By The Atlantic, December 2016
The country has become repressive in a way that it has not been since the Cultural Revolution. What does its darkening political climate—and growing belligerence—mean for the United States?
What if china is going bad? Since early last year I have been asking people inside and outside China versions of this question. By “bad” I don’t mean morally. Moral and ethical factors obviously matter in foreign policy, but I’m talking about something different.
Nor is the question mainly about economics, although for China the short-term stability and long-term improvement of jobs, wages, and living standards are fundamental to the government’s survival. Under China’s single-party Communist arrangement, sustained economic failure would naturally raise questions about the system as a whole, as it did in the Soviet Union. True, modern China’s economic performance even during its slowdowns is like the Soviet Union’s during its booms. But the absence of a political outlet for dissatisfaction is similar.
Instead the question is whether something basic has changed in the direction of China’s evolution, and whether the United States needs to reconsider its China policy. For the more than 40 years since the historic Nixon-Mao meetings of the early 1970s, that policy has been surprisingly stable. From one administration to the next, it has been built on these same elements: ever greater engagement with China; steady encouragement of its modernization and growth; forthright disagreement where the two countries’ economic interests or political values clash; and a calculation that Cold War–style hostility would be far more damaging than the difficult, imperfect partnership the two countries have maintained.
The next president, then, will face that great cliché, a challenge that is also an opportunity. The challenge is several years of discouraging developments out of China: internal repression, external truculence, a seeming indifference to the partnership part of the U.S.-China relationship. The opportunity is to set out the terms of a new relationship at the very moment when it is most likely to command China’s attention: at the start of a new administration.
Dealing with China is inescapable. It is becoming more difficult, and might get harder still.ina need to be high on the new president’s priority list? Because an important assumption has changed.
In both word and deed, U.S. presidents from Nixon onward have emphasized support for China’s continued economic emergence, on the theory that a getting-richer China is better for all concerned than a staying-poor one, even if this means that the center of the world economy will move toward China. In one of his conversations with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Barack Obama said, “I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.”
Underlying this strategic assessment was an assumption about the likely direction of China’s development. This was not the simplistic faith that if China became richer, it would turn into a liberal democracy. No one knows whether or when that might occur—or whether China will in fact keep prospering. Instead the assumption was that year by year, the distance between practices in China and those in other developed countries would shrink, and China would become easier rather than harder to deal with. More of its travelers and students and investors and families would have direct connections with the rest of the world. More of its people would have vacationed in France, studied in California, or used the internet outside China, and would come to expect similar latitude of choice at home. Time would be on the world’s side in deepening ties with Chinese institutions.
But that’s no longer true. Here are the areas that together indicate a turn:
Communications. China’s internet, always censored and firewalled, is now even more strictly separated from the rest of the world’s than ever before, and becoming more so. China’s own internet companies (Baidu as a search engine rather than Google, WeChat for Twitter) are more heavily censored. Virtual private networks and other work-arounds, tolerated a decade ago—the academic who invented China’s “Great Firewall” system of censorship even bragged about the six VPNs he used to keep up on foreign developments—are now under governmental assault. When you find a network that works, you dare not mention its name on social media or on a website that could alert the government to its existence. “It’s an endless cat-and-mouse,” the founder of a California-based VPN company, which I’m deliberately not identifying, recently told me. “We figure out a new route or patch, and then they notice that people are using us and they figure out how to block it. Eventually they wear most users down.” On a multiweek visit to China early last year, I switched among three VPNs and was able to reach most international sites using my hotel-room Wi-Fi. On a several-day visit last December, the hassle of making connections was not worth it, and I just did without Western news sources.
Those days are gone. Every week or two the Chinese press carries warnings, more and more explicit, by President Xi Jinping and his colleagues that dissent is not permissible and the party’s interests come first. Also this year, the government banned foreign-owned media—that is, all media beyond its direct control—from publishing anything in China without government approval. It cracked down on several publications (notably the business magazine Caixin and the Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend) that for years had mastered the art of skirting government controls.
This past February The Guardian ran a poignant piece about young journalists in China who had decided that there was no point in even trying to report on their society’s challenges. “Being a journalist has no meaning any more,” a person identified as “a thirtysomething editor from one of China’s leading news organisations” told The Guardian’s Tom Phillips. “My greatest feeling is that in recent years the industry’s freedoms have reached their lowest ebb in history.” A few weeks earlier I had been in Shanghai meeting with a group of 20‑something, still-idealistic Chinese student reformers, talking about their long-term hopes. One student wanted to open legal-aid clinics for migrant workers; another, a muckraking-style news service about urban inequities; another, a center for women’s rights. A few years earlier, I would have been excited to hear such plans. Now I’m fearful—and expect that if those students end up realizing their dreams, they will be doing so in some other country.
In the past five years, the screws have been tightened further on all these and other groups. Churches have been bulldozed across the country, allegedly as part of urban-development plans. Many of the country’s public defenders and public-interest lawyers are now in jail. So are prominent feminists and environmental organizers. The April 21 cover of The New York Review of Books this year billed an article by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell, who has written about China since the 1960s, as “The New Terror in China.” “In my lifetime I did not imagine I would see the day when China regressed back closer to its Maoist roots,” Schell told me. “I am fearing that now.”
Extraterritoriality. The recent repression is worse because China’s officials are attempting to extend it beyond China’s borders. Countries have always tried to use economic muscle to advance political or ideological ends. In China’s case, the most obvious example is its ongoing economic punishment of Norway (notably a boycott of its salmon) for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s insolence in selecting the still-imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago. But recently the Chinese government has jailed or harassed the relatives of activists and dissidents who have left the country, and put pressure on foreign companies and organizations to apply China’s censorship standards beyond its borders. Two years ago, the U.S. firm LinkedIn was found to have censored critical posts about China from its worldwide network, even when the posts were written and intended to be read only by people outside Chinese territory. The agreement was a condition of LinkedIn’s operating in China. Twitter is still banned there, but in April it hired an engineer who once worked for China’s military and security services as its managing director for China. In one of her first tweets, she wrote to CCTV, the carefully monitored state-run TV network, saying, “Let’s work together to tell great China story to the world!”
Day by day, life on the streets in the Chinese cities I’ve recently visited seems as free-form and commerce-minded as ever. But national politics matter more than they have in many years, and the political climate is darkening. “China is experiencing the most sustained domestic political crackdown since Tiananmen Square,” Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese law who teaches at Fordham University’s law school, wrote this year. Almost everyone I spoke with agreed.
I spoke with the head of a non-Chinese software company that has a 20-year record of sales to Chinese universities and local and provincial governments. He said customers began informing him last year that they were required to switch to Chinese suppliers. (When writing about the United States, I try never to use “blind” quotes. Precisely because of the increased repression I’m describing here, I need to do so when writing about China.) This spring, the Chinese government blocked Apple’s iTunes movie and iBooks services and apps in China. Soon thereafter, Apple reported its first global revenue decline in 13 years, in part due to plummeting income from China, and saw its market capitalization drop by $40 billion. The Chinese government’s motive in cracking down on Apple was probably political rather than crudely commercial. As an analysis in Varietypointed out, the rising popularity of streaming video on iPhones and other devices made the Apple sites important portholes for movies, documentaries, and other material from the outside world. But regardless of rationale, the effect was to damage Apple relative to its Chinese competitors (notably a smartphone company called Xiaomi), much as the politically motivated crackdown on Google damaged it relative to its main Chinese rival, Baidu.
The military. This is the most publicized aspect of a changed attitude from China. China has land borders with more than a dozen countries, and is connected by the East and South China Seas to half a dozen more. At the moment, it has territorial disputes with many of those countries, all of them on its maritime frontiers, because of its recent “island building” program and insistence on increased military, fishing, and mineral-exploitation rights in the region. In July, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines, and against China, in a dispute over China’s newly expansionary claims in the South China Sea. Since then, both sides seem to have backed away from ship-to-ship confrontations on the high seas, but underlying disagreements remain. “They have managed to alienate or intimidate many once-friendly neighbors, thereby unnecessarily increasing tensions in the region,” Orville Schell told me. “The only exceptions are Putin and [Rodrigo] Duterte,” the truculent new president of the Philippines.
It would be a mistake to view China’s recent actions “primarily as the product … of an aggressive leader,” Jeffrey Bader, the National Security Council’s China expert during Obama’s first term, wrote this year. “The military build-up, the assertive behavior in the South and East China Sea … the political repression and denial of basic rights”—these, in Bader’s view, predate Xi’s tenure and will postdate it too. Rather than being based purely on personalities, these changes are most often traced to the messages—both emboldening and unsettling—that the Chinese leadership took from the world financial collapse of 2008.
The paradoxical combination of insecurity and aggressiveness is hardly confined to China. The United States has all too many examples in its own politics. But this paradox on a national-strategic scale for China matched what many people told me about Xi himself as a leader: The more uncertain he feels about China’s diplomatic and economic position in the world, and the more grumbling he hears about his ongoing crackdown, the more “decisively” he is likely to act. “Xi is a weak man who wants to look strong,” a foreign businessman who has worked in China for many years told me. “He is the son of a famous father [Xi Zhongxun, who fought alongside Mao as a guerrilla and became an important Communist leader] and wants to prove he is worthy of the name. As we’ve seen in other cultures, this can be a dangerous mix.” Ten years ago, when I visited a defense-oriented think tank in Beijing, I was startled to see a gigantic wall map showing U.S.-affiliated encampments and weapons on every Chinese frontier except the one bordering Russia. I came to understand that the graphic prominence of the U.S. military reflected a fairly widespread suspicion that the United States wishes China ill, is threatened by its rise, and does not want to see China succeed. Almost no one I spoke with recently, however, foresaw a realistic danger of a shooting war between China and the United States or any of its allies—including the frequently discussed scenario of an unintentional naval or aerial encounter in the South China Sea. Through the past few years, in fact, U.S. military officials, led by the Navy, have engaged their People’s Liberation Army counterparts in meetings, conferences, and exercises, precisely to lessen the risk of war by miscalculation. “Naval forces are actually pretty good at de-escalating and steering out of one another’s way,” a senior U.S. Navy officer told me.
What is to be done? The next president will face a quandary often called the “Thucydides Trap.” This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.
The Chinese and U.S. economies are increasingly intertwined; U.S. universities depend on Chinese students who pay full freight; the culture of each country is enriched by its exposure to the other. Millions of people on each side, including my wife and me, enjoy, respect, and love people they have met and the encounters they have had in the other country. Because of bad air and suspect food, we were often sick while living in China, but the daily vividness of living there made us feel more fully alive.
The United States will be less fully able to realize its national potential if it can no longer deal with China. But the terms of engagement may need to be changed.
“I personally, and many people who have spent their lives trying to understand China, felt worried about what seemed to be significant changes in its internal and external behavior, and uncertain about how the U.S. should respond,” Susan Shirk, the head of the China policy center at UC San Diego, told me recently. Shirk and Orville Schell have put together a bipartisan Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward China, made up of nearly two dozen academics and veterans of recent Republican and Democratic administrations. It plans to submit a report to the new president, examining the options if China really is going bad.
Choosing battles carefully. The seas around China have been the theater for some of China’s most dramatic recent muscle-flexing. But for reasons of geography, history, and national psychology, they may be the wrong place for highly publicized efforts to draw the line.
Michael Pillsbury, a longtime analyst of the Chinese military who is generally viewed as a hawk, has suggested one reason. In a 2012 journal article called “The Sixteen Fears: China’s Strategic Psychology,” Pillsbury argued that the very steps through which the United States might most naturally try to show resolve and presence in the region are ones most likely to bring out a hostile Chinese response. For instance, the first three items on his list were “fear of an island blockade,” “fear of a loss of maritime resources,” and “fear of the choking off of sea lines of communication.” (A list of comparable U.S. fears would begin with “fear of a surprise attack,” on the model of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, and then “fear of national decline,” dating back to the nation’s earliest days.) Thus, what the U.S. might intend as efforts to restore the pre–Xi Jinping norm in the area could spring the Thucydides Trap and become a showdown about prestige, political values, and overall standing in the world.
Domestically, the main threat to China’s high-tech, high-culture ambitions is the increasing repression of the Xi Jinping years. China’s universities will always be second-rate as long as they are limited to a China-only internet. Its investment climate will be limited as long as the government so obviously manipulates the financial markets. “Their political model has absolutely no appeal, not even to their own people,” Chas Freeman told me. Freeman was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush, but 20 years earlier, as a young State Department officer, he had served as interpreter during Richard Nixon’s first meetings in Beijing. “This is a sui generis system that no one is copying.”
Nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that China’s oversteps have generated ill will far greater than the goodwill fostered by its foreign aid and Confucius Institutes, which are supposed to teach Chinese language and promote Chinese culture around the world.
Steadily shaping China’s choices. Near the end of my conversations, I would ask each person, “What’s the best tool the United States could use to shift China’s behavior?” And each person would pause, and look out the window or take a sip of coffee, and then begin with something like “Well, it’s complicated, because …” The complication is that the U.S. and China have become so intertwined economically, and so constructively collaborative in a range of scientific, environmental, academic, and even diplomatic spheres, that almost any measure that would “punish” China would necessarily also damage the United States and much of the rest of the world. Simplest example: When Donald Trump was asked in October how the U.S. should respond to various Chinese excesses, he said that if “we cut off [the economic] relationship with China, China would go bust so fast.” Of course so would everyone else, given China’s integration into the U.S. manufacturing supply chains and its heavy investment in U.S. real-estate and financial markets. The reason the measures would backfire is not that China “controls” the United States, as many Americans fear. The problem is that the two economies are now part of one large whole.
What may work, however, is a strategy one former Western-country ambassador to China described as “shaping reality in a way that makes it unattractive for China to maintain its present course.” The clearest recent example involves the Chinese military’s hacking of U.S. corporate secrets. A year ago, when Xi Jinping visited Washington (just after Pope Francis, who drew more press and crowds), President Obama is widely believed to have informed him that the United States had had enough on this front. Government-on-government spying and hacking? Sure, that’s normal. But governmental spying on foreign companies, to help their domestic rivals, was different. And if it didn’t stop, the U. S. government would find ways to make life more difficult for Chinese companies. Through use of America’s own formidable tools for cybermeddling? Through impediments to investments? Through shifts in visa policies for influential Chinese families and officials? Obama could leave the means to Xi’s imagination. It wasn’t specific, it wasn’t directly threatening, and it wasn’t public, but Obama’s talk was apparently effective. By most accounts, Chinese military hacking of U.S. corporations has decreased.
The United States does not have in every realm the leverage its cyberagencies give it in electronic warfare. But it is still the stronger partner in the relationship, with a more advanced economy, an incomparably more powerful military, and a vastly superior network of alliances. And it can use those to shape the realities in which China chooses its future course.
For 45 years, my predecessors have committed themselves to a partnership that would help China develop economically and resume its place of prominence among nations. We have believed in helping build a better future for China’s people. Our own national life has been enriched by this contact. This is an achievement of which China’s people, and our own, and the world’s can be proud.
But the relationship has been built on assumptions of balance and mutual benefit. We would open ourselves to China’s people and ideas, and China would be open to ours. We would incorporate Chinese firms into our economy, and our firms would have a fair chance within China. The events of recent years have forced us to reconsider whether China’s leaders still view this as a balanced and mutually beneficial relationship. We hope that on their side they, too, are reconsidering their recent actions and will return to the cooperative path. Chinese leaders often quote famous dictums from their literature, and I will cite one of our famous American sayings: We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The United States would prefer the easier path of cooperation, which has been so beneficial to our two countries. But we are preparing for the hard way.