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    China and the Perils of Bipartisanship

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    Not a single congressional Republican voted for the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Not even the so-called moderate Republicans, the handful who backed the second impeachment of former US President Donald Trump, deigned to support an economic package that helps Americans hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire Republican caucus didn’t just snub the Democrats. They ignored the Republican mayors, as well as 41% of Republican voters, who approved of the legislation.

    Naturally, the unified Republican caucus complained that President Joe Biden was not displaying his promised bipartisanship. It didn’t seem to occur to them that bipartisanship is a two-way street. How soon they’ve forgotten that nearly every Democrat in both houses voted for the Trump administration’s initial bailout package in March 2020.

    A Deeper Look into Hong Kong’s Evolution

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    Nevertheless, the Biden administration remains eager to find common ground with Republican legislators. The president has high hopes that he can attract Republican support for an infrastructure bill this summer, given that rebuilding American bridges, highways and the like was a priority for the previous administration.

    But here’s a truly troubling scenario. Casting around for another unifying topic, the Biden team has seized upon China. Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned about what China is doing these days. There is bipartisan disgust over what’s happening in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Hawks in both parties have long warned about Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea. Despite wildly different economic ideologies, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in their opposition to Chinese trade and currency policies, cavalier approach to intellectual property rights and efforts to dominate markets in the Global South.

    On the face of it, however, the bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is starting to pull together is just another infrastructure initiative. It is meant “to shore up U.S. supply chains, expand American production of semiconductors, create 5G networks nationwide and pour billions into investments into U.S. manufacturing companies and hubs, among other proposals,” according to The Washington Post.

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    But it’s not just infrastructure. The measure is specifically designed to bolster the full-spectrum US fight against China. “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing, and Schumer has the opportunity to take ownership of being against China,” points out Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-wing American Action Forum.

    According to the most benign reading of this bipartisanship, the Biden administration will be manufacturing an anti-Chinese version of the Sputnik moment when, in 1957, the Soviet launch of the first artificial satellite prompted a frenzy of US government spending on science and technology to catch up to the Russians. “The danger China poses could fundamentally reorder U.S. attitudes toward government’s role in domestic economic growth, research and development in ways that leave the United States stronger,” writes liberal columnist E.J. Dionne.

    A robust industrial policy is indeed preferable to, say, the tariffs that the Trump administration levied against Chinese products. If fear of China overcomes the conservative distaste for government interventions in the economy, should progressives really be looking this particular gift horse in the mouth?

    Full Court Press

    The Quad is the latest multilateral mechanism through which the United States is putting pressure on China. The four countries — the United States, India, Japan and Australia — all have their separate beefs with Beijing. But last week was the first time that the heads of these four states met as part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which was set up in 2007.

    The statement the four leaders recently published in The Washington Post makes no mention of China. It’s all about cooperating on climate, the pandemic and strengthening democracy. But that’s just being diplomatic. As Alex Ward writes in Vox, China has “gotten into a deadly fight over a disputed border with India, started a trade war with Australia, hacked the US government, and for years used its might to push Japan around on economic and military matters.” Trump tried to rally the four countries behind his own anti-China agenda. But his efforts were compromised by a suspicion in many quarters that he’d just as soon negotiate a deal with China behind the Quad’s back as coordinate a united front.

    The current president, by contrast, has moved steadily away from a preference to engage China. “Biden had to be reprogrammed on China” during the presidential campaign, one of his advisers said. This reprogramming explains Biden’s harsher tone during the election, such as calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping “a thug.”

    As president, Biden has been careful to sound notes of both amicability and threat. Cooperation to deal with the climate crisis is certainly a possibility. But promoting deals with China is not going to win the new president support in Congress or, for that matter, with the American public. China’s unfavorability rating rose to 79% in a recent Gallup poll, its worst showing in more than four decades. A shift has taken place in just the last couple of years. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans now have “cold” feelings toward China, compared to only 46% in 2018.

    The appointment of Kurt Campbell as the Indo-Pacific coordinator at the National Security Council (NSC) indicates the direction of the administration’s new take on Asia. Campbell was a key architect of the “Pacific pivot” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration. He’s not going to play quite the anti-China role that Matt Pottinger did on Trump’s NSC, but he’s a firm believer in strengthening bilateral alliances and multilateral coordination to contain China.

    In a January 2021 piece in Foreign Affairs, Campbell channeled Henry Kissinger in asserting the need for the US to restore a “balance of power” in the region. What that really means is that the US, with the help of its friends, must push back against China to reassert its own Pacific authority, both militarily and economically. Practically, Campbell explains, this means that:

    “Although Washington should maintain its forward presence, it also needs to work with other states to disperse U.S. forces across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. This would reduce American reliance on a small number of vulnerable facilities in East Asia. Finally, the United States should encourage new military and intelligence partnerships between regional states, while still deepening those relationships in which the United States plays a major role—placing a ‘tire’ on the familiar regional alliance system with a U.S. hub and allied spokes.”

    Over the years, China has steadily eroded US power not only in Asia but internationally. It used the anti-globalism of the Trump years to expand its influence in international institutions such as the United Nations and its associated bodies like the World Health Organization. Where It has encountered difficulties in expanding its influence, such as with international financial institutions, it has simply created its own. Shortly after Biden’s election, China joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes the countries of Southeast Asia, plus Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan). This move, plus Beijing’s recent investment agreement with the European Union and President Xi’s announcement that China would also consider joining a modified Trans-Pacific Partnership, suggests an economic counteroffensive to the US ramping up of multilateral security arrangements.

    These moves have not gone unnoticed. On the eve of their first visit to Asia this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin III wrote in The Washington Post, “If we don’t act decisively and lead, Beijing will.”

    The Biden administration’s decision to focus on beefing up US economic competitiveness, particularly in the tech sector, is in some ways an admission of defeat. China has outmaneuvered the United States in the global economy. The only way Washington can compete at the moment is by throwing its weight around militarily and trying to play catch-up on the home front.

    Is China a Useful Threat?

    It’s hard to argue with the importance of investing in critical US industries. Republicans and laissez-faire economists generally oppose such a policy of picking winners and losers in the marketplace, except when it comes to the military-industrial complex. Only a large external threat can move such ideologues to accept the obvious: governments can and should shape markets.

    But here are some problems with hitching this industrial policy to the “China threat.” The global economy needs an overhaul to address the climate crisis, rampant economic inequality, automation and other developments. This is no time for the US to turn its economic relationship with China into a Cold War competition. Sure, let the two countries compete over who makes the best laptop computer, but cooperation is essential for developing new rules for the global economy. A robust industrial policy doesn’t preclude cooperation, unless it feeds into a rancor and a parochialism that makes cooperation near to impossible.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of global supply chains, with the collapse of international trade and countries initially competing for scarce medical equipment. This is not a new problem, however. Shelley Rigger writes in her 2013 book on Taiwan about a moment “in 1999 when a power transmission tower on a remote mountain in central Taiwan toppled, blacking out the island’s high-tech industry for a day. The interruption nearly doubled the world price of memory chips and the supply of TFT-LCD flat screens took six months to return to normal.” Natural (and unnatural) disasters can wreak havoc on the supply of essential components.

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    Ensuring an indigenous supply of computer chips may well protect the US in the short term, but it does little to address the underlying problem of supply chains. A return to a time when every country produced all of its essentials or went without is not really an option, considering the importance of global trade routes going back to the Silk Road and even before. Reshoring and relocalization are both essential in this age of climate crisis. But a reordering of the global economy that accommodates such changes should be a matter for coordination, not Cold War competition.

    In addition, an industrial policy that prioritizes gaining a competitive edge over China could overshadow the other major focus of the Biden administration, namely reducing the national and global carbon footprints. High-tech products often rely on key outputs of the extraction industry, like cobalt and lithium. An industrial policy built on minimizing carbon emissions and the use of rare minerals, rather than besting China, would pick very different economic winners and losers.

    When it comes to foreign policy, bipartisanship is not necessarily a virtue. The two major US parties came together around waging the Vietnam War, confronting the Soviet Union during the Cold War and fighting “terrorism” in the wake of September 11. The first failed, the second was outrageously expensive and nearly ended in nuclear apocalypse, and the third led the country into the infamous “forever wars.”

    Selectively challenging China over its human rights record, its overreach in the South China Sea or the conduct of its businesses around the world (like this fish meal operation in Gambia) is appropriate. Going all out in a military, economic and cultural competition with the Asian superpower — and forging a wafer-thin bipartisan consensus to do so — is the height of folly.

    *[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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      A Deeper Look into Hong Kong’s Evolution

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      In the wake of dramatic protests that Western media have covered extensively over the past two years, Keith Zhai and Chun Han Wong, writing for The Wall Street Journal, report that changes are about to take place in Hong Kong. Whether the planned changes will appease last year’s protesters remains to be seen. The practices they denounced concerned the system of government, the structure of authority. They worried that civil liberties were being threatened by Beijing’s interference in the governance of the former British colony.

      Coverage by Western media of the street battles that took place generally condemned what was perceived to be a betrayal by Beijing of “pledges to allow Hong Kong’s governance to remain semiautonomous until at least 2047.” Western politicians and pundits seized on China’s aggressive crackdown on the protesters as a pretext for denouncing the People’s Republic for its anti-democratic, authoritarian methods.

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      With the help of the coronavirus pandemic that helped to clear the streets, the government finally managed to quell the protests. Profiting from the calm, the Chinese are now planning a number of reforms. The WSJ quotes Bernard Chan, a member of Hong Kong‘s cabinet, on the nature of the intended effort: “What Beijing ultimately wants to address in Hong Kong is ‘not the politics, but the deep-seated issues’ including the lack of affordable housing and the city’s deeply polarizing income gaps.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Deep-seated issues:

      The kind of issues that developed nations with a modern, free market economy refuse to address directly due to their belief that private enterprise will step up as soon as they discover how solving such problems can become profitable

      Contextual Note

      Chan distinguishes between “politics” that fascinate the elite (as well as the media) and “deep-seated issues” that affect all citizens. The WSJ provides some indication of the nature of the struggle to come, particularly concerning housing: “Land-policy reforms can help improve access to cheaper homes, although officials must overcome the entrenched influence of local property tycoons whom Beijing regards as too passive in their support of government goals.”

      With its focus on how the economy works, The WSJ is well placed to understand the impact of “entrenched influence” exercised by “property tycoons.” For the past four years, the US itself was governed by a property tycoon specialized in wielding influence. The example of Donald Trump, the former president, may serve to demonstrate that the only effective way to “overcome” tycoons’ influence is to eject them from their position of power. But when the tycoons are legion and anonymous, as they are in Hong Kong, the struggle will be bound to last a certain time. 

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      The debate this has provoked in Hong Kong is fraught with the hypocrisy everyone would expect when the stakes are so high. The Chinese government appears to be focusing on soft power as it promises relief for a struggling population to distract from the issue of democratic representation. The policy may reflect the Marshall Plan approach that worked so well to consolidate America’s soft power in Europe following World War II.

      The Beijing government’s narrative attributes the discontent of the protests to the very concrete social issues, deviating attention from the political issues the protesters themselves highlighted. Chan bluntly explains: “They want us to fix it.” He may be right. Just as the Americans fixed Europe with the Marshall Plan and nobody complained about their encroaching power.

      Not everyone is convinced. Opposition politicians have expressed skepticism “that Beijing can overcome the decades of policy inertia and infighting that beset Hong Kong‘s political and business elite.” So long as those by virtue of their assets and cash wield actual power, the inertia is likely to continue.

      Emily Lau, a former chairwoman of Hong Kong‘s Democratic Party, complains that former leaders appointed by Beijing in the face of the social challenge “never bothered to solve it.” She believes the new ones appointed after the showdown with protesters are unlikely to do any better. This could be interpreted as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. But there are reasons to believe the new policy will force change. One member of a think tank dedicated to Hong Kong policy claims that if those in charge “can’t serve the people well, they must step down.”

      Historical Note

      Keith Zhai and Chun Han Wong remind readers of what Western media prefer to ignore: that Hong Kong is not just a glamorous, glitzy coastal resort, but has a history. Without returning to the dramatic historical events that made it a British colony, they cite examples of how things worked during the colonial period that only ended in 1997. Hong Kong has maintained a “low-tax regime, largely unchanged since British rule,” with no “duties on sales, consumption, capital gains, dividends or inheritance,” the journalists write. The British designed this to draw Western finance, multinational companies and tourists to the enclave, turning it into a free-wheeling platform for global capitalism with a commanding seaside view over all of eastern Asia.

      The writers also cite Hong Kong’s “land policies, another legacy of British rule, which have long been criticized for artificially inflating real-estate prices that boost government coffers and developers’ profits.” This system “effectively imposes shadow taxes on residents through sky-high housing prices and rent.” As in practically every modern democracy run less by representatives of the voters than by the forces of the free market, assets are privileged long before governments can even begin to consider the people’s needs. The journalists give the details of some of the proposed reforms but conclude by evoking a potential battle to come: “Such changes could see officials take on the city’s influential property tycoons, who have wielded outsize influence over land policy.”

      An article in The South China Morning Post suggests the real motives behind China’s new policy. The author cites “a historical moment rooted in the Chinese collective consciousness, and central to the very concept of national identity, that set the trend of that relationship [between Beijing and Hong Kong].” The historical narrative “cuts across various layers of society and is shared by both opponents and supporters of the Communist government.” The Chinese remember it as the “century of humiliation.”

      The Opium Wars stand as one of the most shameful episodes in the annals of British imperialism, an act of aggression that saw London apply the proverb, “to kill two birds with one stone.” The two birds were China and India, which together now represent approximately a third of the world’s population. Under British direction, India produced the opium that the Brits themselves, playing the role of the neighborhood drug dealer, incited the Chinese to get hooked on, which, according to mercantilist logic, produced the means to pay for the Chinese exports of silk, porcelain and tea that the British themselves were increasingly addicted to.

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      A major prize in the settlement of the First Opium War was the cession of Hong Kong to the British in 1841. That marked the beginning of the century of humiliation. For the British, the acquisition of a delicious Asian bauble was the reward for their military planning and valor. Contemplating the spoils of war, Queen Victoria famously boasted that her husband, Prince Consort Albert, “is so amused at my having got the Island of Hong Kong.”

      The South China Morning Post article explains the sense of injustice felt by the Chinese after their treatment by the British. Many of them, and not just the government, see the question of Hong Kong as a question of national pride and part of their anti-colonial mission. “Deep down, Chinese nationalist sentiment is based on the hope of correcting and overcoming the legacy of imperialist invasion of Chinese lands,” The Morning Post reports.

      When the Chinese speak of “deep-seated” issues, their notion of depth includes the reality of the lives of working people in Hong Kong, many of whom can no longer afford rent even for a few square meters of living space. The issue no longer concerns preferences or superficial claims. It is even less about being “amused” at possessing a piece of coastal territory with a strategically situated harbor. These are indeed deep matters. The Western powers and their media, as they attempt to deal with the rise of China, would be well advised to break free from their addiction to shallow reasoning as they seek to defend their waning hegemony.

      *[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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      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.

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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.

      Embed from Getty Images

      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.

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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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      India and China: A Time for Diplomacy, Not Confrontation

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      Chinese and Indian forces have pulled back from their confrontation in the Himalayas, but the tensions that set off the deadly encounter this past June — the first on the China–India border since 1975 — are not going away. Indeed, a poisonous combination of local disputes, regional antagonisms and colonial history could pose a serious danger to peace in Asia.

      In part, the problem is Britain’s colonial legacy. The “border” in dispute is an arbitrary line drawn across terrain that doesn’t lend itself to clear boundaries. The architect, Henry McMahon, drew it to maximize British control of a region that was in play during the 19th-century “Great Game” between England and Russia for control of Central Asia. Local concerns were irrelevant.

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      The treaty was signed between Tibet and Britain in 1914. Although India accepts the 550-mile McMahon Line as the border between India and China, the Chinese have never recognized the boundary. Mortimer Durand, Britain’s lead colonial officer in India, drew a similar “border” in 1893 between Pakistan (India’s “Northern Territories” at the time) and Afghanistan that Kabul has never accepted, and which is still the source of friction between the two countries. Colonialism may be gone, but its effects still linger.

      Although the target for the McMahon Line was Russia, it has always been a sore spot for China, not only because Beijing’s protests were ignored, but also because the Chinese saw it as a potential security risk for its western provinces. England had already humiliated China in the two Opium Wars as well as by seizing Shanghai and Hong Kong. If it could lop off Tibet — which China sees as part of its empire — so might another country… like India.

      A Threat to China?

      Indeed, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and absorbed Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, the Chinese saw the grab as a threat to the security of Tibet and its restive western province of Xinjiang. The area in which the recent fighting took place, the Galwan Valley, is close to a road linking Tibet with Xinjiang.

      The nearby Aksai Chin, which China seized from India in the 1962 border war, not only controls the Tibet-Xinjiang highway, but also the area through which China is building an oil pipeline. The Chinese see the pipeline — which will go from the Pakistani port of Gwadar to Kashgar in Xinjiang — as a way to bypass key choke points in the Indian Ocean controlled by the US Navy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The $62-billion project is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a piece of the huge Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure and increase trade between South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and China.

      China moves 80% of its oil by sea and is increasingly nervous about a budding naval alliance between the United States and Beijing’s regional rivals, India and Japan. In the yearly Malabar exercises, the three powers’ war-game closes the Malacca Straits through which virtually all of China’s oil passes. The Pakistan-China pipeline oil will be more expensive than tanker supplied oil — one estimate is five times more — but it will be secure from the US.

      In 2019, however, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah pledged to take back Aksai Chin from China, thus exposing the pipeline to potential Indian interdiction.

      From China’s point of view the bleak landscape of rock, ice and very little oxygen is central to its strategy of securing access to energy supplies. The region is also part of what is called the world’s “third pole,” the vast snowfields and glaciers that supply the water for 11 countries in the region, including India and China. Together, these two countries make up a third of the world’s population but have access to only 10% of the globe’s water supplies. By 2030, half of India’s population — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water.

      The “pole” is the source of 10 major rivers, most of them fed by the more than 14,000 thousand glaciers that dot the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. By 2100, two-thirds of those glaciers will be gone, the victims of climate change. China largely controls the “pole.” It may be stony and cold, but it is the lifeblood to 11 countries in the region.

      Back in Time

      The recent standoff has a history. In 2017, Indian and Chinese troops faced-off in Doklam — Dongland to China — the area where Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim come together. There were fistfights and lots of pushing and shoving, but casualties consisted of black eyes and bloody noses. But the 73-day confrontation apparently shocked the Chinese. “For China, the Doklam stand-off raised fundamental questions regarding the nature of India’s threat,” says Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

      Doklam happened just as relations with the Trump administration were headed south, although tensions between Washington and Beijing date back to the 1998-99 Taiwan crisis. At that time, President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the area, one of which traversed the Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland. The incident humiliated China, which re-tooled its military and built up its navy in the aftermath.

      In 2003, President George W. Bush wooed India to join Japan, South Korea and Australia in a regional alliance aimed at “containing” China. The initiative was only partly successful, but it alarmed China. Beijing saw the Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” and the current tensions with the Trump administration as part of the same strategy. If one adds to this the US anti-missile systems in South Korea, the deployment of 1,500 Marines to Australia and the buildup of American bases in Guam and Wake, it is easy to see why the Chinese would conclude that Washington had it out for them.

      China has responded aggressively, seizing and fortifying disputed islands and reefs, and claiming virtually all of the South China Sea as home waters. It has rammed and sunk Vietnamese fishing vessels, bullied Malaysian oil rigs and routinely violated Taiwan’s airspace.

      China has also strengthened relations with neighbors that India formally dominated, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives, initiatives which India resents. In short, there are some delicate diplomatic issues in the region, ones whose solutions are ill-served by military posturing or arms races.

      The dust-up in the Galwan Valley was partly an extension of China’s growing assertiveness in Asia. But the Modi government has also been extremely provocative, particularly in its illegal seizure of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Galwan incident, the Indians were building an airfield and a bridge near the Chinese border that would have allowed Indian armor and modern aircraft to potentially threaten Chinese forces.

      Dangerous Thoughts

      There is a current in the Indian military that would like to erase the drubbing India took in its 1962 border war with China. The thinking is that the current Indian military is far stronger and better armed than it was 58 years ago, and it has more experience than the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The last time the Chinese army went to war was its ill-fated invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But that is dangerous thinking. India’s “experience” consists mainly of terrorizing Kashmiri civilians and an occasional firefight with lightly-armed insurgents. In 1962, India’s and China’s economies were similar in size. Today, China’s economy is five times larger and its military budget four times greater.

      China is clearly concerned that it might face a two-front war: India to its south, the US and its allies to the west. That is not a comfortable position, and one that presents dangers to the entire region. Pushing a nuclear-armed country into a corner is never a good idea.

      The Chinese need to accept some of the blame for the current tensions. Beijing has bullied smaller countries in the region and refused to accept the World Court’s ruling on its illegal occupation of a Philippine reef. Its heavy-handed approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and its oppressive treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, is winning it no friends, regionally and internationally.

      There is no evidence that the US, India and China want a war, one whose effect on the international economy would make COVID-19 look like a mild head cold. But since all three powers are nuclear-armed, there is always the possibility — even if remote — of things getting out of hand.

      In reality, all three countries desperately need one another if the world is to confront the existential dangers of climate change, nuclear war and pandemics. It is a time for diplomacy and cooperation, not confrontation.

      *[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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      Water Becomes a Weapon in China’s Geopolitical Chess

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      Many centuries ago, the great Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu observed: “The nature of water is such that it avoids heights and hastens to the lowlands. When a dam is broken, the water cascades with irresistible force. Now the shape of an army resembles water. Take advantage of the enemy’s unpreparedness; attack him when he does […] More

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      China’s Race for Scientific and Technological Supremacy

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      Science and technology will become the lifeblood of the Chinese economy in this decade and will remain its lifeblood in the future. That is, in part, because China has become sufficiently advanced to be able to effectively compete with the US and other technological leaders in the West. It is also the key to China’s […] More

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      America vs. China: An Ideological Choice

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      China’s incredible rise as a global power over the past 30 years has really only been possible because of the liberal world order that America helped create, which Beijing used to its maximum advantage. China has embedded itself into the world order economically, diplomatically, technologically, in business and in so many other ways as a […] More