Tài liệu nghiên cứu sinh

The U.S.
and Chinese Presidents Should

Go on a Weekend Retreat
They and the rest of the world will regret the result if their reprisals over trade issues keep
escalating.
June 4, 2019
President Trump with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing in 2017.Credit...Damir

Sagolj/Reuters
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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If I had one wish it would be that the leaders and trade negotiators of the U.S. and China would
go on a weekend retreat together — I’d suggest Singapore — with a facilitator — I’d suggest
Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong — with no press or tweeting allowed and try to
work out the basic trade and geopolitical understandings to govern their future ties.
Because if their trade tit-for-tats keep intensifying, they’re going to do something that they and
the rest of the world will profoundly regret — fracture the foundations of globalization that have
contributed so much to the prosperity and relative peace the planet has enjoyed since fighting
two world wars in the last century.
The U.S. and China are the two most powerful countries and economies in the world. Their
economies are also totally intertwined. If they start ripping out the telecommunications wiring,
manufacturing supply chains, educational exchanges and financial investments that they’ve
made in each other since the 1970s, we’ll all end up living in a less secure, less prosperous and
less stable world.
If you don’t think that’s a real prospect, you haven’t been paying attention.
President Trump was right to engage in some trade shock therapy with Beijing. China no longer
just wants to sell the U.S. toys and tennis shoes. It now wants to sell the same high-tech
products, like 5G telecom, robotics, electric cars and A.I. systems, that America specializes in. So
China had to be made to bluntly understand that the U.S. would not look the other way anymore
from China’s longstanding abusive trade practices, nor would it be bought off, either.
We need a level playing field — but not a new battlefield.
“A strategic reset was needed in relation to 21st-century China, but the danger is that we’re
sleepwalking into a generational conflict that is neither necessary nor one that we in the West
are prepared for, any more than the Chinese,” observed Nader Mousavizadeh, co-founder of
Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm that advises many global companies
doing business in China.
There has been a tendency in Western policy toward China, added Mousavizadeh, to lurch “from
the lazy truism that the U.S.-China relationship is the most important one of the 21st century —
and therefore should be shielded at all costs from ordinary economic and geopolitical pressures
— to an equally lazy fatalism about a new great power conflict with China. But there is nothing
inevitable about a new Cold War.”
Yet, this seems to be what we’re stumbling into. “The new divide with China may begin with
technology and continue with finance and manufacturing but it ends, ultimately, with people,”
noted Mousavizadeh. “If the tariff war now underway culminates with removing Chinese
citizens from Western businesses, and U.S. citizens from Chinese companies out of fears of
espionage or theft, it will constitute an irreversible step toward generational enmity.”
While I agree with Trump’s core instinct that the trade issue had to be addressed in strategic
fashion, I disagree with his total reliance on tariffs to force China to the table. Tariffs are so open
to abuse, as each sector of the U.S. economy — like farming — demands special exemptions or
payoffs. And more important, this approach makes the conflict all about America versus China
on trade, when this should be about the world versus China on trade. Because European, Asian and
Latin American countries all have the same trade problems with China that we do.
Trump should have signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which brought together the 12
biggest Pacific economies excluding China, representing 40 percent of global G.D.P., behind
American trade standards — and then sought to bring along the European Union as well — into
a single coalition to negotiate a new trade regime with Beijing. Instead, Trump tore up TPP and
alienated the Europeans by imposing various steel and aluminum tariffs on them. So foolish.
But that’s now water over the dam.
Trump’s team thought its approach was working — that tariff pressures plus negotiations would
get China to enact into its laws restrictions on cybertheft of intellectual property, forced
technology transfers, certain subsidies to Chinese companies, nonreciprocal trade rules,
currency manipulation and barriers to China’s financial services markets, among other issues.
Negotiators also discussed a detailed process for adjudicating disputes.
All along, though, the Chinese complained that the language sought by the U.S. was one-sided
and tantamount to a confession of guilt by China that would make it look as if President Xi
Jinping was kowtowing to the U.S.
The Chinese also complained that Trump was making excessive demands in terms of the
amount of U.S. goods and services he wanted China to buy to reduce the trade imbalance, and
that the U.S. would still not guarantee to end tariffs. Also, some Beijing hard-liners wanted to
teach the Americans a lesson about the real balance of power today — or, as one of them put it to
me last year: “You Americans are too late. We’re too big to be pushed around anymore.”
Whatever the reasons, in the first week in May, following intense trade talks in Beijing — which
left the Americans thinking they were getting close to a deal — the Chinese sent back their latest
edits on the working draft: On page after page, sources said, lines were drawn through almost all
the clauses the two sides had been negotiating for months. No deal.
Trump was livid, and on May 10, he hiked the tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese exports
to the U.S. to 25 percent from 10 percent. Beijing then slapped new tariffs on $60 billion of U.S.
products.
On a separate track, Trump put the Chinese telecom giant Huawei on a list of companies that
need special permission to buy U.S.-made microchips, software and other components. The
reasons were Huawei’s long history of reported stealing of intellectual property and the fear that
if our allies bought Huawei’s 5G telecommunication system it would open them and us to much
greater Chinese espionage. China retaliated with an edict to strike back at any foreign company
that boycotts Huawei.
And that is how a trade war can escalate into a full-scale U.S.-China economic war. It may be
that China’s government simply cannot or has no desire to change its growth model — hard
work, smart infrastructure and education investments, a high savings rate, plus lots of unfair
trade practices — because it would mean the end of Communist Party rule.
It may be that 2019 will mark the beginning of both the Sino-American geopolitical and
economic Cold War and the erecting of an equivalent of the Berlin Wall down the middle of the
global technology market, dividing those that trust installing Chinese technologies to power
their 5G phones, computers and internet systems and those that don’t.
I don’t know if that’s where we are. I do know we urgently need to avoid that place if we can. The
two sides need to get together at the highest levels and explore whether there is a credible — but
more gradual — approach to changing China’s trade practices that we both can live with.
And they have to explore whether there is an alternative to just banning companies like Huawei,
such as fining or suspending them for abuses, while giving them a clear road map back into our
markets if they demonstrate that they’ve cleaned up their act.
Our goal should be to move China toward global best practices on all these issues, not to isolate
it and create a bifurcated world economy, internet and technology market.
It would help if we were mobilizing every one of our allies in this project, not hammering them
with tariffs, too. It would help if we had a president who was more respected around the world
and did not always have to be seen as “winning” and the other guy as losing.
It would all help. But here is where we are. And where we are is really dangerous.
On Taiwan, Biden Should Find His Inner
Truman
May 24, 2022
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
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The White House insists that President Biden did not break with longstanding policy when, at a
news conference in Tokyo on Monday with the prime minister of Japan, he flatly answered “yes”
to the question, “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”
Don’t believe the diplomatic spin that there’s nothing to see here. Don’t believe, either, that the
president didn’t know what he was doing. What Biden said is dramatic — as well as prudent,
necessary and strategically astute. He is demonstrating a sense of history, a sense of the moment
and a sense that, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, new rules apply.
American policy toward Taiwan for the past 43 years has been chiefly governed by two core, if
somewhat ambiguous, agreements. The first, the One China policy, which Biden reaffirmed in
Tokyo, is the basis for Washington’s diplomatic recognition of Beijing as the sole legal
government of China.
The second, the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, is the basis for our continued ties to Taiwan as a
self-governing entity. But unlike the treaties the U.S. maintains with Japan and South Korea, the
act does not oblige American forces to come to the island’s defense in the event of an attack —
only that we will provide Taiwan with the weapons it needs to defend itself.
Former presidents, including Donald Trump, have hinted that the United States would fight for
Taiwan but have otherwise remained studiedly vague on the question. That may have once
served Washington’s strategic purposes, at least when relations with Beijing were warming or
stable.
But Xi Jinping has changed the rules of the game.
He did so in Beijing by setting himself up as leader for life. He did so in Hong Kong by doing
away with the “one country, two systems” formula and crushing pro-democracy protests. He did
so by flouting the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling against China’s outrageous claims to
possess most of the South China Sea. He did so through a policy of industrial-scale theft of
U.S. intellectual property and government data. He did so through a policy of Covid-
19 stonewalling and misinformation. He did so with pledges of friendship to Russia that
reassured Vladimir Putin that he could invade Ukraine with relative impunity.
And he’s changed the rules of the game through some of the most aggressive military
provocations against Taiwan in decades. Countries that spoil for fights tend to get them.
All the more so after the chaotic U.S. retreat from Afghanistan threatened to turn into a global
rout. Chinese propaganda organs began speaking of the “Afghan effect.” An editorial last
summer in Beijing’s Global Times warned that “Washington’s arms are way too long, so Beijing
and Moscow should cut them short in places where Washington shows its arrogance and
parades its abilities.”
What, then, should Biden have done? Stick to the diplomatic formulas of a now-dead status
quo?
This is not the first time Biden has suggested the United States would fight for Taiwan, but the
last time he said something along similar lines, it was treated as a classic Biden gaffe by the
press. Now it should be clear he means it. In Tokyo he stressed that an invasion of Taiwan would
be a catastrophe on a par with Ukraine — and that he’d be willing to go much further to stop it.
This is a good way of not repeating Dean Acheson’s infamous 1950 mistake of excluding South
Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia, which invited North Korea’s invasion later that
year. It’s also a good way of not repeating Biden’s own mistakes in the run-up to the invasion of
Ukraine that gave Putin too many reasons to doubt the strength of Washington’s commitments
to Kyiv.
It’s also a good basis for a more open military relationship with Taiwan. Last year The Wall
Street Journal broke the news that a few dozen U.S. Special Operations troops and Marines were
in Taiwan, secretly training their island counterparts. That contingent should grow.
So should U.S. sales of the kinds of smaller weapon systems — Stingers, Javelins, Switchblades
— that have foiled the Russians in Ukraine and that are hard to target and easy to disperse.
Beijing will call such steps provocations, but it’s mere deterrence. The point is to raise the costs
of an invasion beyond anything even a headstrong chauvinist like Xi is willing to pay.
Two more items. First, Taiwan’s defense budget, in relation both to its robust economy and the
military threat it faces, remains scandalously low, despite recent growth. The Biden
administration should stress to Taipei that the American public’s appetite to help our allies
militarily is directly proportionate to their willingness to help themselves.
Second, U.S. defense spending, despite nominal increases, is also too low in the teeth of
inflation, with a Navy that continues to shrink in a world far more dangerous in this decade than
it was in the last. Biden may have wanted to model his presidency on F.D.R.’s and the New Deal.
History may give him no choice but to model it on Truman’s and containment. There are worse
precedents.
This Is What America Is Getting Wrong
About China and Taiwan
Oct. 16, 2023
By Oriana Skylar Mastro
Ms. Mastro is an expert on Chinese politics and military policy.
For a half-century, America has avoided war with China over Taiwan largely through a delicate
balance of deterrence and reassurance.
That equilibrium has been upset. China is building up and flexing its military power; hostile
rhetoric emanates from both Beijing and Washington. War seems likelier each day.
It’s not too late to restore the kind of balance that helped to keep the peace for decades, but it
will require taking steps to ease China’s concerns. This will be difficult because of Chinese
intransigence and the overheated atmosphere prevailing in Washington. But it is worth the
political risk if it prevents war.
Deterrence came in the form of the implied use of U.S. military force to thwart a Chinese attack
on Taiwan. Reassurance was provided by the understanding that the United States would not
intrude on decisions regarding Taiwan’s eventual political status.
The United States and its regional allies must continue to create a robust military deterrence.
But U.S. leaders and politicians also need to keep in mind the power of reassurance, try to
understand China’s deep sensitivities about Taiwan and should recommit — clearly and
unequivocally — to the idea that only China and Taiwan can work out their political differences,
a stance that remains official U.S. policy.
During the Cold War, Beijing and Washington signed a series of communiqués related to
Taiwan. One of them said the United States “reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the
Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” This and other wording was deliberately
ambiguous, but it was accepted by all sides as a commitment to avoid rocking the boat. China
still views this arrangement as binding.
To be clear, it was China that began rocking the boat first.
Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party was
elected president of Taiwan (succeeding a more China-friendly administration), Xi Jinping has
repeatedly brandished China’s military power with large-scale military exercises and other
pressure tactics apparently meant to discourage independence sentiment on Taiwan.
U.S. political figures have rightly responded with rhetorical support for democratic Taiwan, by
supplying it with weapons and by strengthening the U.S. military presence in the region. But the
American reaction is also pouring fuel on the fire.
I have worked on U.S. defense strategy in various military roles for more than a decade. I
recently traveled to Beijing, where I met with Chinese government and military officials, leading
academics and experts from Communist Party-affiliated think tanks. During these talks it was
clear that Beijing is far less concerned with U.S. efforts to enhance its military posture in the
region — the deterrence side of the equation — than with the political rhetoric, which is seen in
China as proof that the United States is moving away from past ambiguity and toward
supporting Taiwan’s de facto independence.
They have plenty of evidence to point to.
In December 2016, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president or president-elect since the
normalization of China-U.S. relations in 1979 to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader, when
Ms. Tsai called to congratulate him on his election victory. President Biden has, on four
occasions, contradicted the U.S. policy of ambiguity by saying we would support Taiwan
militarily if China attacked. The number of U.S. Congress members visiting Taiwan — which
China views as overt support for the island’s independence — reached a decade high last year,
including an August 2022 trip by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time and the
highest-ranking U.S. official travel to Taiwan since the 1990s. That has continued this year: In
June a nine-member congressional delegation, the largest in years, arrived in Taipei.
Provocative legislation has not helped. Last year the Taiwan Policy Act, which articulated
support for Taiwan’s role in international organizations, was introduced in the Senate, and in
July of this year the House passed a similar act. House Republicans introduced a motion in
January to recognize Taiwan as an independent country.
Actions like these put great pressure on Mr. Xi, who won’t tolerate going down in history as the
Chinese leader to have lost Taiwan. That would be seen in Beijing as an existential threat,
potentially fueling separatist sentiment in restive regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
For now, lingering doubts over Chinese military capabilities and the specter of U.S. and allied
retaliation are enough to restrain Mr. Xi. But if he concludes that the United States has broken,
once and for all, from its previous position on Taiwan and is bent on thwarting unification, he
may feel that he must act militarily. The United States might be able to build the necessary
military power in the region to deter a Chinese war of choice. But the level of dominance needed
to stop Mr. Xi from launching a war he sees as necessary might be impossible to achieve.
Reassuring China would require Mr. Biden to reiterate that the United States does not support
Taiwanese independence or oppose the island’s peaceful unification with China and that,
ultimately, Taiwan’s fate is up to Taipei and Beijing. It would mean moving away from attempts
to create international space for Taiwan and chastising Beijing when it pulls away Taipei’s
diplomatic partners. The White House would also need to use what leverage it has to discourage
members of Congress from visiting Taiwan and threaten to veto provocative legislation.
There would doubtless be blowback in Washington and Taipei, and Mr. Xi may already have
made up his mind to seize Taiwan, regardless of the U.S. stance. But a politically neutral
position on Taiwan is what the United States has followed for decades. Presidents Bill
Clinton, Barack Obama and George H.W. and George W. Bush advocated peaceful dialogue
between Taipei and Beijing to resolve their differences.
There also are longer-term repercussions to consider: If the combination of deterrence and
reassurance fails and China attacks Taiwan, it will set a precedent in which Chinese leaders kill
and destroy to achieve their goals. But if a pathway remains for China to eventually convince
Taiwan’s people — through inducements or pressure — that it is in their interest to peacefully
unify, then that may be a China that we can live with.
In the best-case scenario, the United States and China would reach a high-level agreement, a
new communiqué, in which Washington reiterates its longstanding political neutrality and
China commits to dialing back its military threats. This would avert war while giving China
political space to work toward peaceful unification. That might mean using its clout to isolate
Taiwan and eventually convince the island’s people that it should strike a deal with Beijing. But
it isn’t Washington’s place to prevent the unification of the two sides — only to ensure that
doesn’t happen through military force or coercion.
A war between the United States and China over Taiwan could be the most brutal since World
War II. As politically difficult as it may be, U.S. leaders have a duty to try to prevent conflict, and
that means speaking more softly but carrying a big stick.
Trump ‘Could Tip an Already Fragile
World Order Into Chaos’
Dec. 13, 2023
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics,

demographics and inequality.
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Two weeks ago, The Washington Post published “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly
Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending,” by Robert Kagan.
Four days later, The Times published “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical
Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, one in an
ongoing series of articles.
On the same day, The Atlantic released the online version of its January/February 2024 issue; it
included 24 essays under the headline “If Trump Wins.”
While the domestic danger posed by a second Trump administration is immediate and pressing,
Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — sometimes referred to as the “alliance of autocracies” —
have an interest in weakening the global influence of the United States and in fracturing its ties
to democracies around the globe.
“Clearly, this coalition threatens global security and deterrence and requires policies suited to
the assaults Russia and China regularly conduct,” Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign
Policy Research Institute, wrote in a recent column published in The Hill, “The ‘No Limits’
Russo-Chinese Alliance Is Taking Flight.”
In a 2020 essay, Michael O’Hanlon, the director of foreign policy research at Brookings, pointed
out that “many Americans” question whether
a global economy and alliances around the world are good for them. As the election of Donald
Trump had proved in 2016, numerous voters are willing to rethink our place in the world. If we
do not listen to that message, the entire domestic basis for a strong United States and an
engaged foreign policy leadership role could evaporate.
This conversation, “more than any other,” O’Hanlon wrote, “is the debate we need to have as a
country.”
If Donald Trump is re-elected, how will the former president — who has openly praised dictators
like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who has questioned the value of NATO and who
has denigrated key allies — deal with what the Pentagon calls, in O’Hanlon’s words, the “the 4
plus 1 threat matrix — the five main threats of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and
transnational violent extremism or terrorism”?
To gauge the range of possible developments in a second Trump administration, I asked
specialists in international affairs a series of questions. On the basic question — how damaging
to American foreign policy interests would a second Trump administration be? — the responses
ranged from very damaging to marginally so.
Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings,
is quite worried.
Asked if Trump would withdraw from NATO — a major blow to European allies and a huge
boost for Vladimir Putin — Stelzenmüller replied by email:
Very likely. We know that from [former ambassador to the United Nations, John] Bolton’s book
and from recent reporting out of Trump’s inner circle. Sumantra Maitra’s dormant
NATO article, much read at NATO, suggests a suspension or withdrawal-lite option — but even
that would fatally undercut the credibility of Article V.
(Article V of the NATO agreement asserts that “the parties agree that an armed attack against
one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them.”)
Sumantra Maitra is a visiting senior fellow at Citizens for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think
tank. His essay calls for retrenchment of America’s financial and logistical support of NATO, just
short of withdrawal:
A much more prudent strategy is to force a Europe defended by Europeans with only American
naval presence and as a logistics provider of last resort with the U.S. reoriented toward Asia.
West Europe will not be serious about the continent’s defense as long as Uncle Sam is there to
break the glass during a fire.
Stelzenmüller wrote that she sees little or no chance that a Trump administration would join an
alliance of Russia, China, North Korea and other dictatorships, “but would Trump see himself as
a friend of the authoritarians? Absolutely.” Under Trump, “the spectrum would clearly shift to a
much more transactionalist, pro-authoritarian or even predatory mode. That alone could tip an
already fragile world order into chaos.”
Sarah Kreps, a political scientist at Cornell, suggested that “if past is prologue, we could expect
Trump to harp on the issue of free riding but not actually do anything different. He’ll probably
do a lot of heckling that’s unmatched by actual policy change.”
In this context, Kreps continued, “it will be left to the career diplomats to do the heavy lifting
behind the scenes to provide the alliance glue while Trump is hammering the capitals about
burden sharing.”
How about NATO?
“The alliance has such deep roots now and has ebbed and flowed in terms of its strength, but the
structural factors present right now will be more powerful than any individual president.”
I asked Kreps whether it was conceivable that Trump could join a Russia-China-North Korea
coalition.
“Again, past being prologue here, we have good reason to think that he talks friendly to
autocrats, but won’t act.”
How would Trump change the role of the United States in foreign affairs?
“I would expect to see more of what we saw in the last administration: a lot of bluster, a lot of
braggadocious declarations about how countries are taking the United States seriously now, but
not a lot of change.”
Kreps was the least alarmed of those I contacted concerning a second Trump administration.
Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, staked out a middle — but
hardly comforting — ground. In an email, he wrote that because of their conflicting interests,
“it’s highly unlikely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran will ever form an alliance.”
Instead, he described their ties as “a network of highly transactional bilateral relationships — a

marriage of convenience — that lacks basic trust, let alone the kind of common strategic vision
and military interconnectedness that characterize the U.S. alliances.”
In this context, Kreps continued, “it will be left to the career diplomats to do the heavy lifting
behind the scenes to provide the alliance glue while Trump is hammering the capitals about
burden sharing.”
How about NATO?
“The alliance has such deep roots now and has ebbed and flowed in terms of its strength, but the
structural factors present right now will be more powerful than any individual president.”
I asked Kreps whether it was conceivable that Trump could join a Russia-China-North Korea
coalition.
“Again, past being prologue here, we have good reason to think that he talks friendly to
autocrats, but won’t act.”
How would Trump change the role of the United States in foreign affairs?
“I would expect to see more of what we saw in the last administration: a lot of bluster, a lot of
braggadocious declarations about how countries are taking the United States seriously now, but
not a lot of change.”
Kreps was the least alarmed of those I contacted concerning a second Trump administration.
Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, staked out a middle — but
hardly comforting — ground. In an email, he wrote that because of their conflicting interests,
“it’s highly unlikely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran will ever form an alliance.”
Instead, he described their ties as “a network of highly transactional bilateral relationships — a

marriage of convenience — that lacks basic trust, let alone the kind of common strategic vision
and military interconnectedness that characterize the U.S. alliances.”
Farewell to the U.S.-China Golden Age
Nov. 14, 2023
Credit...Pool photo by Feng Li
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Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board.
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A lunch meeting about China this summer at the Upper East Side headquarters of the Council
on Foreign Relations felt more like an Irish wake.
A crowd that included gray-haired China hands and not-so-gray-haired tech executives shared
memories of their years in the Middle Kingdom as diplomats, entrepreneurs and English
teachers in the countryside. One attendee recalled how the car of Warren Christopher, then
deputy secretary of state, was attacked by a mob in Taipei, Taiwan, after U.S. officials
announced that Washington would re-establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. Another told
stories about living for years in Beijing as a translator, brand strategist and freelance music
critic on a “dodgy visa” that the Chinese government would never give out today. They were all
keenly aware that they had lived through an extraordinary period of warm relations that is now
gone, perhaps forever.
“We were privileged to live in China during a remarkably free and open period of time, to learn
the language, make friends, find spouses, and some for a while could even own property,” Ian
Johnson, a journalist who has contributed to The New York Times and who lived in China for
two decades, told me later. “It’s very different now, especially for grad students and journalists,
but also for tourists. China has closed itself off.”
The nostalgia was poignant but the gathering was also notable for what it represented. The
Council on Foreign Relations, of which I am a member, is a sort of brain trust for the country’s
foreign policy establishment — a repository for the wisdom accrued by Americans who have
lived and worked around the globe. That lunch meeting underlined the fact that China was
turning into something they hadn’t expected — and slipping out of their reach. At the very time
when understanding China has become more important than ever, they were losing visibility,
access and insight, thanks to increasing repression in China and new restrictions enacted by the
United States. There was nothing to be done. It was out of their hands. A melancholy
camaraderie filled the room. It felt like the end of an era.
When Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a fellow at the council, polled the group about who planned to return
to China, fewer than half raised their hands. Between Chinese Communist Party raids of the
offices of American consulting companies and threats of congressional subpoenas of American
businesses that work in China, some felt it was simply too dangerous.
Only about 350 American students are studying in China today, down from some 15,000 in
2015. The Fulbright program in China, canceled by President Donald Trump, has stayed
canceled. And a key agreement on science cooperation — the first major agreement that the
United States signed with China after diplomatic relations were established — was almost
allowed to expire this year, and even so was renewed for only six months. That doesn’t bode well
for future relations. Those exchanges are the glue that keep populations on good terms, even
when their leaders are not.
It’s not clear how far Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping will go to re-establish those kinds of ties
when they meet in San Francisco on Wednesday on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation conference. Both leaders have taken steps to reduce tension since the
summer. But the hard reality remains: The United States and China, the two most powerful
nations in the world, are bound to butt heads in this new era and nobody knows how
acrimonious it is going to get.
During the golden years, American policymakers rooted for China’s economic success and
worried about the risks that a failed and starving China would pose for the world. These days,
American policymakers look for ways to frustrate China’s ambitions, worried about the risks a
successful but still authoritarian China poses for the world.
Jan Berris, vice president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, who was hired to
help host the groundbreaking visit of the Chinese Ping-Pong team in 1972 and has helped host
Chinese delegations ever since, told me that Americans have yet to adjust to the new reality of a
world in which the United States “is not always going to be on top.”
“One of the things that really irritates Chinese, ordinary citizens and officials alike, is that many
Americans continue to think of them as the younger brother,” she said. “Well, they’ve grown up
and they’ve proven to the world that they can do things quite well by themselves and they don’t
need us to tell them what to do.”
During the good old days, China’s economy was growing so fast that American investors saw
opportunities everywhere. When Jack Perkowski moved to China in the 1990s to start the auto
parts company Asimco, horse-drawn wagons still plodded along a two-lane road that led to
Beijing’s international airport, according to his book “Managing the Dragon: Building a Billion-
Dollar Business in China.” Back then, China needed everything — capital, technology, corporate
governance experience. By the time Mr. Perkowski returned to New Jersey in 2020, China had
all those things in spades. Today, it is much harder for Americans to compete. “China’s got more
capital, frankly, than a lot of companies in the United States,” he told me.
China has gone from a poor country that was deeply insecure about its place in the world to one
that is wealthy and confident — too confident, in fact. China’s neighbors have started getting
nervous.
These days, Mr. Perkowski said, it is his home country that is burdened by insecurity. China is
10 years ahead of the United States in the electric vehicle battery business, but the U.S.
government is so worried about relying too heavily on China that it is putting new restrictions in
place that curb partnerships with Chinese battery companies. Mr. Perkowski wants to bring
Chinese know-how to help build the electric car battery industry in the United States, just as he
took U.S. management know-how to China to build up an auto parts industry decades ago. He’s
even teamed up with Bob Galyen, who spent years building China’s electric vehicle industry, to
do it. But the politics of this new era make that difficult.
If China has changed, so too has the United States. In the golden years of the relationship, the
U.S. system of nearly unfettered capitalism and representative self-governance was a model for
much of the world. Today it is a showcase of political sclerosis, reactionary populism and a
nearly unbridgeable gap between rich and poor.
As if more evidence was needed, Mr. Biden will meet with Mr. Xi as his own government
prepares for the possibility of a shutdown over impasses about how to keep the lights on. San
Francisco, the host city, has cleared some of its homeless encampments in advance of Mr. Xi’s
visit, but that’s not fooling anybody.
Mr. Xi is preoccupied with problems of his own, including an economic slump set off in part by
his own relentless crackdown on the private sector, which has scared away foreign investors.
China just posted the first deficit in foreign direct investment since 1998, the year that it started
collecting statistics. During the golden years, China took double-digit growth for granted. No
longer. Mr. Xi is also expected to address some of the world’s most powerful C.E.O.s in San
Francisco and is likely to remind them that China is once again open for business. Whether he’ll
be able to win anybody over remains to be seen.
The limits and possibilities of this new era are still being defined. We can only hope that a few
decades from now, people will gather at the Council on Foreign Relations and toast a new
generation of leaders who got things right.
How Do We Manage China’s Decline?
Aug. 29, 2023
Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press

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By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Several years ago, the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison coined the term “Thucydides’
trap.” It was based on the ancient historian’s observation that the real cause of the
Peloponnesian War “was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta.” Allison
saw the pattern of tensions — and frequent wars — between rising and ruling powers repeating
itself throughout history, most recently, he believes, with the challenge that a rising China poses
to American hegemony.
It’s an intriguing thesis, but in China’s case it has a glaring flaw: The main challenge we will face
from the People’s Republic in the coming decade stems not from its rise but from its decline —
something that has been obvious for years and has become undeniable in the past year with the
country’s real estate market crash.
Listen to ‘Matter of Opinion’
Four Opinion writers on the global power realignment and America’s
imperfect allies.
Opinion | Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen
What Happens When You Stop Being a Superpower?
June 22, 2023
Western policymakers need to reorient their thinking around this fact. How? With five don’ts
and two dos.
First, don’t think of China’s misfortunes as our good fortune.
A China that can buy less from the world — whether in the form of handbags from Italy, copper
from Zambia or grain from the United States — will inevitably constrain global growth. For the
U.S. chip maker Qualcomm, 64 percent of its sales last year came from China; for the German
automaker Mercedes-Benz, 37 percent of its retail car sales were made there. In 2021, Boeing
forecast that China will account for about one in five of its wide-body plane deliveries over the
next two decades. A truism that bears repeating is that there is only one economy: the global
economy.
Second, don’t assume the crisis will be short-lived.
Optimists think the crisis won’t affect Western countries too badly because their exports to
China account for a small share of their output. But the potential scale of the crisis is staggering.
Real estate and its related sectors account for nearly 30 percent of China’s gross domestic
product, according to a 2020 paper by the economists Ken Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang. It is
heavily financed by the country’s notoriously opaque $2.9 trillion trust industry, which also
appears to be tottering. And even if China averts a full-scale crisis, long-term growth will be
sharply constrained by a working-age population that will fall by nearly a quarter by 2050.
Third, don’t assume competent economic management.
Last month Donald Trump described the rule of China’s president, Xi Jinping, as “smart,
brilliant, everything perfect.” The truth is closer to the opposite. As a young man, according to a
peer from his youth, Xi was “considered of only average intelligence,” earned a three-year degree
in “applied Marxism” and rode out the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath by becoming
“redder than red.” His tenure as supreme leader has been marked by a shift to greater state
control of the economy, the intensified harassment of foreign businesses and a campaign of
terror against independent-minded business leaders. One result has been ever-
increasing capital flight, despite heavy-handed capital controls. China’s richest people have also
left the country in increasing numbers during Xi’s tenure — a good indication of where they
think their opportunities do and do not lie.
Fourth, don’t take domestic tranquillity as a given.
Xi’s government’s recent decision to suppress data on youth unemployment — just north of 21
percent in June, double what it was four years ago — is part of a pattern of crude obfuscation
that mainly diminishes investor confidence. But the struggles of the young are almost always a
potent source of upheaval, as they were in 1989 on the eve of the Tiananmen Square protests.
Never mind Thucydides’ trap; the real China story may lie in a version of what’s sometimes
called Tocqueville’s paradox: the idea that revolutions happen when rising expectations are
frustrated by abruptly worsening social and economic conditions.
Fifth, don’t suppose that a declining power is a less dangerous one.
In many ways, it’s more dangerous. Rising powers can afford to bide their time, but declining
ones will be tempted to take their chances. President Biden was off the cuff but on the mark this
month when he said of China’s leaders that “when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.”
In other words, as China’s economic fortunes sink, the risks to Taiwan grow.
Sixth, do stick to four red lines.
American policymakers need to be unbending and uncowed when it comes to our core interests
in our relationship: freedom of navigation, particularly in the South China Sea; the security of
Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific allies; the protection of U.S. intellectual property and national
security; and the safety of U.S. citizens (both in China and in the United States) and residents of
Chinese ancestry. Helping Ukraine defeat Russia is also a part of an overall China strategy, in
that it sends a signal of Western political resolve and military capability that will make Beijing
think twice about a military adventure across the Taiwan Strait.
Seventh, do pursue a policy of détente.
We should not seek a new cold war with China. We cannot afford a hot one. The best response to
China’s economic woes is American economic magnanimity. That could start with the removal
of the Trump administration tariffs that have done as much to hurt American companies and
consumers as they have the Chinese.
Whether that will change the fundamental pattern of Beijing’s bad behavior is far from certain.
But as China slides toward crisis, it behooves us to try.
Even China Isn’t Convinced It Can
Replace the U.S.
By Jessica Chen Weiss
Dr. Weiss is an author and China expert at Cornell University.
There’s a hardening view in Washington that China seeks to supplant the United States as
the leading world power and remake the international system in its illiberal image.
China has of course fed these fears by building up its military, partnering with a revanchist
Russia, pressing disputed territorial claims, and with its own rhetoric. President Xi Jinping of
China has vowed to thwart what he views as U.S.-led efforts to “contain, encircle and suppress”
China and has said “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph.”
But such ideological proclamations are in part motivated by insecurity — most Communist
states have collapsed, and the Chinese leadership fears being next — and are meant more
to instill domestic confidence and loyalty to the party than to reflect actual policy or fixed
beliefs.
Ideology in China is itself malleable, rather than a rigid cage that determines policy and has
been continually tweaked to justify the maintenance of one-party rule through decades of great
change. Under Mao, for instance, capitalists were persecuted as “counterrevolutionaries.” But
under President Jiang Zemin the Chinese Communist Party abandoned a core Marxist belief in
2001 by accepting private entrepreneurs as party members. China’s economy today is more
capitalist than Marxist and highly dependent on access to world markets.
Assessments of China based on cherry-picked phrases from party propaganda overlook the
frequent gap between rhetoric and reality. In 2018, for example, China cracked down on Marxist
student groups and labor organizers, possibly because — as the labor scholar and sociologist Eli
Friedman has noted — the young activists embodied “the Marxist principles the C.C.P. has long
since abandoned in practice.” Likewise, Beijing has for years emphasized the sanctity of national
sovereignty and noninterference in a country’s domestic affairs, yet has provided diplomatic
cover for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Leading Chinese intellectuals openly acknowledge the difficulty of reconciling what China says
with what it does. “Even we don’t believe much of what we say,” the Chinese economist Yao
Yang, who is known for his pragmatic views, has said. “Our goal is not to defeat liberalism, but
instead to say that what we have can be as good as what you have.” Jiang Shigong, a legal
scholar and apologist for Mr. Xi’s political philosophy, has written that “‘socialism’ is not
ossified dogma, but instead an open concept awaiting exploration and definition.”
China’s long-term ambitions are difficult to know with certainty, and they can change. But it
is far from clear that it can — or even seeks to — replace the United States as the world’s
dominant power.
Mr. Xi and the C.C.P. apparently see the United States as trying to keep China perpetually
subordinate and vulnerable, opposing whatever China does or advocates in an international
system that Beijing believes favors the United States and developed democracies. But at a
minimum, China seems more intent on modifying aspects of a system under which it has
prospered — making it safer for autocracy — rather than replacing it.
Mr. Xi often couches this effort in his political slogans like the “China dream” and a “shared
future for humankind.” But there is continuing debate in China over what these visions really
mean and what costs and risks China should accept in seeking global leadership. China’s
overseas development largess, for example, is limited by the imperative of addressing its own
persistent development needs at home, research by the scholar Min Ye has shown. Same for
other key Chinese strategies for widening its influence: Its efforts to internationalize the
renminbi and reduce dollar dominance are constrained by the tight grip it keeps on the
currency’s value, as well as other capital controls. These policies help stabilize its economy and
prevent capital flight, but they limit the renminbi’s global appeal.
U.S. concerns often center on the legitimate fear that China could attack Taiwan. But despite
menacing Chinese military exercises meant to deter the self-ruled island from moving closer to
formal independence, many experts believe that Beijing still prefers to achieve its longstanding
objective of “peaceful reunification” through measures short of war. China could lose in a war
and face international sanctions and supply chain disruptions. These would be economically and
politically devastating, jeopardizing Mr. Xi’s prime objectives of regime security, domestic
stability and national rejuvenation.
Doubts are growing that China, facing economic headwinds and a shrinking population, can
achieve its goal of surpassing the United States as the world’s largest economy, let alone other
metrics of global leadership. There is broad recognition in China that it
remains militarily, economically and technologically weaker than the United States and that
further modernization depends upon continued access to international technology, capital and
markets within a stable economic order. “It is impossible for America to contain the rise of
China,” the influential Chinese scholar Huang Renwei has noted, “and it is equally impossible
for China to quickly surpass America.”
Chinese rhetoric about global governance reform has resonated in many developing countries
that also see international institutions as tilted against them. But there is little reason to believe
that the C.C.P.’s self-serving, nationalist ideology will captivate the world, especially as Mr. Xi
feeds mistrust with his authoritarian ways, coercive tactics against
foreign businesses and trading partners, and policies that increasingly smack of paranoia. China
tends to be viewed more favorably in parts of the developing world. But that owes more to
economics than to ideas, and its overseas investments have often been criticized for lacking
transparency, saddling poor countries with debt, as well as environmental and other concerns.
The United States must continue to discourage and hedge against more threatening Chinese
behavior, including bolstering Taiwan’s capacity to resist coercion. But Washington should
resist being guided solely by fear, which threatens the openness and dynamism responsible for
American technological and scientific leadership. Policymakers should pair deterrent threats
with more robust efforts to seek a constructive relationship with China, while also protecting the
core values and interests of an inclusive international order and calling on Beijing to offer more
credible reassurances of its intentions.
There is no doubt that China — whatever its trajectory — poses a huge and complex policy
challenge for America. But exaggerating fears of an “existential struggle” increases the likelihood
of conflict, crowds out efforts to tackle shared challenges like climate change and creates a with-
us-or-against-us framing that could alienate the United States from allies and much of the
world.
Worse, reflexively maneuvering to outcompete or thwart China only validates hard-liners in

Beijing who believe that America is implacably hostile and that the only response lies in
undermining the United States.
By continuing on that road, the world’s two most powerful countries may end up turning each
other into the enemies that they fear.
The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable
Peacemaker
March 22, 2023
Representatives of Iran, China and Saudi Arabia in Beijing on March 10.Credit...China Daily,
via Reuters
By Trita Parsi
Mr. Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft.
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There was a time when all roads to peace went through Washington. From the 1978 Camp David
Accords between Israel and Egypt brokered by President Jimmy Carter to the 1993 Oslo Accords
signed on the White House lawn to Senator George Mitchell’s Good Friday Agreement that
ended the fighting in Northern Ireland in 1998, America was the indispensable nation for
peacemaking. To Paul Nitze, a longtime diplomat and Washington insider, “making evident its
qualifications as an honest broker” was central to America’s influence after the end of the Cold
War.
But over the years, as America’s foreign policy became more militarized and as sustaining the
so-called rules-based order increasingly meant that the United States put itself above all rules,
America appears to have given up on the virtues of honest peacemaking.
We deliberately chose a different path. America increasingly prides itself on not being an
impartial mediator. We abhor neutrality. We strive to take sides in order to be “on the right side
of history” since we view statecraft as a cosmic battle between good and evil rather than the
pragmatic management of conflict where peace inevitably comes at the expense of some justice.
This has perhaps been most evident in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but is now increasingly
defining America’s general posture. In 2000, when Madeleine Albright defended the Clinton
administration’s refusal to veto a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning the excessive
use of force against Palestinians, she cited the need for the United States to be seen as an
“honest broker.” But since then, the United States has vetoed 12 Security Council resolutions
expressing criticisms of Israel — so much for neutrality.
We started to follow a different playbook. Today, our leaders mediate to help “our” side in a
conflict advance our position rather than to establish a lasting peace. We do it to demonstrate
the value of allying with the United States. While this trend is more than two decades long, it has
reached full maturity now with great-power competition with China becoming the organizing
principle of U.S. foreign policy. This rivalry is, in the words of Colin Kahl, the under secretary of
defense for policy, “not a competition of countries. It is a competition of coalitions.” Following
Dr. Kahl’s logic, we keep our coalition partners close by offering them — in addition to military
might — our services as a “partial broker” to tilt the scales of diplomacy in their favor.
It’s what you do when you see the world through the prism of a Marvel movie: Peace is born not
out of compromise but out of total victory.
But just as America has changed, so has the world. Elsewhere in the world, Marvel movie logic is
seen for what it is: Fairy tales where the simplicity of good versus evil leaves no space for
compromise or coexistence. Few have the luxury of pretending to live in such fantasy worlds.
So while America may have lost interest in peacemaking, the world has not. As the Ukraine
crisis has shown, America has been immensely effective in mobilizing the West but hopelessly
clueless in inspiring the global south. While the Western nations wanted the United States to
rally them to defend Ukraine, the global south was looking for leadership to bring peace to
Ukraine — of which the United States has offered little to none.
President Jimmy Carter in three-way handshake at the White House after signing the historic
U.S.-sponsored peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979.Credit...Agence France-Presse —
Getty Images
Image
President Bill Clinton presiding over White House ceremonies marking the signing of the peace
accord between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993.Credit...Ron Edmonds/Associated Press
But America not only has moved beyond peacemaking. It is also increasingly dismissive of other
powers’ efforts to mediate. Though the White House officially welcomed the Saudi-Iranian
normalization deal, it could not conceal its irritation at China’s new-won role as a broker in the
Middle East. And Beijing’s earlier offer to mediate between Ukraine and Russia was quickly
dismissed by Washington as a distraction, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky of
Ukraine welcomed it on the condition that Russian troops would withdraw from Ukrainian
territory. As Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation recently pointed out, there is an
inherent hypocrisy “in touting Ukraine’s agency when it prosecutes war, but not when it pursues
peace.”
Still, Xi Jinping of China seems undeterred. He traveled to Moscow this week and also plans to
speak directly to Mr. Zelensky in what appears to be preparation for an active mediation attempt
to bring the war to an end.
Mr. Xi succeeded in bringing Iran and Saudi Arabia together precisely because he was on
neither’s side. With stubborn discipline, Beijing maintained a neutral position on the two
countries’ squabbles and didn’t moralize their conflict or bother with whose side history would
take. Nor did China bribe Iran and Saudi Arabia with security guarantees, arms deals or military
bases, as all too often is our habit.
Whether Mr. Xi’s formula will work to end Russia’s war on Ukraine remains to be seen. But just
as a more stable Middle East where the Saudis and Iranians aren’t at each other’s throats
benefits the United States, so too will any effort to get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating
table.
In a multipolar world, shared responsibility for security can be a virtue that reduces the burden
on Americans without increasing threats to U.S. interests. It is not security that we would give
up, but the illusion that we are — and have to be — in control of developments far away. For too
long, Americans have been told that if we do not dominate, the world will descend into chaos. In
reality, as the Chinese mediation has shown, other powers are likely to step up to shoulder the
burden of security and peacemaking.
The greatest threat to our own security and reputation is if we stand in the way of a world where
others have a stake in peace, if we become a nation that doesn’t just put diplomacy last but also
dismisses those who seek to put diplomacy first.
In tomorrow’s world, we should not worry if some roads to peace go through Beijing, New Delhi
or Brasília. So long as all roads to war do not go through Washington
U.S.-China Relations Keep Getting
Worse. Do They Have To?
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; images by Lauren DeCicca, Mandel Ngan and
whitemay/Getty Images
By Spencer Bokat-Lindell
Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.
The detection and downing of a Chinese spy balloon in American airspace earlier this month,
and the attendant decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone the first trip to
China by America’s top diplomat since 2018, was just the latest episode in a longer story of
deteriorating relations between the world’s two great powers.
That story began in earnest five years ago, when the Trump administration ignited a trade war
that the Biden administration has continued to wage. It took another turn in May when
President Biden pledged to defend Taiwan if China attacked it, a striking (if halting) departure
from longstanding policy, which was underscored by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
visit to the island over the summer. And last month, a top Air Force general issued a
memo predicting a war in 2025 and calling for preparations “to deter, and if required, defeat
China.”
Why does Washington believe that China is the top threat to U.S. national security? Are those
fears founded, and what should be done to avoid a potentially disastrous military conflict
between two nuclear-armed countries? Here’s what people are saying.
How dangerous is China, really?

China’s authoritarian government affords its citizens few civil liberties and even fewer political
rights, and exercises its control through sprawling one-party rule, widespread
censorship, repression of civil society, systems of surveillance and propaganda that have
grown increasingly sophisticated under President Xi Jinping, and the mass detention of
religious and ethnic minorities, which the United States has deemed a genocide.
There are, of course, other authoritarian governments in the world; the United States is even
allied with some of them. But to U.S. officials, what makes China a unique threat — beyond its
size — is the modernization of its military and, in the words of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin,
its “increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system
to fit its authoritarian preferences”:
 In recent years, Beijing has made expansive claims to the South China Sea, one of the
world’s most critical waterways, that are widely viewed as unlawful.
 It has effectively revoked Hong Kong’s autonomy and quashed its pro-democracy movement.
 And it has held more aggressive military drills near Taiwan, a prosperous democracy formed in
1949 just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China that Beijing views as an illegitimate
breakaway province.
Since the 1970s, the United States has struck a delicate diplomatic balance through the “one
China” policy, under which it does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation, and through
“strategic ambiguity,” selling arms to Taiwan without making any security guarantees.
Taiwan dominates the production of microchips, which are critical to the functioning of
electronic devices. A Chinese invasion that constrained the supply of those chips would lead to
“a deep and immediate recession” and “an inability to protect ourselves,” Commerce Secretary
Gina Raimondo warned last year.
As the world’s second-largest economy, China also exerts influence through trade, alleged
theft of intellectual property and investment in developing countries that critics have called a
new form of colonialism. And as China’s market power has grown, “U.S. institutions and
businesses are increasingly silencing themselves to avoid angering the Chinese government,”
German Lopez of The Times has written.
But for all these concerns, many reject the notion that China poses an existential threat to the
United States. At the most basic level, “China has neither the destructive capability nor the
geopolitical motivation to destroy the U.S.,” Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont
McKenna College, argued in Bloomberg in 2021. Even with a recent expansion, China’s nuclear
arsenal remains much smaller than America’s, he added, and its military still lags in
technological sophistication and experience.
In the view of Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft, Beijing also has shown little interest in exporting its governance system. “Where it
does, it is almost entirely directed at developing countries, not industrial democracies such as
the United States,” he argued in Foreign Policy in 2021. Moreover, its economic development
model “is almost certainly not sustainable in its present form, given China’s aging population,
extensive corruption, very large levels of income inequality, inadequate social safety net, and the
fact that free information flows are required to drive global innovation.”
To Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China and Asia-Pacific studies at Cornell University, the
logic of zero-sum competition with China has become so pervasive in Washington among
members of both parties that it risks undermining America’s own interests. “When individuals
feel the need to out-hawk one another to protect themselves and advance professionally,”
she wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, “the result is groupthink.”
And for detractors of such groupthink, the reaction to the balloon incident is yet another
instance of threat inflation. “Americans use all kinds of technology to gather intelligence on
China and other states: satellites, phone tapping, computer intrusions, and even good old-
fashioned human sources,” writes Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy. “It just seems
as if Washington blew this whole thing way out of proportion.”
Can the United States and China compete without conflict?

Even those who hold countering China’s rise as a top national priority aren’t particularly keen to
start a war, as it would almost certainly exact tremendous costs:
 In a conflict over an invasion of Taiwan, the United States and its allies would lose tens of
thousands of service members and Taiwan’s economy would be devastated, according to recent
simulations conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
 In part because the U.S. and Chinese economies are deeply interdependent, a war lasting just
one year would cause America’s G.D.P. to fall by 5 percent to 10 percent and China’s by 25
percent to 30 percent, with severe effects for the global economy, according to a RAND
Corporation study.
 Conflict could also imperil cooperation on climate change between the United States and China,
the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters, as Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan temporarily did.
Opinions differ on how war might be best avoided. Regarding Taiwan, there are some, like Yu-Jie
Chen, a research professor in Taiwan, who contend that deterring China requires more
demonstrations of support from like-minded democracies, “including signing bilateral economic
agreements with Taiwan, allowing it to join regional trade organizations to diminish Taiwan’s
economic overreliance on China, supporting Taiwan’s participation in international
organizations and more gestures like Ms. Pelosi’s visit.” The Times columnist Bret Stephens has
argued that Biden should also end the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity in a formal statement.
Yet others think that would be a counterproductive provocation, as Beijing already assumes that
the United States would support Taiwan in a conflict. “It would erode assurance by implying our
policy is to guarantee Taiwan independence,” Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner at the China-
focused research firm GaveKal Dragonomics, told Foreign Affairs in November. “And it could
incite Taiwan to make more aggressive moves toward independence, which would increase, not
lower, the chances of armed conflict.”
On other matters, there is more consensus about how to ease tensions. There is relatively broad
support, for example, for increasing military aid to democracies in the region. “An active denial
strategy that focuses on supplying defensive weapons to U.S. allies and a lower-profile, more
agile deployment of U.S. forces in the region would raise the costs of Chinese military action
without exacerbating China’s own sense of insecurity,” write Jake Werner, a China historian,
and William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Last year, Congress passed bipartisan legislation allocating $52 billion in subsidies and tax
credits to encourage domestic chip production, an industrial policy that could help lower the
national security stakes of the Taiwan dispute by hedging against supply chain vulnerabilities.
As Steven Rattner, a counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, wrote in
The Times last month, “even many free-market conservatives seem to recognize that unfettered
capitalism can lead to imperfect results.”
Biden could also turn down the temperature of the U.S.-China rivalry by rolling back tariffs on
Chinese imports, which the Times editorial board described last year as “the Trump
administration’s failed gambit of bullying China into making economic concessions.” Instead of
trying to change China, the board argued, the United States should focus on strengthening ties
with China’s neighbors, as “recent history teaches that the United States is more effective in
advancing and defending its interests when it does not act unilaterally.”
For now, an uneasy peace

However the balloon affair blows over, it has highlighted how strained U.S.-China relations have
become and how easily another dispute could curdle into conflict. “As we see with balloons —
who predicted a balloon mini-crisis? — the possible permutations are endless,” Chris Buckley,
who covers China for The Times, said this week.
It has also revealed how little the two powers now communicate: Shortly after the balloon was
shot down, the Pentagon said that Secretary Austin reached out through a special crisis line to
his Chinese counterpart, who declined to answer his call.
Should this frosty dynamic persist, “a new type of Cuban-missile-crisis moment, when the fate
of the world hangs in the balance, is not inconceivable,” Michael Schuman writes in The
Atlantic. “Then the two adversaries may find that the channels of communication they’d need to
avert disaster aren’t working, and their inimical attitudes are too entrenched to find a solution.”
A War With China Would Be Unlike
Anything Americans Faced Before
Feb. 27, 2023
Credit...Ricardo Tomás

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By Ross Babbage
Dr. Babbage is the author of the forthcoming book “The Next Major War: Can
the U.S. and Its Allies Win Against China?”
A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World
War II.
The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said
unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved.” His Communist Party regime has
become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and
directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.
The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan
would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining
America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S. access to
world-leading semiconductors and other critical components manufactured in Taiwan. As
president, Joe Biden has stated repeatedly that he would defend Taiwan.
But leaders in Washington also need to avoid stumbling carelessly into a war with China because
it would be unlike anything ever faced by Americans. U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to
sending their military off to fight far from home. But China is a different kind of foe — a
military, economic and technological power capable of making a war felt in the American
homeland.
As a career strategic analyst and defense planner, including for Australia’s Defense Department,
I have spent decades studying how a war could start, how it would play out and the military and
nonmilitary operations that China is prepared to conduct. I am convinced that the challenges
facing the United States are serious, and its citizens need to become better aware of them.
The military scenario alone is daunting: China would probably launch a lightning air, sea and
cyber assault to seize control of key strategic targets on Taiwan within hours, before the United
States and its allies could intervene. Taiwan is slightly bigger than the state of Maryland; if you
recall how quickly Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, you start to realize that the
takeover of Taiwan could happen relatively quickly. China also has more than 1,350 ballistic and
cruise missiles poised to strike U.S. and allied forces in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and
American-held territories in the Western Pacific. Then there’s the sheer difficulty the United
States would face waging war thousands of miles across the Pacific against an adversary that has
the world’s largest navy and Asia’s biggest air force.
Despite this, U.S. military planners would prefer to fight a conventional war. But the Chinese are
prepared to wage a much broader type of warfare that would reach deep into American society.
Over the past decade, China has increasingly viewed the United States as mired in political and
social crises. Mr. Xi, who likes to say that “the East is rising while the West is declining,”
evidently feels that America’s greatest weakness is on its home front. And I believe he is ready to
exploit this with a multipronged campaign to divide Americans and undermine and exhaust
their will to engage in a prolonged conflict — what China’s military calls enemy disintegration.
Over the past two decades, China has built formidable political warfare and cyber warfare
capabilities designed to penetrate, manipulate and disrupt the United States and allied
governments, media organizations, businesses and civil society. If war were to break out, China
can be expected to use this to disrupt communications and spread fake news and other
disinformation. The aim would be to foster confusion, division and distrust and hinder decision
making. China might compound this with electronic and probably some physical attacks on
satellites or related infrastructure.
These operations would most likely be accompanied by cyber offensives to disrupt electricity,
gas, water, transport, health care and other public services. China has demonstrated
its capabilities already, including in Taiwan, where it has waged disinformation campaigns, and
in serious hacking incidents in the United States. Mr. Xi has championed China’s political
warfare capabilities as a “magic weapon.”
China could also weaponize its dominance of supply chains and shipping. The impact on
Americans would be profound.
The U.S. economy is heavily dependent on Chinese resources and manufactured goods,
including many with military applications, and American consumers rely on moderately priced
Chinese-made imports for everything from electronics to furniture to shoes. The bulk of these
goods is transported aboard ships along sea lanes increasingly controlled by Chinese
commercial interests that are ultimately answerable to China’s party-state. A war would halt this
trade (as well as American and allied shipments to China).
U.S. supplies of many products could soon run low, paralyzing a vast range of businesses. It
could take months to restore trade, and emergency rationing of some items would be needed.
Inflation and unemployment would surge, especially in the period in which the economy is
repurposed for the war effort, which might include some automobile manufacturers switching to
building aircraft or food-processing companies converting to production of priority
pharmaceuticals. Stock exchanges in the United States and other countries might temporarily
halt trading because of the enormous economic uncertainties.
The United States might be forced to confront the shocking realization that the industrial
muscle instrumental in victories like that in World War II — President Franklin Roosevelt’s
concept of America as “the arsenal of democracy” — has withered and been surpassed by China.
China is now the dominant global industrial power by many measures. In 2004 U.S.
manufacturing output was more than twice China’s; in 2021, China’s output was double that of
the United States. China produces more ships, steel and smartphones than any other country
and is a world leader in the production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and
electronics — the basic building blocks of a military-industrial economy.
Critically, the United States is no longer able to outproduce China in advanced weapons and
other supplies needed in a war, which the current one in Ukraine has made clear. Provision of
military hardware to Kyiv has depleted American stocks of some key military systems.
Rebuilding them could take years. Yet the war in Ukraine is relatively small-scale compared with
the likely demands of a major war in the Indo-Pacific.
So what needs to be done?
On the military front, the United States should accelerate programs already underway to
strengthen and disperse American forces in the Western Pacific to make them less vulnerable to
attacks by China. At home, a concerted effort must be made to find ways to better protect U.S.
traditional and social media against Chinese disinformation. Supply chains of some critical
goods and services need to be reconfigured to shift production to the United States or allied
nations, and the United States must pursue a longer-term strategic drive to restore its
dominance in global manufacturing.
Building a stronger deterrence by addressing such weaknesses is the best means of averting war.
But this will take time. Until then, it is important for Washington to avoid provocations and
maintain a civil discourse with Beijing.
The high-altitude balloon that drifted across the United States this month was seen by many
Americans as a shocking Chinese breach of U.S. sovereignty. It may turn out to be child’s play
compared with the havoc China could wreak on the American homeland in a war.
What Americans Don’t Understand
About China’s Power
Its biggest advantage is American stagnation.
Jan. 16, 2020
Celebrating the beginning of a new decade at Shougang Park in Beijing on New Year’s
Eve.Credit...Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
Chinese leaders stretching back to Deng Xiaoping have often thought in terms of decades. A
decade encompasses two of China’s famous five-year plans, and it’s a long-enough period to
notice real changes in a country’s trajectory.
As it happens, I spent time in China at both ends of the decade that just ended, first in 2010 and
again recently. And I was left with one main conclusion: China has just enjoyed a very good
decade.
Yes, it still has big problems, including the protests in Hong Kong. But by the standards that
matter most to China’s leaders, the country made major gains during the 2010s. Its economy is
more diversified. Its scientific community is more advanced, and its surveillance state
more powerful. Its position in Asia is stronger. China, in short, has done substantially more to
close the gap with the global power that it is chasing — the United States — than seemed likely a
decade ago.
Many Americans, of course, understand that China is on the rise and are anxious about it. Yet I
also returned from my trip thinking that this American anxiety tends to be misplaced in one
crucial way: China is not preordained to supplant or even match the United States as the world’s
leading power. China’s challenges are real, not just the protests in Hong Kong but also the
dissent in Xinjiang and Tibet, the bloat in its state-run companies and the looming decline in its
working-age population.
The No. 1 reason China has made such stark progress in geopolitical terms is that its rival just
endured a bad decade by virtually every measure. While China takes more steps forward than
backward, the United States is moving slowly in reverse.
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Incomes, wealth and life expectancy in the United States have stagnated for much of the
population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions. The
result is a semidysfunctional government that is eroding many of the country’s largest
advantages over China. The United States is skimping on the investments like education, science
and infrastructure that helped make it the world’s great power. It is also forfeiting the soft power
that has been a core part of American pre-eminence.
President Trump plays a telling role here. More so than his predecessors, he has been willing to
treat China as the strategic threat that it is. Yet he is confronting it so ham-handedly as to
strengthen China.
Image
President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in
2019.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Instead of building a coalition to manage its rise — including the Asian nations in China’s
shadow — Trump is alienating allies. Instead of celebrating democracy as an alternative to
Chinese authoritarianism, he is denigrating the rule of law at home and cozying up to dictators
abroad. Trump, as Keyu Jin, a Chinese economist at the London School of Economics, says, is “a
strategic gift” for China.
The recent trade spat is an example. The Trump administration was right to take a tougher line.
But after imposing unilateral sanctions, Trump then accepted a truce that did not do much to
address the core problems, like China’s corporate subsidies.
The current version of the United States doesn’t seem to know quite what it is — global
democratic leader or parochial self-protector — and the confusion benefits China. After the
Trump administration this year asked 61 countries to bar Huawei, the Chinese
telecommunications company, the response was embarrassing: Only three have done so.
President Emmanuel Macron of France now argues that Europe should position itself as a third
global power between the United States and China, rather than what it has been — an American
ally.
There is an unending debate among China experts about whether the country is weak or strong.
The answer is that it’s both. But its direction is clear. China continues to become stronger.
The maturing of the economy felt particularly striking to me as I compared my two visits.
Although growth has slowed, from about 10 percent a year at the decade’s start to less than 7
percent now, part of that slowdown was inevitable, as the country became less poor. The
encouraging news for China is that, as Neil Shen, the founding partner of the venture capital
firm Sequoia Capital China, says, “the quality of the growth has been much improved.”
When I talked with Chinese leaders and business executives in 2010, they spent a lot of
time lamenting two problems — a lack of innovative companies and a low level of consumer
spending. I didn’t hear those laments this time.
Today, China is home to perhaps the world’s hottest social media app, TikTok, which is more
popular than Facebook among American teenagers, according to a recent survey. Other
innovators are likely to follow, because China’s digital economy now has some advantages that
not even the American version does.
Instead of being fragmented among dozens of apps — one for Starbucks, others for Amazon and
airlines and so on — much of Chinese commerce happens within one of two digital networks —
WeChat Pay and Alipay. People open one app and can pay for almost anything, in stores or
online. The simplicity encourages further retail innovations, and Facebook and Google are
trying to mimic this model. It feels like the future of commerce.
It’s also part of a larger advance in China’s consumer economy. Consumer spending
now accounts for about 39 percent of China’s G.D.P., up from a low of 35 percent in 2010. The
word “consumerism” may have negative connotations in the United States, where such spending
accounts for about 68 percent of G.D.P., but it means something quite different in recently poor
countries. It signifies a shift away from an economy dominated by sustenance farming and
smokestacks and toward the comforts of modern life.
One of my stops was Nanjing, China’s 12th-largest city, best known to outsiders as the site of a
civilian massacre by Japanese troops in the 1930s. That history makes the city a symbol of the
humiliations China suffered for much of the 20th century. Those humiliations continue to shape
pop culture; a remarkable share of contemporary television shows cast the Japanese military as
villains.
More quietly, though, Nanjing embodies the growth of a middle-class consumer culture. The
city’s subway system opened only 14 years ago and now transports one billion riders a year. It’s
clean and bustling, and the trips I took each cost either 2 or 3 yuan (about 28 cents or 42 cents).
Nationwide, almost 30 other cities have opened subways since Nanjing did, giving China the
world’s largest subway ridership.
Nanjing is also one of the stops on the high-speed train line that opened between Shanghai and
Beijing in 2011. Nanjing is roughly as far from Beijing as New York is from Cincinnati, and the
express train takes less than four hours.
Image
A subway train in Nanjing, China, decorated for the World Cup in 2018.Credit...SIPA Asia, via
ZUMA
This infrastructure makes all kinds of economic activity easier — commuting to work, taking
vacations or simply going shopping. On a recent Saturday night at Nanjing’s seven-story Deji
Plaza mall, the restaurants were packed, as were the aisles at Uniqlo, even at 9 p.m.
Beyond the economy, China has also made stark progress in other areas over the past decade. It
is close to becoming the world’s leading funder of scientific research and development, thanks to
soaring increases in China and meager ones in the United States. The quality of American
science remains higher, but the gap has narrowed.
China’s military has also become stronger. China is now the largest trading partner not only of
Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia but also of Australia, Brazil and South
Africa. And start-up companies have become dynamic enough to lure a growing number of
Chinese graduates of American universities to return home, Matthew Slaughter, the dean of
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me — shortly after he had attended an alumni event
in Beijing.
Increasingly, this trade brings cultural and political sway. Just look at the National Basketball
Association’s awkward attempts to placate China after a Houston Rockets executive dared to
post a Twitter message (quickly deleted) expressing support for Hong Kong protesters. N.B.A.
officials understood, as many other corporate executives do, that Beijing effectively holds veto
power over their plans for growth.
China’s leaders, in turn, have started shedding the humility that had characterized much of their
foreign policy since Deng. At a recent conference I attended on the outskirts of Beijing, with Bill
Gates, Henry Kissinger, Henry Paulson and many American officials and executives, the
swagger of the Chinese officials was notable. Some of the Americans delivered blunt criticism of
China’s economic policy. Chinese officials largely ignored the complaints.
“We Chinese people know very well what we have, what we want and what it takes,” Wang
Qishan, China’s vice president, told the conference, the New Economy Forum. “We have the
confidence, patience and resolve to realize our goal of great national rejuvenation.”
China has now exceeded the world’s expectations for three decades in a row — which, of course,
does not guarantee that the streak will continue in this new decade.
China still has a long way to go. Its foreign policy will be made more difficult by the growing
wariness of China’s power in other countries. Its economy will have to cope with debts from its
building boom, and President Xi Jinping’s support for politically obedient — but often
inefficient — state-managed companies isn’t helping. The sharp decline in the working-age
population over the next quarter-century, thanks to the old one-child policy, will probably
present China’s biggest challenge since the 1989 democracy movement.
A decade from now, I can easily imagine China as an even stronger rival to the United States —
dominating its Pacific realm and leading a loose global coalition of authoritarian states — or as a
weaker one, struggling to manage internal dissent and tensions with its Asian neighbors. But the
United States should feel some urgency about the possibility of the first scenario.
On my last day in Beijing, I visited the Forbidden City, the complex of old imperial palaces,
which Xi has ordered spruced up, in part to remind people that a powerful China is the historical
norm. To make sense of the trip, I sat down in a courtyard and looked back at two lists that I had
made during my 2010 visit.
One summarized the steps that China needed to take in the years ahead to become stronger —
increasing consumer spending, strengthening its scientific sector, becoming more innovative
and so on. The other listed the steps the United States should take to stay strong — like reducing
inequality and investing more in the future. The contrast, between progress and stagnation, was
clear. I think the rational conclusion is to be worried about the future of American power.
This Is What America Is Getting Wrong
About China and Taiwan
Oct. 16, 2023
By Oriana Skylar Mastro
Ms. Mastro is an expert on Chinese politics and military policy.
For a half-century, America has avoided war with China over Taiwan largely through a delicate
balance of deterrence and reassurance.
That equilibrium has been upset. China is building up and flexing its military power; hostile
rhetoric emanates from both Beijing and Washington. War seems likelier each day.
It’s not too late to restore the kind of balance that helped to keep the peace for decades, but it
will require taking steps to ease China’s concerns. This will be difficult because of Chinese
intransigence and the overheated atmosphere prevailing in Washington. But it is worth the
political risk if it prevents war.
Deterrence came in the form of the implied use of U.S. military force to thwart a Chinese attack
on Taiwan. Reassurance was provided by the understanding that the United States would not
intrude on decisions regarding Taiwan’s eventual political status.
The United States and its regional allies must continue to create a robust military deterrence.
But U.S. leaders and politicians also need to keep in mind the power of reassurance, try to
understand China’s deep sensitivities about Taiwan and should recommit — clearly and
unequivocally — to the idea that only China and Taiwan can work out their political differences,
a stance that remains official U.S. policy.
During the Cold War, Beijing and Washington signed a series of communiqués related to
Taiwan. One of them said the United States “reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the
Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” This and other wording was deliberately
ambiguous, but it was accepted by all sides as a commitment to avoid rocking the boat. China
still views this arrangement as binding.
To be clear, it was China that began rocking the boat first.
Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party was
elected president of Taiwan (succeeding a more China-friendly administration), Xi Jinping has
repeatedly brandished China’s military power with large-scale military exercises and other
pressure tactics apparently meant to discourage independence sentiment on Taiwan.
U.S. political figures have rightly responded with rhetorical support for democratic Taiwan, by
supplying it with weapons and by strengthening the U.S. military presence in the region. But the
American reaction is also pouring fuel on the fire.
I have worked on U.S. defense strategy in various military roles for more than a decade. I
recently traveled to Beijing, where I met with Chinese government and military officials, leading
academics and experts from Communist Party-affiliated think tanks. During these talks it was
clear that Beijing is far less concerned with U.S. efforts to enhance its military posture in the
region — the deterrence side of the equation — than with the political rhetoric, which is seen in
China as proof that the United States is moving away from past ambiguity and toward
supporting Taiwan’s de facto independence.
They have plenty of evidence to point to.
In December 2016, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president or president-elect since the
normalization of China-U.S. relations in 1979 to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader, when
Ms. Tsai called to congratulate him on his election victory. President Biden has, on four
occasions, contradicted the U.S. policy of ambiguity by saying we would support Taiwan
militarily if China attacked. The number of U.S. Congress members visiting Taiwan — which
China views as overt support for the island’s independence — reached a decade high last year,
including an August 2022 trip by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time and the
highest-ranking U.S. official travel to Taiwan since the 1990s. That has continued this year: In
June a nine-member congressional delegation, the largest in years, arrived in Taipei.
Provocative legislation has not helped. Last year the Taiwan Policy Act, which articulated
support for Taiwan’s role in international organizations, was introduced in the Senate, and in
July of this year the House passed a similar act. House Republicans introduced a motion in
January to recognize Taiwan as an independent country.
Actions like these put great pressure on Mr. Xi, who won’t tolerate going down in history as the
Chinese leader to have lost Taiwan. That would be seen in Beijing as an existential threat,
potentially fueling separatist sentiment in restive regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
For now, lingering doubts over Chinese military capabilities and the specter of U.S. and allied
retaliation are enough to restrain Mr. Xi. But if he concludes that the United States has broken,
once and for all, from its previous position on Taiwan and is bent on thwarting unification, he
may feel that he must act militarily. The United States might be able to build the necessary
military power in the region to deter a Chinese war of choice. But the level of dominance needed
to stop Mr. Xi from launching a war he sees as necessary might be impossible to achieve.
Reassuring China would require Mr. Biden to reiterate that the United States does not support
Taiwanese independence or oppose the island’s peaceful unification with China and that,
ultimately, Taiwan’s fate is up to Taipei and Beijing. It would mean moving away from attempts
to create international space for Taiwan and chastising Beijing when it pulls away Taipei’s
diplomatic partners. The White House would also need to use what leverage it has to discourage
members of Congress from visiting Taiwan and threaten to veto provocative legislation.
There would doubtless be blowback in Washington and Taipei, and Mr. Xi may already have
made up his mind to seize Taiwan, regardless of the U.S. stance. But a politically neutral
position on Taiwan is what the United States has followed for decades. Presidents Bill
Clinton, Barack Obama and George H.W. and George W. Bush advocated peaceful dialogue
between Taipei and Beijing to resolve their differences.
There also are longer-term repercussions to consider: If the combination of deterrence and
reassurance fails and China attacks Taiwan, it will set a precedent in which Chinese leaders kill
and destroy to achieve their goals. But if a pathway remains for China to eventually convince
Taiwan’s people — through inducements or pressure — that it is in their interest to peacefully
unify, then that may be a China that we can live with.
In the best-case scenario, the United States and China would reach a high-level agreement, a
new communiqué, in which Washington reiterates its longstanding political neutrality and
China commits to dialing back its military threats. This would avert war while giving China
political space to work toward peaceful unification. That might mean using its clout to isolate
Taiwan and eventually convince the island’s people that it should strike a deal with Beijing. But
it isn’t Washington’s place to prevent the unification of the two sides — only to ensure that
doesn’t happen through military force or coercion.
A war between the United States and China over Taiwan could be the most brutal since World
War II. As politically difficult as it may be, U.S. leaders have a duty to try to prevent conflict, and
that means speaking more softly but carrying a big stick.
China’s Military Is Going Global
Sept. 7, 2023
By Craig Singleton
Mr. Singleton is a China analyst and senior fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies in Washington.
At Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, China is nearing completion of what U.S. officials suspect will
be its first overseas military outpost in the Indo-Pacific region. This represents a major
evolution in Beijing’s regional defense strategy. Beyond facilitating Chinese military
adventurism in the South China Sea, the new base could provide the People’s Liberation Army,
or P.L.A., with a staging ground to monitor and influence vital maritime routes like the Malacca
Strait, through which an estimated 40 percent of the world’s trade flows.
But the base also shines a light on Beijing’s broader embrace of an innovative strategy to
challenge American military strength that has potentially grave implications for Washington
and its allies.
China’s expanding military mission centers on establishing what it calls “strategic strong
points” along China’s major trade, energy and resource routes, especially those that run from
China through the Malacca Strait and into the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. China has
plainly stated that these points are designed to “provide support for overseas military
operations” and “exert political and military influence” abroad.
Open-source intelligence and imagery suggest that China is laying the groundwork for this
network with completed or potential projects stretching from Djibouti in East Africa and
Equatorial Guinea on Africa’s Atlantic coast to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.
China’s defense strategy has historically been focused on defending Chinese territory closer to
home. But as its military strength and overseas interests have grown, Beijing has pivoted toward
deploying military assets farther abroad. China remains at a great tactical disadvantage
compared with the United States, which maintains a sprawling, expensive network of hundreds
of military bases in more than 80 countries. But China now has the world’s largest navy. That,
combined with its new approach — leaner and more cost-effective than the everywhere-at-once
U.S. strategy — could chip away at America’s edge, giving Beijing the ability to strike military or
other high-value targets during a conflict or neutralize America’s ability to redirect its forces to
China’s immediate periphery should a conflict arise there.
In building this architecture, China is utilizing the groundwork already laid by its sprawling Belt
and Road Initiative, begun a decade ago and centered on revitalizing infrastructure at ports
around the world with the goal of expanding Chinese economic and political power. Once-
commercial projects are now being retrofitted with military assets.
Concerned U.S. policymakers need look no farther than Djibouti — China’s first overseas
“strategic strong point.” In 2015, China began work on a civilian multipurpose port in the
country, located where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean. That port, near the U.S. military’s
Camp Lemonnier, has evolved into a heavily fortified base. According to the intelligence
platform Stratfor, it includes more than 250,000 square feet of underground bunkers —
a common P.L.A. technique for concealing artillery and other munitions from spy satellites.
Similar changes are afoot at the port of Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates, where a Chinese
shipping conglomerate built and now operates a commercial container terminal. Biden
administration officials believe China is building a covert military facility there — around 50
miles from a U.A.E. air base that hosts a major U.S. Air Force unit. In Pakistan, Beijing
recently delivered two naval frigates to safeguard a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project
that includes the Chinese-invested port of Gwadar, where China is believed to be
considering establishing a naval presence.
China’s strategic strong points may result in new bases that could be advanced staging areas for
its armed forces or platforms for spying on foreign militaries. In other cases it may reach access
agreements with host countries that allow for refueling, repair and short-term stopovers of
Chinese military assets or personnel.
America, China and a Crisis of Trust
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
 April 14, 2023
TAIPEI, Taiwan — I just returned from visiting China for the first time since Covid struck. Being
back in Beijing was a reminder of my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know.
Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly, and have so reduced our
points of contact — very few American reporters are left in China, and our leaders are barely
talking — that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing
good will come from this.
The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted
Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast and to warn anew that peace and stability in the
Taiwan Strait are incompatible with any move by Taiwan toward formal independence — was
just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is. The smallest misstep by either
side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.
That’s one of the many reasons I found it helpful to be back in Beijing and to be able to observe
China again through a larger aperture than a pinhole. Attending the China Development Forum
— Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese
officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists — reminded me of some
powerful old truths and exposed me to some eye-popping new realities about what’s really
eating away at U.S.-China relations.
Hint: The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its
absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United
States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be
both a weapon and a tool. Just when trust has become more important than ever between the
U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.
More personally, being back in Beijing was also a reminder of how many people I’ve come to
know and like there over three decades of reporting visits — but please don’t tell anyone in
Washington that I said that. There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and
Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China. Truth be told, both countries have
so demonized the other of late that it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I
can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and
naturally capitalist population than China.
Being back was also a reminder of the formidable weight and strength of what China has built
since opening to the world in the 1970s, and even since Covid hit in 2019. China’s Communist
Party government has a stronger grip than ever on its society, thanks to its police state
surveillance and digital tracking systems: Facial recognition cameras are everywhere. The party
crushes any challenge to its rule or to President Xi Jinping. These days, it is extremely difficult
for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the
record. It was not that way a decade ago.
That said, one should have no illusions: The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the
hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to
build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower
classes steadily better.
Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely
erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces. As my Times colleague Keith
Bradsher reported in 2021, Shanghai had recently built 55 new parks, bringing its total to 406,
and had plans for nearly 600 more.
Bradsher, one of the handful of American reporters who lived in mainland China through nearly
three years of stringent “zero Covid” policies, also pointed out to me that some 900 cities and
towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote
communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable. In the last 23 years America has built
exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C.,
and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. I say this to explain that
being in Beijing reminds you that China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive
police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes
both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.
For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International
Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland. It
makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation
builder named Donald Trump.
O n my first day in Beijing, I had a conversation with a young Chinese woman, a college
student. Her first question, alluding to a book I wrote, was: “Mr. Friedman, is the world still
flat?”
I explained why I thought it was flatter than ever by my definition — that because of steady
advances in connectivity and digitization, more people can compete, connect and collaborate on
more things for less money from more places than ever. During my time in Beijing, I was struck
at how educated Chinese people seem to be more connected, and able to get around digital
firewalls, than before.
I could see the woman wasn’t totally convinced by my explanation, so we moved on to other
subjects. And then she dropped this: “I just used ChatGPT.”
I said, “You used ChatGPT from Beijing, and you’re asking me if the world is still flat?”
Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to
do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time
on it.
It’s funny, though — just when you start to worry about the state of J.F.K. Airport, and all the
stories in recent years that China was going to bury us in the race to A.I., an American team,
OpenAI, comes up with the world’s leading natural language processing tool, which enables any
user to have humanlike conversations, ask any question and get deep insights in every major
language, including Mandarin.
China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health
records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build
huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.
But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the
power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real
problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I.
systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t
ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if
your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to
censor, it will be less productive.
“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”
Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Bradsher.
It’s for all of these reasons that weighing the shifting power relationship between America and
China has become such a popular pastime among elites in both of our countries. For instance,
through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23rd hearing on Capitol Hill
where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly
interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging
American children’s mental health.
Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, with almost 25 million followers on Weibo,
China’s equivalent of Twitter, explained to me just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It
was widely and derisively commented about online in China.
(All that said, YouTube has been banned from China since 2009, so we’re not the only ones
frightened by popular apps. I say we trade: We’ll accept TikTok if Beijing will let in YouTube.)
“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is
rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to
me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end.
We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”
Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever
become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is
no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that
war will not break out between our two countries.”
I t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and
Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while:
What exactly are America and China fighting about?
A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m
not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”
I’m pretty sure I’d get the same answer in Washington.

The best part of this trip was uncovering the real answer to that question and why it stumps so
many people. It’s because the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the
usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus
democracy.”
Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something
old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a
rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists that are not always visible to the naked eye.
The old and obvious aspect is that China and America are jostling to acquire the most economic
and military clout to shape the rules of the 21st century in ways most advantageous to their
respective economic and political systems. And one of those disputed rules, which America has
acknowledged but not endorsed, is China’s claim to Taiwan as part of “One China.”
Because that “rule” remains in dispute, we will continue to arm Taiwan to deter Beijing from
seizing the island, crushing its democracy and using it as a jumping off point to dominate the
rest of East Asia, and China will keep pushing for reunification — one way or another.
One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between
nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a
result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.
America knew how to deal with Nazi Germany, an economic and military peer, but a country
with which we were not deeply economically intertwined. America knew how to deal with the
Soviet Union, a military peer but nowhere near our economic peer, and a country with which we
were not economically intertwined at all.
Ditto China. For several thousand years China saw itself as situated in the middle of the world —
hence it referred to itself as Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom — protected by mountains, deserts
and seas on all sides, and often dominating states around it, while fiercely preserving its own
culture. That was until the 19th century, when it began to be repeatedly ravaged by stronger
foreign powers: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.
But in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and
military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.
How intertwined? Americans’ favorite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until
recently the favored foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them
today — is America. That makes for some weird scenes, like watching one country shoot down
another country’s intelligence balloon just after the two countries in 2022 set a record in annual
bilateral trade.
Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to
do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater
importance in international affairs.
This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and
services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected
through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet. When so many more products or
services became digitized and connected, so many more things became “dual use.” That is,
technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.
In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone
is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act
into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your
favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the
software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.
Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons.
And, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to
call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her
backyard.
This, too, leads to more weird twists. I am thinking of how a number of U.S. armed forces
branches have banned TikTok from government-issued smartphones and computers. This is
surely the first time that the Pentagon has banned an app that is known mostly for sharing
dance moves. But there is a real fear that TikTok’s highly addictive algorithm is dual use and
could be repurposed by the Chinese intelligence service to amass data on our youth — more than
150 million Americans have downloaded the app, the company says — to scramble their brains,
spread disinformation or collect information that could one day be used for blackmail.
And the twists just keep on coming. For the first 30 or so years after Beijing opened up to
trading with the world, starting around 1978-79, China largely sold America what I call
“shallow” goods — shoes, socks, shirts and solar panels.
Meanwhile, America and the West tended to sell China what I call “deep goods” — goods that
went deep into their systems and were dual use — namely software, microchips, bandwidth,
smartphones and robots. China had to buy our deep goods because, until relatively recently, it
could not make many itself.
As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its
political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily
becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent
every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark
sides of its political system.
But then, about eight years ago, we got a knock on our door and there was a Chinese salesman.
He said: “Hi, my name is Mr. Huawei and I make 5G telephone equipment better than anything
you have. I’m starting to install it all over the world, and I’d like to wire America.”
What America essentially told this Huawei salesman, as well as other rising Chinese high-tech
firms, was this: “When Chinese companies were just selling us shallow goods, we didn’t care if
your political system was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian; we were just buying your
shallow goods. But when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go
deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have
enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G
telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”
T he role of trust in international relations and commerce took one more great leap for
another reason: As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the
microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th-
and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.
So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy
efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and
military affairs.
But here’s the rub: Because the physics of making advanced logic chips has become so complex
— a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers thick and the world’s best mass producer of
advanced chips in the world is now making three-nanometer transistors — no one country or
company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply
chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.
China doesn’t need to look far for that lesson. It is on display right across the Straits of Taiwan,
at the world’s greatest chip-making company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,
better known as TSMC.
After I left Beijing, I came to Taiwan, where I spent an afternoon with the leaders of TSMC at
their headquarters in Hsinchu Science Park, a 90-minute drive south of Taipei, the capital.
When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s
most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same
recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”
TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer
companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs
into chips that perform different processing functions. In doing so, TSMC makes two solemn
oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it
will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.
“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for
business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of
them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to
customer C.”
But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more
complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can
master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC
and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global
suppliers.
“Our customers are very demanding,” added Zhang. “Their products each have unique
requirements.” They each “tell us what they want to do, and together we figure out how TSMC
will design the process to make it.” As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme,
“the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more
closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust
you.”
China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is

partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their
most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.
It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp
disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became
much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made
itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century —
semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more
devices and services became deep and dual use.
W hy did China lose our trust?
After the period of China’s isolation and internal turmoil under Mao Zedong ended with his
death in 1976, a successor, Deng Xiaoping, made a 180-degree turn away from Maoism. Deng
established a much more collective leadership for China and term limits for the top leaders, and
he put pragmatism — whatever would drive economic growth — above Communist ideology,
while hiding China’s growing strength.
In the era of Deng and his successors — in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s — Beijing forged
strong economic and educational ties with the United States, which ushered China into the
World Trade Organization, on the condition that China gradually phase out its mercantilist
practice of funding state-owned industries and that it gradually open itself to more foreign
investment and ownership, much as the world opened itself to China’s exports.
But after Xi Jinping took over as China’s paramount leader in 2012, he seemed to be alarmed at
how China’s openness toward the world, its consensus approach to leadership and its rush down
a semi-capitalist path had led to runaway corruption inside both the Communist Party and the
People’s Liberation Army, to a degree that was hurting the party’s legitimacy.
So Xi centralized power into his own hands, crushed all the fiefs that had been created by
different leaders of different government agencies and sectors of the economy, re-injected the
authority of the Communist Party into every corner of business, academia and society and
deployed pervasive surveillance technologies. All together, this reversed what seemed like
China’s steady march toward more openness — and even a somewhat freer press.
Xi also basically shifted away from Deng’s unabashed unleashing of the private sector, focusing
instead on building national economic champions that could dominate all the key industries of
the 21st century — from A.I. to quantum computing to aerospace — and making sure
Communist Party cells were in their management and in their work forces. And when American
trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-
funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the
rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”
Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its
crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in
Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling
toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves
toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs,
his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese
businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built
up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and
shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by
software, connectivity and microchips.
As that happened, it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United
States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all
sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.
B eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America
— in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to
use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from
America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror. So
Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led
investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world.
And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.
Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by
many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic
troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or
automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s
exports to the United States. As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to
boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to
more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.
A senior administration official told me that Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in
November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my
hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people.
You’re playing with fire.
Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result
of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened
both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.
I say that because of how often senior Chinese officials tell every foreign leader and visiting
Western business executive they meet today that China is “open” and eager for foreign
investment. The reality is, it has to be more open to foreign direct investment because China’s
provinces desperately need capital to compensate for all the money each local government spent
controlling Covid and because many of them are running out of land to sell for state-owned
factories to raise money.
I also don’t think it was an accident of timing that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and sort of
the Steve Jobs of China, suddenly reappeared a few weeks ago in state-controlled media after
having suddenly disappeared from public view in 2020. Ma had vanished after a disagreement
with state regulators, who thought he was getting too big and independent. His disappearance
sent shock waves through China’s start-up community and curbed investments.
I have no problem saying that I would like to live in a world where the Chinese people are
thriving, alongside all others. After all, we are talking about more than one out of six people on
the planet. I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed
to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way
to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.
I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one
respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.
China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some
U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed
with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.
Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a
global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally
change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-
à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.
I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.
If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United
States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in
Beijing think otherwise.
And by the way, in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and
America still thrive is utter fantasy. And the notion that the Europeans will always be with us in
such an endeavor, given the size of China’s market, may also be fanciful. Note French President
Emmanuel Macron’s bowing and scraping in Beijing last week.
As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no
one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized,
deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and
maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or
company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.
In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman
quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”
Never has that been truer than today, and never has China been more in need of embracing that
truth.
No, Xi Jinping Is Not About to Attack Taiwan
Oct. 29, 2023
By Bonnie S. Glaser
Ms. Glaser is managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German

Marshall Fund of the United States.
To some observers, it may seem like Xi Jinping is itching to unify Taiwan with China.
The Chinese president has repeatedly asserted that doing so is vital to achieving his “China
Dream” of national rejuvenation. He has instructed the Chinese military to be prepared by
2027 to take Taiwan by force, if necessary, and China increasingly uses its growing military
might to intimidate Taiwan’s people into yielding to Chinese control. Last month, it
staged large-scale naval drills involving an aircraft carrier in waters east of Taiwan and, days
later, flew 103 warplanes toward the island — a single-day record.
But this bluster masks significant misgivings within China’s leadership about whether its largely
unproven People’s Liberation Army forces can seize and control Taiwan at an acceptable cost,
doubts that have very likely been accentuated by Russia’s military failures in Ukraine. In this
light, a P.L.A. takeover of Taiwan is not inevitable nor, perhaps, even likely in the next few years,
which gives the United States and Taiwan time to bolster their military capabilities and avert
conflict.
Recent purges of senior Chinese generals, including the defense minister and two leaders
overseeing the country’s nuclear and missile arsenal, hint at Mr. Xi’s lack of confidence in his
military’s warfighting capability. While the reasons for these cabinet removals have not been
made public, signs point to possible corruption and its impact on military preparedness. Officers
who are lining their own pockets, if that is the case, are likely not taking seriously enough Mr.
Xi’s instruction to be prepared to seize Taiwan by 2027. Mr. Xi has frequently admonished the
P.L.A. to improve military training and strengthen combat readiness.
Russia’s debacle in Ukraine is a cautionary tale for Mr. Xi. Early in the war, the battle-hardened
Russian military failed in the relatively straightforward task of crossing a land border to capture
Kyiv. The P.L.A. would face even greater difficulty in crossing the Taiwan Strait. A large-scale
amphibious invasion is among the most difficult military operations, requiring air and maritime
superiority and the ability to sustain an invading force during a lengthy campaign.
For Mr. Xi, the political risks of anything less than a quick, low-cost and successful invasion are
huge. A protracted stalemate could undermine his assertion that China is strong and powerful
again, jeopardizing his goals of national rejuvenation and a powerful military. Even more
worrying for Beijing is the possibility of defeat at the hands of a well-equipped, dug-in and
defiant Taiwan, aided by the potential intervention of U.S. forces. It’s a nightmare scenario that
could weaken Mr. Xi’s hold on power and even threaten Communist Party rule.
The Chinese leader can also not help but grasp the heavy price being paid by Russia in Ukraine:
military casualties estimated at nearly 300,000 and counting; a severe weakening of the Russian
economy because of international sanctions; incalculable harm to its global reputation; and an
accelerated decline in Russia’s national power.
It’s a perilous time for Mr. Xi to court such danger.
China’s economy is facing long-term slower growth. This raises the specter of dissatisfaction or
even social instability if the government continues to prioritize security and political control
over economic well-being. Thousands of demonstrators across the country protested Mr. Xi’s
obsession with control late last year, taking to the streets to denounce strict Covid policies,
which were subsequently lifted. Some demonstrators voiced rare demands for political change,
including Mr. Xi’s removal. Domestic support for a potential bloody war over Taiwan might not
last long. Because of China’s now-lifted one-child policy, its armed forces are mostly composed
of sons with no siblings. Their parents expect those soldiers to support them in old age and may
take to the streets if casualties were to rise.
Yet another factor likely to restrain Mr. Xi is the prospect of the United States aiding Taiwan.
Bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress for Taiwan’s security has never been stronger, and
President Biden has repeatedly said the United States would support Taiwan militarily if China
attacked. My conversations with Chinese experts suggest that Beijing firmly believes the United
States values Taiwan as an important strategic bulwark in containing China and will intervene to
prevent a Chinese takeover of the island.
Still, there are scenarios where Mr. Xi may feel compelled to take military action. If a future
Taiwan government pushes for formal independence through a referendum or constitutional
revision, Mr. Xi could conclude that the political risks of inaction — to him and the Communist
Party — outweigh the risk of war. A move by an American president or Congress to restore
diplomatic recognition to Taiwan — or return to the defense treaty that it had with Taipei before
the United States switched diplomatic recognition to Communist China in 1979 — could
similarly force Mr. Xi’s hand, even if he is not confident of battlefield success.
Even without such an outright trigger, the upcoming January elections in Taiwan could result in
another four, or even eight, years of rule by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.
Mr. Xi may decide to strike if he begins to feel that Taiwan is slipping further from his grasp,
especially if the United States continues to bolster Taiwan’s military and its own forces in the
region.
But unless his back is against the wall, Mr. Xi will likely conclude that the risks of an
unsuccessful military adventure are too high. This provides an opportunity that the United
States and Taiwan must use wisely.
Taiwan must accelerate its shift toward investing in defense capabilities that can survive — and
prove lethal against — a potential attack. Since resupplying the island will be extremely difficult
if conflict breaks out, it must make a greater effort to stockpile not only munitions, but also food,
water and energy. It needs to adopt a whole-of-society approach to its defense that emphasizes
national resistance, resilience and the willingness to fight.
The United States should do more to help Taiwan achieve these goals. It also needs to continue
efforts to reconfigure its own military posture in East Asia, including spreading out American
forces, making them more resilient and procuring more advanced long-range missiles that can
outmatch China’s weapons. The overall goal of U.S. military strategy in the region should be to
deny Beijing the ability to achieve a rapid, low-cost military victory over Taiwan.
Finally, the United States must also provide credible assurances to Beijing that as long as China
refrains from using force against Taiwan, Washington will not support the island’s
independence nor return to its past defense treaty with Taipei. Assurances like these can help to
avoid war.
In the meantime, China’s rhetoric and aggressive maneuvers should be viewed not as a sign of
imminent attack, but for what they are: a demonstration of Chinese resolve that it will not
accept Taiwan’s permanent separation from China, and a chance for the P.L.A. to hone its skills
— should Beijing one day feel compelled to use them.
Xi Jinping May Be Souring on His ‘Best, Most

Intimate Friend’
July 6, 2023
By Ryan Hass
Mr. Hass was an adviser to President Barack Obama on China policy.
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When Xi Jinping ascended to the pinnacle of Chinese power a decade ago, he saw Vladimir
Putin as a strong leader who shared his hostility to the Western-dominated international
system. They bonded over mutual paranoia about threats to their rule and exchanged best
practices for imposing control at home and making the world more accommodating of their
authoritarian impulses. Mr. Xi referred to Mr. Putin as his “best, most intimate friend.”
In the wake of the Wagner affair, Mr. Xi’s big bet on the Russian leader isn’t looking so safe.
The disastrous Russian war effort, culminating in last month’s aborted insurrection by the
Wagner group’s paramilitary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has exposed Mr. Putin’s Russia for what
it is: a weakened, unpredictable nuclear state on China’s border, with a wounded leader whose
long-term hold on power is not assured.
Mr. Xi cannot afford to abandon Mr. Putin altogether. He has invested too much in the
relationship, and Russia remains useful to China. But the bromance that has caused so much
concern in the West has probably peaked.
If Mr. Xi is to achieve his strategic goal of surpassing U.S. strength around the world, he will
need to rebalance his foreign policy to account for Mr. Putin’s vulnerabilities. That may mean
stronger Chinese support for ending a war that has backfired so severely on the Russian leader
and a potentially less confrontational Chinese approach toward the United States and Taiwan.
There are signs the Xi-Putin bonhomie may already be cooling. Beijing offered only a muted
response to the Wagner episode, calling it an “internal affair,” but hints of alarm over the failed
mutiny have appeared in Chinese state-run media. Mr. Xi would not benefit by giving a blank
check of support to Mr. Putin now. Doing so could invite questioning at home about Mr. Xi’s
foreign policy judgment, which might only worsen if Mr. Putin were to suffer further setbacks.
China may be compelled to adjust its posture on the Ukraine war. So far, while issuing
halfhearted calls for peace, Beijing has lent Moscow crucial diplomatic cover by portraying the
war as justified in thwarting NATO expansion or as provoked by the West. Beijing also has
provided Moscow an economic lifeline, offsetting Western sanctions with a significant
expansion in Sino-Russian trade.
While there have long been signs that Chinese leaders are not fully supportive of Mr. Putin’s
war, the conflict initially offered China hope that it would divert America’s focus away from Asia,
where Beijing has sought to expand its sway. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Washington and its
Asian allies have established a stronger military presence along China’s periphery since the
Ukraine war began and are more united today in limiting China’s access to critical technologies.
Mr. Putin marches to his own tune. But China is now aware that a prolonged war in Ukraine
could further threaten its Russian partner and compromise its own foreign policy agenda. It has
a motive to move beyond vague expressions of principle regarding the war and to exercise its
unique leverage over Moscow to urge an end to the fighting.
One key reason for this is Europe, where China’s image has been battered by its support of
Russia. European business sentiment toward China has soured, foreign direct investment has
slowed, and trans-Atlantic coordination on China has tightened.
Mr. Xi is determined to undercut American efforts to constrain Beijing. A hostile Europe will
make that difficult. Russia’s isolation puts pressure on China to seek better relations with
Europe to prevent its lining up with the United States against China. One of the best ways for
China to achieve that would be to more strongly reposition itself as peacemaker in a conflict on
Europe’s doorstep.
The problems in Russia also complicate Mr. Xi’s calculations regarding Taiwan. The Ukraine
war has made two things clear: Pure military strength does not ensure battlefield success; and
anything short of victory may invite leadership challenges. In that light, triggering a war in the
Taiwan Strait through increasingly bellicose actions could be disastrous for the Chinese leader.
The self-ruled island will hold a presidential election in January to choose a successor to Tsai
Ing-wen, who has angered Beijing by cultivating closer relations with the United States. China
has a range of tools that it is suspected of having used before against Taiwan to apply economic
pressure or sow misinformation in support of candidates who prioritize improved relations with
Beijing.
But aggressive Chinese rhetoric and threatening military exercises around Taiwan could
undercut that goal by boosting candidates who oppose accommodation with China, not to
mention provoking stronger and more visible American and international support for Taiwan.
For Mr. Xi, the sweet spot will be to appear strong and determined while not triggering an
escalatory spiral.
Given these changed dynamics, leaders in Beijing probably also now realize that they must lower
the temperature in relations with the United States. The deep chill cast over China-U.S. relations
by the spy balloon incident in February has recently shown signs of thawing, with last month’s
trip to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken — which included an audience with Mr. Xi —
and this week’s visit by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
The Chinese president still needs his “intimate friend.” Russia remains the only other country in
the world with the means and motivation to partner with China in diluting the role of human
rights and democratic governance in the international system. Steady relations also ensure
stability along their long land border and keep China supplied with discounted Russian energy,
as well as imports of food and military equipment. Both sides can be expected to maintain the
appearance of business as usual.
But Mr. Xi has little to gain from doubling down on Mr. Putin, whose troubles are not helpful for
China’s grand plans.
Many unresolved questions about the impact of Mr. Putin’s weakening grip in Russia remain.
How well Mr. Xi can navigate the fallout, with his partner now diminished, is one of them.
Vladimir Putin Is Still Useful to Xi Jinping. Until
He Isn’t.
July 23, 2023
By Sergey Radchenko
Mr. Radchenko is a historian of the Cold War.
In 1969, China and the Soviet Union seemed on the brink of war.
They fought a deadly border clash in March of that year and another in August. The
Kremlin dropped hints of a nuclear strike. Over the next few years, they exchanged barbs. Mao
Zedong warned, “You piss on my head, and I shall retaliate!” The Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev called Mao “treacherous.” An alliance that Moscow and Beijing previously billed as
unbreakable quickly unraveled.
So Mao reached out to his avowed foe the United States. Mao, a scathing critic of what he called
American imperialism, suddenly referred to President Richard Nixon as “the No. 1 good fellow
in the world,” and by 1972, Nixon turned up in Beijing. It was a geopolitical earthquake that
altered the course of history.
These days Vladimir Putin is Xi Jinping’s No. 1 good fellow as the two countries make common
cause against the United States. But the Russian leader — his authority bruised in the wake of
the aborted mutiny by the Wagner paramilitary group in June — would be wise to keep in mind
China’s track record. As Mikhail Kapitsa, a top Soviet foreign ministry official, put it in 1982,
“The Chinese never befriend anyone for a long time.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s approach to geopolitics is rooted in an ancient strategic culture
of playing other nations — sometimes dismissed as barbarians during China’s imperial times —
against one another for China’s benefit. Mao’s abrupt turn to the United States showed just how
quickly Chinese loyalties can crumble when the usefulness of a strategic partner wanes.
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What Happens When You Stop Being a Superpower?
June 22, 2023
In 1975, Geng Biao, a senior Chinese foreign policy official, explained to other party leaders the
rationale for the switch. It was not because “we have good feelings toward the United States,” he
said, according to the minutes of a party meeting. “We are taking advantage of their conflict,”
referring to the Soviets and the Americans. He added, “We can use them.”
The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping continued cozying up to America, partly as a way to “cope
with the polar bear” — the Soviets — as he put it. The U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. at the
time, Thomas J. Watson, saw through this, warning President Jimmy Carter in 1980 that the
Chinese “jump around from bed to bed. And I think we ought to make sure that they are lashed
down to our bed before we undertake actions which we might regret later on.”
Even the Soviets warned the United States about Beijing’s trustworthiness. The West “may be in
a euphoric mood now about China,” the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said, but would
come to regret it.
China greatly benefited from its turn toward the United States, obtaining access to Western
technology, investment and the vast American market, all of which turned out to be essential for
China to eventually make the great leap to modernity and global clout that it now enjoys.
But by the early 1980s, Deng cagily began playing the barbarians against each other again.
China-Soviet relations grew closer over the rest of the decade, driven in part by shared
resentment of U.S. global dominance and the belief that the Americans were intent on
promoting the overthrow of their regimes.
Mr. Xi, perhaps sensing diminishing returns from deeper engagement with America, has
brought things full circle once more during the Putin era, embracing the Russian leader and
denouncing the United States.
The West is right to be worried. Turning the clock back to the days of Sino-Soviet brotherhood,
Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi have unequivocally sided with each other in challenging the Western-led
world order. The combination of Mr. Putin’s revanchism and military aggression and China’s
economic power is dangerous.
But Mr. Putin has made a potentially grave error, burning bridges with the West to go all in with
China in reckless disregard for Beijing’s track record of instrumentalizing its friendships.
Despite offering diplomatic cover for Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, China has largely avoided
running afoul of Western sanctions on Russia, essentially putting its own interests before those
of its embattled client. Russia’s deepening isolation has given China access to discounted
Russian energy products. Much of the trade between China and Russia is now conducted in the
Chinese yuan, which reduces Russia’s exposure to Western economic pressure but also advances
Beijing’s goal of undercutting the dollar’s dominance as the world currency. At the same time,
China has been able to portray itself to much of the world as a responsible global player with its
halfhearted calls for peace in Ukraine as the war has dragged on.
Mr. Putin, on the other hand, has made his country a junior partner to China. Looking
weakened and less secure after the Wagner revolt last month, he risks becoming even more
dependent on China for political and economic support.
Mr. Xi will no doubt take note. Like past Chinese leaders, he respects strength but knows how to
exploit weakness, and Russia will remain useful to him as he continues to challenge the United
States. Mr. Putin can still make major strategic choices for his country, as long as they coincide
with China’s interests. But will China stand by him if those interests diverge? Or if Russian elites
run out of patience with his poor decisions and try to push him out? Or if the global costs of
standing with him prove too onerous for China?
China remains the same secretive, self-serving Communist Party state that it was in Mao’s day,
with an outlook on global politics in which alignments are viewed as temporary. There are no
“good feelings,” as Mr. Geng put it five decades ago, just cold calculation.
The West, so concerned today about this newly united front between China and Russia, should
remember that.
So should Mr. Putin.

No One Should Want to See a Dictator Get Old
Aug. 15, 2023
By Michael Beckley
Mr. Beckley is the author of “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.”
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Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are both 70 years old, which offers a ray of hope for those worried
about their aggressive efforts to remake the world order. The next decade or two will most likely
bring leadership changes in China and Russia that could play a role in resetting their
relationships with the West.
But for the foreseeable future, the United States and its allies will face a dire threat: An axis of
aging and nuclear-armed leaders who are running out of time to achieve their grandiose
ambitions. As Mr. Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine has made clear, autocratic leaders don’t
always peacefully fade away.
Aging dictators have less time to reshape the world — and more memories of being obeyed at
home and dissed abroad for their conduct. They become increasingly repressive and aggressive
as power goes to their heads. Surrounded by sycophants, they make disastrous decisions again
and again. They start pondering their legacies and wondering why they haven’t received the
global respect they think they deserve or achieved the glory that would etch their names among
history’s greats. They may decide that they don’t want to go down as a merely transitional figure.
It’s a combustible combination: an autocrat who is overconfident and aggrieved and in a hurry.
In his first few years in power in China, Mao Zedong envisioned that his plans to overtake the
capitalist powers could take 50 to 75 years. But as he entered his mid-60s, he progressively
shortened that timetable and in 1958 began the Great Leap Forward, a misguided scheme to
quickly transform China into an industrial giant. At least 45 million people died of starvation or
other causes as agriculture was neglected in the frenzy to meet his targets. Partly to rally the
nation behind the campaign, he instigated an international crisis by shelling islands held by the
Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan. From 1966 to 1976, the aging Mao’s last-ditch effort
to safeguard his rule and legacy resulted in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
Kim Il-sung of North Korea was another leader who acted aggressively in his later years.
Emboldened by the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam and its subsequent military drawdown from Asia,
he spent his third and fourth decades in power going from provocation to provocation. From
1968 to 1988, his regime seized a U.S. intelligence ship and its crew; shot down a U.S.
reconnaissance aircraft, killing all 31 aboard; tried to assassinate a South Korean president on
multiple occasions; killed dozens of South Korean officials, as well as the first lady; bombed a
South Korean airliner, killing all 115 aboard; and dug tunnels sufficient to transport 30,000
troops per hour into South Korea.
Elderly dictators rarely mellow out even when they are firmly in charge. Joseph Stalin emerged
from World War II victorious in his mid-60s. Yet instead of working with his wartime allies, he
sought to dominate Eurasia and sent a new wave of prisoners to the gulag. Leonid
Brezhnev initially pursued détente with the West. But ailing in his second decade in power, he
took a more hostile stance, promoting Communist revolutions around the world, invading
Afghanistan in 1979 and deploying advanced nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Western Europe
while awarding himself a chestful of medals.
Aging autocrats generally don’t change tack unless compelled to. Mao sought
rapprochement with the United States only after the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict made it
clear that China needed U.S. help to counter Moscow. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his
weapons of mass destruction in 2003 because of various factors, including pressure from the
United States. The Chinese Nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek suppressed his yearning
to conquer mainland China and the South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee grudgingly gave up
on taking the rest of the Korean Peninsula in part because they feared the United States would
abandon them.
Which brings us back to Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin.
Rather than easing toward retirement, both men have aggressively asserted vast territorial
claims, ordered mass military mobilizations, strengthened ties with illiberal regimes like North
Korea and Iran and built up their cults of personality. After invading Ukraine, Mr. Putin
explicitly compared himself to Peter the Great, the modernizing conqueror who founded the
Russian Empire. Chinese Communist propaganda describes Mr. Xi as the culmination of a
glorious trinity: Under Mao, China stood up; under Deng Xiaoping, China grew rich; and under
Xi, China will become mighty.
Both have made plain their ambitions to redraw the map of Eurasia. Mr. Putin says Ukraine
doesn’t exist as an independent country and has implied that Moscow should reunite the
“Russian world” — an area that roughly maps the old Soviet borders. China’s claims include
Taiwan, most of the South China Sea and East China Sea and chunks of territory also claimed by
India. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Mr. Xi said in
2018.
Diplomacy did not dissuade Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine, and it is unlikely to alter Mr. Xi’s
fixation on absorbing Taiwan, which he has framed as essential for realizing “the great
rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Revanchist dictators typically don’t respond to nice words.
They must be blocked by alliances of powerful militaries and resilient economies.
Toward that end, the United States and its allies should accelerate arms transfers to frontline
nations like Ukraine and Taiwan and forge an economic and security bloc to stockpile munitions
and critical resources and protect international waters and allied territory. The West must band
together to deprive Beijing and Moscow of any hope of easy wars of conquest.
During the Cold War, containment was designed to thwart Soviet expansion until internal decay
forced Moscow to curtail its ambitions. That should be the same goal today, and it may not take
half a century to get there. Russia is already in decline, China’s rise has stalled, and both
countries have made their neighbors wary. The United States and its allies do not need to
contain Russia and China forever — just until current trends play out. Eventually, their leaders’
dreams of dominance will start to appear fanciful, and their successors might decide to rectify
their nations’ economic and strategic predicaments through geopolitical moderation and
internal reform.
Until then, containing two aging dictators won’t be easy, but it provides the best hope of limiting
the disruption they cause until they fade into the history books.
Banana Peels for Xi Jinping
Nov. 30, 2022
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
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There’s a Soviet joke that has long circulated in China, about a man who is arrested for
protesting in Moscow’s Red Square by holding up a blank sheet of paper.
“How can you arrest me?” the man objects in one version. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Everybody knows,” the police officer answers, “what you mean to say.”
That old joke was inspiration for some of the white sheets of paper protesters displayed in recent
days in China. Everybody in the country knew what the protesters were trying to express but
feared saying.
And when everybody can mentally fill in a blank sheet of paper with the frustration and anger
that so many ordinary Chinese feel, that’s a challenge that the de facto emperor, Xi Jinping,
cannot suppress as easily as he can arrest individual protesters. Xi has meticulously cultivated a
personality cult around himself as the kindly “Uncle Xi” — whose slogan could be “Make China
Great Again” — but in the major cities it’s now obvious that he’s regarded by many as an
obstinate, ruthless and not terribly effective dictator.
So where will these protests lead?
For all the talk about these demonstrations being an echo of the Tiananmen movement in 1989,
they’re really not so far. The 1989 demonstrations unfolded in more than 300 cities around
China, brought more than a million people to the center of Beijing, blockaded entrances to the
Zhongnanhai leadership compound and benefited from a paralyzing power struggle in the
Chinese leadership that delayed a crackdown. In contrast, the Xi regime is already dragging off
protesters and searching people on subways for contraband, such as the Instagram app on their
cellphones.
To challenge the national government in China today is to invite imprisonment — a man
was detained in Shanghai for carrying flowers and making veiled comments — so it’s difficult to
see how open resistance can be sustained. Historically in China, mass protests have arisen not
when conditions were most intolerable (like the famine from 1959 to 1962) but when people
thought they could get away with them, such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956, the
April 5 incident of 1976, the Democracy Wall easing of 1978-79, the student protests of 1986 and
Tiananmen in 1989.
Then again, I was Beijing bureau chief of The Times in 1989, and most people thought a major
protest that year was impossible — until it happened. Human courage is contagious as well as
unpredictable.
So run from anyone who predicts confidently where China is headed. One of the few continuities
in China over the last 150 years has been periodic and unexpected discontinuity.
Yet whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, something important may have
changed.
“It is so significant, for it’s a decisive breach of the ‘Big Silence,’” said Xiao Qiang, the founder
and editor of China Digital Times. “It’s now public knowledge that the emperor isn’t wearing
clothes.”
Xi may be able to reimpose the “Big Silence,” Xiao acknowledged, but, he added, “It’s still a
different China.”
That’s partly because while there have been many protests around the country, they typically
have been localized ones about labor disputes, land seizures or pollution. In contrast, China’s
zero-Covid policy is synonymous with Xi. He owns it. The Chinese who denounce Covid
lockdowns know that they are criticizing Xi.
Xi has painted himself into a corner, and it will be costly for him to ease up on his hated Covid
policy.
This is a problem of Xi’s own making. He refused to import highly effective mRNA vaccines, and
China’s effort to vaccinate older people has been anemic. Only 40 percent of Chinese over 80
have received a booster, so a relaxation of Covid rules could lead to Covid-19 killing hundreds of
thousands of people.
Meanwhile, the current zero-Covid policy has devastated the economy and antagonized the
population. It seems unsustainable.
“People have lost hope,” confided a Chinese friend who is the child of a leader yet now mocks the
Communist Party, adding that Beijing “feels quiet and dead.” From business owners to taxi
drivers, Chinese citizens are struggling with constant Covid tests and lockdowns — and then on
television they see throngs of fans unmasked at World Cup games in Qatar, enjoying a normal
life.
The death Wednesday of Jiang Zemin, a former Communist Party leader, complicates the
picture. Jiang expanded economic reforms and offered a very limited vision of political reform
(for example, he opened up access to the New York Times website in China in 2001; it was
blocked in 2012 under a successor). And deaths of past leaders, including Zhou Enlai and Hu
Yaobang, became ways for Chinese to protest by nominally engaging in mourning.
A hallmark of Chinese protest is that when even the mildest criticisms are banned, people turn
to satire and sarcasm — which amount to mockery of Chinese propaganda.
Gene Sharp, an American scholar who literally wrote the manual for toppling dictators, used to
say that one of the biggest threats to tyrants was humor. Autocrats could survive earnest calls for
free expression, but they deflated when they were laughed at.
I wonder if that will be the unclothed emperor’s challenge ahead, even if he restores the Big
Silence.
Chinese university students have been singing the national anthem because it includes these
words (written before the 1949 Communist revolution): “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves … The
Chinese nation faces its greatest danger.”
It would be awkward to arrest young people for singing the national anthem, but — like that
blank paper — everyone knows what it signifies. That may be intolerable for Xi.
“You get three or five people together and sing the national anthem, and you’ll be arrested,”
predicted a veteran Chinese journalist who also covered Tiananmen.
When police officers show up, protesters have sometimes switched to chanting satirical slogans
in favor of the zero-Covid policy, like, “We want Covid tests!”
When Beijing protesters were criticized for being pawns of foreign forces, one didn’t miss a beat
as he worked the crowd. “By foreign forces,” he asked, “are you referring to Marx and Engels?”
Chinese netizens these days discuss “banana peels” (xiang jiao pi) and “shrimp moss” (xia tai).
Why? Because the former has the same initials as Xi Jinping. And “shrimp moss” sounds like
the Chinese for “step down.”
A dictator’s dilemma: How do you arrest people for posting about banana peels without adding
to the ridicule that undermines your rule?
Xi Jinping’s Covid Crisis Is Really an

Opportunity
Dec. 14, 2022
By Minxin Pei
Mr. Pei is the author of the forthcoming book “Guarding Dictatorship: China’s
Surveillance State.”
The public discontent vented in bold demonstrations last month against China’s Covid
containment policies represents the greatest domestic crisis President Xi Jinping has faced in
his decade in power. His government quickly smothered the protests. It would be tempting to
view things now as a slow-burn stalemate between a restless population and an unyielding
authoritarian government. But the Communist Party’s relationship with the Chinese people is
more complex than that.
As abruptly as it cracked down on the demonstrators, Mr. Xi’s government essentially yielded to
their main demand, pivoting away from its unpopular “zero Covid” strategy in a striking display
of responsiveness. More work is required to put this episode behind him, but Mr. Xi now has an
opportunity to rewrite the social contract that governs China — the implicit bargain under which
the people acquiesce to autocracy in exchange for stability and prosperity.
He could learn from Deng Xiaoping, a master of maximizing the political potential of crisis.
When Mr. Deng returned to power in the late 1970s after the death of Mao Zedong, the
Communist Party faced an existential crisis: Mao’s despotic rule had impoverished China and
devastated the party. Mr. Deng seized the moment, abandoning Mao’s fantasies of a Communist
nirvana in favor of political stability and improving standards of living. The party’s compact with
the people was redrawn.
By the early 1990s, China’s ruling elites were once again demoralized and directionless. The
crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing had soiled the party’s image,
and in December 1991 the Soviet Union crumbled. Mr. Deng again turned crisis into
opportunity. Just months after the Soviet collapse, the 87-year-old leader rallied the party and
breathed new life into market reforms. The decades of economic success that followed
reaffirmed the party’s “mandate of heaven” — the imperial-era concept of a divine right to rule.
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Mr. Deng had the advantage of exploiting crises for which others (Mao and the Soviets) were
blamed. It won’t be as easy for Mr. Xi to disassociate himself from a Covid policy in which he
invested significant political capital but that has stifled the economy and provoked the rare
street demonstrations. But he does have an advantage of his own: During the Communist Party
congress in October, Mr. Xi secured a third term and stacked the party’s upper echelons with his
supporters. Acknowledging a major policy error will not endanger his political survival.
Mr. Xi has a strategic window to not only pivot away from the “zero Covid” policy but also from
a personal governing style that has once again imperiled the party’s deal with the people. Before
Mr. Xi, that longstanding compact had obliged the party to be meritocratic and administratively
competent. Officials were promoted based on the economic performance of their cities and
provinces, and channels — although limited — still existed through which citizens could voice
complaints. Lawyers, journalists and activists enjoyed far more freedom to challenge local
authorities who governed poorly or abused power.
Mr. Xi departed from all this. He inherited the reins a decade ago with the economy booming
but the ruling party tarnished by corruption and environmental devastation. He cracked down
on those problems and prioritized ideological loyalty over economic development and
administrative competence. Political indoctrination reminiscent of the Mao era returned, and
the government has become less friendly to the private sector. Fearful of “color revolutions” —
popular protests in the name of democracy — Mr. Xi has imposed the harshest social controls
and censorship since Mao.
The protests in several cities in late November were, on the surface, directed at harsh and
arbitrary tactics like lockdowns and incessant Covid testing. But other serious public concerns
had been building for years: a slowing economy, soaring youth unemployment, a property-
sector crisis, tightening social controls and Mr. Xi’s revival of discredited Communist ideology.
A lone protester voiced this disaffection in October, putting up anti-Xi banners in Beijing on the
eve of the party congress with slogans like “We don’t want a Cultural Revolution! We want
reform!” — phrases uttered the next month in the street demonstrations.
Mr. Xi would be unwise to stick to his current ideological course of a state-dominated economy
and absolute regime security. If he does, the Chinese economy will almost certainly
underperform. Officials obsessed with demonstrating loyalty to him may double down on ill-
conceived policies that ignore public opinion, the very thing that triggered the demonstrations.
Mr. Xi’s assertive foreign policy will further alienate the West, and continued paranoia about
“hostile forces” seeking to undermine China will bring further repression upon an already weary
public.
Instead, Mr. Xi should channel Mr. Deng. A good start would be to refocus on economic
development and perhaps meet with leading entrepreneurs, some of whom have been detained
or sidelined or have kept a low profile in recent years as Mr. Xi suppressed the private sector.
Rescinding crippling tech regulations imposed in the past two years would also send a positive
signal. Mr. Xi, in fact, presented an ambitious blueprint for deepening economic reform during
his first year in power that called for market forces, rather than the state, to lead development.
As his rhetoric and policies veered to the left over the years, very little of that reform agenda was
carried out, but it is never too late, and it is needed now.
The recent demonstrations also made clear that government must be more responsive.
Restoring those limited channels that had allowed the public to question policy — which Mr. Xi
has all but shut down — will help the party deliver competent governance. The aspirations of
members of China’s growing middle class may constitute a long-term threat to one-party rule,
but they prefer evolution, not revolution. Government incompetence and indifference, however,
as epitomized by “zero Covid,” could radicalize them.
A return to Mr. Deng’s pragmatism will not be credible unless Mr. Xi listens to other voices in
the party. Before he took power, the Communist Party observed a system of collective decision-
making intended to balance the interests of its leading factions. This frequently led to paralysis.
But it also helped the party avoid the kinds of major policy missteps — like “zero Covid” — that
come with one-man rule. Now fully in charge, Mr. Xi may find surrendering a little power
unattractive. But he can still allow more consultation in decision-making.
We don’t know whether Mr. Xi thinks he needs to change course. But if he read the recent
protests correctly, he must realize that a renewed compact with the Chinese people may be
essential to preserving his own “mandate of heaven.”
Xi Jinping Is a Captive of the Communist Party
Too
Oct. 10, 2022
By Kerry Brown
Mr. Brown has written several books on Chinese Communist Party politics
including “The World According to Xi.”
To Western eyes, President Xi Jinping of China may appear as the embodiment of tyrannical
one-man rule, and for good reason.
Since taking leadership of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, he mothballed a power-
sharing arrangement among party factions, transforming one of the world’s largest political
organizations into a unified whole in which his words, thoughts and visage are
everywhere. Speaking in 2016, he used a phrase once uttered by Mao Zedong in describing the
party as China’s “east, west, south, north and center.” He may as well have been speaking of
himself.
Mr. Xi now stands ready to assume an unprecedented third five-year term as supreme leader
during the Communist Party Congress, which will begin on Sunday.
His ability to amass so much unquestioned power has proved unexpected, even unwelcome, to
some. It was widely assumed, with good reason, that China was too complex, too vast and too
capitalist to avoid some form of political pluralism. Surely social media, a rising middle class
and general modernization would lead to that. Instead, Mr. Xi has taken China in the opposite
direction and seems able to extend his tentacles even beyond China’s borders.
But how could this have happened with such relative ease, without bloodshed? It surely cannot
be just through the whim of one man.
For all the fixation on Mr. Xi, in the end his life, purpose and politics are not really about him.
They are about the Communist Party. There is indeed an autocrat who rules modern China, but
it is the party that Mr. Xi serves, not the man. And in a strange way, he is as much a captive of
the party as everyone else.
His place in Chinese history rests on whether he can ensure that party rule endures long after
his departure so that it can fulfill the party’s fundamental aim: restoring China to its ancient role
as a great nation worthy of its Chinese name, “Zhongguo,” “the central country.”
This mission has been in the making ever since the depredations China suffered at the hands of
Western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by the collapse of Chinese imperial
rule in 1912 and Japan’s savage wartime invasion. The Communist Party picked up the pieces of
a broken nation. Mr. Xi’s power derives from the party’s nationalist goal of wiping away those
past shames, restoring China’s strength and control over “lost” territories like Taiwan.
Revanchism may drive President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but it is the lifeblood of the Chinese
Communist Party.
Mr. Xi is the son of a former elite leader, Xi Zhongxun, and learned from him at least one lesson:
Keep faith in the party no matter how it treats you.
Caught up in one of the purges of the Mao era, Mr. Xi’s father was under house arrest for years,
politically rehabilitated only after Mao died. During the Cultural Revolution, Maoist student
militants ransacked the family’s home; one of Mr. Xi’s sisters died in the mayhem. Paraded
publicly as an enemy of the people, his own mother was forced to denounce him. Mr. Xi
eventually spent seven years exiled to the countryside as part of Mao’s exhortation to “learn
from the peasants.”
Although hardened by the experience, Mr. Xi kept faith. A friend of his during those troubled
times recalled a young man with an aura of destiny, a Communist “princeling” who regarded
party leadership as his birthright and had his “eyes on the prize,” according to a classified
2009 report compiled by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Convinced that only the party could
restore China’s strength, Mr. Xi was not corruptible by material gain, his old friend said. The
question was whether he would succumb to the intoxication of power.
By the time he took over in 2012, China’s capitalist transition was complete, but new problems
had emerged. The decade under his predecessor, Hu Jintao, was one of missed opportunity, the
grand mission of national restoration seemingly forgotten. Corrupt local officials governed their
turf like petty tyrants, and protests raged over government heavy-handedness, rampant
corruption, poor labor conditions and colossal pollution.
The anti-corruption campaigns that dominated Mr. Xi’s first few years in power were often seen
as cover for eliminating opponents. But he was primarily motivated by a larger mission to make
the party more efficient and restore its image.
It is striking how little meaningful pushback he has encountered. Formidable as Mao was, even
he encountered opposition to his destructive utopian policies. Deng Xiaoping faced resistance to
his market reforms and Jiang Zemin contended with forces that wanted even greater reform.
But with Mr. Xi, there has been almost no party dissent apart from occasional rumors of internal
grumbling and some lower-level defections.
Part of the reason is the potency of the nationalist mission, which appeals to Chinese citizens far
more than the cold logic of Marxism-Leninism. The displays of patriotic pride during the Beijing
Winter Olympics last February were sincere, as were feelings of wounded anger when the United
States and others blamed China for the pandemic. Even Chinese who may be averse to
Communist Party rule still love their country.
Mr. Xi has been lucky to be able to build on the progress of his forbears. But he has been skillful,
too. The internet could have threatened centralized authoritarian rule, but Mr. Xi’s government
has used algorithms, face recognition and mass electronic surveillance to more pervasively
assert party power. A technology backwater for much of the 20th century, China now has the
world’s most advanced techno-autocracy.
The remarkable muscularity of Mr. Xi’s style is not all about him or his personal aims, ambitions
or ego (while he may certainly have these). China is strong again; Mr. Xi’s one responsibility is
not to foul that up. And that’s why his leadership is so risk-averse, and dissenters are so
energetically crushed. The systematic repression in Xinjiang is the most extreme manifestation
of his obsession with preserving stability, even at the risk of international criticism and domestic
suffering. The same goes for his uncompromising zero-Covid policy.
These and other examples of discipline and control are akin to the directives of a commander
preparing for the final climactic battle before victory — China’s restoration as a great power,
perhaps even overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy someday, can be
realized. Mr. Xi and his party colleagues know that a single misstep could ruin everything.
Someday, of course, Mr. Xi will be gone. But his leadership ethos — the vast project of building
up the current Chinese leader’s public persona, protecting it from all threats and keeping a laser
focus on making China strong, respected, even feared — will remain. Too much has already been
invested in it.
Xi Jinping Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap
Oct. 14, 2022
By Susan Shirk
Ms. Shirk is the author of “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.”
President Xi Jinping’s first decade in power has been a study in hubris. He has purged political
rivals and adopted heavy-handed policies that have imperiled China’s economy. He laid the
groundwork for a crackdown in the Xinjiang region that drove Muslim citizens into thought
reform camps and has alarmed and alienated neighbors with an aggressive foreign policy.
And things just might get worse.
The Chinese Communist Party congress, which opens on Sunday, is expected to hand Mr. Xi
another five years as general secretary of the party. Rather than a reassuring sign of continuity,
his third term as the top leader of China could spell years of uncertainty as problems mount
around an unbound leader who has shown little inclination to share decision-making.
Mr. Xi fell into the same trap that has ensnared dictators throughout history: He overreached.
He has concentrated more power in his hands than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong,
looming so completely over the country that he’s been called the “chairman of everything.”
Rivals — real and imagined — have been removed through an extensive anti-corruption
campaign. Two more top former officials were jailed last month, accused of financial crimes and
disloyalty to Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi has openly accused other politicians of plotting against the party
from the outset of his purge ten years ago. He values fealty to himself as more important than
competence, and subordinates compete to prove their loyalty by carrying out his policies to the
extreme rather than raising harsh truths about negative consequences.
This is precisely the sort of situation that Deng Xiaoping and other former Communist Party
leaders had set out to prevent with changes introduced decades ago.
The over-concentration of power in Mao’s hands led to decisions such as his misguided Great
Leap Forward, a campaign to greatly increase agrarian and industrial output in the late 1950s
that led instead to a devastating famine, and the chaotic political violence of the 1966-76
Cultural Revolution.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Deng made leadership competition more predictable by
introducing term limits and retirement ages for leading posts in the government and military
and giving party institutions more authority. A pattern of decade-long reigns set in. But Mr.
Deng refused to give China’s legislature and courts authority over the party. Party institutions —
their members all appointed by senior leaders — proved to be pushovers for Mr. Xi. No visible
resistance was raised when he engineered the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018,
which could allow Mr. Xi, who is 69, to stay in power until he dies or is deposed in a power
struggle.
The costs of his overreach are piling up.
Mr. Xi, who favors a state-led, centrally controlled economy, began an abrupt crackdown on
major Chinese internet companies last year, part of a plan to redistribute wealth and rein in the
private sector. That has been put on the back burner for now, but not before it wiped billions of
dollars from the valuations of innovative companies and cast a pall over
entrepreneurship, exacerbating an extended Chinese economic slowdown.
And while the rest of the world has learned to live with the pandemic, Mr. Xi has stubbornly
refused to loosen his zero-tolerance approach. Officials nationwide are overzealously
imposing mass lockdowns and surveillance in a bandwagon dynamic that has echoes of the
Great Leap Forward, when officials over-complied with Mao’s damaging directives.
The Covid policy has angered citizens and saddled local governments with the huge costs of
constant testing and quarantining. Private companies stricken by the disruption and regulatory
crackdowns are laying off employees, and college graduates are struggling to find jobs. For the
first time in years, unemployment has become a serious political risk for the party, and a tanking
Chinese real estate market threatens to pull down the entire economy.
On foreign policy, Mr. Xi abandoned decades of Chinese restraint in favor of a muscular
approach designed to restore China’s historical status as a leading power but which is harming
its standing in the world.
China has militarized disputed islets in the South China Sea, threatened military action against
Taiwan, picked a border fight with India and cut off many imports from Australia after that
country’s government called for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
Mr. Xi destroyed Hong Kong’s autonomy and has deepened China’s isolation from Europe and
the United States by aligning with President Vladimir Putin of Russia just before Mr. Putin
launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Countries that could have been Beijing’s valued partners have joined ranks against China in
coalitions like the Quad, which groups together the United States, Japan, Australia and India.
The United States and some European countries, whose trade and investment inflows were
crucial to China’s re-emergence as an economic power, are now apparently less willing to do
business. As Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, said of Chinese protectionism and
pressure to ignore its human rights abuses, his country would no longer “allow ourselves to be
blackmailed.”
The greatest risk now facing China and the world is that the consequences of Mr. Xi’s misrule
could lead to a point where he feels compelled to provoke a foreign conflict to divert domestic
public attention. Mr. Xi’s continued reluctance to share power also could increase the risk of an
internecine split in his third term. The level of dissent within the secretive Communist Party is
difficult to gauge, but possible signs of frustration have emerged.
It’s anyone’s guess how much longer Mr. Xi’s rule will last, but there appears no end in sight.
The party normally selects a successor five years in advance to groom and introduce him to the
Chinese public. But everyone is in the shadow cast by Mr. Xi, who has so far given no hint who
his eventual successor might be.
Next week’s congress will be closely watched for clues that other leaders might be allowed to
take on more power and responsibility. But that seems unlikely. Mr. Xi is almost certain to stay
in character, packing the top leadership with his loyalists. And the more concentrated his power,
the greater the hazards for China and the world.
Thank You, Xi Jinping
Oct. 18, 2022
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
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Dear President Xi:
Please accept my country’s gratitude and congratulations as you embark on your third term as
general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Though it may not be obvious now, we
believe your reign will one day be recognized as one of the great unexpected blessings in the
history of the United States, as well as that of other free nations.
A few exceptions aside, this was not what was generally expected when you first became
paramount leader 10 years ago.
Back then, many in the West had concluded that it was merely a matter of time before China was
restored to its ancient place as the world’s dominant civilization and largest economy. China’s
astonishing annual growth rates, frequently topping 10 percent, put our own meager economic
progress in the shade. In one industry after another — telecommunications, banking, social
media, real estate — Chinese companies were becoming industry leaders. Foreign nationals
flocked to live, study and work in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing; well-to-do American
parents boasted of enrolling their children in Mandarin immersion classes.
At the policymaking level, there was widespread acceptance that a richer China would be vastly
more influential abroad — and that the influence would be felt from Western Europe to South
America to Central Asia to East Africa. Though we understood that this influence could at times
be heavy-handed, there was little political will to curb it. China seemed to offer a unique model
of capitalist dynamism and authoritarian efficacy. Decisions were made; things got done: What
a contrast with the increasingly sclerotic free world.
Not that we thought that all was well with China. Your rise coincided with the dramatic downfall
of your principal rival, Bo Xilai, amid rumors of a possible coup. Longer-term challenges —
widespread corruption, an aging population, the role of the state in the economy — required
prudent management. So did the international resentments and resistance that swiftly rising
global powers invariably engender.
Still, you seemed up to the job. Your family’s bitter experience during the Cultural Revolution
suggested that you understood the dangers of totalitarianism. Your determination to crack down
on corruption seemed matched by your willingness to further liberalize your economy —
demonstrated by your appointment of the competent technocrat Li Keqiang as your premier.
And your stay with a family in Iowa in the 1980s raised hopes that you might harbor some
fondness for America.
Those hopes haven’t just been disappointed. They’ve been crushed. If there’s now a single point
of agreement between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — or Tom Cotton and Nancy Pelosi — it’s
that you must be stopped.
How did you do it?
Your war on corruption has turned into a mass purge. Your repression in Xinjiang rivals the
Soviet gulags. Your economic “reforms” amount to the return of typically inefficient state-owned
enterprises as dominant players.
Your de facto policy of snooping, hacking and intellectual-property theft has made Chinese
brands like Huawei radioactive in much of the West. In 2020 F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray
noted in a speech, “We’ve now reached the point where the F.B.I. is opening a new China-related
counterintelligence case every 10 hours.”
Your zero-Covid policy has, at times, transformed China’s great metropolises into vast and
unlivable prison colonies. Your foreign policy bullying has mainly succeeded in
encouraging Japan to rearm and Biden to pledge that America will fight for Taiwan.
All of this may make your China fearsome. None of it makes you strong. Dictatorships can
usually exact obedience, but they struggle to inspire loyalty. The power to coerce, as the political
scientist Joseph Nye famously observed, is not the same as the power to attract. It’s a truism
that may soon come to haunt you — much as it now haunts Vladimir Putin as his once-fearsome
military is decimated in Ukraine.
You could still change course. But it seems unlikely, and not just because old men rarely change.
The more enemies you make, the more repression you need. Surrounding yourself with yes men,
as you are now doing, may provide you with a sense of security. But it will cut you off from vital
flows of truthful information, particularly when that information is unpleasant.
The Achilles’ heel of regimes like yours is that the lies they tell their people to maintain power
ultimately become lies they tell themselves. Kicking foreign journalists out of China makes the
problem worse, since you no longer have the benefit of an outside view of your compounding
troubles.
None of this solves our problems here in the United States. In many ways, your truculence
exacerbates them, not least in the increasing risk that we may someday come to blows. But in
the long-run competition between the free and unfree worlds, you are unwittingly helping make
the case for the free. To adapt a line from my colleague Tom Friedman, does anyone want to
be your China for a day? I doubt it.
Which is why we want to say thanks. We know our Union is faulty; we know our leaders are
flawed; we know that our society’s edges are frayed. To take one hard look at you is to prefer all
this to your dismal alternative.
Xi Jinping Is the Second Coming of Mao Zedong

Oct. 7, 2022
By Peter Coy
Opinion Writer
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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is surely the greatest person alive today, at least if one takes seriously
the coverage by China’s official news service, Xinhua. Its website has a channel called Xi’s Time
that is devoted to extolling him. A few headlines: “Xi Jinping — Champion of Disabled Rights,
Prospects,” “Xi Jinping’s Bond With a Tibetan Village” and “Xi Jinping and His Loving Care for
China’s Giant Pandas Overseas.”
Xi controls Xinhua, so essentially, he is looking in the mirror and praising his own magnificence.
To most people living in democratic nations (though perhaps not all), such self-promotion
seems ridiculous and self-defeating. But Xi clearly doesn’t agree. He is building up a cult of
personality that he’s betting will help him rule China unchallenged.
Beginning Oct. 16, Xi is virtually certain to consolidate his power at the 20th National Congress
of the Communist Party of China. He’s expected to win a third five-year term as general
secretary of the party’s Central Committee, breaking a tradition of retiring from that key
position after a decade. He’ll also almost certainly continue to hold the other two key positions
in government: president of the People’s Republic of China and chairman of the Central Military
Commission.
It’s past time to consider seriously that Xi Jinping is the second coming of Mao Zedong, who
ruled China from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death in
1976. I discussed that theory recently in an interview with Christopher Marquis, the author, with
Kunyuan Qiao, of the forthcoming book “Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese
Enterprise.”
Mao is widely regarded today in the West as, at best, a flawed patriot and, at worst, a brutal
dictator. The Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, his misguided attempt at rapid
industrialization, contributed to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. So intent were
ordinary Chinese on raising steel production that they melted down hoes, plows and other iron
implements in crude backyard furnaces, leaving them nothing to work the fields.
Less than a decade later, Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution: Students turned in their
teachers for sedition, Mao’s rivals were shot to death, and a whole generation of China’s best
and brightest were exiled to the countryside for re-education (including Xi himself).
Communism and isolationism kept China desperately poor under Mao.
Xi, however, sees Mao as very much worthy of emulation. Marquis, a professor at the Judge
Business School of the University of Cambridge, gave me examples, saying: “He uses Mao’s
slogans frequently. He dresses like him, gestures like him. At the 100th anniversary of the
founding of the Communist Party of China” — which was last year — “he wore a very specific
type of suit, a special kind of Mao suit that only Mao wore on very specific occasions. And he
gave his speech from Tiananmen Square, just like Mao did when he proclaimed the founding of
the P.R.C.”
If play acting were the extent of Xi’s emulation of Mao, no one outside of historians would much
care. It’s more than that. Xi, like Mao, asserts the primacy of the Communist Party. He’s bearing
down on or squeezing out private enterprises and foreign-owned businesses. He relies heavily
on propaganda and cuts off his people’s access to foreign sources of information. He harbors
bitterness toward nations — such as Japan, Britain and the United States — that he believes
humiliated China in the past and aim to prevent its rise to greatness today. And he is intent on
completing Mao’s civil war with the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek by absorbing Taiwan,
where the Nationalists fled in defeat in 1949.
One big difference is that under Mao, ordinary Chinese ate bitterness, as a Chinese expression
goes, but they have tasted sweetness under Xi, under whose rule China’s economic miracle has
continued. That’s an enormous advantage for Xi. The implicit bargain in modern China is that
its leaders will deliver prosperity and, in exchange, the people will deliver their unwavering
support. But Xi’s policies jeopardize that bargain by threatening China’s prosperity.
“The brilliance of the Chinese government in the 1980s and 1990s is that they always did things
in an experimental fashion,” Marquis told me. An example is Shenzhen, the special economic
zone in southern China near Hong Kong that has become an economic powerhouse. “They
would tweak things here and there, depending on how things work,” he added. “Different cities
had different battery technologies. Some had hydrogen fuel.”
Xi has circumscribed that kind of experimentation, putting more emphasis on the Communist
Party’s control of the commanding heights of the economy, Marquis said. “I’m not as optimistic
on China’s future economic growth as I was for a long time,” he said. “It seems much more
ideologically focused.”
“Mao and Markets” contends that “Mao left an enduring imprint or legacy in the Chinese
society, on both Chinese institutions and individuals.” It adds: “The C.C.P.-government
maintains these Maoist institutions and individuals hold beliefs deeply rooted in Maoism and
pass them on to following generations.”
Since Maoism’s popular appeal never died, it’s not surprising that Xi has been able to step into
Mao’s cloth shoes. Say what you want about Mao, he managed to rule China for close to three
decades. That kind of track record has enormous appeal to the likes of Xi. Said Marquis: “Xi has
very strong Maoist tendencies, to put it lightly.”
Hillary Clinton: Republicans Are Playing Into
the Hands of Putin and Xi
April 24, 2023
By Hillary Clinton
Mrs. Clinton was the U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
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Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is making a ransom demand. His hostages are the
economy and America’s credibility. Mr. McCarthy has threatened that House Republicans will
refuse to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling, potentially triggering a global financial
crisis, unless President Biden agrees to deep cuts to education, health care, food assistance for
poor children and other services.
Mr. McCarthy repeatedly invoked the threat of Chinese competition as justification. The speaker
is right that this debate has significant national security implications — just not the way he says.
With Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in its second year, tensions with China continuing to
rise and global threats looming, from future pandemics to climate change, the world is looking
to the United States for strong, steady leadership. Congressional brinkmanship on the debt
ceiling sends the opposite message to our allies and our adversaries: that America is divided,
distracted and can’t be counted on.
Let’s start by dispelling a myth. The debt ceiling debate is not about authorizing new spending.
It’s about Congress paying debts it has already incurred. Refusing to pay would be like skipping
out on your mortgage, except with global consequences. Because of the central role of the United
States — and the dollar — in the international economy, defaulting on our debts could spark a
worldwide financial meltdown.
Republicans in Congress have consistently voted to raise the debt ceiling with little drama when
a fellow Republican is in the White House — including three times under President Donald
Trump. But during Democratic administrations, they have weaponized the debt ceiling to extort
concessions, despite the danger of default.
I was secretary of state during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, so I saw firsthand how this partisan
posturing damaged our nation’s credibility around the world.
I vividly remember walking into a Hong Kong ballroom that July for a conference organized by
the local American Chamber of Commerce. Congressional Republicans were refusing to raise the
debt ceiling, and the prospect of a default was getting closer by the day. I was swarmed by
nervous businessmen from across Asia. They peppered me with questions about the fight back
home over the debt ceiling and what it would mean for the international economy. The regional
and global stability that America had guaranteed for decades was the foundation on which they
had built companies and fortunes. But could they still trust the United States? Were we really
going to spark another worldwide financial crisis? And the question that no one wanted to ask
out loud: If America faltered, would China swoop in to fill the vacuum?
I tried to reassure those businessmen the same way I did when I spoke with anxious foreign
diplomats throughout that summer, confidently promising that Congress would eventually
reach a deal. I repeated a quip sometimes apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill: You can
always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else. Privately, I
crossed my fingers and hoped it was true.
Later that day, I headed to a villa in mainland China for a meeting with my counterpart, State
Councilor Dai Bingguo. Over the years, I had heard monologues from Mr. Dai about America’s
many supposed misdeeds, his criticisms at times bitingly sardonic but usually delivered with a
smile. So I was not surprised when he, too, turned the conversation to the debt ceiling, barely
containing his glee at our self-inflicted wound. I was not in the mood for lectures. “We could
spend the next six hours talking about China’s domestic challenges,” I told Mr. Dai.
Fortunately, Congress and President Barack Obama finally reached an agreement to raise the
debt ceiling before careening into the fiscal abyss. But the S&P still fell 17 percent, consumer and
business confidence nose-dived, and the government’s credit rating was downgraded for the
first time ever. After another crisis in 2013, the lesson was clear: Negotiating with hostage-
takers will only embolden them to do it again.
Fast-forward a decade, and Republicans are playing the same game. Except now, the risks are
even higher.
Today the competition between democracies and autocracies has grown more intense. And by
undermining America’s credibility and the pre-eminence of the dollar, the fight over the debt
ceiling plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.
America’s leadership around the world depends on our economic strength at home. Defaulting
on our debts could cost the United States seven million jobs and throw our economy into a deep
recession. Instead of the “arsenal of democracy” capable of outcompeting our rivals, dominating
the industries of the future such as microchips and clean energy and modernizing our military,
America would be hobbled.
Even setting aside this economic carnage, brinkmanship over the debt ceiling reinforces
autocrats’ narrative that American democracy is in terminal decline and can’t be trusted.
Trust matters in international affairs. We frequently ask other nations to put their faith in the
United States. Our military will be there to protect allies, our financial system is secure, and
when we warn about compromised Chinese telecom equipment or an impending Russian
invasion, we’re telling the truth. Threatening to break America’s promise to pay our debts calls
all that into question.
When I was secretary of state, a big part of my job was rebuilding confidence in the United
States after the George W. Bush administration. It wasn’t easy. Senior Chinese officials rarely
missed an opportunity to argue that the United States was to blame for the 2008 global financial
crisis, and they enjoyed highlighting our troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more
dysfunctional or untrustworthy America looked, the easier it was for Chinese propagandists to
bad-mouth democracy and brag about their own authoritarian system.
Today America’s credibility will help determine whether nervous Europeans continue to stand
with us and support Ukraine or seek an accommodation with an emboldened Russia. It could
determine whether more Asian nations welcome American military bases and troops to deter
Chinese aggression, as the Philippines recently did, or buckle to Beijing’s bullying.
There’s more. Playing games with the debt ceiling imperils the dollar’s pre-eminent position in
the global economy and the power that gives the United States.
All over the world, people, companies and governments conduct international transactions in
dollars, invest in U.S. Treasury bonds and rely on U.S. banks because they trust that America
pays its debts, upholds the rule of law and guarantees stability. The centrality of the dollar gives
the United States far-reaching influence. It allows us to impose crippling sanctions, like those I
negotiated against Iran during the Obama administration and those the Biden administration
has used to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is why Fareed Zakaria recently
declared in a Washington Post op-ed that “the dollar is America’s superpower.”
It’s no surprise that Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin are eager to disrupt the dollar’s dominance and defang
American sanctions. At their recent summit in Moscow, Mr. Putin suggested Russia may start
selling oil around the world using Chinese yuan rather than dollars, which it is already doing for
shipments to China. The two countries are also trying to build cross-border financial systems to
allow them to bypass U.S. banks and are holding fewer reserves in dollars.
If Congress keeps flirting with default, calls for dethroning the dollar as the world’s reserve
currency will grow much louder — and not just in Beijing and Moscow. Countries all over the
world will start hedging their bets.
It’s a sad irony that Mr. McCarthy and many of the same congressional Republicans seemingly
intent on sabotaging America’s global leadership by refusing to pay our debts are also
positioning themselves as tougher-than-thou China hawks. They talk a good game about
standing up to Beijing, yet they are handing a major win to the Chinese Communist Party.
Republicans should stop holding America’s credit hostage, shoulder their responsibilities as
leaders and raise the debt ceiling.
The Decade That Cannot Be Deleted
May 18, 2023
By Pamela Paul
Opinion Columnist
It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted
from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a
generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to
purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every
hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced.
Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed.
Intellectuals were tortured.
But in China, a country where information is often suppressed and history is constantly
rewritten — witness recent government censorship of Covid research and the obscuring of Hong
Kong’s British colonial past in new school textbooks — the memory of the Cultural Revolution
risks being forgotten, sanitized and abused, to the detriment of the nation’s future.
The Chinese government has never been particularly eager to preserve the memory of that
sordid decade. When I spent six weeks traveling in China in 1994 — a slightly more open time in
the country — I encountered few public acknowledgments of the Cultural Revolution. Museum
placards and catalogs often simply skipped a decade in their timelines or provided brief
references in the passive voice along the lines of “historical events that took place.”
But in her new book, “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution,” the
journalist Tania Branigan notes that under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, efforts to suppress
this history have intensified — with troubling implications for the political health of the country
at a time when it looms larger than ever on the world stage. “When you’ve had a collective
trauma, you really need a collective response,” she told me recently. “I can see why the
Communist Party wants to avoid the rancor and bitterness, but when you don’t have that kind of
acknowledgment, you can move on — but you can’t really recover.”
Though Xi himself was a victim of the Cultural Revolution — reportedly betrayed by his own
mother, exiled into rural poverty — he “is more conscious of the uses and disadvantages of
history than any leader before him, bar perhaps Mao himself,” Branigan writes in the book. In
2021, Xi warned the Communist Party against “historical nihilism” — any unflattering portrayal
of the party’s past — an existential threat as great, in his estimation, as Western democracy.
High school textbooks in China now reduce the Cultural Revolution to just a few short
paragraphs. The only national heritage spot devoted to it was closed to visitors when Branigan,
who reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 to 2015, tried to enter. Those who had
lived through the Cultural Revolution were often reluctant to speak with her. Some of her
excursions to research the movement were monitored, and relevant sites were closed off. “The
party and those it rules have conspired in amnesia,” she writes. “A decade has disappeared.”
In the absence of real history, a small nostalgia industry has arisen in China around the Cultural
Revolution, which includes themed restaurants, re-enactments, costumes and associated kitsch
that bear a distinct resemblance to our own country’s Civil War re-enactments, Confederate
statues and wedding-venue Southern plantations. The United States has in recent years
reconsidered some but far from all of this disturbing nostalgia, as Clint Smith powerfully
documented in his 2021 book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of
Slavery Across America.”
But whether in China or in America, when a country avoids a full reckoning with its darkest
periods, such nostalgic impulses tend to foster wishful thinking and facilitate propaganda. In
China, many young people who never experienced the horrors of Maoism now yearn for its
“idealism” and clarity; former Red Guards recall the unity and purpose missing in today’s
materialist society. Such distortions can also lead to what Branigan refers to as “a tragic
fatalism” — what the Chinese call “eating bitterness” — renouncing the power to enact personal,
societal or political change.
Another term she uses when accounting for the price of enforced forgetting is “the hum of
shame.” Even those who were otherwise patriotic described their fellow Chinese to Branigan as
“ethically hollow.” They lamented a kind of numb passivity, an absence of conscience, a
“sickness of the soul.” According to her, the Chinese consider “moral decline” to be the country’s
most pressing threat, ahead of both poverty and crime.
Such is the inevitable legacy of a political trauma as totalizing in scope as the Cultural
Revolution. “No workplace remained untouched,” Branigan writes. “No household remained
innocent. ‘Complicity’ is too small a word — comrade turned on comrade, friend upon friend,
husband upon wife and child upon parent. You could build a career on such betrayals, until the
currents shifted once more and the victims turned upon you. Such intimate treacheries and
abrupt reversals rent the very fabric of China, Confucian ideals of family obedience and newer
Communist pledges of fraternity.”
When the Cultural Revolution comes up in American conversation, it’s generally in debates over
the rise of groupthink and mob mentalities, performative outrage on Twitter and on college
campuses. Parallels certainly exist: Political leaders fomenting cultural wars, polarization
reducing differences of opinion to signifiers of ally and heretic and the media resorting to shouty
sloganeering over considered debate.
But Branigan’s book offers an equally important cautionary lesson: the perils of ignoring or
distorting history. What a country downplays in its historical record continues to reverberate,
whether it’s the Cultural Revolution in China or the treatment of Native Americans and the
legacy of slavery in the United States. And just as Xi Jinping can censor China’s recent Covid
record, so can America attempt to whitewash events — attempts to overturn the 2020 election,
the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — in its own recent past.
Near the end of Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed,” the author describes his grandparents’
experiences of segregation in the South, which took place just a decade before China’s Cultural
Revolution. “Black-and-white photographs and film footage can convince us that these episodes
transpired in a distant past,” he writes, “untouched by our contemporary world.” But as his
grandmother tells him, “It was for real, and I had lived it.”
China’s Lending Practices Are Not a Good Look
April 19, 2023
By Peter Coy
You’re reading the Peter Coy newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A veteran business and economics
columnist unpacks the biggest headlines. Get it in your inbox.
President Xi Jinping of China wants his nation to be seen as a responsible world leader, to
“contribute China’s wisdom and solutions to the cause of peace and development for all
humanity,” as he said on New Year’s Eve. But China is taking a narrow view of its self-interest in
negotiations over debt relief to poor countries such as Sri Lanka and Zambia. This is
undoubtedly a factor in China’s diminished standing in the world. YouGov Cambridge
Globalism polls found that China’s image was worse in 2022 than in 2019 in Egypt, India,
Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey, as well as in European nations surveyed.
The question is: Why? Why is China making maximal demands on debt repayment and resisting
cooperation with the International Monetary Fund? Playing ball really would promote “peace
and development for all humanity” while winning China some badly needed friends in the
world.
The explanation for China’s tough stance is discouraging for the short term but possibly
encouraging for the long term. In the next few years, political and economic forces inside China
will make it hard for the country to budge. But there are signs that China’s leaders will
eventually come around to seeing the value of working with the I.M.F. and other multilateral
institutions.
“I think it’s in flux right now. It’s evolving,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of AidData, a
research lab at William & Mary, a Virginia university, told me. “In more and more countries,
Suriname and elsewhere, we’re starting to see more coordination between the People’s Bank of
China, the I.M.F. and the borrower,” Parks said, adding, “I don’t want to make it sound like
that’s a preordained outcome, but they’re inching in fits and starts in that direction.”
China’s foreign lending was never — as many once thought — primarily about gaining influence.
It was at least as much about earning a return on its dollars (which China acquired by running
chronic trade surpluses) that was higher than the return it could get by stashing the money in
U.S. Treasury securities and mortgage bonds. Low-income nations borrowed from China, even
though it charged relatively high interest rates, because it was willing to take bigger swings,
make decisions quickly and dispense with labor, environmental and anti-corruption conditions.
Loan terms are mostly secret.
“China has vastly expanded its portfolio of loans and trade credits and is now, by far, the largest
bilateral official creditor in the world,” Brent Neiman, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet
Yellen, said last year.
Bilateral official lending consists of loans by the Chinese government and state-owned entities
such as the huge China Development Bank. But now that the risky loans it made are going bad,
Chinese lenders, public and private alike, appear to have zero interest in swallowing losses to
keep good relations with debtor nations.
Yi Gang, the internationally minded governor of the People’s Bank of China, has said the right
things about cooperation, but he’s not calling the shots. The actual lenders are private banks and
official or semiofficial lenders whose bosses don’t want to admit that they made bad loans.
That’s even more of a career killer in China than in, say, the United States or Switzerland.
Sri Lanka, which can’t pay what it owes, is the current flashpoint. In March the I.M.F.’s
executive board approved a $3 billion rescue loan to Sri Lanka after China agreed to a two-year
moratorium on debt payments by Sri Lanka to China. But that was just a stopgap measure. Sri
Lanka needs lenders to forgive some of its debt, and China hasn’t agreed to do that.
At the spring meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank in Washington this month, a proposal
was circulated in which the World Bank would make new subsidized loans to countries in
default, such as Sri Lanka, which would help not only those borrowers but also China as a
lender. In return, China would drop its repeated demand that the World Bank and other
multilateral development banks take losses alongside other creditors when debt burdens are
lightened. Yi said China was willing to work through the Group of 20’s Common Framework,
which coordinates the restructuring of the debt of sovereign governments.
In contrast to that mildly positive news was the announcement on the sidelines of the I.M.F. and
World Bank meetings that the Paris Club, an informal group of official lenders, was going ahead
with negotiations over Sri Lanka’s debt without China. Bloomberg reported that people familiar
with the talks said they were “eager not to let Beijing hold up negotiations any further.”
Eswar Prasad, a former head of the I.M.F.’s China division, told The Times last week that
China’s intransigence had left it “increasingly isolated.” I interviewed him this week. “They want
to have it both ways,” he said. “To be seen as responsible players but at the same time to bend
the rules to their advantage. That is the conundrum they face.”
China could have looked good if it had dealt with its debtors early and fairly, Prasad said. If it
bows to reality now, it will appear to be caving in to the I.M.F. and the World Bank and thus
indirectly to the United States, he added. That’s humiliating.
Ricardo Reis, an economist at the London School of Economics who has researched China’s
lending, told me that China’s Belt and Road Initiative loans remind him of the Marshall Plan
that the United States created to rebuild Europe after World War II. Parks, the AidData
executive director, said one difference is that China’s Belt and Road lending is in dollars, not in
its own currency. He likened China’s attempts to bail out Belt and Road borrowers to U.S. aid to
Latin American nations during the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.
An important research paper on China’s bailout lending was released before the I.M.F. and
World Bank spring meetings. It’s by Sebastian Horn of the World Bank, Parks, Carmen Reinhart
of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Christoph Trebesch of the Kiel Institute for the
World Economy in Germany. It said that “the Chinese government has created a new system of
international rescue lending, which has not yet been documented or studied.”
The rescue lending system is new because it’s the first time China has had to worry about foreign
loans going bad. It’s learning lessons that the United States absorbed decades ago. “We see
historical parallels to the era when the U.S. started its rise as a global financial power, especially
in the 1930s and after World War II, when it used the U.S. Ex-Im Bank, the U.S. Exchange
Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to U.S.
banks and exporters,” the paper said.
Americans came to realize that going it alone was not in their long-term interest. They were
happy to have the I.M.F. be the bad cop. It’s the I.M.F. that insists that nations curb food and
fuel subsidies, for example, to qualify for loans.
The authors seemed torn over how things will play out. “Over time,” they wrote optimistically in
the conclusion, “these ad hoc activities by the U.S. developed into a tested system of global crisis
management, a path that China may possibly pursue as well.” But the last sentence hit a minor
chord. It noted that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia also made rescue loans
in opaque ways: “These developments may indeed foreshadow a deeper shift towards a more
multipolar and fragmented international financial architecture.”
Elsewhere: Back to Work

The exodus from the labor force caused by the Covid-19 pandemic prompted lots of thought
pieces in this newspaper and elsewhere about detachment from work, variously known as
the Great Resignation, the lying flat movement and the age of anti-ambition. Well, look what’s
happening now: In February and March, the share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who are either
working or looking for a job matched the recent peak of 83.1 percent that it reached in January
2020, just before the pandemic struck.
Image
The Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers celebrated the participation rebound
in a blog post on Monday. “The swift but lagged response of labor supply to surging demand
suggests that with time workers do respond to favorable economic conditions,” the post said. On
the downside, as the chart shows, the 25-to-54 rate is still well below where it was in 2000. And
the rate for all adults hasn’t gotten back to its prepandemic peak, thanks mostly to baby boomer
retirements.
How Four Leaders Are Turning the World Upside
Down
Oct. 3, 2023
Opinion Columnist
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Ever since learning that in 1947, Walter Lippmann popularized the term “Cold War” to define
the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, I thought it would be cool
to be able to name a historical epoch. Now that the post-Cold War has expired, the post-post-
Cold War that we’ve entered is just begging to be named. So here goes: It’s the age of “That Was
Not the Plan.”
I know, I know, that doesn’t trip off the tongue — and I don’t expect it to stick — but boy is it
accurate. I stumbled across it on a recent trip to Ukraine. I was speaking with a Ukrainian
mother who explained that since the war started, her social life had been reduced to occasional
dinners with friends, kids’ birthday parties “and funerals.” After typing her quote into my
column, I added my own comment: “That was not the plan.” Before last year, young Ukrainians
had been enjoying easier access to the E.U., embarking on tech start-ups, thinking about where
to go to college and wondering whether to vacation in Italy or Spain. And then, like a meteor,
comes this Russian invasion that turns their lives upside down overnight.
She is not alone. A lot of people’s plans — and a lot of countries’ plans — have gone completely
haywire lately. We’ve entered a post-post-Cold War era that promises little of the prosperity,
predictability and new possibilities of the post-Cold War epoch of the past 30 years since the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
There are many reasons for this, but none are more important than the work of four key leaders
who have one thing in common: They each believe that their leadership is indispensable and are
ready to go to extreme lengths to hold on to power as long as they can.
I am talking about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The
four of them — each in his own way — have created massive disruptions inside and outside their
countries based on pure self-interest, rather than the interests of their people, and made it far
harder for their nations to function normally in the present and to plan wisely for the future.
Take Putin. He started off as something of a reformer who stabilized post-Yeltsin Russia and
oversaw an economic boom, thanks to rising oil prices.
But then oil revenues started to sag, and as the Russia scholar Leon Aron describes it in his
forthcoming book, “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” Putin made
a big turn at the start of his third presidency in 2012, after the largest anti-Putin rallies of his
rule in 100 Russian cities broke out and his economy stalled. Putin’s solution: “Shift the
foundation of his regime’s legitimacy from economic progress to militarized patriotism,” Aron
told me, and blame everything bad on the West and NATO expansion.
In the process, Putin made Russia into a besieged fortress, which, in his mind and propaganda,
only Putin is capable of defending — and therefore requires that he stay in power for life. He
went from Russia’s distributor of income to a distributor of dignity, earned in all the wrong ways
and places. His invading Ukraine to restore a mythical Russian Motherland was inevitable.
Events in China have also unfolded quite unexpectedly of late. After steadily opening up and
loosening internal controls since 1978, making it more predictable, stable and prosperous than
at any other time in its modern history, China experienced an almost 180-degree U-turn under
President Xi: He dispensed with term limits — respected by his predecessors to prevent the
emergence of another Mao — and made himself president indefinitely. Xi apparently believed
that the Chinese Communist Party was losing its grip — leading to widespread corruption — so
he reasserted its power at every level of society and business, while also eliminating any rivals.
It has made China more closed than any time since the days of Mao — complete with the sudden
disappearances of the ministers of defense and foreign affairs — and sparking talk that we may
have already seen “peak China” in terms of the country’s economic potential, which would be an
earthquake for the global economy.
It was certainly not in my plan that after nearly a lifetime following Israel’s struggles with
foreign enemies, I would end up writing about how the biggest threat to the Jewish democracy
today is an enemy within — a judicial coup led by Netanyahu that is splintering Israel’s society
and military.
The former director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Dan Harel, told a Tel Aviv
democracy rally last week that “I have never seen our national security in a worse state” and that
there has already been “damage to the reserve units of essential IDF formations, which has
reduced readiness and operational capability.”
This is no small problem for the United States. For the past 50 years, Israel has been both a
crucial ally and, in effect, a forward base in the region through which America projected power
without the use of U.S. troops. Israel destroyed both Iraq’s and Syria’s budding attempts to
become nuclear powers. Israel is the main counterweight today for containing the expansion of
Iranian power across the whole region.
But if we have three more years of this extremist Netanyahu government, with its aspiration to
annex the West Bank and govern Palestinians there with an apartheidlike system, the Jewish
state could become a major source of instability in the region, not stability, and a much more
uncertain ally — more like Turkey and less like the Israel of old.
And why? In a recent Times profile of Bibi, Ruth Margalit quoted Ze’ev Elkin, a former Likud
minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, as describing Netanyahu thus: “He began with a worldview
that said, ‘I’m the best leader for Israel at this time.’ Slowly it morphed into a worldview that
said, ‘The worst thing that can happen to Israel is if I stop leading it, and therefore my survival
justifies anything.’”
Needless to say, watching Donald Trump’s effort to overturn our 2020 election by inspiring a
mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and then seeing this same man become the leading
Republican candidate for president in 2024, makes our next election among our most important
ever — so that it won’t be our last ever. That was not the plan.
To the extent that there is a common denominator that binds these four leaders, it’s that they
have all breached the rules of their game at home — and, in Putin’s case, started a war abroad —
for an all-too-familiar reason: to stay in power. And their local systems — the Russian elite, the
Chinese Communist Party, the Israeli electorate and the Republican Party — have not been able
to effectively or entirely constrain them.
But there are also important differences among the four. Netanyahu and Trump are facing
pushback in their democracies, where voters may yet oust or stop both of them — and neither
has started a war. Xi is an autocrat, but he does have an agenda to improve the lives of his
people and a plan to dominate the major industries of the 21st century, from biotech to artificial
intelligence. But his increasingly iron-fisted rule may be exactly what prevents China from
getting there, chiefly because it’s sparking a brain drain.
Putin is nothing but a mafia boss masquerading as a president. He will be remembered for
transforming Russia from a scientific powerhouse — which put the first satellite into orbit in
1957 — into a country that can’t manufacture a car, a watch or a toaster that anyone outside of
Russia would buy. Putin had to dial 1-800-NorthKorea to scrounge for aid for his ravaged army
in Ukraine.
Trump, ultimately, is the most dangerous of the four — for one simple reason: When the world
becomes this chaotic, and such key countries go off the plan, the rest of the world depends on
the United States to take the lead in containing the trouble and opposing the troublemakers.
But Trump prefers to ignore the trouble and has praised the troublemakers, including Putin. It’s
what makes the prospect of another Trump presidency so frightening, so reckless and so
incomprehensible.
Because America is still the tent pole that holds up the world. We don’t always do it with
wisdom, but if we were to stop doing it at all — watch out. Given what’s already going on in these
other three important countries, if we go wobbly, it will birth a world where nobody will be able
to make any plans.
There’s an easy name for that: the Age of Disorder.
Another Dictator Is Having a Bad Year
March 17, 2022
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
The term “dictator” comes from ancient Rome — a man whom the republic would temporarily
give absolute authority during crises. The advantages of untrammeled power in a crisis are
obvious. A dictator can act quickly — no need to spend months negotiating legislation or fighting
legal challenges. And he can impose necessary but unpopular policies. So there are times when
autocratic rule can look more effective than the messiness of democracies bound by rule of law.
Dictatorship, however, starts to look a lot less attractive if it continues for any length of time.
The most important argument against autocracy is, of course, moral: Very few people can hold
unrestrained power for years on end without turning into brutal tyrants.
Beyond that, however, in the long run autocracy is less effective than an open society that allows
dissent and debate. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the advantages of having a strongman who
can tell everyone what to do are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and
independent thought.
I was writing at the time about Vladimir Putin, whose decision to invade a neighboring country
looks more disastrous with each passing day. Evidently nobody dared to tell him that Russia’s
military might was overrated, that Ukrainians were more patriotic and the West less decadent
than he assumed and that Russia remained highly vulnerable to economic sanctions.
But while we’re all justifiably obsessed with the Ukraine war — I’m trying to limit my reading of
Ukraine news to 13 hours a day — it’s important to note that there’s a superficially very different
yet in a deep sense related debacle unfolding in the world’s other big autocracy: China, which is
now experiencing a disastrous failure of its Covid policy.
I know that in the West we’re all supposed to be over Covid, although it is still killing 1,200
Americans a day and infections are surging again in Europe, probably presaging another surge
here.
But China is definitely not over Covid. Hong Kong, which for a long time seemed virtually
unscathed, is experiencing hundreds of deaths a day, a catastrophe reminiscent of early 2020 in
New York — back when there were no vaccines and we didn’t know much about how to limit
transmission. Major Chinese cities like Shenzhen, a crucial world manufacturing hub, are back
under lockdown. And it’s not at all clear when or how China’s new health crisis will end.
All of this represents a huge reversal of fortune. For much of 2020, China’s zero-Covid policy —
draconian lockdowns whenever and wherever new cases emerged — was hailed by many as a
policy triumph. Quite a few commentators, not all of them Chinese, went so far as to cite China’s
Covid success as proof that world leadership was passing from America and its allies to the
rising Asian superpower.
Then three things went very, very wrong.

First, as much of the world was turning to mRNA vaccines — a new approach adapted to Covid
with miraculous speed — China insisted on using its own vaccines, which rely on older
technology and have proved far less effective, especially against the Omicron variant of the
coronavirus. Not only did China insist on using inferior but home-developed vaccines; it tried to
discourage adoption of Western vaccines by spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Second, vaccination rates among China’s elderly — the most vulnerable group — have lagged.
This may in part be because disinformation about mRNA technology has not only discouraged
people from taking the most effective vaccines, but it has also bled into distrust of vaccines in
general. And it may reflect broader distrust of the government; China’s leaders lie to their
people all the time, so why believe them when they say you should take your shots?
Finally, the zero-Covid strategy is extremely disruptive in the face of highly contagious variants
like Omicron, especially given the weak protection provided by Chinese vaccines.
The thing is, all of these failures, like Putin’s failures in Ukraine, ultimately stem from the
inherent weakness of autocratic government.
On vaccines, China succumbed to the kind of blinkered nationalism all too common in
authoritarian regimes. Would you have wanted to be a health official telling Xi Jinping that his
vaunted vaccines were seriously inferior to Western alternatives, especially after Xi’s minions
had gone to considerable lengths to claim the opposite?
On zero Covid, would you want to be an economic official telling Xi that the cost of draconian
lockdowns, a policy of which China was so proud, was becoming unsupportable?
And as I said, a government that lies all the time has trouble getting the public to listen even
when it’s telling the truth.
I don’t want to engage in Western triumphalism here. Vaccine refusal is a big problem in
America, too. And I’m worried that we may be moving too quickly to dismantle Covid rules.
Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open
society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.
A Look Back at Our Future War With China
July 18, 2023
By Carlos Lozada
Opinion Columnist and co-host of ‘Matter of Opinion’
Carlos Lozada and his co-hosts discuss America’s place in an increasingly

dangerous world.
It is unfair, but tales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace. The same is true,
perhaps more so, for warnings of wars to come versus assurances of good will. Dire scenarios of
risk and escalation are almost always more captivating than those dissenting voices that explain
how to avoid a fight. It is a narrative advantage that hawks enjoy over doves, realists over
idealists and those believing in nightmares over those who dream of the alternative.
The 360-degree rivalry between the United States and China has yielded a barrage of recent
books about the possibility of armed conflict breaking out, with plenty of advice on how to
forestall it. If “Who lost China?” was an American preoccupation of the early Cold War, “Who
lost to China?” threatens to become its contemporary variant. After five decades of engagement
between Washington and Beijing, a period that featured both America’s unipolar triumphalism
and China’s ascent to economic superpower status, the two countries are now on a “collision
course” for war, many of these books assert, even if the rationales are varied and at times
contradictory.
In these works, the antagonists are bound for strife because China has become too strong or
because it is weakening; because America is too hubristic or too insecure; because leaders make
bad decisions or because the forces of politics, ideology and history overpower individual
agency. A sampling of their titles — “Destined for War,” “Danger Zone,” “2034: A Novel of the
Next World War” and “The Avoidable War” — reveals the range and limits of the debate.
I don’t know if the United States and China will end up at war. But in these books, the battle is
already raging. So far, the war stories are winning.
The U.S.-China book club is insular and self-referential, and the one work that all the authors
appear obliged to quote is 2017’s “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’s Trap?” by Graham Allison, a political scientist at Harvard. He looks at the war
between ascendant Athens and ruling Sparta in the fifth century B.C. and echoes Thucydides,
the ancient historian and former Athenian general, who argued that “it was the rise of Athens
and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Sub in China for Athens and
the United States for Sparta, and you get the gist.
Allison, best known for “Essence of Decision,” his 1971 study of the Cuban missile crisis, does
not regard a U.S.-China war as inevitable. But in his book he does consider it more likely than
not. “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress
makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception,” he writes. He revisits 16 encounters between
dominant and ascendant powers — Portugal and Spain fighting over trade and empire, the
Dutch and British contesting the seas, Germany challenging 20th-century European powers and
other confrontations — and finds that in 12 of them, the outcome was war.
As China continues amassing economic and political clout and an American-led global order
appears less sustainable, it becomes “frighteningly easy to develop scenarios in which American
and Chinese soldiers are killing each other,” Allison warns. When there is mistrust at the top,
when worldviews are irreconcilable and when each side regards its own leadership as
preordained, any nudge will do. “Could a collision between American and Chinese warships in
the South China Sea, a drive toward national independence in Taiwan, jockeying between China
and Japan over islands on which no one wants to live, instability in North Korea or even a
spiraling economic dispute provide the spark to a war between China and the U.S. that neither
wants?” he asks. (In “Destined for War,” this is a rhetorical question.)
Such story lines are the lifeblood of the U.S.-China literature. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley,
senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, begin their 2022 book “Danger Zone” with a
surprise Chinese invasion of Taiwan set in early 2025. U.S. forces in the western Pacific are too
scattered to respond effectively, and soon enough an ailing President Biden is pondering a low-
yield nuclear strike against Chinese forces in mainland ports and airfields. “How did the United
States and China come to the brink of World War III?” Brands and Beckley ask. Too easily.
In “The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s
China,” Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia and a longtime scholar of China,
imagines 10 distinct plotlines, many revolving around the fate of Taiwan. For instance, what if
China seeks to take the island by force and Washington opts to not respond? That would be
America’s “Munich moment,” Rudd writes, eviscerating any American moral authority. Even
worse would be the United States reacting with military force but then losing the fight, which
would “signal the end of the American century.” Half the scenarios in his book, Rudd notes,
“involve one form or another of major armed conflict.” And he’s the most dovish of the lot.
An extended war story is found in “2034,” a work of fiction written by Elliot Ackerman, a
novelist and former Marine special operations officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO.
Published in 2021, “2034” is basically a beach read about how we get to nuclear war. The
authors imagine a seemingly chance standoff in the South China Sea between a flotilla of U.S.
destroyers and a Chinese trawler toting high-tech intelligence equipment, which in a matter of
months escalates into a world war that leaves major cities in ashes, tens of millions of people
dead and neither Washington nor Beijing in charge. One of the main characters, a Chinese
official with deep U.S. ties, recalls taking a class at Harvard, “a seminar pompously titled The
History of War taught by a Hellenophile professor.” If it’s a dig at the ubiquitous Allison, it
might also work as a homage, because in “2034” China and the United States are ensnared by
Thucydides.
In “The Avoidable War,” Rudd cautions that the incentives for Beijing and Washington to
escalate hostilities, whether to save lives or save face, “could prove irresistible.” Ackerman and
Stavridis follow that script. In their novel, a recklessly hawkish U.S. national security adviser —
with the perfect last name of Wisecarver — and a smugly overconfident Chinese defense
minister keep going until cities like San Diego and Shanghai are no more and India emerges as a
global power, both in terms of its military capabilities and its mediating authority. (The U.N.
Security Council even relocates from New York to New Delhi.) “This conflict hasn’t felt like a war
— at least not in the traditional sense — but rather a series of escalations,” an influential former
Indian official declares near the end of the novel. “That’s why my word is ‘tragic,’ not ‘inevitable.’
A tragedy is a disaster that could otherwise have been avoided.”
By these accounts, the forecast for tragedy is favorable. Allison sees the rise of Chinese
nationalism under President Xi Jinping as part of the long-term project to avenge China’s
“century of humiliation,” from the First Opium War to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949,
and restore the country’s top rank. Both the United States and China view themselves in
exceptional terms, Allison explains, as nations of destiny. Washington aims to sustain the Pax
Americana, whereas China believes that the so-called rules-based international order is just
code for America making rules and China following orders — an oppressive scheme to contain
and sabotage China’s pent-up national greatness.
The extent and durability of that greatness are matters of disagreement in these books. Allison
contends that the economic balance of power “has tilted so dramatically in China’s favor” that
American pretensions to continued hegemony are unrealistic. But Brands and Beckley, writing
five years later, see a middling Middle Kingdom, a nation that for all its “saber rattling” (an
obligatory activity in foreign policy tomes) is threatened by enemies abroad and an aging
population and faltering economy at home. “China will be a falling power far sooner than most
people think,” Brands and Beckley declare. “Where others see rapid Chinese growth, we see
massive debt and Soviet-level inefficiency. Where others see gleaming infrastructure, we see
ghost cities and bridges to nowhere. Where others see the world’s largest population, we see a
looming demographic catastrophe.”
Except that those interpretations do not render China any less dangerous to U.S. interests or
security. Just the opposite, Brands and Beckley argue. As China sees its window of opportunity
closing rapidly, it could decide to make a move now in pursuit of its goals — taking Taiwan,
expanding its sphere of influence, achieving global pre-eminence. Thus, the 2020s is the decade
when the U.S.-Chinese competition “will hit its moment of maximum danger.”
Note how Allison believes war is possible because China is on an inexorable path to growth and
influence, whereas Brands and Beckley worry about conflict precisely because Chinese power
may be waning. This is the occupational hazard of national-security thought leadership: Once
you’ve decided conflict is likely, any set of conditions can credibly justify that belief.
The notion of the American dream is inseparable from the national identity of the United States,
no matter that it can mean different things to different Americans. But there is also a Chinese
dream, articulated, somewhat amorphously, by one individual: Xi, who is also the general
secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the chairman of the Central Military
Commission.
The U.S.-China books devote much attention to the motives and intentions of China’s leader.
Allison describes Xi’s Chinese dream as a combination of power, prosperity and pride, “equal
parts Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular vision of an American century and Franklin Roosevelt’s
dynamic New Deal.” Rudd devotes 11 chapters of his book to Xi’s ambitions and worldview,
including his relentless focus on retaining power; his push for national unity, particularly
regarding Taiwan; his need to maintain China’s economic expansion; his drive to modernize the
military, especially China’s naval strength; and his effort to challenge Western-style liberal
norms.
These goals may appear more attainable to Xi thanks to the “theory of American declinism” that
gained currency among China’s foreign policy elites during the Obama years, Rudd writes,
particularly after the post-9/11 wars and the Great Recession. The corollary of that theory, of
course, is that the time for China’s primacy has arrived. In “2034” the same view comes alive in
a melodramatic monologue by China’s defense minister. “Our strength is what it has always
been — our judicious patience,” he declares, in contrast to the Americans, who “change their
governments and their policies as often as the seasons” and who “are governed by their
emotions, by their blithe morality and belief in their precious indispensability.” In 1,000 years,
the United States “won’t even be remembered as a country,” he states. “It will simply be
remembered as a moment. A fleeting moment.” In the novel, China seizes its moment to try to
end America’s moment. Instead, both moments come to an end.
In “Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future,” Chun Han Wong, a
correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, notes that the Chinese president has no deep
animosity toward the United States and in fact has some affection for American culture. When
Xi was vice president, Wong writes, he sent his daughter to study at Harvard, and he has shared
his affection for American movies like “Saving Private Ryan.” Of course, a Chinese president’s
fascination with a film about brutality, heroism and loss in a past world war may signal
something less encouraging than the strength of America’s soft power.
Wong explains how Xi has hardened his control over the Chinese Communist Party with anti-
corruption purges and has deployed state security and surveillance to suppress any threats to
China’s stability and, more to the point, to his power. The president is an “ardent nationalist,”
Wong writes, one who is “stoking a sense of Chinese civilizational pride,” among his country’s
leadership and people. Xi has made a more robust military “a centerpiece of his China dream,
demanding that the armed forces be ‘ready to fight and win wars.’ ” It doesn’t take much
sleuthing to imagine who the opponent in such wars might be. Xi’s assertions of a rising East
and a diminishing West “has become an article of faith within the party and beyond,” Wong
writes. “Questioning such views is almost tantamount to disloyalty.”
Brands and Beckley are less fixated on Xi; they see China’s revisionist project as long predating
China’s latest leader. “America has a China problem, not a Xi Jinping problem,” they write. But
they might find validation in Wong’s reporting. By centralizing so much power and control in
himself and by governing through fear, Xi “may have become the weakest link in his quest to
build a Chinese superpower,” Wong writes. Scared of disappointing Xi, the state bureaucracy
becomes paralyzed, while the party is so animated by a single personality that any potential
successor could struggle to lead it.
“Xi’s China is brash but brittle, intrepid yet insecure,” Wong concludes. “It is a would-be
superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come.”
Throughout these books on China and the United States, scenarios of war abound, while paths to
peace are less obvious. Allison pines for the era of Washington wise men like George Kennan,
George Marshall, Paul Nitze and other Cold War luminaries. The United States requires not one
more “China strategy,” Allison admonishes, but serious reflection on American objectives in a
world with a rival that could become more powerful than the United States. “Is military primacy
essential for ensuring vital national interests?” Allison asks. “Can the U.S. thrive in a world in
which China writes the rules?” We need the big thinkers, he writes, because “destiny dealt the
hands, but men play the cards.”
Brands and Beckley are wise to point out, contra Allison’s Thucydides trap, that countries can be
rising and falling at the same time and that moments of great geopolitical peril happen not only
when a country is on the rise but also when its ambition and desperation come together.
Unfortunately, their practical proposals are obscured by the self-help buzzwords of the national
security set. “The key is to take calculated risks — and avoid reckless ones,” they advise. And
“Danger-zone strategy is about getting to the long game — and ensuring you can win it.” Brands
and Beckley even call for Washington to deploy “strategic MacGyverism — using the tools we
have or can quickly summon to defuse geopolitical bombs that are about to explode.”
(Translation: Wing it and hope that someone supersmart will step in to fix any crisis.)
Adding “strategic” to any foreign-policy lingo immediately gives it a loftier vibe, of course, and
Rudd is a master of this approach. In “The Avoidable War,” he invokes strategic perceptions,
strategic adversaries, strategic equations, strategic logic, strategic thinking, strategic
community, strategic direction, strategic offramps, strategic language, strategic literacy,
strategic red lines, strategic cooperation, strategic engagement, strategic temperature and a joint
strategic narrative — and that’s just in the introduction.
No surprise, Rudd’s plan to avoid this avoidable war is something he calls “managed strategic
competition.” It involves close and ongoing communication between Beijing and Washington to
understand each other’s “irreducible strategic red lines,” thus lessening the chance of conflict
through misunderstandings or surprises. (Rudd likens it to Washington and Moscow’s efforts to
improve communication after the Cuban missile crisis.) Under managed strategic competition,
both sides could then channel their competitive urges into economics, technology and ideology
and their cooperative needs into arenas such as climate change and arms control.
Washington may be employing some form of Rudd’s playbook. Antony Blinken, the secretary of
state, and Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, have recently visited China, and John
Kerry, the special envoy for climate change, arrived this week. “We believe that the world is big
enough for both of our countries to thrive,” Yellen said at a news conference after her meetings.
Except thriving is no longer either side’s sole objective. Thriving under whose leadership and
under whose terms? The Biden administration has imposed restrictions on the sale of
semiconductor technology to China and is planning additional measures, whereas Chinese
hackers recently penetrated the email account of the secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo,
who has been critical of China’s business policies — all reminders that economic tensions have
ways of spilling beyond the purely commercial realm.
Even Rudd admits that his preferred approach may just temporarily forestall an eventual
conflict. He also acknowledges that managed strategic competition would require
“unprecedented bipartisan consensus” among the American political class to ensure continuity
regardless of the party in power. Normally, the need for bipartisanship only guarantees the
failure of any Washington initiative, but China has been one of the few areas of some
consistency across the Trump and Biden administrations. In a recent and much-discussed
Foreign Affairs essay titled “The China Trap,” Jessica Chen Weiss, a former senior adviser with
the State Department’s policy planning staff in the Biden administration, notes that the current
U.S. president has “endorsed the assessment that China’s growing influence must be checked”
and that on Capitol Hill “vehement opposition to China may be the sole thing Democrats and
Republicans can agree on.”
The trap Weiss foresees is not China tricking the United States into conflict, which is what
happens in “2034.” Rather, it is that Washington, understanding nothing but a zero-sum world,
will accept that conflict with China is inevitable or necessary. In other words, bipartisanship
may be required for peace, but it can also lead to war.
Weiss proposes meaningful U.S. discussions with China’s leaders not merely about how best to
communicate during a crisis, “but also about plausible terms of coexistence and the future of the
international system — a future that Beijing will necessarily have some role in shaping.” She
calls for “an inclusive and affirmative global vision,” which sounds nice but is never explained in
detail. “The United States cannot cede so much influence to Beijing that international rules and
institutions no longer reflect U.S. interests and values,” Weiss argues. “But the greater risk today
is that overzealous efforts to counter China’s influence will undermine the system itself.” It is the
kind of distinction that can be parsed only in hindsight: Make sure you go far enough, but just
don’t go too far.
In one of the disquisitions on world affairs and national character that crop up throughout
“2034,” a Chinese official concludes that the United States suffers not from a lack of intelligence
about other countries’ intentions but from a lack of imagination about how those intentions
translate into actions. Judging from these various books, however, it seems that American and
Western thinkers are perfectly capable of exercising their imaginations. That might be part of
the problem. Writing recently in the journal Liberties, Ackerman wonders if a new world war
becomes likelier when the generation that remembers the last one dies out. “Without memories
to restrain us, we become reliant on our imaginations,” he writes. So far, though, the imagined
scenarios for war are more persuasive than those for peace.
These need not be the only stories we tell. “China is like that long book you’ve always been
meaning to read,” a U.S. intelligence official tells Brands and Beckley, “but you always end up
waiting until next summer.” This is the summer I finally picked up that book. I hope there will
be more to come, books in which the stories of peace have at least a fighting chance.
War Crimes Charges Against Putin
March 20, 2023
To the Editor:
Re “A World Court Accuses Putin of War Crimes” (front page, March 18):
The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against President
Vladimir Putin of Russia on charges of war crimes — citing his responsibility for the abduction
and deportation of Ukrainian children — is a much-needed stand against this heartless, brutal
tyrant.
Mr. Putin seems to place little to no value on the lives of 43 million Ukrainians as well as the
lives of the hundreds of thousands of ill-trained Russians whom he relentlessly feeds into the
deadly maw of his illegal, unnecessary war.
Though his imminent arrest is unlikely, one can dream.
Perhaps, in the future, he may need to quietly seek treatment for an ailment outside his home
country, which he has personally plundered for decades — and then he can be detained, receive
superb medical care behind bars and ponder his deeds as he awaits trial.
Mark Keller
Portland, Ore.
To the Editor:
Few people initially thought that Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who went on trial for
war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, would end up in front of an
international tribunal in The Hague to face justice.
If things turn sour for Vladimir Putin in Russia, he may be turned over by a new government —
all anyone would have to do is put him on a plane to The Hague — or he may decide on his own
to leave for the relative safety of an International Criminal Court trial.
Mike Priaro
Calgary, Alberta
To the Editor:
Even if he evades justice, as many believe likely, Vladimir Putin’s obituary across the world will
read “wanted war criminal,” rather than his fantasized “modern-day Peter the Great.” That may
be as good as it gets.
Theodore Tsomides
Raleigh, N.C.
To the Editor:
If there is still reason to believe that actions have consequences, as most of us were taught as
children, the International Criminal Court’s action validates that belief.
Barbara J. Kelly
Broomfield, Colo.
Labor in Qatar: The Government’s View
To the Editor:
Re “Qatar Invested Millions in Courting U.N. Agency” (front page, March 12):
We believe that the article presents a flawed view of Qatar’s labor reforms and collaboration
with the International Labor Organization. The reason Qatar has established a productive and
lasting partnership with the I.L.O. is our genuine commitment to implementing comprehensive
labor reforms.
Qatar is transparent in all its collaborations with the I.L.O., consistently striving to improve
worker conditions by reforming laws and strengthening enforcement. Funding details of our
program with the I.L.O. and the establishment of its office in Doha are publicly available online.
This arrangement has facilitated regular on-the-ground technical consultations and constructive
dialogue to hasten the pace of labor reforms and identify areas for further improvements.
Allegations that Qatar has attempted to influence the I.L.O.’s independent reporting or public
statements are unfounded. Such statements could hinder the I.L.O.’s efforts to improve workers’
rights globally and dissuade other governments from seeking support from the I.L.O. and other
multilateral institutions.
Ali Al-Ansari
Washington
The writer is the media attaché to the U.S. for the State of Qatar.
Working in the Office

To the Editor:
Re “Working Remotely Is Less Healthy Than You Think,” by Jordan Metzl (Opinion guest essay,
March 17):
As Dr. Metzl says, humans are social creatures. As much as we’ve become connected through the
internet, nothing will ever replace grabbing lunch with co-workers, dropping by someone’s
office to ask a quick question and problem-solving an issue on the whiteboard. These small
interactions will improve interconnectedness within teams and lead to happier employees.
Last summer, I interned at a company where my entire team was remote. Yet I went into the
office every day because I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to use the physical space as much
as possible. Most full-time employees didn’t go in person, but I spent my time in the office with
many other interns.
I wonder if this is something that we should consider: how older generations tend to be the ones
embracing remote work, while the younger generation seems to crave those in-person
interactions with each other.
Sharon Zou
Boston
The writer is a junior at Boston University.
To the Editor:
Re “And Child Care for All,” by Binyamin Appelbaum (Opinion, March 2):
The first two years of the Biden administration exposed deep challenges for outside advocacy
groups that work with Congress, and we can’t avoid those challenges anymore.
This essay was a good starting point in providing a post-mortem of recent failures, but advocates
must also address two additional truisms in the federal policymaking ecosystem that were
exposed over the same period.
First, American families and communities simply don’t care about how bills are passed: They
care about certainty, and they want policy results that last.
Second, the majority of advocates refuse to acknowledge the political constraints they face in
achieving policy change on behalf of the American people.
If advocates are to work with a divided government and increasingly polarized parties, we must
face reality and try to operate within this environment, not outside of it — especially if we’re
working toward lasting, bipartisan success on many of the domestic policies that this article
highlights.
Paolo Mastrangelo
Washington
The writer is the head of policy and government affairs at Humanity Forward.
New York’s Public Housing

To the Editor:
Re “City Eyes Public Housing Open Spaces for New Buildings” (news article, March 9):
I read with horror the proposal by Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council, to build
affordable housing in the empty spaces (e.g., playgrounds and gardens) of New York City’s
public housing developments, which were built decades ago with actual quality of life in mind.
To plop new construction in the midst of current tenants’ homes, blocking their windows and
taking away their limited open space, is one of the worst options I can imagine. I would hardly
call it “an innovative way of thinking,” as Ms. Adams did.
These buildings were built as an answer to the tenements of the past, and now, Ms. Adams
proposes building homes crammed on top of each other, reminiscent of those same tenements.
Jo Ann Wanamaker
New York

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The U.S.

and Chinese Presidents Should

President Trump with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing in 2017.Credit...Damir

We need a level playing field — but not a new battlefield.

But that’s now water over the dam.

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

But Xi Jinping has changed the rules of the game.

Ms. Mastro is an expert on Chinese politics and military policy.

To be clear, it was China that began rocking the boat first.

They have plenty of evidence to point to.

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics,

How about NATO?

Instead, he described their ties as “a network of highly transactional bilateral relationships — a

How about NATO?

Instead, he described their ties as “a network of highly transactional bilateral relationships — a

Credit...Pool photo by Feng Li

 Share full article

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board.

Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press

 Share full article

First, don’t think of China’s misfortunes as our good fortune.

Third, don’t assume competent economic management.

Fourth, don’t take domestic tranquillity as a given.

Fifth, don’t suppose that a declining power is a less dangerous one.

Sixth, do stick to four red lines.

Seventh, do pursue a policy of détente.

Dr. Weiss is an author and China expert at Cornell University.

Worse, reflexively maneuvering to outcompete or thwart China only validates hard-liners in

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.

How dangerous is China, really?

Can the United States and China compete without conflict?

For now, an uneasy peace

 Share full article

So what needs to be done?

Jan. 16, 2020

By Oriana Skylar Mastro

Ms. Mastro is an expert on Chinese politics and military policy.

To be clear, it was China that began rocking the boat first.

They have plenty of evidence to point to.

 April 14, 2023

I’m pretty sure I’d get the same answer in Washington.

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is

Ms. Glaser is managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German

Xi Jinping May Be Souring on His ‘Best, Most

Mr. Hass was an adviser to President Barack Obama on China policy.

Mr. Radchenko is a historian of the Cold War.

So should Mr. Putin.

Which brings us back to Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin.

So where will these protests lead?

Xi Jinping’s Covid Crisis Is Really an

And things just might get worse.

The costs of his overreach are piling up.

Dear President Xi:

Xi Jinping Is the Second Coming of Mao Zedong

Elsewhere: Back to Work

Then three things went very, very wrong.

Opinion Columnist and co-host of ‘Matter of Opinion’

Listen to ‘Matter of Opinion’

Carlos Lozada and his co-hosts discuss America’s place in an increasingly

Though his imminent arrest is unlikely, one can dream.

Working in the Office

New York’s Public Housing

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