Why do I believe China is taking an overall defensive position in international affairs? There are cultural, economic, domestic and international reasons but let me first offer evidences that China is indeed defending — rather than offending — itself. To do that I would introduce (the currently prevailing) counter-argument that China has been provocative and offensive across the board or across many fronts.
The Campbell List Of Chinese Offenses
In a recent online speech delivered to a conference audience at Stanford, Kurt Campbell, the “Asia Tsar” of the Biden administration, talked about China’s rising soft power in passing but clearly his focus was on the harsh/hard power that he believes China is holding — and also wielding — over the world.
A side note: I prefer to hear speeches and even better, debates, because unlike lengthy books, speakers must lay out their core ideas in a condensed fashion, and answer questions from live audience that oftentimes are even more revealing of what are really on their minds. It is not exaggerating to say that from books to talks authors must go through re-creations that help the audience get a better grip what they are saying or want to say.
Back to the online speech and in Campbell’s own words, “We have seen across board a number of things that are upsetting and destabilizing strategically.” He went on to a list of incidences ranging from border conflicts with India, “some of the worst engagements since the 1960s, a kind of undeclared economic campaign against Australia, wolf warrior diplomacy quite harsh against France and Europe, stepped up military interactions in South China Sea, regular military action sorties across Taiwan strait, more pressure on Japan, really across the board signals that China is determined to play a more assertive role.”
Campbell looked back at the “operating system” in Indo-Pacific that the US has favorably built in the last 40 years that led the region to the greatest prosperity and lifted millions of people out of poverty in human history. But in the last several years this operating system that has favored the US has come to under pressure from two sources. One is predictable and the other unlikely so.
He attributed the problems to that “China as a rising power takes issues with certain elements of the existing, dominant system, and would like to revise some elements of that. That’s a natural instinct of the incumbent on the existing state the status quo is to push back to sustain to system.”
Campbell then famously claimed that the period of engagement with China is coming to an end.
Campbell More Hawkish Than Mearsheimer
Campbell’s reasoning sounded familiar because it is not much different from that of Mearsheimer — perhaps with a less deterministic tone and a less focus on the military. But Campbell is also less symmetric than Mearsheimer, which frankly worries me more. Here is why.
Mearsheimer developed his deterministic theory by assuming China as a “mirror image” of the US. In so doing Mearsheimer implicitly put both the US and China on the equal footing and if conflicts were to occur, we would blame both by assigning them an equal share of responsibilities.
In other words, Mearsheimer says military conflict is inevitable between the two, but it is nobody’s fault — or everybody’s fault — because everybody wants the same thing: global hegemony.
Campbell went further than Mearsheimer — perhaps something natural or politically correct for a sitting government official to do so — by squarely blaming China for all the problems and troubles we are facing today. In that sense, Campbell is more a “China hawk” than Mearsheimer is. To have someone like him in charge of China/Asian affairs is worrisome. Campbell is better off — for himself and for the nation — to work in the Pentagon.
Instead of citing Mearsheimer, Campbell quoted the work of Graham Allison at Harvard, which frankly did not present much fresh idea other than going further back in history to the Ancient Greek rather than WWI.
There’s just one problem: We should never forget we are dealing with China — an Asian power today — not an European power in the long past. It makes sense for them to revisit the European history because that was what they are more familiar with, more so than China anyway.
Interestingly, although Campbell acknowledged the global historical theater moved from Europe to Asia, by simply quoting what Allison said about the ancient history without adding much critique from the perspective of today’s Asia, Campbell did not show us the right amount of critical thinking that happens to be, well, critical, for us to understand the events today. I did expect more from someone of a senior officials with decades of experiences dealing exclusively with Asian affairs.
I must add that I have nothing personal against Campbell and frankly, I would be the first to praise him if he says something wise in the future. This is strictly professional criticism. Besides, who is to say Campbell was wrong in the first place? At issue is first and foremost different perspectives. I am a globalist while Campbell spoke clearly for the interest of this country — at least he thought so — and for other people in the administration.
As a globalist, I want China and the US to have sustainable peace, which is in the best interest of the world. However, what is best for the world may or may not be the best for the US — at least not always in the short run.
Once Again, Growth & Not Fixed Mindset
Having said that, I do want to point out that hiring people based on past experiences alone is bad. We really need to have a growth, not fixed, mindset to find better fit of talents to tasks. It is entirely possible working on the same job for decades only proves detrimental — not beneficial as expected — to the job. Mediocracy tends to persist throughout the life. We are better off to install fresh minds to move the task forward. This is actually one reason behind the term limit of presidency in the US.
The problem in the US is that many (most?) people only care about past experiences. They conflate a fixed mindset with science, or merit with seniority: Placing someone on a job with a long time experiences is taken to be a science based HR policy, which is presumably based on merits and facts. Worse, many or most people voluntarily give up critical thinking toward anyone who had senior experiences on the job.
Never Stop Engagement
Ending engagement brings bad news for diplomacy, which is all about engaging nations in meaningful conversations, communications and most of all, negotiations — until the last minute when a military conflict is proven inevitable. Even with the break of a war, diplomacy should stay alive because countries may talk themselves out of an ongoing war.
This idea helps us understand why Biden and Putin met recently, despite they deeply dislike each other. Talking is always better than fighting, and I wish there be more frequent meetings, phone calls and “Zoom like” exchanges between Beijing and Washington, between Biden & Xi. So for example the next time some western media brought out violation or offensive acts of China, like the forced labor in Xinjiang, a laughable accusation to anyone even with scanty knowledge of how things work in China today, Biden can initiate a phone call to hear what Xi Jinping has to say.
Allowing Different Voices In Washington
The fact of matter is, we are humans and we are what we hear, read and eat. I noticed that after the first (two hours long) phone call between Biden & Xi, Biden had a softer, more understanding tone toward Xi and China. As time goes on, as he heard more domestic hawks complaining against China, his raised his voices quite a bit.
Leaders must consciously make a periodical effort to hear diverse voices from different perspectives — unlike one is as ignorant and stubborn as Trump. This helps them make smarter, more balanced decisions. I wish the Pentagon and the State Department would provide different soundbites, although lately they have sounded more like each other. I see that as a risk factor inside the government.
Having policy debate is healthy as it brings safety to the country and the world. Tolerating and leveraging diverse voices is the best strength of this country. The US should never learn from, nor act like, China that actively kill or muffle diversity so that the whole country has only one official voice. This is the very reason I believe China is less stable domestically than the US, despite spending so much money on domestic stabilities.
Xi Jinping should learn something from the emperor Great Yu (大禹) in governing the flood. Yu‘s strategy was unblocking the water flows (导), while his father, emperor Gun (鲧), did something exactly opposite like Xi is doing: blocking the water flow anywhere he could (湮). The result? Almost everybody in China today knows about Great Yu and the story how he tamed the floods (大禹治水), while hardly anyone even had the knowledge of existence of his father.
Buying Property & Casualty Insurance
Of course, Campbell was talking about “engagement” as the grant China strategy. But even there his claim was oversimplifying and inaccurate. If the US is sincere about having a multi-dimensional relationship with China, with elements of competition, cooperation and adversaries, engagement is not an option but a must. Engagement is at the core of diplomacy mostly because it is a better choice than the alternatives. If we bring an end to engagement, what’s next? Decoupling, coercions, threats, ultimatums and straight military confrontations? None of these is as cost effective as engagement.
Engaging China is for America’s own good, not something that only China can benefit from. Engagement is like buying property and casualty insurance, in the sense that we are transferring the risk of conflicts through accumulation of resources that helps reduce or spread the risk of loss. All accident, health, property and casualty insurance policies are the so called “indemnity contracts,” which allow the insured parties to pay a small amount of premium to expect higher returns from the insurance policies.
international relationships are too complicated, the stakes are too high (especially between the US and China), and relationships involve too many dimensions to give up engagement prematurely — unless we want to cause international troubles at all costs, like Hitler did for the allies before and during the World War II.
The Western Vs. Chinese Genes
I want to end this blog by fact checking against the Campbell List from all public sources: the Wikipedia pages. But first a simple overall difference: Crusading the world to spread one’s own preferred beliefs is a part of “western genes”, not of Chinese culture. China has never tried to conquer the world even at its peak time. Instead, fighting internally among the Chinese is a long tradition and a preoccupied business throughout its history.
The furthest trip the Chinese ever had was made by Zheng He (郑和), who according to this Wikipedia page, “commanded expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Western Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433.” It was not because China did not have the technologies to go further, as “his larger ships carried hundreds of sailors on four decks and were almost twice as long as any wooden ship ever recorded.”
And how was the trip recorded? Instead of viewing it as one of the most glorious events in China’s history, “In the decades after the last voyage, Imperial officials minimized the importance of Zheng He and his expeditions throughout the many regnal and dynastic histories they compiled.”
Fact Checks of Campbell List
The Wikipedia says that “According to Reuters, island building in the South China Sea primarily by Vietnam and the Philippines has been going on for decades; while China has come late to the island building game, its efforts have been on an unprecedented scale it had from 2014 to 2016 constructed more new island surface than all other nations have constructed throughout history and as of 2016 placed military equipment on one of its artificial islands unlike the other claimants.”
“A 2019 article in Voice of America that compared China and Vietnam’s island building campaign in the South China Sea similarly noted that the reason why Vietnam in contradistinction to China has been subject to little international criticism and even support was because of the slower speed and widely perceived defensive nature of its island-building project.”
The takeaway: China was not the first in building islands in the South China Sea, other ASEAN countries did. We can blame China for moving too fast, but not for it being the first provocative mover in the region.
What about dispute with Japan, the Senkaku islands in particular? This Wikipedia page told us that “In September 2012, the Japanese government purchased three of the disputed islands from their private owner, prompting large scale protests in China. As of early February 2013, the situation has been regarded as “the most serious for Sino-Japanese relations in the post-war period in terms of the risk of militarised conflict.”
Only after this initial move of Japan government that “On 23 November 2013, the PRC set up the ‘East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone’ which includes the Senkaku Islands, and announced that it would require all aircraft entering the zone to file a flight plan and submit radio frequency or transponder information.”
Looking further back, “Japan argues that it surveyed the islands in the late 19th century and found them to be terra nullius (Latin: land belonging to no one); subsequently, China acquiesced to Japanese sovereignty until the 1970s. The PRC and the ROC argue that documentary evidence prior to the First Sino-Japanese War indicates Chinese possession and that the territory is accordingly a Japanese seizure that should be returned as the rest of Imperial Japan’s conquests were returned in 1945.“
Given this historical root, I am not sure it was a smart move for the US to include the island in its “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, meaning that a defense of the islands by Japan would require the United States to come to Japan’s aid.” Again, Japan started with a wrong move by government purchasing parts of the island from private owners, not China.
Regarding the border conflicts with India, even though Campbell wanted to make a big deal out of it by saying it was the worst border conflict since 1960s, the fact remains that the non-armed fist fights stopped and both sides retreated in the end. Once again, it started by China objecting the Indian road construction in the Galwan river valley, according to this Wikipedia page. Even so, “India and China have both maintained that there are enough bilateral mechanisms to resolve the situation.” The way Campbell presented to us was blowing the event out of proportion, again worrisome for someone in charge of Asian affairs.
I would not see China’s military actions in the Taiwan strait as the evidence that the country is the most aggressive and dangerous force in the world, like Nikki Haley said that if China takes Taiwan, it’s all over. Beijing has been talking about country reunification since the Nixon era, and frankly it has shown enough patience over time. Xi Jinping is definitely not a democratic leader as we wish, but he is not the “mad man” like Obama said of Trump, either.