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      The Great Game of the 21st Century

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      From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian Empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia. At the heart of the “Great Game” was the United Kingdom’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So, wars were fought, borders drawn and generations of young met death in desolate passes and lonely outposts.

      The BRI: Keeping the Plates Spinning on China’s Economy

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      In the end, it was all illusion. Russia never planned to challenge British rule in India and the bloody wars settled nothing, although the arbitrary borders and ethnic tensions stoked by colonialism’s strategy of divide and conquer live on today. Thus China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal battle over lines drawn long ago in London, while Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul vie for tiny uninhabited islands, remnants of Imperial Japan.

      That history is important to keep in mind when one begins to unpack the rationales behind the increasingly dangerous standoff between China and the United States in the South China Sea.

      A New Cold War

      To the Americans, China is a fast-rising competitor that doesn’t play by the rules and threatens one of the most important trade routes on the globe in a region long dominated by Washington. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has essentially called for regime change.

      According to Ryan Hass, former China director on the National Security Council, the Trump administration is trying to “reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed” by administrations that follow. In short, a cold war not unlike that between the US and the Soviet Union.

      To the Chinese, the last 200 years — and China’s leaders do tend to think in centuries, not decades — has been an anomaly in their long history. Once the richest country on the globe who introduced the world to everything from silk to gunpowder, 19th-century China became a dumping ground for British opium, incapable of even controlling its own coastlines.

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      China has never forgotten those years of humiliation or the damage colonialism helped inflict on its people. Those memories are an ingredient in the current crisis.

      But China is not the only country with memories. The US has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown.

      An example is conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who recently warned that China’s navy has more ships than the US Navy, ignoring the fact that most of China’s ships are small coast guard frigates and corvettes. China’s major strategic concern is the defense of its coasts, where several invasions landed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

      The Chinese strategy is “area denial”: keeping American aircraft carriers at arm’s length. To this end, Beijing has illegally seized numerous small islands and reefs in the South China Sea to create a barrier to the US Navy.

      In the World Bank’s Wake

      But China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military, and is currently targeting South Asia as an area for development. South Asia is enormously complex, comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Its 1.6 billion people constitute almost a quarter of the world’s population, but it only accounts for 2% of the global GDP and 1.3% of world trade.

      Those figures translate into a poverty level of 44%, just 2% higher than the world’s most impoverished region, sub-Saharan Africa. Close to 85% of South Asia’s population makes less than $2 a day.

      Much of this is a result of colonialism, which derailed local economies, suppressed manufacturing and forced countries to adopt mono-crop cultures focused on export. The globalization of capital in the 1980s accelerated the economic inequality that colonialism had bequeathed the region.

      Development in South Asia has been beholden to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which require borrowers to open their markets to western capital and reduce debts through severe austerity measures, throttling everything from health care to transportation. This economic strategy — sometimes called the “Washington Consensus” — generates “debt traps”: countries cut back on public spending, which depresses their economies and increases debt, which leads to yet more rounds of borrowing and austerity.

      The World Bank and the IMF have been particularly stingy about lending for infrastructure development, an essential part of building a modern economy. It is “the inadequacy and rigidness of the various western monetary institutions that have driven South Asia into the arms of China,” says economist Anthony Howell in the South Asia Journal.

      The BRI takes a different tack. Through a combination of infrastructure development, trade and financial aid, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe are linked into what is essentially a new “Silk Road.” Some 138 countries have signed up.

      Using a variety of institutions — the China Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — Beijing has been building roads, rail systems and ports throughout South Asia.

      For decades, Western lenders have either ignored South Asia — with the exception of India — or put so many restrictions on development funds that the region has stagnated economically. The Chinese initiative has the potential to reverse this, alarming the West and India, the only nation in the region not to join the BRI.

      The European Union has also been resistant to the initiative, although Italy has signed on. A number of Middle East countries have also joined the BRI and the China-Arab Cooperation Forum. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have signed on to China’s Digital Silk Road, a network of navigation satellites that compete with America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the EU’s Galileo. China also recently signed a $400 billion, 25-year trade and military partnership with Iran.

      Needless to say, Washington is hardly happy about China elbowing its way into a US-dominated region that contains a significant portion of the world’s energy supplies. In a worldwide competition for markets and influence, China is demonstrating considerable strengths.

      That, of course, creates friction. The United States and, to a certain extent, the EU have launched a campaign to freeze China out of markets and restrict its access to advanced technology. The White House successfully lobbied Britain and Australia to bar the Chinese company Huawei from installing a 5G digital network, and it is pressuring Israel and Brazil to do the same.

      An October Surprise?

      Not all of the current tensions are economic. The Trump administration needs a diversion from its massive failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Republican Party has made China-bashing a centerpiece of its election strategy. There is even the possibility that the White House might pull off an “October surprise” and initiate some kind of military clash with China.

      It is unlikely that Trump wants a full-scale war, but an incident in the South China Sea might rally Americans behind the White House. The danger is real, especially since polls in China and the US show there is growing hostility between both groups of people.

      But the tensions go beyond US President Donald Trump’s desperate need to be reelected in November. China is reasserting itself as a regional power and a force to be reckoned with worldwide.

      That the US and its allies view that with enmity is hardly a surprise. Britain did its best to block the rise of Germany before World War I, and the US did much the same with Japan in the lead up to the Pacific War.

      Germany and Japan were great military powers with a willingness to use violence to get their way. China is not a great military power and is more interested in creating profits than empires. In any case, a war between nuclear-armed powers is almost unimaginable (which is not to say it can’t happen).

      China recently softened its language toward the US, stressing peaceful coexistence. “We should not let nationalism and hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” says Xu Quinduo of the state-run China Radio. “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

      The new tone suggests that China has no enthusiasm for competing with the US military, but it would rather take the long view and let initiatives like the Belt and Road work for it. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese don’t want to see Trump reelected, and they clearly have decided not to give him any excuse to ratchet up the tensions as an election-year ploy.

      China’s recent clash with India, and its bullying of countries in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have isolated Beijing, and the Chinese leadership may be waking to the fact that they need allies, not adversaries. And patience.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Can China Duplicate the US Military-Industrial Complex?

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      With the 2020 US election approaching, the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear to have decided that there are only two issues worth pursuing. The first,  which they hope the American public will swallow, would be the visibly diminished cognitive capacity of Democratic nominee Joe Biden that has, they claim, turned him into a Marxist and Bernie Sanders’ poodle.

      The second issue is more likely to stir up the jingoistic emotions of the electorate. It consists of portraying China as an evil empire and perpetrator of pandemics. Pompeo has been trotting the globe, raising the rhetorical tone to make sure everyone understands how deserving China is of any punishment Trump may decide to inflict on it in between now and the first week of November.

      China certainly merits everyone’s attention, simply because it’s there, it’s imposing, it’s growing in influence and it has already clearly shifted the global geopolitical balance in parallel with America’s ongoing hegemonic decline. It’s a theme that resonates with the working class. From a purely electoral point of view, countering the evident rise of China seems like the most obvious theme for Trump to push. After all, his stance of getting tough with China played a big role in the 2016 election.

      The Brain Malfunction Affecting the US and Its Respectable Media

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      Irrespective of elections, every pundit involved in evaluating geopolitical game plans has been homing in on the faceoff between the US and China. Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks, writing for Foreign Affairs, have produced a fascinating piece of tendentious ideological reasoning in an article with a provocative title, “Can China’s Military Win the Tech War?” It has the merit of focusing on what is truly the most crucial point of rivalry between the US and the Middle Kingdom: technological prowess in the coming decades.

      Alas, their article reads like an exercise in fuzzy neoliberal logic, adorned with an orgy of Silicon Valley venture capital jargon, imbued with romanticized entrepreneurial idealism. Its trendy vocabulary tells us more about a new culture shared between Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, than it does about the geopolitical theme it purports to clarify. The authors assail the reader with these bold concepts: “innovative startups” “collaborative disruption,” “agile and innovative,” “critical innovation,” “emerging technologies,” a “sense of urgency” linked to “today’s competitive … environment,” and “incentives for innovators.”

      China’s rise as a supplier of technology poses a major problem because, in today’s world, technology and defense have become one and the same thing. We learn that “as China’s defense capabilities have grown, some Western policymakers have started to wonder whether the United States needs to adopt its own version of civil-military fusion, embracing a top-down approach to developing cutting-edge technologies with military applications.”

      And here is the crux of the problem: “Chinese President Xi Jinping formalized the concept of civil-military fusion as part of the extensive military reforms laid out in his 2016 five-year plan.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Civil-military fusion:

      The name given to the Chinese version of the seven-decades-old system developed in the US christened by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 as the military-industrial complex

      Contextual Note

      Manuel and Hicks start their discussion in this introductory sentence: “As the Chinese government has set out to harness the growing strength of the Chinese technology sector to bolster its military, policymakers in the United States have reacted with mounting alarm.” Thinkers in the West are now wondering whether the Chinese top-down, authoritarian model of decision-making might not be superior to the point of constituting a model the US needs to emulate. The authors set out to prove the contrary.

      The article highlights President Xi Jinping’s Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development whose “goal is to promote the development of dual-use technology and integrate existing civilian technologies into the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).” Manuel and Hicks seem to have missed the most obvious point — that Xi has simply taken the American system and stood it on its head. Since World War II, the US has traditionally followed the pattern of developing military technology, which is then made available to private companies to exploit commercially as civilian technology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The article also fails to notice how the Chinese have profited from the American system. The US uses its commercial marketplace to validate the types of civilian technology that prove successful. The Chinese can then either copy or reverse engineer the same technology for their civilian market before adapting it to military use. This means the Chinese are getting the best of both worlds. They let the marketplace in the West filter out the civilian applications that work, sparing themselves the research.

      Sensing a possible weakness, the authors, undaunted, turn to the catechism of their neoliberal ideology. It contains an article of faith based on the unfounded (and clearly mistaken) belief that private enterprises will always be paragons of efficiency as opposed to governments that will always function as fountains of inefficiency. “China’s bureaucratic and authoritarian approach to civil-military fusion is likely to waste considerable time and money. By trying to control innovation, Beijing is more likely to delay and even stifle it,” Manuel and Hicks write. We are safe. The liberal economy of the US owns a monopoly on innovation.

      The authors conclude that the US should not seek to emulate the Chinese model. They do, however, concede that “Washington does need a strategy to strengthen its national security technology and industrial base.” That sounds like encouragement of government inefficiency, but Silicon Valley jargon comes to the rescue. The US needs a strategy “centered on collaborative disruption that generates the right incentives for innovators, scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, and others,” they add. The following sentence offers more jargon in lieu of logic, but especially wishful thinking. The authors call for “forward-looking changes in the Defense Department and smart investments across government.”

      Curiously, Manuel and Hicks seem to recognize the obstacle. They see a “risk not because of China but because of a lack of agility and creativity among U.S. planners and policymakers.” This is the ultimate expression of neoliberal ideology. Entrepreneurs are agile and creative. Government planners and policymakers are useless bureaucrats, a fact they reaffirm with this remark: “The Defense Department’s long lead times and slow decision-making remain significant obstacles to innovation.”

      Perhaps even more astonishingly naive is their plea to push the already existing logic of revolving door corruption. As a solution to US inertia, they recommend “more opportunities to hire people directly from industry or research institutions into the senior civilian government or even the military ranks,” as well as wishing to expand “the number of temporary fellowships for private-sector experts to spend a year or two in government.” Those are permanent features of the military-industrial complex that have contributed massively to its corruption.

      Historical Note

      Insisting that if China wants to catch up, it should emulate the United States, Anja Manuel and Kathleen Hicks offer a potted history of the development of America’s military-industrial complex. They cite the founding of labs in the 1930s to develop supercomputing, the military’s post-war collaboration with Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor to develop microprocessors and the creation in 1958 of the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which helped develop GPS and the Internet.” They then proudly cite the Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit, founded in 2015, which “has helped innovative startups gain a foothold at the Pentagon.”

      The authors recommend little more than the logic that has prevailed for the past 70 years. They maintain that “partnering effectively with the private sector can save taxpayer dollars.” In reality, it means companies will continue to see their R&D funded by taxpayers, with no risk and, of course, the opportunity to reap profits from future business in civilian technology. That translates as no benefit to taxpayers but colossal rewards for shareholders.

      Manuel and Hicks insist on the necessity of “collaborative disruption,” which “will require upfront investments and streamlined approaches for getting the best commercial technology into the Department of Defense.” This language is designed to appeal to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It may also appeal to the same political class that has profited personally and politically from the growth of the military-industrial-financial complex. In other words, it is more of the same, but with updated vocabulary. Whether, as the authors hope, the US can by these means “secure the advantage in defense capabilities on its own terms” over China remains to be seen.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      US health secretary praises Taiwan's Covid-19 response during rare high-level visit

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      The US health secretary, Alex Azar, has met with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, in the highest-level US visit in more than four decades, pledging “strong support and friendship” from president Donald Trump.The meeting in Taipei on Monday threatened to escalate worsening tensions between the Washington and Beijing, the latter of whom’s government claims Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China, taking issue with any acknowledgement of Taiwan’s status as a sovereign state.Azar, a US cabinet member, is the most senior American official to visit Taiwan since Washington broke off official ties in 1979 to grant diplomatic recognition to Beijing.Applauding Taiwan’s response to the Covid-19 crisis, he said: “Taiwan’s response to Covid-19 has been among the most successful in the world, and that is a tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan’s society and culture.”“President Tsai’s courage and vision in leading Taiwan’s vibrant democracy are an inspiration to the region and to the world,” he said.As China’s relations with the US and other Western countries have deteriorated over the past year, Taiwan has gained more support in the international community with countries supporting Tsai’s calls for his country’s inclusion in the World Health Organization.While Washington broke off official ties 40 years ago, it has maintained close relations with Taiwan and Trump has ramped up US support for Taipei with arms sales and legislation in the face ofopposition from China.Increasingly, Taiwan’s democratically elected government is also being held up as a foil to China’s ruling Chinese communist party, which critics say is growing more authoritarian under Xi Jinping. The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted further divisions as some countries blame China’s lack of transparency for the outbreak.Tsai, who has been branded by Beijing as a “separatist”, said it was “highly regrettable” that China had blocked its participation in the WHO during a pandemic.Tsai won re-election in January and has received a boost in popularity for her government’s handling of the virus, which has resulted in just seven deaths on the island.Thanking the US for its support of Taiwan’s bid to attend the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, the president said: “Political considerations should never take precedence over the right to health. The decision to bar Taiwan from participating in the World Health Assembly is a violation of the universal rights to health.” More

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      in US Politics

      Why a Biden presidency might not mean a return to pre-Trump foreign relations

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      European leaders, desperate for an end to the Trump presidency, are being warned that four years of Joe Biden may present them with new challenges and not a simple restoration of the benign status quo in transatlantic relations prior to 2016.An evolving Biden doctrine about ending “forever wars” and protecting American workers from Chinese competition would require collective military and economic commitments from the EU that it is still ill-equipped to meet, foreign policy specialists have suggested.The overall tenor of the platform, emphasising post-Covid multilateralism and cooperation with fellow liberal democracies, is already welcome in Europe. Biden’s promised end to the institutionalised mayhem, animus towards allies and pandering to authoritarians will be a relief. Competence, reliability and dialogue may not be a high bar to set a presidency, but simple normality would amount to a revival of the idea of the west, such has been the chaos of the past four years.Forsaken multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization, would be rejoined, ending the US practice, in the words of Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser Tony Blinken, of simply going awol. “Ninety per cent of life is about showing up,” Blinken told Chatham House, adapting Woody Allen.Biden may seem to personify an old-school nostalgic Atlanticism of the foreign policy establishment. But the Democrat’s draft policy platform released last month reflects the influence of the progressive left, and an effort to absorb the lessons from the shock 2016 defeat.Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, speaking to the European Council on Foreign Relations podcast, agreed that Biden had moved to the left, saying he had faced mobilisation on foreign policy from progressives in a way that Barack Obama never experienced. As a result, foreign policy is no longer a backwater in democratic politics, and new links between foreign and economic policy are being drawn.Many of the Obama-era foreign policy advisers now clustered around Biden, dismissed as a horror show by some on the left, also deny that they crave simple restoration, saying everything has changed since 2016.Stung by Hillary Clinton’s defeat, they recognise the populists’ claim to have better constructed a foreign policy to help Americans’ daily lives at home. William Burns, a former state department official under Obama and one of Biden’s many advisers, recently wrote: “The wellbeing of the American middle class ought to be the engine that drives our foreign policy. We’re long overdue for a historic course correction at home.”Jeremy Shapiro, a senior researcher with the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR), also says there has been a pressure on Democrats to make their foreign policy more relevant to daily American lives. “There was this sense that in the Obama administration foreign policy was a plaything of the elites divorced from Americans’ daily existence. The change from Obama to Biden is there will be more focus on America.”Without threatening tariff wars, the Biden platform hints at a new scepticism about globalism and free trade. In broader policy terms, Europe will welcome Biden’s commitment to the Paris climate change treaty, and to Nato, “the single most significant military alliance in the history of the world,” as Biden described the organisation to the Munich security conference in 2019. To the relief of Berlin, the withdrawal of US troops from Germany would stop. A more consistent approach to Turkey would be sought. More

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      in US Politics

      Think 'sanctions' will trouble China? Then you're stuck in the politics of the past | Ai Weiwei

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      The Trump administration has floated the idea of sanctioning Chinese officials and members of the Communist party of China. Before we ask whether this is a good idea, let’s ask how Sino-US relations got to this stage.The US cold war with the Soviet Union was over ideology, but today’s standoff with China is different. The Chinese state has no ideology, no religion, no moral agenda. It continues wearing socialist garb but only as a face-saving pretence. It has, in fact, become a state-capitalist dictatorship. What the world sees today is a contest between the US system of free-market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism. How should we read this chessboard?The post-Mao dictatorship in China has lived by the principle of “repress at home and be open to the world”. It has imported knowhow from abroad. There are an estimated 360,000 Chinese students currently enrolled who have come through America’s open door. Over 40 years, at least a million have returned to China and fed their new technical knowledge into the existing authoritarian structures that have built the dictatorship. It might be the most momentous personnel transfer in history. When I applied to study in the US in the 1980s, I filled out a questionnaire that asked if I had ever been a member of the Communist party. The point of the question was presumably to avoid ideological risks. But it is beyond doubt that the Chinese students coming in with me included many party members who were headed to some of the US’s finest schools, often with scholarships. Americans generally assumed that these students would feel the appeal of liberal values, which they would then take back to China. What happened more often, though, was that Chinese students were quick to see the cultural differences between the two countries, and to draw the very logical conclusion that American values are fine for America but would never work in the Chinese system.If those US hopes for the exportation of values had panned out, much of China would have been won over by now. But what has actually happened? Returnees are now leaders in much of Chinese business and industry, but anti-American expression in China is as strong today as it has been since the Mao era.Washington bears much of the responsibility for what has happened. In the years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, administrations of both parties touted the absurd theory that the best plan was to let China get rich and then watch as freedom and democracy evolved as byproducts of capitalist development.But did capitalist competition, that ravenous machine that can chew up anything, change China? The regime’s politics did not change a whit. What did change was the US, whose business leaders now approached the Chinese dictatorship with obsequious smiles. Here, after all, was an exciting new business partner: master of a realm in which there were virtually no labour rights or health and safety regulations, no frustrating delays because of squabbles between political parties, no criticism from free media, and no danger of judgment by independent courts. For European and US companies doing manufacture for export, it was a dream come true.Money rained down on parts of China, it is true. But the price was to mortgage the country’s future. Society fell into a moral swamp, devoid of humanity and difficult to escape. Meanwhile, the west made their adjustments. They stopped talking about liberal values and gave a pass to the dictatorship, in which Deng Xiaoping’s advice of “don’t confront” and Jiang Zemin’s of “lie low and make big bucks” made fast economic growth possible.European and American business thrived in the early stages of the China boom. They sat in a sedan chair carried up the mountain by their Chinese partners. And a fine journey it was – crisp air, bright sun – as they reached the mountain’s midpoint. But then the chair-carriers laid down their poles and began demanding a shift. They, too, sought the top position. The signal from the political centre in China changed from “don’t pick fights” to “go for it”. Now what could the western capitalists do? Walk back down the mountain? They hardly knew the way.Covid-19 has jolted the US into semi-awareness of the crisis it faces. The disease has become a political issue for its two major political parties to tussle over, but the real crisis is that the western system itself has been challenged. The US model appears to others as a bureaucratic jumble of competing interests that lacks long-term vision and historical aspiration, that omits ideals, that runs on short-term pragmatism, and that in the end is hostage to corporate capital.Are sanctions the way to go? A foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing recently remarked words to the effect that the US and China are so economically interlocked that they would amount to self-sanctions. The US, moreover, would be no match for China in its ability to endure suffering. And there he was correct: in dictatorships, sacrifices are not borne by the rulers. In the 1960s Mao said: “Cut us off? Go ahead – eight years, 10 years, China has everything.” A few years later Mao had nuclear weapons and was not afraid of anyone.The west needs to reconsider its systems, its political and cultural prospects, and rediscover its humanitarianism. These challenges are not only political, they are intellectual. It is time to abandon the old thinking and the vocabulary that controls it. Without new vocabulary, new thinking cannot be born. In the current struggle in Hong Kong, for example, the theory is simple and the faith is pure. The new political generation in Hong Kong deserves careful respect from the west, and new vocabulary to talk about it.“Sanctions” is a cold war term that names an old policy. If the US can’t think beyond them, the primacy of its position in this changing world will disappear. More