I can’t stop thinking about the amount of confidence exhibited by Mr. Yang, Jiechi (pronounced like Young-Jay-Chee) during the opening exchanges before the first meeting in Anchorage to his American counterparts. I watched this video clip, this longer one and even this one since yesterday, although they partly overlapped.
What Strengths & Qualifications?
This exchange could mean little more than a media show targeting domestic audience on both sides. But let us ask this question, similar to what Mr. Yang asked but turned it around: Does China have the qualification to lecture the Americans?
Whether you call it “strengths” like the Biden administration has been doing or “qualifications” like the Chinese did this time in Anchorage, one thing is clear: Strengths & qualifications ultimately arise from within the country. The two parties can fight for years or even decades in Alaska without making much difference in their relative standing of the game if nothing changes inside their own countries.
One question however has to be answered first in order to talk about the topic intellectually: What strengths or qualifications we are talking about? The simple answer is that they must be multidimensional, not single, which explains why we should always speak of strengths or qualifications, never strength nor qualification without the ending “s”. At a minimum, according to Secretary Blinken, the strengths must be measured by economic, military, diplomatic and technological dimensions, for both the US and China.
Missing The US On Its Heyday
Speaking of multiple strengths, in the old days (up until after WWI), it was pretty much the military might and results from the battlefields that determined who must compensate whom for the war costs and who could expand its colonies.
We all have the US to thank for a fundamental change of the rules of the game. Essentially after winning WWII, the US did something historically different: It did not seek any colony, not even compensation for its war costs or losses. Instead, through the famous Marshall Plan, it ended up paying or assisting the countries that lost the war (like Japan and Germany), so that they could recover as much as possible and rejoin the global economy as quickly as possible.
I really missed the America back then, the heyday of the US showing so much self confidence and so much strengths that it was willing to share its successes with the rest of the world (the US even offered Marshall Plan to the Soviet Bloc, only to be rejected by Stalin). The country really taught the world what winning truly meant and how what was good for one country could be good for the world! I wish the US were as self-confident today as then, because a confident US can lead the world more efficiently and contribute more to the world.
Capital Has No Home Country, Workers Do
Growing up in China, I remember vividly the famous slogan of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels inside the cover page of their little book The Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!” (全世界无产者联合起来!)
Another well known idea of Marx is that workers “have no country” because as this web page explains, “they must regard the bourgeois national state as a machinery for their oppression and after they have achieved power they will likewise have ‘no country’ in the political sense, inasmuch as the separate socialist national states will be only a transitional stage on the way to the classless and stateless society of the future.”
Of course, like most if not all Marxist predictions, this one also failed to materialize. It turns out that “workers of the world” never saw things that way. The backlash following the globalization serves as a fresh reminder that workers of different countries care so much about their own welfare that they hate the workers in other countries who they believe had taken away their jobs.
It is the “capital of the world” that sees little need for a home country, as it wants to flow to wherever the highest returns are. This capital of the world drove up the Marshall Plan as the first successful modern attempt to reduce the significance of national boundaries — to be replaced by a unified global economy of free markets. The next time the capital of the world tried was the latest wave of globalization as we know it, which has been much bigger and broader than the Marshall Plan by covering more developing countries. Unfortunately this time it ended with a big backlash and even the US is now openly talking about putting its national interests above everything else.
The US Strengths Have Changed Little
The truth is that the absolute or self-possessed strengths of the US have experienced little change since the time of the Marshall Plan, it is the relative strengths of the country that have changed due to China’s rise. Of course in all competitions relative strengths are pretty much the only thing that matters. But even in terms of relative strengths, it is better to keep in mind that China is more of a “Paper Tiger” than the US is.
People should all read this beautiful essay published today in Washington Post illustrating why China is weaker than most Americans recognized. The author, Fred Hiatt, stated that: “I can endorse Yang’s criticism of U.S. human rights without being sent to prison for ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble‘. So I would say to Director Yang, you are right about America. If you are just as right about China, let Wang Bingzhang and Zhang Zhan and Joshua Wong out of prison. Let them speak their minds. Let your people organize and rally and vote.”
That is, the fundamental model of state capitalism is more vulnerable than the US model and China faces future risk exposures that are more severe and larger than the US.
But the Chinese vulnerabilities cover more domains than politics. For example, a collapse of its real estate market is all that is needed to crush the entire economy, reverse its breathtaking record of growth in decades. Beijing knows that and Xi, Jinping knows that, which is why he repeatedly reminded party officers to be mindful of “grey rhinos” and “black swans” or any subversion mistakes.
Across the dimensions listed by Blinken, none of China strengths had been entirely home grown. Like I said last time, the US owns originality in all its dimensions of strengths — and China has none. Let’s look at China’s economic strength, as pretty much everything else is derived from that.
China’s Two Exogenous Pushes of Economic Growth
A quick looking back at the history of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) would help. Since 1949, PRC has had two surges of growth of its economic muscles, each has had foreign inputs. The first was the “honeymoon” or “Comrades + Brotherhood” period with the Soviet Union, roughly from 1949 to 1959, especially during its first Five Year plan of 1953-57. According to this website, the Soviet Union “contributed advice, logistics and material support. Moscow provided a small loan of $300 million and, more importantly, the services of several thousand Soviet engineers, scientists, technicians and planners.”
As a result, “Industrial output more than doubled, with an annual growth rate of 16 per cent. Steel production grew from 1.3 million tonnes in 1952 to 5.2 million tonnes in 1957; 16.56 million tonnes were produced in 1953-57, double China’s combined steel production between 1900 and 1948.”
There were a total of 156 engineering or industrialization projects, which as correctly pointed out by this author, “laid the foundations for China’s industrialization.”
The second exogenous push to Chinese economy was the “reform and opening-up” period under the auspice of Deng, Xiaoping, which largely coincided with the period of globalization, especially after China joined the WTO. This time the western inputs had been mostly on the low or mature end of technologies, and no engineer was sent to China to direct construction and industrialization — like the Russians did in the 1950s. But it turned out that seeing the designs for the fancy and advanced goods was enough for the Chinese to jump start its own economy. And we have seen the rest of the Chinese miracle unfolding till today.
Like I said before, the lesson from the brief history of the PRC is that we can believe the Chinese are sincere when they ask for global competition but not confrontation, cooperation but not decoupling. The irony here is that, like I said before, an authoritarian regime like China has taken the right side of the history, and it is the US that faces a real danger of betraying its own long history of free trade, open competition and the doctrine of win-win games.
If you only consider political institutions, you will never understand how this would happen. How is it ever possible for an authoritarian country to be right while a democracy wrong? But if you consider preinstitutions as well as institutions, it becomes easy to see where it all comes from: Democracy does not guarantee winning, while authoritarianism is not always destined for failure. It is more about historical trajectory, timing, generalized game resources, mindsets and most of all, the interactions between game players.
Reading Competitions Right
I want to cite this opinion piece from the Atlantic as a bad example of reading the Sino-US competition wrong. A few sentences from the author would help us see what is on some US officers’ mind. Speaking of the harsh exchanges before the first meeting in Anchorage, “The meeting would have been a failure if it had resulted in general declarations to cooperate while minimizing competition.” Because, according to the author, “Organizing the relationship around cooperation is theoretically desirable as an end goal but will be unattainable for the foreseeable future, given the unfolding reality of an assertive, repressive China and a defiant America.”
It is usually a bad — even dangerous — idea to determine your game strategy solely by intents of yours and others. Just because China has been assertive does not mean the US should change its strategy from cooperation to competition. By the same logic, just because “China believes that the balance of power has shifted in its favor over the past 10 years, especially during the pandemic” does not mean the US should fix that assessment for them.
When the girls from Berkeley last Saturday met girls from Stanford on the soccer field, each team wanted exactly the same thing as the other team: defeating the competitor. This holds for all sports games. In fact, a game would have to be extended if its scores tied. By the same token, any team that does not want to win is not a good team and makes the game boring to watch. You should see how excited the Berkeley girls were when they beat Stanford for the first time in 8 years!
The right strategy is to play by resources of your own, your allies as well as your competitor. I have no problem seeing the US playing the “human rights” card because this is what the US is relatively strong. Similarly, the US should play with allies, which again is where China is relatively weak — as long as Washington remains clearheaded that these things alone do not define the whole game and do not guarantee a victory in the economic domain.
Reading the Competitors Right
The US also should not blow the issues of Hong Kong and Xinjiang up out of proportion, which is easy to do given the currently highly negative sentiment in the country. By the way, the latter helps explain the number of anti-Asian incidents across the country, thanks partly for Trump calling Covid-19 the “China Virus”. They are “anti-Asian” only because most non-Asians can not tell Chinese apart from Korean, Japanese or Vietnam (I myself would have to guess sometimes), otherwise the incidents against Chinese would be a lot higher.
Back to Xinjiang & Hong Kong, I just want to say that things are more complicated than Beijing being the evil against its own people. It is interesting to see that excellent essay by Fred Hiatt claiming that “No one disputes that the protest was peaceful” in talking about the Hong Kong protest, when in fact that protest was far from peaceful and cops in Hong Kong were beaten by protestors, something hard to even imagine in the US. For example, I saw the other day that police had pepper sprayed the “unruly” spring breakers in Miami Beach and nobody would blame them for human rights violation.
Sometimes I feel depressed: If the opinion page editor of the Washington Post (i.e., Fred Hiatt) did not know what happened in Hong Kong, the world would never know any better. This is not to blame Fred but more of human nature. Can you expect the average resident in California to keep an active log of what is going on in Tennessee or Mississippi (I had to Google them to find the right spellings of their names)? Of course not. We only seek information for the people or places we are interested in. But this is only rational, because our time and energy are limited and we must allocate them to things that matter most to us. (By the way, we know Meghan the Duchess was lying when she told Winfrey that she did not know much about Prince Harry. Who in today’s world would marry someone without Googling him/her first, right?)
The Xinjiang case is similar. Do not take the words from the so called eye witnesses literally. It is possible that some of them may lie for various reasons, sometimes just for public attention. I have read enough stories of the so called “democratic fighters” from China, who would do anything just to get money from the US government or from the public. They lie, they fight among themselves constantly for who should be in charge of the organizations, and they sometimes even commit crimes in this country. It is not just the mainlanders but guys from western countries like Adrian Zenz and Steve Bannon, who would make up stories or statistics to promote their causes.
In general, it is important to keep in mind that being an Authoritarian regime has been almost nothing but an international liability because the default attitude of people in democracies is not to believe whatever they say. However, a lie is a lie, and it does change its nature just because it is about an authoritarian country.
I am however 100% on board for the charges against China’s suppression of lawyers, reporters and activists. The US should keep pushing China toward more freedom in that direction, making the lives of the suppressing government harder by bringing international pressures to them.
Reading China Dynamically Right
The final point I want to make is that we should read Beijing and Washington right. Again, the same article of the Atlantic stated that “The truth is that the United States does pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests (although not necessarily those of the Chinese people), while the CCP surely poses a threat to liberal democracy and U.S. interests. Ultimately, Washington and Beijing will have to acknowledge this to each other. That will be difficult for the Biden administration, which is accustomed to assuming that American interests are not a threat to any other government, but broadly benefit all major world powers.”
This is an unfair to the Biden team, which has kept saying said that the relationships with China are multifaceted, including rivalry. More generally, a game player is too naive if she or he holds a presumption that all games are win-win games. Smart as Biden team is, they are unlikely to make that kind of mistake.
On the other hand, we should hold dynamic view of our competitors because they, just like we, can and will change over time. China for example will move toward more serious about protecting intellectual property rights, for the simple reason that they will have more and more of their own intellectual properties to protect.
I want to return to my earlier point of having some basic trust about China. It is so easy to see China — or any other competitors for that matter — as a devil or demon in every sense, when the truth is that we are lucky to have a competitor almost as large as us. Size matters, especially a matching size between competitors does many good things to both sides, first among them is the reduced risks. Put simply, the US is much safer dealing with China than dealing with North Korea, the latter can and will take many risky steps as long as it can win. Having little to lose from a war with the US, Kim Jong-un is willing to do anything, including suicidal moves. China on the other hand has already too much to lose from a war with the US, so unless Taiwan — or the US — did something stupid to provoke Beijing, China is unlikely to seize Taiwan just because it has claimed Taiwan as a province of the mainland.