The Problem With “Distrust & Verify”
The importance of having efficient dialogues, not just monologues among ourselves, cannot be overstressed. I am not a big fan of the so called “Distrust and Verify” doctrine by the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who probably thought he was smarter than Ronald Reagan with his famous and original “Trust, but verify” mantra. No, Reagan was smarter because there is a good reason to begin with some trust.
The genocide case provides a perfect example why starting from distrust will most likely end with distrust. In other words, distrust will feed itself and initial distrust will be snow balling to more distrust. The “verify” part becomes an empty word or window dressing, all that is really going on is “distrust.” A distrust presumption can and will distract us from searching for facts and proofs. We consciously or unconsciously fall into the trap that “When in doubt, stay distrust!” when the correct mindset should be “When in doubt, pause and search for evidences!”
It is the need for humbly seeking facts that makes international dialogue so imperative. Frankly I wish the Zenz report had used a less assertive tone, but an individual scholar is perfectly entitled to his or her personal opinions. Government leaders on the other hand must be more careful when it comes to making policies, because the stakes are much higher.
“China Tough” Vs. “China Smart”
I agree with Kurt Campbell that we want to have a stable competition with China. But reaching that level of interactions requires some baseline trust, plus staying analytical, otherwise not only stable competition is impossible, even the competition part will be given away to head-on clashes. The US and China relationship will be reduced to enemies in a zero-sum game, when all we need for a China strategy is to be tough.
Being “China tough” is easy these days. Everyday we hear commentators and read opinion pages along that line. There is even an ongoing race of Who is tougher to China. With such an atmosphere, with the bipartisan and public views currently the lowest on China, one is likely to walk away even if the toughness results in some bad consequences or losses. Trump essentially lost his trade war with China, but hardly anyone held that against him.
Being “China smart” is much harder, It requires deep knowledge and good communication skills. But first and foremost are two things: (1) having baseline trust and (2) staying analytical. These matter more because knowledge and communication skills can be learned but baseline trust and an analytical approach are best preinstalled. One thing we have learned from Trump supporters is that facts alone are not enough to make people smarter. You need a deep appreciation of truth and facts and you need to analyze social facts constantly to stay smart.
There is another possibility for being China smart: The forced smart. That is, when the two countries are neck to neck in possessed power and resources, enough for mutually destroying each other, then they will have to reach an equilibrium or some agreements. Yes, such a situation will be stable, like it or not.
While this forced smart will be stable, it won’t be as stable as actively constructed smart. In that sense, only the latter is real smart, the former is not. The point is that nothing can replace trust, and trust can pay compound interests automatically as time goes on, even without new investments later on. On the forced smart we can’t rule out misjudgment of either side, which may push the party or parties to play the game of chicken, that is, no party is willing to yield when at least one party should. Therefore, both end up suffering unnecessarily or unwisely.
Living In The Past & Fearful of Future
Installing baseline trust requires preemptively uninstalling the view that China is presumably or automatically sinister. Unfortunately, many in the US, their minds anyway, stay in the past and refuse to accept the status quo as it is.
Let me explain: Our expectation of China in the past — that the country becomes more liberal, freer or whatever and however we desire it to be when it gets richer — clearly belongs to the past. We do not own it today and we can try to hold that against China but it does us no good. After all, it was only our expectation and China certainly does not feel owing anything to us for not acting the way we expected the country to be. Therefore, the best strategy is to let go the old expectation as yesterday’s story, and live in the reality today by thinking of how to deal with the real China.
But the other mistake that many have made or are making is to jump from one extreme to another, or from past to the future. They wanted to learn the lesson from the past, so they overreact by saying that we were wrong to assume China as a benign partner, so we cannot make the same mistake twice. China is an evil and we must defeat it now before it eats us alive. “Once bitten, twice shy” would be the words for describing them.
Interestingly, those whose minds are in the past tend to be the same people fearful of China future. The best strategy is to avoid these two extremes and accept China as it is today — and build our strategy accordingly. Instead of looking back and pointing fingers at each other and arguing whose fault it was for China to get this big and this strong, it is far more important to put the old expectations aside and just deal with China like we would with any other countries.
After all, as this author pointed out, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore “all of which defied the “expectations of Anglo-American economists, journalist, and trade officials.” There is no reason for China to be different.
US Is Lagging Behind In Pursuing National Interests
I have pointed out in an earlier blog that we are living in a world of national interests. What has set China and the US apart is that China has long been trying to maximize its national interests, while the US (especially the liberals) is still reading the world as an arena of ideologies — consciously and unconsciously, on and off, sometimes confidently and other times not so confidently.
Now that Trump is out of the WH, it is safe for me to say one thing that I was afraid of saying before: Trump was the first modern day president emphasizing so much of the national economic interests. The Biden administration should learn something from Trump — but not from Pompeo, see the reason above — in terms of putting US national interests first. The other thing Trump was right was to point out the DOJ likes wars “because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
This reminds me of the time when Bush Jr. ordered troops to invade Iraq in 2003. Almost everyone in China thought the US was after the oil. I was the only one (to my knowledge) to see differently. Yes, the invasion was driven by resources, but a different kind. You know what they say, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The same holds true for weapons. When you have too many advanced weapons, you will have an urge to try those on real or invented enemies.
I know people may judge me for saying this, but I still want to say it in my personal blog: As far as I can see, what happened in Hong Kong and Xinjiang were driven more by domestic imperatives than by a desire to challenge the world orders and show off the Chinese muscles. That’s just against China’s own interests.
Xi, Jinping is not an evil by default. As I said previously, Xi is first and foremost a patriot and a competent national leader that China has not seen before. Among some Chinese Xi is not appreciated but hey, no national leader can — and should — make everyone happy.
The internal speeches of Mr. Xi on Xinjiang told us that it was Xi who set the basic tone of “Indoctrinating but not eliminating the Uyghurs.” Xi has his bottom line, unlike Mao, the latter used to claim during the World Conference of the Communist Parties in 1957 that he would be willing to see half the Chinese people die — as long as the Soviet bloc can beat the US.
Mao spent half of his life in military battles, while the priority of China and Xi today is to avoid military conflicts with the US as much as possible. Why am I so sure? Because China wants the US businesses and the US technologies. Believe me, if they could get away from stealing US technologies, they will. But if not, it is also true that they have been faithfully paying intellectual property taxes and loyalties for decades. At the minimum, China wants to keep touch with the US rather than decoupling.
I never believed in the Zenz report and will present evidences to reject the charge in another part of the blog when I received more Xinjiang Statistical Yearbooks to work with. Genocide is just not something China will do. The Tiananman Square massacre in 1989 was unlikely to be repeated today, partly because when its economy has reached the current size, the cost of doing another massive killing is simply too high to bear. Another reason is that decades of development may not have turned China into a democracy, but the party and the society are more civilized in terms of treating lives preciously. China has changed, the communist party has changed — from a revolutionary party to a party of serving national interests. Just read this most recent real life story of saving 11 trapped mine workers after two weeks underground to convince yourself. The final reason is that China, especially Xi, has (falsely) believed that their system is superior to the US. They are anxious to show the world that they have a nice and harmonious racial relationship — unlike the US. Anyone dare to even mention the thought of ethnic genocide would be subject at least to party discipline, even criminal trials.
Finally, another thing that makes China different from many if not all failed countries is that this country is genuinely willing to learn from the US. Mr. Xi’s speeches on how to handle the Xinjiang terrorism showed that he had been watching events in the US closely.
In sum, the party and the country must have done something right to come to its current achievements. That “something” I believe is the leadership’s deep understanding of Chinese people, what they crave for (material fortunes) and what they care less (individual human rights, democracy), and then leverage these social preferences to grow domestic economy and steadily improve its citizens’ welfare — thus to consolidate its power.
National Interests Help “China Smart”
Putting our national interests first has several advantages. First of all, it simplifies the China strategy. Should we go tough or gentle on China? Simple, if something will be good to the US, deal with China softly and work together with it; if something may hurt or threats to hurt the US, be tough.
Secondly, putting national interests first also means we reduce the chance of misreading China, which will benefit the entire world, including US and China. When your attention shifts from ideology to GDP or GNP, it becomes easier to understand China, because everything China does is to grow its economy and maximize citizens (mostly materialistic) welfare. Trump knew it, and that’s why he stayed away from accusing China’s moves in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
It is not necessary to demonize everything China does through an ideological prism, although it will be harder for the Biden administration to shy completely away from ideology — I told myself that even before the inauguration. For one thing, China faces domestic imperatives more frequently than international imperatives, much like the US. The difference is that because the US has a much bigger international stage and is more internationally active in global affairs than China, it tends to see or overread every Chinese move from an international perspective that requires counter-acts from the US, if not from the economic perspective then an ideology need.