The Chinese Challenge

This is a blog post that I have long been promising my partner Maree that I would write, but which has taken longer to formulate than I had hoped. However it seems more topical than ever, so better late than never!

The Backdrop: The Dragon Awakes

The role of China in the world’s economy has been probably the biggest economic story of the past forty years. In the late 1970s China had by far the world’s biggest population, and a long and illustrious history of imperial military conquest, overseas economic ventures, and cultural and technological achievements. Unfortunately, most of that long and illustrious history had ended around 1840, when the Qing dynasty’s grip on the country loosened and a series of internal revolts (Taiping, Dungan and Boxer), along with invasions by Western countries (the two Opium Wars) left China weakened and impoverished, prey to Western imperialists. The 20^th century didn’t start out much better, with the 1911 Revolution overthrowing the last Qing Emperor, only to degenerate into civil strife between rival regional warlords. Then came Japanese invasion, and finally the Communist Revolution of 1949. China then spent the next 30 years oscillating between centrally planned industrialization and insane interludes like the Great Leap Forward (with 30 or 40 million dead by starvation) and the Cultural Revolution (with fewer dead, but more cultural trauma). By the time Deng Xiaoping allowed the first tentative steps towards economic liberalization in late 1978, China’s GDP per person was about US$ 400 per person in 2021 dollar terms, placing it behind Mali, Rwanda and Bangladesh, and only marginally ahead of Myanmar and Nepal. In per capita terms, China produced about 2% as much as the US.

Since then, China’s economy has exploded in size, helped by a huge liberalization of economic rules and an adoption of cowboy capitalism that wouldn’t have been out of place in New York, London or Paris in 1880. By 2028, it will overtake the US in gross GDP (although not in GDP per capita), and its economic growth rate never once dropped below a blistering 7% per year between 1990 and 2016. China’s rulers can point with pride to the fact that they have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of absolute poverty over the past few decades. China’s megacities of today are unrecognizable to anyone who visited them in the 1980s. In fact, between my first and last visit to China (1998 and 2012), the city of Kashgar and the town of Tashkurgan, in far western Xinjiang, changed so much that I thought I was in completely different places.

One of the great illusions held by US and European politicians, political scientists and geopolitical pundits during the 1990s and early 2000s was that this titanic increase in prosperity would inevitably lead to a burgeoning middle class that would eventually demand greater political liberalization. The brutal starvation of peasants between 1958 and 1962, the pointless destruction of the Four Olds during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, and the blood-soaked butchery of the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 were ample testimony to the inhumane authoritarian impulses of the Chinese Communist Party, but surely as Chinese citizens grew richer and better educated, they would demand a bigger say in their lives, and expect more personal freedom of conscience, action and speech.

This seemed to be a possibility, but in the early 2000s the hammer of state repression started to come down on the restive Uighurs of Xinjiang. Then in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the government started to control criticism, unrest or mere dissatisfaction with a far more iron fist. This momentum towards increased authoritarian control, buttressed by high-tech Orwellian surveillance, only increased with the coming to power of Xi Jinping in 2012, and the rise of his cult of personality. Now China is the archetype of the authoritarian control state, with its Great Firewall, its extensive censorship of the online world, its brutal repression in Xinjiang and Tibet (with Inner Mongolia next in line for the same treatment), and its newly assertive foreign diplomatic and military policy.

Wolf Warrior Diplomacy

The Economist recently published an insightful but bleak instalment of its Chaguan column, in which its chief China correspondent reflects on developments in Chinese politics and society. His thesis is that China’s government, having spent the past 40 years “as a risk-averse bully”, is now starting to throw its economic and geopolitical weight around because the West is in irreversible long-term decline and it is China’s time to seize the mantle of global leadership. I don’t know if this is entirely true, but China has certainly taken the gloves off when it comes to dealing with other countries.  Examples range from publicly hectoring the USdelegation at bilateral talks in Alaska in March, to crushing civil society and the civic freedoms it guaranteed until 2047 in Hong Kong, rattling its sabre at Taiwan, asserting extremely dubious territorial claims all over the East China and South China Seas and organizing boycotts of any Western firm or government that contradicts, no matter how timidly, the Chinese government’s Panglossian claims of how wonderful life is for Uighurs, Tibetans or dissidents in Hong Kong. China’s diplomats have become adept online trolls in the Trumpian mould, aggressively pushing propaganda of dubious truth. (China’s diplomats are hardly the first to act this way; my mother, growing up in New Brunswick in the 1950s, remembers her relatives nicknaming a hammer “an American diplomat”.)

China’s economic heft makes its pugnacity important to the rest of the world. When Australia’s government insisted that the WHO needed to investigate what had happened in Wuhan in the  earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, China responded by organizing boycotts of Australian products such as  wine, barley, lobsters and coal. Given the outsized proportion of Australian exports in these sectors that go to China, the boycott has been more painful to Australian exporters than to Chinese consumers. China’s debt diplomacy, often associated with its Belt and Road Initiative, has landed many countries, from Kenya to Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Montenegro, deeply in hock to the Chinese government. This has given China influence over domestic political and economic policy in these countries, with the prospect of key infrastructure projects being repossessed by the Chinese as collateral on non-performing loans.

Sometimes Chinese diplomats don’t restrict themselves to mere verbal combat. In October of last year Chinese diplomats charged into a celebration of Taiwan’s national day with fists swinging, landing a Taiwanese diplomat in hospital. China’s willingness to assert extraterritorial authority over Taiwan’s external affairs bodes poorly for small countries forced to choose between the two countries. Another recent incident saw the Chinese government successfully lobbying for a French university museum not to use terms such as “Genghis Khan”, “Empire” and “Mongol” in an exhibition about the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan; China is busy rewriting history from a more Han-centric perspective in restive outlying regions inhabited by non-Han minorities such as Xinjiang, Tibet and now Inner Mongolia, and demands that foreigners toe this ideological line.

The Chinese consul-general in Brisbane, Australia, Xu Jie, was appointed an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland in 2019, partly because of the Chinese government and its Confucius Institute contributing monetarily to fund four Chinese studies courses at UQ. In 2020, when a protest on campus was organized against China’s policies in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang, pro-Beijing counterdemonstrators showed up ready for battle and attacked the anti-Beijing students. Xu Jie praised the counter-demonstrators, many of them students from mainland China, for displaying “spontaneous patriotic behaviour”. Drew Pavlou, the student organizer of the original anti-Beijing protest and a longtime critic of the Chinese Communist Party, was suspended for two years (later reduced to six months) from UQ, seemingly because the UQ administration feels the need to kowtow to China for financial reasons; this certainly looks like a pretty dark stain on the university’s stance on academic freedom. There was no rebuke of Dr. Xu for his role in the conflict. The university vice-chancellor, Peter Hoj, was previously on the board of Hanban, the Chinese organization which runs Confucius Institutes all over the world.

The Geopolitical Stakes

These Chinese actions overseas might be laughed off as tinpot dictator comic-opera antics if it were not for China’s immense geopolitical power in the world; if diplomats from North Korea or the Central African Republic or Honduras behaved this way, it   wouldn’t really be worth writing a blog post about it. However these actions form part of an aggressive multi-pronged Chinese strategy to achieve various long-term strategic goals; it would behove Western democracies to take note and prepare some countermeasures.

One of China’s foremost goals is to reconquer Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province. For a long time optimists held that in order to convince Taiwanese citizens and the island’s government of the benefits of reunion with the motherland, Beijing would scrupulously adhere to the letter and spirit of the “one country, two systems” arrangement it agreed to with Hong Kong, which should have guaranteed Hong Kong’s ability to govern itself under a much more liberal and Western-style political and civic culture until 2047. However since the rise to power of President Xi Beijing has continually ratcheted up authoritarian rules, resulting in bouts of street demonstrations in 2012, 2014 and 2019-2020 by Hong Kong citizens protesting the erosion of their liberties by the Chinese central government. This culminated with the passage of the national security law in June, 2020 which imposed much broader exemptions to Hong Kong law for the Beijing authorities, and which was widely seen as abrogating the 1997 handover treaty between the UK and China. It certainly looks like an increasingly dark future for young Hong Kong citizens, who are said to be exploring emigration at a higher rate than at any time since the pre-handover days of the mid-1990s.

Taiwanese citizens are understandably not enormously excited about the prospect of being absorbed into the People’s Republic, either peacefully or by force. Taiwan has all the trappings of an independent country: its own currency, passports, border controls, postal service, laws, financial institutions and political leadership. However the events of 1949, when the remnants of the collapsing Chinese Nationalist regime in China fled to the island, mean that no government, including the Taiwanese, officially recognizes Taiwan as an independent state. The Taiwanese maintain the laughable fiction that their government is really the authority over all of the mainland as well as the island; the authorities in Beijing regard Taiwan as a renegade territory. Foreign countries have had the choice between recognizing either the government in Beijing or the government in Taipei as the legitimate authority over all of China, and nowadays almost all countries have opted for Beijing; there are 15 countries which still maintain that Taipei governs the mainland, but they are mostly tiny nations, many in the Pacific, with Guatemala being the most populous and influential country in this group. Recently some Taiwanese politicians have floated the idea of declaring formal independence, but have refrained out of fear that this would spark a full-scale invasion from the mainland. Of late China has been conducting larger and more frequent aerial incursions into Taiwanese airspace, raising fears that reconquest may no longer be just a theoretical idea. The most recent case, a few days ago, saw 25 Chinese military aircraft fly into Taiwanese airspace.

China is also engaged in a much larger-scale and longer-term game to claim almost the entire waters of the East China and South China Seas. Based on a rather vague 1947 claim by the Kuomintang (the Nationalists who would flee to Taiwan two years later), the so-called Nine-Dash Line makes very broad claims that look ridiculous on a map, with the Chinese boundary line running very close to the shores of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam. The Chinese have spent a couple of decades staking out claims on shoals that appear only at high tide, dumping thousands of tons of fill to build up artificial islands on which they can build naval and air bases. Recently a 200-vessel Chinese “fishing fleet” showed up at Scarborough Shoal, claimed by the Philippines, and spent several weeks ostentatiously not fishing. The United States periodically sends its navy through disputed waters on “freedom of navigation” missions, but it’s not clear how willing it would be to take direct military action if the Chinese were to evict, say, the Malaysian navy from its base on Layang Layang atoll. Governments such as the Philippines have stated that they cannot afford to antagonize their powerful Chinese neighbours. This conflict looks set to simmer on, but with the Chinese prepared to play a long game, they may feel that in the end they will end up holding all the territory that they want.

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, through which Beijing has disbursed billions of dollars in funding for infrastructure projects all over the Eurasian continent and around the Indian Ocean, is another example of a long-term bet by Beijing. It calculates that by providing funding to often dodgy governments with no awkward questions asked, it can buy itself international diplomatic support as well as improved access to natural resources and export markets. By binding the ex-Soviet Central Asian states  ever more closely to Beijing, the Chinese authorities have ensured that none of these Muslim-majority states, many of them with close ethnic relatives across the border in Xinjiang, have raised a single objection to Beijing’s awful campaign of ethnic repression against the Uighurs, Kazakhs and Tajiks in that region. Even the European Parliament has seen active Chinese lobbying andmonetary support to parties that have reliably supported Beijing on any number of issues.

Perhaps the most worrying development, though, is the Chinese willingness now to present themselves as an alternative system of government and development, in opposition to what they see as a decaying and decadent West. By pointing to their own remarkable increase in industrial capacity and prosperity, they can make a case that liberal democracy not only isn’t necessary in order to make a country richer, but that it may be an impediment. The bumbling response to covid-19 in the US, Canada, the UK and the EU strengthen China’s claim that an iron fist brings better results to big challenges. Given that sociological research shows that about one-third of people have an authoritarian disposition, it’s not that hard to convince a lot of authoritarian rulers and their supporters that adopting the draconian Chinese techno-surveillance state and ruthless suppression of dissent is the route to an increased standard of living, and that a critical mass of the population will support a cash-for-silence bargain. Countries from Hungary to Zambia to Pakistan to Myanmar which have slipped down the scores in the world democracy league tables find financial and diplomatic support from the Middle Kingdom useful in propping up their regimes.

Of course being part of the Chinese economic and political orbit means toeing the Chinese line on issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, the repression of the Uighurs and the South China Sea territorial claims. The recent boycotts of Western fashionfirms deemed insufficiently supportive of China’s brutal crackdown in Xinjiang shows how fiercely the Chinese government will wield its diplomatic, economic and online muscle to enforce compliance. Before Western fashion firms and Australia, there were similar boycotts threatened against the NBA, western car companies and Japanese corporations in general. Because China is such an important market for so many Western exporters, these boycotts can hurt those companies, which will then lobby for their governments to make nice with China. Expect these outbursts of nationalist anger to increase in coming years.

Repression In Xinjiang and Tibet

Xinjiang is a part of China dear to my heart; I have visited it four times, in 1998, 2002 and 2004 by bicycle, and again in 2012 on a mountaineering trip. I love its deserts, its ancient oasis towns and its desolate mountains such as Muztagh Ata and the remote Kunlun Range. China's westernmost territory extends far into Central Asia, and has only sporadically been part of the Middle Kingdom; its most recent reabsorption into China happened during the Qing Dynasty's expansion under its last great emperor, Qianlong, between 1755 and 1760. Parts of it broke away from central control during the Dungan rebellion in the 1860s and 1870s, and again during the warlord-dominated decades in the early 20th century. Its population is a crazy-quilt of ethnicities, mostly Turkic-speaking Uighurs, but including Dzunghur Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and even a few descendants of White Russian refugees from the Russian Civil War a century ago.

Xinjiang has never really fit easily into the Chinese empire; its commercial and ethnic ties look west into modern-day Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, while its Muslim religion does not mesh well with Confucian ancestor veneration, Daoism or official atheism. China has been busy in Xinjiang, as in Tibet, in a process of demographic inundation, encouraging (or ordering) mass immigration of Han Chinese settlers from the eastern provinces; in 2012 I was told that the Kashgar region was twinned with Guangdong province, and that each city in Guangdong had to provide a quota of settlers to move to Xinjiang. As the British and Americans did in North America, as the Argentinians did in the southern parts of their country, as the Israelis are doing now, as the British did in Australia, the idea is to reduce the indigenous population of Xinjiang to a minority in order to reduce their troublesome independent-minded streak, and to brainwash, incarcerate and displace the Uighurs and others in order to turn them into patriotic Chinese. The Beijing government says that it is all in the service of "fighting extremism" and "preventing terrorism", but the fact that over 1 million adults (of a non-Han population of 10 million in Xinjiang) are estimated to be locked up in a gulag of "vocational training" and "re-education" camps, with up to one-third of Kashgar's Uighur adult population thought to be detained, speaks to the inhumane and totalitarian ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party. The BBC and the Guardian have been carrying out exemplary journalism on this topic, combing through party and government documents and scrutinizing satellite imagery to show the scale of the repression. Other tactics, including sterilization of Uighur women, forced marriages of Uighur women to Han men, systematic rape and harassing the families of Uighurs living in exile, show how deadly serious the intent of the Beijing authorities to destroy the Uighurs (and other Muslim majorities) as a coherent culture really is. It is clearly one of the most egregious human rights disasters in the world today, and one that the Beijing government insists, despite copious evidence to the contrary, does not exist. John Sudworth, the BBC's Beijing bureau chief, recently relocated from Beijing to Taipei because of the level of official harassment over his reporting on Xinjiang.

Of course Xinjiang is not unique; many of the techniques used to break Uighur culture were previously employed in Tibet, and the Communist party chief in Xinjiang previously served in the same role in Tibet. Tibet has been under the iron heel of Beijing since Beijing's invasion in 1950, and especially since the escape of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959 after a failed uprising. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Tibetan culture was systematically attacked, with Buddhist monks forced out of monasteries, Buddhist nuns raped, monasteries pillaged, destroyed and used for artillery practice, and Tibetan nomadic herders forcibly collectivized. The Dalai Lama has been demonized in the Chinese press for six decades, and possession of his picture has been grounds for arrest or torture. In an episode straight out of the pages of an Ionesco absurdist play, the Chinese Communist party, officially committed to scientific atheism, has forbidden the Dalai Lama not to be reincarnated; it has decreed that he must be reincarnated, and he must do so within Chinese territory. (Other prominent lamas, such as the Karmapa Lama, who escaped to India in 1999, and the Panchen Lama, who has not been seen in public since he was taken into custody by Chinese authorities at the age of 6, have been the target of Beijing's desire for complete control over Tibet.) It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Tibetans died either as a direct result of Chinese violence, or through starvation. After a slight relaxation during the 1990s, Tibetans saw an upsurge of repression in the years leading up to the Beijing Olympics, which has continued to the present day. Tibet, like Xinjiang, is being settled by Han Chinese who already form a majority of the population of Lhasa and other major cities, and may now outnumber ethnic Tibetans in the entire Tibetan Autonomous Region. Xinjiang's system of "re-education camps" was pioneered in Tibet (and in adjacent Tibetan-majority areas in other provinces such as Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu).

The violence, coercion and repression in both Xinjiang and Tibet have led to an upsurge of Han chauvinism, with settlers looking down on the indigenous population as backward, lazy, unclean and unintelligent. This attitude seems to be spreading to Inner Mongolia and to  areas, such as Linxia and Ningxia, inhabited by China's "other" Muslim population, the Hui. This does not bode well for any of China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities; with the Han making up 95% of the country's population, any minority can be regarded as surplus to requirements just as easily as the Uighurs and Tibetans.

What’s To Be Done?

So what needs to be done by liberal democracies to stand our ground against a newly assertive China keen to throw its weight around? I think there are a few options that need to be employed. First of all, there needs to be robust military responses to Chinese threats to Taiwan and the countries of the South China Sea. The US Navy is doing its part to contest Chinese claims in the regions. The so-called Quad (the US, Japan, Australia and India) are working on an ad-hoc basis to counter Chinese manoeuvres in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea; we probably need more of that, with other countries chipping in as well (particularly the UK and France). As well there needs to be diplomatic support from other liberal democracies to countries being bullied by China (like Australia, Taiwan and the Philippines).

Economically, it makes sense to avoid becoming too dependent on China either for imports of manufactured goods, or exports of raw materials. This runs counter to the ideals of free trade, but with China increasingly willing to use this trade as an economic weapon to get its way, it seems prudent to reduce mutual dependence, particularly in key sectors like telecommunications, farm trade, renewable energy and rare earths. This runs the risk of the world splitting into competing spheres of influence, a la the Cold War, but that seems to be happening anyway.

Diplomatically, I think that liberal democracies need to present a more united front against the axis of authoritarianism comprising countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. Holding countries’ feet to. the fire over human rights abuses is important, especially after the disgraceful Trumpian interlude in the US. Targeted sanctions against Chinese officials involved in brutality in Xinjiang, which were co-ordinated by the EU, US, Canada and other countries make for a good start. It seems like a reasonable bet that the 2022 Winter Olympics in China will be boycotted by at least some Western countries. It also seems time for universities in Western countries to think long and hard about the role of Confucius Institutes on their campuses; the situation at the University of Queensland suggests that they may not always make positive contributions to academic freedom and Western values. The fact that Oxford University is asking students in Chinese studies to submit some papers anonymously to avoid retribution from authorities in Beijing suggests the chilling effect that the Chinese Communist Party is having on free academic speech abroad.

In the field of ideas, I think that it would be good to make the point repeatedly and in various arenas that the dispute between China’s autocratic techno-Orwellian leadership and liberal democracy is not a confrontation between civilizational blocs. China has made huge contributions to the world’s collective cultural and scientific knowledge over the centuries, and Chinese civilization provides much to instruct the rest of the world. However the modern Chinese Communist Party is not a government or civic system which inspires the desire to imitate it in most liberal democracies; the conflict is between a nationalist authoritarian  geopolitical power and the rest of the world, not between Chinese and Western cultures.

I hope that leaders in liberal democracies are able to rise above the short-term political calculations tied to electoral calendars and think in sustained long-term ways about how to deal with the challenge posed by the autocrats who rule China and would like to extend that power over much of the rest of the world. Much depends on being able to respond appropriately to the actions emanating from Beijing.