"Media Crackdown in PRC" or "Propaganda Power Struggle Within CCP"?

I have a piece up exclusively at Asia Times, Battle Between Xi Jinping and Propaganda Chief Plays Out in Media.

I look at a recent series of high profile incidents--high profile, I must say, because foreign media outlets obsess over PRC media issues--that involve free press and free expression (none of which are characteristic elements of PRC discourse) and power and propaganda (Communist meat and potatoes).

In consolidating Xi Jinping's rule and, I believe, in an exercise in battening down the hatches and making the CCP more disciplined, robust, and responsive to policies of the Center as Xi's plans to reconstitute and redirect the economy enter a much more fraught and difficult stage, control over the media has apparently been tightened.

At the same time, Xi's energetic activities imply that media and propaganda have also become a  priority because they constitute a realm in which Xi's opponents have entrenched themselves, and Xi wants to spade them out.

This view is supported by the circumstances of the "Yes Men" essay, widely viewed in the West as a rebuke to Xi's authoritarianism and hostility to free expression but which, on closer examination, looks like something else.

Read the whole thing!

G-Zero: US-China Relations in the Age of Xi

A few years back, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State declared that G-2—a US-PRC great power condominium much dreaded by advocates of a muscular attitude toward the Chinese menace—was dead.

Don’t worry, China hawks.  G-2 is still dead.

What’s left is G-Zero: a world in which the PRC and US governments go their separate ways and have less and less to do with each other.

As a result, the PRC’s bar for “success” in official and state visits to the United States is extremely low.  Decent venues, nice photos, no embarrassing incidents…

The baseline for humiliation is Hu Jintao’s 2006 official visit to the United States.  The atrocities were documented at the time by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:

The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the "national anthem of the Republic of China" -- the official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.

…

China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an "official" visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.

…

If only the White House hadn't given press credentials to a Falun Gong activist who five years ago heckled Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, in Malta. Sure enough, 90 seconds into Hu's speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, "President Hu, your days are numbered!" and "President Bush, stop him from killing!" 

Bush and Hu looked up, stunned. It took so long to silence her -- a full three minutes -- that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech and television coverage went to split screen. 

Much, much better this time.  Top drawer reception, lots of nice pictures, demonstrators kept at a remote and silent distance, PRC media flooded the zone with favorable coverage at home,  Xi Jinping looked in control and at ease in the aerie of the cranky and contentious US bald eagle and got his “world leader” ticket punched.

All this despite the fact that the US has moved overtly into an alliance with Japan to contain the PRC in East Asia, and pretty much the only positive subject the two countries really have to talk about is climate change.

There was no official communique; instead the US acquiesced as the PRC issued a laundry list of 49 “outcomes” that looked suspiciously like a summary of 49 things the two countries talked about but never quite agreed on.

By the way, note to posterity:

The Wall Street Journal mis-characterized Xi Jinping as saying “China’s President Pledges No Militarization in Disputed Islands” in its headline and “Xi Jinping made a commitment…” in the lede.

What he actually said was: “China does not intend to pursue militarization of Nansha Islands in South China Sea….”

That’s not a “pledge” or “commitment”, folks.  It’s a statement of “intent” under current circumstances but contingent upon future developments.  Let’s see where the goalposts show up when the South China Sea jostling resumes.

The overall “same bed different dreams” anomie in the loveless official relationship was also on display during the joint press conference.  The U.S. press corps and President Obama let their preoccupation with the seemingly less than world-historical issue of Speaker of the House John Boehner’s resignation run away with them.  By my estimate, President Obama spent half of his response time to questions by Western journos musing on Boehner’s departure and the prospects for a government shutdown, while President Xi presumably (no split screens this time) either played Angry Birds on his smart phone or pondered the inspiring or encouraging spectacle of American democracy valiantly staggering forward despite its self-inflicted wounds.

President Xi had his relatively low expectations met, I believe.

For the US press, on the other hand, there is no standard is too high to which a visiting Chinese dignitary can be held, especially when US-PRC relations have entered the cybercrime/South China Sea/dissident crackdown/screwed-up stock market phase.  The task was made infinitely easier by the near-simultaneous visit of Pope Francis, the massive, ecstatic reception given the pontiff, and the contrast it provided with the scripted, plodding US-PRC summit.

The Guardian’s Tom Phillips mocked PRC fawning coverage of Xi’s visit with a tweet “Pope?  What Pope?”

Reuters helpfully pointed out:

Feted in China, Xi’s U.S. Profile dims in Shadow of Pope 

The ex-Ambassador of Mexico to the PRC, Jorge Guajardo, who assiduously tends the anti-PRC vineyard from his current residence in Washington, contributed this inadvertently revealing insight to Reuters:

"To be contrasted with someone who has no military, no economic might and be completely eclipsed, I think it’s astounding. I don’t think the Chinese are noticing the contrast in messages,” said Jorge Guajardo. 

The actual message, perhaps imperfectly grasped by Ambassador Guajardo, is that Pope Francis’ agenda, which challenges the prevailing capitalist, political, and spiritual orthodoxy in this country, is not regarded as a threat to the US because Pope Francis has zero clout.  The PRC, on the other hand, is playing the same amoral, moneygrubbing, and bullying game we are—and, thanks to its military and economic muscle, is making life difficult for us in ways Pope Francis can’t even dream of.

Somebody else who “missed the message” was CBS News’ Mark Knoller, who tweeted:

Ending hour-long joint news conference, Pres Obama and Xi shake hands. Obama walks Xi to his car. A limo, not a Fiat. 

What, no rickshaw? I tweeted in reply.

The relevant comparison for Xi, of course, is not the Pope and his funky Fiat, it is President Obama, whose ride of choice is The Beast, a $1.5 million dollar armor-plated limousine—with a supply of the president’s blood in the trunk!-- escorted by a phalanx of black SUVs filled with submachine-gun-wielding Secret Service agents.

Clearly, the US media and, I expect, many citizens of the US are much more comfortable dealing with the fantasy of flying heavenward on Pope Francis’ wings of mercy and compassion, not the grubby reality of wrestling on the White House lawn with a mean, fat panda for dominance of the 21^st century economic and military order.

Funny thing is, the PRC has a similar combination of affinities and aversions, unpleasant realities and comforting fantasies, as was exhibited on Xi’s next stop: the United Nations.

The PRC had worked out a nice deal to co-host a UN conference on gender equality, the Global Leaders' Meeting on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment “chaired by Xi Jinping” on the 20^th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, a monumental gender equality conference in Beijing, and taking place in New York just before the UN General Assembly’s 70^th anniversary confab.

In early 2015 the PRC had detained the “Feminist Five”, women who had attempted to promote a national movement of the type that the CCP abhors, in order to bring attention to inequities against women in the PRC.  The government, presumably mindful of the grisly optics this provided the conference, had freed the women in March, but that did not preclude the US from beating on the subject. 

Freed from the onerous obligation of hospitality demanded by the state visit, the United States government leapt at the opportunity to rain on Xi’s parade on the occasion of the UN conference.

Samantha Power, the US Permanent Representative to the UN had announced that the US would commemorate the conference by honoring twenty women political prisoners, the most conspicuous of whom was Wang Yu, a human rights lawyer, albeit not a feminist but indeed a woman imprisoned as part of a crackdown on nettlesome lawyers.  Wang had bravely defended many activists, including one of the “Feminist Five”.

Despite the generally pretty good status of women in the PRC—especially when compared to the gender equality shortcomings of humanity’s-flavor-of-the-week Pope Francis, let alone Saudi Arabia, whose elevation to the chair of the UN Human Rights Council was hailed by the United States (and excused by Samantha Power as “just a procedural position”)—the gender conference was deemed worthy of a US boycott, as the New York Times’ Jane Perlez reported:

The Chinese government planned Mr. Xi’s prominent role to show that he is committed to the empowerment of Chinese women. The ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, thinks otherwise.

Ms. Power…was present when Mr. Xi addressed the summit, but unlike the scores of international leaders at the event, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France, she did not speak.

President Obama did not attend the session, a decision by the administration to signal its distaste for the idea of Mr. Xi celebrating women’s progress in China amid a sweeping crackdown on dissent, including the arrest of female activists.

Victory of principle, or churlish own-goal along the lines of US resistance to the AIIB and boycott of the PRC’s 70^th anniversary parade.  You decide!

Hillary Clinton, presumably by virtue of her “present at the creation” participation in the original conference in Beijing in 1995, felt empowered to weigh in with this tweet:

Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton

Xi hosting a meeting on women's rights at the UN while persecuting feminists? Shameless. #Freethe20 http://hrc.io/1KDkyFz  -H

So, from her individual account, Clinton called out Xi by name, and called him “shameless”.  In Chinese, “shameless” doesn’t mean, Hey, he sure has thick skin/big balls/a bold indifference to criticism/what a cool, edgy, transgressive bro!  It translates as 无耻 , meaning a person without a sense of shame and beneath contempt.

It’s a major insult, one whose import—with the added offense of applying the epithet directly to Xi, literally in his face—perhaps escaped Clinton and the functionaries who manage her twitter account.  Global Times took up the cudgels on Xi’s behalf, while declining to quote the tweet, an indication of its odiousness.

Since the CCP leadership already cordially detests Clinton for her upfront role in orchestrating the pivot and promoting the diplomatic and military ostracization of the PRC—remember Xi Jinping’s “back trouble” when Clinton visited Beijing on her farewell tour as Secretary of State?—maybe it’s no big deal.

Except that it will further concentrate the attention of Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership on restructuring the PRC’s foreign relations so that unpleasant engagement with a United States government--possibly soon to be run by President Hillary Clinton--can be minimized as much as possible.

Indeed, that was the theme, ignored by the US-centric Western press (but hammered home by the PRC press non-stop), of Xi’s current visit.

A few awkward hours in Washington, bookended by outreach to business leaders in Seattle and a major public relations push in New York to buttress the UN—and claim an increasingly central role in a non-US-dominated international order—by the PRC.

In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Xi was able to offer up some crowd-pleasing initiatives that put some meat on the bones of the PRC’s idea of the UN as a viable venue for its foreign policy and international relations—and an alternative to the unipower priorities of the United States.

He promised $1 billion over ten years to a fund to support the UN.  If this works out to $100 million per year--and ends up in the coffers of the UN, instead of expended by the PRC on initiatives it deems worthy--it might represent about a 1/3 increase in the PRC’s underwriting of the UN budget.

Add $100 million to the African Union to assist in its peacekeeping operations.

And the pledge of a standing, standby force of 8000 men as a reserve for UN peacekeeping operation, thereby offering the possibility of the UN having significant muscle on tap and providing a viable alternative to helpless reliance on the US and other national forces to enforce UNSC resolutions.

Add to that announced initiatives to support South-South exchanges and, in the US “sub-national” exchanges between Chinese and Americans.

And a $2 billion assistance fund plus debt relief for poor countries.

All in all, a concerted effort to diminish the US government as a factor in PRC foreign relations, and eliminate the need, as much as feasible, for PRC leaders to engage in onerous, expensive, and humiliating visits to the United States in order to wangle grudging and partial acknowledgment of PRC peer status by the United States.

Prospects for the PRC buying and bullying its way into a multi-polar world are looking pretty good.

The US should get ready for G-Zero…and maybe be more careful what it wishes for.

"China" Rising: The Parade

Think of the PRC September 3 military parade, officially "Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War", as a tabula rasa, a blank screen upon which observers can project their PRC-related hopes, fears, anxieties, and fantasies.  And, for Xi Jinping, to illustrate his "China Dream."

While the PRC exhibited its military might, some Western outlets flexed their China bashing muscle.

Western coverage of the parade was perhaps not journalism’s finest hour.  Condescension, cluelessness, and barely concealed agendas shared the rostrum with reportorial rigor and objectivity.

One China watcher analyzed the parade for the Western media before it even happened, and then announced on his Twitter feed that he wouldn’t deign to watch the festivities, perhaps to preserve the Platonic purity of the image he had devised.

Time: Tiny Pacific Nation of Vanuatu to Join Motley Crew at China’s WWII Anniversary Parade 

VOA: Analysts: Beijing Military Parade a ‘Bazaar’ of Stolen Technology 

Somewhat lower down the food chain, The Daily Beast: Hey, Look! Tanks in Tiananmen!

In my opinion, a central purpose of the parade was to elevate and celebrate Xi Jinping as a key figure in 21^st century China.  The parade recapitulated Deng Xiaoping’s parade on the 35^th anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1984.  Xi, like Deng, rode down Chang An Avenue by himself with the gaze of the world upon him, so on and so forth.  The CCP, by the way, had the same fear of snipers back then.  I was there in ‘84, ventured out on a balcony for a better look, and was promptly and firmly instructed to get back inside.

As to what doctrine Xi was promoting, the parade was not an “anti-Japan” parade.   Japanophiles may be distressed to read this, but I don’t think the PRC seriously regards Japan as an invasion threat to China anymore.

Actually, the parade was an “anti-United States” parade.

The ostensible reason for the display of the PRC’s military might was that the United States has turned its back on the Potsdam dispensation, abandoned the “honest broker” “Pacific peacekeeper” role it claimed after World War II, and has instead become an overtly destabilizing force in the region, encouraging Japan to expand its military role, egging on the Philippines & Vietnam, etc.  The PRC, therefore, not only has to look out for itself; it’s got to look out for the whole East Asian region to keep US adventurism in check.

PRC perceptions of the US posture were confirmed by Washington’s disparagement of the commemoration.  The US recapitulated its boycott of Putin’s V70 parade and sent no national leader—not even Joe Biden!—to Beijing and merely sent Ambassador Baucus.  Japan and the Philippines sent nobody.  Most other countries hedged their bets.  India, for instance, only sent VK Sing, Minister of State for External Affairs.  The US media framing that the parade was only attended by lickspittles, jerks, losers, Putin, and Vanuatu was perhaps not appreciated by the President of Vietnam, Truong Tan Sang, or the President of the Republic of Korea, Park Geun-hye, or for that matter UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon.

The United States flirted with the same overreach that tainted its opposition to the AIIB by leaning on South Korea’s President Park not to attend.   Park attended, and so did Ban Ki-moon, despite criticism from Japan.  Ban’s presence was a reminder that the stated purpose of the parade was to uphold the post-World War II order that created the UN and turned over the job of ordering the world UNSC superpower club, and also a hint that US geostrategic boffins infatuated with Abe and roping Japan into the US security regime in Asia are ignoring ROK resentment at Japan for its brutal decades-long colonial occupation (and current zero-sum economic competition) at their peril.

All in all, the US response probably strengthened the hardliners around Xi by reconfirming US hostility to “rising China”.

In an interesting sidebar, the US government dropped its September 2 Victory Day holiday in 1975 in the spirit of US-Japanese amity; Rhode Island is the only state that still gives its government workers a holiday, despite some resentful lobbying by Japanese interests.

The United States prefers to get its World War II rocks off at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, when world leaders converge to commemorate America’s astounding success in convincing the West that the US and not the USSR was responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Don’t believe me?  In 1945, 57% of French surveyed attributed the victory in Europe to the USSR, and only 20% to the US; now the numbers have flip-flopped completely: 54% credit the US, only 23% credit the Soviet Union.

Soft power, baby!  Undoubtedly, Xi is chagrined at his relative lack of success in moving the historiographical needle in favor of Chinese contributions during the Second World War, at least in the West.

Much unfavorable attention was paid to the tsunami, excuse me, haixiao of hyperbolic Japan-devil-bashing, Japan-murdering Chinese superhero-fluffing, ahistorical movie, TV, and print campaign to exalt the Chinese role and CCP leadership in the anti-Japanese struggle, perhaps reaching its nadir with a movie poster apparently placing Mao Zedong (instead of Chiang Kai-shek) at the 1944 Cairo Conference.  Of course, whose nadir is perhaps open to question.  The Guardian mocked the PRC for putting Mao in the poster for the movie; but from what I can see of the trailer, Chiang is accurately shown at the conference, while Mao is depicted uttering some noble anti-fascist verbiage from inside China.

Ah…or aagh…soft power.  The West is obviously extremely protective of its role in winning “World War II”, and laying claim to leadership/lawgiver status in the postwar order.  Now that the PRC asserts that the West is abdicating that role in order to cozy up to Japan and contain the PRC as a peer competitor, the West is getting testy about PRC pretensions to stepping up to sustain and guarantee the post-war order in Asia in its stead.

History would not seem to be on Xi’s side.  China, let alone the CCP, cannot claim a great deal of martial glory in the defeat of Imperial Japan, as this detailed rundown by Han Linchao of who did what in WWII illustrates.  It was pretty much an American show, and a bloody one at that.

However, the CCP has adroitly “sliced the World War II salami”, to coin a phrase, by splitting the Asian conflict into two separate chunks.  There’s the “Pacific” chunk, in which the United States overwhelmed Japanese military forces in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945; and there’s the ”China” chunk, in which Japan started to fight its way into China in 1931 via Manchuria and got caught in a quagmire that it departed only with the utter collapse of its military capabilities in 1945, and after inflicting gigantic human suffering on China.

So the CCP calls September 3 “Commemoration of The 70th Anniversary of The Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (a.k.a. China chunk) and The World Anti-Fascist War (Pacific chunk)".

And it may gravel Western sensibilities, especially with its implication that the US was the decisive force in only one of the four global theaters, but this conceptual split captures what happened in Asia better than “World War II”, which is largely a US/UK construct.

Indeed, Japan uses a similar formulation to the PRC: the “China War” and the “Pacific War”.  Probably the reason why Abe feels its proper to apologize to the US and backhand South Korea and the PRC is that Japan was unambiguously defeated by the US in the Pacific War, while the collapse on the Asian mainland had little to do with superior Korean and Chinese arms and valor, and a lot do to with catastrophic, serial defeats in the Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the opportunistic Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the Kuriles in the last moments of the war.

In his brief remarks kicking off the parade, Xi Jinping presented the situation reasonably accurately, especially if one defines “winning” as the first time since the Opium War a Chinese representative got to sit down on the victor’s side of the table and stick it to an imperial freebooter:

The Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War were a decisive battle between justice and evil, between light and darkness, and between progress and reaction. In that devastating war, the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression started the earliest and lasted the longest. In defiance of aggression, the unyielding Chinese people fought gallantly and finally won total victory against the Japanese militarist aggressors, thus preserving China's 5,000-year-old civilization and upholding the cause of peace of mankind. This remarkable feat made by the Chinese nation was rare in the history of war.

The victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression is the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times. This great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonize and enslave China and put an end to China's national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times. This great triumph re-established China as a major country in the world and won the Chinese people respect of all peace-loving people around the world. This great triumph opened up bright prospects for the great renewal of the Chinese nation and set our ancient country on a new journey after gaining rebirth.

During the war, with huge national sacrifice, the Chinese people held ground in the main theater in the East of the World Anti-Fascist War, thus making major contribution to its victory. In their war against Japanese aggression, the Chinese people received extensive support from the international community. The Chinese people will always remember what the people of other countries did for the victory of their War of Resistance.

 

The PRC posture is also something of a gift to the Kuomintang (albeit something of a poisoned chalice that the politically-vulnerable KMT on Taiwan cannot quite bring itself to accept at this time).  The standard narrative of Chinese involvement in the continental war effort was that Chiang Kai-shek, by and large, was a maladroit and unenthusiastic ally, holding back from the anti-Japanese struggle and instead hoarding his forces and US weaponry in anticipation of a restart of the civil war, which he lost in a rather humiliating fashion.

Instead, the current CCP revisionism accommodates the KMT as flawed, indeed, doomed Chinese partners in the anti-Japanese effort.  And, with the veterans, memories, and animosities of the Chinese civil war dying out, the CCP is determinedly and not entire inaccurately packaging the anti-Japanese struggle as a shared heritage of all the Chinese people.

So I think the “Xi Jinping is trying to pretend Commies won WWII” mockery is somewhat misplaced.

Instead, Xi was advancing a new formula for the PRC’s relationship with its people, its neighbors, and the Chinese diaspora: it was moving beyond the CCP as embodiment of the Chinese peasants and proletariat (Mao) and the Chinese nation (Deng) to claim a role for the party as the representative and shield of the Chinese people in the region and around the world, and a guarantor of East Asian stability.

The parade was meant to demonstrate that the PRC has a military heft commensurate with its ambitions…and that Xi Jinping is an effective steward of this mission.

And it did a pretty good job.

Twilight of the CCP…AND Shambaughism?

I’ve resisted weighing in on l’affaire Shambaugh—David Shambaugh’s blunt WSJ op-ed declaring that “the endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun” thanks to Xi Jinping’s predilection for tight control instead of political reform as a response to China’s looming troubles—because there’s really no useful response to his thesis except “Interesting prediction of the future…but predicting the future of China accurately is notoriously difficult.”

However, there is one point I think is worth raising, is How does U.S. government PRC policy reflect, contradict, or address Shambaugh’s views?

David Shambaugh, after all, is the most heavily credentialed China-watcher in the biz.  If he says the CCP is headed for collapse, how does that affect the agendas and policies of the Asian affairs cohort at the White House, NSC, State Department, etc.?  How can it not?

Haven’t seen any discussion of that yet, either on Twitter or scratching around at the paywalls of the beleaguered US media stockades.

Which, to me, means that David Shambaugh has, in one sense, already won.

Back in 2010 I wrote, “Maybe It’s Time to Stop Listening toDavid Shambaugh”. Ha!

My thesis in 2010 was that Shambaugh was dealing rather imperfectly with the consequences of the failure of his preferred model for dealing with the PRC—engagement—by blaming the PRC for not living up to a rather crappy model.

Specifically, the model of engagement underpinned by “responsible stakeholderism”: the idea that the US was the paragon and guardian of a liberal international order and the road forward for the PRC would be to integrate itself into that order by means of suitable domestic and international liberalization, and by not pulling dick moves on human rights, nuclear non-proliferation, climate change, etc. 

By October 2010, after a series of dick moves--the acrimony of Copenhagen, the grinding, sordid yet ultimately successful effort to extract the PRC’s vote in favor of Iran sanctions at the UNSC, and the first Senkaku/rare earths flare up--it was clear that the PRC was not going to play Robin to America’s Batman.

Shambaugh abandoned his previous tentative optimism and characterized the 2010 CCP regime—figureheaded by the pasty-passive Hu Jintao, not today’s menacing Xi Jinping pandadragon, mind you-- as “truculent, narrow-minded, hypernationalist”.

This was good enough for the Western China commentariat, which attributed the hiccups in the global order to PRC transgressions and transgressiveness.  The US, by this telling, was passive and reactive in dealing with PRC aggression, system-gaming, and selfish behavior.

And I think this is still good enough for most people.  There is no discussion of US PRC policy or how Shambaugh’s views might affect it.  It’s almost as if we don’t have an active US PRC policy.  It’s almost as if the US, to unleash the social science buzzbomb, has “no agency” and is merely reacting to whatever crap the CCP panda flings out of its cage at the global order.

But, of course, not good enough for me.  My feeling was that all great powers and wannabe great powers are “truculent, narrow-minded, hypernationalist”, including the United States.

 

Especially the United States, which by 2010 had blotted its own “responsible stakeholder” copybook with the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis.  My jaundiced opinion hasn’t improved with President Obama’s Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, and IS contributions.

In 2009-2010, I saw a rather cynical effort by the United States and the State Department under Hillary Clinton to make up for lost geopolitical ground at the PRC’s expense, particularly in the Copenhagen Climate Conference fiasco of late 2009 (where the US negotiating position keyed on driving a wedge between the PRC and the developing world) and the cynical Clinton-Maehara tag team attack on the PRC maritime border vulnerabilities at ASEAN (apparently neither of these worthies was pleased that President Obama planned not to reaffirm coverage of the Senkakus in the US-Japan security treaty).

Perhaps in the future we’ll view events less through the lens of Shambaugh “PRC is a bad actor” truthiness and more through “what actually happened” factiness, but the China Matters perspective is still waaaaaaaaaaaay in the minority.

For me, the most telling example of the “aggressive PRC bad guy/reactive US good guy” narrative is the South China Sea.

The SCS brouhaha dates back to Hillary Clinton’s declaration that the US had a national interest in “freedom of navigation in the South China Sea” at the ASEAN foreign ministers’ conference in Hanoi in 2010.  I will spare my impatient readers a recap of how in my opinion the United States took a virtually intractable but low-level problem of conflicting claims over dozens of uninhabited rocks and atolls that should have been addressed with interminable bilateral can-kicking, and irresponsibly but successfully spun it into the geopolitical gold of a polarizing regional crisis that made the case for the US pivot to Asia.

But I will use the current spate of PRC island-building in the SCS to illustrate my point.

Unquestionably, the PRC is cabbage-wrapping, salami-slicing, and indeed salami-stuffing the area within the Nine-Dash-Line into China-dominated oblivion.

What I would term “Shambaughism” provides one explanation: the “truculent, narrow-minded, hypernationalist” PRC, unwilling to get with the peaceful global program, is giving full play to its aggressive inclinations by annexing most of the South China Sea.  

“Shambaughism” implies that the US is a passive observer of these unprovoked offenses, and also indicates a response in keeping with the US role as guarantor of Asian regional security and protector of the rules-based international order: the US has to react by upgrading deterrence through an expensive naval build-up, strengthened alliances with the Philippines and Vietnam, and by encouraging Japan and India to take an active interest in balking PRC activities in the region.

I will, in this context, admit that I feel that the feckless US policy in Ukraine—where it helped light the fuse of civil war but then had no effective answer when RF units and RF-supplied eastern Ukrainian forces handed Kyiv its own ass—encouraged the PRC to believe, probably correctly, that in the SCS as in Ukraine, the local power’s determination to advance its core interests in its “near beyond” would trump US willingness to escalate mischief to discommode an adversary thousands of miles away.

“China Matters fact-ism”, on the other hand, looks at the US as possessing “agency”, having since 2010 committed itself to a cynical policy of encouraging heightened tensions in the SCS with the idea that the PRC’s put-upon neighbors would be driven into the US security and economic camp.

And, for the recent, expensive spate of island-building, I find explanation in US encouragement of the Philippines in pursuing its arbitration suit before UNCLOS seeking to invalidate the Nine-Dash-Line, instead of engaging in interminable jaw-jaw with the PRC over island claims and, in particular, development of the precious Reed Bank hydrocarbon project that is very important to the Philippine government’s economic fortunes.

The PRC’s fast-tracked island-building program is, in my opinion, a high-profile “price-tag” operation, telling the US, the Philippines, and Vietnam that the arbitration outcome (which will quite possibly be unfavorable to the PRC, especially since the PRC has declined to mount a defense) will mean exactly Zero.

In fact, less than zero for the Philippines, since the PRC will be less inclined to compromise on South China Sea issues since the Philippines’ action moved the issue from bi-lateral debate to an international issue—one where the PRC has, through its preemptive island-building operation, demonstrated it is willing to live with the consequences of an unfavorable legal status and a “frozen conflict”.

“Shambaughism” in my opinion dictates escalation.  And I think we’ll get it.  

And of course, the more “Shambaughism” is entrenched—now with the “Not only is the PRC is bad international actor, the CCP is going to collapse soon” enhancement—the more escalation we’ll get.

“China Matters fact-ism” implies that the Philippines will wake up the day after the UNCLOS arbitration award thinking, “Nothing has changed except the PRC has totally entrenched itself in the SCS.  Remind me what I won here?  Time for some discreet rapprochement.”  I think we’ll get that, too.

But in the long term, I think we’ll see less Shambaughism.

Because…so I guess I should offer my views on The Future of the CCP after all.

It’s actually pretty simple.

In my opinion, the world is run by jerks in suits.  When regime change occurs, the new nation is still run by jerks in suits.  The PRC will be no exception.

I think Xi Jinping came to office in an atmosphere of crisis.  Economy slowing; straightforward Keynsianism of throwing money into the banking system yielding decreasing returns, inflationary pressures, higher debt burden; unsustainable revenue model for local governments; SOE & local government indebtedness; growing disconnect between government economic objectives and priorities of the business sector; corruption; increasingly vocal and networked dissatisfaction; chafing at PRC pretensions at the margins (Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong); demographic issues; corruption; clear need to wean economy and employment from the easy but no longer valid export/infrastructure growth model to something more complicated; a general desire by the US, Japan, and much of the world to circumscribe the PRC’s freedom of action and its international opportunities. 

Plenty of opportunities for the wheels to come off.  

Undoubtedly the CCP takes the USSR as the negative example, but I don’t think they worry so much about how Gorbachev made a meal out of party/economic/political reform and f*cked over the entire Soviet Union.  I think it looks at the procession of CPSU hacks from Brezhnev on who let matters coast and decline for decades until the problem landed in Gorby’s lap.

So Xi, in my opinion, is reviving the CCP as step one.  Not turning it into a democratic paradise of fresh ideas—they’re still communists ferchissakes—but clearing out the deadwood, crushing the opposition, eliminating dangerous factions and alternative power centers, and putting the healthy fear of corruption prosecutions in the minds of the remainder.  The objective is to make the CCP a loyal, responsive instrument that won’t break down or turn against the Center when things get rough.

And I expect things to get rough.  Oligarchs with their own ideas on how to run things and hooked on their financial and political privileges but are sucking up too much bank credit for the wrong economic sectors will have to be persuaded, conciliated, deterred, reined-in, or removed.  Local governments have to be restructured into genuine tax-farming organizations instead of financing their operations through bank loans and real estate shenanigans.  Employees and owners will take it in the neck if the CCP is to be serious about forcing a restructuring of the economy.

Nobody is going to be very happy.

So in addition to getting the flabby CCP ready for battle, Xi is cracking down on dissent, tightening control of the media, and upgrading the Great Firewall.   My personal opinion is that Tibet/Xinjiang policies are now pre-emptively harsh (on top of being reflexively brutal) so that the Party can keep a lid on the western part of the country in case Taiwan or Hong Kong blows up.  And, of course, it helps to present the picture of a nation under threat from external forces which, to be frank, is not just a useful political fantasy for the CCP.  

The key question will be whether Xi Jinping can sell the internal/external threat narrative, and the idea that the PRC is effectively addressing those threats.  I’d say yes on selling the narrative; as for whether Xi and the CCP are doing a reasonable job, it depends on how effective his remedies seem to perform and how equitably the pain is spread around.

The CCP will try to soften the thousands if not millions of blows by gingerly goosing the economy when things get too bad (right now I see the PRC desperately but not quite successfully fighting against the urge to go all-in on quantitative easing), and by delivering a few nice things: maybe an improved judicial process, most likely an environmental quality push that advances some of Xi’s economic restructuring/personnel and power management objectives while delivering some popular stuff like cleaner air and water to the PRC’s citizens. 

I should say I have my doubts that “Under the Dome”—the anti-pollution super-TED talk that conquered PRC social media—is symptom of a populist uprising against the CCP’s pollution-abetting ways.  I expect Xi expects and may have planned in advance to to channel that enthusiasm—and public resentment against local officials who operate, fund, and protect polluting industries that Xi wants to get rid of—in the service of his agenda.

All in all, PRC economic and social restructuring is a long process, and I think Xi’s still at step 1: cleaning up the party (and military).  When he’s secured the Party, then he’ll try to go after selected SOE and local government targets.  The rest of the job will probably still be unfinished when Xi packs it in, presumably in 2022 or so.

But his objective, I believe, will be to leave a party/state/economic structure that cannot easily be screwed up even by a Chinese Gorbachev.  If the CCP regime collapses, I believe the regime will degrade relatively gracefully—and the longer Xi is in power and can effectively advance his agenda, the more graceful that decline will be.

In particular, I believe a failure of governance at the Center will be answered by the devolution of actual power to the coastal provinces: Guangdong, Shanghai etc.  Without a strong Center to restrain them and by shedding the incubus of the poorer provinces, provincial heavyweights will pursue their own paths to political power and economic advantage—that may or may not involve appeasing the urban well-to-do with political liberalization or even the hollowing-out or sidelining of the CCP, locally and eventually at the national level.

But my prediction is that in the near, medium, and long term, China will be run by jerks in suits…just like the rest of the world.

It is also a process that has little to do with the central shibboleth of Shambaughism: the need for political as well as economic reform to rescue the PRC from its looming national cul de sac.  Or as he put it in his op-ed:

Until and unless China relaxes its draconian political controls, it will never become an innovative society and a “knowledge economy”—a main goal of the Third Plenum reforms. The political system has become the primary impediment to China’s needed social and economic reforms.

But using political reform as a diagnosis of China’s ills, and its panacea, isn’t quite a logical and evidentiary slam dunk, in my opinion.  Letting 100 flowers bloom may not be the only or even the most practical way of handling the big challenges and risks that China is facing.

On the occasion of the National People’s Congress (cue “rubber stamp” sneering) in Beijing, the state news agency Xinhua ran a commentary that, I think, sums up the Xi Jinping view of political reform. 

 

Once one gets over the reflexive What do them Commoonists know ‘bout Democrosee?? atavism, the perspective is worth considering, as is the question: When we look at the whole oligarch/1%/globalized/managed democracy/hyperdebt megillah, are the PRC & US actually diverging…or converging?  And in twenty years, when China is whatever the heck it is, will “Shambaughism” survive only as a dusty curiosity in the museum of IR ideas that didn’t quite cut it?

(China Daily, amusingly, ran an abridged version of the commentary that omitted the rip on Indian democracy that infuriated the Indian media, as well as mercifully leaving out the reference to the unnamed but clearly identifiable Democratic Republic of Congo):

A discussion on how historical events may have developed differently will not rewrite history. It does, however, offer an opportunity to consider–and better understand–the present, and how to forge a better future. 

The ongoing annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC) provides a suitable backdrop to reflect upon the country's 61-year-old fundamental political system, and to examine how this unique model of governance has transformed the ancient middle kingdom into the world's second largest economy.

Had the world's most populous nation been governed by a bipartisan system, what would have happened? 

Hindsight shows us that the Western political system, which is not inherently problematic and was designed to encourage "freedom," would have been incompatible to a country where efficiency has driven remarkable economic growth and social development.

Seemingly endless political bickering, inherent in the Western model, would have led to political dysfunction, which in turn would have brought catastrophic repercussions on a nation four times as big as the United States.

Political lobbying would dilute the unique strength and success of socialist China's "concentrating resources to do big things."

Should China have adopted a system that facilitated lobbying among interest groups, policies on domestic infrastructure to bills that had worldwide implication would be caught in a self perpetuating cycle of limitless debates. 

China is the world's leading emitter of C02, however, had financial oligarchies been allowed to run the nation like a profit-seeking conglomerate, a carbon emission deal–such as the climate accord reached between Beijing and Washington during the 2014 APEC meeting–would have been out of the question.

Even in comparison with the Republicans in the United States, filibusters in Chinese Congress would have made any health care or poverty reduction bill extremely difficult to pass.

Further, China's feat of becoming the first developing country to halve its population living in poverty would have never been accomplished. 

Half of the 1.3-billion population may have been recipients of foreign aid, making it a huge burden on the world. 

At best, China would have been another India, the world's biggest democracy by Western standards, where around 20% of the world's poorest live and whose democracy focuses on how power is divided.

In 2014, India registered a per capital gross domestic product (GDP) equal to a mere quarter of China's GDP. 

Or, China could have become certain African democratic country that has struggled with civil wars, military junta, coup d'etats and the "curse of resources" for decades following the end of Western colonial rule in the 1960s.

Should China's mainstream political parties have been fiscally irresponsible and pursued interventionist policies globally, like in the United States, the People's Liberation Army would have received an inflated military budget–at the expense of development projects. 

This situation would have fed nationalist sentiment, and wars would be imminent. This would have only been good news for opportunists and arms dealers, who would have rushed to cash in on the unrest.

A system that allows plurality is fertile ground for election rigging, vote buying and the silencing of minorities. In a country as ethnically and geographically diverse as China, the fires of opposition would have been stoked and the nation divided.

That is why in his article "Why Socialism?," Albert Einstein said that in a capitalist society: "Legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists. So the representatives of the people do not [...] protect the interests of the underprivileged."