Matt Turpin's China Articles - April 9, 2023
Friends,
Despite wishful thinking from certain leaders (side-eye at French President Macron), Beijing and Moscow have formed an economic, diplomatic, and military bloc to confront and undermine their shared adversaries.
Exploiting rifts between these adversaries (as well as domestic divisions within them) and ensuring that a broad coalition cannot form to counter a Sino-Russian order, are the most critical objectives for the PRC and Russian Federation. Achieving their broader shared goal – building an international system that favors their regimes – can only happen if the opponents of that goal are unable to mount an effective defense.
So far, Beijing and Moscow have been relatively successful at imposing dilemmas on their adversaries.
Much of this success stems from political failures within countries that oppose a Sino-Russian order. These failures result from an inability to recognize the stakes, a refuse to abandon magical thinking, and a persistent tendency to underestimate Beijing and Moscow. The result is that countries ‘lowball’ the resources and effort that are necessary to resist and deter this new Sino-Russian bloc.
These “political failures” are not confined to one party or one country, they are shared failures across open societies.
Let’s hope that Churchill’s witty, yet apocryphal quote about always doing the right thing, only after trying everything else, holds true.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
1. Xi shifted gears on Japan's claim to Russian-held isles in Putin meet
Japan Times, April 3, 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping did not support Japan's claim over Russian-held islands off Hokkaido in his talks with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin last month, according to a Chinese source familiar with the matter, abandoning a long-held stance of recognizing them as Tokyo's.
Xi told Putin in their meetings in Moscow that China "does not take either side" regarding the territorial row, in a shift to neutrality from China's position indicated by then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong in 1964 to view the four disputed islands as belonging to Japan, the source said.
Bilateral negotiations over the islands known as the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kurils in Russia have been suspended since Tokyo imposed punitive sanctions against Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine.
The change in China's position could make it more difficult to settle the decades-long dispute, as Moscow is unlikely to concede on the issue now it has backing from Beijing, observers say.
COMMENT – Of course, if Xi Jinping wants to abandon the PRC’s nearly six decades of support for Japan’s sovereignty of islands held by Russia, then Japan may have justification to re-examine sovereignty issues that are sensitive to Beijing.
2. China to inspect ships in Taiwan Strait, Taiwan says won't cooperate
Liz Lee and Ben Blanchard, Reuters, April 5, 2023
China's Fujian maritime safety administration launched a three-day special joint patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait that includes moves to board ships, it said on its WeChat account.
The move comes amid heightened tensions between China and Taiwan, with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California on Wednesday, becoming the most senior U.S. figure to meet a Taiwanese leader on U.S. soil in decades.
The maritime safety authority in the southeastern Chinese province said on Wednesday the operation included "on-site inspections" on direct cargo ships and construction vessels on both sides of the Taiwan Strait "to ensure the safety of vessel navigation and ensure the safe and orderly operation of key projects on water".
Taiwan's Transport Ministry's Maritime and Ports Bureau said in a statement late Wednesday said it has lodged a strong protest with China about the move.
It said it has notified relevant shipping operators that if they encounter such requests from China they should refuse them and immediately notify Taiwan's coast guard to render assistance.
"If the mainland side insists on taking one-sided actions, it will create obstacles to normal exchanges between the two sides. We will be forced to take corresponding measures," it added, without giving details.
Areas covered by the operation include the Pingtan Taiwan direct container route, the "small three links" passenger route, the Taiwan Strait vessel customary route, the densely navigable areas of commercial and fishing vessels, and areas with frequent illegal sand mining activities.
The "small three links" passenger route refers to boat routes between Taiwan's Kinmen and Matsu islands which sit opposite China and Chinese cities.
3. China’s New Tech Weapon: Dragging Its Feet on Global Merger Approvals
Lingling Wei and Asa Fitch, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2023
The U.S. encouraged China to set up a robust antitrust regime. Now, Beijing is holding back its required green light for mergers that involve American companies as a technology war with Washington intensifies.
Chinese regulators recently have slowed down their merger reviews of a number of proposed acquisitions by U.S. companies, including Intel Corp.’s $5.2 billion takeover of Israel-based Tower Semiconductor Ltd. and chip maker MaxLinear Inc.’s $3.8 billion purchase of Silicon Motion Technology of Taiwan, according to people close to the process.
As preconditions for approving some of the transactions, the people said, officials at the State Administration for Market Regulation, China’s antitrust regulator known as SAMR, have asked companies to make available in China products they sell in other countries—an attempt to counter the U.S.’s increased export controls targeting China.
The Chinese demands could put U.S. companies in an impossible position as Washington has enacted legislation restricting American companies’ ability to sell to China and expanding certain types of production there.
The State Administration for Market Regulation didn’t respond to questions. Neither did Tower, MaxLinear and Silicon Motion. Intel declined to comment.
4. China Has Been Waging a Decades-Long, All-Out Spy War
Calder Walton, Foreign Policy, March 28, 2023
While the West was distracted, the Chinese government began an intelligence assault that never stopped.
One week ago, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was questioned by members of the U.S. Congress, before the world’s media, about whether the Chinese government uses the wildly popular video-sharing app to spy on Americans. His testimony came several weeks after the appearance of a Chinese spy balloon floating across the United States. What are we to make of these two stories, which are at their core both about Chinese espionage?
To borrow a phrase from Mission: Impossible: Relax, it’s much worse than you think. We are now witnessing some of the effects of a decision made years ago by China to use every means and medium of intelligence-gathering at its disposal against the West. Its strategy can be summarized in three words: collect, collect, collect. Most Westerners do not yet appreciate just how sweeping China’s intelligence onslaught directed at their countries is; for decades, their own governments likewise didn’t understand because their attention was largely directed elsewhere.
After 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community was overwhelmingly geared toward counterterrorism. U.S. spy chiefs followed priorities for this agenda set by decision-makers in Washington. The U.S. government’s strategic focus on combating terrorism took place at the expense of focusing on resurgent states such as China and Russia. As we pass the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it is useful to understand how China’s intelligence and national security establishment reacted at the time.
The strategy that China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its principal civilian intelligence service, took toward the United States after 9/11 followed a Chinese saying, ge an guan huo, which roughly translates as “watch the fires burn from the safety of the opposite river bank, which allows you to avoid entering the battle until your enemy is exhausted.” The MSS followed this saying to a T. Its long-term aim was to contain the United States, and then supplant it, in Southeast Asia. As the United States was mired in the Middle East, the gains being made by the MSS went by largely undetected or appreciated by U.S. intelligence.
Beginning in 2005, the MSS declared war on the U.S. intelligence community. From that point on, all of the service’s best resources and personnel were marshaled against U.S. intelligence—while the United States was pivoting to the global war on terrorism. According to one CIA official with deep expertise on China, with whom I had an exclusive interview on condition of anonymity, internal MSS deliberations from that time were marked with glee as the U.S. government was consumed, if not distracted, by the global war on terrorism.
Chinese intelligence was soon winning its war on U.S. spies. As previously reported in these pages, in 2010 the MSS dismantled a major CIA network being run from its station in Beijing. It reportedly led to the killing or imprisonment of more than a dozen CIA sources in China over more than two years. Details about how Chinese intelligence compromised the U.S. network remain murky. It seems, however, that the MSS hacked into the CIA’s supposedly secure communication channels. There are also whispers that the network may have been compromised by a human agent—a mole, to use John le Carré’s phrase—in the CIA. That person may have been Jerry Lee, a former CIA case officer working on Chinese affairs. After leaving the CIA, Lee sold U.S. secrets to Chinese intelligence. He was later caught—a U.S. counterintelligence success—and in 2019 was sentenced to 19 years in prison. There is little information in the public domain about what secrets Lee delivered to his Chinese handlers.
At this point, you might well say, fair enough—spies spy, just as robbers rob. Perhaps China has been doing what all states do, only better? This might be called the realist school of espionage in international affairs. Such a line of thought about China, usually said with a shrug, is misleading, however. China’s intelligence services operate in a fundamentally different way from those in the West—in nature, scope, and scale.
5. Sequoia and Other U.S.-Backed VCs Are Funding China’s Answer to OpenAI
Juro Osawa, The Information, April 5, 2023
A boom in artificial intelligence startup funding sparked by OpenAI has spilled over to China, the world’s second-biggest venture capital market. Now American institutional investors are indirectly financing a rash of Chinese AI startups aspiring to be China’s answer to OpenAI.
The American investors, including U.S. endowments, back key Chinese VC firms such as Sequoia Capital China, Matrix Partners China, Qiming Venture Partners and Hillhouse Capital Management that are striking local AI startup deals, which haven’t been previously reported. U.S. government officials have grown increasingly wary of such investments in Chinese AI as well as semiconductors because they could aid a geopolitical rival.
COMMENT - It is behavior like this that will drive the United States, Europe, and Japan to adopt outbound investment restrictions on the PRC. Since individuals and firms refuse to account for legitimate national security concerns themselves, they will likely need to be prohibited from doing it by law.
AUTHORITARIANISM
6. China is ghosting the United States
Nahal Toosi, Phelim Kine, and Erin Banco, Politico, April 5, 2023
Beijing has effectively frozen high level bilateral diplomatic contact in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident in February.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants to reschedule his date with China. Beijing is giving him the cold shoulder.
The Biden administration called off Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing in February after a Chinese spy balloon traversed U.S. skies, but has since been trying to restart high-level talks. That includes rescheduling the Blinken visit, and setting up other trips by top U.S. officials and a phone call between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a current U.S. official and a former State Department official said.
COMMENT – See my comments in earlier issues about the need for the Biden Administration to abandon its ‘ardent suitor-like’ obsession with high-level meetings.
7. Why Did China Recall Millions of Newspapers?
James Palmer, Foreign Policy, April 5, 2023
Millions of copies of the March 30 edition of the People’s Daily newspaper were recalled after a so-called political mistake, as China calls slip-ups that go against the official government line. The error in question? Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name was left out of a sentence that should have read, “The central government with comrade Xi Jinping at the core assesses the situation.”
COMMENT – The Chinese Communist Party is simultaneously: arrogant and paranoid.
8. It is getting even harder for Western scholars to do research in China
The Economist, April 5, 2023
Access to databases of vital materials is dwindling.
For much of the past century, foreign academics have had a tough time learning about China. Few could visit the country when it was ruled by Mao Zedong. Some instead tracked newspapers like the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece. These offered plenty of ideological hectoring but few believable details about people’s lives. Reading dry party documents, an art known as Pekingology, was like “swallowing sawdust by the bucketful”, as one renowned China-watcher put it.
Some Western scholars went to meet refugees in Hong Kong, which was then under British rule. Interviewees often assumed that the researchers were spies (some probably were). One academic recalled his struggles trying to find out about the legal system under Mao. His informant in Hong Kong kept trying to tell him where China’s airfields were hidden.
9. The IMF faces a nightmarish identity crisis
The Economist, April 4, 2023
The fund is caught between America and China, and its purpose is unclear
During the landmark three-week conference at Bretton Woods in 1944, one delegate contrasted the “extraordinarily beautiful” venue—the Mount Washington hotel—with the “glorious confusion” of negotiations. Yet the bedlam gave birth to the world’s most important international economic institution: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was founded to ensure global macroeconomic stability. In the nearly 80 years since its creation, the fund has lent $700bn to 150 countries.
When the IMF meets for its spring jamboree in Washington on April 10th there will once again be confusion about its purpose. Only this time it will not be glorious but ominous. Like many liberal institutions built after the second world war that could both serve American interests and claim to represent all of humanity, the fund is now ensnared by the Sino-American rivalry. Everyone—including the countries which negotiate and vote on the fund’s governance, the creditors which lend to countries it bails out, and its staff—seems uncertain about the fund’s future.
This is quite a reversal. Three years ago the IMF was poised to orchestrate a grand policy response to covid-19. In reaction to the crisis, the fund boosted by $185bn the amount it could raise from central banks to lend to distressed economies. Commitments from rich countries, the fund’s first source of borrowed capital, doubled to $482bn. The IMF brokered a deal at the g20, including China, to freeze interest payments for poor countries. And it doled out $650bn in “Special Drawing Rights”, its own quasi-currency made up of a basket of those of its biggest members, to central banks to lend to poorer countries. The IMF, it seemed, was fulfilling its modern mission: to backstop countries in distress and, by extension, the world economy.
The trouble is that, amid what is already the largest debt crisis since the 1980s (judged by the share of world population affected), the IMF’s efforts have been variously hamstrung, hesitant or irrelevant. Nearly $1trn has been injected into the fund since covid began to spread, but its loan book has grown by only $51bn. The fund has managed to approve just $2bn, or 5% of the capital it raised for new lending facilities, to tackle everything from climate change to food shortages, and even this money is yet to leave its accounts. Poor countries have struggled through the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising interest rates mostly on their own.
Three factors explain the IMF’s enfeeblement. First, the intransigence of Chinese creditors that have lent to poor countries. Second, the parlous state of middle-income countries in perennial distress, for which loans are as much about geopolitics as economics. Third, the imf’s inability to execute a plan, pushed by its leadership, to use resources for purposes that are less diplomatically controversial, such as big-ticket climate loans and health policies.
COMMENT – As the Dutch Prime Minister argued back in October 2019, our WWII-era global institutions are no longer “fit-for-purpose.” This is not a criticism of multilateralism, the institutions, or the fine people who work for them, it is an observation that the circumstances in which these institutions were created are not the circumstances we have today.
The question before us, is: how do we reform or refashion these institutions to serve our interests today in ways that fit the current circumstances?
10. China’s new Premier Li Qiang calls for more ‘practical cooperation’ with Russia
Amber Wang, South China Morning Post, April 4, 2023
Li’s call with Russian counterpart Mikhail Mishustin comes at a time when China’s growing closeness to Moscow is facing close scrutiny in the West. Call comes ahead of visit to Beijing by Emmanuel Macron and EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen, who are expected to push China over its stance on Ukraine.
11. What Do Closer Chinese-Russian Ties Mean for Central Asia?
Reid Standish, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 28, 2023
12. AUDIO – China and Russia: a friendship without limits
European Council on Foreign Relations, March 31, 2023
Last week, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping completed a three-day visit to Moscow, his first since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, Xi and Vladimir Putin had famously announced a “friendship without limits”. But it is unclear whether that relationship is purely transactional, a marriage of convenience, or based on more fundamental, ideological factors.
COMMENT – A chart that helps illustrate the PRC’s vital assistance to Russia.
13. U.S. Due Diligence Firm Says China Detained Its Employees
Keith Bradsher, New York Times, March 24, 2023
14. China Renaissance delays results, halts trade citing star dealmaker's disappearance
Xie Yu, Reuters, April 3, 2023
Boutique investment bank China Renaissance Holdings said it would delay its audited annual results and suspend its stock trading from Monday, after mainland authorities took away its chairman, Bao Fan, to co-operate with an investigation.
In a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, the bank said auditors told it they were unable to complete their audit and sign off on the earnings report until Bao, as controlling shareholder, becomes generally available for contact.
"While the company has used its best efforts to facilitate the requests of the auditors", those requests are not matters within the control of China Renaissance, the bank said in the filing, adding that the board "was not able to reasonably estimate when it would meet to approve" the 2022 annual results.
Bao, who is also CEO, started the bank in 2005 with a two-person team, seeking to match capital-hungry startups with venture capitalist and private equity investors.
COMMENT – This ordeal for China Renaissance and Mintz Group should be a flashing red warning light for anyone thinking about doing business in the PRC. When the rule of law does not exist and individuals can be ‘disappeared’ by the State, investors and MNCs are taking enormous risks.
Alexandra Sharp, Foreign Policy, April 5, 2023
The French are not ready to cut off China—yet. On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The three-day visit is expected to cover trade, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and other issues.
The European Union’s relationship with China has been at an all-time low. But that hasn’t stopped Paris from seeking high-level economic engagement with the world’s second-largest economy. Since being elected president in 2017, Macron has visited China numerous times and signed agreements on green finance, intellectual property rights, and foreign investment. This week’s trip aims to bolster these economic ties—60 French business leaders are traveling with Macron, including the heads of Airbus and energy giant Électricité de France—while also preventing the Europe-China relationship from sinking any further.
COMMENT – President Macron’s trip does raise the question: why is Paris so out-of-step with Brussels? President von der Leyen described a fairly comprehensive rationale for ‘de-risking’ and European unity last week, and Paris seems to be focused on purely French parochial interests.
16. Ahead of Xi meeting, Macron warns against shunning China
Michel Rose and Laurie Chen, Reuters, April 5, 2023
17. Europe Faces Narrow Path in Balancing Relations With China As Macron Goes To Beijing
Reid Standish, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 4, 2023
18. Watching China in Europe - April 2023
Noah Barkin, German Marshall Fund, April 3, 2023
COMMENT – As I’ve recommended before, you should read and subscribe to Noah’s monthly newsletter.
19. Bad cop in Brussels: How the European Commission is driving the China narrative – again
Janka Oertel and Andrew Small, European Council on Foreign Relations, March 31, 2023
JO: Interesting – so do you think Macron really believes that China can, and would, play a constructive role on Ukraine?
AS: In recent weeks, China has been simulating a peace initiative for Ukraine, though barely going through the motions – as we saw in Moscow, Xi is not trying very hard to pretend that it’s real. Some European policymakers nonetheless think it is useful to simulate believing in it. This is partly for tactical reasons. There is an advantage in demonstrating both that all avenues are being exhausted and that Beijing is not acting in good faith. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky himself used the announcement of China’s Ukraine position paper to say that he wants to meet with Xi to talk about the proposals, some aspects of which he said he was open to. Calling the Chinese leadership’s bluff is something European leaders can do too, pushing Beijing on specific elements of the peace initiative proposals and ensuring that there is no room for the Chinese government to claim that its efforts were rejected out of hand.
JO: Okay, this is the benign interpretation. What would be a more cynical one?
AS: The approach certainly provides an excuse for Europeans to avoid making some difficult choices about China policy on the grounds that “we need China on Ukraine.” It also provides political cover for dressing up commercial deals as constructive ‘engagement.’ In addition, there are European leaders who labour under the delusion that Beijing’s statements make a difference to Moscow’s nuclear strategy. The push during Scholz’s visit and at the last G20 summit to get Xi to repeat boilerplate Chinese positions on the threat and use of nuclear weapons made sense at the time, but there have since been some wildly inflated claims about its impact on Russia’s behaviour. Serious Chinese analysts don’t believe it makes any difference. Macron is arguably in a different category – he seems to believe in his personal capacity to influence other political leaders’ calculations, as we’ve seen before with Putin and Donald Trump. His rather mixed track record does not seem to be deterring him from trying again with Xi. At worst, the effect of all this can be to create the impression for China that its relationship with Russia can be used as leverage over Europe, rather than European leaders simply making clear to Beijing that the current trajectory of China-Russia relations is likely to further damage its relations with Europe.
AS: Do you think that Europeans have wrestled hard enough yet with the possibility of Chinese military assistance to Russia?
JO: No. In recent weeks, whenever we have spoken to European policymakers they were mostly looking at the risk of Chinese arms deliveries to Russia through the angle of potential US sanctions on China and American requests for Europeans to replicate them. It seems not yet to have occurred to them that it would be important for Europe independently to build a credible deterrent against China further enhancing Russia’s fighting capabilities. Although the recent visit to Beijing by the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, seems to indicate that there is an attempt to coordinate the European message on Ukraine, it is not entirely clear what Europe’s own red line for Chinese support for Russia is and what the consequences of overstepping that would be. European leaders need to drive home an absolutely clear message to the Chinese government about their own security interests. To be clear, Europeans should not want to see China arming Russia to help win the war in Ukraine. And they should be incredibly clear that, whatever Washington does or does not do, that Europe is willing to act on this by itself.
AS: How great do you currently think the risk is that China provides lethal aid? How do you interpret Xi’s visit to Moscow in that context?
JO: The risk is real. It depends on how the war evolves, but one should not underestimate how much Beijing is already doing to help Moscow sustain its ability to continue fighting – economically, financially, diplomatically, and through dual-use support. Xi’s recent visit to Russia underscored the level of backing and the level of mutual interest. For European security, it is long overdue for the EU to take the China-Russia relationship seriously, to acknowledge that it is here to stay, and to understand its long-term consequences.
20. Xi's chief of staff Cai Qi is symbol of powerful court
Katsuji Nakazawa, Nikkei Asia, March 30, 2023
Former Beijing chief to oversee all aspects of security.
21. Chinese officials promise foreign investors greater access – Believe it when you see it
The Economist, April 5, 2023
22. China’s Propaganda Looks to Japan’s G7 Presidency
Etienne Soula, Alliance for Securing Democracy, March 23, 2023
At the beginning of 2023, Japan assumed the presidency of the Group of Seven (G7) from Germany. This puts Tokyo, already a prime target of Chinese information manipulation, at the helm of a body that has drawn significant and sustained criticism from Chinese diplomats and state media over the past 14 months. The recurring narratives promoted by Beijing during that period provide an indication of what Japan should look out for over the coming year.
Edith Lin and Willa Wu, South China Morning Post, April 4, 2023
24. Hedge Fund Snow Lake Quits Hong Kong After More Than a Decade
Bei Hu, Bloomberg, April 3, 2023
China-focused hedge-fund firm Snow Lake Capital Ltd. has left Hong Kong after 12 years of operating in the city, people familiar with the matter said.
The company shuttered its office in Hong Kong last month, the people said, requesting not to be named because the matter is private. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Sean Ma has relocated to Menlo Park, California for personal reasons. Its chief operating and financial officer is also based in the US city, said one of the people. All members of its Hong Kong-based research team moved to Beijing last month, the person added.
COMMENT – Workers and firms are fleeing Hong Kong. For all of Beijing’s bluster, people are voting with their feet. This will cause the Party to institute even greater controls, further convincing companies, investors and regular people, that the future does NOT belong to the People’s Republic.
ENVIRONMENTAL HARMS
25. China has not done enough to halt the wildlife trade
The Economist, March 23, 2023
That is true whether or not covid-19 made the jump from wild animals.
26. China’s Panda Diplomacy is Not Breeding Conservation
Charlotte Bull, The Diplomat, April 5, 2023
Foreign zoos should not be sucked into the fantasy that they are aiding conservation by hosting pandas.
This year has already offered a series of unfortunate events for panda enthusiasts in the West. In January, Edinburgh Zoo in the U.K. announced they would send their pandas back to China after they failed to produce cubs. Later that month, Finland said it is considering returning a pair of pandas due to mounting costs.
These events have called into question China’s so-called panda diplomacy, an instrument of soft power cloaked as conservation. Although zoos hosting pandas continue to send China millions a year in conservation fees, the population of the vulnerable species remains alarmingly low in the wild.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE AND COERCION
27. Arunachal Pradesh: India rejects China's attempt to rename disputed places
BBC, April 4, 2023
India has reacted sharply to China's attempts to rename places in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and said it "outright rejects" the move.
The state has been and will always be an "integral and inalienable part of India," foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said on Tuesday.
His comments came after reports said that China had renamed 11 places along a disputed Himalayan border region in the state.
28. Ottawa stalls on measures to combat foreign interference
Robert fife and Steven Chase, The Globe and Mail, April 3, 2023
29. Italy reviews limiting China's Sinochem influence over Pirelli -Bloomberg News
Nilutpal Timsina, Reuters, April 4, 2023
30. Chinese State Propaganda Goes to Bat for TikTok
Lindsay Gorman and Etienne Soula, Alliance for Securing Democracy, April 6, 2023
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared on Capitol Hill on Thursday 23 March to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where lawmakers peppered him with questions about TikTok’s Chinese ownership, effects on youth, and practices around data collection. Chew assured the committee that TikTok functions independently of the Chinese Communist Party, but before and after the hearing, the Chinese government devoted significant state resources to defend the company—seemingly calling into question TikTok’s independence.
During the week of the hearing, we tracked Chinese state media and diplomatic activity on the Alliance for Securing Democracy at GMF’s Hamilton 2.0 dashboard. We found that Chinese diplomats and state media have mounted a sizable influence campaign in defense of TikTok, during which they have recycled familiar tropes and anti-US narratives in an effort to shape public opinion beyond China’s borders. These narrative efforts have generally followed five key trends.
Chinese diplomatic and state media accounts:
Amplified the TikTok CEO’s statements to paint the app in a benign light;
Hyped TikTok’s popularity and elevated the consequences of a ban;
Criticized and mocked members of Congress;
Denigrated the entire US political system and painted the United States as hostile to business; and
Portrayed criticism of TikTok or China as xenophobic.
The fact that China feels compelled to defend TikTok so vociferously is notable. Chinese state media is primarily a vehicle the authoritarian one-party government uses to broadcast its worldview and shape perceptions, both internally and globally. The global dimension of state media outlets’ work has grown in importance since Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power and insisted on spreading China’s “discourse power” by having state media “tell China’s story well”.
A key component of this strategy to increase the reach and persuasiveness of the Chinese state’s worldview has been the denigration of its democratic rivals, first and foremost the United States. CGTN, Xinhua, and others incessantly portray the United States as dysfunctional, overbearing, and destructive.
31. China thinks it’s diplomatically isolating Taiwan. It isn’t
CNN, March 24, 2023
32. Micron Gets Caught in U.S.-China Crossfire
Jacky Wong, Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023
Beijing has long hesitated to strike back at U.S. chip companies—but Micron is a soft target.
Beijing has launched its first major counterstrike in its chip war with the U.S.
The blow is far from crippling, but U.S. companies in high-tech sectors where European or Asian alternatives exist might increasingly find themselves holding the short end of the stick in China.
33. China Strikes Back at U.S. Chip Maker Even as It Signals Openness
Chang Che and John Liu, New York Times, April 4, 2023
When top Chinese officials held receptions for dozens of American and European business executives at back-to-back annual economic forums last week, the intended message was clear: China is open for business.
But by week’s end, China’s fearsome regulators had sent an altogether different signal.
Beijing announced a cybersecurity review of Micron Technology, a top-tier U.S. chip maker, on Friday. The measure, which many industry analysts had expected, is China’s most significant stroke of retaliation against Washington over its campaign to sever China’s access to high-end chips.
34. The U.S.-China Fault Line Is Felt in the Academy
Christina Lu and Rocio Fabbro, Foreign Policy, April 5, 2023
The breakdown in university exchanges threatens understanding and collaborative research.
When Peking University in Beijing harshly cracked down on student activists in 2018, educators around the world watched with alarm. Yet one year later, the Chinese institution was welcoming a high-profile guest—Martha Pollack, the president of Cornell University—and by 2021, the two partners were proposing a flashy dual-degree program.
Back in Ithaca, New York, the proposal met fierce backlash. Cornell’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly opposed the partnership in a vote, citing concerns of academic freedom and transparency; many students decried Beijing’s human rights violations and mass detention of Uyghurs.
“It became very clear that from the students’ standpoint, from the faculty standpoint, there was no interest in expanding the relationship” in this way without more rigorous ethical oversight, said Eli Friedman, a professor at Cornell. “And they did it anyway.”
Tucked away between gorges and hiking trails in the depths of upstate New York, talk of great-power competition can feel far from Cornell’s campus. But it’s in this isolated environment—and I know it well, having studied there myself—that debates over partnerships with China have sharply unfolded, underscoring how deteriorating U.S.-China relations have swept American universities into a geopolitical firestorm.
35. TikTok’s Russia Challenge: Kremlin-Funded Media Reaches Millions on the App
Joseph Bodnar, Alliance for Securing Democracy, March 30, 2023
TikTok has been central to the world’s understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It was particularly valuable in the conflict’s early days when people were desperate for news and able to find real-time updates about military maneuvers and on-the-ground conditions through the platform. Russian state media took notice of this and has been using the app to push its own narrative.
TikTok, though, did not appear eager to embrace its wartime role or the content moderation responsibilities that came with it. Eventually, after being pressured by Ukrainian and Western officials to take Moscow’s propaganda seriously, TikTok labeled around 50 accounts as Russian state-controlled media.
That labeling process, though, appears to not have been comprehensive or effective at reducing engagements with Russian state media. Our analysis found 78 TikTok accounts, including 47 labeled by the platform, that are likely tied to Kremlin-funded outlets. As of March 22, those accounts had more than 14 million followers and had generated more than 319 million likes.
Not all the accounts labeled by TikTok or in our own dataset are active, but it appears that each account could start posting again if they chose to do so.
36. Czech lower house speaker Adamová in Taiwan with huge delegation
Focus Taiwan, March 25, 2023
37. Suidani Disqualified from Provincial Assembly
Solomon Star News, April 5, 2023
The Minister of Provincial Government and Institutional Strengthening Rollen Seleso has disqualified former Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani from the Malaita Provincial Assembly in accordance with section 15(1)(a) of the Provincial Government Act 1997.
Reasons for the disqualification were outlined in a letter to Suidani on March 20 which included Suidani’s ongoing failure to recognize the One China Policy which is a key policy of the National Government which all Provincial Governments are an agent.
The second reason was Suidani’s collusion with Chinese Taipei in defiance of the Sovereign decision of the National Government to recognize the One China Policy.
38. Security services forced to probe foreign links to MPs’ groups, Labour MP reveals
Adam Forrest, The Independent, April 5, 2023
HUMAN RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
39. China wants the world to forget about its crimes in Xinjiang
The Economist, March 23, 2023
When fire spread through an apartment building in Urumqi last year, killing at least ten people, the public was horrified. Hundreds of people took to the streets in cities across China. At great risk, they voiced displeasure with covid-19 restrictions that may have stopped people escaping the blaze. But today the families of the victims are reluctant to tell their stories. Most are Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group native to the western region of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital. They have long been persecuted by the government, which has threatened more such treatment if they speak out.
China’s attempts to silence the Uyghurs coincide with a diplomatic push in Europe, where it is hoping officials will forget about its grave human-rights abuses in Xinjiang. Since 2017 China has locked up more than a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in “re-education” camps. Rights groups have documented campaigns of forced sterilisation, cultural assimilation and the destruction of mosques (a broken minaret is pictured). Lately, though, the appearance of state oppression has changed. China is trying to convince the world that Xinjiang is just like any other region in the country.
40. China may face more embarrassment over its human-rights record
The Economist, March 23, 2023
More countries appear willing to call out its treatment of the Uyghurs.
41. ITF resumes tennis in China with no word on Peng Shuai
Associated Press, April 5, 2023
The International Tennis Federation will play tournaments this year in China with no word of a resolution to the case of Chinese doubles player Peng Shuai.
Peng disappeared from public view shortly after accusing a former high-ranking Communist Party official — in a web posting in November of 2021 — of sexual assault.
The ITF, which conducts tournaments below the elite level in its World Tennis Tour, lists its first tournament in China on June 5-11 at Luzhou. The ITF’s last full season in China was 2019, prior to COVID-19.
“The ITF anticipates a resumption of tournament activity within China for each of the ITF Tours later this year,” the ITF said in a statement.
The WTA, which runs the sport’s top-tier women’s events, hasn’t announced if it will resume staging tournaments in China.
In late 2021, WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon announced that the WTA would be suspending all of its tournaments — including the season-ending WTA Finals — that were held in China because of concerns over Peng, costing the tour millions.
COMMENT – Pretty shameful development for the International Tennis Federation.
42. Vatican says China has unilaterally appointed bishop to Shanghai
Crispian Balmer, Reuters, April 4, 2023
Chinese authorities have appointed a new bishop to Shanghai, the largest Roman Catholic diocese in China, the Vatican said on Tuesday, in an apparent violation of a bilateral pact between the two states.
The Holy See was informed "a few days ago" of the decision by China to transfer Bishop Shen Bin from Haimen, in Jiangsu province, to the diocese of Shanghai, the Vatican said.
It added that it had learned of his official instalment earlier on Tuesday from the media.
"For the moment I have nothing to say about the Holy See's assessment of the matter," spokesman Matteo Bruni said.
The announcement came just four months after the Vatican accused China of violating its bilateral accord on the appointment of bishops by installing one in a diocese not recognised by the Holy See.
The contested, secret pact was renewed last October for the second time since 2018.
The deal was a bid to ease a longstanding divide across mainland China between an underground flock loyal to the pope and a state-backed official church. For the first time since the 1950s, both sides recognised the pope as supreme leader of the Catholic Church.
COMMENT – Just about everyone warned the Vatican that this would happen when Pope Francis entered into the ill-conceived 2018 agreement with Beijing. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party does not fulfill its international agreements or protect the human rights of its citizens should not be a surprise to anyone.
I think it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is no John Paul II, a church leader who took the Soviet Union seriously as a threat and sought to ensure that Catholics around the world did not fall victim to governments committed to stamping out their religion.
Here’s a piece from 2016, highlighting the calls from inside China’s Catholic community warning Pope Francis not to view Beijing naively. Unfortunately, for Chinese Catholics the Vatican has sought to silence and marginalize individuals like Cardinal Joseph Zen, who the Chinese Communists have put on trial and the Pope refuses to assist.
43. WAY BACK MACHINE – The Vatican’s Illusions About Chinese Communism
David Feith, Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016
Cardinal Joseph Zen says that the Holy See misunderstands how repressive China is.
INDUSTRIAL POLICIES AND ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE
44. China weighs export ban for rare-earth magnet tech
Shunsuke Tabeta, Nikkei Asia, April 6, 2023
China is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.'s advantage in the high-tech arena.
Officials are planning amendments to a technology export restriction list, which was last updated in 2020.
45. Made-in-India iPhones surge as Apple moves production away from China
Xinmei Shen, South China Morning Post, April 5, 2023
India-made iPhones surged in volume and value last year, as Apple moved to shift some production away from China in a bid to diversify its supply chain.
In 2022, the shipment volumes of iPhones made in India grew 65 per cent year on year, while their value gained 162 per cent, according to a report published by market research firm Counterpoint last week.
As a result, Apple last year accounted for 25 per cent of the value of India’s total smartphone shipments, up from 12 per cent in 2021, according to Counterpoint.
China produces up to 85 per cent of iPhones globally, but is at risk of losing its dominance as Apple takes steps to shift more of its manufacturing supply chain outside China.
46. Apple’s Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, April 5, 2023
The company is laying the foundation to make phones elsewhere, from the screws on up.
In late March, when Tim Cook made his first public appearance in China since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Apple Inc.’s chief executive officer approached it with all the delicacy of a high-stakes diplomatic visit. Cook took colleagues to an Apple retail store in Beijing and met privately with high-ranking government officials to discuss the company’s operations. “This has been a symbiotic kind of relationship that I think we both enjoyed,” he told the audience at a state-sponsored technology conference, in an appearance at which he also announced the expansion of a multimillion-dollar rural education program in the country.
One of the signature achievements of Cook’s career at Apple has been his work crafting its relationship to China, which is unusually positive compared with those of other US tech companies. Over more than two decades, Apple has built a vast manufacturing and assembly operation in the country involving thousands of business partners. There are more than 40 Apple stores in mainland China, and Apple draws almost 20% of its revenue from its “Greater China” region, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong.
47. US-China tech war: without advanced chips, can China’s smartphone industry survive?
He Huifeng and Jane Cai, South China Morning Post, April 4, 2023
Limited access to high-end semiconductor chips poses a major threat to China’s world-leading smartphone manufacturing industry. Chinese smartphone firms will face an ‘innovate or die’ situation, especially as multinationals look to diversify, industry insiders say.
48. Running on Ice: China’s Chipmakers in a Post-October 7 World
Jan-Peter Kleinhans, Reva Goujon, Julia Hess, and Lauren Dudley, Rhodium Group, April 4, 2023
US export controls designed to freeze-in-place China’s leading edge chip development are a powerful brake on Beijing’s ambitions to become self-sufficient in foundational technologies. But this should not obscure the fact that China is building significant capacity in semiconductor markets that rely on mature process nodes – including in sensors, power semiconductors, and microcontrollers found in every day consumer electronics, vehicles, and medical devices.
This note takes a closer look at which semiconductor segments still lie beyond the reach of US regulators and where Chinese chipmakers and state backers may focus their resources. We also assess how China’s expanding market share in these mature technology segments could trigger regulatory actions by the US aimed at steering supply chains away from China.
Key Takeaways
US fabless chip designers depend almost entirely on foreign foundries for contract-manufacturing of legacy chips: 80% of foundry capacity for 20-45nm process nodes is located in China and Taiwan. For 50-180nm process nodes, China and Taiwan together control around 70% of foundry capacity globally.
An attempt by the US and partners to outpace China in building out manufacturing capacity for trailing edge process nodes would require considerable time and resources, as well as political tolerance of higher prices. In the next 3-5 years China is due to add nearly as much new 50-180nm wafer capacity as the entire rest of the world.
China’s tech indigenization efforts, the threat of US export controls, and OEM supply chain diversification could help Chinese chipmakers grow market share in segments that do not rely on node shrinkage, such as microcontrollers and automotive semiconductors.
Chinese firms designing cutting-edge semiconductors for markets like smartphone processors and autonomous driving are still producing well below the high performance computing thresholds set by US export controls, but will remain heavily dependent on foreign-owned foundries to manufacture such chips.
49. Congress Seeks Details on Spying Risks from Chinese Cargo Cranes
Gordon Lubold and Aruna Viswanatha, Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023
Top lawmakers who oversee the Department of Homeland Security want to hold hearings and obtain access to classified and unclassified government documents that expose potential security vulnerabilities posed by dozens of Chinese-made cranes at American ports across the country.
It is “extremely worrisome” that about 80% of American port cranes use Chinese software that is manufactured by a Chinese company, said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R., Tenn.) in a statement. “On behalf of the American people, this Committee is demanding answers on the risks these cranes pose to U.S. cybersecurity and the resilience of our critical infrastructure, which is a core aspect of the homeland security mission.”
The demand for more information follows a Wall Street Journal article on March 5 that detailed for the first time some of the security concerns posed by the large cranes, which are made by state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, or ZPMC, in China and are used in most American ports. ZPMC has ties to the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA and, according to lawmakers, “participates in military-civil fusion.”
The cranes are equipped with Chinese-made software that could be used to surveil or manipulate port operations, U.S. officials said. No evidence has emerged that Beijing has used the cranes to conduct nefarious activity at any American ports, officials said.
50. Airbus to Double Production in China as It Moves Ahead with New Orders
Liz Alderman, New York Times, April 6, 2023
The French plane maker announced the agreement despite pressure on Europe from the Biden administration to isolate Beijing.
Airbus agreed on Thursday to build a second assembly line at its factory in China and was given a green light by Beijing to move ahead with 160 previously announced plane orders. The announcement was a pointed reminder of how China remains a critical market for European companies, even as American manufacturers are pulling up stakes.
The agreement was signed in Beijing by Airbus’s chief executive, Guillaume Faury, who was part of an economic delegation accompanying President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Union on an ambitious state visit with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
51. Silicon Valley Is Beating Washington to China Decoupling
Rishi Iyengar, Foreign Policy, April 3, 2023
Tech investors in the United States and China were dialing back bilateral links years before Biden decided to.
After flocking to China for more than a decade, American venture capitalists have significantly curtailed their exposure to the country’s technology sector in recent years, in large part due to increasing geopolitical tensions and increasing investment restrictions in both Washington and Beijing.
According to data from research firm PitchBook, U.S. investors participated in deals worth $7.2 billion in China’s tech industry last year, down from its recent peak of $35.6 billion in 2018. The number of deals also fell to its lowest level in five years. Market intelligence firm S&P Global, which published similar figures, blamed a cocktail of China’s strict zero-COVID policy, the resulting supply chain issues, and escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington “causing some investors to proceed with caution.”
A Shanghai-based lawyer who advises both U.S. and Chinese investors and spoke on condition of anonymity said investment on both sides in each tech sector “fell off a cliff” in the second half of the Trump administration, estimating that the pullback is “90 percent political.”
52. Japan restricts chipmaking equipment exports as it aligns with US China curbs
Tim Kelly and Miho Uranaka, Reuters, March 31, 2023
53. China seeks WTO review of chip export restrictions led by US
Cyril Ip, South China Morning Post, April 5, 2023
Peggy Sito, South China Morning Post, April 5, 2023
55. House unanimously passes bill to work to remove China’s ‘developing country’ label
Mychael Schnell, The Hill, March 27, 2023
The House unanimously passed a bill on Monday that would direct the Secretary of State to work toward stripping the People’s Republic of China of its “developing country” label in international organizations
The measure — titled the PRC Is Not a Developing Country Act — cleared the House in a 415-0 vote.
The legislation would direct the Secretary of State to “pursue” altering the status of the People’s Republic of China from developing country to upper middle income country, high income country or developed country for international organizations that include both the U.S. and China, and propose a mechanism to do so.
Additionally, it would direct the top diplomat to work “to ensure that the People’s Republic of China does not receive preferential treatment or assistance within the organization as a result of it having the status of a developing country.”
“The People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy, accounting for 18.6 percent of the global economy,” Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.), a sponsor of the measure, said on the House floor Monday.
“Their economy size is second only to that of the United States. [The] United States is treated as a developed country, so should PRC,” Kim said. “And is also treated as a high-income country in treaties and international organizations, so China should also be treated as a developed country.”
“However, the PRC is classified as a developing country, and they’re using this status to game the system and hurt countries that are truly in need,” she added.
56. China hawks want to toughen proposed new UK procurement law
Eleni Courea, Politico, April 4, 2023
Conservative MPs who take a hard line on China are pushing a series of amendments aimed at toughening up the U.K. government's upcoming procurement bill, POLITICO's London Playbook newsletter reported.
The bill — which will be introduced as part of Britain's post-Brexit reform of procurement policy — will introduce rules for firms competing for government contracts and strengthen ministers’ power to exclude companies that are deemed a national security risk.
Some MPs in Rishi Sunak's ruling Tory Party don't think the legislation in its current form goes far enough.
Alicia Kearns, the Tory chair of parliament's influential foreign affairs committee, has put forward a series of amendments that would require the Cabinet Office to maintain a “high risk” list of companies that could only sell surveillance equipment to public authorities with explicit ministerial approval. The amendments are backed by three other select committee chairs — defense committee chair Tobias Ellwood, business committee chair Darren Jones and women and equalities committee chair Caroline Nokes.
CYBER AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
57. Deutschlands oberste Cybersicherheitsbehörde setzt Huawei-Technik ein [Germany's top cyber security authority uses Huawei technology] – ORIGINAL IN GERMAN
Dietmar Neuerer, Handelsblatt, April 5, 2023
GOOGLE TRANSLATE – The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) relies internally on technology from the controversial Chinese network supplier Huawei . This emerges from the response of the federal government to a small question from the Union parliamentary group, which is available to the Handelsblatt.
Specifically, it is about components in the communication infrastructure. According to the document, the BSI uses a Huawei LTE router from Chinese manufacturers for external presentations via an open Internet connection.
58. Australia Bans TikTok from Government Devices Amid Security Concerns
Stuart Condie, Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023
59. AUDIO – The Most Amazing — and Dangerous — Technology in the World
Ezra Klein Show, April 4, 2023
Nectar Gan, Yong Xiong, and Juliana Liu, CNN, April 3, 2023
It is one of China’s most popular shopping apps, selling clothing, groceries and just about everything else under the sun to more than 750 million users a month.
But according to cybersecurity researchers, it can also bypass users’ cell phone security to monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages and change settings.
And once installed, it’s tough to remove.
While many apps collect vast troves of user data, sometimes without explicit consent, experts say e-commerce giant Pinduoduo has taken violations of privacy and data security to the next level.
61. The U.S. Wants to Make Sure China Can’t Catch Up on Quantum Computing
Kevin Klyman, Foreign Policy, March 31, 2023
In January, the Netherlands and Japan—the leading suppliers of semiconductor production equipment—agreed in principle to implement the United States’ October 2022 semiconductor export controls on China, stonewalling China’s development of advanced semiconductors. While the details of the trilateral agreement remain murky, restrictions on the sale of AI chips and advanced machine tools to China will significantly impede China’s drive for high-tech self-sufficiency.
But these restrictions are just the opening salvos in a series of unprecedented export controls on China planned by the Biden administration. After controls on semiconductors, the Commerce Department is moving on to the next emerging technology it worries China could weaponize: quantum computing. Export controls on quantum computing hardware, error correction software, and the provision of cloud services to Chinese entities are poised to become the next front in the U.S.-China tech war.
62. China plans $500 million subsea internet cable to rival US-backed project
Joe Brock, Reuters, April 6, 2023
Chinese state-owned telecom firms are developing a $500 million undersea fiber-optic internet cable network that would link Asia, the Middle East and Europe to rival a similar U.S.-backed project, four people involved in the deal told Reuters. The plan is a sign that an intensifying tech war between Beijing and Washington risks tearing the fabric of the internet.
63. India at the Centre of the Indian Ocean Submarine Cable Network: Trusted Connectivity in Practice
Kausha Arha, ORF, April 6, 2023
It is in India’s strategic interest to be the leader of trusted connectivity in data flows across the Indian Ocean. Before the decade’s end, India is expected to surpass China as the most populous nation in the world and overtake Japan as the world’s third largest economy as well. It will likely remain the fastest growing large economy throughout this decade, and perhaps longer.
India’s demographic and economic trends also point to it becoming a digital superpower. India’s public and private sectors should leverage these trends to push the country onto the centre-stage of connectivity across the Indian Ocean. India’s G20 presidency offers a timely platform to demonstrate leadership in furthering this goal.
MILITARY AND SECURITY THREATS
64. Taiwan monitoring Chinese strike group off the coast after president meets US speaker
Helen Davidson and Amy Hawkins, The Guardian, April 5, 2023
Taiwan authorities are monitoring Chinese military activity including a carrier strike group about 200 nautical miles (370km) off the main island’s coastline, after the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, met US House speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles.
In the meeting, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, McCarthy stressed the urgency of arms deliveries to Taiwan, while Tsai praised the “strong and unique partnership” with the US.
65. Guam, where America’s next war may begin
The Economist, April 2, 2023
66. Japan Weighs Bomb-Shelter Bill with Eye on China, North Korea
Isabel Reynolds and Yuki Hagiwara, Bloomberg, April 3, 2023
With tensions around Taiwan rising and North Korea firing missiles at a blistering pace, lawmakers in neighboring Japan are pushing for a rollout of shelters where its residents can take refuge in the event of an attack.
A bill laying out a schedule for shelter provision could be passed as soon as next fiscal year, Keiji Furuya, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker and former minister for national resilience, said in an interview last week.
COMMENT – With Xi Jinping exhorting his subjects to prepare for war, Japan looks ready to fund air raid shelters for its own citizens.
67. Japan, U.S., South Korea conduct anti-sub drills with eye on North Korea
Junnosuke Kobara, Nikkei Asia, April 4, 2023
68. Xi Jinping to face European pressure over support for Russia in Ukraine war
Financial Times, April 6, 2023
69. Chinese and Russian researchers barred from Japan space agency institute
Japan Times, March 25, 2023
A scientific institute belonging to Japan's space agency has barred Chinese and Russian researchers, among others, to protect sensitive technological information that could be used for military purposes, a source close to the matter has said.
The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) has set new standards for accepting foreign researchers and students that went into effect last September, the source said Friday. Its parent, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, declined to comment.
The move comes as part of efforts to prevent technologies used in satellites and rockets from being accessed by foreign agencies that are developing weapons of mass destruction. Individuals from countries such as North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Belarus have also been barred from undergoing screening to enter ISAS.
70. Beyond the First Battle: Winning the Long War Over Taiwan
Lonnie Henley, FPRI, March 22, 2023
Much has been written on whether war with China is likely and whether Beijing has a timeline for invading Taiwan. When it comes to what such a war would look like, however, the focus is almost exclusively on the early days or weeks of the conflict, defeating a Chinese attempt to land on Taiwan and countering Chinese threats to American forces. Virtually no one looks past those first weeks, at what happens after the United States repels the landing. The country is in severe danger of winning the first battle only to lose the war.
If Xi Jinping or a future Chinese leader goes to war over Taiwan, it will be in the full knowledge that he is risking both China’s future and the survival of the Chinese Communist Party regime. Win or lose, the conflict would devastate China’s economy, disrupting trade, destroying infrastructure, and opening decades of extreme hostility with the United States and its allies. Having argued to the Chinese people that the situation in Taiwan was critical enough to require such enormous sacrifice, accepting defeat would not be an option. If the amphibious landing failed, and Beijing could not find a political formula they could sell as victory despite the military failure, then they would be forced to continue the conflict by whatever means possible.
There is a risk that Beijing would escalate to a limited nuclear strike at this point, despite their avowed policy of never being the first to use nuclear weapons. If they refrain from nuclear use, then the most effective course of action remaining is a prolonged blockade of Taiwan to starve the island into submission. Unfortunately, the United States (and the people of Taiwan) has little ability to break such a blockade.
71. Japan eyes upgrading Aegis ships with Tomahawk missiles by FY 2027
Japan Times, March 25, 2023
The government plans to upgrade all eight of its Aegis destroyers by fiscal 2027 so that they can install Tomahawk cruise missiles purchased from the United States, a government source said Saturday.
The move is intended to help Japan develop capabilities that can strike targets inside an adversary's territory, amid North Korea's growing nuclear and missile threats and China's military rise.
According to the source, Japan plans to acquire the latest Tomahawk Block-5 missiles with a range of about 1,600 kilometers. The government has already announced a plan to purchase 400 Tomahawks, earmarking ¥211.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in the budget for fiscal 2023 starting April.
72. U.S. military aid policies leave Taiwan in a bind, business council chief says
Gabriel Dominguez, Japan Times, April 3, 2023
As Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen prepares to meet U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this week, the head of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council has criticized Washington for not doing enough to meet the self-ruled island’s security needs, putting Taipei in a “quandary” over the type of weapons required for its defense.
“U.S. war fighters, government officials and members of Congress on both sides of the political spectrum have all expressed a sense of urgency about China’s intentions toward Taiwan,” Rupert Hammond-Chambers said in a recent interview.
“But that urgency is not bridging the gap into an all-of-government response,” he said, criticizing the White House for failing to ensure that the most significant Taiwan-related military aid provisions in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) are “appropriately funded.”
73. The view from the front line between Taiwan and China
The Economist, April 5, 2023
74. China’s military aims to launch 13,000 satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink
Cate Cadell, Washington Post, April 6, 2023
In the race for low-earth orbit dominance, Beijing is years behind SpaceX and worried about the threat to its national security.
ONE BELT, ONE ROAD STRATEGY
75. US Vice President Harris promises greater investment for Africa
Reuters, March 26, 2023
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said on Sunday that the United States will increase investment in Africa and help spur economic growth as she began a week long tour of the continent aimed at offering a counter to the influence of rival China.
China has invested heavily in Africa in recent decades, including in infrastructure and resource development, while Russian influence has also grown, including through the deployment of troops from Russia's private military contractor Wagner Group to aid governments in several countries.
Joseph Webster and Joze Pelayo, Atlantic Council, April 5, 2023
The US and its allies and partners must pragmatically adapt to China’s growing regional influence by providing credible alternatives to Beijing, especially in key technological areas. This also includes providing a positive economic agenda for the region and, when necessary, vigorously opposing the PRC’s role in regional security.
77. In Croatia, U.S. Campaigned to Stop Chinese Bid on Key Port
Warren Strobel, Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2023
Both the Trump and Biden administrations have worked with allies to limit Beijing’s influence in Europe.
On Rijeka’s waterfront, vast piles of scrap metal stretch for hundreds of yards, the byproduct of an ongoing construction project to renovate the port in the northern Adriatic Sea.
When a deal to remake the port emerged three years ago, it set off alarm bells in Washington: Three Chinese state-owned companies had won a bid for a 50-year deal to build and operate a modern new ship-container terminal at Rijeka, a deep-water port with easy access to central Europe’s markets.
78. What China’s Global Security Initiative Tells Us About Its Strategic Engagement with Latin America
R. Evan Ellis, The Diplomat, April 4, 2023
The GSI (Global Security Initiative) speaks repeatedly of China’s interest in involving itself in new mechanisms for “governance” of both traditional and non-traditional security at the global scale.
Chinese engagement with Latin America may be mostly about commerce, but it is nonetheless strategic in its character. Its new Global Security Initiative (GSI) openly highlights the explicitly military and other strategic dimensions of its approach toward Latin America and other parts of the world.
The GSI, introduced in 2022 and outlined in February 2023 through a Ministry of Foreign Affairs concept paper compliments the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the PRC’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) in its evolving and increasingly ambitious narrative about how China seeks to interact with the rest of the world.
On its face, the GSI is filled with superficially non-threatening catchphrases such as “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security,” “respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries,” “abiding by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter,” and “peacefully resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation.” Yet a careful reading of the “priorities” portion of the document makes clear China’s increasing focus on security sector activities as one pillar of its engagement with Latin America (among other regions), and provides troubling insights into how the PRC wishes to proceed.
OPINION PIECES
79. Don’t let Beijing define the narrative of Taiwan’s relations with the world
Markus Garlauskas, Atlantic Council, April 3, 2023
China is yet again ramping up its saber-rattling over the travels of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who is sandwiching stops in New York and Los Angeles around her ongoing trip to Central America. But that should not deter US leaders—including Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who plans to meet with Tsai this week in Los Angeles—from staying the course and engaging with Taiwanese officials.
Unfortunately, the media coverage of her US stopovers is not helping, as it has been dominated by the rhetoric and dire threats emanating from Beijing. Just a quick sampling of top headlines about Tsai’s travels shows how prominent this theme has been in the Western media:
· Beijing warns of ‘severe impact’ on US-China relations as Taiwan’s leader lands in New York
· China threatens retaliation if Kevin McCarthy meets with Taiwan’s president
· Taiwan’s President Lands in the U.S. Amid Threats From China
At first glance, with this sort of framing, it is easy to see how this situation could be misinterpreted. To those who do not track US-Taiwan relations closely, Tsai’s transit of the United States may seem to be a rare activity, a high-stakes display of diplomatic brinksmanship amid heightened tensions, or even an intentional poke in the eye to Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
This framing serves Beijing’s interest in seeking to isolate Taiwan and portray both Taipei and Washington as provocateurs. The truth is, as US State Department officials have repeatedly stated, such transits are not unusual. This is the seventh time for Tsai herself.
To be clear, the United States and its friends around the world should not ignore threats from Beijing, implicit or explicit. Responsible leaders should not be complacent about the threat that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) poses to the international order as a strategic competitor and as a potential military aggressor. They should have no illusions about Xi’s willingness to use coercion and force to achieve his goals and to change the status quo. Listening, watching, and carefully assessing Xi’s “red lines” is also an important endeavor that may help to prevent a miscalculation that could lead to the most devastating war in human history. However, no country in the world should allow the near-constant stream of threats and warnings emitting from Beijing to lead it to believe that actions that are reasonable, routine, and restrained are instead risky, worrisome, and escalatory.
80. Ukraine Is No Distraction from Asia
John P. Walters, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2023
If you don’t believe me, ask Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president.
81. Why China Is So Bad at Doing Big Things
Minxin Pei, Bloomberg, April 2, 2023
The country has a reputation for accomplishing impossible tasks. But its strengths only work in certain cases.
82. U.S. Research Scientists Are Blind to China’s Threat
Paul Dabbar, Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023
U.S. public-health agencies jumped to an unwarranted conclusion in 2020 that Chinese scientists had done nothing deliberate or accidental to cause the Covid pandemic. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continued to defend engagement with China on pathogen research even as other parts of the U.S. government identified serious biosecurity risks from collaboration with Chinese labs.
All government research agencies have different cultures. U.S. public-health agencies have historically been rooted in “open science”—the view that scientific collaborations should be encouraged globally, and that geopolitics shouldn’t constrain cooperation between well-meaning researchers. Little thought is typically given to the national-security implications of joint research. Even when confronted with credible information about the risks of their research partnerships, the public-health agencies often ignore them. Some in the open-science agencies refuse even to acknowledge that research can have national-security implications. But the issue can’t be wished away.
83. The U.S. Needs an Economic War Council for China
Edward Fishman, Foreign policy, April 6, 2023
This week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California. It’s the second time in less than a year that Taiwan’s leader has sat down with a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—and it’s the second time Beijing is saber-rattling and threatening significant retaliation.
Tensions in Asia are nearing a high point. Across Washington, there is a sense that, left unchecked, Beijing is likely to try to seize Taiwan by force. There’s much debate about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s precise timeline as well as what domestic and foreign factors might shorten or extend it. What is clear, however, is that we are now entering a critical phase in efforts to deter Chinese military aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
A Chinese decision to launch an invasion of Taiwan would disrupt global trade, wreak havoc on supply chains, imperil a vibrant Asian democracy, exert extreme pressure on America’s closest allies, and almost definitely bring the United States and China into direct confrontation.
The most important U.S. policy goal must be to deter Beijing from making such a costly choice.
Military planning together with Taiwan and other regional partners is necessary but not sufficient to give deterrence the best chance to succeed. Economic contingency planning is essential, too. Unfortunately, the U.S. government doesn’t do this as a matter of course. There are barely enough officials working on sanctions and economic statecraft at the State Department and Treasury to administer the more than 30 sanctions programs currently in place, much less plan for future contingencies.
This urgently needs to change. Using lessons from the template it developed in advance of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Washington should rapidly start preparing to use economic statecraft to defend its allies in the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression.
84. Foreign business community in China beware
Peter Humphrey, Politico, April 5, 2023
Peter Humphrey is a former Reuters correspondent and spent over a decade as a fraud investigator in China for Western firms. He is currently an external research affiliate of Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a mentor to families of foreigners wrongfully detained in China.
The recent raid against American due diligence firm Mintz in Beijing, and the arrest of all five of its Chinese employees there, carries echoes of the past.
Reminiscent of the raid against my own due diligence firm ChinaWhys almost 10 years ago, which led to my wrongful imprisonment for two years on cooked-up charges of illegal information gathering, the latest raid has sent a chilling warning to all foreign businesses operating in China — gather information at your own peril; you can become a target at any time.
85. China is its own worst enemy
Daniel R. Depetris, The Interpreter, April 6, 2023
Xi’s belligerence prompts classic balancing, an alignment among smaller states that would alone struggle to compete.
On 3 April, the Philippines government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr formally unveiled four additional locations where US forces will be permitted to operate. Two of those locations, in Santa Ana and Lal-lo, are located in Cagayan, the Philippines’ northernmost province, approximately 440 kilometres from Taiwan’s southern coastline. The announcement occurred two months after Washington and Manila concluded negotiations on the new basing arrangements, which come on top of the five locations the US military already uses. Both sides lauded the deal as an example of a strong US-Philippines alliance. “It seems to me,” Marcos said after the talks concluded, “that the future of the Philippines, and for that matter the Asia-Pacific region, will always involve the United States”.
It’s tempting to congratulate the individual US and Philippine negotiators for this week’s news. But China and its President Xi Jinping really deserve much of the credit.
China’s conduct in the Indo-Pacific, more than the talent of the US diplomatic corps, Washington’s renewed focus on Asia, or Marcos’ attempt to make a name for himself, is the biggest motivator for the balancing behaviour that can be seen in the region. If it weren’t for Beijing’s incessant campaign to press its territorial claims on land and at sea, it’s highly unlikely new access arrangements for the US would have been discussed.
The Philippines is hardly the only country taking stock of its own geopolitical surroundings.
86. CCP or CPC: A China Watchers’ Rorschach
Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, China Media Project, March 30, 2023
The choice to use either CCP or CPC for China’s ruling Communist Party has become politically charged, but how did this distinction arise — and does it even matter?
On a cold January evening in 1931, He Yeduo (贺页朵) pledged his life to the Chinese Communist Party. The 45-year-old Jiangxi peasant was barely literate, but at the oath-swearing ceremony on a Red Army base in the Jinggang Mountains, the “cradle of the Chinese revolution,” he took out a piece of red cloth and began writing.
A quarter of the Chinese characters he wrote, professing his faith to the then-embattled and apparently doomed guerrilla forces in his native province, were misspelled. But at the top of the cloth, now regarded as a divine relic of the revolution, are three perfectly formed letters, the name of the organization he would die for: “C.C.P.”
Nine decades later, these three letters have become an unacceptable slur to many supporters of He’s beloved Chinese Communist Party.
Acronym Acrimony
“CCP”s fall from the sacred to the profane can be cataloged by an emerging discourse in pro-CCP online circles demanding foreign scholars, journalists, politicians, and everyday internet users defer to the more recent translation currently favored by the Party: the “Communist Party of China,” or “CPC.”
Nationalist tabloid the Global Times suggested in December 2022 that the word “Chinese” is a racist dog whistle. A 2021 article in Australia’s Canberra Times argued that the acronym CCP makes the “racist” and “ludicrous” suggestion that “all [Chinese] share the same political beliefs” — a suggestion that the Party itself, which routinely claims to enjoy the “wholehearted support of all Chinese people,” may not find so offensive, if it were being made at all. Across social media platforms, the CCP’s supporters have also taken to branding those who write “CCP” as anti-China, and thereby fair game for mockery or disregard.
Interestingly, however, Chinese-language accounts from state media and even the Party itself do not share the same venom over this — for some, anyway — emotionally charged debate. A post from the Communist Party’s official CPC News (www.cpcnews.cn) website describes the distinction between the two acronyms as such:
· Both CPC and CCP refer to the Communist Party of China — it’s merely that the officially recognized wording domestically is CPC… Some foreign media continue to use CCP […] but that doesn’t mean that every article using CCP is negative and every article using CPC is positive; whether it is negative or positive depends upon the specifics of its content.
The terminally-online acrimony over acronyms may be recent but the distinction itself, as the article explains, is not. According to official accounts, the Party made the move from CCP to CPC 80 years ago.
A Historic Reshuffle
“Overthrow the power of the capitalist class,” “eradicate capitalism,” and “join the Comintern”: these were part of the First Program passed by the Chinese Communist Party on the day it was founded in the French Concession of Shanghai on July 21, 1921.
The third item should hardly come as a surprise. Two agents of the Communist International, also known as the Third International, were present at the clandestine meeting and had been instrumental in organizing it. In the CCP’s early years, the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau had a profound — and welcome — influence on the Party. At the time, Communists the world over saw themselves as members of a single, global political movement with its central nervous system in Moscow.
Soviet guidance ensured that Leninism beat out more popular schools of leftist thinking such as anarchism. It also pushed the Communists into a tenuous United Front with the Kuomintang. But as time went on, patience with these European advisors wore thin, and a “native Communist” faction stressing the Sinification of Marxism and peasant revolution rose to prominence under Mao Zedong.
The Long March from the Jinggang Mountains to the dugouts of Yan’an was a key moment in this power struggle, with Mao’s guerrilla warfare strategy emerging triumphant from the Zunyi Conference. The influence of the Comintern agents and their Soviet-trained allies was still alive, but just barely. The death blow came in 1943, at the same moment as we are told the change from CCP to CPC occurred.
87. The false choice of confronting Russia or China
Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 4, 2023
88. Counter Chinese Bullying With an ‘Economic Article 5’
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Foreign Policy, March 28, 2023
89. The TikTok Debate Should Start with Reciprocity; Everything Else Is Secondary
David Moschella, ITIF, March 29, 2023
During the March 23 Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on TikTok, I kept waiting for someone to ask the most important and basic question: Why should the United States allow China to have open access to America’s vast social media market when U.S.-based firms can’t do the same within China?
90. Shipping Lines Are Getting Worried About Dependence on China
Elisabeth Braw, Foreign Policy, April 3, 2023
In February, shipping giant Maersk took possession of a new cargo vessel, one that can meet the International Maritime Organization’s requirements for zero-emission shipping. That’s the good news. The bad news? The Maersk Biscayne was built by the Jiangsu New Yangzi shipyard in China, where Maersk has several more ships waiting to be built. Shipping companies are discovering that they’re far too dependent on Chinese shipyards, at a time when the rapid downward spiral of China’s relationship with the West could have calamitous effects. But Western countries’ atrophying shipyards will take a lot of time, and a lot of money, to restore to anything close to what’s needed.
China makes a lot of ships. According to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, last year Chinese shipyards built 47.3 percent of ships made around the world, received 55.2 percent of new orders, and had 49 percent of holding orders. That’s a radical shift from the early 1900s, when British shipyards produced almost 60 percent of merchant ships.
In the early 1950s, Britain and Western Europe still dominated shipbuilding for the global market. But since then, and especially since the 1980s, globalization has taken its predictable course. By 2010, only about 3 percent of all ships were made in the U.K. and Europe; after China, South Korea and Japan built the most. Today, the EU reports it accounts for 6 percent of civilian shipbuilding, while the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reports that China, South Korea, and Japan together build 94 percent of the world’s civilian ships.
Until very recently, that was fine; indeed, it was desirable, because Chinese shipyards build (and repair) ships well and efficiently. Now, though, shipping companies are realizing that their dependence on Chinese ports may not be such a good bet after all. While they—like most other companies—don’t take a position on issues like the persecution of the Uyghurs, they’ve concluded that the risk of a war over Taiwan is increasing and that such a conflict could disrupt Chinese shipbuilding. Even though de-globalization is in full swing, any disruption to shipping companies’ ability to transport goods would pose serious problems to the shipping industry. To be sure, global commerce is beginning to de-globalize—but that simply means that more goods will travel between friendly countries, including distant ones, and fewer goods will travel between the West and China and the West and Russia.
91. Just like that, Biden’s Chinese spy balloon credibility goes pfffffft
Jim Geraghty, Washington Post, April 6, 2023
The overwhelming majority of the news world might be obsessed with what was going on in a New York City courthouse this week, but that circus overshadowed significant news the Biden administration might be glad was little-noticed. NBC News reported that the Chinese spy balloon — which similarly dominated news cycles as it drifted across the United States before finally being shot down off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4 — “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts.”
Two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official told NBC News that China had enough control over the balloon to steer it to make multiple passes over some sites, at times flying figure-eight formations, and the balloon transmitted the information back to Beijing in real time.
The intelligence gathered by equipment the balloon carried was characterized as “mostly from electronic signals” picked up from weapons systems and base personnel, rather than images.
92. Biden’s Hot Air About Spy Balloons
Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023
It turns out the blimp was transmitting information to Beijing in real time.
Remember when a Chinese spy balloon flew across the entire continental United States? The Administration is hoping the public has forgotten about the February fiasco, so it’s all the more important to note that the Biden narrative about this spectacle is losing altitude as more details emerge.
Press reports on Monday suggest that the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. air space near Alaska on Jan. 28 was able to collect intelligence on American military sites. The balloon was spotted flying in Montana, home to intercontinental ballistic-missile fields. U.S. officials told NBC News that the Beijing blimp could fly in figure-eight pirouettes, lingering over areas of interest. The balloon could pick up electronic signals and transmit information to Beijing in real-time, NBC reports.
This is a Sidewinder missile through the White House-Pentagon talking points at the time, namely that the balloon didn’t present a big intelligence risk and couldn’t suck up better information than Chinese satellites in low-earth orbit. Americans were supposed to believe that China would go through the trouble of building a global balloon flotilla, spotted all over Europe and Asia, for no spying benefit.
The Administration repeated this claim all over town. The Pentagon told reporters on Feb. 2 “that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added” over satellites. After President Biden ordered the balloon shot down off the U.S. East Coast, defense officials said on Feb. 4 that the action “further neutralized any intelligence value it could have produced, preventing it from returning” to Beijing.
The balloon carried a payload the size of a regional jet and the news leaks suggest it was capable of self-destructing on command. In other words, America may have been relying on the judgment of the Chinese Communist Party to avoid damage or loss of life on the ground while the balloon was flying over the U.S.
The Biden Team also played up their decision to wait to shoot down the balloon. It wasn’t American hesitation or weakness, they implied, but a chess move to study the Chinese balloon program. The U.S. military “took all necessary steps” to protect against the balloon’s “collection of sensitive information,” and the balloon’s trip was “of intelligence value” to the U.S., the Pentagon said on Feb. 4.
“We tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities, and we learned more about how it operates,” President Biden said on Feb. 16. “And because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection.” This is the same rhetorical jiu jitsu that tried to spin the chaotic U.S. surrender in Afghanistan as a triumph of logistics.
Recall that the Administration went public about the balloon only after civilians in Montana had spotted it. Our guess is that it kept quiet until then because it wanted to keep Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to China on course. Once the balloon story broke, Mr. Blinken canceled the trip, and U.S.-China relations have worsened since.
The latest stories make Mr. Biden’s decision to wait to shoot down the balloon look worse, and Congress has an obligation to figure out what American assets may have been compromised by the flyover. Lawmakers have been trying to ferret out a timeline of decisions, to little illumination. The Biden Team has also gone dark on the three “unidentified objects” the U.S. military shot down shortly after the balloon, perhaps because they overreacted and shot down hobby aircraft.
The Biden Administration may insist that the intelligence Beijing gleaned wasn’t that valuable, but voters can fairly conclude the President isn’t leveling with them. This has become a pattern with Team Biden, and it’s undermining the bipartisan support the President needs to conduct foreign policy in an increasingly dangerous world.
93. Xi Jinping’s idea of world order
Mark Leonard, European Council on Foreign Relations, April 5, 2023
The real battle for international supremacy today is not between democracies and autocracies, but between different models of global order, with China and the West each offering its own distinct account of “democracy”. The sooner that Western leaders recognise this, the better chance they will have of attracting new partners
94. Building a New American Arsenal
Julia van der Colff, War on the Rocks, March 31, 2023
Alarm bells are ringing at the Pentagon. The United States is rapidly depleting its munitions stockpiles to support the Ukrainian military. This support comes amid a serious backlog on the delivery of over $14 billion worth of arms shipments to Taiwan. The war in Ukraine has confirmed what was already widely known: America’s industrial base atrophied following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Despite efforts to reshore and bolster the manufacturing base, reaching the production capacity needed to replenish stockpiles and prepare for the possibility of full-scale conflict with China remains improbable. The current replacement times for critical inventories average over a staggering 13 years at current production capacity rates. Many of America’s advanced systems are produced on a very small number of assembly lines by an even smaller number of manufacturers. Production requires input from a shrinking labor force with knowledge of these systems, and supply chains are composed of rare earth metals, chips, and obscure mechanical parts from across the world that are very difficult to secure.
95. A Prisoner of China. An American Scandal.
Peter Savodnik, The Free Press, April 5, 2023
For 11 years, Mark Swidan has languished in a Chinese prison on charges no one believes. ‘If this were a politically connected person, he would have been out a long time ago…
96. When might US political support be unwelcome in Taiwan?
Alastair Iain Johnston, Tsai Chia-hung, and George Yin, Brookings, April 5, 2023
According to recent surveys we conducted in Taiwan, a majority of respondents believe that Pelosi’s visit was detrimental to Taiwan’s security. At first glance, this seems surprising. In a triangular relationship between a patron state (the United States) and its client (Taiwan) on the one hand, and a shared adversary (China) on the other, one might normally expect the client to welcome visible and credible signals of support.
However, even as its security environment appears to be deteriorating, a client might not welcome signals of support from the patron if the client considers those signals to be so provocative that they undermine its security. Typically, it is the patron that worries about entrapment by its client, while the client worries about abandonment by the patron. But our surveys suggest that a considerable portion of Taiwanese voters worry about entrapment by the United States. There are, of course, partisan differences concerning fears of entrapment. Supporters of the Kuomintang (KMT) and independents worry that the convergence of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and U.S. preferences toward strategic competition with China makes Taiwan less secure.
This concern about entrapment appears to have increased after Pelosi’s visit. We conducted a panel survey in Taiwan with two waves, one in September 2022 and a second in January 2023, to gauge the Taiwanese public’s reaction to Pelosi’s very public demonstration of support for Taiwan. In 2022, we asked respondents, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit and the PRC’s unprecedented military exercises around Taiwan, whether Taiwan faced a serious threat. In January 2023, we followed with a slightly different question about whether Pelosi’s travel had made Taiwan more or less secure.