, and she has made controversial remarks about historical events. Her campaign slogan, “Japan is Back,” echoes the populist tone of US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric.

The second major contender was Shinjiro Koizumi, aged 44, son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Currently serving as the agriculture minister, he built his platform around addressing inflation and rejuvenating Japan’s economy.

The third was Yoshimasa Hayashi, a 64-year-old diplomat who served as Ishiba’s chief of staff and government spokesperson. Kiba describes him as a pragmatic candidate with strong foreign policy credentials and close ties to former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Ultimately, Takaichi won the LDP’s choice for president. She is currently on track to become Japan’s first female prime minister.

Who is Takaichi?

Takaichi’s rise captures the emotional pulse of Japan’s conservative base. As Kiba notes, many within the LDP miss Abe, whose strong leadership style still resonates. Takaichi represents a return to that era, promising discipline and national pride.

Her conservatism, however, divides the party. Critics within the LDP recall the Abe-era scandals over campaign financing and misuse of funds that eroded public trust. Yet these same controversies have ironically boosted Takaichi’s appeal among ultra-right voters who feel alienated by the more centrist Kishida and Ishiba factions.

This political shift has been reinforced by the rise of Sanseitō, a new far-right party that performed strongly in July’s upper house elections. Many of its supporters were once loyal to the LDP but defected over dissatisfaction with moderate policies. Khattar Singh and Kiba see this as a warning sign that the Japanese right is fracturing, and whoever succeeds Ishiba will need to mend these internal divisions.

Japan’s economy

Japan’s economy remains a central challenge for any incoming prime minister. Ishiba’s administration came under fire for a July 23 trade deal with the United States that many believed leaned in the US’s favor. The agreement left unresolved issues over tariffs on semiconductors and medical supplies, sparking criticism across party lines.

Kiba argues that the next leader must repair Japan’s trade posture and manage relations with the US, particularly as protectionist policies resurface in Washington. Inflation, still a pressing concern, is likely to dominate domestic debate. Khattar Singh adds that Japan’s recovery depends on restoring confidence in both fiscal policy and the leadership steering it.

Japan’s top issues

Beyond the economy, Khattar Singh and Kiba identify three major policy fronts:

1. Trade and security: Japan must balance its tariff disputes with maintaining a strong US–Japan security alliance. Washington continues to pressure Tokyo to contribute more to defense costs — a politically sensitive issue amid voter fatigue.
2. Inflation and domestic stability: The cost-of-living crisis has eroded public patience, and the new prime minister will need quick wins to restore confidence.
3. Diplomacy and regional relations: Japan faces an increasingly tense neighborhood. On September 3, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un met in Beijing, signaling a new phase of coordination among Japan’s nuclear-armed rivals. Managing this trilateral threat while maintaining close cooperation with the US and South Korea will be an early and defining test of Japan’s next leader.

The leadership race is about far more than replacing Ishiba. It is about the soul of Japan’s ruling party — whether it will return to Abe’s hardline nationalism or chart a new, pragmatic path through turbulent economic and geopolitical waters.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Who Will Be Japan’s Next Prime Minister? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

However, in May 2025, we will cover two — two, not three — issues. They are: US Budget and US–China Tariff Deal Unleash New Economic Uncertainty, and Hunger Now Strikes Gaza and Big Crisis Brews in Israel. So, let’s get to number one: US Budget and US–China Tariff Deal Unleash New Economic Uncertainty.

So we have a lot to get through. And the gist of it is that for all the promises of balancing the budget and trimming government finances, the House of Representatives under their great leader, US President Donald Trump, has passed a budget that will spend even more. So deficits will go up, debt will go up.

Glenn Carle: I’d like to jump in here. Great art, I would argue — and I’m not a conservative who argues for the unities of time and space — must combine farce with tragedy so as to leaven the sadness. And the budget bill, we’ll call it, seems to be a spectacularly wonderful piece of art then. So why don’t you start with what is fundamentally — one should only look at it as a farcical enterprise, because otherwise we would all simply commit suicide.

Atul Singh: We don’t want you to commit suicide, Glenn. You have a long, long way to go, many books to write and many Hollywood thrillers to be made about your various stories. But let’s start.

The House of Representatives passed a budget bill for fiscal year 2025 by a single vote. Members of Congress debated the bill through two successive nights, and only after a marathon push, this bill passed in a 215 to 214 vote.

Contents and consequences of the Trump budget

Atul Singh: And this is extremely telling because it’s by a knife’s edge, a razor’s edge, and clearly the Congress — or rather the House of Representatives — is deeply divided. The bill is 1,100 pages long. I’m sure, Glenn, you’ve read every page. If not you, I’m sure some others have. I see we have Christopher Roper Schell in the audience, and I’m sure he’s read every page since he spent 11 years on Capitol Hill — so a hundred pages for every year.

Anyway, importantly, what does this 1,100-page extravaganza do? It extends corporate and individual tax cuts passed in 2017. Remember, this happened during Trump’s first term in office, so he’s very committed to extending these tax cuts. This bill also cancels many of former President Joe Biden’s green energy incentives. Now, I know, Glenn, you will be saddened by that. It tightens eligibility for health and food programs for the poor. The bill also funds Trump’s crackdown on immigration, adding tens of thousands of border guards and creates the capacity to deport up to one million people each year. The bill also loosens regulations on firearm silencers — because, you know, that’s extremely important. Not just to own a gun, but to have a silencer, (laughs) so that you can operate it with safety after night, without any sound to give you away.

Glenn Carle: That’s right, you don’t want to bother the neighbors!

Atul Singh: Yes, sound pollution is a terrible thing, ladies and gentlemen. Indian regulators and legislators should take note. They should learn something from the US.

Now, this is a sweeping tax and spending bill that increases US debt by trillions of dollars. Note: the US debt has already reached 124% of the GDP. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the bill will increase the US government’s deficit by $3.4 trillion by 2034. Note that the US government spent $1 out of $8 on interest payments. According to the CBO, this is more than the defense budget. Over the next ten years, the CBO estimates that the US will spend $1 out of $6 on interest payments because of an aging population. As we know, anywhere in the world, aging populations push up any government’s health and pension costs. The US is no exception. So maybe we need to bring back smoking, Glenn, smoking and drinking. All this clean living is a bad idea.

Glenn Carle: That’s right. That’s right.

Political rhetoric and regressive realities

Atul Singh: Now remember that this budget has led to mixed emotions. The Speaker of the House actually says the House has passed generational, truly nation-shaping legislation. This is Mike Johnson. Maybe he’s right. Who knows?

US President Donald Trump has the bill, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” I don’t see how it is an act, because it has to go through the Senate — but let’s go with the President, because he is the most powerful man in the world, and the wisest, of course. And his billionaire ally, Elon Musk, is disappointed. Musk says the bill can either be big or beautiful but not both. So, well, now there seems to be a chasm between two BFFs — best friends forever.

Note that all Democrats and two Republicans voted against the bill. A third Republican voted “present,” which means he or she voted neither for nor against the bill. Another Republican missed the vote because he had fallen asleep. Very convenient. It will not show up on his record.

Now, after all this division within the House of Representatives, Moody has downgraded US credit rating from Aaa to Aa1, citing a decline in fiscal metrics. For the first time, the US does not hold a top-notch score from any of the three big credit rating agencies.

Markets are worried about growing US debt. And note, the CBO estimate, which I mentioned that the US would spend $1 out of $6 on interest payments, does not take into account Trump’s new budget. The House of Representatives’s new budget worsens an already bad fiscal situation. So obviously, markets are worried. Yields on 30-year government bonds have jumped to over 5%, the highest in 18 months. Markets are volatile and they have dipped somewhat — not dramatically, but still. If you look at them across a six-month timespan, they have dipped.

More importantly, the dollar has depreciated. This has major implications when it comes to the cost of imports and could add to inflationary pressures. So, on the whole, the US budget, which has just gone through the House of Representatives, now has to get through the Senate. And if it does, it adds to the fiscal pressures on the US.

Now look, any reform will require cutting a bit of spending and raising taxes, and that causes pain. And this is a challenge with all democracies. All democracies find it easy to kick the can down the road. They find it very difficult to cut spending or to raise taxes because that causes pain.

Glenn Carle: Well, that’s the thing. I mean, it’s easy to give, but it is very difficult to withhold or to take or to tighten one’s belt, or make others tighten their belts. I do agree with the Speaker of the House that it may be, if not the most significant, one of the more significant pieces of legislation in… well, that’s Trump who said this: if not in the history of the country, certainly it is very important. But I think for the really opposite reasons than Trump claims, although I don’t know that he actually believes himself.

So with all of these detailed things, what really is going on? It’s the same old story, really. And stereotypes are always based on some truth, and the relevant stereotype or thumbnail sketch of the respective parties’ positions and what’s happening — is that this is perhaps the most regressive budgetary tax legislation in history. It takes — the various proposals will probably remove ten to 12 million of the poorest citizens in the United States from any sort of medical insurance whatsoever so that those saved funds can essentially be granted to the top 1% of Americans based on wealth, which means that those who have $11 million net assets or more will receive all of the funds through tax cuts that have, up until this bill, funded medical insurance for the 12 million poorest Americans. 

The middle class will suffer a bit — probably $1,200 per year, or $1,200 to $1,600 per year, I think it is more in cost. So you’re going to get to that part actually next — that’s on tariffs — so I’m speaking a little bit there. But it’s not catastrophic for the middle class, but it is a phenomenal gift to the wealthiest 1%.

What’s happening — this is the standard difference between Republican philosophy and policy and Democratic, broadly speaking. But all thought is generalization and all generalization, of course, will ignore any number of specific details that contradict the broader statement.

The Democrats, as we all know, think the government must be activist so as to create more equality. Ideally, equality of opportunity — not always of outcome — for society as a whole, and that one cannot pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps all the time, but sometimes one needs assistance to start the process.

Whereas the Republicans believe — and we’re having a distilled version of pure conservative Republican ideology in the Trump administration, whose policies really are shaped by the right wing of the Republican Party — believe that the only function government should have is border control — we’re seeing that in spades in the Trump administration — a strong national defense, and that’s it. That’s it. So that, literally, people are free to do whatever they want — which means if they can’t figure things out, they can die under a bridge.

I’m paraphrasing once again one of my favorite , which is from Anatole France in the 19th century and his arguments in France over liberal economic policies versus the socialist ones. That’s truly what is happening here, in a way that has not happened in policy terms since the 1880s, 1890s — since before the birth of the modern welfare state or social democracy, the role of governments to address some social concerns, be it the health of its citizens or stability of the banking system and so on.

Atul Singh: Though to be fair, Glenn, the House of Representatives have not really cut down Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security — the big ticket items — so they have not gone to—

Glenn Carle: Medicaid will.

Atul Singh: Okay. But not Medicare yet. And Social Security, they haven’t touched it much.

Glenn Carle: No, it’s coming.

Atul Singh: So they haven’t gone back to the pre-Bismarck era.

Glenn Carle: It’s coming. No, well, I didn’t say they’ve eliminated everything yet. But the trend and the objective is to reduce the size of the federal government. We saw this through Doge — whatever one thinks of Elon Musk, he actually was acting simply as an agent of the philosophy that has shaped the policy recommendations of the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the Project 2025 and its authors, which is to reduce, in absolute terms, the size and role of the federal government of the United States — to decentralize anything, to leave everything to local authorities or to do nothing.

And we have seen a proposed increase in the defense budget, a substantial increase in the border control budget — because we’re going to get rid of all these people who don’t look like me and are not here legally, or even maybe if they are here legally. And it is a nearly revolutionary shift in thrust and intent of the role of the federal government. Certainly one we’ve not seen since in the United States since the Supreme Court prior to 1933, and policies by the Democratic Party — the parties are switching the theology — up until about the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt 125 years ago.

So it is shockingly powerful and coherent. I personally find it appalling. One might support these views — I know a lot of people who are friends, actually, who do — but that’s the intent.

Now, on the budget deficit. Theoretically, this is supposed to — the Republicans have baked their bread and buttered it on claims that they want to be the party of fiscal responsibility. As Atul pointed out, this is the most irresponsible single budget in American history.

You know, when Social Security was begun in 1933, the retirement age was set at 65. And in an act of great humanitarian compassion, the life expectancy — so that meant that one could not receive the pension until age 65 — but the life expectancy in 1933 was 65. So one might be slightly cynical about how generous it was. But a fortunate circumstance was that there were something like 16 workers per beneficiary at the time. And as we all know, that has declined continually as the American population and all populations have aged. And now there are, I think, two workers per beneficiary. And that is unsustainable.

However, to fix all of this problem with Social Security and the federal budget deficit actually could be done without catastrophic harm or disruption. I believe that Paul Krugman has calculated — and his first name slips my mind, I just had a conversation with him, actually — one of President Bush’s chief economists is Mr. Mankiw — both of them have—

Atul Singh: Greg Mankiw.

Glenn Carle: Mankiw, yeah, have said — thank you — a change in revenues and expenditures adding up to 2.1% — that’s the figure that I retain — of GNP. So a rise in revenues, decline in expenditures equal to 2.1% of GNP would address the United States’s structural budget deficit.

That could be done progressively, without huge disruption. You freeze Social Security cost-of-living increases, say — I’m just making this up off the top of my head — and you increase taxes by 1% or something to that effect. These are not quite marginal changes, but they are not revolutionary changes. And yet, as Atul pointed out—

Atul Singh: It could increase retirement age as well. There are many, many tweaks you could do.

Glenn Carle: Which has been happening and probably should continue to. And if one does that — because now the life expectancy is not 65 — it’s 79, I think, for males—

Atul Singh: More parties, more beer.

Glenn Carle: Then we wouldn’t have to have all of the tooth-pulling and true pain, disruption that is coming from this bill, if ever it is passed, which is very problematic.

Tariff truce or temporary fix?

Atul Singh: So what we see is that the bill still has to go through the Senate. The bill will still have to then come in as legislation, and we see that the uncertainty that characterizes America is only on the rise. And indeed, that’ll have global consequences.

And talking about uncertainty, we have to talk about the US–China trade deal. And this happened a lot earlier than a lot of people expected. It happened after negotiations in Geneva. The US, of course, will decrease the extra tariffs on Chinese goods to 30%. China will remove non-tariff barriers on American goods and decrease extra tariffs to 10%. The total US tariffs on Chinese goods would remain about 40%, while Chinese tariffs on American goods would be 25%.

So this is detail-schmetail, in a way, but the key question is: Why did both these countries agree to a truce? Well, when it comes to US President Donald Trump, he clearly does not want empty supermarket shelves, inflation or recession. Most market analysts predicted a guaranteed US recession with 145% tariffs on Chinese goods. This was more pain than Americans were willing to bear.

Our sources in the Trump administration inform us that Bessenomics is winning against Navaronomics. Now, this is very interesting. In our conversations with many people in the Trump administration, they are saying that the administration is falling into two camps.

Bessenomics refers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant’s economic vision. So this is a more transactional take on traditional Republican economics. Bessant wants China to sign more purchase agreements, as it did during Trump’s first term — buy more commodities such as soybeans, maybe American beef, pork, manufactured goods such as Boeing planes. And so, his idea is: China has not played fair, and this is what Republicans believe in. And there’s more than an element of truth — China has not played fair when it comes to trade. It has backed national champions. It has tariff and, more significantly, non-tariff barriers. So let’s use tariffs as a transactional tool, as leverage to gain greater market access into China. That reduces the deficit, and that is in American interest because it creates American jobs, because a key focus for the administration is to bring back American jobs. So for Bessant, this is just a means to an end.

Navaronomics refers to the economic vision of Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing to Trump. Now, he aims for a total reordering of global trade through punitive tariffs. He is much more of a true believer. He believes in truth with a capital T. He’s much more of an ideologue. He’s a bit like the neoconservatives of Iran. And so, he’s authored the 2006 book, The Coming China Wars, and the 2011 book, Death by China. He believes that Chinese illegal export subsidies and currency manipulation make it impossible for American companies to compete. The solution is an isolationist and protectionist economic policy that unleashes a full-scale trade war on China.

And we hear — and this is not just us, this is a number of other publications have also alluded to this — that Bessant, not Navarro, has pushed for a US–China trade truce.

So that is the incentive on the US side. What is the incentive for Xi Jinping? Well, we’ve talked a lot about China, and we were China bears long before others were. And both Glenn and I remember going and meeting the Indian Foreign Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry folks there had belief in China’s miraculous ability to defy the economic laws of gravity. We always believed that the Chinese economic miracle would face a slowdown. It’s not that China will go back to smoking opium as in the 19th century, but we certainly see the increased unemployment — particularly youth unemployment — the decreased growth; the real estate sector in the doldrums, which we pointed out repeatedly; the high debts on bank books; the aging population; the fact that households have a majority of their wealth locked up in real estate — because you don’t have such developed capital markets, people are not owning portfolios of Apple, Google, Walmart and God-knows-what shares.

Glenn Carle: And in one of the great ironies of modern history, certainly one of the last two, I think it is, maybe three, remaining “communist” states have a terribly underdeveloped social security system. The Chinese people don’t have the pension system and care that Western democracies provide for their populations, which is in part why their savings are so high, and why the property bubble explosion is more than just bad economically, but catastrophic even socially.

Atul Singh: And our sources in Beijing and Tokyo regularly explain how the Chinese economy is experiencing a profound crisis. Why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fears unrest, and some even believe that the economic pain could lead to a real threat to the stability of the regime. And that is why Xi Jinping, who withdrew his zero-Covid policy very quietly with the white flag of surrender.

Therefore, Xi Jinping definitely doesn’t want to be bullied, he definitely does not want to lose face in his negotiations with the US. But also, this Xi-led CCP does not want the economic pain to get so overbearing that it starts impacting the stability of the regime. So it was in their interest to conduct a truce.

Now, both sides claim victory. Both sides say that the other is more vulnerable to tariffs. The jury is still out on what is truly the case. But the important thing is that this is just a truce. The trade war is not over yet. This is something to really bear in mind.

The US will retain tariffs on electric vehicles. The US will continue to stop China gaining cutting-edge technologies, whether it is semiconductors or jet engines. The US has already sanctioned more than 20 companies, including Hong Kong-based entities, for shipping Iranian crude oil. And of course, the Chinese are objecting to the US–UK trade deal, which lowers American levies on British car and steel imports provided that the UK works to promptly meet US requirements on supply chain security and ownership of production facilities.

Why is this important? Because the Chinese own a lot of these facilities in the UK, and the Chinese see this as a violation of the basic principle that trade agreements between countries should not target other nations. And they see this as a clear example of mala fide US intentions. So, on the whole, we believe this deal achieves a suboptimal equilibrium, and it could easily be undone.

Undermining superpowers from within

Glenn Carle: I think we should think of China and the United States as being two people in a rowboat in the ocean, who don’t get along whatsoever and want to go in opposite directions. But unless they both row, the boat will be swamped. So they’re stuck. China cannot do without the US market and cannot — without huge disruption to itself — withdraw or sell off, exit from the $700 billion, I think it is, in US bonds that it has. And the US can’t, without tremendous political problems for the administration and huge economic pain and recession, pay for the imported goods with the higher tariff rates or produce equivalent products itself in a way that would avoid causing economic harm.

[Atul shares the Geopolitical Risk Monitor on his screen]

Glenn Carle: Oh, goodness, are we sharing a screen?

Atul Singh: Yes, I’m sharing a screen showing the Chinese GDP growth declining. This is our Geopolitical Risk Monitor. You can see that there are strong incentives for China, as Glenn said, as there are for the US, to somehow not completely end up in a bish-bash-bosh and sink the boat, which is the global economy.

Glenn Carle: Something that’s shocking — at least shocking from the American perspective, perhaps a little less shocking from the Chinese perspective, but nonetheless shocking — is that both countries and both leaders, Xi and Trump, are taking actions that long-term undermine the strengths of their respective economies and societies.

Atul has spoken about the budget issue — that’s what we’ve talked about so far in the United States — and it’s very important. But it’s one element of a broader series of changes being proposed or executed through executive actions to a host of American practices and systems that really have been the generator of American exceptionalism and economic wealth, and therefore, political strength and influence. In the United States’s case, are Americans intrinsically superior economically? Obviously not; see others.

But what America has done better than anyone else — and it’s not only because America is a continent with great natural resources, which are fundamental attributes and parts of the explanation — but there’s this web of approaches and systems that has been unique in the world. We still have a vast array of strongly supported research institutions and universities, such as Harvard or Bell Labs, which do cutting-edge research. And they can do so because they have access to huge amounts of capital, which has been funneled significantly by the federal government, working within a society where the rule of law is on the whole objective and applied equally and openly; where capital flows are ample, liquid and relatively unregulated; where the workforce is highly trained and literally the best and the brightest from around the world have been aggressively encouraged to come, compete, succeed — and those who fail cause no problems, because the successes vastly outweigh the failures.

All of those attributes of American success are being eroded and undermined now. The budget is one component of this. And all of this is almost the American government committing suicide. It’s the Trump administration actively, consciously pursuing many of these policies. We can talk about the reasons why they think it should be done, but they’re undermining the roots of American exceptionalism.

At the same time, Xi Jinping, I think pretty clearly, is doing the same thing to China. China is the great success story in human history of the last 40 years, with its growth and the wealth and the opportunities it’s providing to ever more of its citizens, and its increasing influence and power worldwide. I would argue China has been, and could continue to be, achieving essentially all of the goals that it seeks without taking the steps that Xi has felt obliged to do, for fear of, as Atul touched upon clearly several times just now, losing control and seeing the Chinese party challenged or overthrown through social unrest and grievance and demand and so on. His response has been the classic one of an authoritarian, totalitarian — to double down on tightening control.

So that now you have, in every level of every corporation in China, every business, a representative of the political commissar, essentially — a Communist Party official who interferes with the rational decision-making of a bank, car company or farm, and undermines, long-term, the roots of the Chinese miracle, if you want to call it that, which has been decentralizing decision-making and providing opportunity for people to pursue their own interests.

So it is a remarkable thing we’re seeing. And the budget issues, which are critical, are just one component of this larger, terrible story that we’re living.

Atul Singh: Two quick points and we’ll move on. Peter Isackson makes the point that he is more inclined to follow Louis-Vincent Gave of Gavekal Research’s analysis of China rather than our doomsday scenario. Well, Louis has a point. But Louis is rather rosy on China. Yes, China has bet big on electric cars, solar panels and even AI. But fundamentally, we think that the structural problems in the Chinese economy are not going away. Xi is fundamentally amongst—

Glenn Carle: If I had to choose between the economic policies addressing fundamental issues of China today or those of the United States, I would choose China. Certainly, I agree with Peter on that.

Atul Singh: Okay, well, so maybe I’m a little biased. I think the Chinese economy, with its centralization and Xi being a Maoist, has a lot of risks that are underappreciated — particularly in the West. The top-down structure often has problems that are swept under the carpet, until one day they are no longer hidden.

Of course, the US has multiple problems, and we’ve touched upon them — in particular, the polarization, the division, the inability to make sane political and economic decisions, and now a very skittish market, which is seeing rising bond yields and a depreciating dollar. So, a lot of uncertainty in the world.

And those of you who are running companies and want to talk to us, we’re happy to talk to you. Give us a shout. We’ll take this forward.

Glenn Carle: I have for years now made the unamusing pseudo-witticism that with the Brexit vote, England basically committed suicide and declared itself an inconsequential island someplace in the mists of the North Atlantic. But Brexit, compared to what the United States is doing to itself, is a rational step. I do not want to understate the gravity of the harm — economically, socially, politically — of the policies that are working their way through the law-making process in the United States. And Atul talked about the budgetary one.

But let’s go to the next section of the world where things are going completely screwy.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Exclusive: US Budget and US–China Tariff Deal Unleash New Economic Uncertainty appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In his remarks on March 14, Lai China a “foreign hostile force” as he described the and unpacked the series of new national security initiatives. China replied by deploying 59 aircraft around Taiwan’s territory. China has done this frequently since the administration of former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. In response, Taiwan its Kuang Hua VI fast attack missile boats and Tuo Chiang-class corvettes near Kaohsiung, a major trade route and one of Taiwan’s biggest ports, hoping to deter China.

China is serious about “bringing” Taiwan back. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office , “Those who play with fire will surely be burned.” Xi was redundant in his New Year’s when he claimed that “no one can ever stop China’s reunification.” Tensions between both nations have posed a real concern to Asia, as the war in Ukraine continues unabated. This tenseness impacts Asia’s innocents.

Indonesia’s involvement with China and Taiwan

Indonesia has maintained a diplomatic relationship with China since the 1950s. When UN passed in 1971, the nation only recognized China, not Taiwan. This is called the One-China . But Indonesia has also acknowledged Taiwan by building the Taiwan Economic and Trade in its capital of Jakarta. In this position, Indonesia has respected international law.

China and Taiwan are essential partners for Indonesia. China is one of its largest investors and trading partners. Compared to other Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia was the biggest recipient of Chinese investment, as it received around in 2023. On March 20, 2025, the two nations signed a about the Batang Industropolis Special Economic Zone worth Rp 60 trillion (over $3.6 billion). Meanwhile, Taiwan is home to 300,000 Indonesian workers and plays a pivotal role in Taiwan’s New Southbound .

Over three months into his tenure, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has not yet responded to the cross-strait issue, especially as a mediator — former President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo Ukraine and Russia separately in 2022 to show Indonesia’s role as a peace mediator. During former President Soeharto’s reign (1968–1998), the nation was known as a global player. Indonesia is recorded as a top country that has contributed to international conflicts since 1957, when it over 2,000 peacekeepers at the United Nations in Sinai, Egypt. However, during Jokowi’s reign (2014–2024), Indonesia’s political legitimacy decreased due to Jokowi’s domestic focus.

Prabowo’s chance to support Taiwanese rights

Taiwan’s issue could be a tool for Prabowo to increase Indonesia’s political standing. He already did, in fact, when Indonesia the BRICS+ group on January 7. He believes that Indonesia’s participation could result in equal dialogue rather than hostility.

Instead of making policy toward the issue, Prabowo could begin by stating the issue’s narrative. In 2018, Former Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi , “Indonesia… a true partner for world peace, security and prosperity.” Indonesia should be an active player in world affairs, like it has in its of the Palestinian cause in the Gaza war.

To improve Indonesia’s legitimacy, Prabowo should broaden his definition of humanity to include the Taiwanese. Our nation is adamant about human rights, and the Taiwanese deserve them as much as anyone else. Though Indonesia is economically dependent on China, it could speak up for Taiwan’s rights if Prabowo wills it.

The current tensions between China and Taiwan should alarm Indonesia. Prabowo could change Jokowi’s foreign policy direction to respond actively to international issues, rather than focusing solely on domestic affairs.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorialĚýpolicy.

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To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the US, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” That historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Now that a “far-right patriot,” one President-elect Donald Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.

Making the original prediction

Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, I was the historian.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of US decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. President Barack Obama’s administration was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the US was on track for a decade of dynamic growth — the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization and its democratic governance still the global norm.

Looking forward, leading historians of the empire agreed that the US would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely-read book on imperial decline, that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance” — but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While the US’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”

Writing in a similar vein in The New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the US was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.

When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires — particularly those of Britain, France and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.

By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening and corporate bailouts were booming — all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary US citizens, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of the US’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.

Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating US global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”

Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment — think Germany vs Great Britain in World War I — expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the US National Intelligence Council that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”

Just a year later, Chinese President Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power. This would come in the form of what he called “the ,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.

In the following decade, the US–China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall : “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”

The global rise of the strongman

Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.

At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy — forming the in 1995, pressing open-market “” on developing economies and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).

By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the US and Japan, while simultaneously 2.4 million US jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the US and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.

Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections — in Russia in 2000, Israel in 2009, Hungary in 2010, China in 2012, Turkey in 2014, the Philippines and the US in 2016, Brazil in 2018, Italy in 2022, the Netherlands in 2023, Indonesia and the US again in 2024.

Set aside their incendiary us-vs-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an . In Russia, President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, President Recep Erdoğan caused a crippling , while 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte 30,000 suspected drug users and China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to in office and stay out of prison.

Prospects for Donald Trump’s second term

After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, the US is no longer the — or perhaps even an — “exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent re-election, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.

In the globalized world the US made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.

Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the US will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to C until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029. That is the year Trump finishes his second term.

On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also wind farm leases on Federal lands and the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.

As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the US economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that US-made products will be ever less competitive.

To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petroleum-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the US automotive industry uncompetitive at home and abroad.

Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic–foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling US farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs. Simultaneously, it will dramatically raise the cost of consumer goods for US citizens, stoking inflation and slowing consumer spending.

Reflecting his to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall meeting in May 2023, he he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he : “I would tell [Ukrainian President] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”

Just two days after the November 5 election, Trump reportedly Putin over a phone call “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, the Wall Street Journal that the new administration is considering “cementing ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.

With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator — should Trump actually appoint one — might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a . But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French President Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.

US allies

Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for US global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, NATO is arguably the most powerful military alliance in modern history.

Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the US into war. While campaigning last February, he that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.

Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the US presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the entente with Australia and Britain; the with Australia, India and Japan and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the administration US President Joe Biden those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so US power in the region.

Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he in June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he the Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.

Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the US position along the Pacific littoral, which for 80 years has been the fulcrum of its global imperial posture. This would push its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to the US’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.

A silent US recessional

Adding up the likely impact of Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Requiem for an Empire: How America’s Strongman Will Hasten the Decline of US Global Power appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Among the things Trump got right during his first residency in the White House was slapping Congress and the American public upside the head with a two-by-four to finally wake them up and realize that the Communist Party of China (CCP) is not a benign force in the world. This time around, Trump has the advantage of a Congress and an American public nearly unified in their opposition to the CCP, which should make it easier to ramp up the pressure on Beijing, particularly given the Republicans’ clean sweep of the Executive and Legislative branches.

Trump’s “subtlety of a Mack truck”-driven approach to foreign policy stands a good chance of backfiring vis-à-vis American businesses, however, as many of them continue to feed from the Chinese teat. Tens of thousands of American businesses continue to manufacture, import from and/or export to China despite the many hardships associated with COVID-19, the downturn in the Chinese economy and the crackdown on foreign businesses in recent years. Their voices will undoubtedly be heard at the White House as Trump attempts to tighten the noose on Beijing.

Trump’s cabinet and other nominations to date provide ample evidence that he is intent on burning the place down — so why stop at America’s borders? The foreign policy patch-up job Biden attempted to complete over the last four years — during which, many European governments, in particular, silently wondered whether an agreement with Washington was worth the paper it is printed upon — will be quickly eviscerated. An unvarnished foreign policy whose core is nationalism, protectionism and a zero-sum approach to engagement is sure to delight friend and foe alike.

Is China ready for four more years of Trump?

Beijing is certainly ready, with a list of countermeasures aimed at the American government and American businesses. US businesses in China are going to find operating there even more unpleasant for the next four years. The CCP may also be expected to attempt to strengthen its bilateral relationships around the world as America retreats and will undoubtedly find heightened levels of interest, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The newly inaugurated mega-port in Peru is emblematic of how Beijing continues to use its Belt-and-Road infrastructure projects to strengthen its economic and diplomatic relationships. Trump’s re-election meshes nicely, also, with Beijing’s policy of self-reliance and the Made in China 2025 policy.

But the degree of economic, political and diplomatic malaise in China will also be impacted by Trump’s second term. The Chinese economy could be significantly smaller than official statistics suggest. It is spending more and more to produce less and less. Most of its natural resources are in decline, its workforce is shrinking, Xi’s dictatorial rule has prompted increasing domestic uneasiness, its economy is under growing pressure, and its Asian neighbors are ever ore alarmed by China’s aggressive actions in the region — and they are reacting to it. 

China is exhibiting classic signs of a peaking power. Xi’s crackdowns at home and increasing aggression abroad. The military buildup during peacetime is unprecedented. And China is much more willing to extend its security perimeter and to strengthen its alliances with some of the world’s most detestable regimes.

The Chinese word for crisis (·Éŧľ±ÂáÄ«) contains characters that signify danger (危) and opportunity (ćśş), and Trump 2.0 represents both. Xi will want to use the next four years to de-emphasize China’s many domestic challenges and re-emphasize its growing stature in the world. If one envisions a cessation of the Ukraine and Israel/Gaza/Lebanon/Iran wars in 2025, Xi will feel he has more latitude to further strengthen China’s relationships with Russia, Iran, and Israel. Similarly, he is likely to feel more emboldened to introduce new initiatives to ingratiate China with a broader array of governments in areas where progress has been less pronounced, such as regarding climate change and natural disaster relief.

It seems doubtful that Trump will choose to embrace areas of possible collaboration with China, but we can expect a heightened degree of generalized competition, with an increased potential for conflict. Trump’s presidency will coincide with 2027 — the year Xi has targeted for the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan. Trump will likely be tempted to cut some sort of deal with Xi (as he is so transaction-oriented) to essentially cede Taiwan to Beijing in return for something of substance for America. One can only speculate what that might be, but what seemed impossible only a few years ago seems increasingly possible, if not likely, now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The View From China on Trump 2.0 appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Xi has cleverly cast China as a defender of the status quo, pledging support for “” guided by theĚýUN Charter. Ultimately, however, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants to preserve only those elements of the existing order that helped China to rise over the past two generations — such as the world trade rules that enabled it to become the manufacturing epicenter of the world by encouraging inflows of foreign capital and technology.

Beijing instead shuns or undermines those principles that do not directly benefit China or that stand in the way of its rise. Xi’s declarations for a “global security ” or a “ of shared future for mankind” are really more of a call for the continued rise of the CCP and China. “Shared future” is another way of saying �“development first” while rejecting any order guided by universal values.

Rejecting the West’s moral high ground

Defenders of Chinese ambition would argue that communist leaders have a justifiable right to reject or reshape global rules written decades ago when they were not part of the discussion. Other analysts question just how disruptive China could actually be. But China does not need to replace every current rule in order to make its mark. What is important is that China is undermining the legitimacy upon which those rules are based. According to Chinese rhetoric, the international rules-based order touted by the United States is nothing more than power politics, a bid to replace commonly accepted international laws and norms with the rules of a few countries.

Xi rejects the premise that World War II granted liberal democracies a mandate to create the world in their image. arguing that Western advocacy of universal human rights — inĚýĚýand elsewhere — is a new form of colonialism.

In 2022, Xi gave Western leaders an insight into China’s human rights outlook. President of the European Council Charles Michel had argued that Europe’s dark past, notably the Holocaust, obliges its leaders to call out human rights abuses across the world, including, of course, in China. Xi that the Chinese have even stronger memories of suffering at the hands of colonial powers. He cited treaties forcing China to open its markets and cede territory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and racist banning Chinese people and dogs from parks in European-run enclaves. Xi recalled the massacre of civilians at Nanjing by Japanese invaders in 1937. He claimed that such aggression left the Chinese people with strong feelings about human rights and foreigners who employ double standards to criticize other countries. The Chinese government seeks to reopen old arguments about how to balance sovereignty with individual freedoms.

That is an important aspect of the human rights debate — China has indeed suffered at the hands of foreign powers. And the US government is indeed in the habit of lecturing to other governments about human rights when it has its own litany of human rights abuses, from the slaughter of American Indians and slavery to racism, alleged war crimes, and the treatment of immigrants under Trump.

A Machiavellian strategy

Xi believes in the inexorable decline of the American-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He would like to see world order become a more transactional system of bilateral agreements between great powers.

We can see how this outlook plays out in practice by looking at China’s response to the Russia–Ukraine war. There, China has played an awkward handĚý. In short, its goals are to ensure that Russia is subordinate to China, but not so weak that Putin’s regime implodes; burnish its own credentials as a peacemaker in the eyes of the Global South; and undermine the perceived legitimacy of Western sanctions and military support as a tool of foreign policy.Ěý

Xi’s campaign extends to the Middle East as well. In 2023, China skillfully brokered a detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia that served to emphasize the West’sĚýĚýin the region over the past two decades. Xi the Global Civilization Initiative, which argues that countries should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others and from stoking ideological confrontation.”

Xi’s slogans seek to subvert the normative language of the twentieth century so that multilateralism becomes synonymous with a world that rejects universal values and is run by balancing great-power interests. By doing so, China is pushing back against efforts to contain the perceived military threat it poses as well as promoting an economic growth model which embraces autocratic states without imposing conditions on them.

Of course, the real point of Xi’s approach to foreign policy is to ensure the supremacy and permanence of the CCP. Yet the agglomeration of China’s bilateral relationships with some of the world’s most reprehensible regimes creates contradictions. For example, China supports Iran but chooses to ignore its ongoing nuclear escalation which threatens China’s other client states in the region.

China sees itself as superpower that can attain influence without winning affection, obtain power without trust, and have a global vision without universal human rights. Most of the world’s people do not identify with such a vision, but that has not prevented the Chinese government from proceeding apace with its warped orientation to the rest of the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Explaining China’s Perspective on the World appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The drought is over, mate. We can sell our wine in China again. Albo’s visit was the first step in a new era. And you blokes shouldn’t read too much into the subs and all that AUKUS stuff. We only care about the Pacific because you do. The stand-off was all about nothing.

— Australian wine company sales manager

Easy for you to say. The �subs’ you mention will get deployed off the Chinese coast. How would you feel if we sent nuclear-powered submarines with ballistic missiles to cruise in international waters just off Perth?

— Chinese distribution manager 

China President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden were motivated in part by a mutual requirement to repair the economic damage resulting from prolonged political estrangement and the imposition of trade tariffs. Biden asserted that the US was not trying to decouple from China, perhaps acknowledging tacitly that attempts to do so have been unsuccessful. Both economies need each other’s markets to ensure future growth. Yet there are powerful people in Beijing and especially Washington who are prepared to mortgage economic stability and growth for what they perceive as wider geopolitical advantages, even at the risk of military conflict.

In early December, the US House of Representatives China committee recommended Congress legislate to allow it to sanction the Chinese Communist Party economically and diplomatically if China engages in military action against Taiwan or other US allies and partners (partners could mean any country). The committee also advised the administration to revoke licenses that currently allow US companies to supply Huawei.

Politics and geopolitics override economics

Whatever conciliatory statements Biden made in San Francisco, he will likely be forced to repudiate next year as he fights to win the support of Americans who have been conditioned to see China as an enemy and want to see him �stand up’ to Beijing. The Democrats and Republicans are unified in their characterization of China as the architect of America’s domestic ills. When both American political parties unite over foreign commercial and political conflicts, Washington has sometimes made its worst mistakes, such as the escalation of the Vietnam War and recent military interventions in the Middle East, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the diminution of American power and legitimacy.

While the Chinese economy will strengthen in 2024 and Beijing has enjoyed some rapprochement with both Washington and Canberra, global geopolitical threats have not diminished. The dangerous jousts between the US and Chinese navies along the fringes of China’s territorial waters continue. Although Taiwan and Vietnam are not the potential flashpoints they appeared to be a year ago, Biden’s military guarantee of the Philippines has created a new theater for a proxy conflict with China. France just announced it will conduct joint exercises with the Filipino military and that it intends to garrison soldiers in the country. The US and China continue inching towards a Second Cold War, evidenced by the AUKUS pact, the QUAD, Papua New Guinea’s security agreements with both Canberra and Washington, and the recent US announcement that it will deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles in the region soon — probably on Guam.

China remains committed to globalization; it has no choice, for it depends on imports for so many essential materials and components. As the Chinese economy recovers, so will the global economy, hopefully prompting many of its trading partners to restrain Washington’s paranoid struggle to contain China’s inexorable rise.

Foreign investors will need to consider geopolitical risks more carefully now and, in the years to come, as the US is likely to impose more restrictions on Chinese technology and continue to highlight selective (Chinese, as opposed to its allies’) human rights issues, all in the attempt to slow China’s growth. Chinese defensive rhetoric will only intensify in response, and it will continue to increase its military spending.

We hear a lot about China’s political tensions, but at least Xi is talking to foreign leaders again. I fly to the US next week to buy oranges. If we just do business as normal, hopefully things will become more normal again.

— Beverage company supply-chain manager, southwest China

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The overarching of Xi Jinping Thought, or Xi’ism, is “upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics to realize socialist modernization and national rejuvenation.” Xi’ism promotes 14 fundamental principles, which include “a people-centered approach,” “law-based governance,” “upholding core socialist values,” “ensuring harmony between humans and nature,” “upholding absolute Party leadership over the people’s forces,” and “promoting the building of a community with a shared future for humanity” amongst others.

While most of these principles seem worth pursuing, their implementation results in stringent restrictions on individual freedoms.

China’s ethnic policy

Western governments and media have extensively criticized President Xi and the Communist Party of China (CPC) for their forceful assimilation of ethnic Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians into China’s majority Han culture. In recent years, Beijing has indeed intensified the pressure on Chinese ethnic minorities not just to integrate, but to fully assimilate into the Han culture. Those who resist are forcefully assimilated using any means deemed necessary by the CPC.

The West’s central contention is that ethnic minorities should be granted the right to preserve their distinct cultural, religious and social identities. They should be also allowed to manage their own regions as real autonomies, with only limited intervention from the central government in Beijing. While these ethnic and political rights are enshrined in the Constitution of China, the fact is that Beijing has ignored them for the sake of engineering a new .

What is less well-known in the in the West is that one central objective of Xi’ism is to assimilate the approximately 1.2 billion culturally eclectic ethnic Hans into a new Chinese national identity. The values, objectives and structure of this new nation are meticulously defined by Xi’ism and implemented in a country-wide social engineering program supervised of the CPC. By implementing this social engineering program, Beijing intends to strengthen the social cohesion of the 1.4 billion Chinese to ensure that the country will continue prospering as a nation-state. In turn, this prosperity should safeguard the legitimacy of the CPC’s absolute leadership in the eyes of the Chinese people.

Xi’ism has had its share of success

So far, the CPC leadership has been successful in turning a failed country into a prosperous one. As per the World Bank’s , “Since China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, GDP growth has averaged almost 10 percent a year, and more than 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty.” This growth continued under Xi’s tenure, which began in 2013. From 2013 until the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese economic growth averaged around .

Without question, Xi’s program has numerous individual and social rights, such as freedom of expression and assembly. Nevertheless, the CPC’s success in providing a prosperous life for most of the 1.4 billion Chinese cannot be denied.

It is Xi’s belief that one of the cornerstones on which to build this success is China’s social cohesion To achieve this, Beijing is implementing a social engineering program. Every society, in reality, is a construct. Still, the idea of socially engineering a society is not welcomed in Western societies. This is because of deep-rooted Western beliefs and values such as the assumption that each individual should be allowed to freely define his identity and choose his way of life. Still, much like any structure, every society has to be engineered.

Western societies are engineered, too. Otherwise, they would not be societies at all. An obvious fact showing that this is the case is the public education systems that for 15 years brainwash — benignly or not — our younger generations with homogeneous values, objectives and ways of thinking. Additionally, the fact that Western national or regional societies gravitate around common ideologies, values and objectives indicates that they have been engineered. So, the question is not whether it is necessary to social engineer a society, but how to do it to maximize its prosperity.

How can the West approach social engineering consciously and productively?

There are numerous problems with the current Western social engineering paradigm. Among them is the fact that Western political elites do not explicitly acknowledge the use of social engineering, making it difficult to engage in public and academic debates to analyze and improve it. Another problem results from some of the deeply rooted values and beliefs common in the West that grant almost unrestricted individual freedoms and the right to everyone to have a say in almost everything. Yet another problem is the common fallacy of attributing most of Western prosperity to freedom and democracy, rather than to scientific and technological development, discipline and commitment. These beliefs and values are not only weakening Western societies’ social cohesion and robustness, but are also masking the need for a fundamental change in the current social paradigm.

Guided by Xi’ism, the CPC is socially engineering a new Chinese national identity by forcefully assimilating ethnic minorities and homogenizing the eclectic Hans. This does not mean, of course, that the West should follow China’s lead and attempt to stamp out ethnic diversity. What it does mean is that the West needs to be open about the need to be proactive in socially engineering its own societies based on values and objectives that are not always popular.

It is time for the West to take a honest look at its current social engineering paradigm and fundamentally redesign it to build a society that will be in a strong position to overcome the challenges of this century and ensure the future prosperity of its peoples.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Prior to the summit, there seemed few discernible obstacles to some kind of trainwreck, whether a complete breakdown in relations, a disastrous trade war or even a military clash over Taiwan or contested islands in the South China Sea. Beginning with last February’s Chinese and continuing with a series of bitter trade disputes and recurring over the summer and fall, events seemed to be leading with a certain grim inevitability toward some sort of catastrophe. After one such incident last spring, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “the smallest misstep by either side could ignite a US-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.”

In recent months, top leaders in both Beijing and Washington were becoming ever more concerned that a major US–China crisis — and certainly a war — would prove catastrophic for all involved. Even a major trade war, they understood, would create economic chaos on both sides of the Pacific. A complete breakdown in relations would undermine any efforts to come to grips with the climate crisis, prevent new pandemics or disrupt illegal drug networks. And a war? Well, every authoritative nongovernmental simulation of a US–China conflict has ended in for both sides, as well as a significant possibility of nuclear escalation (and there’s no reason to assume that simulations conducted by the American and Chinese militaries have turned out any differently).

As summer of 2023 turned into fall, both sides were still searching for a mutually acceptable “offramp” from catastrophe. For months, top officials had been visiting each other’s capitals in a frantic effort to bring a growing sense of crisis under control. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing in June (a trip after he canceled a February visit thanks to that balloon incident), Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in July, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited in . Similarly, Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Washington in October. Their meetings, to The New York Times reporters Vivian Wang and David Pierson, were arranged “in the hope of arresting the downward spiral” in relations and to pave the way for a Biden-Xi meeting that might truly ease tensions.

Mission accomplished?

Not surprisingly, for both Biden and Xi, the primary objective of the San Francisco summit was to halt that downward spiral. As Xi reportedly Biden, “Should [the US and China] engage in mutually beneficial cooperation or antagonism and confrontation? This is a fundamental question on which disastrous mistakes must be avoided.”

From all accounts, it appears that the two presidents did at least stop the slide toward confrontation. While acknowledging that competition would continue unabated, both sides agreed to “manage” their differences in a “responsible” manner and avoid conflict-inducing behavior. While the United States and China “are in competition,” Biden Xi, “the world expects the United States and China to manage competition responsibly to prevent it from veering into conflict, confrontation, or a new Cold War.” Xi reportedly endorsed this precept, that China would strive to manage its differences with Washington in a peaceful fashion.

In this spirit, Biden and Xi took several modest steps to improve relations and prevent incidents that might result in unintended conflict, including a Chinese promise to cooperate with the US in combating the trade in the narcotic drug fentanyl and the resumption of high-level military-to-military communications. In a notable first, the two also “affirmed the need to address the risks of advanced [artificial intelligence] systems and improve AI safety through US-China government talks.” They also put their stamp of approval on a series of cooperative steps by their climate envoys John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua to mutually combat climate change.

Still, neither president agreed to any fundamental alterations in policy that might have truly shifted bilateral relations in a more cooperative direction. In fact, on the most crucial issues dividing the two countries — Taiwan, trade and technology transfers — they made no progress. As Xue Gong, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, , whatever the two presidents did accomplish, “the Biden-Xi meeting will not change the direction of US-China relations away from strategic competition.”

With that still the defining constant in relations and both leaders under immense pressure from domestic constituencies — the military, ultra-nationalist political factions and assorted industry groups — to hang tough on key bilateral issues, don’t be surprised if the slide towards crisis and confrontation regains momentum in 2024.

The trials to come

Assuming US and Chinese leaders remain committed to a nonconfrontational stance, they will face powerful forces driving them ever closer to the abyss, including both seemingly intractable issues that divide their countries and deeply entrenched domestic interests intent on provoking a confrontation.

Although several highly contentious issues have the potential to ignite a crisis in 2024, the two with the greatest potential to provoke disaster are Taiwan and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

A self-governing island that increasingly seeks to pursue its own destiny, Taiwan is viewed by Chinese officials as a renegade province that should rightfully fall under Beijing’s control. When the US established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979, it acknowledged the Chinese position “that there is one China and Taiwan is part of China.” That “” principle has remained Washington’s official policy ever since, but is now under increasing pressure as ever more Taiwanese seek to abandon their ties with the PRC and establish a purely sovereign state — a step that Chinese leaders have could result in a military response. Many American officials believe that Beijing would indeed launch an invasion of the island should the Taiwanese declare their independence and that, in turn, could easily result in US military intervention and a full-scale war.

For now, the Biden administration’s response to a possible Chinese invasion is governed by a principle of “strategic ambiguity” under which military intervention is implied but not guaranteed. According to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, any attempt by China to seize Taiwan by military means will be considered a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” but not one automatically requiring a military response. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of prominent Washington politicians have called for the replacement of “strategic ambiguity” with a doctrine of “” which would include an unequivocal pledge to defend Taiwan in case of an invasion. President Biden has lent credence to this stance by that it is US policy (it isn’t), obliging his aides to eternally walk back his words.

Of course, the question of how China and the US would respond to a Taiwanese declaration of independence has yet to be put to the test. The island’s current leadership, drawn from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has so far accepted that, given the way Taiwan is slowly achieving de facto independence through diplomatic outreach and economic prowess, there’s no need to rush a formal declaration. But presidential elections in Taiwan this January and the possible emergence of another DPP-dominated administration could, some , trigger just such a move — or, in anticipation of it, a Chinese invasion.

Should the DPP candidate William Lai win on January 13, the Biden administration might come under from Republicans — and many Democrats — to accelerate the pace of arms deliveries to the island. That would, of course, be viewed by Beijing as tacit American support for an accelerated drive toward independence and (presumably) increase its inclination to invade. In other words, Joe Biden could face a major military crisis remarkably early in 2024.

The South China Sea dispute could produce a similar crisis in short order. That fracas stems from the fact that Beijing has declared sovereignty over nearly the entire South China Sea — an extension of the western Pacific bounded by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo and Vietnam — along with the islands found within it. Such claims have been challenged by that sea’s other bordering states, which argue that, under international law (notably the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) they are entitled to sovereignty over the islands that fall within their individual “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs). In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague on a petition from the Philippines that China’s claims were invalid and that the Philippines and its neighbors were indeed entitled to control their respective EEZs. China promptly both protested the ruling and announced its intention to disregard it.

Chinese control over those islands and their surrounding waters would have significant economic and strategic implications. To begin with, it extends China’s defense perimeter several hundred miles from its coastline, complicating any future US plans to attack the mainland while making a PRC assault on US and allied bases in the region far easier. The South China Sea also harbors major fisheries, an important source of sustenance for China and its neighbors, as well as of oil and natural gas coveted by all the states in the region. China has consistently sought to monopolize those resources.

To facilitate its control over the area, the PRC has military installations on many of the islands, while using its coast guard and maritime militias to drive off the fishing boats and oil-drilling vessels of other states, some of those ships. On October 22, for example, a large Chinese coast guard vessel bumped into a smaller Philippine one seeking to reinforce a small outpost of Philippines Marines located on the Second Thomas Shoal, an islet claimed by both countries.

In reaction to such moves, officials in Washington have repeatedly asserted that the US will assist allies affected by Chinese “bullying.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin last July at a meeting with Australian officials in Brisbane, “We’ll continue to support our allies and partners as they defend themselves from bullying behavior.” Three months later, following that clash at the Second Thomas Shoal, Washington its obligation to defend the Philippines under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, should Filipino forces, ships, or aircraft come under armed attack, including “those of its coast guard — anywhere in the South China Sea.”

In other words, a future clash between Chinese vessels and those of one of Washington’s treaty partners or close allies could easily escalate into a major confrontation. Just what form that might take or where it might lead is, of course, impossible to say. But it’s worth noting that, in recent South China Sea exercises, the US Indo-Pacific Command has , involving multiple aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. Any US military response on such a scale would undoubtedly prompt a comparable Chinese reaction, setting in motion a potential spiral of escalation. Assuming that China continues its policy of harassing the fishing and exploration activities of its southern neighbors, a clash of this sort could occur at almost any time.

Resisting bellicose impulses

Given the dangers in Taiwan and the South China Sea, Presidents Biden and Xi will have to exercise extreme patience and prudence to prevent the ignition of a full-blown crisis in 2024. Hopefully, the understanding they developed in San Francisco, along with new crisis-management tools like enhanced military-to-military communications, will help them manage any problems that do arise. In doing so, however, they will have to overcome both the escalatory dynamics built into those disputes and bellicose domestic pressures from powerful political and industrial factions that view intense military competition with the other side (if not necessarily war) as attractive and necessary.

In both the US and China, vast military-industrial operations have blossomed, fed by mammoth government disbursements intended to bolster their ability to defeat the other’s military in all-out, high-tech combat. In this hothouse environment, military bureaucracies and arms-makers on each side have come to assume that perpetuating an environment of mutual suspicion and hostility could prove advantageous, leaving key politicians ever more obliged to shower them with money and power.

On December 13 and 14, for example, the US Senate and House of Representatives, seemingly incapable of passing anything else, a record defense policy bill that authorized $886 billion in military spending in 2024 ($28 billion more than in 2023), with most of the increase earmarked for ships, planes and missiles intended primarily for a possible future war with China. American military leaders — and politicians representing districts with a high concentration of defense contractors — are sure to request even greater spending increases in future years to overcome “the China threat.”

A similar dynamic fuels the funding efforts of top Chinese military-industrial officials, who no doubt are citing evidence of Washington’s drive to overpower China to demand a reciprocal buildup, including (all too ominously) of their country’s . In addition, in both countries, various political and media figures continue to benefit by harping on the “China threat” or the “America threat,” adding to the pressure on top officials to take strong action in response to any perceived provocation by the other side.

That being the case, Presidents Biden and Xi are likely to face a series of demanding challenges in 2024 from the seemingly intractable disputes between their two nations. Under the best of circumstances, perhaps they’ll be able to avoid a major blow-up while making progress on less contentious issues like climate change and drug trafficking. To do so, however, they’ll have to resist powerful forces of entrenched bellicosity. If they can’t, the fierce wars in Ukraine and Gaza in 2023 could end up looking like relatively minor events as the two great powers face off against each other in a conflict that could all too literally take this planet to hell and back.

Fingers crossed.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Deflation is worse now than it was during China’s COVID slump. From 2020 to 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping attempted to stop the spread of the virus by instituting extreme lockdown measures across the country, which became known as his infamous zero-COVID Policy. Predictably, this brought the Chinese economy to a standstill. Following nationwide protests in November 2022, Xi lifted the policy. Yet, a year later, consumer demand has not rebounded. China is still stuck in the doldrums. Beijing policymakers have set a growth target of 5%, the lowest in decades. Even then, Chinese bureaucrats, notorious for cooking the books, cannot meet this low target.

China is in a very risky situation. Systemic weaknesses make the world’s second-largest economy surprisingly brittle. Unlike Europe or even the US, supposedly socialist China has almost no safety net for retirees. And, after four decades of the one-child policy, older Chinese cannot fall back on their few children to support them, either. They have to rely on their personal savings in order to survive.

In Western economies, people put their retirement funds in a mix of stocks and bonds. These provide a diversified and (usually) reliable return. But China’s financial sector is not nearly as sophisticated. The country lacks a well-developed stock market for private investors to invest. So, 60-70% of household savings are tied up in real estate. And it is the real estate industry that is in the most trouble.

Property prices are plummeting. Developers are finding themselves with properties on their hands that no one will lease or buy. Chinese cities are full of apartment and office buildings with no occupants. Developers cannot make the money back on their investments and therefore cannot pay back their creditors. In 2021, China’s second-largest property developer Evergrande Group defaulted. In 2023, China’s largest developer Country Garden defaulted, too. Dozens of other firms are teetering on the brink of collapse. If the real estate industry crashes, China’s population of over 250 million people over 60 will see their savings vanish into thin air.

Banks are in trouble, too. As real estate firms default on the debt they owe, their creditors, i.e. banks, have to write off huge losses. Defaults by these firms could make the banks insolvent as well. If this contagion spreads throughout the Chinese banking system, the workshop of the world may descend into a recession of titanic proportions.

Xi is taking the ship down

How did China’s economy get so bad?

Zero-COVID took a huge bite. But other forces are afoot. The US is turning increasingly protectionist, unwilling to have its domestic industry compete with China’s low, low prices. As China undergoes deflation, those prices will only get lower and calls for protection stronger. Both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden hiked tariffs and sanctions on China.

Historically, protectionism has done wonders for the US. In the 19th century, the US used tariffs to protect its markets from cheap manufactured goods coming out of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Instead of becoming a source of raw materials and a market for British goods, the US fostered its own industrial revolution that made it the most prosperous country on the planet. Now, the US is developing a domestic microprocessor industry and no longer wants to rely on imports.

Other countries, too, have cut down on imports from China. “Reshoring,” “nearshoring” and “friendshoring” are the words of the day. Democracies would rather buy from each other than rely on an authoritarian China that uses economic leverage against them. This means the money that used to pay Chinese labor is now going to Mexicans, Indians and Poles.

While overseas changes are a big factor, the fundamental causes of China’s slowdown are internal. For one thing, China is following a pattern that all growing economies go through. Thanks to the biggest and fastest industrialization in history, China made huge profits selling goods at prices that developed countries, with much higher wages and costs, couldn’t match. Now, China’s population is wealthier and demands higher wages. This means that China has trouble competing with other developing nations, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. Both can underprice China. In transitioning to more profitable high-tech goods, China faces stiff competition from developed economies like the US, Germany and South Korea. China is now very firmly stuck in the “middle income trap” and there is no easy way out of it.

China is also facing other unique problems. Typically, a nation first becomes wealthy, and then its wealthier citizens have fewer children. But China is facing a demographic bust caused by its now-abandoned one-child policy. The Chinese have gotten old before they’ve gotten rich. With fewer young workers, China needs to squeeze more productivity out of each worker to keep growing. Meanwhile, they are increasingly burdened with supporting their elders. That is an impossible task.

A pragmatic administration could make the transition less painful. “Demography is destiny,” goes the adage there is likely no stopping China’s relative economic decline. However, this decline does not have to turn into a crash. Unfortunately, China is no longer ruled by a pragmatis like the legendary Deng Xiaoping but by an ideological Xi.

Like Mao Zedong, Communist China’s founder and dictator, Xi has tightened state control over all aspects of Chinese life. This includes the economy, reversing Deng’s measures. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao’s confidants. Zhongxun later fell victim to Mao’s purges and was thrown in prison. Instead of souring on Mao, Xi seems to have doubled down on Maoism, striving to be even more faithful to this ideology than his father.

Every company has a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its board as an “observer.” This has a chilling effect at every level. Entrepreneurs now have to keep their heads down, fearing retaliation if they question the party line. They risk getting their stocks delisted from exchanges and even disappear. The Alibaba CEO Jack Ma vanished for a bit after criticizing the CCP. Such a climate of fear hamstrings business leaders’ ability to give feedback to the government and warn them of potential problems.

Poor communication and misallocation of resources now characterize the Chinese economy. In a market economy like the US, nine million financial service employees are at work ensuring that capital is allocated to productive projects and not spent on wasteful ones. But China has an undeveloped financial sector. Instead of banks, investment firms and entrepreneurs decide where to invest. Behind the scenes, party capos in each province call the shots. They’re incentivized to boost numbers artificially to meet the central government’s growth targets. This creates system-wide misallocations of capital. Wanting to impress the bosses in Beijing, regional governors have massively over-invested in real estate, building shiny new cities with no one to work in them.

On top of this, the Chinese government has discouraged domestic consumption. With falling foreign demand, China could have turned to domestic demand to drive growth. But instead, it has instead encouraged households to save. Xi has resisted calls for boosting domestic consumption, perhaps for ideological reasons. He may simply see consumption as decadent and capitalist. Xi could still correct his course but he seems disinclined to do so.

In this way, Xi resembles the celebrated English writer Samuel Johnson. This towering literary genius composed the first English dictionary and had a great appetite for life. As he lay dying in 1784, he wanted bloodletting treatment, which was then prevailing medical wisdom. His doctors prudently refused. But Johnson snatched a knife from them, stabbing himself as he cried, “I want life, I want life.” Like the great Englishman, Xi is trying to save the economy even as he stabs it incessantly.

China’s economic problems are deep but not insurmountable. Here, the great man theory of history becomes relevant. If someone like Deng had won the struggle for power in the 2010s, things could have been very different. Instead, China has got another Mao at the helm and is heading over a cliff.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

If China goes down, it’ll take a lot of other economies along with it. Too many economies import from the Middle Kingdom and too many export to it. Even without a crash, China’s current deflation will cause damage. It is bad news for Germany and France who will suffer from lower Chinese demand.

Unlike the UK, which makes a lot of money through financial services, Germany is a manufacturing-based economy. The country’s second-largest company is Siemens, which makes machines for manufacturers. As the workshop of the world, China buys a lot of these machines. 51łÔąĎ’s Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh learned this first-hand when he first visited China in 2005. He found Chinese hotels to be full of Germans selling their wares to factory owners.

In a nutshell, Germany is dependent on the Chinese market. When China sneezes, Germany catches a cold.It is for this reason German Chancellor Olaf Scholz flew all the way to Beijing and returned without even spending the night thanks to Xi’s ridiculously rigid zero-COVID policy. This trip made plain what everyone knew: German prosperity is highly dependent on Chinese demand.

Related Reading

Is the German Economy Now Destined to Decline?

The French depend on China too. They sell luxury goods to China’s growing bourgeoisie. Young Chinese have embraced both Christianity and Christian Dior with equal fervor. With the Chinese feeling less wealthy, Christian Dior will not be able to sell them as many perfumes and bags as before. Luxury goods are the first consumption item to be axed in a recession.

Unlike Europe, the US relies less on exports and makes goods mostly for domestic demand. Still some companies will feel the pinch. A slowing Chinese economy means Boeing will sell fewer planes in China.

To respond to falling demand, China might respond with another stimulus. This time, it may not work as well. A slowdown might lead to China dumping even more goods on the global market at rock-bottom prices. Don’t be surprised to see other nations raise anti-dumping duties in response.

The slowdown is causing a cash crunch for China. Now, Beijing will curb spending on its Belt and Road Initiative and other ambitious projects from Latin America to Africa to Asia. These economies will feel the pain as Chinese capital dries up even as exports to China go down as well.

For now, China is continuing its astounding development into a great power despite all of its problems. But it is now more brittle both as an economy and as a political system. The CCP has neither democratic nor ideological legitimacy. The CCP’s claim to legitimacy rests on its ability to deliver growth. With the economy slowing, the Xi-led CCP increasingly relies on nationalism to command blind obedience. This has made China aggressive on its borders and the adjoining seas. Beijing has exacerbated historical grudges with Taiwan, Japan, India and the nations of Southeast Asia. The CCP has also stepped up military parades, a common tactic of fascists and communists. Only the North Koreans rival the Chinese in their love of tank-filled parades and goose-stepping soldiers.

So, China will be both defensive and aggressive at the same time for the foreseeable future. The risk of conflict is now greater everywhere. All it takes is one radicalized young officer with an itchy trigger finger to  start a war in the Himalayas. After all, the Chinese, remember that Indian troops under Lord Elgin’s command destroyed the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

Nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. As it rears its ugly head in East Asia, there is little in the way of good news to end this piece. The future looks bleak.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Now, suddenly, Chinese President Xi Jinping has gone from Rambo to Romeo. He visited San Francisco, California, on November 14 for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. His tone in California was all about cooperation, not rivalry.

In reality, this shift began over a year ago. For the last 18 months, both China and the US have been making abortive attempts to lower the temperature of their relationship. Each attempt failed largely due to domestic circumstances in both countries. In February 2023, a Chinese intelligence-gathering balloon flew over the US. Xi had not been aware of the operation, but the US detected the balloon and eventually shot it down. Then, the US accused China of spying, forcing China to respond defensively and make counter-accusations. So, Xi could not take a friendly tone for another few months. Now, the time for demonstrating friendship has come.

A weakening China tries to make friends

After years of belligerence, why is China trying to lower tensions with the West? China’s economic prowess, the basis of its political and military power, is ebbing.

For a long time, China was the fastest-rising large economy in the world, with eye-popping growth rates of 8% per year. This was largely the result of a large, mostly agrarian nation modernizing its economy with (often stolen) foreign technology. Now, China is a world leader in many cutting-edge technologies. . China can no longer hoist itself up with others’ help, and it will not see the same growth that it saw in the past.

The disastrous zero-covid policy, trade wars with the West, and the policies of reshoring, nearshoring and friendshoring have taken their toll on China’s economy. Exports are down, and so is employment. Meanwhile, China’s unemployed youth are taking to the temples for solace or help.

More fundamentally, China’s population is shrinking. Decades of the one-child policy have created an economy of only children burdened with taking care of the older generation. Unlike people in the West, elderly Chinese cannot look to a social safety net for help. China has no social security programs like Europe or the US.

So, older people must rely on their savings. Unlike in the West, where retirement funds are typically invested in a robust mix of stocks and bonds, the Chinese financial industry is not as developed. Most household savings are invested in real estate. But the real estate sector is deeply unhealthy. It has long been managed by corrupt provincial and military officials who allowed unwise investments. China’s cities are dotted with hastily-built, shoddy apartment buildings that cannot find tenants. Real estate developers put themselves into debt to construct these edifices and find they cannot recoup their investment. So, the Chinese real estate industry may well be on the verge of collapse. If it goes down, it will take the retirement savings of hundreds of millions of people with it.

China knows that if it is going to weather this collapse, it will not be able to do so alone. It must diversify its economy and build interdependence with foreign partners, including the US, rather than relying on domestic growth driven by questionable real estate development.

What did Xi say in San Francisco?

In San Francisco, nothing particularly groundbreaking was announced. Much of what typically gets said at summits like these is boilerplate, and most of the policy announcements had been telegraphed in advance. But China launched a major charm offensive.

The most notable line in Xi’s November 15 speech was this: “The number one question for us is, are we adversaries or partners?” China, Xi said, “is ready to be a partner and friend of the United States.” Xi’s question is, to all appearances, an honest one.

The sentiment does not seem to be shared in Washington. If you go to the White House website, you will see language of “strategic competition.” The White House insists that it will always stand up for its values and partners against Chinese aggression. Still, the US does emphasize the importance of managing competition responsibly and making sure that it does not spiral out of control.

After the conference, US President Joe Biden made plenty of headlines by labeling Xi as a “dictator.” Instead of reacting with anger and counter-accusations, however, Chinese officials attending the dinner were quick to dismiss the comment, placing blame on the media for cornering Biden with a “gotcha” question. It is clear that they want the overall tone of the summit to be cooperation, not competition. 

Moving on to specifics, Xi courted the business community and tried to make it more attractive for multinationals to keep doing business in China. Xi promised that China would relax restrictions on foreign investment and more rigorously protect investors’ rights within the country — including intellectual property. This is a new tune, not what the Chinese were singing even a few months ago. Historically, China has sought to gain an advantage over Western competitors by ignoring patents and copyrights.

China and the United States also discussed cooperation on areas of mutual concern. China promised to help prevent the trafficking of fentanyl into the US, even making a few arrests in the lead-up to the summit. China and the US resumed military-to-military ties, increasing communication in order to avoid unwanted escalation following incidents. They also discussed taking steps to mitigate the risks posed by climate change and the military use of AI.

It’s important to note that when China and the Us make statements like these, their intended audiences are not primarily each other but the rest of the world that is watching. China, evidently, wants to appear more trustworthy and less threatening, a better business partner. Meanwhile, the US wants to emphasize that it is a trustworthy security partner. So, China is talking friendship, and the US is not.

Chinese interests have not essentially changed. Its strategic interest in controlling its barrier seas and Taiwan has not gone away. So, it is talking about friendship and multilateralism now, but we must remember that China has always been willing to make bilateral deals — as long as they benefit China.

What the US needs and continues to enforce, on the other hand, is rules-based free trade on the seas. Unfortunately, in this department it is suffering from a self-dealt injury. Donald Trump scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have functioned as the cardinal strategic response to China’s rise. Now, there is no there is no political will in Washington for a new free trade agreement. Even Democrats now oppose such moves, tying Biden’s hands. So, the US has undermined the credibility of its own rules-based trade order, which incentivizes other nations to choose a more reliable partner than the schizophrenic US.

All that said, although the media seem to think that nothing much happened in San Francisco, they are wrong. What China and the US did was heal much of the damage done in the last few years of worsening relations. They reestablished lapsed cooperation agreements. The summit represents the culmination of the US’s characteristic foreign policy — cooperation where cooperation is possible and competition where competition is necessary — which had fallen by the wayside in the Trump and Biden years.

For now, China seems to need the US somewhat more than the US needs China. The US is in a lot of debt, but the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, so as long as it manages inflation rationally the Federal Reserve will be able to manage this debt just fine. And the dollar’s status as reserve currency is not about to change any time soon.

Still, the US is not immune to economic damage, even if it does not face the same existential economic threats that China does. If a full trade war were to spiral out, a lot of campaign donors, as well as the average voter, would feel the pinch. So, members of Congress are on the hook to some degree to get along with China. This means that we are more likely to than not to keep seeing cooperation between the world’s two economic powerhouses.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Exclusive: Emperor Xi’s New Charm Offensive in San Francisco appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

But it hasn’t been exactly a red-carpet kind of visit.

For one thing, because the two leaders will be talking in San Francisco, their confab will generate very little of the pomp and circumstance of a US president welcoming a foreign dignitary to Washington. Second, the focus of Xi’s visit is the APEC meeting. He’ll be absorbed in wooing the other 20 members of the group, which works on facilitating trade and investment in the larger Asia-Pacific region. The APEC region, after all, is responsible for of all global trade.

But perhaps most importantly, and ominously, the United States and China are not exactly on great terms at the moment.

In addition to the deterioration in security relations — the of a Chinese balloon, the increasing tensions in the South China Sea — the two countries have been involved in a low-intensity trade war and a tit-for-tat brawl on advanced technology. The United States has imposed an escalating series of export controls on semiconductors, artificial intelligence technology and the like. This summer, China retaliated by restricting exports of gallium and germanium to essentially zero. It 90% and 60%, respectively, of these two rare earth elements.

Pundits and media commentators, following the lead of the Biden administration, have worked hard to lower expectations for the Biden–Xi meeting.

“We’re not talking about a long list of outcomes or deliverables,” a senior administration official reporters. “The goals here really are about managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.”

Sounds to me like the first meeting at the office of a couples counselor. Since the Trump presidency, everyone has been talking about the “decoupling” of China and the United States. It’s really too bad that Biden and Xi don’t have the services of a third-party facilitator who can help the couple sort through their problems.

But wait: How about if I offer to fly out to San Francisco to mediate?

True, I’m not a licensed therapist. But some of my nearest and dearest are, and their professional wisdom has inevitably rubbed off on me. Plus, I think I have some good ideas of how to prevent the United States and China from falling into a messy divorce.

Getting to “Maybe”

My clients have built a strong relationship that has stretched across five decades. They come from very different backgrounds, so it’s only to be expected that they will have some conflicts. But even while they were bickering with one another, China and the United States set a in trade in goods last year (though it has a bit since then). Like any successful couple, they have become dependent on one another while preserving a good deal of independence.

During their first visit with me, I will encourage Biden and Xi to start out by acknowledging what’s working well in the relationship.

My guess, however, is that the two will soon fall to griping.

Beijing is angry about the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed during his presidency and that Biden hasn’t lifted, which China pegs at an average of compared to the 7.3% that China imposes on US products. It’s not happy about the export controls on advanced technology that the United States and European Union have levied. And it really doesn’t like the way that Europe and the United States have put pressure on manufacturers to stop relying on China for critical raw materials.

Washington, meanwhile, has accused China of ripping off the intellectual property of US firms. It’s beyond annoyed that China has been using advanced technology to upgrade its military and it’s concerned as well about China’s human rights record. It puts Chinese tariffs on US goods at somewhere between .

Both countries have other complaints. The United States worries about China’s military actions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, its military alliance with Russia and its efforts to gobble up critical resources in the Global South. China is furious at how the United States is building alliances — such as the “Quad” with India, Japan and Australia — designed specifically to contain China’s ambitions. Another major irritant is the aggressive actions that US military craft near China’s borders. And don’t get Beijing started on the double standard that the United States maintains on human rights where Washington basically looks the other way at Saudi and Israeli violations but holds China strictly to account.

Complaining is not the royal road to reconciliation. Biden and Xi have to listen to each other to make any progress. That’s certainly what administration officials mean when they say that both sides have to commit to “ensuring channels of communication are open.”

But let’s face it: Listening isn’t enough either.

Identifying mutual interests

If couples have children, they have an obvious mutual interest in raising the family in a healthy environment.

Biden and Xi don’t have any children in common. But the trade between the two countries functions as a kind of offspring of the relationship. And let’s face it: My clients are really screwing up with that particular kid.

The tariffs in particular have not benefited either side. They have cost US consumers a huge amount of money, to the tune of a month (by the end of 2018). Through 2021, that added up to $48 billion that consumers in extra cash. According to a 2020 Brookings :

The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for US workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies. A spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau stated that “farmers have lost the vast majority of what was once a $24 billion market in China” as a result of Chinese retaliatory actions.

US businesses are well aware of how much these tariffs — and other practices — have damaged their own bottom line. Perhaps that’s why business leaders are Xi in San Francisco at a $2,000 a plate dinner.

It’s harder to know how much China has been affected by the tariffs, though one study , on the basis of a reduction in the intensity of nighttime lighting in China, that local economic activity has shrunk. However, China has probably not suffered as much as the United States, since its US-bound exports by only 8.5% (compared to a decrease of 26.3% of China-bound exports from the US) and its exports to the rest of the world increased by 5.5% (compared to an increase of only 2.2% for U.S. exports to the rest of the world).

Then there’s the matter of the global commons. A couple that spends less time and energy squabbling can turn their attention to improving their own house or even the surrounding neighborhood. To do so, however, they have to stop wasting resources on feeding their mutual grievances.

Both China and the United States devote enormous sums to countering perceived threats from the other side. It’s hard to separate out precisely what percentage of the nearly trillion-dollar military budget is allocated to this particular bilateral dispute, but safe to say it’s a lot. China spends $225 billion (Beijing’s figures) and $300 billion (outside estimates). It’s likely that at least half of that combined figure — around $650 billion a year — is being poured down the drain of “preparedness” for some future battle between the two superpowers.

If China and the United States engaged in threat reduction — and then proceeded to arms control — that would free up a lot of money that could go, for instance, toward addressing climate change. Fortunately, it looks like the two countries are going to face-to-face climate discussions, which could help pave the way for some future reallocation of resources.

The couple could team up to work on other resource questions. The United States and China are competing furiously to secure critical raw materials throughout the world. What if they cooperated instead on research on recycling and less mining-dependent alternatives? The and China are both guilty of overfishing (with China the culprit). What if they led a global effort to manage ocean resources more responsibly?

Of course, it’s not my job to tell clients what to think or do. But therapist bias is a real thing, and I never claimed to be licensed. Maybe I can steer them toward what I think are more useful ways of working together as a couple.

One tactic is to get them to talk about the various threats that they view in common. My clients are both worried about unpredictable leaders — aside from themselves, naturally — who could start a nuclear war or unleash a pandemic. They are also worried about religious fundamentalism. They are both concerned about the collapse of the Russian government and its replacement by fratricidal chaos (there’s no lack of countries that fall into this category).

The list of potential common projects is immense. But how can the two sides overcome a trust deficit to re-establish a healthy working relationship?

How about some olive branches?

When a couple doesn’t trust each other, someone has to make a first attempt at reconciliation, however modest. It might be an apology, or the purchase of some flowers, or a promise — finally — to watch a baseball game together.

As a therapist, my bias is revealed through my leading questions.

“With the presidential election coming up next year,” I ask Joe Biden, “what are you most worried about?”

“The economy,” he says, curtly.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Prices shooting back up.”

“How can you best prevent that?”

He looks impatient. “Well, there’s the Federal Reserve, and the interest rates, and the—“

I’m shooting meaningful glances at Xi, who is glowering in his chair. “And…?”

“Yes,” Biden begrudgingly agrees. “The economy is still taking a hit from the tariffs.”

“Which means?” I prompt.

Biden glances at Xi. “I suppose we could consider a partial reduction of some of the tariffs if…”

â€Ŕá´Ú…?” I ask.

“If he does something in return.”

I turn my attention to Xi. “What do you think?”

“We could consider a partial reduction of some of the tariffs if…”

â€Ŕá´Ú…?”

“If he does something in return,” Xi says.

“Those rare earth element export controls have to go,” Biden says.

“And so do the controls on AI chips,” Xi says.

The horse-trading begins in earnest. In short order, the clients have drawn up a preliminary agreement on tariffs and export controls.

It’s a start.

Next week, they’ll meet again in my office and we’ll practice our affirmations. We’ll do a short exercise involving gratitudes.

Then we’ll move on to saving the planet.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post How to Defrost the Cold War With China appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Both nations declared the outcome of the summit globally positive, but US President Joe Biden took the opportunity to in a moment of provocation when he referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator,” repeating a remark he had made earlier in the year. In response to a reporter’s question about his view of Xi, Biden explained: “He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.” The Chinese reacted by calling that statement “irresponsible political manipulation.”

Is this simply a case of US culture valuing directness and the supremely American virtue of “speaking out” in contrast with Chinese culture’s commitment to harmony? At one point during the summit, Biden had to say about the manner in which the two leaders conducted their exchange: “Just talking, just being blunt with one another so there’s no misunderstanding.”

°Ő´Ç»ĺ˛ą˛â’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Blunt:

1. The opposite of sharp
2. In the metaphorical diplomatic language of US President Joe Biden, “not sharp” in the sense of blurted without thinking of the consequences.

Contextual note

Was there “no misunderstanding?” Biden has had nearly three years to work out his relationship with Xi and with China. He has spent most of that time skirting the issue. As a politician, he can’t afford to appear soft on the rising Middle Kingdom. China-bashing has become a popular pastime amongst US voters and Republican politicians. Those in the business community who, to the contrary, seek a harmonious relationship with the Middle Kingdom have measured the interdependence of the two nations’ economies. For political professionals, seeking understanding with China is toxic.

During the 2020 election campaign, Democrats found themselves on the defensive as Donald Trump and Republicans made a spectacle of showing how tough they were on China. They accused Biden and Democrats of cowardly appeasement. That may explain why, in March 2021, at its first formal meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska, not even two months after Biden’s inauguration, the US delegation insisted on appearing intransigent and confrontational.

Most observers were surprised, especially as Biden’s central campaign theme turned around the idea that he would break with Trump’s brazenness and bombast. He sought to reassure the outside world. He promised to restore a culture of rationality, civilized dialogue and diplomatic seriousness in his foreign policy.

The first test was the high-level talks with China in Alaska. Instead of appealing to the idea of mending the fences Trump had broken, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took on the role and tone of a prosecutor in a courtroom as he intoned a litany of complaints about Xi’s policies. He voiced Washington’s “concern” that China’s “actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” White House adviser Jake Sullivan piled on. BBC that “Mr. Sullivan hit back, saying Washington did not seek a conflict with China, but added: �We will always stand up for our principles for our people, and for our friends.’” Clearly, he didn’t include China among the “friends.”

A historian attempting to describe the Biden administration’s approach to building a relationship with Beijing — as demonstrated in the 2021 meeting in Anchorage, Alaska — might be tempted to call it metaphorically “an attack with a blunt instrument.” The Chinese may have found this more mature, but hardly more rational, than Trump’s occasional, but largely innocuous, ravings. The obvious friction of that meeting in Alaska certainly produced its effects inside the US, exacerbating the idea that had been circulating in the background for some time that war with China in the coming years was inevitable, if not imminent.

Diplomacy used to have its traditions. One of them was that the first meeting between members of a new White House administration and another major power would, at least superficially, emphasize cordiality, respect and civility. Such encounters typically aim at creating a minimal level of trust and an environment that opens the door to constructive dialogue. Such diplomacy has always respected one of the deepest customs in Asian cultures, where time must be taken to establish a relationship before getting down to any kind of serious business.

Apart from obligatory handshakes, the spectacle surprised even US media. CNBC succinctly summed up the in Alaska led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken as “an unusual public display of tensions.” This left everyone wondering what November’s meeting in San Francisco might produce. More of the same? A breakthrough? Or even the kind of “reset” Hillary Clinton Russia back in 2009 when she began running Barack Obama’s State Department?

Historical note

It’s much too early to begin to assess the historical significance of those two meetings in Alaska in 2021 and San Francisco in 2023. In the hiatus between the two events, the shape of international relations has radically evolved, largely as a result of the Ukraine war. The shift from the unipolar world that had become the norm after the fall of the Soviet Union to a multipolar world has been dramatically confirmed.

In 2021 Sullivan could boast: “Secretary Blinken and I are proud of the story about America we’re able to tell here, about a country that under President Biden’s leadership has made major strides to control the pandemic, to rescue our economy and to affirm the strength and staying power of our democracy.”

After less than two months in office, was the pandemic under control? Had Biden rescued the economy? Was the belief in US democracy strengthened? If you ask those questions to Americans today, the answers to all those questions are more ambiguous than ever.

As for the relations with China, Biden can credibly insist that Xi holds dictatorial powers over China’s central government — but does that make him an evil dictator? China has a remarkably decentralized political system in which, despite a clearly centralized control at the national level by the CCP, local governments wield far more power over people’s lives and environments than local governments in the US. Though Biden describes global tensions as a competition between democracy and authoritarianism, the evidence shows that US democracy, whose lawmaking is largely conducted through the mediation of lobbies, has become indistinguishable from corporate oligarchy.

In other words, the reality of global hegemony is not only about military power, financial clout and political influence. It is also about perception. For decades, the US has excelled in exercising its soft power, projecting an image most people across the globe found attractive. The Biden administration has done little more than confirm the impression Trump’s administration had offered to the world: that the soft power of the US, transmitted through Hollywood, TV and celebrity culture, may be little more than an illusion designed to cover up sheer hegemonic will.

The Chinese position in Anchorage, as exposed by Yang Jiechi, sounded empathetic and liberal. “And the United States has its style, United States-style democracy. And China has the Chinese-style democracy. It is not just up to the American people, but also the people of the world, to evaluate how the United States has done in advancing its own democracy.”

In contrast, Blinken offered this thought: “I recall well when President Biden was vice president and we were visiting China … Vice President Biden at the time said it’s never a good bet to bet against America, and that remains true today.”

For the rest of the world, that kind of language is hard to distinguish from mafia rhetoric. It highlights Noam Chomsky’s of US foreign policy, in his book Withdrawal, as resembling that of a “godfather.”

Yang at one point insisted that “the United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world.” Thanks to the war in Ukraine and now Israel’s war on Gaza, that has become an obvious truth, even if the Western media insist on ignoring it.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51łÔąĎ Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

Sending Blinken to China Won’t Interrupt the Slide Toward War

The World Needs the US and China to Talk

The Tragicomedy of Sanctions or the Theater of the Absurd

The post American Bluntness and the Changing World Order appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

[Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh and retired CIA officer Glenn Carle commented on Qin’s fall from grace in an earlier FO° Exclusive.]

Li and Qin were also removed from their positions on the State Council. Both men have fallen victim to a broader purge that has included senior generals Li Yuchao and Xu Zhongbo as well as Major General Cheng Dongfang. In Xi’s court, no one is safe.

Xi appears unable to identify and promote trustworthy talent in an orderly way. He elevates favorites to top positions and then fires them summarily. Few, if any, really know the real reason why. What is going on?

Zhongnanhai has reverted to the days of its past. This compound is where leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the State Council reside. Appositely, Zhongnanhai is a former imperial garden and lies next to the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. Yet again, it has become a shadowy medieval court where courtiers fall from favor overnight.

This concentration of power and arbitrary imperial rule portends a darker era for China. The CCP-run Middle Kingdom is no longer the institutional, collective dictatorship that Xi inherited from his predecessors. He has transformed it into a one-man dictatorship and, therefore, cannot rely on institutions to bring good people to the top. Loyalty, not professionalism, is how one rises through the ranks. As the sackings of two favorites demonstrate, even loyalty is not enough.

Basically, the Chinese state is no longer able to cultivate and promote top talent, a process essential for any organization’s success. Xi only promotes those he can trust. However, once they are in power, he cannot trust them to do their jobs.

Xi’s reliance on personal favorites has exposed his administration to caprice. China is no longer ruled smoothly as in the days of Deng Xiaoping and his successors. It has gone back to the days of Mao Zedong. There is no process that slows or moderates Xi’s whims. Instead, everything runs or stops and everyone rises and falls at his pleasure. 

In a system where institutions have no legitimacy, the incentive is to be a yes-man. No one can dare tell the emperor that he is naked. Disasters inevitably follow. Then, ministers lose their heads.

It is clear that China has entered another period of malaise. Deng’s era of pragmatism and professionalism has been replaced by a Mao-style personality cult. In our era, political dysfunction is not only a hallmark of democracies but also autocracies. Even China, which has been a poster child for autocratic rule with its spectacular growth rates, extraordinary infrastructure and spectacular reduction in poverty, is falling apart.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Exclusive: Emperor Xi Jinping Now Gets Rid of Another Minister appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The United States usually gravitates toward focusing on a “process” in the Middle East — often involving Arab–Israeli peace efforts of some stripe. The Bush administration focused on democratization (once it had moved past the initial military strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the Obama administration on Iran ties. The Biden team has settled on Israeli–Saudi ties. Even so, the administration is determined not to let the Middle East become its focus, and it hopes the region will not become a distraction.

Despite the pivot to China, the Middle East continues to demand US attention

Globally, the Biden administration is focused on great power competition. Unlike the Trump administration, however, the Biden team emphasizes the importance of working with allies and partners on shared challenges with the goal of creating a more predictable, rules-based global environment. In the Middle East in particular, the administration has been intent to diminish the emphasis placed on military operations, partly through diplomacy and other aspects of statecraft and partly through efforts to boost partner capacity and partner integration. Notably, counterterrorism plays a much smaller role in Biden administration rhetoric on the region, and a US desire to help improve regional governance has remained muted.

In practice, the biggest problem the administration has had is persuading its partners of its commitment. A narrative that Biden was seeking to abandon the Middle East set in early, and this saw allies and partners scurrying to hedge against an impending power vacuum. China in particular has benefitted from this perception, a development that has fed into Washington’s global emphasis on China’s changing role. Perhaps inadvertently, a US focus on China creates tension between a desire to focus America’s attention on the Western Pacific and a desire to focus on a key area of Chinese attention, the Middle East.

Why Saudi Arabia and Iran Are Making Out Now

For the Biden administration, getting the “China piece” right has been a challenge with two key partners, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Biden of the Saudis during his presidential campaign, and many Democratic Party activists think his criticism of the Saudis was right. The Saudis’ commitment to sustained oil production cuts, the ongoing war in Yemen and political repression at home all discomfort many Democrats. Yet Biden and his team have found the Saudis to be essential partners on everything from energy pricing to regional security to counterterrorism, and the rapid liberalization of some aspects of Saudi life is a sign that the kingdom is changing, at least in part in ways the Biden team finds constructive.

President Biden’s awkward to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s much smoother in December 2022 created a visible contrast. Since then, the Biden administration seems to have found its footing with Saudi Arabia, with a series of high-level visits to help advance ties with Israel and open discussion about the possibility of normalization.

While the US-Saudi relationship has been improving in the last nine months, the US–UAE relationship has been growing more tense. Not only have the two parties failed to agree on terms to sell the F-35 to the UAE — after the to do so was the foundation for Israel’s official recognition by the UAE and three other Arab governments — but tensions over the UAE’s ties to Russia, amidst the war in Ukraine, and to China have raised the temperature in both capitals. Billions of dollars in Russian assets and thousands of Russian citizens have into the UAE, and there are widespread reports that the UAE is Russian economic activity. Complaints that the Emiratis were allowing China to construct a in Abu Dhabi, and disbelief at their denials, raised tensions further.

The UAE had grown accustomed to being Washington’s favorite and most trusted Arab government, but much of that shine has worn off. The perception among Democrats that the UAE was too closely aligned with Trump and with Republican politics has lingered. Meanwhile, the Qatari decision to make every effort to help with the withdrawal from Afghanistan created a debt of US in stark contrast to lingering UAE–Qatar dating from the 2017  blockade that other UAE allies have since abandoned.

Qatar: America’s Best Friend in the Gulf?

Iran remains a Biden administration focus, but movement is slow. The administration was never able to resume direct nuclear talks with the Iranians (it came into office in January 2021; President Raisi came into office in August 2022, and the timing was never right). Resuming compliance with the nuclear accord was an initial objective of some in the administration, but this has been abandoned. The Biden administration appears to be pursuing a “less for less” strategy of something short of an agreement in return for something short of sanctions relief, built on private understandings rather than public agreements. With the Iranian economy under pressure, and with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in diminishing health, the Biden team seems to have decided that Iran remains important but is not urgent and the time to negotiate heavily is not now.

Is There a US–Iran “Non-Agreement”?

Saudi–Israeli relations may be Biden’s chief focus

Some of the administration’s stickiest problems are in Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu is the favorite of few in the Biden White House, but he is far more palatable than many members of his ruling right-wing coalition. Biden has trodden lightly in Israel’s ongoing political crisis, although his sympathies are clear. It is unclear whether Netanyahu has any wiggle room — to push off a reckoning with the Israeli public, to sustain his coalition, to tack toward the center and build a different coalition, or any other course. Meanwhile, violence is growing in Israel (both between Arabs and Jews and within the Arab community), the economy is weakening, politics are polarizing and Palestinian politics are dissolving. Israel could have a crisis on many fronts.

For Biden, putting an Israeli–Saudi peace deal front and center meets a number of needs. On the Israeli side, the prospect of a deal with Saudi Arabia, which is widely popular in Israel, allows the United States to press Israel while saying it is merely advancing Saudi normalization. For the US–Saudi relationship, serious strategic discussions have put to rest all of the discourse about the United States abandoning the Middle East. Like many processes, this one is likely to unfold over years, and the Saudi aspirations are far above what any US administration is likely to deliver or be able to deliver. For the Saudi side that’s fine.

In fact, the Saudis feel less urgency than the other parties by far. First, they are not committed to the principle of making an agreement, whereas both Israel and the United States have long talked about the importance of normalization between Israel and its neighbors. Netanyahu and Biden also face difficult political straits, and each could use a win right now. On the Saudi side, the economy is strong and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman believes he will be in power for decades. He can make this deal today, in five years or in ten. For such a major move, he will want major rewards. And from a purely political perspective, it is hard to imagine that he is eager to deliver a political victory to either Biden or Netanyahu; in any case, he may doubt their ability to deliver.

Last Saturday, the Saudi online newspaper Elaph that Saudi Arabia had frozen talks over normalization because Israel had been refusing any gesture to the Palestinians. Then, on Tuesday, The New York Times that the White House was exploring a formal defense treaty with Saudi Arabia. It remains unclear whether the contradictory reports of stagnation and progress are related, or what either might have to do with the shape of any future agreement. Regardless, we are likely many steps away from a comprehensive deal.

The US–Saudi–Israeli triangle is likely to be an important, and perhaps even the dominant line of effort for the United States in the Middle East in the years to come. Crises will emerge, and some are likely to displace the talks for a time. The logic of greater cooperation seems clear to all sides, however, and in the absence of other US-led processes, this one is likely to be a central dynamic over many years.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post What Does Biden Have Planned in the Middle East? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Nepal is a landlocked nation. It depends on oil imports, the of which comes from India. At the same time, its high mountains and swift rivers make it a potential . So, energy is a key foreign relations priority. With global supply chains disturbed by recent events such as the war in Ukraine, Nepal will have to maintain good relations with both of its large neighbors, China and India.

Nepal between two economic powers

Prachanda’s visit to India in June deepened the two nations’ energy relationship. India is a big energy customer, and this means it has a lot of influence on Nepal’s energy industry. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi broadcasted this influence by a strategic blueprint to augment power imports from Nepal to India. He set the formidable target of 10,000 megawatt-hours over the next decade. That number had previously been only 450 megawatt-hours.

Energy is just part of the story. India is far and away Nepal’s largest economic partner. buys 80% of Nepal’s exports and provides 61% of its imports. And the trade relationship between the neighbors is growing fast.

By contrast, China provides 15% of Nepal’s imports, and exports from Nepal to China amounted to in 2022.  China has increased its involvement in the Nepali economy in recent years, serving as a in Nepal’s infrastructure development. China has Nepal access to some of its ports so that the landlocked country will no longer have to rely on others to conduct global trade. Additionally, both nations embarked on an ambitious project to establish a linking Kathmandu with Tibet.

For Nepal, the challenge will be to avoid taking sides and instead to promote a multilateral solution that will benefit all parties involved.

What is in store for Nepal and China?

Prachanda’s visit signifies not only bilateral cooperation but also Nepal’s aspiration to become a regional energy hub. Nepal and have just made an energy export agreement, and Prachanda will likely negotiate an export agreement with as well during this visit. China is the world’s largest , and that industry consumes a gargantuan amount of electricity. Nepal is an obvious choice as a partner for China.

With its eyes set on bolstering national dignity, unity, and mutual interests, Nepal forges ahead with a clear understanding of its foreign policy goals: regional balance, multilateral solutions and sustainable development.

Cooperation, not competition

In a world that continuously experiences shifts in alliances and geopolitical currents, it is important to respect each country’s sovereign right to engage with others based on its distinct circumstances. Such engagements should be appreciated as means of fostering bilateral ties, cultural exchanges and economic collaborations, without hastily attributing them to grander geopolitical designs.

In conclusion, while the international community may observe these diplomatic interactions with inquisitiveness, it’s prudent not to overinterpret their significance. Nepal, like every nation, has its own unique priorities to pursue, but it seeks to do so in a way that is beneficial for everyone in the region. By doing so, Nepal can promote prosperity while defusing, rather than adding to, regional disputes and tensions.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Indeed, the G20 summit in New Delhi carries significant diplomatic importance for India. It offers a prime opportunity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to showcase India’s role on the global stage. Welcoming delegates from a multitude of member nations, including prominent figures like US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, presents a substantial diplomatic undertaking for India. The absence of leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot go unnoticed, and it will be intriguing to observe the outcomes and agreements that emerge from this pivotal summit.

The of Xi is particularly noteworthy. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will instead attend the event. The snub is telling, given that India is one of China’s greatest regional rivals. Perhaps China is having trouble grappling with India’s economic and recent achievements in space exploration, including a historic on the moon’s South Pole. Xi’s decision could also spring from a desire to strengthen China’s role in the newly-expanded BRICS forum, where he appeared more comfortable during a recent summit. Or Xi may have been kept home to address China’s economic challenges, notably the precarious which saw one of the nation’s largest property developers on the verge of default.

Xi’s absence raises questions about China’s diplomatic strategy and global posture. It suggests a reluctance to engage in an event where he might face difficult inquiries regarding China’s economic trajectory, military activities concerning Taiwan and support for Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. This decision also adds to concerns among investors about the increasing unpredictability of China’s policies, with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that abrupt shifts in Chinese policy have made the nation appear nearly “uninvestable.”

India is a nation committed to democracy and multilateralism, and its presidency will be a significant milestone as it seeks to find practical global solutions for the benefit of all and embody the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

Will India’s G20 presidency leave an imprint on the forum’s global agenda? New Delhi is highly optimistic of a declaration with India’s clear stamp on it. India wants the G20 to be a group for the global public good and not just an economic cooperation body. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam literally means “the world is a family,” and not just the human world, but the environment from plants and animals down to microorganisms. 

India’s priorities at the G20

In more concrete terms, India’s at the summit are six:

First, Qin disappeared from public view for the past month. He failed to attend a summit in Indonesia. Beijing pushed back his July 4 meeting with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. The very brief official explanation blamed unspecified health problems. Qin was one of the most high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). So, it was strange for him to have been absent for this long. Now, Qin has been summarily dismissed.

The strange case of a summary sacking

When high-profile figures in China go out of public view for extended durations, criminal investigation can follow. However, they sometimes reappear with no explanation. Chinese President Xi Jinping himself vanished for a fortnight shortly before becoming the country’s leader in 2012. This prompted speculation about his health and possible power struggles within the CCP.

Qin rose and fell like Icarus. He was ambassador to the US where he gained fame in China and infamy elsewhere as a tough-talking “wolf-warrior” diplomat. Before his ambassadorial position, Qin had been a foreign ministry spokesman and had helped organize Xi’s trips overseas, giving him the opportunity to work closely with China’s de facto emperor.

Xi engineered Qin’s elevation and his fall has damaged China’s supreme leader. Clearly, the CCP’s top man has been making bad decisions and his judgment is suspect. Recently, Xi’s public problems have been increasing. Both his catastrophic zero-Covid policy and its silent, cowardly abandonment have hurt Xi’s reputation. He is also getting blamed for China’s real estate woes and a sputtering economy. Xi and the CCP stand damaged by Qin’s dismissal.

Wang, a career diplomat who speaks Japanese, is returning to a post he held between 2013 and 2022. The 69-year-old was standing in for Qin in recent weeks. Wang is an old hand. He was promoted to the Politburo of the CCP last year and is concurrently the head of the party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission. His return might be a move to stabilize Chinese diplomacy. Wang has been the foreign minister before and is regarded as a very capable official. Therefore, his appointment bodes well for continuing the stabilization of US-China relations.

Reading the tea leaves: a change in policy?

No one really knows why Qin fell from favor. For a long time, he was Xi’s blue-eyed boy. Speculation abounds of an extramarital affair and sex scandals. Yet it could well be that palace intrigues in Zhongnanhai caused Qin’s downfall.

Qin might have become the sacrificial lamb for increasing frustration with Xi’s policies. Wolf warrior diplomacy is not as popular as it used to be. It has led to an almost universally hostile reaction, from both democratic and authoritarian states across the Indo-Pacific. They have now started organizing militarily, politically and economically against China. This has caused the CCP high and mighty in Zhongnanhai some alarm. 

Qin’s fall might be a sign of the pressure that China is feeling. The economy is experiencing lower growth rates, higher unemployment figures and more dissatisfaction. This does not mean that the CCP regime is about to collapse, but Xi and his party have certainly lost some of their shine. So, they have to do something.

China might be nominally communist but is culturally Confucian. The state is sacrosanct and, by extension, so is the Xi-led CCP. If something is not working, it must be the fault of an individual minister, official or party member. So, a fallible scapegoat must be found. Qin might have taken the hit to preserve the infallibility of Xi and the CCP.
More importantly for our purposes, what does Qin’s dismissal and Wang’s return mean for the Chinese foreign policy. A priori, it seems that Beijing is likely to be more conciliatory at least in its tone. Wang has more relationships with his foreign counterparts than Qin. This should help Wang to smooth some ruffled feathers. Xi wants continuity and predictability, not description and volatility, right now.

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In recent months, among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s followers, there has been much talk of a “forever war” in Ukraine dragging on for years, if not decades. “For us,” Putin a group of factory workers recently, “this is not a geopolitical task, but a task of the survival of Russian statehood, creating conditions for the future development of the country and our children.”

Visiting Kyiv last February, US President Joseph Biden assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for, for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.” A few weeks later, the European Council “its resolute condemnation of ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s actions and unwavering support for Ukraine and its people.” 

With all the major players already committed to fighting a forever war, how could peace possibly come about? With the UN compromised by ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s seat on the Security Council and the G7 powers united in “¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” the most likely dealmaker when it comes to ending this forever war may prove to be President Xi Jinping of China.

China? Really?

In the West, Xi’s self-styled role as a peacemaker in Ukraine has been widely mocked. In February, on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, China’s as the “only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis” sparked a barbed reply from US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who claimed the war “could end tomorrow if Russia stopped attacking Ukraine.”

When Xi visited Moscow in March, the statement Chinese officials released claiming that he to “play a constructive role in promoting talks” prompted considerable Western criticism. “I don’t think China can serve as a fulcrum on which any Ukraine peace process could move,” Ryan Hass, a former American diplomat assigned to China. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, pointed out that “China has taken sides” in the conflict by backing Russia and so could hardly become a peacemaker. Even when Xi made a to Zelensky promising to dispatch an envoy to promote negotiations “with all parties,” critics dismissed that overture as so much damage control for China’s increasingly troubled trade relations with Europe.

The symbolism of peace conferences

Still, think about it for a moment. Who else could bring the key parties to the table and potentially make them honor their signatures on a peace treaty? Putin has, of course, already violated UN accords by invading a sovereign state and ruptured his economic entente with Europe by trashing past agreements with Washington to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. And yet the Russian president relies on China’s support, economically and otherwise, which makes Xi the only leader who might be able to bring him to the bargaining table and ensure that he honors any agreement he may sign. That sobering reality should raise serious questions about how any future Beijing-inspired peace conference might happen and what it would mean for the current world order.

For more than 200 years, peace conferences have not only resolved conflicts but regularly signaled the arrival at stage center of a new world power. In 1815, amid the whirling in Vienna’s palaces that accompanied negotiations ending the Napoleonic wars, Britain emerged into its century-long reign as the globe’s . Similarly, the 1885 that carved up the continent of Africa for colonial rule heralded Germany’s rise as Britain’s most serious rival. The somber grand Hall of Mirrors that officially ended World War I in 1919 marked America’s debut on the world stage. Similarly, the at San Francisco that established the UN (just as World War II was about to end) affirmed the ascent of US global hegemony.

Imagine the impact if, sooner or later, envoys from Kyiv and Moscow convene in Beijing beneath the gaze of President Xi and find the elusive meeting point between ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s aspirations and Ukraine’s survival. One thing would be guaranteed: after years of disruptions in the global energy, fertilizer and grain markets, marked by punishing inflation and spreading hunger, all eyes from five continents would indeed turn toward Beijing.

After all, with the war disrupting grain and fertilizer shipments via the Black Sea, world hunger to an estimated 345 million people in 2023, while basic food insecurity now afflicts 828 million inhabitants of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Should such negotiations ever prove fruitful, a televised signing ceremony hosted by President Xi and watched by countless millions globally would crown China’s rapid 20-year ascent to world power.

The world’s newest great power

Forget Ukraine for a moment and concentrate on China’s economic rise under communist rule, which has been little short of extraordinary. At the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China was an economic lightweight. Its massive population, 20% of the world’s total, was just 4% of global economic output. So weak was China that its leader Mao Zedong had to amid a Moscow winter for an audience with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin just to plead for the industrial technology that would help rebuild an economy devastated by 12 years of war and revolution. In the decade following its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, however, China quickly became the workshop of the world, an unprecedented $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves.

Instead of simply swimming in a hoard of cash like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin, in 2013 President Xi announced a trillion-dollar development scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It aimed to build a massive infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass and Africa, thereby improving the lives of humanity’s forgotten millions, while making Beijing the focal point of Eurasia’s economic development. Today, China is not only an industrial powerhouse that 18% of the global gross domestic product (GDP), compared to 12% for the US, but also the world’s chief creditor. It provides capital for infrastructure and industrial projects to while offering some hope to the still subsisting on less than four dollars a day.

Testifying to that economic prowess, for the past six months world leaders have ignored Washington’s pleas to form a united front against China. Instead, remarkable numbers of them, including Germany’s Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, have been to pay court to President Xi. In April, even French President and US ally Emmanuel Macron visited the Chinese capital, where he a “global strategic partnership with China” and urged other countries to become less reliant on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar.”

Then, in a diplomatic coup that stunned Washington, China took a toward healing the dangerous sectarian rivalry between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia by a meeting of their foreign ministers in Beijing. As the Saudis’ and Iran’s , Beijing had the commercial clout to bring them to the bargaining table. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi then the restored diplomatic relations as part of his country’s “constructive role in facilitating the proper settlement of hot-spot issues around the world.”

Geopolitics as a source of change

Underlying the sudden display of Chinese diplomatic clout is a recent shift in that essential realm called “geopolitics” that’s driving a fundamental realignment in global power.

Around 1900, at the high tide of the British Empire, the English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder started the modern study of geopolitics by publishing a highly arguing that the construction of the 5,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok was the beginning of a merger of Europe and Asia. That unified land mass, he said, would soon become the epicenter of global power.

In 1997, in his book , former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski updated MacKinder, arguing that “geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.” In words particularly apt for our present world, he added: “America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

Imagine geopolitics as the deep substrate shaping far more superficial political events, even if it’s only noticeable in certain moments, much the way the incessant grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates only becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. For centuries, if not millennia, Europe was separated from Asia by endless deserts and sprawling grasslands. The empty center of that vast land mass was crossed only by an occasional string of camels traveling the .

Now, thanks to its in infrastructure—rails, roads, pipelines, and ports—China is fundamentally changing that geopolitical substrate through a more-than-metaphorical merger of continents. If President Xi’s grand design succeeds, Beijing will forge a unified market stretching 6,000 miles from the North Sea to the South China Sea, eventually encompassing 70% of all humanity and effectively fusing Europe and Asia into a single economic continent: Eurasia.

Despite the Biden administration’s fervid attempts to create an , recent diplomatic eruptions are shaping a new world order that isn’t at all what Washington had in mind. With the economic creation of a true Eurasian sphere seemingly underway, we may be seeing the first signs of the changing face of international politics. The question is: Could a Chinese-engineered peace in Ukraine be next in line?

Pressures on China for peace

Such growing geopolitical power is giving China both the motivation and potentially even the means to negotiate an end to the fighting in Ukraine. First, the means: as ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s for its commodity exports, and Ukraine’s largest before the war, China can use commercial pressure to bring both parties to the bargaining table, much as it did for Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Next, the motivation: while Moscow and Kyiv might each exude confidence in ultimate victory in their forever war, Beijing has reason to grow impatient with the economic disruptions radiating out across the Black Sea to roil a delicately balanced global economy. According to the World Bank, almost (47%) is now surviving on seven dollars a day, and most of them live in Africa, Asia and Latin America where China has made massive, long-term developmental loans to under its Belt and Road Initiative.

With 70% of its lands and their rich black soils devoted to agriculture, Ukraine has for decades produced bumper crops of wheat, barley, soybeans and sunflower oil that made it “the of the world,” providing the globe’s hungry millions with reliable shipments of affordable commodities. Right after the Russian invasion, however, world prices for grains and vegetable oils shot up by 60%. Despite stabilization efforts, including the UN’s Black Sea Grain Initiative to allow exports through the war zone, prices for such essentials remain all too high. They threaten to go higher still with further disruption of global supply chains or more war damage like the recent rupture of a crucial Ukrainian that’s turning more than a million acres of prime farmland into “desert.”

As costs for imports of fertilizer, grain and other foodstuffs have soared since the Russian invasion, the Council on Foreign Relations that “a climbing number of low-income BRI countries have struggled to repay loans associated with the initiative, spurring a wave of debt crises.” In the Horn of Africa, for example, the sixth year of a crippling drought has pushed an estimated into a “hunger crisis,” forcing the governments of Ethiopia and Kenya to balance costly food imports with the repayment of Chinese loans for the creation of like factories, railroads and renewable energy. With such loans surpassing in nations like Ghana, Malaysia, Pakistan and Zambia, while China itself holds outstanding credits equivalent to , China is far more invested in global economic peace and stability than any other major power.

Beyond western fantasies of victory

At present, Beijing might seem alone among major nations in its concern about the strain the Ukraine war is placing on a world economy poised between starvation and survival. But within the coming six months, Western opinion will likely start to shift as its inflated expectations for Ukrainian victory in its long-awaited “” meet the reality of ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s return to trench warfare.

After the stunning success of Ukraine’s offensives late last year near Kharkiv and Kherson, the West dropped its reticence about provoking Putin and began shipping billions of dollars of sophisticated equipment—first and missiles, then and battle tanks and, by the end of this year, advanced . By the war’s first anniversary last February, the West had already provided Kyiv with in aid, and expectations of success rose with each new arms shipment. Adding to that anticipation, Moscow’s own “winter offensive” with its desperate suicide attacks on the city of Bakhmut , as Foreign Affairs put it, that “the Russian military demonstrated … it was no longer capable of large-scale combat operations.”

But defense is another matter. While Moscow was wasting some in suicide assaults on Bakhmut, its specialized tractors were cutting a formidable network of along a 600-mile front designed to stall any Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Ukraine’s troops will probably achieve some breakthroughs when that offensive finally begins, but are unlikely to push Russia back from all its post-invasion gains. Remember that ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s army of 1.3 million is than Ukraine’s, which has also suffered many casualties. In March, the commander of Ukraine’s 46th Air Assault brigade the Washington Post that a year of combat had left 100 dead and 400 wounded in his 500-man unit and that they were being replaced by raw recruits, some of whom fled at the very sound of rifle fire. To counter the few dozen “symbolic” Leopard tanks the West is sending, Russia has thousands of in reserve. Despite US and European sanctions, ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s economy has actually continued to grow, while Ukraine’s, which was only about a tenth the size of ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s, has shrunk by 30%. Facts like these mean just one thing is likely: stalemate.

Beijing as peacemaker

By next December, if Ukraine’s counteroffensive has indeed stalled, its people face another cold, dark winter of drone attacks, while ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s rising casualties and lack of results might by then begin to challenge Putin’s hold on power. In other words, both combatants might feel far more compelled to sit down in Beijing for peace talks. With the threat of future disruptions damaging its delicate global position, Beijing will likely deploy its full economic power to press the parties for a settlement. By trading territory, while agreeing with China on reconstruction aid, and some further strictures on Ukraine’s future NATO membership, both sides might feel they had won enough concessions to sign an agreement.

Not only would China then gain enormous prestige for brokering such a peace deal, but it might win a preferential position in the reconstruction bonanza that would follow by offering aid to rebuild both a ravaged Ukraine and a damaged Russia. In a recent report, the World Bank that it could take $411 billion and over a decade to rebuild a devastated Ukraine through infrastructure contracts of the very kind Chinese construction companies are so ready to undertake. To sweeten such deals, Ukraine could also allow China to build massive factories to supply Europe’s soaring demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Apart from the profits involved, such Chinese-Ukrainian joint ventures would ramp up production at a time when that country is likely to gain duty-free access to the European market.

In the post-war moment, with the possibility that Ukraine will be an increasingly strong economic ally at the edge of Europe, Russia still a reliable supplier of cut-rate commodities and the European market ever more open to its state corporations, China is likely to emerge from that disastrous conflict—to use Brzezinski’s well-chosen words—with its “preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent” consolidated and its “basis for global primacy” significantly strengthened.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The country’s economic growth is flagging. China’s central bank has been lowering interest rates in a feeble attempt to stir investment. The real estate sector, one of China’s main drivers of growth, is very weak. Loans made for unsuccessful real estate ventures now fill the books of many Chinese banks. The bubble is just waiting to pop, which would be a catastrophe in an economy where a whopping 70% of individual investors’ portfolios are tied up in real estate.

China knows that its economy is weakening. Expectations are no longer so strong (at least in the medium term), that a rising Middle Kingdom will vanquish its adversaries and replace the US as the dominant power in the region. Beijing seems to be taking a different tack, and it is calming down its aggressive rhetoric against the US. It is beginning, indeed, to seek rapprochement.

Really, Rapprochement with the US? 

After so many years of wolf warrior diplomacy, this new-found reasonableness is hard to believe. Atul Singh and Glenn Carle explain how such a surprising change in direction may be coming about.

Underneath it all, Atul reminds us, is the “very simple social contract” which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has with its citizens. The communist regime’s credibility doesn’t rest on any democratic legitimacy but on its sheer ability to get results—prosperity. If it cannot provide that, its very existence is in question.

Without a crystal ball, no one can predict what will happen to China when the bubble inevitably bursts. Glenn refers to conversations he has had with Indian leaders who are watching developments in China with keen interest. They suggest that their northern neighbor may well weather the storm. Glenn is not so sure.

It is far more uncertain how China will navigate the middle income trap: the natural stagnation of growth that occurs when economies attempt to move from manufacturing into services. It will not be nearly as easy for China to repeat its strong growth of the last few decades, no matter how clever the CCP’s economic policy tsars may be.

All this has led Chinese leaders to come to terms with reality and look to the US for cooperation. Despite hawkish rhetoric from partisan ideologues on both sides, cooler heads among policymakers seem to be signaling rapprochement. However, this may not be possible.

The problem, as Glenn explains, is that China wants to put aside economic and trade disagreements with the US while leaving political issues outstanding. This may be too much of an ask. It seems doubtful that the US and China will be able to successfully work together while they maintain mutually incompatible goals in Taiwan and in the South China Sea. 

At the heart of the matter is a fundamental disagreement. The ruling power wants to remain top dog. The rising power wants to usurp that position. The Thucidides trap remains strong and the risk of conflict high.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Breakdown of the US’s ability to talk to and think about China

Under Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and, partly, Donald Trump, the US had institutionalized large-scale communications with China, especially through the strategic economic dialogue (Bush), strategic and economic dialogue (Obama), and comprehensive economic dialogue (Trump). Dozens of senior officials regularly met. Those dialogues could not resolve the great issues like Taiwan or intellectual property, but officials came to understand each other and render differences manageable.

When Donald Trump became President, Xi Jinping was determined to keep communications open and relations constructive. Chinese scholars say the lavish welcome Trump was given was historically exceptional.

As with other relationships, Trump responded initially with admiration: “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find it. There’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.” Likewise, at Davos in 2020: “Our relationship with China has now probably never, ever been better … He’s for China, I’m for the US but, other than that, we love each other.” But Trump’s mood changed and the dialogue lapsed. Biden chose to permanently abandon institutionalized dialogue permanently. Blinken’s trip marginally walks back that decision and marginally walks back the coldness Blinken deliberately instilled at his initial meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage.

US Presidents traditionally ensure the presence of some cabinet-level officials with expertise and experience on the most vital national security issue of the time, once the Soviet Union and now China. No Cold War president would have been without the top-level expertise brought to the task by a Kissinger, Brzezinski or Scowcroft.

George W. Bush was a foreign policy failure in many respects but, guided by Hank Paulsen in the Treasury and brilliant CIA China expert Dennis Wilder in the National Security Council (NSC), he balanced his strong support for Taiwan’s security with strong support for the 1970s peace agreements and ended up admired by both Taipei and Beijing.

Obama ended the tradition of having cabinet-level China expertise. Trump followed suit. Biden has been exceptionally striking in declaring that China is America’s ultimate foreign policy threat but hiring no top-level expertise on China. His Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and CIA Director spent their careers on the Middle East and Europe; his Secretary of Defense on the Middle East. Even Biden’s ambassador to China is a career Middle East and Europe official. His NSC Asia czar has no direct experience with China and became famous for demanding disengagement based on the false assertion that US engagement with China presumed engagement would democratize China.  

Some of these officials, like CIA Director William J Burns, are outstanding and have deployed their European expertise to resist Russian aggression. Regarding China, though, it is another story. Imagine the CEO of a giant food company announcing that cereals constitute the greatest opportunity and the greatest competitive threat, then announcing that the heads of the Wheaties division, the Cheerios division, the oatmeal division and all others would be hamburger experts.

Below the leadership level, things are even worse. Intelligence and Defense Department officials say that it has become so difficult for anyone with China expertise and experience to get security clearance that the US has partially blinded itself. Scholars and business executives who bridge the two countries are frightened, and vast numbers are considering departure to China. Some visiting Chinese professors, including two of the most pro-American international relations scholars and one invited personally by Jimmy Carter, have been treated very badly by US immigration authorities.

In short, Biden has continued and worsened the Trump disjunction between strategic imperatives and leadership skills, the Trump contempt for expertise and the Trump (late, partial, possibly temporary) dismissal of institutionalized dialogue. No weekend trip can ameliorate these fundamental realities.

The US fumes against China because it no longer understands it

Magnifying the consequences is a vital difference between Trump and Biden. Trump always sought the deal, albeit a misconceived deal: The trade war was about trade disparities, and if Beijing took specific actions, the trade war would proportionately ease. Biden proposes no deal, just escalated sanctions.

Given the overwhelming evidence that steel and aluminum tariffs hurt the US more than China, raise prices and cost many tens of thousands of US jobs, most economists assumed that the President whose slogan is “a foreign policy for the middle class” would lift them. But, no: US Trade Representative Katherine Tai says they are necessary to maintain “leverage” over China. There is of course no leverage from policies that damage America more than China.

The Biden administration has totally repudiated the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Brzezinski.

Lacking expertise, Washington frequently seems clueless about how the world views its China policies. For instance, Blinken and Biden often broadcast versions of Biden’s June 9 statement that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a “debt and confiscation program.” Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo  Belt & Road similarly. Developing world leaders, who frequently contrast China’s development offers with Washington’s lectures or its omnipresent Special Forces teams, know that is false. Every China specialist knows the study of 1100 Chinese loans that found there was not a single instance of China using debt problems to seize collateral.

Does the US President have no idea what he is talking about, or is he systematically spreading disinformation? Either way, developing countries can dismiss much of US policy. For instance, many give credence to the argument that the problem in both Europe and Asia is US efforts to encircle and destabilize its adversaries. Hence, all of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East align with China regarding US sanctions on Russia.

The big problem is Taiwan. Henry Kissinger warns that we are sliding toward war over Taiwan. The Biden administration has totally repudiated the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Brzezinski. Washington promised to abstain from official relations or an alliance with Taiwan. But President Biden has promised four times to defend Taiwan; that is an alliance.

Speaker Pelosi was emphatic that her August trip to Taipei was an “official” trip; immediately after her meeting with President Tsai, the presidential spokeswoman went on island-wide TV and proclaimed, “We are a sovereign and independent country.”

Responding to lesser provocations, George W Bush, his secretary of state, and his deputy secretary of state, no panda-hugging liberals, distanced the US and warned Taipei to stop. Instead, Secretary Blinken continues to welcome such official relations and tell the Chinese not to “overreact.” 

The angry popular reaction inside China to Xi’s failure to respond decisively to such US initiatives is the one risk that could topple Xi Jinping from power. Concern about that is the one thing that could trigger him to launch a direct attack on Taiwan.

Biden has no senior advisor who understands such things. Blinken and Sullivan act on how they believe theoretically China should react, not on knowledge of actual Chinese politics.

If war comes, it will not be the limited conflict of US war games. China will hit Okinawa immediately or lose. The US will hit mainland Chinese bases immediately or lose. China will respond against the US.

The common denominator of Trump’s MAGA policies, Biden’s MAGA-plus policies, and Representative ultra-MAGA policies is a repudiation of the promises and norms the US accepted when Nixon, Carter, Mao and Deng compromised to eliminate what had been a terrible risk of conflict over Taiwan.

The cover for that repudiation is an endless repetition of the assertion that China is planning an invasion of Taiwan, an assertion for which the US intelligence community says there is no evidence.

The fact of the matter is that Washington’s hard left and the hard right always despised compromise. The pragmatic center has evaporated, for domestic reasons, and the self-righteous ideologues rule Congress. No quick visit, no fog of diplomatic niceties will arrest the resultant reversion to the pre-1972 risk of war.

(China took an equally dangerous turn, also for domestic reasons. Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Canadian hostages, economic war on Australia, and much else are serious issues. But this article is about the US; previous US administrations handled middle-sized issues without sliding toward war.)

Biden was elected by the pragmatic center, but he has no China team, no China policy, no strategic vision. He should be wary of taking even a small risk that history will remember him for the first inadvertent world war of choice. Weekend trips for marginal changes of tone do not address the problem.

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[ edited this piece.]

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This time around, the US had been cut out of the picture, a sea change reflecting not just Chinese initiatives but Washington’s incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing in the subsequent three decades in the Middle East. An aftershock came in early May as gripped Congress about the covert construction of a Chinese naval base in the United Arab Emirates, a US ally hosting thousands of American troops. The Abu Dhabi facility would be an add-on to the small base at Djibouti on the east coast of Africa used by the People’s Liberation Army-Navy for combating piracy, evacuating noncombatants from conflict zones, and perhaps regional espionage.

China’s interest in cooling off tensions between the Iranian ayatollahs and the Saudi monarchy arose, however, not from any military ambitions in the region but because it imports significant amounts of oil from both countries. Another impetus was undoubtedly President Xi’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, that aims to expand Eurasia’s overland and maritime economic infrastructure for a vast growth of regional trade — with China, of course, at its heart. That country has already invested billions in a and in developing the Pakistani Arabian seaport of to facilitate the transmission of Gulf oil to its northwestern provinces.

Having Iran and Saudi Arabia on a war footing endangered Chinese economic interests. Remember that, in September 2019, an Iran proxy or Iran itself launched a drone attack on the massive refinery complex at al-Abqaiq, briefly knocking out five million barrels a day of Saudi capacity. That country now exports a staggering barrels of petroleum daily to China and future drone strikes (or similar events) threaten those supplies. China is also believed to receive as much as from Iran, though it does so surreptitiously because of US sanctions. In December 2022, when nationwide protests forced the end of Xi’s no-Covid lockdown measures, that country’s appetite for petroleum was once again unleashed, with demand already up 22% over 2022.

So, any further instability in the Gulf is the last thing the Chinese Communist Party needs right now. Of course, China is also a global leader in the transition away from petroleum-fueled vehicles, which will eventually make the Middle East far less important to Beijing. That day, however, is still 15 to 30 years away.

Things Could Have Been Different

China’s interest in bringing to an end the Iranian-Saudi cold war, which constantly threatened to turn hotter, is clear enough, but why did those two countries choose such a diplomatic channel? After all, the United States still styles itself the “indispensable nation.” If that phrase ever had much meaning, however, American indispensability is now visibly in decline, thanks to blunders like allowing Israeli right-wingers to cancel the Oslo peace process, the launching of an illegal invasion of and war in Iraq in 2003, and the grotesque Trumpian mishandling of Iran. Distant as it may be from Europe, Tehran might nonetheless have been brought into NATO’s sphere of influence, something President Barack Obama spent enormous political capital trying to achieve. Instead, then-President Donald Trump pushed it directly into the arms of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation and Xi’s China.

Things could indeed have been different. With the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, brokered by the Obama administration, all practical pathways for Iran to build nuclear weapons were closed off. It’s also true that Iran’s ayatollahs they don’t want a weapon of mass destruction that, if used, would indiscriminately kill potentially vast numbers of non-combatants, something incompatible with the ethics of Islamic law.

Whether one believes that country’s clerical leaders or not, the JCPOA made the question moot, since it imposed severe restrictions on the number of centrifuges Iran could operate, the level to which it could enrich uranium for its nuclear plant at Bushehr, the amount of enriched uranium it could stockpile, and the kinds of nuclear plants it could build. According to the inspectors at the U.N.’s , Iran faithfully implemented its obligations through 2018 and — consider this an irony of our Trumpian times — for such compliance it would be punished by Washington.

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei only permitted President Hassan Rouhani to sign that somewhat mortifying treaty with the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in return for promised relief from Washington’s sanctions (that they never got). In early 2016, the Security Council did indeed remove its own 2006 sanctions on Iran. That, however, proved a meaningless gesture because by then Congress, deploying the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, had slapped unilateral American sanctions on Iran and, even in the wake of the nuclear deal, congressional Republicans refused to lift them. They even a $25 billion deal that would have allowed Iran to buy civilian passenger jets from Boeing.

Worse yet, such sanctions were designed to punish third parties that contravened them. French firms like Renault and TotalEnergies were eager to jump into the Iranian market but feared reprisals. The US had, after all, fined French bank $8.7 billion for skirting those sanctions and no European corporation wanted a dose of that kind of grief. In essence, congressional Republicans and the Trump administration kept Iran under such severe sanctions even though it had lived up to its side of the bargain, while Iranian entrepreneurs eagerly looked forward to doing with Europe and the United States. In short, Tehran could have been pulled inexorably into the Western orbit via increasing dependence on North Atlantic trade deals, but it was not to be.

And keep in mind that Israeli Prime Minister (then as now) Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied hard against the JCPOA, even going over President Obama’s head in an unprecedented fashion to encourage Congress to nix the deal. That effort to play spoiler failed — until, in May 2018, President Trump simply tore up the treaty. Netanyahu was boasting that he had convinced the gullible Trump to take that step. Although the Israeli right wing insisted that its greatest concern was an Iranian nuclear warhead, it sure didn’t act that way. Sabotaging the 2015 deal actually freed that country from all constraints. Netanyahu and like-minded Israeli politicians were, it seems, upset that the JCPOA only addressed Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program and didn’t mandate a rollback of Iranian influence in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, which they apparently believed to be the real threat.

Trump went on to impose what amounted to a financial and trade on Iran. In its wake, trading with that country became an increasingly risky proposition. By May 2019, Trump had succeeded handsomely by his own standards (and those of Netanyahu). He had managed to reduce Iran’s oil exports from 2.5 million barrels a day to as little as barrels a day. That country’s leadership nonetheless continued to conform to the requirements of the JCPOA until mid-2019, after which they began flaunting its provisions. Iran has now produced highly enriched uranium and is much closer to being capable of making nuclear weapons than ever before, though it still has and the ayatollahs continue to deny that they want such weaponry.

In reality, Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” did anything but destroy Tehran’s influence in the region. In fact, if anything, in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq the power of the ayatollahs was only strengthened.

After a while, Iran also found ways to smuggle its petroleum , where it was sold to small private refineries that operated solely for the domestic market. Since those firms had no international presence or assets and didn’t deal in dollars, the Treasury Department had no way of moving against them. In this fashion, President Trump and congressional Republicans ensured that Iran would become deeply dependent on China for its very economic survival — and so also ensured the increasing significance of that rising power in the Middle East.

The Saudi Reversal

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices spiked, benefiting the Iranian government. The Biden administration then imposed the kind of maximum-pressure sanctions on the Russian Federation that Trump had levied against Iran. Unsurprisingly, a new Axis of the Sanctioned has now formed, with exploring trade and arms deals and Iran allegedly providing to Moscow for its war effort in Ukraine.

As for Saudi Arabia, its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, recently seemed to get a better set of advisers. In March 2015, he had launched a ruinous and devastating war in neighboring Yemen after the Zaydi Shiite “Helpers of God,” or Houthi rebels, took over the populous north of that country. Since the Saudis were primarily deploying air power against a guerrilla force, their campaign was bound to fail. The Saudi leadership then blamed the rise and resilience of the Houthis on the Iranians. While Iran had indeed provided some money and smuggled some weapons to the Helpers of God, they were a local movement with a long set of grievances against the Saudis. Eight years later, the war sputtered to a devastating stalemate.

The Saudis had also attempted to counter Iranian influence elsewhere in the Arab world, intervening in the Syrian civil war on the side of fundamentalist Salafi rebels against the government of autocrat Bashar al-Assad. In 2013, Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia joined the fray in support of al-Assad and, in 2015, Russia committed air power there to ensure the rebels’ defeat. had also backed al-Assad (though not militarily) and played a quiet role in the post-war of the country. As part of that recent China-brokered agreement to reduce tensions with Iran and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia just spearheaded a decision to the al-Assad government to membership in the Arab League (from which it had been expelled in 2011 at the height of the revolts).

By late 2019, in the wake of that drone attack on the Abqaiq refineries, it was already clear that Bin Salman had lost his regional contest with Iran and Saudi Arabia began to seek some way out. Among other things, the Saudis reached out to the Iraqi prime minister of that moment, Adil Abdel Mahdi, asking for his help as a mediator with the Iranians. He, in turn, invited General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Jerusalem Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, to Baghdad to consider a new relationship with the House of Saud.

As few will forget, on January 3, 2020, Soleimani flew to Iraq on a civilian airliner only to be assassinated by an American drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on the President Trump who claimed he was coming to kill Americans. Did Trump want to forestall a rapprochement with the Saudis? After all, marshaling that country and other Gulf states into an anti-Iranian alliance with Israel had been at the heart of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords.”

The Rise of China, the Fall of America

Washington is now the skunk at the diplomats’ party. The Iranians were never likely to trust the Americans as mediators. The Saudis must have feared telling them about their negotiations lest the equivalent of another Hellfire missile be unleashed. As 2022 ended, President Xi actually visited the Saudi capital Riyadh, where relations with Iran were evidently a topic of conversation. This February, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing by which time, according to the Chinese foreign ministry, President Xi had developed a to mediating between the two Gulf rivals. Now, a rising China is offering to launch other Middle Eastern mediation efforts, while “that some large countries outside the region” were causing “long-term instability in the Middle East” out of “self-interest.”

China’s new prominence as a peacemaker may soon extend to conflicts like the ones in and . As the rising power on this planet with its eye on Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa, Beijing is clearly eager to have any conflicts that could interfere with its Belt and Road Initiative resolved as peaceably as possible.

Although China is on the cusp of having three battle groups, they continue to operate close to home and American fears about a Chinese military presence in the Middle East are, so far, without substance.

Where two sides are tired of conflict, as was true with Saudi Arabia and Iran, Beijing is clearly now ready to play the role of the honest broker. Its remarkable diplomatic feat of restoring relations between those countries, however, reflects less its position as a rising Middle Eastern power than the startling decline of American regional credibility after three decades of false promises (Oslo), debacles (Iraq) and capricious policy-making that, in retrospect, appears to have relied on nothing more substantial than a set of cynical imperial divide-and-rule ploys that are now so been-there, done-that.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the sharp end of the rise of a critical mass of world leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms. They imagine the ideational and/or physical boundaries of their countries as defined by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion rather than international law.

Often that assertion involves denial of the existence of the other and authoritarian or autocratic rule. As a result, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in good company when he justifies his invasion of Ukraine by asserting that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. In other words, Ukrainians as a nation do not exist.

Neither do the Taiwanese or maritime rights of other littoral states in the South China Sea in the mind of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Or Palestinians in the vision of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners. Superiority and exceptionalism are guiding principles for men like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Netanyahu. 

In 2018, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, adopted a controversial basic law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. “Contrary to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the nation-state law was seen as enshrining Jewish superiority and , as bolstering Israel’s Jewish character at the expense of its democratic character, ” said journalist Carolina Landsmann.

Israeli religious Zionist writer Ehud Neor argued that “Israel is not a nation-state in Western terms. It’s a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy that Jewish people were always meant to be in the Holy Land and to follow the Holy Torah, and by doing so, they would be a light unto the world. There is a global mission to Judaism.”

Similarly, Erdogan describes Turkey as “dĂĽnyanın vicdanı,” , a notion that frames his projection of international cooperation and development assistance. “Turkey is presented as a generous patriarch following in the steps of (a particularly benevolent reading of) the Ottoman empire, taking care of those in need—including, importantly, those who have allegedly been forgotten by others. In explicit contrast to Western practices described as self-serving, Turkish altruism comes with the civilizational frame of Muslim charity and solidarity reminiscent of ” said scholars Sebastian Haug and Supriya Roychoudhury.

In an academic comparison, Haug and Roychoudhury compare Erdogan’s notion of Turkish exceptionalism with Modi’s concept of “vishwaguru.” The concept builds on the philosophy of 19th-century Hindu leader Swami Vivekananda. “His rendition of Hinduism, like Gandhian Hindu syncretic thought, ostensibly espouses tolerance and pluralism. With this and similar framings, the adoption of an allegedly Gandhi-inspired syncretic Hindu discourse enables Modi to distance himself politically from the secularist civilizational discourse of (Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal) Nehru,” the two scholars said. “At the same time, though, Modi’s civilizational discourse, with its indisputable belief in the superiority of Hinduism, has begun to underpin official rhetoric in international forums,” they added.

In a rewrite of history, Putin, in a 5,000-word article published less than a year before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, portrayed the former Soviet republic as an anti-Russian creation that grounded its legitimacy in erasing “everything that united us” and projecting “the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”

In doing so, Putin created the justification civilizationalist leaders often apply to either expand or replace the notion of a nation-state defined by hard borders anchored in international law with a more fluid concept of a state with external boundaries demarcated by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion, and internal boundaries that differentiate its superior or exceptional civilization from the other.

Civilizationalism serves multiple purposes. Asserting alleged civilizational rights and fending off existential threats help justify authoritarian and autocratic rule.

Dubbed by Global Times, a flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi has redefined civilisation to incorporate autocracy. In March, Xi unveiled his at a Beijing conference of 500 political parties from 150 countries.

Taking a stab at the Western promotion of democracy and human rights, the initiative suggests that civilisations can live in harmony if they refrain from projecting their values globally. “In other words, ” quipped , “the West should learn to live with Chinese communism. It may be based on Marxism, a Western theory, but it is also the fruit of China’s ancient culture.” Xi launched his initiative days before Biden co-hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy.

The assertion by a critical mass of world leaders of notions of a civilisational state contrasts starkly with the promotion by Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s Indonesia-based largest and most moderate Muslim civil society movement, of the nation-state as the replacement in Islamic law of the civilizationalist concept of a , a unitary state, for the global Muslim community.

Drawing conclusions from their comparison of Erdogan’s Turkey and Modi’s India, Haug and Roychoudhury concluded that civilizationalist claims serve “two distinct but interrelated political projects: attempts to overcome international marginalization and efforts to reinforce authoritarian rule domestically.”

Like Biden, Xi and other civilizationalist leaders are battling for the high ground in a struggle to shape the future world order and its underlying philosophy. Biden’s autocracy vs. democracy paradigm is part of that struggle. But so is the question of whether governance systems are purely political or civilizational. Addressing that question could prove far more decisive for democracies.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The visit is a sign that China intends to become a new power player in the region, with Saudi Arabia, one of China’s largest suppliers of oil, by its side. On the other hand, it also illustrated the strained nature of China’s relationship with Iran. According to John Calabrese, Director of the Middle East-Asia Project at the Middle East Institute, Xi’s attendance served as a clear reminder “of the frustrating reality that, in substantive terms, China-Iran relations have stagnated.” The visit only served to further exacerbate what “has long been an asymmetrical, limited partnership” continued Calabrese. 

However, the visit “should not be regarded as China no longer being interested in Iran,” Dr. Manochehr Dorraj of Texas Christian University said. “But that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) not only rank as the number one and number two trade partners for China, but they also have the financial capability to invest in the Chinese economy, something that Iran is currently lacking. This is among several factors why the Chinese leadership may prioritize bilateral ties with the Arab World as more significant.” 

Changing times and changing priorities

China’s engagement in the Middle East has steadily grown over years, building alliances with countries that are strong economically and stable politically. Before, the region occupied only a secondary role in China’s foreign policy. 

The two countries released a 4,000-word joint statement that outlined their alignment on everything from security to oil-related issues. The statement will likely worsen Sino-Iranian relations as the language painted Iran as a malignant actor in the region. This makes it appear to be more the work of the kingdom than China.  

Jacopo Scita, a Bourse and Bazar Foundation Policy Fellow concurs, noting it is striking and unexpected that the joint statement “does not reflect the usual, carefully choreographed balancing typical of China’s public discourse on Iran-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) relations.”

Barbara Slavin, a Stimson Center Distinguished Fellow, agreed that “Xi definitely seemed to be tilting toward the Saudi/Emirati point of view on a number of issues”. 

Dr. Dorraj deemed that China likely agreed to the “wording because Saudi Arabia is a top oil exporter to China and they want Saudi business. At the same time, China is very reluctant to become entangled in domestic affairs or meddle in regional conflicts and prefers stability in the region.” This perhaps explains why they were willing to spend the political capital to mediate a reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia which was announced on 10th.

Where does Iran now fit?

The statement was a message of dissatisfaction that China wanted to convey to Iran, according to Scita. Naturally, Iran was not pleased by the visit or the statement. According to Scita, the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi perceived both “as a detriment to relations and in particular to its “” policy, of which the partnership with China is one of the main pillars.” 

“Raisi understood the reasons for President Xi’s visit but was clearly unhappy because the language of the statement aligned more with Saudi Arabia,” Slavin said. This was evidenced in articles published by hardline Iranian media news outlets that expressed outrage over the visit and the language of the statement, according to Dr. Dorraj.

During the visit, China ensured that it will sell arms to Saudi Arabia without any human rights stipulations. Beijing has been assisting the kingdom with building drone factories and selling long-range missiles to Riyadh, which Iran is already aware of. 

According to Slavin, Tehran is worried about “Chinese willingness to assist Saudi nuclear development and efforts to acquire a full nuclear fuel cycle.” Iran, “is irrelevant in the Saudi Arabia-China relationship and has other partners to rely on for weapons sales,” Dr. Dorraj continued. 

Old country seeks new friends

To add insult to injury, Beijing sent former Vice Premier Hu Chunhua’s visit to Tehran on December 13th. Despite having been recently removed from his post, Chunhua led the delegation to meet with President Ebrahim Raisi.

Dr. Dooraj believes that too much has been made about Chunhua’s involvement. On the other hand, Scita believes that this “implicitly conveys the message that China-Iran relations are subordinated to China-Arab relations.” Slavin agrees, that it’s “clear that Saudi Arabia is much more important to Beijing than Iran.” Despite cuts in oil prices, Iran remains a junior partner compared to Saudi Arabia and the GCC.

Examining China’s foreign policy in the region helps in understanding the subordinate role of Iran. For Scita, it’s classic strategic hedging with a focus on establishing ties with strong economies and stable political systems. 

Calabrese sees “China focused more on Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states in the near term, with an eye towards building its relationship with Iran in the long term if/when conditions allow”. 

Calabrese doesn’t foresee the status quo changing in the near future. Improving relations would require lifting Western sanctions and reopening negotiations of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Tehran is unwilling to do. Therefore, China will continue to sideline Iran as it reorients its regional diplomatic strategy.  

Tehran’s place within the Belt and Road Initiative

Tehran still remains valuable for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Calabrese noted that Iran’s location remains “a very important potential node along the BRI.” Dr. Dorraj agrees, adding that Iran is situated along the largest coast in the Persian Gulf with many ports to facilitate the movement of Chinese goods, while also possessing a large consumer base of around 85 million people.

Scita adds that “Iran’s prominent place in the BRI is an unfulfilled potential and it’s preventing Tehran from fully integrating into China’s westward infrastructural and investment projects.” Tehran has yet to fully integrate into the BRI primarily because “sanctions have made it more difficult for China to invest in Iran and there are no signs that Tehran is ready to accept a deal reviving the JCPOA that would provide sanctions relief.” 

In comparison, Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia and the UAE faces no such impediments. This is because “China formally states they are in favor of partnering with â€�Strong States,’” Dr. Dorraj said. In other words, China prefers countries that enjoy political stability and are able to safeguard their relations. 

As China’s vested interests grow in the Middle East, so will the need to protect them. The recent wave of protests in Iran has posed a serious challenge to the regime’s legitimacy. In contrast, Saudi Arabia (and the GCC more broadly) is politically stable, is largely free of domestic unrest, and has a relatively robust economy. All of this is important for Beijing, Dr. Dooraj said. 

Looming questions for the future

On February 14, President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing on an invitation from President Xi Jinping. While some analysts the visit as an that “China-Iran relations are warming,” other experts contended that it was more symbolism than substance. 

For example, Slavin believes that the visit “seemed more like a way for Raisi to get away from his mounting domestic problems, including the protests over the enforced hijab and the sinking Iranian currency.” 

Raisi did not exactly return empty-handed. The Iranian president signed more than 20 cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding but according to Calabrese, “the documents contained pledges, and nothing more.” “Even the Iranians realize they are junior partners,” Calabrese added.

Jason Brodsky, Policy Director of United Against Nuclear Iran, believes that China will still continue to balance its interests with Saudi Arabia and Iran, former regional rivals. In March, as previously mentioned, Iran and Saudi Arabia reached an agreement in Beijing to restore diplomatic ties after a 7-year rift.

Dr. Dooraj disagrees with the alarmism from many experts who argue that Beijing has essentially moved on from Iran. “China spent political capital to mediate and reconcile ties between both states and demonstrates how effective Chinese diplomacy has been in comparison to the United States,” Dr. Dooraj said. 

Calabrese adds that the Chinese-brokered deal also illustrates “the advantage that Beijing has over Washington in leading on this particular issue, namely a constructive relationship with and positive leverage over Tehran.”   

Let’s not forget, Calabrese said, that “There are six GCC states. There is only one Iran. Of those six Gulf Arab states, the energy and other ties with China have become far more extensive and promising than with Iran, especially because of the latter’s economic and political isolation.” 

For now, Slavin asserts that “Iran is losing ground to the Arabs in terms of Chinese foreign relations.” Beijing’s interests align with Saudi Arabia and the GCC. Nevertheless, China sees no reason to alienate Iran. Therefore, China will continue to maintain ties with both Saudi Arabia and Iran, even it prioritizes one over the other.

[Naveed Ahsan edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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On the eastern side, the Russian rulers are strongly interested in maintaining control over Siberia, which gives the country access to the Pacific Ocean. Hence, they have a geopolitical interest in having friendly relations with China. On the western side, Russia retains access to the Baltic Sea in Saint Petersburg and has managed to keep the enclave of Kaliningrad despite the three Baltic republics declaring independence from the Soviet Union. On the southern side, Russia wants access to the Black Sea, which is the gateway to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Hence, Crimea is of vital importance to Russia.

If Putin were a new Peter the Great or a new Stalin, a settlement between great powers would be within reach: a Yalta-Potsdam-style division of spheres of influence. But as a country in decline with repeated loss of territories, Russia views the hostility from its neighbors as an existential threat. Therefore, it has responded with exasperated despair.

Not a very good war so far

The invasion has not worked as well for Russia as Putin expected. We have learned that, in war, it is more difficult to conquer than to defend. Some experts in military history and strategy estimate that for an attack to succeed in conquering adverse territory,the attacker may need more resources, in troops and weapons, than the defender. This alone can explain why, so far, the Russians haven’t entered Kyiv or Kharkiv, while the Ukrainians have not arrived in Crimea or most of the Donbas.

The attacker’s disadvantage is aggravated by bad management, typical of authoritarian governments. As stated by strategist “A lot of most catastrophic decisions come from autocratic decision-making.” Autocracies lack open and often critical feedback. They believe that “the advantage of autocracy is bold and decisive decision-making.” However, the lack of feedback mechanisms mean that “one poor decision or bit of bad luck can put [them] out completely.”

Along with catastrophic decisions, Russia has been hampered by the fact that some crucial potential allies have not joined its adventure. A few weeks before the invasion, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed an agreement for “unlimited cooperation,” but the Chinese have kept their distance since the war broke out. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone further than Xi and told Putin in public that today’s era is not an era of war.

A long bloody war looms

The current protracted stalemate has so far not yielded a clear winner. In a lecture at Georgetown University, CIA Director William Burns that the next six months will be critically decisive. He suggested that the alternatives are either a quick military overturn followed by negotiation and peace or an escalation towards a long war.

A negotiated peace would require that none of the two sides achieves absolute victory or faces bitter defeat. In his recent visit to Warsaw, US President Joe Biden that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never.” This is a very different declaration to a call for Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat.

So far, both Russia and Ukraine are still at the rhetorical stage of being maximalist in their demands. Each expects to be in a strong position if a real negotiation ever starts. In the past, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explicitly he could accept painful concessions on Crimea and Donbas, which were the original objectives of the Russian “special military operation.” As the war has gone on, Zelenskyy has changed his position. He regularly proclaims his determination to move back to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. Zelenskyy also insists on applying for EU and NATO memberships. Russia, in turn, verbally rejects any concession of moving backward.

For an escalation in conflict, the Kremlin would have to make risky domestic moves, including new conscriptions and mass mobilizations. This would make Russian politics the continuation of war by other means, which is what Clausewitz meant even if he phrased it the other way. It is from impatience and distress that Putin toys with using tactical nuclear weapons over Kyiv. He is playing a game of chicken with the US on the assumption that Washington wants to avoid the risk of World War III.

As of now, it seems that Ukraine might be able to sustain its belligerence for as long as the US and NATO keep providing increasingly effective and lethal weapons, including drones, missiles, tanks and even fighter jets. However, political calculations and concern about excessive financial costs of war might make the US Congress and several European countries restrict unrestricted support.

The conflict has already lasted longer than many regional wars and might degenerate into a war of attrition. An end might come from changes away from the war fronts. There should be elections in Russia and Ukraine twelve months from now. There is uncertainty not only about the results of these elections but also whether they will actually be held. The US, the UK and the European Parliament also face elections in 2024, which will come in the middle of a war.One thing we certainly know and can be sure about is that war is the worst human activity with tragic consequences of death and destruction. We have plenty of information and images about the human tragedy in Ukraine. To understand the gruesome nature of war further, you could watch the movie . It is probably the best war movie ever because of the way it captures the horrors of war. Sadly, that horror continue for a while in Ukraine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Xi Jinping is now emperor. He has centralized all power. Xi followed a disastrous zero-COVID policy that decimated the economy. Protests forced him to make a U-turn. A little after the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi abandoned his zero-COVID policy suddenly and dramatically.

China did not reopen in a phased manner. It went from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in less than five seconds. Chinese health authorities have admitted that 80% of the population has caught COVID since early December. This means 1.2 billion of China’s 1.41 billion people have caught COVID.

Official figures record a mere 72,000 deaths. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are Chinese statistics. This figure is patently and absurdly untrue. On January 22, the Chinese rang in the lunar new year. Family gatherings and temple visits shot up. So did COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Just as in other parts of the world before, reports are coming in from around China about hospitals running out of beds, oxygen and drugs. It is clear that the Xi-led CCP failed to prepare for this COVID surge. They neither have the right vaccines nor the right drugs. China’s vaccine development and deployment is in deep doubt.

Many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese analysts observe that Xi’s and the CCP’s competence is now in question. Even two years earlier, few Chinese students criticized Xi. Now, almost all of them are critical of the emperor. Xi’s legitimacy and the CCP’s hegemony are now in question.

In 2022, China admitted that the country lost 850,000 people. This might mark the start of China’s relative decline. The days of fast economic growth based on cheap labor are over. This will make China a more dangerous actor on the global stage. External aggression has often been a diversionary tactic to overcome internal tension. Xi might find patriotism and Wolf Warrior diplomacy a useful tool to rally public support.

Over the last few years, China has been acting increasingly aggressively against its neighbors in general and Japan in particular. In 2021, a joint Chinese and Russian fleet circumnavigated Honshu, Japan’s largest island. No foreign fleet had ever done this. Last year, Chinese warships and Russian bombers operated near Japan.

In December, Japan released two important documents: National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy. Both of them outline how Japan plans a more robust foreign and defense policy to counter China. Japan is also doubling its defense budget from 1% to 2% of the GDP over five years. This will make it the third biggest defense spender after the US and China.

Japan does not want any unilateral changes to the status quo and will work with allies to counter any unilateral moves. Japan also aims to deter any invasion. It is clear that zeitenwende—an epochal tectonic shift—has come to Japan instead of Germany. While the latter is still dilly dallying as the speakers discussed earlier, Japan has acted decisively.

The increase in Japanese defense achievement will see innovation in technology. Japan has the memory of making good stuff. The land of Toyota might create new unmanned vehicles that operate both in the air and in water. Japan might also give a fillip to the use of robots in war.

Carle takes a very upbeat view of Tokyo’s recent moves. Until now, Japan has been a subordinate ally of the US. Now, Japan is acting in Africa to counter the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is no longer acting under the umbrella of the US but a strategic defense partner. It is no longer Pax Americana in Asia but it is an alliance that is fundamentally different from the past.

Japan is also investing big time in India. Osamu Suzuki invested in India, revolutionized India’s automobile industry and achieved historic success. More Japanese investment has followed in multiple industries. Japan is building the bullet train from Ahmedabad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home city, to Mumbai, India’s business capital. 

The Japanese are engaging with their allies from South Korea and Taiwan to Vietnam and India. The Quad—a group of Japan, India, Australia and the US—was the late Shinzo Abe’s idea when he was prime minister. In some ways, Xi’s actions have upset nearly all of China’s neighbors and gives Tokyo a historic opportunity to finally counter Beijing. Finally, Tokyo is reverting to the pre-1945 days when Japan was powerful and influential in Asia. At a time of historic shifts, the balance of power is changing profoundly.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The  that Putin signed with Chinese leader Xi Jinping confirms their overlapping interests, their joint insistence on the right to do whatever they like within their own borders, and their disgust over the destabilizing nature of various US military actions.

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There’s much high-flown language in the statement about democracy, economic development and commitment to the Paris climate goals of 2015. But the timing of the statement suggests that it’s really about hard power. Putin didn’t travel all the way to Beijing and Xi didn’t meet with his first foreign leader in two years just to hammer out a general statement of principles. Putin wants China to have his back on Ukraine and is supporting Chinese claims over Taiwan and Hong Kong in return.

This isn’t an easy quid pro quo, given that the two countries have long had a wary relationship. In the past, Russia eyed China’s global economic ambitions with concern, and a  type of Russian conspiracy theorist worried about large numbers of Chinese moving into the underpopulated Russian Far East. Before Putin took over, China was uncomfortable with the political volatility of its northern neighbor. After Putin, Beijing was not happy with the Kremlin’s military escapades in its near abroad.

But that is changing. “For the first time in any of ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s recent aggressions, Putin has won the open support of China’s leader,” Robin Wright  in The New Yorker. “China did not back ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s war in Georgia in 2008, or its invasion of Ukraine in 2014, nor has it recognized ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s annexation of Crimea.”

The geopolitics of the new relationship between China and Russia is certainly important. But let’s take a look at what’s really fueling this new alliance. Quite literally.

Fossil Fuel Friendship

Inside the Arctic Circle, just across from the bleak military outpost of Novaya Zemlya, Russia has built the northernmost natural gas facility in the world: Yamal LNG. More than 200 wells have been drilled to tap into the equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil. Nuclear-powered icebreakers clear the port of Sabetta for liquefied natural gas tankers to transport the fuel to points south. Russia also plans to build a train line to ship what it expects to be 60 million tons of natural gas per year by 2030.

Russia can thank climate change for making it easier to access the deposits of natural gas. It can also thank China. Beijing owns about  of Yamal LNG. The Arctic is quite far away from China’s usual Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Yamal is also an increasingly perilous investment because  permafrost puts all that infrastructure of extraction at risk. But China needs huge amounts of energy to keep its economy growing at the rate the central government deems necessary.

That’s why so many of the BRI projects involving Russia are centered around fossil fuel. At the top of the list is the first Power of Siberia pipeline, which opened in 2019 to pump natural gas from the Russian Far East into China. A second such pipeline is under consideration, which  connect China to… Yamal LNG.

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At the moment, the natural gas from the Russian Arctic supplies consumers in Europe. With a second Power of Siberia pipeline, Russia could more easily weather a boycott from European importers. Yamal, by the way, is  under US sanctions, which has made Chinese financial backing even more essential. China is investing a total of $123.87 billion in the three phases of the Power of Siberia project, which is more than any other BRI oil and gas investment and four times what China on energy from Saudi Arabia.

But these are not the only Belt and Road connections between the two countries. Five of the top 10 BRI mining  are in Russia, including a $1.8 billion coal mining complex. China is also investing in an Arctic free trade zone and upgraded rail and road links between the two countries.

Let’s be clear: the bear and the dragon don’t see eye to eye on everything. As Gaye Christoffersen  in The Asan Forum: “China focused on infrastructural projects useful for importing Russian natural resources, while Russia focused on developing industries in resource processing. The two sides failed to reach a consensus. Later, China insisted, as a Near-Arctic state, on equal partnership in developing the Northern Sea Route, while Russia demanded respect for its sovereignty and rejected China’s Arctic claims. They are still in disagreement despite joint efforts.”

But the basic relationship remains: Russia has energy to sell and China is an eager buyer. In a side deal that coincided with their recent Olympic statement, for instance, China agreed to purchase $117.5 billion worth of oil and gas. “Rosneft, ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s largest oil producer, announced a new agreement to supply 100 million tons of crude through Kazakhstan to the Chinese state company China National Petroleum Corporation over the next ten years—while the Russian energy giant Gazprom pledged to ship 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year to China through a new pipeline,”  Frederick Kempe at the Atlantic Council. Talk about greasing the wheels of cooperation.

A Future Eastern Alliance?

Putin hasn’t given up on Europe. He still has friends in Victor Orban’s Hungary and Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbia. Europe remains the biggest market for Russian oil and gas. And both NATO and the European Union continue to attract the interest of countries on Russian borders, which means that the Kremlin has to pay close attention to its western flank.

But the Ukraine crisis, even if it doesn’t devolve into war, could represent a turning point in contemporary geopolitics.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a great deal in common. They are both nationalists who derive much of their public legitimacy not from an abstract political ideology, but from their appeals to homeland. They have a mutual disgust for the liberalism of human rights and checks on government power. Despite their involvement in various global institutions, they firmly believe in a sovereignist position that puts no constraints on what they do within the borders of their countries.

But perhaps the most operationally important aspect of their overlapping worldviews is their approach to energy and climate.

Both China and Russia are nominally committed to addressing climate change. They have pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, though they both resort to some dodgy accounting to offset their actual emissions and meet their Paris commitments. China is more serious in terms of installing renewable energy infrastructure, with solar, wind and other sources responsible for  of power generation. ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s commitment to renewable energy at this point is .

But both remain wedded to fossil fuels. It’s a matter of economic necessity for Russia as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, the second-largest exporter of petroleum and the third-largest exporter of coal. Fossil fuels  for over 60% of the country’s exports in 2019; oil and gas alone provide well over a third of the federal budget. All of this is in jeopardy because a good number of ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s customers are trying to wean themselves of fossil fuel imports to cut their carbon emissions and to decrease their dependency on the Kremlin.

But not China. Despite its considerable investments into renewable energy, Beijing is still a huge consumer of fossil fuels. Chinese  for natural gas has been rising for the last few years and won’t peak until 2035, which is bad news for the world but good news for the Russian gas industry. Oil consumption, which is more than twice that of natural gas and is rising more slowly, will  in 2030.

Coal is still China’s largest source of energy. “Since 2011, China has consumed more coal than the rest of the world combined,” according to . “A˛ő of 2020, coal made up 56.8 percent of China’s energy use.” In 2020, as Alec MacGillis points out in a New Yorker , China built three times more power-generating infrastructure from coal than the rest of the world combined, and it continues to mine staggering amounts of the stuff. Despite all the domestic production, however, China still relies on imports. Because of trade tensions with Australia — the world’s second-largest exporter of coal after Indonesia — China has increasingly  to Russia to meet demand.

In other words, Russia and China are positioning themselves to use as much fossil fuel and emit as much carbon as they can in the next two decades to strengthen their economies and their hegemonic power in their adjacent spheres—and before international institutions acquire the resolve and the power to hold countries to their carbon reduction promises.

Yes, other countries are slow to abandon fossil fuels. The United States, for instance, relies increasingly on  for electricity generation to compensate for a marked reduction in the use of coal. Japan remains heavily  on oil, natural gas and coal. So, Russia and China are not unique in their attachment to these energy sources.

But if the world’s largest  of fossil fuels teams up with one of the world’s largest producers, it doesn’t just discomfit NATO generals and the trans-Atlantic establishment. It should worry anyone who believes that we still have a chance to prevent runaway climate change by 2050.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Any serious journalist should understand that China’s past has already been rewritten by its government. This is something every government everywhere in the world does as a matter of routine. In other words, presenting as worrying news the idea that President Xi Jinping is doing something unusual (and dishonest) by rewriting the past only makes sense if you believe your own government doesn’t rewrite its own history.

But this is not merely one of the silliest articles about history ever published in a serious journal, it is also a profoundly inane article about China, a subject that merits everyone’s attention today. In an era that increasingly resembles the Cold War of the 1950s, The Times appears to treat its journalists as hacks who have been given the task of rewriting not just the meaning of history, but also the significance of observable current events. Even the most banal ritual of the Chinese government serves as a pretext to inspire fear, indignation or hate rather than reflect on the evolution of power.

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In the original Cold War, The New York Times and the rest of the media focused exclusively on ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s Soviet Union. Today, even though The Times is still committed to echoing CIA-inspired propaganda about Russia, China has become the principal target.

Buckley’s subtitle reads: “A new official summation of Communist Party history is likely to exalt Xi Jinping as a peer of Mao and Deng, fortifying his claim to a new phase in power.” Framed in this way, it sounds as if Xi’s claim would amount to a serious distortion of history. Buckley implies that Xi is a narcissistic Donald Trump-like upstart, or perhaps a Nero or Caligula, a deeply flawed historical non-entity intent on using the power associated with the position to project the unjustified image of a transformative leader.

The problem is that most serious observers of China, including historians, whether approving or disapproving his policies, consider Xi to represent a new phase of Chinese leadership, on a par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Moreover, this is at a moment in history at which China has already become a dominant power, which was not the case for either Mao or Deng.

Buckley finds particularly objectionable the claim in an article from Xinhua, the official news agency, claiming that “Xi Jinping is undoubtedly the core figure mastering the tide of history.”

°Ő´Ç»ĺ˛ą˛â’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Tide of history:

A dead metaphor used by all leaders who want people to believe that some indescribably powerful force justifies all the decisions they are making

Contextual Note

Buckley is right to signal that this is pure propagandistic rhetoric, especially when it asserts that Xi is “mastering” the tide of history. Only the moon can be said to master the earth’s tide, and even then it isn’t a question of mastery but influence. The tide of history is something else again. But the journalist’s complaint doesn’t focus on the predictable and standard rhetoric of propaganda. Instead, it serves as a pretext for developing its own propaganda. Buckley sees this as an illustration of Xi’s hubris. It’s all about Xi, not about China.

Buckley concentrates his indignation in sentences such as this one: “The resolution is likely to offer a sweeping account of modern China that will help to justify Mr. Xi’s policies by giving them the gravitas of historical destiny.” The complaint that this is an attempt at justification is certainly true, but the idea Buckley expresses concerning “destiny” is foreign to Chinese culture. It is a Western import that makes little sense to the Chinese. The US is the nation that justified a genocidal campaign against the native population in the name of “manifest destiny.”

In traditional Chinese culture, the closest approximations of the Western notion of destiny are , meaning a right attributable to circumstance, and , meaning “destiny, luck as conditioned by one’s past.” The Chinese version of the West’s divine right is the concept identified by Mencius as tian ming, or the mandate of heaven attributed to rulers and emperors.

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None of these concepts correlate with the Western and more specifically American idea of destiny, a force that empowers a nation or a person to embody what is assumed to be the moral meaning of history. Xi’s propaganda cites the “tide of history” with a Marxian nuance — the triumph of the working class — but in the background is the central idea in Chinese culture, of harmony rather than conquest. Tides advance and recede, following the logic of yin and yang. Buckley’s idea of “the gravitas of historical destiny” imposes a Western interpretation of a unidirectional movement on Chinese culture.

Buckley cites various Western experts to prove that Xi is violating the true notion of history. He cites the former Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who is particularly well qualified to comment because he “speaks Chinese and has had long meetings with Mr. Xi.” Rudd correctly mentions Xi’s “ideological framework which justifies greater and greater levels of party intervention in politics, the economy and foreign policy.” Putting words in Rudd’s mouth, Buckley oddly calls this authoritarian move “Mr. Xi’s conception of history.” No, it’s Mr. Xi’s conception of power.

On the same topic, Le Monde’s Beijing correspondent, Frederic Lemaitre, what an informative rather than a purely polemical article might look like. Instead of dwelling, as Buckley has obsessively done, on the presumed betrayal of his artificial idea of what history should be, Lemaitre explores numerous facets concerning the current historical significance of the event. He notes that in contrast with two previous official histories of the party, this version “is less about the past than the future.”

The article then examines a long series of issues that provide perspective on the context of this attempt at reframing of the Communist Party’s history. Lemaitre focuses particularly on Xi’s maneuvering within the party and China’s rivalry with the United States. He doesn’t seem to find illegitimate Xi’s claim to historical significance. 

Historical Note

Throughout his article, Chris Buckley riffs on the idea of history as something he imagines to be a domain of pure, abstract truth rather than an inevitably imperfect product of human narrative. If not written by presumably independent Americans, China’s crime is to have an official version of history. Nothing like that could happen in the freest nation of the free world: the US.

“In creating a history resolution,” Buckley writes, “Mr. Xi is emulating his two most powerful and officially revered predecessors.” Xi is also emulating every US government throughout its history that has always insisted that slavery and genocide were just the inevitable though regrettable collateral damage of the drive to embody democratic ideals.

Buckley fears that Xi’s “resolution will present the party’s 100-year history as a story of heroic sacrifice and success, a drumroll of preliminary articles in party media indicates. Traumatic times like famine and purges will fall further into a soft-focus background — acknowledged but not elaborated.” The parallel with the treatment of genocide, slavery and persistent racism in the US long after the abolition of slavery is too obvious to dwell on. Didn’t Senator Tom Cotton call a “necessary evil” in his bid to prevent the teaching of the history of slavery from being “elaborated” in the ?

Buckley cites “an assistant professor at American University who has studied Mr. Xi and his father.” He complains that Xi is “someone who sees that competing narratives of history are dangerous.” Buckley apparently thinks nothing like that could ever in the US, a nation where “27 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism.”

The US has always had a problem with history. Compared to Europe, a nation created only two and a half centuries ago simply hasn’t had enough history. At the same time, it has had too much, with its permanent tendency toward violence and civil conflict. That may help to explain Buckley’s confusion.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51łÔąĎ.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post On China, The Times Avoids Substance to Promote Propaganda appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

For Western thinkers, when an entity finds its place in a system, the system’s structured categories serve to situate and ultimately define the substance of the entity. Now that China is subjected to the rules of the global economy, analysts believe they understand it. Influenced by the analytical model inherited from Aristotle’s metaphysics that distinguishes between substance (or essence) and accidence (or variable features), today’s analysts dismiss anything that the system cannot account for as accidents. Accidents can always be corrected in the name of efficiency. 

Despite its manifest peculiarities, for Westerners China has become a member of the tribe. Analysts assess its behavior according to the rules and laws of the tribe. For the past two centuries, beginning with David Ricardo and Karl Marx, Western thinkers have tended to reduce their understanding of social reality to economic relationships. In so doing, they fail to build into their model two dimensions they relegate to the category of Aristotelian accidence: culture and politics.

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At best, the analysts attribute to culture and politics a supporting role in the great cause of economic organization. They fail to notice that cultures not only differ in the way they treat time, space and social relations but also in how they measure value. In particular, they neglect the value cultures attribute to the individual and collective patterns of behavior that form the basis of political systems. This leads to major errors of interpretation. We can see the result in failed military campaigns, from Vietnam to the Middle East. Similar failures occur in the domain of economics.

As if to illustrate the principle, the European Chamber of Commerce has just produced a report expressing its severe critique of what it sees as the erroneous path China’s President Xi Jinping appears to be taking. The august institution, focused on the logic of trade, believes that some of Xi’s salient measures violate a totally rational rulebook that members of the global economic community must always abide by.

¸é±đłÜłŮ±đ°ů˛őĚýĚýthe chamber’s recommendation that “China should abandon a top-level strategy promoted by President Xi Jinping to increase self-reliance, or risk harming innovation and growth prospects,” which clearly implies its opposition to policies such as “common prosperity.”

°Ő´Ç»ĺ˛ą˛â’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Self-reliance:

In Western thought, a virtue for individuals and a vice for nations

Contextual Note

Addressing the same topic, Stephen McDonell, the BBC’s correspondent in Beijing, offers a slightly , one that seeks to explore certain cultural factors. McDonell cites some of the salient features of  Xi’s “common prosperity” program. “Under this banner,” he writes, “targeting tax evasion by the wealthy makes more sense, as do moves to make education more equitable by banning private tutoring companies. The ongoing crackdown on the country’s tech giants can also be seen as part of the plan.”

Unlike the European Chamber of Commerce that worries about the violation of capitalist orthodoxy, McDonell acknowledges a certain coherence in the Chinese plan. He cites the historical reality of the “chasm of income disparity” that has provoked Xi’s initiative.

It’s a criterion that has meaning even in the West, where people have been grappling with the realization that modern capitalism, refashioned by the neoliberals since the 1980s, has produced an increasingly obscene and unmanageable wealth gap that appears built into the system’s logic.

Economists such as Thomas Piketty have focused on that question while going beyond mere economics to take on board the cultural and political (or ideological) underpinnings of the phenomenon.

The thought of most commentators on the economy typically stumbles over its own cultural logic. Like the European Chamber of Commerce, McDonell himself fails to make the cultural leap and relies on Western criteria to complete his analysis. He notes that Xi’s authoritarianism allows him to rewrite the rules at any given moment.

Then he asks the $64,000-question Western analysts always consider fundamental: “How can anybody reliably make investment decisions if they don’t know what the ground rules will be in a month’s time?”

Historical Note

McDonell’s question makes immediate sense for his Western readers since the notions of investment and risk are at the core of all thinking about the economy. But in his own potted summary of the history of communist China’s economic ideology, the BBC journalist offers a number of clues that would explain why this question troubles the Chinese far less than anyone in the West. 

McDonell points to the Chinese government’s management of the narrative around its “concept of socialism.” During its phase of integration into the global capitalist economy, the government “put its faith in trickle-down economics.” McDonell then raises a serious question. “So does Xi Jinping really believe in this idea of a communist project?”

In other words, China painfully shifted from Mao Zedong’s totalitarian version of Marxist doctrine to Milton Friedman’s trickle-down economics under Deng Xiaoping, inaugurating a period of prosperity. Does it make any sense to imagine it might shift again, this time to a new version of Marxist egalitarianism?

To answer this question, McDonell delves into the history of Xi himself and that of his father, who was jailed in 1978 for his commitment to economic liberalization. This allows him to puzzle over the question of whether Xi’s apparent conversion to communist ideals is sincere or merely opportunistic. 

In August, the Daily Devil’s Dictionary suggested that Xi’s motivation might simply be the desire to “remake his image as a populist hero at home” in an effort to consolidate his power and ward off the risk of a future winter of discontent. Most commentators now agree that the “common prosperity” reforms are the real thing and not just political rhetoric.

That explains why the European Chamber of Commerce appears worried. It also explains why the BBC is dedicating a three-part series to elucidate “how Beijing is rewriting the rules of doing business and the global implications of this.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times quoted former US government analyst Christopher Johnson, who pertinently observed that “Xi sees doing something on income inequality and the wealth gap in China as vital in this struggle of global narratives with the U.S. and the West in general.” This dimension of the question adds interest to the drama currently playing out in the US Congress concerning President Biden’s $3.5-trillion infrastructure bill.

Some Republicans see this as proof that . If adopted, the bill would contribute to limiting the huge and widening wealth gap, but it would not attempt to reign in the power of finance and Big Tech, as Xi’s plan intends to do. There is a strong likelihood that Congress will reject the Biden plan. Democracy seems to be having trouble competing with autocracy.

There is another irony in this story about China’s goal of self-reliance. In US culture, self-reliance is a core value. It has come to be identified with capitalism itself and has spawned the culture of individualism that dominates the Western world. The myth of the self-made man sums up the spirit of individualistic capitalism.

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Chinese culture has always rejected self-reliance. While it values prosperity as a goal, Chinese culture sees it as the result of a collective effort, not of individual initiative. One achieves prosperity through one’s family and guanxi, or network of relations, but never on one’s own.

The European Chamber of Commerce fears that a nation representing 20% of humanity might decide to go it alone, not because that would be a bad thing in itself, but because it would remove one-fifth of the world’s trade from the global marketplace. They claim it would stifle innovation. But its effect would more likely be to disrupt the thinking of those who see humanity as collections of individual consumers of standardized products. After all, for Western economists, every self defines itself by what it consumes and how it produces profit for others.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51łÔąĎ.]

*[An earlier version of this article mistakenly labeled the chamber’s recommendation a reaction to Xi’s policy. Updated: February 15, 2022, at 09:30 GMT.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The West Struggles to Understand China’s Common Prosperity appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In the first place, it should be understood that the world “includes many different groups with varying degrees of dependence from China,” says Domingo Sugranyes, director of a seminar on ethics and technology at Pablo VI Foundation. Therefore, he adds, “the need for containment will be seen differently if you are looking at textile supply chains, workers’ rights in [Xinjiang], data privacy rules, markets for European cars.”

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Oscar Ugarteche, a Peruvian professor of economics, believes the emergence of a new superpower competing with other Western countries may be “positive, particularly for the Global South.” That said, we are undeniably witnessing “the emergence of a new distribution of power in which relative weights are shifting away from the United States and its allies, although the absolute political and economic power of these nations is and will remain considerable,” he mentions.

Some, such as researcher Valerio Bruno, see the rise of China not only in the economic and military domains, but also as an ideological confrontation — “between two Weltanschauungen” — that determines whether the future world order will be defined by liberal or authoritarian ideas. Proponents of a containment policy believe that China does not offer a realistic alternative to the liberal order and that it should be obliged to comply with those rules. How? According to economist Etienne Perrot, it could be through “multilateral agreements and targeted alliances” designed to bring European powers more firmly into the containment effort in the economic and technological domains.

In contrast, some observers question the necessity of containment. Kara Tan Bhala, president and founder of Seven Pillars Institute for Global Finance and Ethics, argues that “a deliberate policy of containing another country, and thereby not allowing many to achieve their human potential” may not be morally justified. States should “respect the diversity of systems … while encouraging each other to become �better socialists’ and �better capitalists’ serving humanity,” says Christoph Stuckelberger, a professor of ethics. On the economic front, Ugarteche says, “the technological competition between the USA and China is positive for all of us as it speeds up innovation and reduces costs and consumer prices.”

At first glance, the Cold War rhetoric of containment refers to a bipolar world, which is not (yet) the case. Multipolarity seems to be the best guarantee to avoid the world sliding into bipolarity, with a risk of falling once again into a Thucydides’ Trap. In this perspective, the swift assertion of the European Union as a global, active player is urgently needed to leverage a new negotiated equilibrium anchored in a minimal level of mutual commitment on most urgent global challenges. In that sense, the notion of containment may be reformulated in terms of the world’s self-containment, especially, as Edward Dommen says, when we look “at the way the world economy abuses the planet.”

By Virgile Perret and Paul Dembinski

Author’s note: From Virus to Vitamin invites experts to comment on issues relevant to finance and the economy in relation to society, ethics and the environment. Below, you will find views from a variety of perspectives, practical experiences and academic disciplines. The topic of this discussion is: Does the world need to contain China and, if so, how?

“… multilateral agreements and targeted alliances…”

â€Ô¨±đ˛ő. China, by virtue of its human capacities, its natural resources and its organization, is today the dominant power (in terms of purchasing power parity). Opposite, the United States retains a monetary and military advantage, which China seeks to steal from them. Knowing that “power corrupts” (Lord Acton) and that “only power stops power” (Montesquieu), how to contain China without submitting to the USA? Through multilateral agreements and targeted alliances against MNCs [multinational companies] who, in the global market, behave like privateers in the service of their country of origin, sometimes even like pirates without faith or law.”

Etienne Perrot — Jesuit, economist and editorial board member of the Choisir magazine (Geneva) and adviser to the journal Etudes (Paris)

“… China does not export its politics.”

“Is it the world or is it the West? Did the world need to contain Great Britain or Spain or the US in its time? What we are facing is a new superpower emerging that will compete with other Western countries and the result should be positive, particularly for the Global South. “The more, the merrier.” The technological competition between the USA and China is positive for all of us as it speeds up innovation and reduces costs and consumer prices. All else is irrelevant. China does not export its politics.”

Oscar Ugarteche — visiting professor of economics at various universities

“…negotiate with a clear understanding of issues at stake…”

“The �world’ is no geopolitical actor; it includes many different groups with varying degrees of dependence from China. The need for containment will be seen differently if you are looking at textile supply chains, workers’ rights in [Xinjiang], data privacy rules, markets for European cars and machinery, monetary balances, Taiwan security and microprocessor supplies, loans to Africa and Latin America, or rare earth resources. … If the question refers to containment from the �West’ or, more precisely, the European Union, then the answer is no. We should negotiate with a clear understanding of issues at stake, as in the case of the proposed comprehensive agreement on investment. Above all, we should learn more facts about the incoming largest economic power.”

Domingo Sugranyes — director of a seminar on ethics and technology at Pablo VI Foundation, past executive vice-chairman of MAPFRE international insurance group

“One world — diverse systems”

“How should the role of China be in the world? Three options: 1) China is disconnected from the world, sealed off, as it was to some extent 1949-1979, based on self-reliance and autonomous development; 2) China is fully integrated in the globalized world and follows the Western model of so-called capitalism and democracy as many powers in the West hoped that China, with its Open Door Policy since 1979, would develop; and 3) China is integrated in the world, but with its �Chinese characteristics’ of �third way’ combining planned and market economy, socialist one-party system with elements of consultative participatory processes and controlled civil society. The ethics of international relations needs to respect the diversity of systems as in option 3, while encouraging each other to become �better socialists’ and �better capitalists’ serving humanity.

Christoph Stuckelberger — professor of ethics, founder and president of Globethics.net foundation in Geneva, visiting professor in Nigeria, China, Russia and the UK

“…we are witnessing the emergence of a new distribution of power…”

“The danger of conflict arises when there is no longer a consensus regarding the real power situation of the major parties — in this case, Russia as well as China and the United States. Conflict can become real when the parties, acting on significantly different subjective visions of the objective situation, come into collision. The purpose of conflict will be to demonstrate what the real power relationships have become and to establish some new consensus. Avoidance of conflict requires peaceful development of such a consensus, for which prerequisites will be acceptance by previously dominant countries that we are witnessing the emergence of a new distribution of power in which relative weights are shifting away from the United States and its allies, although the absolute political and economic power of these nations is and will remain considerable.”

Andrew Cornford — counselor at Observatoire de la Finance, past staff member of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), with special responsibility for financial regulation and international trade in financial services

“…foster friendly and mutually fruitful relations…”

“Does the world need to contain China? The USA? Itself? To contain oneself is always good advice, and if we look at the way the world economy abuses the planet, the world ought indeed to contain itself. However, to struggle to contain another party normally provokes a hostile reaction, and things go from bad to worse. Better to converse with it and thus to foster friendly and mutually fruitful relations. Trade is a form of that kind of conversation. As Adam Smith said, “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society … universal opulence.”

Edward Dommen — specialist in economic ethics, former university professor and researcher at UNCTAD and president of Geneva’s Ecumenical Workshop in Theology.

“…climate change will do more to change China…”

“C´Ç˛ÔłŮ˛ąľ±˛Ôľ±˛Ô˛µ China may be too big a task, and not all the world necessarily agrees on this goal. Indeed, it’s questionable if a deliberate policy of containing another country, and thereby not allowing many to achieve their human potential, is morally justified. Certainly, we should robustly oppose her monstrous conduct in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong and counter the Chinese Communist Party’s unacceptable behavior, for example, in trade and IP [intellectual property] in a targeted manner. But the demographics of an aging and gender skewed population, and the devastating effects of climate change will do more to change China than any containment strategy. One final thought: Should the world have contained the US when it destroyed indigenous peoples or practiced slavery?

Kara Tan Bhala — president and founder of Seven Pillars Institute for Global Finance and Ethics

“…two comprehensively different conceptions of the world…”

“A˛ő Xi Jinping continues to steer the Middle Kingdom out of its historical isolation, avoiding challenging the United States for the position of world leader will be difficult, given China’s demographics and economic status. These two Weltanschauungen, two comprehensively different conceptions of the world, sooner or later will present the international community with a choice. Xi is well aware that the Biden administration can finally change course for the US and its allies, forging a united and progressive front after years of populist, nativist and authoritarian politics. Perhaps this element can help understand Xi’s assertiveness at the last World Economic Forum better than the recent economic successes. After all, political and civil rights are China’s Achilles’ heel.”

Valerio Bruno — researcher in politics and senior research fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR).

“…obliging China to follow the rules…”

“Present international relations cannot be correctly interpreted in the Cold War terms. The current confrontation between the United States and China is not Cold War 2.0 — it has a different nature. A historicist attempts to adapt the strategy of containment to post-Cold War realities are doomed to failure. The heterogeneous world is not able to be either an opponent or a proponent of the People’s Republic of China; only the consolidated West can be such an actor. China is a revisionist power. [It] criticizes the liberal world order but does not offer a realistic alternative. The most effective way to minimize Beijing’s destructive influence is to improve a rule-based order, and therefore a liberal order, by obliging China to follow those rules.

Yuriy Temirov — associate professor, dean of the Faculty of History and International Relations at Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University in Ukraine

*[A version of this article was originally published by  and .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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More fitting, however, would be to carve Trump’s face into a different Rushmore altogether. This one would be located in a more appropriate badlands, like Mount Hermon in Syria near the border with Israel. There, Trump’s visage would join those of his fellow autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. To honor the illiberal locals, the stony countenances of Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu would make it a cozy quintet.

Has Putin Won the Vote on Constitutional Amendments?

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Let’s be frank: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are not the company that Trump keeps, despite his “America First” pretensions. His ideological compatriots are to be found in other countries: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Viktor Orban of Hungary and so on. Alas, this global Rushmore of autocrats is becoming as crowded as a football team pressed together for a selfie.

But Putin and Xi stand out from the rest. They get pride of place because of their long records of authoritarian policies and the sheer brazenness of their recent power grabs. By comparison, Trump is the arrogant newcomer who may well not last the season, an impulsive sprinter in the marathon of geopolitics. If things go badly for Team Trump in November, America will suddenly be busy air-brushing 45 out of history and gratefully chiseling his face out of the global Rushmore. Putin and Xi, however, are in it for the long haul.

Leader for Life

At the end of June, Russia held a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes that President Putin proposed earlier in the year. In front of Russian voters were over 200 proposed amendments. No wonder the authorities gave Russians a full week to vote. They should have provided mandatory seminars on constitutional law as well.

Of course, the Russian government wasn’t looking to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion of governance. The Russian parliament had already approved the changes. Putin simply wanted Russian voters to rubber-stamp his nationalist-conservative remaking of his country.

At the same time, a poor turnout would not have been a good look. To guarantee what the Kremlin’s spokesman  as a “triumphant referendum on confidence” in Putin, workplaces  their employees to vote and the government distributed lottery prizes. Some people managed to vote than once. On top of that, widespread fraud was  to achieve the preordained positive outcome.

Instead of voting on each of the amendments, Russians had to approve or disapprove the whole package. Among the constitutional changes were declarations that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that Russians believe in God and that the Russian Constitution takes precedence over international law. Several measures increased executive power over the ministries and the judiciary. A few sops were thrown to Putin’s core constituencies, like pensioners. Who was going to vote against God or retirees?

But the jewel in the crown was the amendment that allows Putin to run for the presidency two more times. Given his systematic suppression of the opposition, up to and including , Putin will likely be in office until he’s 84 years old. That gives him plenty of time to, depending on your perspective, make Russia great again or make Russia into Putin, Inc.

The Russian president does not dream of world domination. He has regional ambitions at best. Yet these ambitions have brought Russia into conflict with the United States over Ukraine, Syria, even . And then there’s the perennial friction over Afghanistan. Much has been made in the US press about Putin offering the Taliban bounties for US and coalition soldiers. It’s ugly stuff, but no uglier than what the United States was doing back in the 1980s.

Did you think that all the US money going to the mujahideen was to cultivate opium poppies, run madrasas and plan someday to bite the hand that fed them? The US government was giving the Afghan “freedom fighters” guns and funds to kill Soviet soldiers,  of whom died over the course of the war. The Russians have been far less effective. At most, the Taliban have  18 US soldiers since the beginning of 2019, with perhaps a couple tied to the bounty program.

Still, it is expected that a US president would protest such a direct targeting of US soldiers even if he has no intention to retaliate. Instead, Trump has claimed that Putin’s bounty program is a hoax. “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” Trump .

Knowing how sensitive the US president and the public are to the death of America soldiers overseas, Putin couldn’t resist raising the stakes in Afghanistan and making US withdrawal that much more certain. Taking the United States out of the equation — reducing the transatlantic alliance, edging US troops out of the Middle East, applauding Washington’s exit from various international organizations — provides Russia with greater maneuvering room to consolidate power in the Eurasian space.

Trump has dismissed pretty much every unsavory Kremlin act as a hoax, from US election interference to assassinations of critics overseas. Trump cares little about Ukraine, has been lukewarm if not  toward US sanctions against Moscow, and has consistently attempted to bring Russia back into the G8. Yet he has also undermined the most important mechanism of engagement with Russia, namely arms control treaties.

President Trump’s servile approach to Putin and disengaged approach to Russia is the exact opposite of the kind of principled engagement policy that Washington should be constructing. The United States should be identifying common interests with Russia over nuclear weapons, climate, regional ceasefires, reviving the Iran nuclear deal — and, at the same time, criticizing Russian conduct that violates international norms.

Territory Grab

China’s Xi Jinping has already made himself leader for life, and he didn’t need to go to the pretense of a referendum on constitutional changes. In 2018, the National People’s Congress simply  the two-term limit on the presidency and boom: Xi can be on top â€�til he drops. Forget about collective leadership within the party. And certainly forget about some kind of evolution toward democracy. Under President Xi, China has returned to the one-man rule of the Mao period.

So, while Putin was busy securing his future this past weekend, Xi focused instead on securing China’s future as an integrated, politically homogeneous entity. In other words, Xi moved on Hong Kong.

Hong Kong once had great economic value for Beijing as a gateway to the global economy. Now that China has all the access to the global economy that it needs and then some, Hong Kong has only symbolic value, as a former colonial territory returned to the Chinese nation in 1997. To the extent that Hong Kong remains an enclave of free-thinkers who take potshots at the Communist Party, Beijing will step by step deprive it of democracy.

On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. “The new law names four offences: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” Matt Ho  in the South China Morning Post. “It also laid out new law enforcement powers and established government agencies responsible for national security. Conviction under the law includes sentences of life in prison.”

The protests that have  Hong Kong for the past many months, from Beijing’s point of view, violate the national security law in all four categories. So, violators may now face very long prison sentences indeed, and police have already arrested a number of people accused of violating the new law. The new law extends to virtually all aspects of society, including the , which now must “harmonize” their teaching with the party line in Beijing.

What’s happening in Hong Kong, however, is still a dilute version of the crackdown taking place on the mainland. This week, the authorities in Beijing arrested Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and prominent critic of Xi. He joins , like real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who was linked to an article calling Xi a “clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor” and Xu Zhiyong, who called on Xi to resign for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Meanwhile, Beijing’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province amounts to collective punishment: more than a  consigned to “reeducation camps,”  separated from their families, . Uighur exiles have China with genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

Like Putin, Xi has aligned himself with a conservative nationalism that appeals to a large portion of the population. Unlike Putin, the Chinese leader doesn’t have to worry about approval ratings or periodic elections. He is also sitting on a far-larger economy, much greater foreign currency reserves, and the means to construct an illiberal internationalism to replace the Washington consensus that has prevailed for several decades. Moreover, there are no political alternatives on the horizon in China that could challenge Xi or his particular fusion of capitalism and nationalism.

Trump has pursued the same kind of unprincipled engagement with China as he has with Russia: flattery of the king, indifference toward human rights and a focus on profit. Again, principled engagement requires working with China on points of common concern while pushing back against its human rights violations. Of course, that’s not going to happen under the human rights violation that currently occupies the White House.

And Trump Makes Three

Trump aspires to become a leader for life like his buddies Putin and Xi, as he has “joked” on . He has similarly attacked the mainstays of a democratic society — the free press, independent judges, . He has embraced the same nationalist-conservative cultural policies. And he has branded his opponents as enemies of the people. In his Rushmore speech on July 3, Trump  against:

“… a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

He went on to describe his crackdown on protesters, his opposition to “liberal Democrats,” his efforts to root out opposition in schools, newsrooms and “even our corporate boardrooms.” Like Putin, he sang the praises of the American family and religious values. He described an American people that stood with him and the Rushmore Four and against all those who have exercised their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. You’d never know from the president’s diatribe that protesters were trying to overthrow not the American Revolution but the remnants of the Confederacy.

Trump’s supporters have taken to heart the president’s attacks on America’s “enemies.” Since the protests around George Floyd’s killing began in May, there have been at least  of cars ramming into demonstrators, a favorite tactic used by white supremacists. There have been over  of press freedom violations. T. Greg Doucette, a “never Trump” conservative lawyer, has collected over  of police misconduct, usually violent, toward peaceful demonstrators.

As I’ve , there is no left-wing “cultural revolution” sweeping the United States. It is Donald Trump who is hoping to unleash a cultural revolution carried out by a mob of violent backlashers who revere the Confederate flag, white supremacy and the Mussolini-like president who looks out upon all the American carnage from his perch on the global Rushmore of autocrats.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Water Becomes a Weapon in China’s Geopolitical Chess

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Although no shots were fired, stones were thrown and fistfights broke out. They resulted in injuries to 11 soldiers from both sides. Numerous fights also occurred in the following weeks, with troops stationed in disputed territories accusing the other side of trespassing. US President Trump offered to mediate but this was rejected.   

This is not the first China-India border conflict. In 2017, both sides  each other in Doklam Plateau — a tri-border area between India, China and Bhutan — for two months, almost triggering an armed conflict. Such tensions between the two countries have existed for over seven decades. They triggered the Sino-Indian War in 1962. Today, China claims and refers to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as Southern Tibet. On the other hand, India sees the China-controlled Aksai Chin as its territory. Since 1962, both sides have signed a series of agreements and agreed to respect the Line of Actual Control that separates the countries.

Can War Break Out Again?

Despite rising tensions, the current standoff is unlikely to turn into a direct military confrontation for a number of reasons.

First, the border conflict could simply be a means of relieving leaders of both countries from rising internal pressure. The worsening global economic conditions and the ongoing China-US trade war no longer enable Beijing to rely on rapid growth as the sole source of the regime’s security. Instead of relying on its domestic economic performance, China is showcasing its strength by defending its territorial claims.

Therefore, Beijing has been more aggressive not only in the China–India border conflict but also elsewhere. In recent weeks, China has deployed more troops to the  and more jets to the . It has also passed a national security law to tighten its grip on Hong Kong.

Second, Beijing might be calculating that India is too occupied with fighting the COVID-19 disease to wage a border conflict with China.

Third, China might just be showing off its army’s capabilities while, at the same time, delivering a political message to India not to get too close to the US. Since the 2017 Doklam border standoff, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been moving closer to the Americans. India has agreed to expand its  in advanced defense items and become part of the US manufacturing supply chain. The South Asian giant has also decided to Chinese companies from taking over domestic businesses. If India moves closer to the US, this could hamper China’s infrastructure development in South Asia, including the disputed economic corridor that  China to Pakistan. 

Fourth, the border conflict might be serving Modi’s domestic political needs in addition to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s, but a full-blown would serve neither. The novel coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, has hit India hard and the government has been criticized for its response. At the time of publishing, there were over confirmed cases of COVID-19 in India.

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus, many ethnic groups and the opposition organized nationwide protests against the country’s new citizenship law, which allows persecuted non-Muslim minorities to become Indian nationals. Furthermore, since India revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in August 2019, the disputed territory has been under lockdown. The border issue diverts citizens’ attention conveniently. Also, India considers this a strategic opportunity to push China to recognize the current status of the border, given that it is under immense international pressure. India sees China in no condition to start a war.

Fifth, both sides may be jostling to gain favorable strategic positions on the border, but they know that the costs of starting a war outweigh its potential benefits for both of them. These two nuclear powers have enough deterrence capacities against each other. Besides, a conflict with India would weaken China’s focus on meeting key security challenges in the South China Sea. At the same time, India recognizes its military inferiority and inability to win an outright war. In 2019, China’s national defense budget was , almost three times that of India’s $71.1 billion.

What Happens Next?

So far, both sides have relied on many communication channels and constant dialogue to prevent the escalation of violence. In early June, top Chinese and Indian generals held high-level talks with each other. 

Modi has declared that India is open to a diplomatic solution. India has increased its number of troops at the border and issued a  about China’s hindrance of India’s normal patrolling patterns, but the rhetoric has been relatively restrained. China has declared the overall to be “stable and controllable.” It has also announced that the sides would make use of “unimpeded” channels to resolve their issues.

Such statements indicate that both countries have no desire for any further escalation of the current border conflict and that war is unlikely.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The Coming Chinese World Order

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The world’s consumers, businesses and governments have a choice to make. That choice, which is increasingly between the products, brands, influence and policies of two great nations (China and the United States), will increasingly define how the world transitions from an American-led past and present to what could very well become a Chinese-led future.

The moral high ground that had been a hallmark of American supremacy over decades has largely disappeared during the presidency of Donald Trump. That high ground can now be claimed, at least on paper, by Beijing. China has become the world leader in providing foreign aid and is the second-largest contributor to the UN’s peacekeeping budget (after the US), and it is in the process of seizing the role of global leadership on climate change. If perception matters, then China has scored well in terms of the moral high ground, while the US has been floundering on that front in recent years.

China’s Model

How much more can the US drop in the court of global public opinion, and can China rise before Beijing’s approach to governance may be seen as a viable alternative model? Few Americans are likely to drop America’s version of democracy and capitalism in favor of China’s authoritarian model of state-dominated socialism. But that might not sound like a bad idea to hundreds of millions of people around the world who may be benefiting from Chinese aid, jobs and infrastructure projects. A 2019 by Pew concluded as much.

While at least some of China’s methods of doing things in the international arena might be considered objectionable to different people for different reasons, it has been successful in getting a great many things done, in places that some Western governments (notably, the US) are either in the process of ignoring or are doing an inadequate job of supporting.

China is heavily engaged in Africa at a time when the continent really needs such engagement and existing sources of aid are grossly inefficient to meet Africa’s growing infrastructure and other needs. Beijing has a habit of actually doing things while other countries may only talk about doing so. Its tactics may be objectionable on many levels, and the net result of some of its actions may prove to be largely negative over time, but it has stepped up to the plate when action was needed. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will not forget that, and they may even say that they would like their governments to be more like China as a result.

The challenge is to differentiate between benign types of cultural and political promotion versus more direct and potentially meddlesome influence-peddling and interference. While many Western intelligence agencies are focused on ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s information warfare, comparatively few of them may be devoting a similar scale of resources to understand China’s influence operations and how the country is projecting its soft power abroad. One could easily argue that Beijing’s influence operations are far more important, given that this is China’s century.

If President Xi Jinping has his way, there will be no distinct center of gravity for the foreseeable future. More likely, China, India, the European Union and the US will compete for supremacy. But, as with the case in the race for artificial intelligence supremacy, there may be no single victor, and any country that may hold the top spot in politics, economics, technology or as a military power may not stay there for long. As the US continues its downward trajectory and China maintains its inexorable rise, the world order will continue to be multipolar.

Checks and Balances

Yet the coming Chinese world order is likely to be devoid of the kinds of checks and balances the world has come to take for granted in the postwar order. Rather, it is more likely to be akin to a transaction-driven landscape where the strongest party rules and the weak are considered collateral damage. The Chinese order will likely see a break with the Western model by moving decisively away from the Enlightenment ideal of transparency in exchange for the opacity of power.

This transformation has already begun and, as it is occurring, the US and many other countries are asleep at the wheel. As domestic crisis upon crisis piles up, the world’s leading Western economies continue to turn their attention inward, preoccupied with political and economic crises at home and functioning with unipolar blinders on. Many of the world’s leaders fail to appreciate the implications that a world with Chinese characteristics may have on the future.

Not since the modern liberal order was born in the 1940s has the world had to grapple with the possibility of its demise, or at the hand of a rising China. Just at a time when the world is in need of the stability and governance it has had the luxury of relying upon for decades, it must contemplate transitioning to a world order that is not of the West’s choosing. Beijing’s realization of the Chinese century is sure to be infused with precepts and applications that are uniquely Chinese.

The world has yet to fully contemplate all that this portends, but Xi wants to ensure that his vision of world order achieves, at a minimum, the perpetuation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its continued domination over the Chinese people and a pathway that guarantees the supremacy of China throughout this century and beyond. If the Chinese government is to be encouraged to modify the manner in which it engages with the rest of the world, it is up to the world’s nations to enhance the manner in which they challenge Beijing, for the CCP is unlikely to become incentivized to do so without some externally-derived inspiration.

This is China’s century, but that does not mean it should be able to thwart the law, create its own set of rules or avoid sanction when it acts in a manner contrary to established norms and legal standards. Beijing’s vision of the future could become a force for good and generally mutual benefit. It is entirely within China’s power to make that a reality. If it were to do so, that would make choosing a side in the China-America divide a much more difficult process.

*[Daniel Wagner is the author of “.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Just like a physical wall, the Great Firewall constitutes a barrier that limits the flow and exchange of information. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and foreign websites, particularly news agencies such as the BBC or Reuters, are all inaccessible to a Chinese internet user. Instead, Beijing has supported the development of Chinese providers, most importantly Baidu, a Chinese equivalent of Google, or WeChat, a social media platform. In contrast to foreign companies, these national providers fully cooperate with Chinese authorities.

Ubiquitous Censorship

In addition to limiting information flow across the wall, Chinese authorities restrict the information exchange between people living within the wall. Censorship is pervasive. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda department sends out memos to radio, TV and newspaper agencies informing them on how to report on certain incidents.

Although the privatization of Chinese media has reduced the official grip on the broadcasting of information, media outlets practice “self-censorship,” attempting to anticipate what might be censored so as to not be fined or closed down by authorities. Private websites, blog articles and social media accounts of citizens are similarly censored if the party-state regards them as too critical or as having the potential of stirring too much public debate.

As a consequence, the “Great Chinese Firewall” severely hampers access to information and freedom of expression. The (BTI) 2018 survey on China, for instance, rates Chinese citizens’ freedom of expression at two out of a possible 10 points (whereby one is the worst and 10 the best). This rank is only worse in countries such as North Korea or Oman, which have a ranking of one point. Since 2016, censorship has been tightened even further, increasing the amount of foreign and domestic websites blocked on the Chinese internet.

Information Propagates the Official Line

The Great Firewall and domestic censorship limits information flow across and within China and also shapes and directs public opinion, and thereby influences how information that contradicts the official “line” is perceived. Information is not only censored but tailored to promote a specific view on Chinese history, the CCP and foreign countries, aiming to foster nationalist sentiments.

Student textbooks, for instance, teach Chinese children to be patriotic and critical of “the West,” whose arrival in the 19th century has in “100 years of humiliation” of the “great Chinese civilization.” Chinese citizens encounter these views and praise of the CCP in the form of billboards and posters in streets, public transport or at the workplace. Public opinion is also shaped in a more subtle manner by governmental social media accounts or the so-called “” — state-employed bloggers who influence opinion online by posting positive comments and news about the government.

Thus, the Great Firewall creates a certain space in which information is limited and targeted in a way so as to direct public opinion and indirectly preempt the potential impact of critical information.

This is not to say that Chinese citizens blindly believe and follow official propaganda. Many have become wary of official media outlets and propaganda posters. Foreigners and Chinese alike use virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the Great Firewall and access uncensored information. Others circumvent official censorship by using code words and metaphors to criticize the government and the lack of freedom of speech. When the true meaning of these puns is discovered, new ones are invented.

Crackdown Underway on Opposition

Nevertheless, despite these efforts, the Great Firewall and official censorship can only be circumvented and not directly opposed. Specialized or insider knowledge is needed, for example, to access VPNs and understand coded language.

With an increased crackdown on both — VPNs and critical bloggers — the already limited freedom of expression and access to uncensored information has been reduced. Moreover, the party-state is becoming increasingly savvy in their efforts to more subtly influence public opinion, potentially becoming more successful in shaping Chinese citizens’ perceptions and interpretation of information.

The Great Chinese Firewall, therefore, not only constitutes a barrier between the outside world and China, but it simultaneously creates a space in which the party-state can flexibly influence public opinion. With the tightening of control under President Xi Jinping, the space for freedom of expression and critical thinking will further shrink in the future. However, despite its potential to indoctrinate Chinese citizens, it is yet to be seen whether this strategy can promote the two main objectives of the party-state: economic development and social stability.

Expressing criticism lets off steam that may otherwise be channeled into open protests. Critical thinking and free access to information are needed to be innovative — a key skill the party-state needs for economic development. This means that Beijing will need to find the right balance between allowing and censoring information and freedom of speech to meet its key goals for the future.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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And while some analysts were connecting the sluggish growth figure directly to the current trade spat with the US, that’s not the central problem, according to experts from Wharton and Stanford University. Rather, the challenges to China’s economy are deeper, structural, longer-term, and have been building for years. They include over-investment, high savings and modest, if growing, consumer spending, high debt and low industrial productivity.

Those are the views of Wharton Emeritus Management ProfessorĚý, a longtime China expert, and Richard Dasher, director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford. Overcoming those problems requires big shifts in how the country’s economy is organized, an overhaul the government is attempting to execute.

“The tariffs and trade friction with the US is a relatively small part of what is going on,” notes Dasher.

Less Export-Dependent

One reason the current head-butting on trade issues between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping is not deeply affecting China: Net exports as a percentage of China’s economy have shrunk sharply for years and now areĚý. And Dasher says that China’s exports to the US make up just 5% of total exports. So while China’s US exports fell 7.8% in June, the result is not exactly a death blow to the nation’s $13.6 trillion economy.

More generally, the graph of China’s economic growth has sloped downward since 2009, Meyer notes. The last quarter’s number was related to internal problems. Three of the most important in his view are the following: (1) demographics, “China is getting older” and the workforce is beginning to shrink; (2) “regression to the mean” — countries that grow quickly “almost always encounter … very rapid deceleration in growth at some point;” and (3) “excessive reliance on capital investment,” particularly in infrastructure.

Added to overspending on infrastructure, China also is boosting consumer and industrial spending by expanding available credit, Dasher says. “They are really very debt-ridden.” He found it interesting that financial markets did not react “too unfavorably” to the very low GDP growth rate “because consumer spending is up over 9% (in part due to recent tax cuts). And industrial investments are higher than GDP growth. The only way you can do that is through extending more credit.” And officials have done that by giving banks a lot of funds to lend out.Ěý

Dasher and Meyer offered their comments on theĚý.

But the most fundamental — and crucial — issue for China’s economic future is lagging productivity, according to Meyer. Productivity — “the amount of output we get per level of input” — is the most important driver of GDP in the long run for every economy and it has been low in China. In most industrial sectors, “some economists say it has been negative since as early as 2007. And certainly, I would say with a little more certainty since, say, 2012, 2013.”

In the meantime, the country has been piling up debt — by consumers and local governments in particular. “Who’s going to repay that debt? No one knows,” Meyer says. To repay it China will have to increase productivity, which almost certainly means moving up the value chain into “leading-edge industries.” Related to that, China analysts have long said that the nation must move from investment-led growth to consumption-led growth as a way to avoid the so-calledĚý.

Racing Toward Innovation

And China has to try to do this rapidly. The list of industries it is hotly pursuing and that fit the bill run from “green energy to artificial intelligence to 5G and beyond,” Meyer explained. China is in a race to get a foothold in industries “where productivity will increase” in time to pay off its mountain of accumulating debt.

While China is pushing hard to restructure its economy, pressures are mounting. There is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, just as there is in the US. “Wages in East Coast Chinese cities are going up drastically while the wage gap between the coast and interior is [becoming] greater and greater,” notes Dasher. “You really have tension inside the country.” Chinese officials may not have to worry about getting re-elected, but they do “have to worry about people seeing them as legitimately improving the quality of life for people.”

ThisĚýĚýagrees that China’s chief economic problems are domestic and creating social pressure. “A˛őset prices, particularly housing, have risen so high that many young professionals find themselves priced out of the market in China’s booming cities.”

Taking trade out of the picture for a moment creates more clarity around what are the central differences between the US and China. Some argue that the real competition between China and the US ultimately is not over trade, but rather about who will lead the future in . That idea also helps to explain the related disputes involving US tech sales to Huawei and objections to accepting Huawei into the 5G space in the US.

In the US, meanwhile, “we complain about our productivity levels which seem to be a 0% to 1% increase a year — my gosh, that’s low,” says Meyer. “Why aren’t we seeing the benefits of automation, etc.? But in China, in most industrial sectors, productivity has been going down.”

Despite the productivity advantage, the US does not have a company that can compete with Huawei, Meyer points out, noting that the “strongest Western competitors are Nokia and Ericsson,” both small compared to Huawei. “So the question is why aren’t we in this space? Why are we complaining that the Chinese are unfair, which they may be by US standards but probably not by their standards. Why aren’t we competing?”

The US has to grow “its fundamental industrial capacity” just as China needs to build a more balanced economy. But another key question for Meyer, given that Huawei enjoys significant government aid, is this: How much should theĚýUS government guide the effort for US companies? “There’s a lot of evidence out there that government support has been critical in many of our technologies, even today in Silicon Valley.”

Meyer also thinks the US should realize the risky game it is playing with the trade war. The US should “worry a little more — maybe a lot more — about what would happen if Xi were precipitously pushed out of power. Is this going to be a good thing or not a good thing? And use that to calibrate the amount of pressure we put on China.”

As for the tariffs themselves, Meyer calls them “a blind alley…. They often end in economic downturns.” And it is worth noting that US exports to China were down 31.4% in June.

A Blunt Instrument

Dasher, meantime, finds the tariffs a “blunt instrument” that are ineffective in solving the problems the US faces with China. “We really need to move back towards a rule-based kind of international system. We need to worry about IT. We need to try to encourage China to join the club of other advanced nations that have intellectual property to protect, and recognize each other’s need to protect intellectual property.”

President Trump, meanwhile, recently said that US tariffs “are having a major effect on companies wanting to leave China for non-tariffed countries.” There appears to be some truth in the claim. Some countries are benefiting from shifts in sourcing as result of the 25% tariffs imposed on many Chinese goods. Those countries range from Vietnam – the biggest winner — to Taiwan, Malaysia, Chile and Argentina, according to a report by , the Japanese investment bank.

Other reports suggest that Mexico and even France and Germany have benefited. On balance, however, the impact on third-party countries from the trade disputes will likely be negative, the report noted. Certainly if the disputes slow China’s economy, others will feel the effects because China remains the world’s largest generator of economic growth.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of 51łÔąĎ.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post What’s Really Behind China’s Falling GDP? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Raising the debate to the level of universal principles, Chinese President Xi Jinping has framed his response to US President Donald Trump’s doctrine of America First, a specific brand of the widespread idea of American exceptionalism. At a conference in Beijing, XiĚý that China would “be more open to the world,” while calling “stupid … those who believe in cultural superiority.”

Xi hopes “that all countries will adhere to the spirit of openness and promote policy communication, connectivity and smooth trade.” In what some might deem a glance at US history, he added: “It is stupid to believe that one’s race and civilization are superior to others, and it is disastrous to wilfully reshape or even replace other civilizations.” Could this presage good news for the province, whose culture the Chinese government has been aggressively assailing? This would be an appropriate moment for them to remind President Xi of the implications of his new policy.

The reassuring message Xi wants the world to understand could be translated as: Don’t expect us to insist on Chinese exceptionalism. Behind it may be the idea that other nations should have no hesitation to join China’s “Belt and Road” effort to restructure geopolitics because, unlike the US, Beijing will not try to impose its cultural values beyond its borders.

President Trump didn’t invent American exceptionalism, an idea embraced by the overwhelming majority of the political class. In some ways, Trump’s America First policy undermines the concept itself, just as his aggressive philistinism has cast a shadow on the global prestige of US culture. Trump’s exceptionalism emphasizes celebrity, wealth, narcissism and a form of moral impudence Americans like to call assertiveness. John F. Kennedy invited Duke Ellington to the White House; Trump invited Kanye West.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Superiority:

The sense that one is above all rivals and, therefore, entitled to and impose one’s values and refuse the criticism of others

Contextual noteĚý

Xi spoke at a conference with the title, “Dialogue of Asian Civilizations,” an event organized by what Reuters to as Beijing’s “propaganda ministry.” The fact that the motivation behind the conference might be propaganda seems to contradict Xi’s message of openness, respect for other civilizations and denial of cultural superiority. But it was the author of the Reuters article that chose to use the term “propaganda,” which sounds fearful and reminds readers of the Cold War. The official translation, preferred by the Chinese, is the of the Communist Party. The English word “propaganda” itself comes from Latin and simply means “things that are disseminated, propagated or spread.” In this age of marketing, which means selling oneself as well as one’s products, spreading a loaded message has become a universal human activity.

The notion of publicity certainly sounds innocent and propaganda worryingly sinister, which explains why both sides — East and West — will promote the idea that propaganda is something the other side does but we don’t. The West is proud of its free press, which — as — has a curious habit of echoing its establishment’s official line, while focusing its analysis and criticism not on policies but on personalities.

In contrast, the Chinese government effectively exercises centralized control over its media, which has the merit of not allowing propaganda to masquerade as independent reporting. In the West, and particularly in the US, the government has quietly but effectively subcontracted propaganda to the corporate media, who tend to be only marginally and occasionally disobedient.

To better understand the pertinence of Xi’s rhetoric and the contrast with the US, try to imagine Trump or indeed any US president inviting their media/propaganda team to propose a conference with the title, “Dialogue of American Civilizations.” This would be unthinkable from several points of view. For the US, there is only one America, a fact that constantly irritates both Canadians and Latin Americans, who have trouble accepting the idea that only US citizens have the right or rather the arrogance to call themselves “Americans.”

But the idea of speaking about “American civilizations” would also mean recognizing true Americans, those who populated the continent before Europeans and, more particularly, the British arrived in North America. The systematic genocide and land grab carried out over several centuries aimed not just at exterminating people and laying a claim to the valuable land that could, according to European cultural values, be divided up into exploitable property, but also at suppressing the very idea that the “savages” may have had a “civilization” (or civilizations).

Historical note

As we enter the period of history that future historians are likely to call the “Chinese century” following the decline of the US empire, Xi expects his message to sound reassuring to most regions of the world that have lived first through several centuries of submission to “European superiority” and then to what was commonly referred to as Pax Americana (the rule of American peace), which, as political scientist Michael C. Desch , should really be called Bella Americana (the rule of American wars). In his words: “While the Cold War was hardly an era of harmony and good fellowship, the post-Cold War era of American primacy actually deserves the sobriquet of Bella Americana.”

The US achieved its dominance after World War II by seducing Europe and Japan with its apparently generous effort to rebuild their economies, coupled with a monumental effort to spread its values through cultural channels. Hollywood and the music industry played major roles. But for the superficial icing on the cake, so did neoliberal economic theory, which was the cake.

The wonderful thing about theories, rather than actual pastry, is that you can have your cake and eat it if you get other people to believe in it. It contains the magic ingredient that has always fascinated Warren Buffett in the same way that black holes fascinated Stephen Hawking: . Albert Einstein jokingly called it the eighth wonder of the world, followed by this : “He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

In some sense, the China of Deng Xiaoping discovered the mystery of compound interest in the late 20th century. While retaining the Communist Party as the unique foundation of its political system, the world’s most populous nation got its hands on the secrets of capitalism’s internal mechanics and found ways of mobilizing energies that the West was no longer capable of summoning up.

This has put the West in a defensive position that increasingly relies on siege tactics and military organization. If China is capable of evolving toward the kind of openness that Xi Jinping is promising, even if it is a slow evolution, its seductive attraction for the rest of the world will enable it to achieve superiority while avoiding the narcissism of exceptionalism.

In any case, for the moment it’s a clever, seductive ploy that is bound to have some serious success. It has already begun having an effect in Europe — that may further destabilize the continent itself — as both and the seem ready to sign on to the Belt and Road initiative.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]Ěý

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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This week, US Senator Bob Corker turned on the man he endorsed not too long ago. The senator called US President Donald Trump “” and declared that the president debased the country, weakening its global standing. Corker was bit more charitable than a protester who threw Russian flags at Trump and accused him of treason. It seems the United States of America is not so united these days.

Divisions in the US are dwarfed by divisions in Spain though. Madrid has dismissed Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont. Its chief prosecutor is preparing criminal charges against Puigdemont, who is pro-independence and organized a referendum in defiance of the Constitutional Court. Only 43% of voters cast their ballots, but 90% of the votes cast were in favor of independence. This has led Spain into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Before the crisis, Catalonia had one of the greatest levels of self-government in Spain. The constitution gives the Catalans their own parliament, police force and public broadcaster. Culture, environment, communications, transportation, commerce and public safety were all Catalan domains. It seemed Spain was putting the days of General Francisco Franco behind it and turning into a model democratic European state.

That has all come to an end. Madrid has responded with a heavy hand. Both unionists and secessionists have good arguments, but things have descended from the realm of reason into emotion. Even as many crave independence in Catalonia, hundreds of thousands marched in a huge in Barcelona. The issue is now dividing Catalans, Spaniards and even Europeans.

It turns out that Kenyans are divided too. Fewer than turned up to vote in an election rerun that the opposition boycotted. The rerun occurred because the Supreme Court annulled the August election citing “irregularities and illegalities.” It was supposed to decide on an appeal to delay the rerun, but only two of the seven judges showed up in court. The deputy chief justice failed to appear after her bodyguard was shot and wounded the day before. All of this sounds rather fishy and 50 people have already died in the violence that broke out since the original election. President Uhuru Kenyatta will trounce his rival Raila Odinga who has already pulled out of the election, but Kenyan democracy is unlikely to emerge in rude health.

Brazilian democracy is not doing much better. President Michel Temer managed to avoid trial on corruption charges. This “” garnered votes from 251 deputies and beat off the 233 who wanted him in court. Temer is the first president in Brazilian history to face charges when still in office. He is accused of heading a criminal organization and of trying to obstruct the course of justice. Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 for far milder transgressions. Yet Temer presides over an empire of patronage and even his record unpopularity is not enough to push him out of office. The May 15, 2016, edition of The World This Week predicted a bleak future for Brazil. With Temer getting away this week, the future for Brazil has just become bleaker.

Yet it is developments in East Asia that take center stage. In China, the Communist Party voted to enshrine President Xi Jinping’s name and ideology in its constitution, emulating the . Even Deng Xiaoping’s name and ideology were only added to the constitution after his death unlike Xi and, of course, Mao Zedong. Xi is now the “.” In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe triumphed in snap parliamentary elections that he had called a year early. With a reputation as a right-wing hawk, Abe seems to have profited from tensions over North Korea. Worryingly, Abe has a supermajority that allows him to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution, which he plans to change by 2020.

SIMMERING TENSIONS SET TO RISE

The September 3 edition of The World This Week analyzed how China was in a bind thanks to North Korean saber-rattling. Its troubled and tortured relationship with the Hermit Kingdom notwithstanding, it is still an ally of this anachronistic country. However, Kim Jong-un is more of an asset for Abe than for Xi. In July, the questioned the durability of Abenomics after a “raft of scandals.” Yet thanks to fears over North Korea, Abe has ensconced himself more snugly in the premiership this week.

What is going on?

Like Xi, Abe is a princeling. Only, Abe is much more blue blooded and did not experience years of hardship as a peasant, which Xi experienced thanks to the Cultural Revolution. Abe’s father was foreign minister and his grandfather was prime minister. Unsurprisingly, this princeling is a nationalist who wants Japan to turn into a “normal country.” This desire is not new. Generations of right-wing politicians have smarted under the humiliation of World War II.

Article 9 of , which was promulgated on November 3, 1946, states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” It goes on to say that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained” and Japan would not have “the right of belligerency” as a state. The nationalists do have a point. This article does seem a bit unfair when other countries have the right to pursue their foreign policy aggressively through threat of war or war itself, leaving Japan weak and vulnerable.

Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s former prime minister, called for “reform with no sacred cows” and aimed to get rid of the most sacred of Japanese cows, Article 9. Koizumi wanted Japan to be a normal country and have a military instead of self-defense forces. In May 2001, pointed out that Japan was the largest contributor to the United Nations and to its peacekeeping budget. Yet the constitution did not allow the country to send troops for any UN operations, blighting its aspirations for a permanent Security Council seat. Nevertheless, Japan’s self-defense forces were the best-equipped in Asia and its defense spending was comparable to China in 2001. The venerable publication of 1843 vintage declared that “Japan’s position is anomalous.” That anomaly is worse in 2017 and Abe has a strong case for amending Article 9. Unlike Koizumi, he has a two-thirds majority to do so.

Yet as Shi Biquan of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences argued in 2015, . Although Shi presents a classic Chinese view, he has a point when he objects to Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Conservative Japanese take the view that they visit the shrine to “pay homage not just to the dead of the Pacific war, but also to the kami—the divine spirits—of all the 2,466,000 men and women who have lost their lives for Japan since the shrine was founded in 1869.” As Shi wrote, the shrine also “honors 14 Class-A war criminals” who, as per the literature of the shrine, “were cruelly and unjustly tried by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied forces.”

Unlike Germany, Japan has not come to terms with its history. A little over two years ago, Abe came under fire for suggesting that the Japanese military did not coerce thousands of young Korean women into working in frontline brothels for its troops during the war. Notably, Emperor Akihito struck a “.” In his article, Shi objects less to Japanese nationalism but more to Abe’s efforts to promote a wrong view of history. This is an objection that Koreans, Malaysians and many other Asians share. Most Asians are not as alarmed by Abe’s victory, though, because they fear China more than Japan. However, the Chinese are certainly disturbed by the rise of Abe. They fear that the Japanese will ally more closely with the US to contain their historic enemy.

Sino-Japanese rivalry over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands has already made the East China Sea one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Japan has the support of Washington and Abe is determined to strengthen the US-Japan alliance. Like his grandfather, Abe is using golf as a diplomatic tool. In February, Abe and Trump played the game in Palm Beach, Florida. When the US president visits Japan, golf will resume and so will the Abe-Trump . Abe has given Trump unwavering support for his tough talk against North Korea.

Abe has also been on a charm offensive with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Abe pledged to yen ($1.68 billion) in low-interest loans for infrastructure projects, including a new high-speed railway employing Japanese bullet train technology. More worryingly for Beijing, the US, India and Japan “deployed front-line warships, submarines and aircraft” in “the tri-nation in the Bay of Bengal” earlier this year. Needless to say, China fears being hemmed in by this formidable alliance and is speeding up its “.” Even as ocean temperatures rise, political tensions might be heating up even faster with Xi’s emergence as de facto emperor and Abe’s rise as an all-powerful premier.

AGING SAMURAIS AND RUSTING SWORDS

Abe might want to counter the rise of the Middle Kingdom and neuter the threat of the Hermit Kingdom, but there are a few wrinkles that he has been unable to iron out. First, the jury is still out on . For two decades, Japan has suffered deflation. Abenomics was Abe’s three-pronged approach to jolt the country out of its deflationary malaise. A combination of fiscal expansion, monetary easing and structural reform aimed to boost domestic demand and growth of GDP while boosting inflation by 2%.

Fiscally, Abe has run near-record levels of deficit spending. In 2013, he unleashed a fiscal stimulus of 20.2 trillion yen ($210 billion), of which 10.3 trillion yen ($116 billion) was direct government spending. This gigantic stimulus package focused on building critical infrastructure projects such as bridges, tunnels and earthquake-resistant roads. Spending boosts have followed since. Monetarily, the Bank of Japan has carried out an unprecedented asset purchase program. This policy of quantitative easing (QE) has unleashed a torrent of liquidity into the Japanese economy, pushing interest rates into negative territory. It is supposed to make consumers spend money and companies to invest it, stimulating the economy. Abe has also tried to slash business regulations, cut corporate taxes, make the agricultural sector more competitive, liberalize the labor market and encourage women into the workforce.

Sadly for Abe, the economy has not responded as favorably as his electorate. Growth continues to be sluggish, inflation is well below target and debt continues to balloon. Difficult structural reforms have languished in the face of deep-seated cultural conservatism. The yen has fallen by a dramatic 50% against the dollar since 2012. This has made exports cheaper but imports more expensive. Domestic demand has not changed much, but rival exporters like Germany and China have been warning about a global currency war.

More importantly, Abe has been upended on the economic front by his friend Trump. By jettisoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a central feature of the Obama Doctrine that would have boosted Japan at the cost of China, the US has left Japan in an unhappy place. Its export-oriented economy is especially vulnerable in the face of new winds of protectionism. Meanwhile, Japan’s national debt is now over 1 quadrillion yen ($11 trillion), surpassing 245% of its GDP. The has repeatedly warned that Japanese debt levels are unsustainable. Abe might want to kick start a more muscular foreign policy, but the Japanese economy is rusting fast.

It is unclear what Japan can do to pull out of its economic mess. It is aging dramatically even as its women are not having many children. Over the last decade, the working age Japanese population declined by 6%. Abe is simultaneously trying to boost both female employment and fertility. This is hard enough for any country, but Japan’s famously chauvinistic culture makes it even more difficult to achieve its twin contradictory goals. Japan’s “” is starving the economy of labor. There are twice as many job vacancies as applicants.

Immigration could be the answer, but this island nation has traditionally been averse to foreigners landing on its shores. The Japanese fear that their cultural identity might be threatened, that crime might rise, and that they might struggle to attract skilled immigrants anyway. Meanwhile, rural communities crumble even as Abe’s “” seeks to automate “every corner of [its] economy and society.” That might conceivably work to lift the economy and sustain society, but it will definitely not provide Abe young samurais to flex Japan’s foreign policy muscles. For now, though, Abe’s sun is on the rise in the land of the rising sun.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visitĚýĚýand enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

China’s Cyberwarfare Finds New Targets

© Alexander Yakimov

Is China a leader in cyberwarfare? China answers yes

With the massive media coverage of Russian cyber interference in recent Western elections, the time is ripe to examine the issue of cyberwarfare in China. China discusses its own emphasis on cyberwar capabilities in several official documents, including the 2015 China’s Military Strategy white paper: “Cyberspace has become a new pillar of economic and social development, and a new domain of national security. … As cyberspace weighs more in military security, China will expedite the development of a cyber force, and enhance its capabilities of cyberspace situation awareness, cyber defense, support for the country’s endeavors in cyberspace and participation in international cyber cooperation, so as to stem major cyber crises, ensure national network and information security, and maintain national security and social stability.” Moreover, in the wake of the massive worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack, China was hit hard… Read more

The Daily Devil’s Dictionary: Bush Defines “Moral Clarity”

George W. Bush © Jason and Bonnie Grower

Former born-again political leader George W. Bush defines morality for a new generation.

On October 19,ĚýGeorge W. BushĚýshared with the world his slightly indirect critique of Donald Trump, as he warned his audience about the rise of bigotry and populism under the current administration. In particular, he lamented the loss of “moral clarity” in the younger generations. Here is what he said: “There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned, especially among the young who never experienced the galvanizing moral clarity of the Cold War or never focused on the ruin of entire nations by socialist central planning.” Moral clarityĚýis a term that has become rare in political discourse, especially when politicians are speaking among themselves. It is far more useful when speaking to a public who haven’t had time to think about the issue addressed… Read more

Qatar Crisis Broadens Definitions of Food Security

© Gil C

The Qatar crisis has showed that size is no longer the only factor that determines a state’s ability to chart an independent course.

Food security has taken on a new dimension in theĚýQatar crisis. The standoff pits an Emirati-Saudi alliance against Qatar, and there appears to be no end in sight. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia would deny that they are attempting to starve Qatar into submission. The diplomatic and economic boycott has forced the Qataris to seek alternative food suppliers and alternative air and sea shipment routes. Yet the de facto strategy by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh is to drive up the cost of Qatari food and other imports — to the point that Doha can no longer afford the more expensive imports. In the process, the boycott has redefined the national security aspects of food security, particularly for small states that are more vulnerable to external… Read more

Silencing of Dissent in India Spells a Weakness of Democracy

Mullik Ghat Flower Market in Kolkata, India © Radiokafka

Across India, dissenters from the mainstream narrative pay the ultimate price for their opinions.

India has a rich history of questioning and philosophizing. In ancient India, women likeĚýGargi were lauded for their ability to tire people at debates. Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s former prime minister, was noted for his ability to weave language beautifully during debate. Democracy was the very foundation of the newborn nation of India in 1947. In the early days of independence, people spoke up for their rights, went on hunger strikes and openly protested against the government. Amidst this struggle, India became an example for other nations in the way it stuck together as a country and a democracy, despite its extreme diversity and dissent from one corner to another. The country’s democratic tradition took an ugly turn in 1975, when theĚýIndira Gandhi-led government presided over a period that became known… Read more

Canada Needs a New Electoral System

Justin Trudeau © Art Babych

Considering the problems associated with a first-past-the-post system, the time has come for Canada to change its electoral model.

Over the years, there has been much debate on whether Canada should keep its current system of first-past-the-post or move to another form of electoral system. Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s campaign platformĚýraised this issue, the promise to deliver has since failed. In 2016, the Special Committee on Electoral Reform’s decision to not move forward with a new model disappointed young Canadians who were passionate about thisĚýdemocratic change. With the election of the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) Jagmeet Singh and hisĚýcampaign promiseĚýto change the system, electoral reform has once again become a big issue in Canada. With the next federal election in 2019 and young political contenders waiting to jump into the ring, it is important that Canadians know what electoral reform is and what… Read more

*[This article was updated on November 6, 2017.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: /

The post The World This Week: Shinzo Abe’s Sun Rises in Japan appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The end of the Cold War saw an era of systemic redefinition, undermining the friend-enemy dichotomy that shaped the international system for half a century. The path of the American century has since been put in jeopardy by an initial — and troubled — period of US-led unipolarity and then by the growth of new powers in the East. Yet the expected emergence of an “A˛őian century” is more present than ever. As , a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, notes, “[T]he â€�rise of China’ has been the most read-about story” of the 21^st century. This shows the magnitude of a debate that has rapidly become mainstream among academics and the general public. Are we facing a progressive West-to-East power shift within the international community?

The decline of the West

The assumption behind the emergence of an Asian century is the ongoing decline of the West. Unsurprisingly, research about the decay of the Western system is remarkably rich. The essay that is often dubbed the modern progenitor of this scholarship is British historian Paul Kennedy’s . Kennedy’s work is a complex historical analysis that finds in the balance between economic wealth and military power the equilibrium that ensures the resilience of great powers. As Professor of the University of Exeter notes, Kennedy’s book became popular because of one short section in which he was directly engaged with the American decline, simultaneously stating the rise of Japan as next leading world power.

Many scholars have stressed the economic dimension of the decline. In 2011, Professor Danny Quah of the National University of Singapore proposed a showing the shift of the global economic center of gravity toward the East. The Asian economic momentum has been highlighted by many researchers, while the French economist notes that “China has replaced Germany as the world’s leading exporter.” Furthermore, declinists produced their own vocabulary, introducing concepts such as the “” and “.”

Despite its momentum of popularity, research on the decline of the West faces a constant and articulated critique. and of the London School of Economics are among the many voices who argue for a nuanced interpretation of the Eastern ascent. Even the concept of the West-to-East power shift seems problematic. Asian countries, in fact, are not following a common path of economic development, nor do they constitute a cohesive political body. China is the rising power in the international community, albeit stretching and consolidating its regional leadership is still a crucial step for Beijing.

The constructed resilience of the Western system

Most theories and critiques focus on the relative distribution of power and economic wealth as the essential indicators of a power shift. Although significant, these arguments fail to consider the relationship between the system and its components. This relationship is neither static, nor purely geographic.

The international system is shaped by the dialogue and interaction of supra-national, national and sub-national subjects, and the values and norms they represent. This dialogue takes place in an environment in which a structure is already established: the West. In international relations, constructivist theories make a qualitative leap in considering material power and structural advantages as meaningful only through “the structure of shared knowledge in which they are embedded,” as per of The Ohio State University. Consequently, the essence of this system is socially constructed, which is understood as mutual construction and interaction.

The West is more than a geographical or economic sum of state and material forces. It is a structure of shared norms and practices. The West is a socially constructed system that embraces every subject that accepts its structure. Here is the reason of its resilience: systemic subjects interact among themselves and with the framework in which they are embedded, and in this way they constantly produce reinterpretations of what constitutes as “Western.”

As American historian brilliantly states in his work, systems are organized in the form of paradigms. Once a paradigm is no longer efficient, a revolution occurs. A revolution completely redefines the existing language and premises and, in this way, it generates a new paradigm. At the present time, the West resembles a paradigm that is still developing.

The Western paradigm still matters

The 2008 financial crisis, which was generated by the high default rate of the US mortgage sector and then resulted in the Great Recession, seemed to be a potential game changer. As the traumatic pivot from a long-lasting system of speculation and financial deregulation, the Great Recession showed a huge vacuum in the structure of Western political and economic governance. The financial crisis amounted to a domino effect that questioned the efficiency of democracy and capitalism. Nevertheless, the structure of the West could respond to the post-crisis recession by simply operating minimum changes within its paradigm. In a nutshell, even after the most tragic non-military crisis of its history, the West remains a valuable framework for Western actors.

A paradigm shift of the West did not occur and is unlikely to occur in the short or medium term. Non-Western actors are still attracted by the Western system. Unsurprisingly, figures show that US universities consistently see an of Chinese students enrolled in their courses, which suggests the appreciation of the Western educational model among Chinese elites.

Moreover, Beijing is occupying the geopolitical space left free by the Trump administration. In his address to the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum, President Xi Jinping pictured China as “.” While he was not promoting an alternative Chinese language, his speech was deeply embedded into the discursive framework established in the West. At Davos, Xi appeared more Western than any other leader.

Another indicator of resilience in the structure of the West can be seen in a speech delivered by after US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May. “Mr. Trump visited the region at the time millions of our people went to the polls,” Rouhani said. “He went to a country whose people haven’t even seen ballot boxes and elections don’t have any meaning for them. I hope one day Saudi Arabia also drives its national strength through elections. Power should not pass on through inheritance, but through elections.”

Since 1979, Iranian confrontation with the US has always been reciprocally fierce and harsh, with both actors keeping their distance and underlying the idea of their belonging to two different and competitive systems. In his speech, Rouhani directly accused the United States, which is still the major promoter of liberal democracy and holds its importance in Western identity, of being a strong ally of a non-democratic regime, Saudi Arabia. Rouhani implicitly pitched Iran as the new standard bearer of democracy in the Middle East. Again, however, the Iranian president’s speech did not set an alternative paradigm, yet it re-elaborated the Iranian space of agency within the already established Western structure.

Eastern actors seek more agency to maneuver

On the one hand, the West as a system of norms and discursive practices is still attractive and resilient, and it shows a general tendency to re-evaluate meaning and actions within that paradigm, rather than promoting an alternative one. However, it can be argued that China and other emerging Asian powers are efficient and capable of eventually filling the political spaces left by Western actors.

On the other hand, the relative power of China is undoubtedly growing, suggesting a partial erosion of US primacy. Nevertheless, the US and Europe still have some crucial structural advantages, as the Western system is based on norms and languages that are eminently American and European. If the power shift continues to happen within this environment, what can be expected in the short/medium term is an increase in the agency of Asian and Eastern countries, not a hegemonic substitution. This power shift is accelerated by the disengagement of the US from its global leadership role.

The construction of an alternative and attractive model is costly. Thus, rather than expecting the Easternization of the Western system, the increased Westernization of Eastern subjects is far more likely to happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Elements of the Chinese and Russian navies just completed an eight-day joint exercise in the . Part of the ongoing Joint Sea 2016 training operation between the two nations, the most recent exercise featured anti-submarine components and amphibious landing elements, among others. Global reactions to the exercise have varied, but as with any joint project between China and Russia there have been ample speculation that the exercise signals a growing partnership between Beijing and Moscow. Joint Sea 2016 does have a geopolitical intent, but the message is more about the waters of the South China Sea than an emerging Eurasian alliance.

A Tale of Two Leaders

There is no mistaking that tiesĚýbetween Beijing and Moscow have warmed in recent years. For much of the latter half of the 20^th century, relations between China and Russia were stormy, with the two countries even engaging in a seven-month border conflict in 1969. The warming of relations is in no small part due to the strong ties between the two countries’ leaders: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

President Xi came to power with a deep understanding of Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union, as he was both a student of Eurasia and spent time in Russia as he was rising through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). President Putin, while not sharing Xi’s knowledge of the other’s country, has emphasized China and ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s overlapping geopolitical interests and found in Xi a strong leader who helms another of the world’s major powers.

The affinity between Xi and Putin has been noted by many and been used as an indicator that warming relations between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic could very well lead to a strong partnership capable of changing global trade and the world’s balance of power. China and Russia do have mutual interests. Both are wary of global institutions that have been established by Western powers and are perceived to be set up to hinder non-Western regimes.

Beijing and Moscow are keenly interested in the affairs of Central Asia, bothĚýas a region in which to spread influence or as a region firmly within theirĚýsphere of influence. The regimes of Xi and Putin employ nationalism as a means ofĚýmaintaining political legitimacy. Xi emphasizes the role of the CCPĚýin leading all of China back to its “rightful” position as a global power that can repel any aggression and erase the memory of China’s struggle during the 20^th century.

Putin likewise has portrayed himself as the leader who will protect Russian civilization against challenges from abroad, keep the West at bay from its encroachment into Moscow’s sphere of influence, and ensure that Russians set the course of their own future. Finally, through institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as more regular bilateral engagement and increasing skepticism of the West, the governments of both states are more familiar with each other today than in previous decades.

Political Divergence

There is no denying that these regimes have in both their strategic visions and political methods, but this hardly adds up to an emerging Eurasian partnership between the two strongest countries in Asia. For starters, despite Xi and Putin’s affinity toward one another, mutual distrust still exists throughout both governments. The legacy of the Sino-Soviet split in the mid-1960s essentially ended relations until the 1989 visit by then-Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. By that time, the Soviet Union was coming to an end, while China was on a path toward integration into the global marketplace.

Today, the two countries are really only connected in a political sense. China is an established economic power and a rising military power that seeks to gain hegemony over the western Pacific and to gain influence in the regions to its west. Russia, by contrast, is entirely dependent upon its natural resource wealth, invested in maintaining its friendships abroad and obsessive in protecting its traditional sphere of influence.

has not come close to expectations. By 2015, between China and Russia was set to reach a goal of $100 billion, but actual trade totals missed that mark by nearly $35 billion. A $200 billion goal by 2020 seems ludicrous at this point given the slow development of bilateral trade, an economic slowdown in China and a global drop in energy prices. Moscow emphasizes its trade with China far more than Beijing, which matches with the reality that Russia needs Chinese capital far more than China needs Russian raw materials.

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Political divergences are also present in the current relationship, even if the ties between the leadership remain strong. ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s annexation of Crimea and its ongoing operations in Ukraine were an unwelcome distraction for Beijing, as it required China’s leadership to craft a message regarding the events in Ukraine that neither alienated Moscow nor gave the appearance that itĚýbacked ¸éłÜ˛ő˛őľ±˛ąâ€™s actions. China has long followed several foreign policy tenets, chief among them is respect for sovereignty, and while China does not always follow its own guidelines, such as in the South China Sea, it does use this idea as means for building relations throughout the world.

The border region between both countries has long been the promised location of prosperity, but little has on the Russian side due to a decreasing population. on both sides of the border about a “wave” of immigrants remain even as workers and farmers flow into Russia from China.

In Central Asia, where both countries are heavily invested, there are indications that cooperation and competition between Russia and China go hand in hand. Russia has dominated Central Asia since the end of the Soviet era, but its interests there have always been primarily of a geopolitical sort. China sees Central Asia as a set of markets in which to gain a presence and as the backbone of its ambitious . In the final accounting, positive trends in the Sino-Russia relationship have not erased long-standing problems in the relationship. China and Russia remain competitors for influence in Eurasia and that should not be forgotten.

South China Sea

Over the last five years, the South China Sea has become one of the most tension-filled areas on earth. The waters of the South China Sea are that important. Fisheries account for billions in potential earnings, natural resource deposits provide the promise of additional windfalls, and some of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes flow through these waters. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan each claim substantial parts of the South China Sea as territorial waters. Each claimant has engaged in some variant of behavior that could be called destabilizing.

The dispute over these waters is not new, but China’s recent actions in support of its maritime claims are particularly aggressive. Beijing has always posited that the vast majority of the South China Sea is its national waters on both a historical and political basis. Due to the modernization of its navy, its relative strength vis-à-vis other regional states and the arrival of a new administration in 2012, the People’s Republic intensified the means by which it claimed the South China Sea. The actions taken by China are well-documented and include the construction of artificial islands, the confrontation of regional naval vessels, and economic activity in waters that are not recognized as belonging to China.

In response to China’s more aggressive actions, East Asia is in the midst of a military arms and much of the region has become less politically toward Beijing and much more receptive to Washington. The United States, as a Pacific power in its own right and an ally with several East Asian states—Japan, South Korea and the Philippines—has become more involved by seeking to keep at bay, expressing concern over China’s island building and routinely engaging in (FONOP). Beijing does not want the US involved in the South China Sea, nor does Beijing believe that the US has any business being an actor within the dispute.

This is what Joint Sea 2016 is :Ěýthe tensions building in the South China Sea. The exercises included fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, marine forces, amphibious operations platforms and naval assets. Chinese and Russian military participants engaged in mostly routine naval activities, save one that should be noted—an island-seizing exercise that has repercussions for the South China Sea.

China, while enjoying positive relations with many countries around the globe, has very few relationships that include a security dimension. Russia is one of the few that it has developed a track by which joint training engagements can take place and with whom itĚýcan convey a message regarding their capability and commitment. China has suffered several complications with itsĚýmaritime claims this year, including the of more frequent joint patrols between US naval and Japanese self-defense force vessels and the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s regarding maritime dispute between China and the Philippines.

A display of strength along with its Russian counterparts communicates that China is not interested in altering its claims. Russia, for its part, has not publicly supported Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, but Putin has long had an interest in developing the capabilities of the Russian military in its Far East and signal to the world that it too is a Pacific power.

Joint Sea 2016

Joint Sea 2016 is not an unexpected development. The exercise itself is part of an existing set of joint training operations between China and Russia that have in past years taken place in the Sea of Japan and the Mediterranean. The fact that the exercise occurred in the South China Sea is perhaps provocative, but joint exercises are a routine component of modern naval operations and have had the positive offshoot of enhancing the professionalization of naval forces that, in turn, help to diminish the probability of problems at sea.

It would be premature to see these joint exercises as evidence of a building military partnership between China and Russia, for there remain divergences that will continue to create complications in the relationship. The lesson, instead, is that China is willing to bring to bear its full economic, strategic and military capabilities to ensure its claims in the South China Sea are maintained. Russia, while having its own objectives, is an effective partner by which to run these training operations in the western Pacific Ocean.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Often feeling insecure from Western-induced barbs, the Chinese Community Party (CCP) is taking its turn for viewing the other side from a pedestal. The rise of Donald Trump and Brexit have allowed the CCP a renewed sense of confidence, given that these two phenomena demonstrate the fallbacks of liberal democracy—and, by default, the success of China’s one-party state.

, a state-owned newspaper, wrote that the rise of Trump opened a “Pandora’s box,” after which the “US faces the prospect of an institutional failure.” Comparing Trump to fascists of the 1930s, the party mouthpiece reminded readers that “Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for Western democracy.”

And then there is Brexit: the victory of an inward-looking, Little England mindset. Though Beijing will regret the loss of its best ally in Europe, the disastrous impact of Brexit on the British economy—as well as the exposure of exaggerations and lies from the Vote Leave camp—adds to China’s argument that Western-liberal democracy is inefficient and destructive.

Beijing’s case for a one-party state is, of course, self-serving. Since China began getting rich in the 1980s, the CCP sought to legitimize its rule through its economic successes. Now the economy is faltering, the party will inevitably seek other sources of legitimacy. One of these is the failure of Western democracy to prevent self-destructive and nationalist leaders coming to power. Paradoxically, the other source of legitimacy is its own Chinese nationalism.

China’s criticism of liberal democracy is more a finger-wagging exercise against nationalist forces that inevitably arise within liberal frameworks. But China, too, is guilty of exploiting and encouraging these forces. China calls out nationalism elsewhere but actively fosters its own.

The Hague Ruling

To distract ordinary Chinese from the economic slowdown, the party has diverted their attention to the South China Sea. Based on , it uses a “nine-dash line” to mark its territory and seeks to control 90% of the South China Sea, including its encompassing strategic islets and reefs. Chinese state media has aggressively pursued a campaign to reiterate these claims to the population.

On July 12, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of claims by the Philippines over control of disputed waters in the South China Sea, which Chinese state-owned media were quick to . China’s state news agency, Xinhua, said that “as the panel has no jurisdiction, its decision is naturally null and void.”

, too, joined the nationalist chorus by hastily posting a map of China and the “nine-dash line” on Chinese social media using a viral hashtag that roughly translates to “China, not a single part can be taken out.” It is reasonable to believe some of these celebrities may have been coerced by the government, given that others have seen their .

When asking ordinary Chinese about the ruling, this author found they were likely to reiterate the party line.

“The South China Sea is China’s inseparable territory. Every fish is China’s,” said Liu Lijuan, a journalism student from Tianjin.

Some took an uglier nationalist approach. Lu Miyuan, a nurse from Hebei province, threatened: “If the Philippines claims the South China Sea, then China will claim the Philippines.”

By using nationalism, Beijing is, to use the Chinese idiom, riding a tiger and unable to get off. The use of nationalism may help prop up the CCP in the short term, but the party will find itself unable to quell the increasingly hostile sentiments of its citizenry.

Just like how Brexiters made unrealistic claims about a life outside the European Union, Beijing may disappoint the nationalist forces on which it is riding. If the Chinese government cannot secure territory and meet its citizens’ unrealistic nationalist aspirations, the CCP will lose a source of legitimacy. The people may turn against it.

And beyond the South China Sea, China is having other territorial problems, again thanks to its heavy handedness. Relations with Taiwan—which is included in China’s territorial claims but enjoys de-facto independence—are , with Taiwan showing no appetite to rejoin the mainland. , unthinkable before Xi Jinping’s premiership, are growing. The supposedly autonomous region of Xinjiang is descending into civil war, and .

It is unlikely that China will not be able to secure all these territorial claims and calm nationalist sentiment. Warning against the rise of Trump, : “The US had better watch itself for not being a source of destructive forces against world peace, more than pointing fingers at other countries for their so-called nationalism and tyranny.”

Perhaps China should take its own advice.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The final of the World Snooker Championship took place this week in Sheffield, the hardscrabble town in England’s north perhaps best known as the setting for the movieĚýThe Full Monte.

Sheffield is a former industrial center so snookered by globalization that the laid-off steel workers in that 1997 film decide to become male strippers to make ends meet. Twenty years later, Sheffield’s steel industry continues to shed jobs, largely because ofĚýĚýcoming from China.

Still, the sector is creating some new jobs as investment is also coming in from China. In 2015, a major Chinese manufacturing conglomerate, CISDI Group, chose Sheffield for its trans-Atlantic headquarters. China thus emerges as the villainĚýandĚýthe savior of Sheffield.

Back to snooker. Invented by Her Majesty’s soldiers in India at the end of the 19^thĚýcentury, snooker became a quintessential British pastime. I was introduced to the game when I studied at the University of East Anglia many years ago and instantly fell in love with it.

It’s basically pocket billiards played on a bigger table with narrower pockets. There are 15 red balls and six colored balls, and you alternate sinking the reds and the colors, accumulating different points for each color. It’s an agonizingly precise game, and good players are as adept at snookering their opponents—trapping them in difficult positions—as they are at “potting” the balls.

The Crucible Theater in Sheffield has hosted the World Championship for the last 40 years. Going back to 1927, the winners haveĚýall been players from British Commonwealth nations—mostly Brits, a few Scots, a sprinkling of Welsh and Aussies, and even one-time winners from Canada and Ireland. All of the challengers in the final round have been from Commonwealth countries as well.

Until this year. At the 2016 World Snooker Championship final, the “jester from Leicester” Mark Selby squared off against Ding Junhui, the 29-year-old Chinese challenger. It was a close match. Coming of age in Dongguan City—the Sheffield of China—Ding has been the number two player in the world since 2014. He probably has the world’s largest fan base. DingĚý, conservatively, that 100 million of his compatriots would tune in to watch the final match of the world championship.

This was no idle boast. There are now more snooker players in China than in the rest of the worldĚýcombined. There’s even aĚýĚýoutside of Beijing, where China hopes one day to woo the World Championship away from Sheffield.

In the end, DingĚý. But he’s still young. When it comes to snooker, China will not remain number two for very long. It will eventually produce a number one player and thenĚýĚýthe game thereafter.

In the world at large, China has been number two ever since the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese economy eclipsed that of Japan. It’s not easy to chart China’s future trajectory from the picture presented by Western media and think tanks. For a while, China was portrayed as swallowing the United States in a few short decades.

More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way, and China has become the fragile superpower-in-waiting. For instance, thisĚýĚýargues that, when the US sees China in the rear-view mirror, it appears larger than it is really is:

“In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net,Ěýrapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States.’”

But after enduring bubbles in the real estate sector and the stock market, the Chinese economy seems to have righted itself. Indeed, Beijing continues to trumpet its bold economic plan, the Silk Road Initiative, for the Asian region as a whole. The Communist Party is deep into its anti-corruption campaign as President Xi Jinping further consolidates his power. And the Chinese military is not slinking away from the South China Sea after the United States has made a show of force in the region.

Snooker is a zero-sum game. There are clear winners and losers. But geopolitics is a multi-level game that offers various win-win and lose-lose scenarios as well. American-Chinese economic cooperation belongs for the most part in the win-win category, while a war between the two countries would inevitably fall into the other.

To become number one, Ding Junhui will practice, practice, practice. He or one of his countrymen will eventually displace the Brits. But in their quest to make China great again on the geopolitical playing field, to what lengths will the current Chinese leadership go?

Xi at the Center

Xi Jinping has been the top Chinese leader for three years. Over the course of his career, he has acquired a reputation for beingĚý, aĚý, aĚý, a staunch , aĚý and aĚý. Perhaps Xi is as large and contradictory as his country: he contains multitudes. Or perhaps, it’s all a matter of Western perceptions (and misperceptions).

Take the issue of corruption. Virtually everyone inside and outside China acknowledges that it’s a major problem affecting the political and economic health of the country. Ordinary people have conducted tens of thousands of protests against the actions of corrupt officials. Many of these protests have targeted land grabs in which party officials have simply seized and sold collective property for personal gain. In 2012, furious at their venal local leaders, the residents of WukanĚý, forcing the central government to allow them to elect their own representatives through a secret ballot.

Then there’s the cost to the Chinese economy. Back in 2006, analyst Minxin PeiĚýĚýthat China was losing around $86 billion a year in the direct costs of corruption (kickbacks, bribes, stolen or misappropriated funds). He concludes:

“This annual transfer, from the poorer to the richer, is fueling China’s rapid increase in socioeconomic inequality and the public’s perception of social injustice. Second, the indirect costs of corruption — efficiency losses; waste; and damage to the environment, public health, education, the credibility of key public institutions, and the morale of the civil service — are incalculable.”

But now that President Xi has launched a serious anti-corruption campaign, the Western press has turned around to focus on the costs ofĚýanti-corruption. Merrill Lynch estimated in 2014 that China stood to loseĚýĚýas a result of the campaign against corruption—in terms of decreased consumption and less capital investment. Poor China: damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t.

More disturbing perhaps are the political costs, as outlined by Orville Schell in aĚýĚýinĚýThe New York Review of Books. What might seem to be reform, Schell points out, is in fact reactionary:

“Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.ĚýBut it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views. To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life.”Ěý

Corruption is a key way for Xi to consolidate his own power and that of his supporters.

But ultimately, his reputation will rise or fall based on the performance of the Chinese economy. TheĚýĚýand the dip in January 2016 prompted dire predictions of Chinese economic decline. Growth is indeed down. The government is pumping stimulus funds into the economy to keep key industries afloat and workers employed (such infusions are creating the oversupply of cheap steel that is, for instance, adversely affecting the British industry in Sheffield). If Beijing can’t keep factories humming and people employed, it faces the prospect of imminent regime change from below.

Donald Trump recently made waves byĚýasserting that AmericaĚý“can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” on trade issues. President Barack Obama made the same argument, but in more polite terms, in aĚýWashington PostĚýop-ed, in which he stated that America, not China, should write the international rules of trade.

But it’s also possible that the Chinese economy is simply stabilizing at a lower level of growth: between 6-7%, compared to the double-digit surges of the 1990s and 2000s. But even at this lower rate, Chinese economic expansion is the envy of the United States (current growth between 2-3%) and Europe (between 1-2%). China is becoming, slowly, a post-industrial country whose economy relies more heavily on consumption and services than production for export. Such transitions are never entirely smooth.

The question remains: Will China be satisfied with a post-industrial future like Europe (prosperity) or will it demand one more like the US (prosperity plus preeminent power)?

Dream or Nightmare?

It’s been nearly four years since Xi made hisĚýĚýoutlining the path by which his country could achieve superpower status.

In talking with non-Chinese, XiĚýĚýthat the dream is about making life better for Chinese people. But the “Chinese dream” means different things to different Chinese. Here, for instance, is the interpretationĚýĚýby an eminent Chinese professor of international relations, Shi Yinhong, as reported to Paul Hartcher in theĚýSydney Morning Herald:

“First, Xi wants China to be acknowledged as a superpower equal to the U.S. Second, he wants China to become the co-manager of global affairs with the U.S., a Group of Two for world governance. Third,Ěýâ€�China must be the preponderant power in the Western Pacific and have some advantage over the U.S.’”

The two visions are, of course, related. US prosperity is built on the foundation of US superpower status. Why shouldn’t China aspire to the same felicitous combination?

But this second interpretation necessarily brings China into confrontation with the United States, particularly in the Pacific and, more specifically, in the South China Sea. In brief, China has claimed sovereignty over a large gulp of this critical waterway. Those claims directly clash with those of the Philippines, Vietnam and several other countries. The Philippines, after several direct maritime confrontations with China, decided to bring the issue to international arbitration through the judicial body of the International Law of the Seas convention, of which both countries are party. The decision of that body is expected in the coming weeks.

Xi Jinping © Shutterstock

In the meantime, China has been asserting its territorial claims by, essentially, creating more territory. Bringing up sediment from the sea floor, China hasĚý, which lies about 500 miles from the Chinese mainland and is much closer to the Philippines. These are not for holiday resort purposes. There are airstrips, port facilities and military buildings. SomeĚýĚýChina to react to an international tribunal ruling in favor of the Philippines by undertaking similar construction work on the Scarborough Shoal.

But take such predictions with a grain of salt. China specialist Bonnie Glaser, who is no “panda hugger,” doesn’t expect China to act rashly,Ěý:

“One People’s Liberation Army officer “with stars on their shoulders” told her island-building on Scarborough is “very, very unlikely,” because Beijing is well aware how badly the region would react. Such action would blatantly violate both China’s 2015 pledge to cease island-building and its 2002 Declaration of Conduct with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). China has broken both promises before, but never so egregiously as building on Scarborough would be.”

The US has fired some brush-back pitches at China, what it calls “freedom of navigation” operations, such as sailing a destroyer through the South China Sea and flying jets above it. But it’s important to point out that, for all the warnings issuing from Washington, the South China Sea is not a vital national security question. US territory is not at risk. China is not threatening the sea traffic that flows through the area. Rather, with its shows of force, Washington wants to remind everyone that it remains the preeminent Pacific power.

The same holds true on economic issues. Donald Trump recently made waves byĚýĚý“can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” on trade issues. President Barack Obama made the same argument, but in more polite terms, in aĚý, in which he stated that America, not China, should write the international rules of trade. These were both the economic equivalents of sending a shot across the bow to remind China who is—or should be—number one.

Trump keeps insisting that he will make America great again, harkening back to some mythic time when America ruled the world without opposition. President Xi similarly wants to make China great again, but he’s alluding to a much more authentic historical period when China was indeed the center of the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. America has suffered a few humiliations over the last couple decades—Vietnam, Iraq—but it remains the world’s strongest power. China, meanwhile, spent a far greater time carved up and controlled by colonial powers. So, it’s entirely understandable why Xi’s message of national renewal resonates so strongly in China.

The reality, however, is that whatever greatness the United States and China can achieve in the future depends on their mutual cooperation. The two countries have put forward rival trade plans. They have also articulatedĚý. At some point, this kind of parallel play will lead to a zero-sum confrontation. And that’s when Washington and Beijing will suddenly discover that, in their separate attempts to become great again, they have quite irreparably snookered themselves.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The latest Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), held on December 4-5 in Johannesburg, South Africa, was monumental for a number of reasons—not least ’s unveiling of an unprecedented $60 billion development and investment deal in aid of Africa over the next three years.

Gargantuan Chinese financial packages have by now become par for the course during this triennial meeting of Chinese and African leaders, which is also hallmarked by the rhetoric of “mutual benefit” and “win-win cooperation,” as the Chinese sought to differentiate themselves from the interventionist habits of their Western counterparts.

The size of the loan, which is almost triple of what was pledged during the previous FOCAC in 2012, is imbued with renewed significance. Most notably, it serves as reassurance of ’s enduring support toward Africa, and its long-term ambitions in the continent.

A closer look into the breakdown of the financial package also reveals marked differences. While concessional loans occupied a large proportion of previous pledges, the $60 billion will be channeled into aĚýĚýcomprising grants and commercial financing for infrastructure projects and capacity building.

An old Chinese adage springs to mind: “If you want to get rich, first you have to build roads.” While China is already the foremost infrastructure investor in Africa, it is now promising to provide satellite reception in 10,000 African villages, as well as technical training programs run by telecoms giant Huawei to acclimatize Africa to the digital economy. This is not to mention the all-encompassing “One Belt, One Road” project that would traverse Africa, Central Asia and Southeast Asia in catalyzing new levels of investment and connectivity.

This heavy emphasis on capacity building thus functioned as a strategic move that would impart greater legitimacy into China’s plans for Africa, and divert attention from its tendentious relationship with Africa’s natural resources and accusations of resource extraction and exploitation. Beyond this exercise in formalism, it also signaled the shifting role of Africa in China’s global outlook, and its new methods of economic engagement.

Chinese Interests in Africa

As China attempts to scale up the value chain of its exports industry, and eventually graduate from light industries to innovative manufacturing and industrial upgrading, many of its low-cost manufacturing bases will be relocated to Africa. It is in this way that Africa will become increasingly incorporated into the production and accumulation process, in a move that evidences the de-territorializing nature of capital.

The inclusion of Africa into global value chains has the potential to create employment opportunities, address potential deficiencies in infrastructure, and stimulate its supply-side capacity. A successful example of this is the fledging leather industry in Ethiopia. From a small manufacturing base in Addis Ababa,ĚýĚýhas created a specialized economic zone that employs over 4,000 locals and exports to Africa, America and Europe. The company also selects university graduates to receive training in China so they can subsequently fill supervisorial roles back home.

However, there are also claims that the relocation of manufacturing hubs from China to Africa also effectively amounts to the relocation of polluting industries away fromĚý, which is currently bearing the brunt of severe air degradation. Just as China had previously served as the “World’s Factory,” it is now beginning to offload its excess industry and pollution to Africa, as it attempts to reorient its economy and exports toward a more efficient and innovative model.

It is important to note that China was in a similar position to Africa a mere 30 years ago, when it struggled to catch up with the earlier industrializers in Europe and the United States, which not only evaded the scrutiny of the stringent environmental codes most forcefully enforced by the West today, but also similarly employed a process of outsourcing of less lucrative industries to China. This again reinforces how the increasing fragmentation of the processes of production lends itself to an integrated, yet clearly segmented notion of global capitalism, as the locus of these industries are in a perpetual shift from center to periphery.

This might also allow us to step away from hyper-moralized perceptions of China-Africa activities as singularly pernicious or self-aggrandizing on China’s part. The features of Africa’s cooptation into the global economy cannot be said to bear the characteristics of an idiosyncratic model of “Chinese capitalism” alone, but rather reveal the ethics of a global capitalism at large.

The significance of the 2015 FOCAC, in this context, reveals the renegotiation of the identities of China and Africa on the international arena. As China moves toward the status of a global power, with an obligation toward the duties and responsibilities that accompany it, it has taken increasing ownership in its dealings with Africa—from deploying peacekeeping troops to South Sudan to establishing its first overseas military outpost in Djibouti.

Conversely, as Africa is increasingly incorporated into the paradigm of global capitalism, the often eluded question of African agency will emerge at the fore as African actors navigate a path toward development that would best suit them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Where do relations between New Delhi and Beijing stand following Indian Prime Minister ’s visit to ? Pretty much the same as before. The trip did little to alter the pattern of heightened strategic competition and modest economic engagement that began to congeal in late 2014.

Modi’s journey was preceded by undue optimism among some in the Indian commentariat that a transformation in bilateral affairs might be in the offing. In this telling, the tandem of Modi and Chinese President — decisive and pragmatic leaders who are both undertaking ambitious economic reform programs at home — would be able to drive relations toward some sort of breakthrough. Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj contributed to this speculation a few months ago, when she that the leadership in both countries had the “political will to think out of the box” to find a solution to the long-simmering Himalayan border dispute plaguing relations for decades.

Others, drawing on the so-called “” narrative of tighter economic collaboration between the countries, that a grand bargain might be forged in commerce and investment. Modi helped to give rise to such thoughts when he coined a new terminology to describe the relationship as “Inch towards Miles” — “INCH that is �India-China’; towards MILES — �millennium of exceptional synergy.’” Some observers thus expected that a deal might be struck channeling China’s vast foreign currency reserves toward ’s vast infrastructure needs, or enlisting Chinese companies in Modi’s signature “Make in India” program that seeks to transform the country into a global manufacturing hub.

To be sure, Modi’s visit did generate plenty of bonhomie. Xi broke with diplomatic protocol and did Modi the honor of welcoming him in Xi’an, a city in central China that Xi considers his hometown. Indian officials reported that the personal interactions between the two leaders “unprecedented chemistry.” Modi even capped the trip off by taking a selfie photo with Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier for whom this must have been an unnatural act.

The Border Question

But it was inevitable that hopes for consequential results would be dashed. As the border question impinges directly on Beijing sensitivities regarding Tibet, the Chinese imperative is to issue dilatory pronouncements that have the effect of reinforcing the status quo rather than overcoming it. Indeed, for all of the trip’s cordiality, Modi reportedly delivered a blunt message to his hosts, telling them that the status quo along the undefined border was unacceptable, and it was their responsibility to address Indian grievances quickly lest they “lead to hesitation and doubts, even distrust, in our relationship.”

Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi / Flickr

The words fell on deaf ears since the visit’s joint statement contained nothing that was new on the issue. Indeed, Beijing telegraphed such an outcome several months ago in its strenuous to Modi’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India’s northeastern region that China has taken to calling “southern Tibet.” Significantly, several days after Modi’s trip to China, his national security advisor that the long-running bilateral negotiations on the border “haven’t reached anywhere.”

Modi’s sojourn to China did yield a slew of commercial agreements, including on the infrastructure front, though it is unclear what their impact will. One Chinese official estimated their value at $10 billion, while an Indian official put it at $22 billion. Whatever the true figure, it falls far short of the $46 billion in infrastructure funding Chinese President Xi Jinping to Pakistan in April and the $50 billion that Li dispensed during his trip to Brazil.

The juxtaposition is all the more glaring given that a few days prior to Modi’s trip, New Delhi tapped a veteran Indian banker to as the first head of the New Development Bank, a Chinese-inspired initiative by the so-called BRICS grouping that is designed to finance infrastructure projects in emerging markets. New Delhi’s participation in the institution (and in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, another Chinese creation) is based on the expectation that some of this funding will be headed India’s way. The “One Belt, One Road” project — Xi’s audacious to build massive infrastructure networks connecting Asia, Eurasia, Europe and East Africa to China — is much ballyhooed these days. But a senior Indian official during the Modi trip that Beijing has not gotten around to inviting India to participate.

(As a side note, one wonders what New Delhi’s reaction will be when Beijing uses its massive leverage in the BRICS bank or the AIIB to torpedo infrastructure loans destined for Arunachal Pradesh. In 2009, China funding from the Asian Development Bank that had been earmarked for flood-control projects in the Indian state. A related question concerns India’s response if either institution directs for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, part of which will run through the disputed Kashmir region.)

As Xi’s visit to India in September 2014 exemplified, India-China leadership summits rarely live up to their hype. Back then the Indian prime minister made a special effort to woo Xi by hosting him in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. The outing featured the two leaders seated together on a swing in a riverfront park, an image the long past days of Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai (“India-China brotherhood”). But the courtship was upended by a major border standoff between Indian and Chinese military forces that began just prior to Xi’s arrival. The episode was much more serious than it appeared , and it continues to cast a shadow over bilateral relations.

Many in the Indian security establishment interpret the incident as a deliberate provocation by Xi, intended to test the mettle of Modi, who at the time had been in office for less than three months. Reinforcing this view was the berthing of a Chinese attack submarine in Sri Lanka just days before Xi showed up in India, the first time the burgeoning Chinese navy had done this. The development was so disquieting from New Delhi’s perspective — “the last straw” as a senior Indian diplomat it — that Modi immediately turned against the Sri Lankan government in response.

Xi Jinping © Shutterstock

Key Points

Anti-China sentiments have noticeably hardened over the past year in New Delhi, as a recent by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s new foreign secretary, demonstrates. According to one conference organizer, Jaishankar’s off-camera remarks were even more critical of China.

From such views have flowed a number of noteworthy reactions:

1) The unprecedented invitation to US President Barack Obama to visit New Delhi as the chief guest for India’s Republic Day celebration this past January, even though Modi had seen Obama in Washington just four months earlier. These invitations are laden with diplomatic significance, since the Indian government uses them as important signaling devices. The deliverables of the Obama visit were also notable: agreement on a new ten-year defense framework ; an unusual joint outlining a common vision on Asia-Pacific policy, including on the South China Sea issue; and a of the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI), a Pentagon proposal for the joint development of weapons systems that the previous Indian government largely . Interestingly, the DTTI’s champion, Ashton Carter, currently the US Defense Secretary, will be in New Delhi shortly to advance this effort.

2) Modi’s decline of a personal invitation by Xi Jinping to attend the November 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing. His absence was curious, given how he had stormed onto the Asian leadership stage and his keen focus on economic diplomacy, not to mention New Delhi’s longstanding desire to join APEC’s formal membership. The explanation for his absence — that Modi needed to focus more on domestic affairs — was less than convincing, especially since he found the time to attend two regional summits in Myanmar and the G20 summit in Australia just days later.

3) For years, New Delhi had shied away from transferring advanced military hardware to Southeast Asian nations for fear of antagonizing Beijing. But in October 2014, it reportedly committed to providing the sophisticated BrahMos anti-ship cruise missile, prompting one well-informed observer to that India is taking “a decisive step towards countering China’s assertive power.”

4) The Modi government has moved to the modernization of the Indian navy, especially its obsolescent submarine branch.

If there are any doubts about the future course of India-China relations, then Modi’s itinerary should put them to rest. After finishing up in China, he traveled to Mongolia, marking the first official visit to that country by any Indian prime minister. Modi surely wanted to collect large-scale infrastructure investment while he was in Beijing. But in Ulan Bator, he was the one infrastructure funding, an effort designed to contest growing Chinese influence in Central Asia.

As he settled into the prime minister’s office, Modi talked about advancing India-China relations by “miles.” Following his visit to China, it appears that he might have to settle for “inches.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In 2014, was 100Ěýout of 178 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.ĚýSince taking office in 2013, President has led a renewed campaign to eradicate corruption, as shown by the July 2014 investigation into allegationsĚýagainst Zhou Yongkang,Ěýwho was officiallyĚýĚýin April 2015.

Zhou was a member of theĚý17^thĚýPolitburo Standing Committee (PSC), China’s highest decision-making body. In his capacity as a member of the PSC, Zhou also wielded a lot of clout and control over the nation’s military forces and the national oil sector. Xi’s campaign to eliminate corruption, however, has its roots in the Lai Changxing corruption scandal in the late 1990s, which involved the largest case of smuggling in Chinese history.

Lai Changxing founded the Yuanhua Group in Xiamen in 1994, where he began smuggling products like cars, oil and cigarettes into Mainland China. Between 1996-99, the total of goods Lai smuggled through Xiamen reached $7.9 billion, and he avoided paying nearly $5 billion in taxes.

To make this happen, Lai paid off more than 64 officials with millions of dollars and developed financial ties with top Chinese officials, including Deputy Minister for Public Security Li Jizhou; Major General of Military Intelligence for the People’s Liberation Army Ji Shengde; and Customers Director of Amoy Yang Qianxian, among many others.

Turning a Blind Eye

There are several explanations as to why those 64 top officials turned a blind eye toward Lai’s smuggling activities. In theory, effective ideological of the party in power would mean there should be a lower degree of corruption. Due to economic liberalization in China at that time, the attractiveness of economic progress made Maoist morality become increasingly irrelevant. Unlike the Mao years when getting rich was seen as bourgeois behavior, the economic reforms in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping prioritized national success in the economic realm.

As a result, it can be seen that officials were willing to help Lai and turn a blind eye to his activities, since his investments and businesses promoted economic growth. These top officials also put their faith in luck, thinking they would not be caught since there were also other senior government officials involved. Indeed, one could say that corruption among politicians was the rule rather than the exception at that time.

Another explanation can be derived from personal connections, known as guanxi, which have long been important social practice in Chinese society. China has a long history of hierarchical systems with Confucian ethics, where roles are established as relationships and are not individualistic.

To some extent, the creation of guanxi through personal connections and cooperation can be regarded as a substitute for the market and the legal-institutional environment that supports it. Guanxi served as a coordinating mechanism that provided more efficient allocation of scarce goods and services. For example, between 1959-61, referred to as three years of great Chinese famine, scarce resources and goods such as housing and schooling were selectively distributed by bureaucrats. This is a possible cultural explanation on the roots of corruption of Lai’s case, where his close guanxi networks with government officials enabled him to easily access resources and later commit crimes.

© Shutterstock

Effects on Foreign Direct Investment

The corruption scandal of had a tremendous on Xiamen’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Two years after the exposure of his smuggling ring, the total foreign trade volume of Xiamen in 2000Ěý $10 billion and the total container throughput increased by 26%, reaching 10 million containers. Xiamen’s GDP in 2000 also achieved $83 billion and its urban per capita disposable income was more than $1,500, increasing by over 12%. However, GDP increased at a lower rate for several years since then and foreign investors were not optimistic about the change.

There are several reasons explaining the downward investment situation in Xiamen. First, many local firms were knowingly or unknowingly connected with the Yuanhua Group, and these firms were adversely affected after the scandal. Many of them had negative earnings or even went bankrupt, therefore,Ěý theĚýlocal business environment and making foreign investment unattractive at that time.

After the Yuanhua Group went bankrupt, employees at state-owned companies received far less revenue since no further “gray” or questionable income was available. These changes led to a decrease in confidence and consumption.

Moreover, the service sector in Xiamen also witnessed a localized great depression after the corruption scandal — for example, a taxi driver’s income was by 50%. Other places in China such as Zhejiang and Guangdong eventually became substitutes for doing business in Xiamen and attracted plenty of foreign direct investment. The overall effect, however, was still negative.

The Timing of Lai’s Downfall and Xi’s Rise

The corruption of the Yuanhua Group, a seemingly independent case in Chinese history, has profound effects on today’s strict anti-corruption reforms under President Xi. According to a 2012 Forbes , corruption practices across the country were rampant between 1996-99 — coincidentally the period of time when Lai carried out his smuggling activities.

During this period of time, Jiang Zemin was president and Zhou Yongkang gained rapid career advancement. More interestingly, Xi Jinping was made governor of Fujian in 2001, the year in which the scandal of Lai was exposed. It is hard to say to what extent Xi had contributed to expose Lai’s corruption when he was governor in Fujian. However, it can be seen that Xi was the perfect crusader against corruption, because he was not involved in any corruption during his tenure as governor. Lai’s from Canada to China in July 2011 was seen as a joint effort between then-President Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. Many within China view Lai’s extradition as a message for many high government officials, who later reported Zhou Yongkang in 2013 for allegedly making billions of dollars through his high position of power within the national oil industry. It can hence be seen that Lai’s sentence may have laid the foundations for Xi’s future efforts to eradicate corruption once he took office.

While truly eradicating corruption might be impossible — given China’s history and nature of governance — an effective legal and institutional environment can reduce such practices by regulating and protecting business activities from government corruption. Moreover, such anticorruption actions must protect the authority of the central government and receive support from the top.

Xi’s campaign to promote good governance can be further supported by his government’s efforts to decrease the widening inequality gap in China. According to a conducted by the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, 10% of China’s richest people enjoyed 45% of the county’s wealth, while the poorest 10% only accounted for 1.4%. As corruption and guanxi networks are usually regarded as the sources of huge concentrations of wealth for China’s richest families, such unfair practices and widening inequality will eventually threaten the stability of society as a whole.

Although Xi’s overarching goal has been to eliminate , empirical questions remain as to when and where corruption rates in the public sector will start declining and whether the new approach to minimize corruption will eventually stimulate changes in China’s political structure so the country’s judicial system will gain independence. As the world awaits more news on Zhou Yongkang’s case, attention will be paid to the future of governance in China.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In China, the dispute over the Senkaku Islands illustrates the usually opaque dynamics between government and society. Japan's attitude toward the islands, however, remains the preserve of government policy. Traditionally, theirpolicy has been an effective mix of pragmatism and principle, but for Japan, the 2012 Senkaku crisis is the story of how this approach fell apart. It’s clear that Japan will have to take their handling of the Senkaku Islands in a new direction or, at the very least, modify the old policy. What's less clear, though, is how these changes can be carried through in a time of economic stress and nationalistic resurgence.

Loud Words and an Olive Branch

Theodore Roosevelt suggested speaking softly and carrying a big stick as a way to signal quiet strength, but in East Asian politics the imperative to save face often dictates the opposite. So strong official statements, complemented by conciliatory actions, have characterized Japanese policy regarding the Senkaku Islands.

Japan, which annexed the isles in 1895 after the first Sino-Japanese War, and regained the islands from the United States in 1972, dismisses the Chinese claim to historical ownership, stretching back to the Ming Dynasty, out of hand. Setting aside the accuracy of this interpretation, this view closes off many possible reactions from Japan – the Japanese line is not just that the islands are theirs, but that there is no dispute at all, and therefore no room or need for negotiation. China might as well be claiming the central districts of Tokyo. According to this view, China’s interest in the islands can only be interpreted as a cynical attempt to foment dispute or .

But Japan has held other positions in the past. During the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and several Japanese prime ministers held talks over the status of the island, and while their conclusion has been to agree to shelve the dispute without any resolutions, Japan’s policy toward the islands still reflects the possibility of negotiation. Left in private hands, they are under the administration of Ishigaki Prefecture in Japan, though neither the prefectural authorities nor its owners have been allowed to reside or build on the islands. As a rule, Japanese authorities have also dealt with Chinese intruders gently, imposing short detentions and rarely pressing charges.  As a signal of conciliation, this policy is as unmistakable as it is incongruous with . Yet the defense of this compromise ended up directly causing the current crisis.

To be sure, it is difficult to conceive of a better way for Japan to square the circle where the Senkaku Islands are concerned. Japan’s history of relations with China after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 has been a narrative of extremes, ranging from isolationism in the 1870s and 1880s as it attempted to modernize itself, to brutal invasions and wars in later decades that continue to taint relations with its close neighbors. Although territorial integrity is essential to any nation-state, the current status quo with China – 300 billion US dollars in trade, hundreds of Japanese factories and franchises scattered throughout the mainland, and considerable cultural influence from J-pop to tourism – is as good as any that Japan has enjoyed in a long time. Some ambiguity regarding islands seems a good price to pay for this.

A Tipped Hand

Strong words and a soft touch tend to cost little and accomplish a lot, but an inconsistent policy is inherently unstable. When political imperatives change, there is always a risk that Japan will either start speaking as it acts – therefore being soft and conciliatory – or acting as it speaks, which could incite conflict. Given Japan’s record of fractured, easily toppled governments, both outcomes pose great costs.

The ruling Democratic Party (DPJ) government learned this in 2010, when they detained a Chinese fishing vessel that had moved too close to the islands. Officials decided not to release the crew without charge, as normal practice dictated; instead, they detained the skipper and considered bringing charges. After a storm of protests in China and rumors of a possible ban on rare earth metals exports, crucial to Japan’s electronics industry, the government relented and . But the damage was done – the skipper became a hero, while Japan’s political leaders looked both foolishly provocative and quick to fold under pressure.

During 2012, this story repeated, except Japan provoked itself. In April, the nationalist governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, from their private owners. This was clearly a push to align the national government’s policy closer to their hardline rhetoric; Ishihara planned to build on the islands, treating the islands as indisputably Japanese as the government claimed they were.

The reaction of the Japanese government was quick – the three islands to be purchased were nationalized in September. By forestalling Ishihara, however, and defending the traditional policy of non-provocation, the administration of then-Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda acted exactly as Ishihara wanted. By nationalizing the three islands, Japanese government changed policy to fit its tough official line, and that shift, intentional or otherwise, was more than enough to spark off a major incident. 

Same Table, Different Players

While a discussion of China’s policy  towards the islands frequently mentions public opinion and attitudes, this element rarely crops up in Japan. Tet, having just elected a new government, it seems clear that Japanese society, while still engaged mainly with domestic economic issues, has chosen for itself a leadership that prefers rhetorical hardness and real-world delicacy.

Abe Shinzo, now serving his second term as prime minister, was once a notorious Japanese nationalist. Among other things, he has advocated amending Japan’s constitution and giving the Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) official armed forces status. Even if many Japanese don’t share Abe’s more hardline views, there remains a general perception that peace and pacifism has somehow eroded Japanese society. A common term for this is heiwa-boke, literally "peace-induced idiocy." Heiwa-boke, they claim, has resulted in Japan’s lack of political weight and influence in its own neighborhood, despite its volume of trade and the number of people worldwide who watch anime. Abe’s revivalist stance, while understandable to a Japan that is stagnant and underrepresented on the world stage, also sparks understandable alarm in China, where Japanese "revival" is irrevocably associated with militarism.

But Abe’s political positions also give him a Nixonian quality in dealing with foreign affairs. His first overseas visit as prime minister was to China, which went a long way towards easing the tensions caused by his predecessor, Koizumi Junichiro. If no one but Nixon could have restarted the United States’ relationship with China, perhaps only a bona fide nationalist like Abe could risk extending an olive branch as well.

The Sliding Scale

Hopes aside, tensions remain high, and the Senkaku dispute appears to have colored other, more general matters as well. Japanese defense expenditure has grown rapidly and naval patrols of the islands continue, as do expeditions by Chinese fishing and patrol craft to sail to and around the islands. This tension has, inevitably, closed some of the distance between Japan’s avowed position and actions.

And yet the distance, and the dilemma that underlies it, remains unresolved. If Chinese patrol boats had appeared in the waters of Kyushu, or in Tokyo Bay, without permission, there would be little argument about who is in the right. So it is with the Senkaku Islands; however, even with Japan’s formidable self-defense forces and American military assistance, the prospect of a war with China is too awful to contemplate. To paraphrase Bismarck, eight rocks in the East China Sea are not worth a single Japanese or Chinese naval craft and the damage that would result.

For all its recognition of “peace-induced idiocy,” it seems that Japan, not unlike China, is also quite content to let its policy drift, oblivious to the risk of conflict – perhaps even more so. A prominent Japanese journalist, when asked about the Japanese reaction to , which caused extensive damage to Japanese shops and factories, gave a surprising answer. There was, of course, some anger, but the consensus appears to have been that the rioting was a good thing. It had "showed the world what the Chinese were really like." The Japanese may therefore feel vindicated in that thinking by recent Chinese behavior.

When both sides are only one accident away from a firefight, however there are many more constructive uses of time – attempting, for example, to clarify procedures for future incidents, or to create a framework for mutual cooperation that would take the heat off the Senkaku Islands issue – than simply sitting back to make a point about purported Chinese barbarism. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Trouble at the Pinnacles – Part 2, Japan appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The Japanese name for the Diaoyu Islands is Senkaku, or “Pinnacled Pavilions,” which sounds far more fitting for a sitcom setting than for an international flashpoint. Yet flashpoints they are – a cluster of uninhabited islets and rocks jutting from the East China Sea, over which China and Japan are once again drifting towards war.

This latest round of confrontations, which began in 2012 and has since become a steady stream of saber rattling on both sides, poses potentially disastrous consequences for the region. With Chinese and Japanese military assets patrolling the islands, three of the world’s largest economies are one provocation or accident from a shooting war, since the United States is Ěýto aid Japan. Earlier this year, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assuredthe Japanese of America’s support and commitment, warning unnamed actors against “unilateral actions… to undermine Japanese administration [over the islands].”

While this is not the first time the islands have been a focus of conflict, the intensity and willingness on the Chinese side to escalate, from quietly encouraging anti-Japanese riots to deploying military patrol boats, and now the Ěýto target Japanese craft, is unprecedented. The Chinese authorities, if perhaps not willing to bite, no longer seem willing to settle for mere barking, and the domestic pressures that favor escalation – particularly within Chinese media and society – will continue to drive future behavior.

Tinder, Kindling, Flame

To many outside observers, China is the clear aggressor; after all, they’re trying to assert control over Japanese-owned territory. According to the Chinese, however, the current crisis is the result of Japanese provocation. On September 10, 2012, Noda Yoshihiko, then Prime Minister of Japan, announced the . This move aimed to block Ishihara Shintaro, the hardline former Governor of Tokyo who planned to purchase the islands. But given the historically fraught Sino-Japanese relationship, it is difficult to imagine a more spectacularly inflammatory timing for the announcement, coming just one week before the anniversary of the , when Japanese officers staged a bombing by “Chinese dissidents” near Mukden (modern Shenyang) to justify the invasion of northeastern China.

Chinese reaction to the announcement was swift, angry, and eventually violent. While diplomatic protests and patrol boats were launched to “guard” the islands, demonstrationsin major cities across the country turned violent, and riot police had to be brought in – but not before Japanese shops and factories were torchedĚýor . While this violence hasn’t reoccurred, Chinese authorities have since actively protected their claim to the islands with even more Ěýand aircraft, coming within three miles of the islands and repeatedly encountering Japanese crafton similar patrols.

Tough rhetoric has accompanied these escalations. Xi Jinping, who assumed leadership of China in November, Ěýthat the islands were a “core interest” over which the “Chinese people” could not be expected to retreat. The media, especially online, animatedly notes Japanese provocations and speaks of preparing for war. Of course, there is nothing better for bolstering a new leadership, especially one that lacks democratic legitimacy, than some full-throated nationalism. Yet, though authoritative statements make the Chinese leadership sound in control of societal sentiment, the true picture is far more complex.

We the Revanchist People

Foreign observers have offered varied interpretations of the relationship between Chinese nationalism and the authorities. One explanation suggests that nationalism, particularly the militant variety, is Ěýby the Party and government. Tolerated when the state is on an even keel, it can be whipped up to exert pressure or provide a distraction, and then reined in at the end of each crisis.

However, while this might have been more accurate in 2008, amidst a booming economy and stable leadership, the current conflict has come at a time when the government is under unusual scrutiny. Political transitions are always excitable periods, even in democratic societies, but China’s most recent transition produced a number of dramatic moments – not the least of which was the , once a contender for the top post.

The legitimacy of China’s government, in the absence of elections, depends on other methods of sensing and reacting to social pressures. For instance, the Communist Party’s primary narrative, wherein it rescues China from foreign powers and leads it to greatness, depends heavily on economic growth. But economic growth has been slowing due to the global financial crisis and income inequality has been increasing for years. At the same time, increasing awareness of the environmental and social cost of China’s economic rise, as well as persistent corruption among government officials, has formed a reservoir of discontent. These internal pressures, built up in an environment with limited means of political expression, have begun to explode in the form of nationalist fervor; in effect, as the economic route loses its luster, society started to look for more direct methods of asserting China’s greatness.

Last September’s riots hinted at the possibility that the government’s control over China’s militant nationalist sentiments had begun to erode. During the previous Diaoyu crisis in 2010, when , the Chinese crew was arrested and detained. This, on the surface, appears an even greater cause for conflict; indeed, large protests were held at Japanese embassies. Eventually, however, under diplomatic pressure, Japan released the fishermen and pressed no charges.Nationalism might have reared its head, but the solution was peaceful and pragmatic.

But there is nothing pragmatic about violent riots, a bête noire of the Chinese authorities, and there is nothing pragmatic about torching the factories and shops of one’s largest trading partner in a time of economic strain. Here, the rage was real and spontaneous; and for a few days it was allowed to burn unchecked.

Rocks and the Deep Blue Sea

Seen in this light, the Chinese readiness to escalate in this instance stems not from inherent aggression or arrogance, but rather from insecurity. While private nationalist groups are nothing new in ChinaĚý – different “Diaoyu Protection Societies” have existed in China since the 1990s – their ire increasingly targets their own government, for failing to both solve problems at home and exercise power abroad. China’s actions might alarm outside observers, but a frequent complaint among Chinese netizens is that they are inadequate and the Party, ultimately, plays to the home crowd.

Such circumstances are not new in the history of Chinese revanchism; the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, for example, was as much against the ruling Manchu government as it was against the foreigners that the court could not resist. The current government is still a long way from being as inept and fractured as the late Qing regime, but the internet allows complaints to spread more freely, to the extent that government spokespersons have had to respond to calls in the media to “have at [Japan] over the Diaoyu islands” (original in Chinese).

Now, several months into the crisis, the nationalist stance appears to have crystallized around some watchwords in the media and commentariat. “Proactive” is one, as is “initiative”; China, they argue, has only reacted to Japanese aggression, and should begin to seize the initiative. Compared to this, Xi’s line on “core interests” sounds positively cautious. Recent Chinese actions, such as the frequent patrols around the isles and the fire control radar incident, can be seen as a way to square the circle – the actions stop short of warmongering, but they are far more provocative than what has been done before, satisfying a national appetite.

In being proactive and assertive over the issue of the Diaoyu Islands, China’s new leadership is in turn reacting to pressures at home that cannot be ignored. The islands have become a focal point of a difficult-to-control revanchism, with roots in Chinese history and current status of the country, but placating those at home means running risks abroad. More even-handed commentators in China have noted the backlash on both economies should there be even a limited, small-scale conflict. Given the government’s actions, their calculation appears to be that it is better to do something than to appear weak and adrift. But continued provocation with no effort at resolution will also cast China adrift, and the destination is much more dire.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In 1993, at the 72^nd anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party, Jiang Zemin warned of the threat that corruption posed to China, stating: “If we do not take resolute action to curb corruption, and let it worsen, we shall destroy the enterprise of reform and the open door, and eventually jeopardize the party's ruling status.” Nearly twenty years later, the specter of corruption still looms large over China’s ruling party.

With corruption often cited as one of the major factors in the eruption of ‘mass incidents,’ China’s leadership has continually emphasized the importance of reigning in corrupt officials, tightening anti-corruption laws, prosecuting offenders, and promoting anti-corruption education. At the 18^th National Party Congress held in Beijing in November, outgoing president Hu Jintao echoed Jiang’s warning from twenty years earlier, stating that if the party failed to handle the issue of corruption well, “it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state.”

Yet throughout the past twenty years, corruption in China has remained endemic. Part of the problem stems from what Kenneth Lieberthal describes as a reward system based on local government officials’ ability to produce high levels of economic growth and contain social instability. At the provincial level and below, government officials have both the incentive and enough decision-making autonomy to pursue infrastructure and development projects that, while often leading to rapid economic growth, fuel corruption, income inequality, wealth differentiation, and environmental degradation.

Further complicating this process is a paucity of reliable top-down of mechanisms of oversight coupled with a cumbersome bureaucracy that together create ample opportunities for local government deviation from Beijing directives, collusion with private business and political interests, and the prioritization of economic gain at the expense of public goods provision and public health and safety. Additionally, China’s business and political culture has, traditionally, relied heavily upon establishing and maintaining connections (guanxi) to build businesses and increase personal wealth. Those who are unable to develop and maintain key relationships often find it difficult to navigate through China’s political and economic environment. 

For those citizens, who fail to benefit from the new economic environment or who become victims of local government malfeasance, there are very few mechanisms for acquiring justice and holding government officials accountable. China’s legal system is extremely weak and lacks independence from the party, making it difficult for citizens to successfully pursue cases that involve government officials. The other official avenue for recourse is the notoriously ineffective petition system.

Petitioning is a centuries-old, legally recognized practice that allows citizens to directly appeal to government officials for justice. The problem is, of course, that many citizens’ complaints involve- whether real or perceived- negligent, incompetent or corrupt local government officials. Unsurprisingly, these government officials are often unwilling or unable to help petitioners. Further complicating the petitioning process is the reward system. Because rewards are partly based on containing social instability, government officials have an incentive to prevent petitioners from seeking justice from higher-level authorities. As a result, petitioners are often kicked around from department to department and even occasionally arrested and forcibly returned to their hometowns if they decide to ‘skip levels’ by immediately going up to the provincial capital or to Beijing itself to petition.

The results of this process- the rapid economic growth, weak mechanisms of oversight and accountability and a perverse reward system- are unsurprising: rampant corruption, rising social tensions and an increase in mass incidents. In 2010, over 180,000 incidents of unrest were reported- up from 87,000 in 2005 and 8,700 in 1993.

As Jiang Zemin’s 1993 speech clearly indicates, however, Beijing has been acutely aware of the problems that corruption poses to social stability for years. Indeed, China spends more annually on domestic security than it does on its military. Yet in spite of the rhetoric and public commitments to fighting corruption very little has been done in terms of the kind of structural reform needed to combat corruption and diffuse social tensions. Part of the problem is simply the system itself. China’s leaders and their families- even those at the very top- benefit from the patronage and guanxi system to such a degree that it is difficult to do anything but maintain the status quo.

Furthermore, China’s breakneck economic growth has actually helped further legitimize the party’s ruling position and kept a lid on widespread dissatisfaction among the middle class regarding the slow pace of political reform. Therefore, any kind of systemic overhaul that might de-prioritize rapid economic development could itself be destabilizing. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the eruption of mass incidents in China has remained highly localized. In other words, those who engage in collective action do not generally target Beijing; rather, they are angry with local government officials. For now at least, this buys Beijing some time, as social tensions are diffused and contained at the local level instead of engulfing the entire country and leading- as Hu feared- “to the collapse of the party and of the state.”

Although instability in China is, as of now, seemingly contained at the local level, China’s leadership is aware that this may not always be the case. The question that China watchers are now asking is: will China’s new leadership embark upon a different strategy, or will they maintain the status quo? Of course in order to answer this question, it is necessary to first ask whether or not any new changes have occurred within the central leadership that are conducive to political reform and second, whether or not the new leadership is amenable to reform.

Lieberthal characterizes China’s evolving central leadership as being built on consensus rather than a powerful central figure, as is commonly assumed. “Since Hu Jintao, the outgoing leader, ascended to the top job in 2002, collective leadership built around consensus decision making has become the norm.” Yet the system of building and maintaining relationships also impacts what happens within the central leadership, as Standing Committee members are often reluctant and even unable to disadvantage other committee members who generally have a vested interest in the sector over which they are charged, such as domestic security or state-owned industries. This makes it far more difficult to make the kind of deep structural reforms that may be necessary to reduce waste and close institutional gaps that may be conducive to corruption.

While the number of members on the Standing Committee was reduced from nine to seven, the basic power-dynamics- as far as observers are aware- have remained unchanged. Although China’s top leader now has less power compared to that wielded by Mao or Deng, he is certainly not without significant influence. Thus, the issue of how China will handle corruption and mass incidents will hinge in part on Xi himself.

Given that information surrounding China’s leaders is so tightly guarded, it is extremely difficult to know whether or not Xi will deviate to any remarkable degree from his predecessors. Additionally, Chinese leaders ascend to the top through loyalty to the party and to their predecessors, not through any kind of proven tendency to depart from the status quo.

While it is possible that Xi’s experiences living in the United States during the 1980s and his desire to engage with US leaders and citizens may signal that he is perhaps more amenable to taking a different approach to politics than his predecessors, there is still much about Xi that suggest he may be less of a reformist than many would hope.

Xi is no less disconnected from the network of patronage and social and familial connections than his predecessors. Reportedly, members of Xi’s extended family reportedly have extensive wealth and vested interests in several key sectors, including real estate, minerals and telecommunications. Furthermore, as the son of one of China’s first generation of leaders, Xi’s rise to power was dependent in large part upon his father’s position and connections, and there is nothing to suggest that he has in anyway divorced himself from this dense web of personal connections.

Yet the issue of corruption and its repercussions has become one that the central leadership can no longer treat with just rhetoric and half-measures. On November 20, China’s newspapers published an article, written by Xi himself, dedicated to the issue of corruption and the new leadership’s call to combat it. Although this may appear like a continuation of the same ineffectual rhetoric of the past, the facts are clear: corruption is not abating and the mass incidents associated with it are only getting worse. So although Xi himself may not- at heart- be the kind of reformist that observers had hoped, China’s endemic corruption and increasing numbers of mass incidents may force the hand of the new central leadership. The system will have to reform or else face the consequences. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In China, the so-called “Great Firewall” censors access to Facebook, Twitter, and many other websites that could contain material that is overtly violent, political, or critical of the government. Yet there are breaches in each of these censored categories—it would be impossible for China to block all portals and still maintain the semblance of a modern society—and many Facebook-withdrawn foreigners use virtual proxy networks (VPNs) to circumvent the censors. The pretense of government control over free speech is generally accepted; in practice, it is spotty and easily flouted.

Most Chinese do not use VPNs. Some fear legal repercussions (VPNs are not technically permitted), but many simply do not find them necessary. Weibo, Renren, and Tudou, the Chinese versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, sufficiently meet the communication and entertainment needs of China’s Internet users. These sites are obviously Sino-centric, but the scope of material available through them (including a range of Western films, television series, and music) is so vast, that it is difficult to call them, conclusively, “limiting.” Indeed, it may be worthwhile to consider the lack of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as less a political concern and more a cultural entreaty. Just as the party refuses to submit to Western government systems in favor of its own , it constrains Western media platforms in order to encourage Chinese ones.

These social media platforms—particularly Weibo—have become outlets for public discussion about politics and party officials. For example, in the past year, journalists covering the Bo Xilai scandal used updates from micro-blogging sites such as Weibo as Ěýfor their research. More recently, President Hu Jintao’s speech on political reform at the 18^th Party Congress spurred a series of Ěýthat lamented and lambasted his vague rhetoric. Despite a slew of attempts to curb the discourse, micro-bloggers are largely undeterred from expressing their opinions. Although especially controversial tweets may be deleted, they are still, for some time, published and available for public consumption. Accordingly, while the censors may periodically stymy the dissemination of information, they do not stop the cultivation of public opinion.

The burgeoning use of social media in China thus gives way to an interesting dynamic between opaque party politics and an increasingly expressive populace. How does China handle the democratization of political discourse while preserving its decidedly undemocratic politics? As Beijing dealed with its once-per-decade leadership transition, Western pundits and commentators are questioning the long-term tenability of China’s one-party government system. The West wants to believe that China is on its way to a more transparent governing system, one that at least pretends to be electorally driven. Indeed, tiny changes prick the horizon: the successful protests against the expansion of a chemical plant in Ningbo, the small-scale local elections, and the party’s self-confessed corruption, all point to a more vocal, discerning public.

Yet despite these democratic trends, it is difficult to shake the fact that the party obliquely sanctions these incidents and admissions. If the party cannot control something, then it must accept it into the party fold. Through acceptance, it regains control. Micro-blogs are a perfect example of this dynamic. As wry Beijingers make witty, 140 character comments on the absurdity of various leadership-transition policies (no knife sales, no rolling down windows in taxis) and individuals in the provinces slyly grumble about delegates, party members are Ěýthis politically-minded discursive environment, and even appropriating it for their own ends. Indeed, China’s official news sources tacitly condone the micro-blogosphere, apparently informed by the adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” While this hints at the potential for an increased dialogue between officials and the public, it also suggests that there is little the party won’t do to ensure its longevity.

The relationship between social media and the leadership transition could feasibly, at some point, give way to a legitimate change in leadership. The Arab Spring showed how, under the right circumstances, social media could be used to mobilize people into action. Furthermore, the different ways around China’s censors and firewalls call into question their efficacy in containing widespread viral activity. It might be worth noting that the Chinese have a long-established historical precedent of overthrowing unpopular regimes.

However, as things currently stand, China’s well-educated, urban middle class youth—the same group that sparked so much political dynamism via social media platforms in other parts of the world—is not agitating for democratic political processes, translucency, or a change in leadership. They do not need to. Standards of living have improved dramatically over the past twenty years, particularly in urban areas. The shift from an export-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy (touted as crucial to China’s sustained economic health) is already apparent in places like Beijing and Shanghai. The average person’s consumption, communication, and entertainment needs are met by a multitude of platforms. It may be that for most in China, the status quo is enough. This political transition is only a transition because it does not need to be anything more.

It is worth noting that if and when political changes do occur, they will be on Chinese terms. And it is unlikely that these political changes will take the form of a Western government structure. A crucial question therefore arises: if, in the future, China says it has achieved democracy—if “democracy” is a measurable, declarable state, like “modernity”—what might that look like? Will it be recognizable to the West? Or will it build on the semantics of “elected officials” and “voters” to create a top-down election process (much like the one that presumably occurs within the party now), with voting privileges extended to every Chinese, to ultimately perpetuate the party’s life? Perhaps democracy is to the party what Twitter is to Weibo: a template that, once built on, will eventually become irrelevant.

*[Editor’s Note: The author requested for their name to be removed, which has been replaced with a pseudonym. Updated: August 27, 2020.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Capping months of public speculation and behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, China's 18th Communist Party Congress officially ended on November 15, setting the stage for a new roster of leaders who will rule China for the next decade. As expected, Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao as the Party general secretary and was also named chairman of the Central Military Commission, which oversees the country's armed forces. In addition, vice premier Li Keqiang moved into position to replace Wen Jiabao as prime minister when government posts are staffed next spring. A seven-member list of members of the Politburo Standing Committee has been released. Still, experts say recent events suggest unresolved differences remain among various Party factions and interest groups. These ultimately show just how fragile the political process remains for one of the world's most powerful countries.  

To be sure, China's Communist Party is at little risk of losing its grip on power in the leadership changeover. Over the past 30 years, Party leaders have worked hard to establish more institutionalized and stable succession procedures. Yet experts say that with the purge of former Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai this spring — along with the weeks-long unexplained absence of Xi Jinping in September and other events — political uncertainty in China actually increased, rather than the opposite, as senior leaders struggled in the past few months to re-establish internal equilibrium.

As a result, the new leaders are expected to focus on self-preservation and the need to restore the Party's image in the coming months, and may become both more risk-averse and more brittle. In particular, perceived challenges to Chinese sovereignty — including outside complaints about Chinese economic or trade policies — or to internal stability may well prompt exceptionally inflexible or even harsh responses in the months ahead.

In addition, recent events have brought even more than the usual uncertainty into assessments of implications of the transition for investors and global businesses operating in China. "We have no idea what the policies of Xi Jinping are going to be," says , a Wharton professor of management. "He's been very careful. Will he be another Hu Jintao? Will he be another Zhu Rongji? Nobody knows. That's probably the most fundamental inflection point coming up soon [but] it will take a few years to know what direction China takes."

Christopher Mark, head of EmergingSignals:China, a service focused on China economic and political analysis, notes that global businesses can expect no near-term changes in the operating environment in China, as the new leadership team will be intent on avoiding destabilizing moves during the transition period — especially between now and next March, when the new government positions are to be filled — and on trying to keep the nascent economic upturn on track. Foreign-invested enterprises are a critical part of this equation, notably in the politically-influential eastern coastal provinces. Global companies that target China's rapidly-evolving consumer and IT markets, as well as the construction and automotive sectors, should be able to profit from Beijing's avowed intention to re-orient the economy toward domestic consumption, expand housing and develop new urban centers in the interior, Mark says. 

Moreover, experts point out, some weight needs to be given to the personal inclinations of Xi Jinping. Even though Xi's policy objectives are still obscure, he has a reputation among Western executives who have dealt with him as a pragmatic supporter of market-friendly approaches to economic development. This is based in part on his father's key role in the early 1980s in the initial stages of China's economic reform and opening to foreign investment, as well as to his own experiences early in his career as an official in the export-oriented Fujian and Zhejiang provinces.

Nevertheless, China's leadership inner circle is a consensus-based institution, and too much should not be read into Xi's presumed preferences, experts say. The new membership of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee is quite conservative, in the sense of being averse to meaningful political reform and supportive of a heavy-handed internal security apparatus. As such, longer-term investment risks associated with mounting social pressures and potential instability will remain high. There is also nothing in the new leadership team that would point to a reversal of recent trends toward a more protectionist operating environment (fueled by an upsurge in nationalist sentiment, currently directed at Japanese firms) and toward increasing industry concentration that favors politically-connected state enterprises, observers note.

Quiet Power Struggle

By all accounts, China's transition got off to a rough start. The corruption accusations against Bo Xilai, who earlier in the year was considered a contender for the country's supreme policymaking body, put the Party's leadership maneuverings in an unaccustomed public spotlight. Experts say they also intensified a factional battle between the relatively more reformist wing of the Party associated with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, and conservatives allied with former President Jiang Zemin.

"The struggle over the future direction and ideology of the Party reflects differences between leaders who, like Bo, pushed for a stronger state role in the economy and society and are closely allied with military leaders, and more reformist leaders affiliated with Hu and Wen, some of whom have been championing the private sector, civil society and the rule of law," says Mark.

Many China experts suggest that because the Bo Xilai affair derailed plans for a seamless and well-orchestrated transition, contending factions within the Party have set aside differences and settled on a leadership roster consisting of well-established and relatively noncontroversial figures. In addition to Xi and Li, the Politburo Standing Committee has five members. They are Wang Qishan, a vice premier with experience in financial and economic policy; Yu Zhengsheng, Party chief in Shanghai; Zhang Dejiang, who replaced Bo Xilai as Party chief in Chongqing; Tianjin Party chief Zhang Gaoli and Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan.

Western analysts have been frustrated by the paucity of information about the policy preferences of China's prospective new rulers. However, some factors could prove significant. For instance, both Xi and Li are believed to be more versed in international political and business dealings than were their predecessors when they took office 10 years ago. Xi served in Fujian in his early career and was later named party leader in Zhejiang, both booming coastal provinces that were at the forefront of China's economic reform and opening to foreign investment in the 1980s.

Recently, Xi's associates have been playing up signals that he may be willing to pursue bolder economic reforms and tackle corruption. According to reports in the Chinese press, Xi met with the son of the late reformist Party chief Hu Yaobang and hinted at the prospect of forthcoming reforms. At the same time, he also has strongly backed China's behemoth state-owned enterprises.

Both outgoing and incoming leaders will grapple with challenges to the Party's legitimacy as the transition unfolds, however. Experts note that renewed emphasis on professional competence within the bureaucracy and the ability to deliver improvements in living standards — along with appeals to nationalist fervor — may bolster the Party leadership's standing with the Chinese public, despite dissatisfaction with local governance and cynicism about endemic official corruption.

Social Tensions

While public anger has in the past been directed mostly at lower-level officials, the impact of the Bo Xilai case and other emergent scandals could contribute to a growing perception of dissoluteness in Beijing, presenting problems for senior leaders who are looked upon to ensure the moral state of the nation.

In particular, Bo's dismissal, and the sensational murder trial of his wife, Gu Kailai, hurt the Party's credibility with upwardly-mobile urban elites, especially in light of allegations that the two had been involved in moving large sums of money illegally out of the country, observers say. Following Gu's conviction in August, China's Internet was flooded with messages expressing outrage that she had evaded the death penalty despite being found guilty of premeditated murder — an outcome considered by many to represent special treatment of a member of the political elite.

In another recent flashpoint, Ling Jihua, a close ally of outgoing Party chief Hu Jintao, was demoted on September 1 from his position managing the daily activities of the top leadership. The announcement came after press reports that his son was killed, and two women seriously injured, while driving a Ferrari.

However, because Bo Xilai had built his public reputation by exploiting social discontent, and tapping into popular resentment over inequality and official corruption, Party leaders are expected to make strenuous efforts to get out in front of these issues in the wake of the purge. As an example, Premier Wen recently called for holding officials more strongly accountable and making the results of investigations public. In other recent comments — including criticism of the monopolistic position enjoyed by state banks, pushing for economic restructuring in favor of boosting consumer spending, and emphasizing the crucial role played by small firms, innovators and entrepreneurs over that of state-owned enterprises — Wen signaled support for more reforms.

China's big state enterprises, which now count as some of the world's most valuable companies, may in fact prove to be a bellwether for China's economic future. "I think continuation of the present policies will alone [impede] or slow or cap economic growth a bit, because under Hu Jintao there's been a resurgence of the wealth, and to some extent, the power of the state enterprises in China," notes Wharton's Meyer. "Fewer people are employed by the states, the SOEs are responsible for less and less of overall output and GDP, but still their centrality in the economy has gone up. So the question is whether there's going to be a second and vigorous wave of privatization in China, turning toward a more capitalist system. We don't know the answer, but it is a very fundamental question."

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

*[This article was originally published by  on November 20, 2012]

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