Last month Civic Future invited me to join a panel at their annual policy forum. The topic: what the United Kingdom should do about China. As I am neither a British citizen nor an expert in British affairs, I thought it impolitic to lecture my hosts on how they should be governing their own country. Instead I focused my remarks on the communist government in Beijing. My aim was to lay out several elements of Chinese foreign policy that must be taken into account by statesmen from any Western country.
It will be difficult to guide any nation through the storms of the next two decades; it will be harder still if our leaders chart their course without reference to the fundamental ways, means, and ends of Chinese strategy. These ways, means, and ends are discernible. When you clear out the deadwood and the underbrush you will find that the many branches of Chinese foreign policy spring from five trunks, each vital and deep-rooted.
Others might parse the fundamentals of Chinese grand strategy slightly differently. What follows is my personal attempt to summarize the essentials of Chinese foreign policy in as few points as possible. These can be stated as follows:
- The overriding goal of the Communist Party of China is to restore China to a position of glory and influence commensurate with its ancestral heritage.
- This can only be accomplished by pioneering a technological transformation of the global economy on the scale of the industrial revolution.
- The greatest perceived threat to China’s rise is found in the ideological domain—and in a globalized world that domain is a global one.
- Chinese leaders imagine they will reshape the global order primarily through economic, not military, tools.
- The main exception to this is Taiwan. With Taiwan economic tools have proven ineffective; the possibility of war is very real.
As I was limited to only eight minutes speaking time, I did not explore all five of these elements at great length. I decided to focus on points #1 and #3, which struck me as the most immediately relevant to the British state. However, I have explored most of the others in various essays I have published over the last few years.
Those who would like to read my assessment of the singular role that technology plays in Chinese grand strategy should read the essay Nancy Yu and I published in Foreign Policy earlier this year: “Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution.” (For those locked out behind a paywall, I excerpt a key paragraphs and expand my argument in my follow up blog post, and summarize my arguments on Bonnie Glaeser’s podcast China Global).
I have written a great deal about Chinese perceptions of threat and the relationship between their threat perceptions and their foreign policy. My best attempts to tackle the topic succinctly are my two contributions to the Lowy Institute round-table on a Chinese world order.
I outline the role Communist leaders believe that economic integration will play in advancing their nation to “the center of the world stage” in my 2020 essay for Palladium, “The Theory of History That Guides Xi Jinping.” (The economic situation has changed somewhat in the years that followed. I analyze how these changes have impacted both Party theory and strategy here and here).
Finally: I have not yet written a piece that explains, with proper sourcing, why I believe the Chinese leadership will be willing to resolve the Taiwan problem through force of arms. I do describe the basic strategic dynamics at play, however, in the essays “We Can Only Kick Taiwan Down the Road So Far” and “Sino-American Competition and the Search For Historical Analogies.”
A video of my opening statement, as well as the prepared statements of the other two panelists and our responses to the questions from the audience, has been embedded at the top of this post. You can also find it here, on the Civic Future Youtube channel.
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For more of my writing on geopolitics, you might also like the posts “Sino-American Competition and the Search for Historical Analogies,” “Against the Kennan Sweepstakes,” “Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers,” “Fear the First Strike,” “The Lights Wink Out in Asia,” and “Losing Taiwan is Losing Japan.” To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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The overriding goal of the Chinese Communist Party is protection of the Party’s primacy and the elimination of potential threats to that primacy. Not the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Not the betterment of the lives of ordinary Chinese. These are at best secondary goals. The CCP under Xi Jinping will ultimately fail in its objectives because its system of government cannot extract the full potential of its citizens. History has shown that economic power, and the military power that is derived from it, accrues to well run liberal democracies with rule of law. The tragedy of the Chinese nation is that with a few exceptions, it has never had leaders who cared more for the people than protecting their own privileged positions.
Quite unlike the esteemed Mr. Greer, who almost always make reasoned and well-sourced statements, Mr. “William” here made claims completely devoid of any factual backing; it is rather unfortunate that the comment under discussion appears to your truly as rather hysterical assertions pumped out from some propaganda or advertising department.
William’s claims that China never had leaders, with few exceptions, who cared for the people and that the current iteration is simply the latest in a long line of despots who only sought to preserve their own privileges are vague yet sweeping in their generality, this is even before we begin to consider as a point of historical comparison just how many caring leaders who loved the “People” (a rather modern concept) that the Greco-Roman-Petty_Kingdoms-Westphalian_States had produced over its three thousand years time-span in Eurpoe. As any reasonably well-informed person would know, it is arguable that both the CCP and the KMT originated from the May Fourth movement, among other things, and the May 4th movement itself was a direct reaction to the perceived inequities of the Versailles Treaty and was fundamentally a movement to strengthen China, and by extension the material welfare of all Chinese citizens via cultural and techological reforms. That the material welfare of the Chinese people has improved over the past century cannot be disputed, and yet there are many, such as William, who would have us believe the fact that the average Chinese citizen now can safely eat three square meals a day rather than being invaded or killed by the Eight Nation Alliance or being bombed and massacred by the Kwantung Army is a mere incidental to the super-villain Xi Jinping’s will to power. The lack of self-reflection and the boundless confidence with which William apparently posted this above comment is rather incredible to me. Another point that William should reflect upon is just how exactly the US and China are currently “extracting” human potential, perhaps by performing a comparative analysis of which nation’s elite is largely seeking rent and thereby immiserating a large section of its population and which is creating wealth and human capital via competition and targetted governmental efforts.
I would agree with you wholeheartedly that Xi Jinping’s wants “national rejuvenation” to restore China to it’s former glory prior to “the Lost Century” and seeks to use S&T as the means to get there. Xi Jinping outlined that in his 19th Party Congress speech in October 2017 speech. Also, he Chinese Academy of Science has an excellent book on how they intend to get there by 2050.Your assessment is correct on using military force for Taiwan only – a war involving the 1st, 2d, and 3rd largest economies is “bad for business” and will utterly derail China’s goals to outpace the US in technological dominance. The outcome is not preordained, but the Chinese will give the US a run for its money.
For historical analogies in strategic competition, I would use the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 18th century, Britain and Germany in the late19th/early to mid-20th century, and the US-Japan economic competition from 1930 to 1941 that led to a shooting war. A good read that is a basic primer on this subject is Ray Dalio’s book ” Principles for a Changing World Order”