2023 and the carcasses of dead policies
Friends,
Happy New Year!
For folks who are interested in China policy issues (and if you subscribe to this newsletter, it is safe to assume you are one of those folks), 2023 was not a boring year.
The expectation at the start of 2023 was that while ties between Washington and Beijing were still frosty after the November 2022 summit between Xi and Biden in Indonesia, the two countries would establish some sort of guardrails to “manage the competition.” Many had assumed that as the PRC opened up after nearly three years of COVID lockdowns that the Chinese economy would boom, as other countries experienced coming out of COVID.
Neither of those expectations panned out.
Within weeks of the start of 2023, a Chinese surveillance balloon transited the United States, was visible to the American public, and the Biden Administration was forced to take action to bring the balloon down just days before Secretary Blinken was to fly to Beijing. While outrage over the violation of American sovereignty died down relatively quickly in the United States, it took much longer for Beijing to check its outrage for being publicly called out for violating American sovereignty. It took months for American diplomats to persuade their Chinese counterparts to resume the agenda agreed upon in Indonesia and was not back on track until a year later when Xi and Biden met just outside of San Francisco.
Far more surprising was the performance of the Chinese economy. In many ways, 2023 broke the spell that investors and business leaders had been under for decades about China’s unstopable economic rise. What had been talked about in hushed tones before 2023 (might the Chinese economy stall?) became a very real scenario over the past year. The wisdom and competence of PRC officials are now openly questioned. The much-respected leaders of the People’s Bank of China have been sidelined by Xi’s ideological allies. Foreign investors and business leaders have taken note and seemed to have realized that putting all one’s eggs to a basket controlled by the Chinese Communist Party is a bad idea.
As the year ended, I have three main take-aways:
A Sino-American cold war fully materialized in 2023.
While leaders in both Beijing and Washington refuse to openly admit it, a cold war exists between the two countries and both are implementing policies, building their militaries, and adapting their economies with that as the basic assumption of the international environment for the foreseeable future. This hostile rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic will have influence over nearly every other geopolitical relationship across the globe and touch nearly every foreign, economic, and national security policy that the governments pursue. Investors and businesses across the globe will be forced to take this new reality into account as they adapt their commercial, industrial, financial, and technological plans.
This is not to say that we will enter a strictly bipolar world or that outcomes will be dictated by Washington or Beijing, other important powers exist and will continue to operate independently and pursue their own interests (just as other countries did during the Soviet-American cold war). This rivalry will inform and influence what options others have and decisions that others make. It will be the elephant in the room.
Cross-Strait tensions re-emerge as the central tenant of Sino-American relations.
As Beijing amasses greater comprehensive national power, the status quo in the Taiwan Strait that we had become accustomed to over the past 50 years is collapsing.
Leaders in Taipei and Washington, as well as leaders in Tokyo, Canberra, Brussels and elsewhere, would prefer to extend the status quo that we had all grown comfortable with. Both governments and companies in those countries had figured out how manage the ambiguity of Taiwan’s status and if they had a choice, they would prefer maintaining the status quo and relegating Cross Strait tensions to the backburner again.
Unfortunately, Xi Jinping and his cadres are NOT satisfied with the status quo. Two things changed to convince PRC leaders that it was time to abandon the status quo and change their approach: 1) the correlation of forces between Beijing and Taipei (and those who assist Taipei) has shifted in favor of the PRC (this started a decade ago and it can no longer be ignored); and 2) domestic political trends on Taiwan suggested that Beijing’s window to persuade the Taiwanese people to “peacefully reunify” closed (this started a decade ago with the Sunflower Movement and it can no longer be ignored). As Secretary Blinken pointed out at Stanford in late 2022, PRC leaders decided to shift the objective of their strategy from deterring formal Taiwanese independence to compelling the annexation of Taiwan.
In short, one way or another, Xi intends to “solve” his Taiwan problem.
Whether we like it or not, Washington won’t be able to ignore or compartmentalize Cross Strait issues as we once were able to. Cross Strait issues will overwhelm other initiatives in the relationship. The reason why this is so, is because Xi Jinping has decided to drive events towards the solution he and his cadres desire (this was on full display during the Xi-Biden Summit, when Xi reportedly spent a significant portion of his time stressing this issue to Biden).
War over Taiwan is not inevitable, but it is now much more likely. [In less than a week, Taiwanese voters go to the polls to decide on their next President and the make-up of the national parliament… I don’t think the outcome will change these dynamics whether the DPP wins or if the KMT wins, Beijing is driving events]
To quote myself from a year ago in comments about an article in Foreign Affairs by Jude Blanchette and Ryan Hass titled, “The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution is No Solution.” (January 8, 2023 Issue):
“[T]he longer we hide our heads in the sand and kick this can down the road, the more difficult this problem will be to manage. Until we stop legitimizing the Party’s ‘One China’ fantasy and call on Beijing to act like a responsible great power (responsible powers don’t threaten their neighbors with annexation), we are unlikely to find a way to manage the long-term stability in the Indo-Pacific. The compromises and half-measures we adopted five decades ago to “reassure” the CCP, under very different circumstances, are no longer fit for purpose, pretending that they are is dangerous.”
2023 witnessed the death of America’s '“engagement policy” towards the PRC, both figuratively and literally.
When Henry Kissinger died on November 29th at the age of 100, America’s 50-year experiment with an engagement policy towards the PRC died with him. Engagement had been on death’s door for years, but the passing of its intellectual father brought it to an end.
No one of any serious stature has stepped on to the stage to fill Dr. Kissinger’s shoes. There have been plenty of folks who have tried over the years to take the baton from him… if I can mix my metaphors (side-eye at John Thornton and Stephen Schwarzman, to name just two)… but no one has the trust and influence that Kissinger had and of course the conditions are no longer the same. Kissinger himself spent his final years trying to revive it and was met with failure.
Diplomacy between the two countries will continue, as it must, but the United States will turn away from its policy of engagement. The idea that Washington can use its control of the international economic system to spur economic development in the PRC, bind Beijing to a liberal international order, and subsequently bring about political liberalization in China is for the history books. Washington no longer exercises the kind of influence over the international economic system that it once did in the 1990s, the liberal international order is fractured, and Beijing has already benefited from enormous economic and technological advancements. The PRC is now a peer of the United States with its own vision for the future. Its current leaders seek to build a world that insulates and protects the Chinese Communist Party.
I suspect that nostalgia for engagement will remain quite strong, particularly as the costs and sacrifices of this new cold war bite. So I leave you with this 1877 quote from a Brit, Lord Salisbury, who would go on to hold the office of Prime Minister three times at the end of the 19th Century.
It is time to cut away the hamper.
***
A tidbit of history… Tomorrow marks the 209th Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans where a ragtag group of Americans defeated a superior British force seeking to take the mouth of the Mississippi River and control of the Gulf coast. It’s the battle that made Andrew Jackson a war hero and contributed 13 years later to his election as President of the United States.
Painting by H. Charles McBarron (1982), Free Men of Colour and Choctaw Indian Volunteers at New Orleans.
In 1812, as the war was beginning, the Louisiana state legislature passed the first law in the nation to authorize black volunteer militia and the commissioning of black officers. The State of Louisiana stood up two battalions of free black men who served with considerable distinction. When these units went into battle in late 1814, they were the first in the country to be led by military officers of African descent. After the battle, Andrew Jackson credited a Black soldier with the sharpshooter shot that killed Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, the British commander of the invasion force and brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington.
In commemoration of that battle, here is Johnny Horton’s song that spent six weeks as the #1 Billboard hit in the summer of 1959.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
1. Xi Jinping uses new year message to sound warning to Taiwan
Edward White, Financial Times, January 1, 2024
Chinese President Xi Jinping has used his annual new year address to the nation to sound a warning to Taiwan’s voters days ahead of the island’s presidential election, while highlighting his country’s technological prowess and economic strength.
In the televised speech on Sunday evening, Xi said the “reunification” of Taiwan and China was a “historical inevitability”. He added that “compatriots” on both sides of the Taiwan Strait must share in the glory of “national rejuvenation”.
Xi’s speech comes at a time of rising geopolitical tensions between China and the west. The US and its allies are concerned about China’s assertiveness in disputed territories in the South China Sea and the rise in military activity around Taiwan, which holds presidential elections on January 13.
China, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, has not ruled out using force if Taipei refuses unification indefinitely. Beijing has denounced the frontrunner in Taiwan’s presidential race, the ruling Democratic Progressive party’s Lai Ching-te, as a separatist.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, who delivered her final new year address and spoke to journalists on Monday in Taipei, reiterated that cross-Strait relations should be decided by democracy and “the will of the Taiwanese people”.
Tsai also delivered a fresh warning over Chinese “interference” in the upcoming presidential and legislative polls. Beijing prefers the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s largest opposition party, which promotes stronger ties with the Chinese Communist party.
Xi’s comments on Taiwan were in line with the message delivered to US President Joe Biden in San Francisco in November, when he said, according to Chinese state media, that “China will realise reunification, and this is unstoppable”. However the language was stronger than in his last new year address, when he referred to “members of one and the same family” who should work together for “lasting prosperity”.
Lev Nachman, a political-science professor at the National Chengchi University, in Taipei, said: “He is using the harsher rhetoric now because of not just the election, but also the current state of US-China affairs and the incredibly sour relationship between the DPP and the CCP.”
Nachman added, however, that Xi’s warning would not “really land” among Taiwanese voters. “It is not that people here don’t think [the threats] are credible or that they are real, it is just that Xi Jinping making a speech threatening Taiwan is so normal here.”
COMMENT – While Xi and his cadres use the term “reunification” and numerous media outlets and analysts parrot that language, it is important to keep in mind that Beijing intends to “annex” Taiwan. To achieve this goal of annexation, Beijing claims it has a right to wage a war of aggression against Taiwan (if the Taiwanese refuse to submit to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands) and that no other country can legitimately intervene or assist the Taiwanese people in deterring this aggression.
So why does Beijing insist on using the term “reunification” and continuously stress that the Cross Strait dispute is a “domestic” issue?
The simple answer is: The United Nations Charter.
Article 1 of the UN Charter describes the purpose of the United Nations, which first and foremost is “to maintain international peace and security” and should that fail, to organize “effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” United Nations Charter prohibits its Members from invading and annexing other states.
If the dispute between the PRC and Taiwan is a dispute between states (whether they are Members of the United Nations or not), then the states are obligated to “seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.” (Article 33)
Under this condition of an interstate dispute, either state can bring the dispute before the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations and that option is available even to states that are NOT members of the United Nations (Article 35).
States can also seek out and join in regional or bilateral collective security arrangements to protect themselves from aggression (Articles 51 and 52: “Nothing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action provided that such arrangements or agencies and their activities are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.”)
Neither state in the dispute is justified in initiating an act of aggression or annexing the other, all are obligated to pursue peaceful means to resolve the dispute. Going back to its foundational purpose, the United Nations is there primarily to organize deterrence against acts of aggression, and should that fail, to organize military and economic action against the aggressor.
However, there is a loophole to all this in Article 2:
“Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter Vll.”
So if Beijing can successfully characterize the Cross Strait dispute as something that is “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction” of the PRC, then Beijing can claim that none of the protections provided by the United Nations apply to Taiwan and that no state can legitimately assist Taiwan.
For decades, Beijing has waged a comprehensive information warfare campaign to achieve two goals: 1) persuade other countries that the dispute between Beijing and Taipei is a domestic Chinese dispute and therefore none of the elements of the United Nations Charter applies; and 2) isolate the Taiwanese from appealing to the protections guaranteed to all states (whether they are Members or not) by the United Nations Charter.
Overall, the Chinese Communist Party has been successful with this information warfare campaign, which is ironic given that since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, one of the most consequential developments in human affairs was the process of decolonialization and the end of empire. The end of WWII and the establishment of the United Nations ushered in new nations around the world. These new states separated themselves from the empires they had once belonged to and leveraged the United Nations to build their own legitimacy as independent states. Self-determination, as opposed to empire, became perhaps the powerful organizing thesis in international affairs in the second half of the 20th Century.
In case after case, once powerful empires lost their legitimacy to hold on to and subjugate culturally distinct polities. Those distinct polities became new and independent states. Algeria and the former French colonial holdings in Southeast Asia, the former republics of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the British Empire and the independent nations that make-up the Commonwealth, the end of American protectorates and administrative rule in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Every Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council went through a process of dismantling their empires both literally and rhetorically… except the People’s Republic of China.
The Chinese Communist Party has proven relatively successful at preventing those same arguments of self-determination from being applied to its imperial acquisitions or its desire to annex Taiwan. The PRC, the successor to one of humanity’s greatest Empires, has managed to portray its own desire to reassemble its imperial holdings (Xinjiang and Tibet) and subsume Taiwan (a culturally, politically, and geographically distinct polity from the PRC), as something in which the concept of self-determination does not apply.
2. Beijing Is on a Wartime Footing
Seth G. Jones, Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2024
Biden needs to rebuild America’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ or risk being unprepared.
The good news about U.S.-China relations is that last month the two countries restored military-to-military dialogue after a 16-month rupture. The bad news is that it hasn’t slowed the military buildup in Beijing, which increasingly appears to be on a wartime footing. The U.S. needs to do likewise and reassemble what President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as the nation’s “arsenal of democracy.”
Chinese leaders have articulated a long-term national strategy to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts,” including developing a world-class military. Over the past decade, the Chinese Communist Party has ramped up defense industrial production and significantly improved its process of researching, developing and producing advanced weapons systems. As Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall III recently observed, China is preparing “specifically for a war with the U.S.”
China’s defense industrial efforts have strengthened its military capabilities. The People’s Liberation Army is amassing a formidable arsenal of medium- and long-range precision missiles capable of striking U.S. and allied bases in the Indo-Pacific. The PLA is also building a web of integrated air-defense systems to challenge U.S. forces in the region. Three of the world’s 10 largest defense companies are now Chinese enterprises: Aviation Industry Corp. of China, China North Industries Group and China South Industries Group.
The main beneficiary of China’s defense industrial growth is arguably the PLA’s navy. China is now the world’s largest shipbuilder by a significant margin. Its shipbuilding capacity is more than 230 times as large as the U.S.’s, allowing it to build 23 million tons of vessels, compared with less than 100,000 tons in the U.S. One Chinese shipyard, the Jiangnan Shipyard located on Changxing Island, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined, according to U.S. Navy estimates.
Beijing’s buildup should be a blinking red light for Washington. The U.S. defense industrial base lacks the capacity, responsiveness, flexibility and surge capability to meet the military’s needs. Part of the problem is that the U.S. defense industrial base remains on a peacetime footing, despite wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as growing tension in the Taiwan Strait and Korean Peninsula.
The U.S. faces a serious shortfall of munitions—especially long-range precision munitions—for a protracted war in the Indo-Pacific. That is owing in some part to Congress’s dragging its feet in fixing contracting problems, such as multiyear procurement. Supply-chain challenges remain serious, too, leading to an insufficient supply of solid rocket motors, ball bearings, microelectronics, and seekers for munitions. Today’s workforce is also inadequate to meet the demands of the defense industrial base.
Yet the U.S. private sector is the most innovative in the world, and it boasts a strong track record of revitalizing its defense industrial base during periods of crisis, such as during World War II and the Cold War. There is, however, a long way to go.
A good place to start is at the White House. Presidents Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan established defense production boards to provide strategic guidance, oversee U.S. defense production, fix bureaucratic problems among executive agencies, and provide a sense of urgency. A national-level body is critical to oversee such a project of revitalization.
COMMENT – Its worth re-reading Seth Jones’ great report from a year ago, Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.
A White House level defense production board which sits above the Pentagon is absolutely necessary at this point. Despite nearly two years of some of the most intense conventional warfare in Ukraine, an expanding war in the Middle East, and an increasingly dangerous situation in the Pacific, the Defense Department has done relatively little to prepare the defense industrial base.
I don’t fault the DoD entirely, the Department cannot accomplish this massive task without Presidential leadership and Congressional consensus. All DoD can do at this point are half measures and those have proven insufficient for the challenge ahead of us.
This will be extremely difficult during an election year… but as Seth Jones points out, FDR made critical decisions in 1940, another equally contentious election year, which put the U.S. industrial base, which had been devastated by a decade of the Depression, on a path to provide the industrial might for the allies.
I recommend reading Arthur Herman’s book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. We need today’s Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser to step forward and organize the productive forces of the United States.
3. Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.
Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, Muyi Xiao, and Chris Buckley, New York Times, December 27, 2023
The ambitious Ministry of State Security is deploying A.I. and other advanced technology to go toe-to-toe with the United States, even as the two nations try to pilfer each other’s scientific secrets.
The Chinese spies wanted more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese technology contractors, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers and intelligence operatives in Beijing’s embassy district fell short of their needs.
The spies asked for an artificial intelligence program that would create instant dossiers on every person of interest in the area and analyze their behavior patterns. They proposed feeding the A.I. program information from databases and scores of cameras that would include car license plates, cellphone data, contacts and more.
The A.I.-generated profiles would allow the Chinese spies to select targets and pinpoint their networks and vulnerabilities, according to internal meeting memos obtained by The New York Times.
The spies’ interest in the technology, disclosed here for the first time, reveals some of the vast ambitions of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency. In recent years, it has built itself up through wider recruitment, including of American citizens. The agency has also sharpened itself through better training, a bigger budget and the use of advanced technologies to try to fulfill the goal of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, for the nation to rival the United States as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power.
COMMENT – Yet another clear indicator of the Sino-American Cold War… the battle of intelligence services as each tries to gain an advantage. I’m still waiting on Hollywood to help Americans understand the MSS in the way that they helped Americans understand the KGB.
4. Keeping Technology Away from China Won't Come Cheap
Bloomberg, December 28, 2023
For all their differences with President Joe Biden, Republican lawmakers have backed at least one of the administration’s key priorities: blocking China’s access to advanced US technologies. If Congress hopes to make such export restrictions work, it should give more support to the agency responsible for enforcing them.
The Commerce Department’s roughly 500-person Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is tasked with drawing up and enforcing rules that dictate what products made with US technology can be sold abroad, to whom, and for what purposes. It also issues licenses approving certain transactions. The agency’s mission took on greater importance and complexity last year, when the US imposed sweeping curbs on shipments of advanced semiconductor technology to China. The rules aim to slow China’s technological progress, not just its access to specific dual-use technology.
COMMENT – If we are successful in deterring direct military conflict between the U.S. and the PRC (which should be our primary goal), then the rivalry between the two countries will primarily play out in competitions over technological, economic, and industrial advantages. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in particular, and the entire Department of Commerce in general, will play a determinative role in those competitions.
The Administration and Congress must provide Commerce and BIS with the resources to match the demands we are placing on them.
5. Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92
Vivian Wang and Joy Dong, New York Times, December 27, 2023
He was removed from his university presidency after supporting pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. He remained a relentless advocate for rule of law.
Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 in Beijing. He was 92.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the China University of Political Science and Law, where he had served as president and was a longtime professor.
Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and a leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.
After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”
In the preface to his 2010 autobiography, Mr. Jiang outlined two qualities he said were important for Chinese intellectuals: “One is an independent spirit that does not succumb to any political pressure and dares to think independently. The other is a critical spirit,” he wrote, adding, “My only wish is to earnestly inherit these two qualities.”
His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-Communist after criticizing excessive top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And, while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.
In the 1970s and ’80s, as China began to recover from the chaos of Mao’s rule, Mr. Jiang returned to his quest for reform, taking up teaching and administrative roles at the university and serving as a high-ranking member of China’s legislature and deputy director of its legal committee. In addition to the civil rights framework, he helped craft China’s property law, contract law and company law, as the country moved toward a market economy.
But it was in the decades after Tiananmen, when he no longer held official or administrative positions, that he made the most sweeping calls for change. He argued that human rights and constitutional democracy were inseparable from the property and commercial rights he had helped introduce. He signed open letters criticizing censorship. When Beijing mounted a crackdown on hundreds of human rights lawyers in 2015, Mr. Jiang said that all of Chinese society should be concerned with protecting lawyers as watchdogs.
COMMENT – Jiang Ping provides an extremely important reminder that the Chinese people and Chinese intellectual life are greater than the sum of Chinese Communist Party rhetoric.
6. Xi Jinping Is Fighting a Culture War at Home
Michael Schuman, The Atlantic, December 20, 2023
The Chinese leader seeks to restore an earlier era of ideological indoctrination and national unity—whether his society wants it or not.
In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.
“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.”
“I also advocate the establishment of a society where everyone is happy and equal,” Confucius responds. “I call it the great unity of the world.”
The program’s message is that modern Chinese culture should be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by another great philosopher, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “There has been endless debate about how traditional culture should be treated,” one scholar on the show explains. But finally, thanks to Xi’s wisdom, “the problem was truly solved, and people’s bound thoughts suddenly became clear.”
The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China. Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”
Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time. He has reversed decades of market liberalization in favor of renewed state intervention in the economy, returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation, and reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book—in a quest for national “unity,” as he defines it, and total Party dominance.
COMMENT – Xi has stressed the critical role of ideology in the PRC’s existential struggle with the West since the day he came to power (translation of Xi’s inaugural address to the Central Committee on January 5, 2013).
We ignore this aspect of Beijing’s cold war with democracies at our own peril.
Authoritarianism
7. Top China Political Advisory Body Exiles 3 Aerospace Executives
Bloomberg, December 27, 2023
8. China’s disciplinary enforcers add ‘bad’ books, sex, drugs to serious offences
William Zheng, South China Morning Post, December 28, 2023
9. Putin promises Xi to 'fight for five years' in Ukraine
Katsuji Nakazawa, Nikkei Asia, December 28, 2023
10. Covid-19 origins: A media conspiracy of silence
Jim Edwards, Press Gazette, December 14, 2023
11. AUDIO – China is More Likely to Blockade Taiwan Than Invade the Island in the Next Ten Years: A Debate with Mr. Lonnie Henley and Dr. Phil Saunders
China Power Podcast, CSIS, January 2, 2024
COMMENT – An exceptionally good debate between Lonnie Henley and Phil Saunders. To me, blockade and invasion are inextricably tied together. For Beijing to succeed in achieving its overarching goal of annexing Taiwan it must achieve two things: 1) isolate Taiwan both physically and psychologically; and 2) gain physical and political control over the entire island.
If blockading alone could these two objectives in a reasonable period of time and at a reasonable cost, then Beijing would prefer that approach. But Beijing can’t assume a blockade will be sufficient (the Taiwanese people might not capitulate… just as the British didn’t capitulate when Nazi Germany sought to blockade the British Isles and conducted a bombing campaign against British cities).
I think Lonnie Henley makes a point worth reiterating: even if Beijing fails in an invasion, it will still seek to blockade Taiwan’s ports. So the United States and other countries that seek to deter Beijing, should invest in resources and concepts that demonstrate that the blockade can be broken.
Also, I recommend reading the recent report that Phil Saunders helped edit at the National Defense University, Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan.
12. Chinese mark Mao's birthday with Cultural Revolution-era chants
Yuri Momoi, Nikkei Asia, December 27, 2023
13. How Snatching American Citizens Turned into a Tool of Hostile Governments
Drew Hinshaw, Joe Parkinson, and Aruna Viswanatha, Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023
Travelers in countries representing nearly a quarter of the world’s population face a heightened risk of arrest—and of becoming pawns in a geopolitical struggle with Washington.
The problem was staring up from a deck of cards, handed from one presidency to the next.
As the Trump administration exited the White House, its national security team left behind some 30 baseball-style cards for the incoming Biden staff, monuments to an ancient practice that had somehow become a grave 21st-century challenge. Each bore the photo of an American held hostage abroad.
Since then, the problem has metastasized into what the Biden administration calls a national emergency. The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention.
Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states.
The Biden administration has brought at least 45 Americans home—mostly via prisoner trades such as last week’s that returned 10 Americans from Venezuela. And yet it says around 30 U.S. citizens are still unjustly detained abroad, an estimate that doesn’t account for the eight still presumably held in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.
The tally does encompass Americans grabbed in countries ranging from Syria and Afghanistan to China—and our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia in March on an espionage charge that he, his government and employer all strongly deny.
COMMENT – Don’t travel to the PRC… the U.S. State Department still classifies the PRC, Hong Kong and Macau as Level 3, “Reconsider travel” with a summary of “Reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”
During the dinner for business leaders in San Francisco in November, Xi announced his goal of bringing 50,000 young Americans to China. No organization should be assisting in this until Beijing has released the people it holds hostage and ends its practice of wrongful detentions.
14. China Wants to Move Ahead, but Xi Jinping Is Looking to the Past
Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023
15. China Appoints New Defense Minister to Fill an Unexpected Vacancy
Chun Han Wong and Wenxin Fan, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2023
16. China’s Xi Is Resurrecting Mao’s ‘Continuous Revolution’ With a Twist
Chun Han Wong, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2023
17. China removes official after video games rules spark turmoil
Josh Ye, Financial Times, January 3, 2024
18. China's 2024 outlook will be shaped by decisions beyond its borders
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Axios, January 3, 2024
19. China cracks down on negativity over economy in bid to boost confidence
Amy Hawkins, The Guardian, December 29, 2023
20. ASEAN becomes more lucrative than China for J.P. Morgan and Citi
Echo Wong, Nikkei Asia, January 3, 2024
21. Tough going in China has global investment banks looking abroad
Echo Wong, Nikkei Asia, December 29, 2023
22. Taiwan investment in China plummets as it soars in U.S. and Germany
Hideaki Ryugen, Nikkei Asia, December 29, 2023
23. Geopolitical risk forces aircraft leasing companies to rethink exposure to China
Chan Ho-him and Sylvia Pfeifer, Financial Times, December 29, 2023
Environmental Harms
24. Leaks on the Rise at China’s Mining Waste Dumps
Wang Shuo and Wang Xintong, Caixin, January 5, 2024
China has seen a “marked increase” in environmental emergencies involving tailings ponds, according to the country’s top environmental watchdog, underscoring the difficulties authorities face in regulating these mineral waste dumps.
Tailings ponds are used to store the waste generated in the process of separating minerals from rocks. Chinese mining companies built thousands of such dumpsites amid the country’s mining boom. While regulators focused on curbing potential safety risks, the efforts of local environmental watchdogs to prevent pollution spills have been lacking, according to industry experts. If a ponds leaks, the tailings, which often include toxic chemicals and heavy metals, can contaminate water supplies and pose a serious threat to people’s health and the surrounding environment.
25. China Wants to Dominate the New Era of Clean Shipbuilding
Bloomberg, December 29, 2023
26. Tracking industry pollution sources and health risks in China
Tien Foo Sing, Wenwen Wang, and Changwei Zhan, Nature, December 14, 2023
Foreign Interference and Coercion
27. China is stoking a controversy in order to influence Taiwan’s election
The Economist, December 27, 2023
28. China Confronts a New Political Reality in Taiwan: No Friends
Josh Chin and Joyu Wang, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2023
29. China-Russia ties in Arctic keep U.S. and Canada on alert
Ken Moriyasu, Nikkei Asia, December 28, 2023
30. How to Thwart China’s Bid to Lead the Global South
Happymon Jacob, Foreign Affairs, December 25, 2023
America Should See India as a Bridge to the Rest of the World.
A global South led by Beijing will be far more antagonistic to the United States and the West than one in which India plays a larger role. Despite New Delhi’s increasingly instrumental view of the global South, its nonideological approach to the developing world could also help bridge the gap between poorer countries and the developed world. As a powerful global South country and an aspirant for great-power status in the prevailing order, India has the ability to traverse major fault lines in the international system. Washington must make use of this unique role that New Delhi can play in world politics. Treat the new global South like a geopolitical opportunity, not a cantankerous old pest.
31. Shein Taps Political Heavyweights to Help Win Over Washington Critics
Ann Gehan, Information, December 28, 2023
32. In a Caribbean Paradise, Taiwan, and China Tussle for Recognition
Taili Ni and Jeffrey Sequeira, Foreign Policy, December 17, 2024
33. Chinese TV host suspended after ‘inappropriate’ Japan earthquake comments
Hayley Wong, South China Morning Post, January 3, 2024
34. China’s Leaders Seek to Raise Global Clout to ‘A New Level’
Bloomberg, December 28, 2023
35. Foreign Funding of U.S. Academia
Off the Press, December 20, 2023
36. AUDIO – Setser on US-China Trade, Lessons from USTR, Economics of Great Powers, and Panda Diplomacy
China Talk Podcast, December 12, 2023
37. China spent over $5.5 million at Trump properties while he was in office, documents show
Zach Cohen and Kara Scannell, CNN, January 4, 2024
The Chinese government and its state-controlled entities spent over $5.5 million at properties owned by Donald Trump while he was in office, the largest total of payments made by any single foreign country known to date, according to financial documents cited in a report from House Democrats released Thursday.
Those payments collectively included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, a state-owned Chinese bank accused by the US Justice Department of helping North Korea evade sanctions and a state-owned Chinese air transit company. Accounting records from Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA, were obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
China is one of 20 countries that made at least $7.8 million in total payments to Trump-owned businesses and properties during the former president’s stint in the White House, including his hotels in Washington DC, New York and Las Vegas, the report states.
COMMENT – Disturbing
Human Rights and Religious Persecution
38. Jimmy Lai lawyers file UN appeal saying there is evidence witness was tortured
Amy Hawkins, The Guardian, January 4, 2024
The international legal team for the imprisoned media mogul Jimmy Lai, who is on trial for national security offences in Hong Kong, has filed an urgent appeal with the United Nations special rapporteur on torture regarding one of the key prosecution witnesses in Lai’s trial.
Lai’s lawyers say there is “credible evidence” that Andy Li, a 33-year-old former pro-democracy activist, was tortured while in prison in mainland China before he confessed to allegedly conspiring with Lai to collude with foreign forces. That is one of the two national security law offences that Lai has been charged with, along with a colonial-era sedition offence. Lai has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Benefits Canada, January 4, 2024
The House of Commons Special Committee studying Canada-China relations is calling on the federal government to bar Canadian pension funds from investing in Chinese companies linked to human rights abuses or that pose a threat to national security.
In a report released last month, the special committee noted the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and several provincial pension funds are invested in technology firms, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., which are known for their controversial activities in China.
40. Prominent Chinese business analysts are starting to disappear from social media
CNN, December 22, 2023
Some of China’s most prominent analysts have been subjected to social media restrictions that appear designed to restrict their ability to comment on the country’s ailing stock markets and struggling economy.
At least six analysts are unable to upload new posts or gain new followers on popular social networking platforms, according to their account pages reviewed by CNN.
One of them is Liu Jipeng, an advisor to the Chinese government, who recently asked retail investors in the country to refrain from investing in the stock market. He has not posted on social media since early December and users can no longer follow his accounts.
When CNN tried to follow his accounts on short-video app Douyin and news aggregator app Toutiao, it saw the following statement: “This user can’t be followed due to violations of the platform’s rules.”
Chinese social media is known to silence critics. Before being curtailed, these business experts were known to air candid views on the state of the world’s second largest economy.
None of the experts affected responded to CNN’s request for comment. And the platforms they used — including Weibo, Douyin and Toutiao — did not respond to CNN’s questions, including the reason behind the restrictions.
The development coincided with a major conference hosted earlier this month by President Xi Jinping to discuss economic targets and policies for next year. According to a readout of the meeting released last week, the ruling Communist Party decided that it should “strengthen economic propaganda and public opinion guidance and promote a positive narrative about the bright prospects of the Chinese economy.”
The national security ministry — a body that has gained further importance during Xi’s 11 years in power — has also stepped up efforts to quash pessimistic opinions about China’s economic future, especially from those who have “ulterior motives.” In a statement last week, it said that badmouthing the economy would disrupt market expectations and hurt growth, thus jeopardizing security.
41. Washington's Xinjiang Fix
Eliot Chen and Katrina Northrop, The Wire China, December 31, 2023
42. Ottawa ready to pay financial settlements to the two Michaels over their ordeal in Chinese prisons
Robert Fife and Steven Chase, The Globe and Mail, December 26, 2023
43. China targets friendly media, diplomats to ‘tell story of Xinjiang’
Frederik Kelter, Al Jazeera, January 2, 2024
Albanian-Canadian historian and journalist Olsi Jazexhi believed in early 2019 that reports about human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) of Western China were lies.
Accounts from people who had fled the area as well as reports from human rights organisations were painting a picture of human rights abuses being perpetrated on a massive scale. Muslim minorities in Xinjiang – the majority of whom are Turkic-speaking Uighurs – were reportedly being deprived of basic freedoms, their cultural and religious heritage was being destroyed and at least 1 million of them had been interned in a vast network of detention camps.
The international community had taken notice and the United Nations had raised its concerns.
But Jazexhi was unconvinced.
“I was certain that the stories were a scheme constructed by the US and the West to discredit China and divert attention away from their own human rights records regarding Muslims,” he told Al Jazeera.
The Chinese government itself vehemently rejected the allegations, acknowledging the existence of the camps but describing them as vocational skills training centres necessary to combat alleged extremism.
To see the truth for himself, Jazexhi contacted the Chinese embassy in Tirana about visiting Xinjiang. He was soon invited to join a media tour for foreign journalists mostly from Muslim countries and in early August 2019, he was on a plane bound for China.
“I went to defend the Chinese government,” he recalled.
But he quickly found that defending the Chinese narrative was a far more difficult task than he had anticipated.
In the first few days in Xinjiang, he and other foreign journalists had to sit through a series of lectures given by Chinese officials about the history of the region and its people.
“They were portraying the indigenous people of Xinjiang as immigrants and Islam as a religion that was foreign to the region,” Jazexhi said. “It was incorrect.”
His disillusion only continued when he and other journalists were taken by their Chinese hosts to one of the so-called vocational training centres outside the regional capital of Urumqi.
“They said it was like a school but it was clearly a high-security site in the middle in the desert,” Jazexhi said.
“They also told us that the people staying there were not allowed to leave so it was obviously not a school but a prison and the people there were not students but prisoners.”
Once they entered the site, Jazexhi had a chance to interact with several Uighurs and it quickly became clear they were not the “terrorists” or “extremists” Beijing had claimed.
“I was talking to people that had been taken there for simply practising Islam by, for example, entering a religious marriage, praying in public or wearing a headscarf,” he said.
“One of them told me that she was no longer Muslim and that she now believed in science and in Chinese President Xi Jinping.”
Jazexhi confronted the accompanying Chinese officials.
“I told them that what they were doing was very wrong,” Jazexhi said.
The interactions led to a quarrel between Jazexhi and some of the Chinese hosts.
When he finally left Xinjiang, he was deeply shocked.
He had thought he was going to expose Western lies but he had instead witnessed oppression on a massive scale.
“What I saw was an attempt to eradicate Islam from Xinjiang,” he said.
44. Thermo Fisher Says It Has Halted Sales of DNA Technology in Tibet
James Areddy, Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2024
Instrumentation maker Thermo Fisher Scientific said it no longer sells certain DNA-based human-identification products in Tibet, building on a similar halt of sales to China’s Xinjiang region of technology that human-rights groups allege can be misused by local police forces.
The decision by Waltham, Mass.-based Thermo Fisher follows its pledge almost five years ago to stop sales of the items in Xinjiang, a move that also followed pressure from human-rights groups. The company didn’t say whether either regional action will affect its business in other parts of China.
China’s treatment of ethnic minorities in the regions of Xinjiang and Tibet has increasingly featured use of technology to identify and track people in ways the U.S. government calls abuse, and human-rights groups have long alleged that products from Thermo Fisher have been used for such purposes by police in the country.
45. Hong Kong Activist Flees to UK, Citing Police Pressure
Chris Buckley, New York Times, December 29, 2023
46. China sanctions a US research firm and 2 individuals over reports on human rights abuses in Xinjiang
Associated Press, December 27, 2023
China says it is banning a United States research company and two analysts who have reported extensively on claims of human rights abuses committed against Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups native to the country’s far northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was quoted as announcing late Tuesday night that Los Angeles-based research and data analytics firm Kharon, its director of investigations, Edmund Xu, and Nicole Morgret, a human rights analyst affiliated with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, would be barred from traveling to China. Also, any assets or property they have in China will be frozen and organizations and individuals in China are prohibited from making transactions or otherwise cooperating with them.
Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage
47. Chinese battery maker Gotion starts making energy storage packs at Fremont plant, kicking off ‘made in America’ initiative
Daniel Ren, South China Morning Post, December 29, 2023
48. China population: reluctance to marry, have kids continued in 2022 as demographic woes deepened
Mandy Zuo, South China Morning Post, December 29, 2023
49. China’s low-altitude economy takes to the skies as unmanned passenger drone completes maiden commercial flight demo
Luna Sun, South China Morning Post, December 29, 2023
50. Some Chinese state property developers stiff their suppliers, defying edicts, and worsening slump
He Huifeng, South China Morning Post, December 28, 2023
51. Import-reliant China makes rubber extraction innovation amid rising demand from car industry
Mandy Zuo, South China Morning Post, December 27, 2023
52. China ups ASEAN trade, investment push with new high-speed railway link connecting to Vietnam border
Ji Siqi, South China Morning Post, December 27, 2023
53. Chinese Carmaker Overtakes Tesla as World’s Most Popular EV Maker
Danny Lee, Bloomberg, December 27, 2023
54. China’s Workers Suffer Biggest Drop in Hiring Salaries on Record
Bloomberg, January 3, 2024
55. Xi Jinping and China face another tough year
The Economist, January 2, 2024
56. US Pressured Netherlands to Block China-Bound Chip Machinery
Cagan Koc and Jennifer Jacobs, Bloomberg, January 1, 2024
57. Xi’s Mixed Messages Leave Whiplashed Investors Wary of China
Bloomberg, January 3, 2024
58. China’s Export-Reliant Growth Model Threatens Its Trade Relations
François Godement, The Diplomat, December 21, 2023
59. China’s Cloud Giants Seek Profits Abroad as Domestic Margins Dwindle
Liu Peilin, Wang Xintong, Zhang Erchi, Guan Cong, and Kelsey Cheng, Caixin, December 27, 2023
60. Despite Bumper Grain Harvest, China Faces Challenge of Food Security
John Xie, Voice of America, December 29, 2023
61. How China Manages Its Currency—and Why That Matters
Weilun Soon, New York Times, December 29, 2023
62. Trump Is Primed for a Trade War in a Second Term, Calling for ‘Eye-for-Eye’ Tariffs
Yuka Hayashi, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2023
63. China’s dreamers and dropouts: ‘lying flat’ generation checks out in Dali
Joe Leahy, Sun Yu, and Andy Lin, Financial Times, December 27, 2023
64. China's industrial profits post double-digit gains but recovery uneven
Reuters, December 27, 2023
65. Hong Kong Stocks Plunge to Losses for 4th Straight Year
Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times, December 29, 2023
66. China’s Property Crisis Blew Up Investments That Couldn’t Lose
Claire Fu and Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times, December 28, 2023
67. China’s Xi Jinping Warns of Economic ‘Winds and Rains’ as Recovery Disappoints
Jason Douglas and Chun Han Wong, Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2023
68. Investors Have Cut China’s Internet Giants Down to Size
Dave Sebastian, Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2023
69. Foreign investors unwind $33bn bet on China growth rebound
Hudson Lockett and Cheng Leng, Financial Times, December 28, 2023
70. Inside the crisis at Alibaba: how China’s best-known tech group lost its way
Eleanor Olcott and Cheng Leng, Financial Times, January 2, 2024
71. Hong Kong’s IPO Drought Casts Pall Over Region’s Businesses
Dave Sebastian and Rebecca Feng, Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2024
72. China's top banks tighten exposure to smaller peers to curb credit risk
Reuters, January 3, 2024
Cyber & Information Technology
73. Tencent Executive Cedes Key Role Amid China Gaming Turmoil
Pei Li and Sarah Zheng, Bloomberg, December 29, 2023
74. The sensors in those self-driving cars have become an international dispute
Tanya Snyder, Politico, December 28, 2023
75. Emergency scramble brings crippled China communications satellite under control
Ling Xin, South China Morning Post, December 27, 2023
76. Beijing launches state-backed AI platform to meet country’s rising demand for computing power
Ben Jiang, South China Morning Post, December 27, 2023
77. Chinese VC and AI Founder Predicts Shakeout in China’s AI Sector
Juro Osawa and Jing Yang, Information, December 27, 2023
78. The Chip Wars Are Metastasizing
Jacky Wong, Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023
79. China struggles to control data sales as companies shun official exchanges
Eleanor Olcott and Wenjie Ding, Financial Times, December 27, 2023
80. Huawei Expects 9% Revenue Growth This Year
Yang Jie, Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2023
81. Nvidia launches new gaming chip for China to comply with US export controls
Reuters, December 29, 2023
82. US wants to contain China's chip industry. This startup shows it won't be easy
John Shiffman and Joshua Schneyer, Reuters, December 30, 2023
Military and Security Threats
83. China decries Taiwan for 'hyping up' military threat, sends warplanes
Laurie Chen and Ben Blanchard, Reuters, December 28, 2023
China's defence ministry accused Taiwan's government on Thursday of deliberately "hyping up" a military threat from China for electoral gain ahead of elections on the island in just over two weeks' time, but again sent warplanes into the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan's Jan. 13 presidential and parliamentary election will shape the Chinese-claimed island's relations with Beijing, which over the past four years has ramped up military pressure to assert its sovereignty claims.
84. Taiwan reports China sent 4 suspected spy balloons over the island, some near key air force base
Associated Press, January 3, 2024
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said that China sent four balloons over the island, three of which passed near to a key air force base.
The reported incursions on Tuesday come as China has been upping its threat to use force to annex the self-governing republic.
Taiwan is holding elections for its president and legislature on Jan. 13, and China has used its military, diplomatic and economic power to influence voters to back candidates favoring unification between the sides. Despite that, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party is leading in most polls, reaffirming the electorate’s backing for the status of de-facto independence from mainland China.
85. China's military lashes out at US after breakthrough talks
Laurie Chen, Reuters, December 28, 2023
China's defence ministry lashed out at the United States on Thursday, a week after their top military officials resumed high-level talks, criticising its continued meddling in the Asia Pacific region and saying it maintained a "Cold War" mindset.
Both sides had pledged at the talks to work towards restoration of contacts to avert miscalculation and misunderstanding, with the U.S. calling for "more work" to ensure military communications stayed open and reliable.
COMMENT – Unsurprising
86. The West Badly Needs More Missiles—but the Wait to Buy Them Is Years Long
Alistair MacDonald, Doug Cameron, and Dasl Yoon, Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2024
87. Abrupt Dismissals Point to Xi Jinping's Quiet Shake-Up of China's Military
Chris Buckley, New York Times, January 3, 2024
88. China’s unsafe interceptions of US military aircraft have dropped off, defense officials say
Oren Liebermann, CNN, January 2, 2024
China’s unsafe interceptions of US military aircraft have dropped off amid signs relations with Beijing are improving, two US defense officials told CNN.
There had been a spike in what the US deemed dangerous incidents in October and the Pentagon publicly condemned China’s behavior. But in a sign military tensions could be easing, the officials told CNN that there have not been major incidents since.
The last interception occurred on October 24, the officials said, when a Chinese fighter jet came within 10 feet of a US B-52 bomber flying over the South China Sea. US Indo-Pacific Command said the Chinese pilot flew in an “unsafe and unprofessional manner” while closing on the larger US aircraft with “uncontrolled excessive speed.”
The Defense Department had warned only days earlier that Chinese “coercive and risky” behavior was on the rise. According to the Pentagon, there were more than 180 incidents of such behavior over the previous two years, which was more than the entire previous decade.
Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, called it a “centralized campaign” to try to force a change in US operational activity in the region.
But in the two months since the unsafe intercept in late-October, the incidents have dropped off, even as the American officials says the Chinese military continues to operate in the South China Sea and the region.
One Belt, One Road Strategy
89. Explosion Kills 19 at Chinese Nickel Smelter in Indonesia
Jon Emont, New York Times, December 27, 2023
90. ‘Fighting spirit’: Xi Jinping reveals China’s push for global power after rare foreign policy meeting
Shi Jiangtao, South China Morning Post, December 29, 2023
91. Myanmar and China's CITIC to resume stalled deepwater port project
Nikkei Asia, December 29, 2023
Opinion Pieces
92. Watching China in Europe—January 2024
Noah Barkin, German Marshall Fund, January 4, 2023
93. Xi Jinping’s Year of Living Dangerously
Karishma Vaswani, Bloomberg, December 27, 2023
94. America is only as secure as its least-secure drone
Mark Montgomery, The Hill, December 26, 2023
95. Victim? Villain? Huawei finds itself trapped in US-China dispute
Robin Harding, Financial Times, December 27, 2023
96. China's Economic Recovery Fizzled in 2023 and Expectations Shifted
Daniel Moss, Bloomberg, December 26, 2023
97. The role of the US, Europe, and Indo-Pacific partners in India’s China strategy
C. Raja Mohan, Garima Mohan, and Tanvi Madan, Brookings, December 27, 2023
98. In the hawk-dove ornithology of China policy, consider the drongo
Charles Parton, Financial Times, December 28, 2023
99. On Ukraine, US, and Europe Risk Flunking Geopolitics 101
Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg, December 31, 2023
100. China's Economic Engine Is Running Out of Fuel
Yi Fuxian, The Wire China, December 31, 2023
101. The U.S. faces a critical shortage in China experts
Rory Truex, Washington Post, January 3, 2024