Matt Turpin's China Articles - December 26, 2022
Friends,
It has been a year filled with important developments, but in my opinion the most significant has been the crystallization of the Sino-American cold war and the likely impacts that will have on the international system, the economic landscape, and global business arrangements. Even as leaders in Beijing and Washington publicly proclaim their desire to avoid one, I suspect that retroactively, we will come to think of 2022 as an important transition point from great power competition to cold war.
These are sobering thoughts, but the sooner we come to grips with the reality we face, the sooner we can think clearly about achieving a degree of strategic stability as both rivals work vigorously to advance their interests and simultaneously seek to avoid direct military conflict (in the nuclear age, waging a cold war is far preferable to a hot war).
As the implications of a cold war sink in, we will need to rebalance our economic, commercial, technological, and industrial arrangements in ways that are more resilient. This rebalancing will be costly, but of course, refusing to adapt to new geopolitical conditions will have far-reaching and more significant costs.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
Wei Jingsheng and Matt Pottinger, Politico, December 20, 2022
Pro-democracy activist Wei Jingsheng in conversation with Matt Pottinger on where China goes from here.
In 1978, activist Wei Jingsheng became China’s most prominent dissident when he posted a signed essay — or “big character poster,” as they are called in China — on a wall in Beijing, arguing eloquently for democracy. He’s been imprisoned twice for his blistering criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, spending some 18 years behind bars before relocating to the United States. Interestingly, he grew up near Xi Jinping, who would become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. Wei’s little brother knew Xi when they were both kids.
In November, I sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Wei in Washington, D.C. We discussed his indoctrination in, and then rejection of, communism as a young person, the future of political dissent in China and Xi’s reading habits, psychology, and greatest vulnerabilities, from the low-level bureaucrats who could stick gum into the party’s gears to the public’s lack of confidence in the regime.
Wei didn’t hedge on the threats to democracy growing around the globe. “If the U.S. continues to choose business interests and tolerate authoritarianism — be it Chinese Communist Party or Saudi Arabia — if they are tolerated for business profits, global democracy will inevitably wane,” he said.
Just a couple of weeks after our interview, mass demonstrations broke out against Xi’s Covid lockdowns following an apartment fire that killed 10 people; many blamed Covid restrictions for delaying the rescue effort. Protestors held up white, wordless sheets of paper as symbols of mourning and defiance of the CCP’s ruthless censorship campaign. Dubbed the “White Paper Revolution,” the protests have had a major impact, contributing to Xi’s decision to dismantle his “Zero Covid” guidelines — perhaps the biggest U-turn on a signature policy since he rose to power a decade ago.
Wei told me the movement has “far exceeded” the Democracy Wall Movement of which he was a leading figure in the late ’70s: “The White Paper Revolution severely undermined Xi Jinping’s confidence. After the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping had come to monopolize power at the center and was feeling smug. But the slogan for Xi Jinping to step down, put forward by the White Paper Revolution, is comparable to the question I raised at the Democracy Wall Movement: Do we want democracy or a new dictatorship?”
He added: “Now the impact and influence of the White Paper Revolution has far exceeded that of the Democracy Wall back then.”
The following interview is drawn from our November conversation. Lin Yang translated the interview into English and edited for length and clarity.
2. ByteDance finds employees obtained TikTok user data from two U.S. journalists
David Shepardson, Reuters, December 22, 2022
ByteDance, the Chinese-parent company of popular video app TikTok, said Thursday some employees this summer improperly accessed TikTok user data of two U.S. journalists and were no longer employed by the company, an email seen by Reuters shows.
ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of an unsuccessful effort to attempt to investigate leaks of company information and were aiming to identify potential connections between two journalists and company employees, said the email. The disclosure, reported earlier by the New York Times, could add to pressure TikTok is facing in Washington from lawmakers and the Biden administration over security concerns about U.S. user data.
COMMENT – I’m shocked to find out that gambling is going on here!
3. The U.S. Needs to Change the Way It Does Business with China
Robert Lighthizer, New York Times, December 18, 2022
In a recent speech, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested an incremental shift in how the United States approaches “competitiveness and the China challenge.” She recognized the serious threat from China, explaining that the United States “will continue to press China to address its nonmarket economic practices that result in an uneven playing field.” She noted, though, that “we are not seeking the decoupling of our economy from that of China’s.”
America’s China policy does need to change. The ruthless repression of its Covid-policy protesters is the latest proof of that, but the greater urgency is that the status quo has things moving to the disadvantages of the United States as well as to the benefit of China. An incremental shift is not enough.
In order to truly ensure that economic relations between the two countries continue to be beneficial to America, it is time to adopt an explicit policy of strategic decoupling of our economy from theirs — not a total decoupling, but one that should be done over time and in an organized way.
There are two fronts in any contest with China: the economic front and the national security front. They are not entirely separate. One affects the other. And for policymakers, that is the point.
We must prepare in both spheres — economic and military — because the best way to avoid a military crisis is to maintain our economic superiority.
4. Driving Force: Automotive Supply Chains and Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region
Laura Murphy, Kendyl Salcito, Yalkun Uluyol, Mia Rabkin, Sheffield Hallam University, December 2022
What parts of your car were made by Uyghur forced laborers?
If you have bought a car in the last five years, some of its parts were likely made by Uyghurs and others forced to work in China. The Chinese government has deliberately shifted raw materials mining and processing and auto parts manufacturing into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region), essentially making international supply chains captive to repressive programs and systematic forced labor.
In a six-month investigation undertaken by Laura T. Murphy, Kendyl Salcito, Yalkun Uluyol, Mia Rabkin, and a team of anonymous researchers, analysis of publicly available documents revealed massive and expanding links between western car brands and Uyghur abuses, in everything from the hood decals and car frames to engine casings, interiors and electronics.
We found 96 companies relevant to the auto industry mining, processing, or manufacturing in the Uyghur Region, including 38 with documented engagement in labor transfer programs. Over 100 international car and car parts manufacturers are at risk of sourcing from those companies.
Consumers do not want cars made through exploitation. But a combination of China's systematic repression of the Uyghurs and opaque supply chains has allowed the automotive industry to become reliant on abusive suppliers. Every major car brand – including Volkswagen, BMW, Honda, Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Stellantis brands (like Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep), Tesla and NIO - is at high risk of sourcing from companies linked to abuses in the Uyghur region. Some are sourcing electronics from firms that are employing trafficked Uyghurs in factories in other parts of China. Some are unwittingly sourcing metals from the Uyghur region, because metal trading companies own equity in Xinjiang smelters. Some of the greatest exposure comes from the steel and aluminum used to make car frames, axels, bodies, engine casings, wheels and brakes. The world’s largest steel and aluminum producers have shifted into the Uyghur Region under Chinese government subsidies and incentives. But tires, interiors, windshields, batteries and practically every other major part are also implicated.
The auto industry cannot wait another day to trace their supply chains back to the raw materials. To do anything short of full tracing would be an enormous legal, ethical, and reputational risk.
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KEY FINDINGS
This report describes the expansion of auto parts and materials production in the Uyghur Region, documents the abuses committed by some of the largest industry actors, and traces the products of those businesses to western car brands, through direct and indirect supply chain links.
Using publicly available sources, including corporate annual reports, websites, and publicity campaigns; government directives and state media, and customs records, we identified the following:
96 mining, processing, or manufacturing companies relevant to the automotive sector operating in the Uyghur Region, including at least 38 that have documented engagement in state-sponsored labor transfer programs.
over 40 automotive-sector manufacturers in China that are sourcing from the Uyghur Region or from companies that have accepted Uyghur labor transfers across China.
more than 50 international automotive parts or car manufacturers (or their joint ventures) that are sourcing directly from companies operating in the Uyghur Region or from companies that have accepted Uyghur labor transfers across China.
more than 100 international automotive parts or car manufacturers that have some exposure to forced Uyghur labor made goods.
Several major international auto manufacturers—including Volkswagen Audi Group, Honda, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes- Benz Group, Toyota, Tesla, Renault, NIO, and Stellantis Group had several supply chain exposures to the Uyghur Region.
COMMENT – I spent a good chunk of time going through this report and its’ annexes… quite disturbing what the research team has found using publicly available sources. It suggests that companies, like the one implicated here, are not particularly interested in examining the exposure of their own supply chains to forced labor and other human rights abuses.
Whether it is the lack of attention on the part of management and their boards or an intentional effort to prioritize low labor costs (or both), the effect is that years of prioritizing PRC manufacturing and supply chains has created a humanitarian disaster. It also gives lie to the rationalizations that many used for shifting manufacturing away from countries with high labor standards and protections to the PRC.
It is also sadly ironic that the Chinese Communist Party, which proports to practice “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” celebrates being the intellectual inheritor of Marxist ideals, and claims to protect the Chinese people from the predations of western capitalism essentially runs slave-labor colonies and factories.
5. China’s Threat to Global Democracy
Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, Journal of Democracy, December 2022
The Chinese Communist Party is deadly serious about its authoritarian designs, and it is bent on promoting them. It is time for the world’s democracies to get serious, too.
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The intertwining of ideology and geopolitics should not be surprising: At root, foreign policy is how a country seeks to make the world safe for its own way of life. Many analysts accept that U.S. foreign policy is driven by ideological impulses. Even hardcore international-relations “realists” concede the importance of ideology when they bemoan the grip that liberal passions have on Washington’s statecraft. Curiously, though, there has been more resistance to the idea that there may be an ideological component to the grand strategy of America’s chief rival—the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing is not making any “grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy,” writes one leading Sinologist. Its foreign policy is based on “pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests.” Realists say that China plays Realpolitik while America ignores John Quincy Adams’s 1821 advice to go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Other analysts suggest that it is a distraction or even a “delusion” to emphasize the ideological aspects of Sino-American rivalry at the expense of Beijing’s military and economic challenge.
In fact, the reverse is true: To grasp the Chinese challenge, we must grasp its ideological dimensions. If Woodrow Wilson and his followers wanted to make the world safe for democracy, the PRC’s rulers want to do the same for autocracy. For them, autocracy is not simply a means of political control or a ticket to self-enrichment, but a set of deeply held ideas about the proper relationship between rulers and the masses. In his October 2022 keynote speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—during which he had himself installed for a third term as top leader, while on the final day having his predecessor Hu Jintao unceremoniously escorted out of the room—Xi Jinping insisted that “constantly writing a new chapter in the Sinicization of Marxism is the solemn historical responsibility of contemporary Chinese communists,” and made it clear that “the authority of the Party Central Committee” will continue to be at “the core of leadership in controlling the overall situation.” Everything in the speech hinges on the CCP remaining in sole charge of “developing socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
This belief in the superiority of an autocratic Chinese model coexists with deep insecurity: The PRC is a brutally illiberal regime in a world led by a liberal hegemon, a circumstance from which the CCP draws a sense of pervasive danger and a strong desire to refashion the world order so that the PRC’s particular form of government is not just protected but privileged. That is why a powerful but anxious Chinese regime is now engaged in an aggressive effort to make the world safe for autocracy and to corrupt and destabilize democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy, but what the scholar Jason Brownlee calls “democracy prevention” is very much at the heart of Chinese strategy today.
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And then there is the ideological imperative. A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if a liberal-democratic government held sway in Beijing. That China is ruled by autocrats committed to ruthlessly suppressing liberalism at home turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”
This is no exaggeration. The infamous Document Number 9, a political directive issued almost a decade ago at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP sees a liberal world order as inherently threatening. “Because China and the United States have longstanding conflicts over their different ideologies, social systems, and foreign policies,” a Chinese military document stated in the 1990s, “it will prove impossible to fundamentally improve Sino-U.S. relations.” For decades, in fact, Chinese officials have alleged that Washington has been waging a deliberate, well-orchestrated campaign—a “smokeless World War III,” in Deng Xiaoping’s words—to weaken and fatally subvert the CCP. Deng blamed the United States for being behind the “so-called democrats” who dared to protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Even when the United States has engaged China, the latter’s leaders have detected a plot to topple their regime. In 1998, Deng’s successor Jiang Zemin warned his colleagues that whether the United States was taking a stance of “containment” or “engagement” toward the PRC, Washington’s real goal was to further a “political plot” to “divide our country” and “change our country’s socialist system.” After Jiang came Hu Jintao, who spoke to his Foreign Ministry in 2003 of the “grim reality that Western hostile forces are still implementing Westernization and splittist political designs on China.”
Chinese leaders are wrong if they think that the United States is actively seeking to overthrow the CCP regime. They are not wrong, however, to think that a world rooted in liberal values is one in which their own rule must be perpetually precarious. In an international system built on respect for human rights and a preference for democracy, governments that murder their own citizens risk censure, ostracism, and punishment—as happened to Beijing after Tiananmen Square in 1989 and is happening again today in response to the brutalization of the Uyghur minority. An international system in which democracies are strong, vibrant, and globally engaged is one in which subversive tendencies will continually tempt states ruled by tyrants: In 1989, Tiananmen Square protesters erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, while those in Hong Kong thirty years later publicly waved American flags and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In what it is and what it does, a hegemonic democracy threatens the Chinese regime.
The resulting insecurity has powerful implications for Beijing’s statecraft. Chinese leaders feel a compulsion to make international norms and institutions friendlier to illiberal rule. They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from the PRC’s borders: In Beijing’s mind, writes Timothy Heath, a “harmonious Asia” would feature a “political order shaped by Chinese political principles.” The rulers in Beijing feel that they must wrest international authority away from a democratic superpower with a long history of bringing autocracies to ruin. And as an authoritarian China becomes powerful, it inevitably looks to strengthen the forces of illiberalism—and to weaken those of democracy—as a way to enhance its influence and bolster its own model. China is doing so, moreover, at a time when the world, and its prevailing distribution of ideological power, presents the CCP with both keen anxieties and tantalizing opportunities.
6. Germany’s Unlearned Lessons: Berlin Must Reduce Its Dependence Not Just on Russia but on China, Too
Liana Fix and Thorsten Benner, Foreign Affairs, December 15, 2022
When Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s federal president and former foreign minister, received the Kissinger Prize in November 2022, he gave a candid assessment of his country’s (and his own) foreign policy failures. Since the world has changed, he said, “we must cast off old ways of thinking and old hopes,” including the idea that “economic exchange will bring about political convergence.” In the future, Steinmeier declared, Berlin must learn from the past and “reduce one-sided dependencies” not just on Russia but also on China.
As the war in Ukraine rages on, few German politicians would take issue with the assertion that Berlin must reduce its energy dependence on Moscow. In fact, the German government has done so. And rhetorically, at least, German leaders are promising to ease the country’s economic dependence on China, as well. “As China changes, the way we deal with China must change, too,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz argued in an op-ed for Politico in November. In a piece for Foreign Affairs magazine, he also argued for “a new strategic culture” as part of Germany’s Zeitenwende, or tectonic shift, in foreign policy, which he announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So far, however, Scholz has been reluctant to upset the status quo with Beijing—not least because Russia’s war and high energy prices have taken a toll on the German economy. Large German companies that are heavily dependent on China’s market are keen to expand their operations instead of cutting back.
But because its economic ties to China are so deep and complex—far more so than is the case with Russia—Berlin must move forcefully to reduce dependence on Beijing. In particular, the risk of a war over Taiwan leaves Germany dangerously exposed to economic coercion and shocks.
This coming February, the German government will publish its first-ever national security strategy. Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this is Berlin’s chance to demonstrate that it has drawn the right lessons from the catastrophic failure of its past approach toward Russia. It is time for Germany to lay out a plan to reduce dependence on China by diversifying trade and investment ties and selectively decoupling from China on critical technologies.
HISTORY LESSONS
The United States and Germany drew opposite lessons from the end of the Cold War. The United States emerged from the confrontation convinced that President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach and an accelerated arms race forced the Soviet Union into negotiations. Germany came out of the Cold War convinced that engagement and Chancellor Willy Brandt’s “change through rapprochement” (later dubbed “change through trade”) had been the winning formula, overcoming the East-West divide through political and economic cooperation, which resulted in positive domestic change in the Soviet bloc.
The idea of “change through trade” survived the end of the Cold War and remained an influential concept in Bonn and Berlin, Germany’s capital before and after German reunification. For a generation of German policymakers, it was a framework that conveniently entwined the engagement of nondemocracies such as China and Russia in pursuit of economic profits with the possibility of transforming those countries into democracies. In 2006, while serving as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign minister, Steinmeier introduced the concept of “change through interlocking”: in essence, by forging economic cooperation through trade and energy partnerships, Berlin would make Russia’s interdependence with Europe “irreversible,” according to a German foreign ministry policy paper. As a result, Moscow would refrain from misbehavior because the cost would be too high. Russia, after all, depended on revenue and technology from Germany and other European countries even more than Germany and its neighbors depended on Russian gas and oil.
The limits to the theory that economic interdependence would deter the Kremlin from breaking international norms became quickly apparent. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. In 2014, it annexed Crimea. In the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, German policymakers thought the economic costs would be too high for Russia to attempt a full-scale attack on Ukraine and to overthrow the government in Kyiv. This was, of course, a fatal miscalculation, underestimating the ideological radicalization of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
COMMENT – Yet another great piece from my friend, Thorsten Benner. I think the point he and Liana Fix make about the different lessons learned at the end of the Cold War is critical.
Thorsten is one of several important voices calling on Berlin to take the challenges posed by the PRC more seriously.
Iris Deng, South China Morning Post, December 21, 2022
Huawei’s inventory of smartphone chips designed by semiconductor unit HiSilicon reached zero in the third quarter, according to a Counterpoint report
The Chinese tech giant has struggled to get advanced new chips made by major semiconductor foundries because of tightened US restrictions
Huawei Technologies Co has finally run out of in-house-designed semiconductors for its smartphones after US trade sanctions effectively cut the company’s access to advanced new chips, according to a report by Counterpoint Research.
Shenzhen-based Huawei, which briefly surpassed Samsung Electronics to lead global smartphone shipments in early 2020, has struggled to get new in-house-designed integrated circuits (ICs) manufactured by a major chip foundry after Washington tightened trade restrictions in August 2020, covering the firm’s access to semiconductors developed or produced using US technology, from anywhere.
Privately-held Huawei and chip design arm HiSilicon were added to the US government’s trade blacklist, known as the Entity List, in 2019. At the time, HiSilicon said it had a backup plan to ensure the group’s survival, while research firms Haitong and Canalys indicated that Huawei had been stockpiling critical US components for almost a year.
“Based on our checks and sell-through data, Huawei has finished its inventory of HiSilicon chipsets,” Counterpoint said in its latest report on global smartphone application processor market share.
HiSilicon’s share of the global smartphone application market this year reached zero in the third quarter, down from 0.4 per cent in the previous quarter and 3 per cent in the second quarter of last year.
The report added that it was “not possible” for Huawei to obtain advanced new ICs from major contract chip makers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co or Samsung, because of the tightened US restrictions.
Huawei did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Wednesday.
As of the third quarter, the global market for smartphone system-on-a-chip shipments was led by MediaTek, Qualcomm and Apple, according to the Counterpoint report.
COMMENT – What a wonderful Christmas present!
8. VIDEO – China's official COVID-19 numbers 'absurdly misleading'
Fabian Kretschmer, Deutsche Welle, December 17, 2022
"Its really hard to assess the situation on the ground because of the lack of transparent data.”
9. China's COVID Spike Not Due to Lifting of Restrictions, WHO Director says
Emma Farge, Reuters, December 15, 2022
COVID-19 infections were exploding in China well before the government's decision to abandon its strict "zero-COVID" policy, a World Health Organization director said on Wednesday, quashing suggestions that the sudden reversal caused a spike in cases.
The comments by the WHO's emergencies director Mike Ryan came as he warned of the need to ramp up vaccinations in the world's No. 2 economy.
Speaking at a briefing with media, he said the virus was spreading "intensively" in the nation long before the lifting of restrictions.
"There's a narrative at the moment that China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden the disease is out of control," he said.
"The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore."
Beijing started pivoting away from its signature "zero-COVID" policy this month after protests against the economically damaging curbs championed by President Xi Jinping.
COMMENT – I think this observation by Mike Ryan (WHO’s Emergencies Director) is incredibly important… like many of us, I had assumed that the policy decision to abandon zero-COVID policies CAUSED the explosion of infections. Ryan points out that the explosion of infections PROCEEDED the policy reversal. In essence, zero-COVID policies were no longer effective in preventing the spread of the latest and most transmissible form of the virus.
AUTHORITARIANISM
10. A Putin ally meets with China’s top leader, highlighting ties as Russia’s isolation grows.
Victoria Kim and Anton Troianovski, New York Times, December 21, 2022
China has remained a significant, if largely silent, counterweight to the international censure of Russia.
A close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Wednesday, a sign of the countries’ alignment amid Russia’s deepening international isolation.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and prime minister, held a previously unannounced meeting with Mr. Xi in Beijing as Chinese and Russian naval ships began weeklong joint exercises in the East China Sea.
China has remained a significant, if largely silent, counterweight to the international censure of Mr. Putin. Russia has backed China’s claim over the island democracy of Taiwan, and trade between the two countries has increased as the United States and Europe have imposed sanctions and sought to choke off Russia’s economy.
11. Chinese business confidence falls to lowest in almost a decade on COVID
Liangping Gao, Reuters, December 18, 2022
China's business confidence fell to its lowest since January 2013, a survey by World Economics showed on Monday, reflecting the impact of surging COVID-19 cases on economic activity with the abrupt lifting of many pandemic control measures.
The index fell to 48.1 in December from 51.8 in November, showed the World Economics' survey of sales managers at over 2,300 companies conducted Dec. 1-16. The index was the lowest since the survey began in 2013.
12. China hospital data absent from WHO's latest COVID reports, raising concern
Emma Farge and Bernard Orr, Reuters, December 22, 2022
The World Health Organization has received no data from China on new COVID-19 hospitalisations since Beijing lifted its zero-COVID policy, prompting some health experts to question whether it might be hiding information on the extent of its outbreak.
13. Blinken cites need for all countries including China to share COVID information
Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters, December 22, 2022
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday emphasized the need for all countries, including China, to share information on their experiences with COVID-19, at a time when some experts have started raising questions about Beijing's official hospitalization and casualty figures.
Speaking at a news conference at the State Department, Blinken said Washington was ready to help all countries on COVID, but said Beijing has not asked for help from the United States.
14. Without a Covid Narrative, China’s Censors Are Not Sure What to Do
John Liu and Paul Mozur, New York Times, December 22, 2022
The end of “zero Covid” has undermined years of official propaganda, and the vast censorship system is struggling to catch up.
Since China dropped its strict “zero Covid” policy, a joke has been making the rounds on social media about the sudden shift.
Three men who don’t know each other sit in a prison cell. Each explains why he was arrested:
“I opposed Covid testing.”
“I supported Covid testing.”
“I conducted Covid testing.”
The joke has yet to be broadly censored. It is a sign of just how much the Chinese Communist Party, usually a master of messaging, is struggling to come up with a coherent explanation for the policy shift and a clear directive for what to do with an explosion of cases now threatening the country’s medical resources.
So dizzying was the switch that even two weeks later, the state’s powerful propaganda and censorship system has yet to catch up to the flood of confusion and criticism seeping through the country’s typically tight internet controls.
Apart from laying out the new Covid rules, Chinese official media still hasn’t offered much guidance from top leaders on the situation. The country’s hundreds of thousands of internet censors, experts say, haven’t gotten guidance on what to allow and what to delete — and may be confused, given that what was blocked a month ago is now official policy. Many Chinese have been asking why they put up with years of harsh lockdowns and travel restrictions, only for the leadership to abandon them and allow the virus to spread unabated.
For China’s leadership, maintaining public trust hinges, in part, on a difficult task: finding a narrative that makes sense of the reversal.
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Thus far, propagandists have hewed to past norms in handling the crisis. They have avoided excessive mentions of the policy shift, instead emphasizing social stability. State media has sympathetically called the situation “stressful” but otherwise portrayed it as a well-orchestrated decision to overcome a virus that is no longer as deadly as it once was.
COMMENT – This is a bit like Winston Smith waking up one day to hear that Oceania’s perpetual enemies, Eurasia and Eastasia, are now Oceania’s closest allies.
15. China’s Relations with Russia, India, and Europe
Celia Belin, James Goldgeier, Tanvi Madan, and Angela Stent, Brookings, December 20, 2022
The Russia-Ukraine war has generated or accelerated negative trends in China’s relations with Russia, India, and Europe. By fall 2022, the growing limitations in China’s relationships with all three were evident. Russia is now a less reliable partner given the uncertainties over the longevity of President Vladimir Putin’s regime; China’s rhetorical support of Moscow’s justifications for its brutal invasion of Ukraine has heightened European concerns about Chinese influence on the continent; and India’s attempts to balance its ties with Russia and the West have not created new openings for Beijing.
16. Police seize on COVID-19 tech to expand global surveillance
Garance Burke, Josef Federman, Huizhong Wu, Krutika Pathi, and Rod Mcguirk, Associated Press, December 21, 2022
17. Europe’s Great Catch-Up on China
Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy, December 20, 2022
With the Ukraine war as a wake-up call, Europe is gradually coming to grips with the China threat.
The United States and European Union have struggled for years to see eye to eye on China, but that is slowly, if unevenly, changing as more European leaders raise alarm bells about the West’s overreliance on Chinese technologies and investments and a brewing geopolitically rivalry with Beijing.
For several years, EU leaders have chafed at the hawkish stance that has settled into most of Washington when it comes to Beijing and quietly rolled their eyes at some of the most hardline anti-China lawmakers in the United States who have advocated for a full economic decoupling from Beijing. Now the China hawks are starting to gain more traction in Brussels and other European capitals, spurred by Beijing’s coercive economic practices, the threats of spyware embedded in its technology, and the grim new feeling of vulnerability to geopolitical tensions brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In Western Europe, the Netherlands is mulling a plan to join U.S. export restrictions on Chinese semiconductors, Germany has blocked a series of high-profile Chinese tech investments, and Belgium is scrutinizing Chinese investments in its port infrastructure. In the east, smaller EU powers are strengthening ties with Taiwan despite sharp backlash from Beijing, and the Baltic countries have bailed on China’s efforts to make trade inroads in the region.
18. Putin oversees launch of Siberian gas field feeding pipeline to China
Reuters, December 21, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over the launch of a major new Siberian gas field on Wednesday to help drive a planned surge in supply to China.
The Kovykta gas field will feed into the Power of Siberia pipeline carrying Russian gas to China. With recoverable reserves of 1.8 trillion cubic metres, it is the largest in eastern Russia.
The launch is part of Russia's strategy to shift gas exports to the east as the European Union cuts reliance on Russian energy in response to the war in Ukraine.
19. Fleeing China's Covid lockdowns for the US - through a Central American jungle
Mengyu Dong, BBC, December 21, 2022
China may be easing some of its severe anti-Covid restrictions but its draconian pandemic policies have driven many citizens to seek a better future elsewhere - whatever the risks in getting there.
Three days into their trek through a Central American rainforest, some 9,300 miles (15,000 kilometres) away from home, the Sun family threw away their camping gear to lighten the load, thinking they would be out by nightfall.
Instead, they were stranded in the jungle by heavy rain.
That night, Sun Jincai, his wife and three children - aged six, nine and 11- squeezed into a small tent they found on the trail, likely discarded by other migrants, like themselves, while trying their best to ignore the cold water seeping through the thin fabric.
"Luckily none of us got sick," said Mr Sun.
It was just one of many perilous steps on their journey from China to the US.
Mr Sun, 34, his wife and youngest child used to spend the better part of a year living on the coast of China, where jobs were abundant.
The other two children lived with their grandparents about 400 miles away in Jiangxi, a landlocked province in China's east, as it was hard to enrol in school outside their hometown.
But as the Chinese economy lost momentum amid tough Covid-19 restrictions and a growing tide of authoritarianism gripped the country, Mr Sun began searching for ways for the family to leave the country together.
"China is going backwards," said Mr Sun. "My wife and I want a better future for the kids."
Briana Boland and Ethan Cramer-Flood, CSIS, December 16, 2022
Is China’s state capitalist system a benefit or a liability for Chinese companies? This case study focuses on two of China’s most prominent tech companies, Huawei and Alibaba, for insight into how the “CCP Inc.” ecosystem of Chinese party-state actors can both support and constrain private sector firms.
In Malaysia, both companies rapidly expanded their footprints throughout the 2010s, becoming deeply integrated in national telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and e-commerce infrastructure—and opening doors for other Chinese companies in Malaysia’s tech sector along the way.
In the past few years, however, Huawei and Alibaba have both faced major hurdles due to their integration in the CCP Inc. state capitalist system. Political pushback against Huawei is damaging its ability to expand internationally, while a government crackdown on China’s own tech sector is challenging Alibaba’s growth prospects.
ENVIRONMENTAL HARMS
21. The world is burning more coal than ever before, new report shows
Ivana Kottasova, CNN, December 16, 2022
22. Gulf of Guinea Countries Agree to Stop Illegal Chinese Fishing
Henry Wilkins, Voice of America, December 9, 2022
Chinese boats are decimating West Africa's fish stocks and fishing communities in the Gulf of Guinea, say environmental groups.
The Institute for Security Studies, a South African think tank, said the communities could be losing more than $2 billion each year to illegal fishing, mainly from Chinese-owned boats.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE AND COERCION
23. CCP Weapons of Mass Persuasion
Jacqueline Deal and Eleanor Harvey, Andrew W. Marshall Foundation, December 2022
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) approach to the United States today reflects the party’s formative competitive experiences a century ago. Starting in the 1920s, the CCP vied with the Nationalist Party (KMT) for control over China, but the CCP was also nominally allied with the KMT in the First United Front, 1924–27. In that context, the Communists waged political warfare against the KMT at the elite and the grassroots level.
Initially, the CCP’s aim was to coopt the KMT. When cooption failed, the Communists turned to subversion before attacking the Nationalists kinetically. In recent decades, the CCP has used this united-front template against the United States, thanks partly to a foundation of U.S.-CCP cooperation laid during the Sino-Japanese War and reinforced in the late Cold War.
This report accordingly traces the CCP’s repertoire for strategic competition to the Chinese Civil War (Part 1). It then analyzes the application of this toolkit to the United States across a series of interactions beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through the present (Part 2). The report concludes with two alternative visions of how the coming decades could unfold, hinging upon Washington’s ability to counter Beijing’s ongoing subversion campaign (Part 3).
24. How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
Alex W. Palmer, New York Times magazine, December 20, 2022
If TikTok’s popularity has thus far provided it some insulation against government action, the app’s time may be running out. In November, Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the F.C.C., said it should be banned outright. Senator Mark Warner, co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said of a ban, “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.” Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told Congress he was “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the United States. Earlier this month, Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation that would effectively prevent TikTok from operating in the United States by banning all apps “subject to substantial influence” by China, Russia and other foreign adversaries.
25. TikTok Owner Now Aiming to Expand into U.S. Enterprise Software Market
Juro Osawa and Shai Oster, The Information, December 20, 2022
If some American politicians and regulators had their way, TikTok would be banned in the U.S. Executives at TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, though, appear so unconcerned by the threat that they’re trying to expand into a new business in the U.S.—selling software for businesses.
ByteDance is stepping up its hiring in the U.S. for its enterprise software business, Lark, whose offerings include productivity software similar to Google Docs and Sheets as well as tools for Slack-like work messaging, videoconferencing, project management and human resources management. Lark’s software is designed to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google as well as more specialized competitors like Slack, Asana, Workday and Zoom.
26. TikTok’s Efforts to Distance Itself From Chinese Parent Stumble Over Talent
Raffaele Huang, Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2022
Short-video app is trying to reduce ties with ByteDance but is still hiring staff in China for key functions.
TikTok has accelerated efforts to move workers away from China in an attempt to distance itself from its Chinese parent, but the short-video app still counts on local talent to handle some key functions and continues to recruit there.
TikTok and its parent ByteDance Ltd. have moved key executives to Singapore and the U.S., ramped up hiring of staff and engineers outside of China, and reorganized teams internally from the rest of the Chinese company’s suite of apps, part of efforts to separate the companies under scrutiny from Washington.
Still, some engineers working on TikTok’s algorithms remain based in China, people familiar with the matter said. Beijing-based ByteDance continues to recruit people in the country to work on TikTok.
The parent is advertising jobs in China to work on various TikTok features, such as private messaging, live-streaming and its marketplace functions. It is also hiring for roles based there focusing on international expansion, including searching for senior algorithm engineers to develop its user search interface.
27. Taiwan investigates TikTok for suspected illegal operations
Ben Blanchard, Reuters, December 19, 2022
Taiwan's government has opened a probe into Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok on suspicion of illegally operating a subsidiary on the island, though the company's owner denied the accusation.
28. Mixed report card: China’s influence at the United Nations
Courtney J. Fung and Shing-hon Lam, Lowy Institute, December 18, 2022
Key Findings
After an initial period of diplomatic ambivalence at the United Nations, China now broadly seeks to reform the UN system from within through its “shared future” global governance vision — an agenda that downplays universal values in favour of championing the primacy of states.
To that end, China uses existing UN structures and rules, no longer under-utilising the power afforded to it within the UN system, including as a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council.
However, China’s contributions do not always translate into successful influence at the United Nations. Its efforts across various domains — whether in terms of funding, staffing, voting alignment, or drafting of UN language — often yield mixed results.
29. Japan looks into claim that China running covert police stations
Kantaro Komiya, Reuters, December 22, 2022
The government in Tokyo is investigating a report that China has set up covert police stations inside Japan, amid similar checks by authorities in European countries, the United States and Canada.
Safeguard Defenders, an Asia-focused rights group based in Spain, has published two reports since September alleging that Chinese authorities have established 102 overseas police stations in 53 countries, including Japan.
30. After AIG, Greenbergs Build a $6 Billion Fortune and Push into China
Blake Schmidt, Bloomberg, December 22, 2022
Evan Greenberg is stepping into his father’s shoes as the family’s next China hand, as made clear by well wishes from Xi Jinping.
COMMENT – It is worth watching how Hank Greenberg, and his son Evan Greenberg, have pursued for years a mission of advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s interests within American business circles and the foreign policy community.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
31. Decolonizing the Discussion of Uyghurs: Recommendations for Journalists and Researchers
Mustafa Aksu, Elise Anderson, and Henryk Szadziewski, Uyghur Human Rights Project, December 21, 2022
At the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022, the Organizing Committee chose two athletes to deliver the ceremonial flame. One of them was Uyghur. Media across the globe reported the athlete’s name as Dinigeer Yilamujiang, much to the dismay of Uyghurs and researchers familiar with the Uyghur language. Dinigeer Yilamujiang is a Pinyin (Latinized standard Mandarin Chinese) rendering of the Uyghur name Dilnigar Ilhamjan. Among the publications using the Pinyin version were leading media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
The issue over names is consequential. The overseas media’s use of Dilnigar’s name in Pinyin was not intended to cause offense; however, the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), given the increased prominence and frequency of writing on Uyghurs, requests journalists, academics, as well as governmental and non-governmental researchers to use Uyghur versions of names.
This briefing outlines UHRP’s own guide to rendering the Uyghur language into Latin script, reporting Uyghur personal names, and writing Uyghur versions of geographical locations. This guide is not intended to exclude other Uyghur-directed interpretations; nevertheless, it is intended to respond to the Chinese government’s well-documented erasure of Uyghur language use in public life.
Furthermore, this briefing is also a call to decolonize language in discussions of Uyghurs. The Chinese government has explicitly linked use of the regional toponym of “East Turkistan” to extremism. UHRP recommends researchers reconsider using the term “Xinjiang,” meaning “new frontier” and to refer to the region with an alternative toponym. “Xinjiang” reinforces the colonization of Uyghurs. In addition to “Uyghur Region,” many Uyghurs also refer to their homeland as “East Turkistan.” Use of Uyghur and Turkic versions for geographical locations recognizes the language and owners of the land before the imposition of the Chinese Communist Party administration in 1949. For example, regular use of the Chinese name “Hami” for the city of “Qumul” has similar colonial associations for Uyghurs. In this briefing, UHRP does nevertheless recommend use of toponyms that have become established in English language reporting on East Turkistan, including “Kashgar,” for example.
32. As China opens up, the woman who captured the horrors of Wuhan is still paying the price
Matthew Campbell, Times of London, December 17, 2022
Fang Fang has been made to suffer for the unflinching pandemic diaries that were read by millions.
When the sickness began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020, the most reliable source of information about the suffering and chaos it caused was Fang Fang, a novelist.
Her online chronicle of life, death and bureaucratic bungling at ground zero of the pandemic was read by millions around China before being published as a book in the West. It made her a target for the regime — and today she is counting the cost, a virtual prisoner in her home, her books in effect banned.
“I am not permitted to participate in any social activities, I am not permitted to publish any essays, have any of my new work published, or my old work reprinted,” she said in an interview.
33. Wang Zang and Wang Li: Marry a Poet and Go to Jail
Wang Zhipeng, Bitter Winter, December 21, 2022
The poet was sentenced for protesting against the repression of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kong democrats, and Falun Gong practitioners. His wife just for being his wife.
34. Forced Uyghur Labor Probably Helped Build Your Car
Cullen Hendrix, Foreign Policy, December 21, 2022
The grave human rights conditions in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where Uyghur Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities are subjected to internment and forced labor, among other abuses, demand international response. So far, the centerpiece of the U.S. response has been the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), signed into law by President Joe Biden in December 2021. The law is intended to prevent U.S. consumers from being complicit in these abuses through the purchase of Chinese goods made with forced labor. In doing so, it encourages global firms to take Xinjiang out of their supply chains in order to maintain access to U.S. markets.
At the time, it was believed that the forced labor problems were concentrated in a few key industries: cotton, polysilicon that underpins solar arrays, and tomatoes. Issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency’s Operational Guidance for Importers—the quick start guide, if you will, for complying with the UFLPA—mentions only those three products by name.
…
For U.S. automakers, the report’s implications are superficially positive—seemingly encouraging consumers to “Buy American”—but actually harrowing. As recently as 2020, the U.S. auto industry was the most reliant on Chinese parts and accessories of major producing countries, with Chinese content in U.S.-built vehicles growing steadily in the last 15 years. Unfortunately, that dependence is most acute in areas that are vital to achieving the emissions cuts necessary to mitigate climate change, such as EV battery production. Assuaging concerns about forced labor would require U.S. and foreign automakers to establish the legality and legitimacy of their supply chains in perhaps the most challenging environment on Earth.
The situation in Xinjiang is appalling, and the U.S. government is right to do what it can to keep U.S. consumers from aiding and abetting abuses there and throughout China. Up until now, doing the right thing was costly but also consistent with broader U.S. economic and security goals: kick-starting U.S. solar production and protecting a beleaguered cotton industry.
The inconvenient truth, however, appears to be that Xinjiang is more deeply enmeshed in global supply chains than was realized when the current enforcement regime was established. And that will affect the UFLPA’s enforceability, both practically and politically. If the United States is serious about enforcing the ULFPA, it will need to ramp up CBP resources dedicated to the task. If it is not, it will clarify the costs the United States is willing to bear to end—or at least not be complicit in—human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
35. US-bound exports from China’s Xinjiang drop 64 per cent, monthly trade data shows
Ji Siqi, South China Morning Post, December 21, 2022
36. Beijing human rights activist immobilized by COVID-19 app
Huizhong Wu, Associated Press, December 20, 2022
Wang Yu, hailed by the U.S. as an International Woman of Courage, has already been arrested, imprisoned and harassed by the Chinese Communist Party for her work as a human rights lawyer representing activists, Uyghur scholars and Falun Gong practitioners. This year, her movements within her home country also have been restricted by a color-coded app on her phone that’s supposed to protect people from COVID-19.
The health codes have become ubiquitous in China as the country has struggled to contain the novel coronavirus, pushing the public to a breaking point that erupted in protests late last month. The government announced last week it would discontinue the national health code, but cities and provinces have their own versions, which have been more dominant. In Beijing last week, restaurants, offices, hotels and gyms were still requiring local codes to enter.
Cleo Li-Schwartz, Grid, December 20, 2022
Filmmaking in China is an increasingly difficult business. A small group of artists is trying to get around the rules.
INDUSTRIAL POLICIES AND ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE
38. China threatens Volkswagen’s export miracle
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph, December 18, 2022
German carmaker feels the effects of Beijing’s desires to have its own companies on top.
COMMENT – How can any of this be a surprise to Volkswagen’s management, board of directors, or shareholders?
39. U.S. Senate Finance Committee asks GM, Tesla, Toyota about Chinese supply chain
David Shepardson, Reuters, December 22, 2022
The U.S. Senate Finance Committee asked eight major automakers, including General Motors, Tesla, Ford Motor, and Honda Motor, to answer questions about their Chinese supply chains, according to letters made public on Thursday.
In June, a U.S. law took effect banning the import of forced-labor goods from Xinjiang, in a pushback against Beijing's treatment of China's Uyghur Muslim minority, which Washington has labeled genocide.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden wrote the chief executives of major automakers inquiring about Chinese supply chain issues, saying "it is vital that automakers scrutinize their relationships with all suppliers linked to Xinjiang."
Beijing denies abuses in Xinjiang, but says it had established "vocational training centers" to curb terrorism, separatism and religious radicalism.
The letters, which were also sent to Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Chrysler parent Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz, said "unless due diligence confirms that components are not linked to forced labor, automakers cannot and should not sell cars in the United States that include components mined or produced in Xinjiang."
Wyden wants to know whether the automakers have ever canceled or curtailed use of any supplier "because of its use of raw materials, mining, processing, or parts manufacturing linked to Xinjiang?"
He cited a new report released earlier this month by researchers at Britain's Sheffield Hallam University on the auto industry's use of steel, aluminum, copper, batteries, electronics and other components produced in Xinjiang.
"Between raw materials mining/processing and auto parts manufacturing, we found that practically every part of the car would require heightened scrutiny to ensure that it was free of Uyghur forced labor," the report said.
GM said Thursday it actively monitors its global supply chain and "conducts extensive due diligence, particularly where we identify or are made aware of potential violations of the law, our agreements, or our policies." It added that its supplier contracts forbid the use of any "forced or involuntary labor, abusive treatment of employees or corrupt business practices in the supplying of goods and services to GM."
The other automakers either did not comment or did not immediately comment.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union this month called on automakers to shift their entire supply chain out of China's Xinjiang region, saying "the time is now for the auto industry to establish high-road supply chain models outside the Uyghur Region that protect labor and human rights and the environment."
40. US toughens restrictions on Chinese tech firms linked to military
Kevin Liptak, CNN, December 15, 2022
41. Tech supply chains brace for impact as China shifts from zero-COVID to rampant COVID
Laura Dobberstein, The Register, December 19, 2022
42. Apple to start making MacBooks in Vietnam by mid-2023
Cheng Ting-Fang, Nikkei Asia, December 20, 2022
iPhone maker aims to have 'out of China' production alternatives for key products. The MacBook is Apple's last major product still manufactured solely in China, but that is set to change in 2023.
Apple plans to move some MacBook production to Vietnam for the first time next year as the U.S. tech group continues diversifying its production base away from China amid escalating tech tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Apple has tapped its top supplier, Taiwan's Foxconn, to start making MacBooks in the Southeast Asian nation as early as around May, sources briefed on the matter said. Apple has been working to add production sites outside of China for all of its major product lines, but doing so for the final one, the MacBook, has taken longer due to the complex supply chain needed for making laptop computers.
43. Chinese Banks Edge Out Wall Street Rivals in Global IPO Rankings
Julia Fioretti, Bloomberg, December 21, 2022
Top two IPO underwriters are Chinese banks this year China has had a record year as IPOs globally have collapsed.
44. WTO rules against U.S. in Hong Kong labelling dispute
Philip Blenkinsop, Reuters, December 21, 2022
The World Trade Organization found on Wednesday that the United States had violated global trading rules by insisting that products imported from Hong Kong be marked as coming from China, a ruling rejected as "flawed" by Washington.
Until 2020, the United States had treated Hong Kong, which is a separate WTO member, in the same manner as before it passed from British control in July 1997.
Then U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order requiring that be changed, with Washington arguing that the Chinese territory was not sufficiently autonomous to justify treatment different from that of China. The order came into effect in late 2020.
A three-person WTO adjudicating panel found that the United States violated an obligation towards Hong Kong, by giving it less favourable treatment than other WTO members in terms of marks of origin on its products.
The United States said it had applied an exception allowing for measures to protect a country's "essential security interests".
The panel acknowledged that tensions had increased between the United States and Hong Kong, but said these had not risen to an "emergency in international relations", the threshold required to apply the exception.
COMMENT – This whole episode calls into question the entire rationale for Hong Kong’s status at the WTO.
On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party insists on their complete sovereignty over Hong Kong (it is illegal for Hong Kongers to sing anything but the PRC national anthem), yet when it benefits them to have a more advantageous position with a separate jurisdiction at the WTO in order to float trading rules the CCP doesn’t like, the Party insists that Hong Kong is separate.
This is just more evidence of the WTO’s irrelevance and the need for complete reform of the institution. I suspect that if Beijing insisted that the grass was blue, the WTO’s adjudicating panel would rule against any country that challenged the PRC by observing that the grass was green.
45. Statement from USTR Spokesperson Adam Hodge
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, December 21, 2022
The United States strongly rejects the flawed interpretation and conclusions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel report released today regarding Hong Kong, China’s challenge to the U.S. determination and action suspending differential treatment for marks of origin. The U.S. action responded to highly concerning actions by the People’s Republic of China to erode Hong Kong, China’s autonomy and the democratic and human rights of its people, threatening U.S. national security interests.
The Biden Administration remains committed to preserving U.S. national security and protecting human rights and democracy, and taking action to protect national security is a right inherent to any sovereign nation and explicitly reflected in the WTO Agreement. The United States has held the clear and unequivocal position, for over 70 years, that issues of national security cannot be reviewed in WTO dispute settlement, and the WTO has no authority to second-guess the ability of a WTO Member to respond to what it considers a threat to its security.
The Hong Kong panel report suggests that the United States cannot act to address China’s undermining of democratic and human rights and democracy in Hong Kong. To be clear, the United States does not intend to remove the marking requirement as a result of this report, and we will not cede our judgment or decision-making over essential security matters to the WTO. This report further underscores the need for fundamental WTO reform and the United States will continue to work constructively with Members to ensure that the WTO remains relevant to the lives of all people.
COMMENT – For the second week in a row, bravo to Ambassador Katherine Tai and her team in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Perhaps next year will provide a bipartisan opportunity for the United States and others to start a fundamental reorganization of the World Trade Organization… the PRC’s accession and failure to abide by the spirit of the agreement have made a mockery of international trade “law.” Repairing the legitimacy of international trade rules now requires a fundamental re-working of the system.
CYBER AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
46. Made in China 2025 is back, with a new name and a focus on database companies
Barry van Wyk, The China Project, December 19, 2022
The Chinese government has yet another plan to domesticate the country’s IT infrastructure and to take back control of its data from foreign companies. Chinese investors have taken note.
47. Appeals court rejects China Telecom bid to reverse U.S. ban
David Shepardson, Reuters, December 20, 2022
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected China Telecom Corp's (0728.HK) challenge to a Federal Communications Commission order withdrawing the company's authority to provide services in the United States.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the bid by the U.S. arm of China Telecom to reverse the order that took effect in January. The FCC said in 2021 that China Telecom (Americas) "is subject to exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government."
48. Why it’s so hard to tell porn spam from Chinese state bots
Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review, December 21, 2022
A new report digs into the porn spam that drowned out China's covid protests—and finds they were likely not engineered by the Chinese government.
A few weeks ago, at the peak of China’s protests against stringent zero-covid policies, people were shocked to find that searching for major Chinese cities on Twitter led to an endless stream of ads for hookup or escort services in Chinese. At the time, people suspected this was a tactic deployed by the Chinese government to poison the search results and prevent people from accessing protest information.
But this spam content may not have had anything to do with the Chinese government after all, according to a report published on Monday by the Stanford Internet Observatory. “While the spam did drown out legitimate protest-related content, there is no evidence that it was designed to do so, nor that it was a deliberate effort by the Chinese government,” wrote David Thiel, the report’s author.
Instead, they were likely just the usual commercial spam bots that have plagued Twitter forever. These particular accounts exist to attract the attention of Chinese users who go on foreign networks to access porn.
49. How Bots Pushing Adult Content Drowned Out Chinese Protest Tweets
Stuart Thompson, Muyi Xiao, Ishaan Jhaveri, and Paul Mozur, New York Times, December 19, 2022
Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, have recently vowed to crack down on bots. But the flood of spam for Chinese users in recent weeks has underscored the challenges the company faces in policing fraudulent and inauthentic activity, especially in foreign languages that have traditionally been more loosely policed by large American social media platforms.
For many Chinese who turned to the platform as demonstrations against Covid-19 restrictions had grown political and widespread — more so than any protests there in decades — the experience of using the app appeared to capture a different reality.
MILITARY AND SECURITY THREATS
50. VIDEO – Indo-Pacific Commander discusses rising tensions with China, future of the region
PBS Newshour, December 16, 2022
51. VIDEO – U.S. military accelerates in Pacific in attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan
PBS Newshour, December 20, 2022
52. VIDEO – CIA Director Bill Burns on war in Ukraine, intelligence challenges posed by China
PBS Newshour, December 16, 2022
53. China sends dozens of warplanes, ships toward Taiwan
Brad Dress, The Hill, December 22, 2022
China sent 39 aircraft and three warships on military drills toward Taiwan on Thursday in a show of force against the self-governing democratic island nation.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said officials detected the aircraft and vessels around 6 a.m. and were closely monitoring the military drills.
Thirty of the Chinese aircraft crossed over the median line of the Taiwan Strait, the ministry added in a Twitter post.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the name for China’s forces, sent various warplanes in a southwest direction toward the southeastern region of the island before doubling back.
The PLA has recently conducted several drills around Taiwan but Thursday’s military activity was the largest in several months.
54. Surge in China’s military operations reflects ‘new normal’ under Xi Jinping
Helen Davidson, The Guardian, December 22, 2022
A rush of Chinese military activity across the region this month has capped off a year of increased aggression, as President Xi Jinping displays China’s increased military might despite economic struggles and the impact of the zero-Covid policy and its sudden end.
This month the People’s Liberation Army – the Chinese Communist party’s military wing – has broadened its aerial incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (Adiz), come to blows with Indian troops in the Himalayas, run military drills near Japan and participated in major joint exercises with Russia.
55. Russia and China are sharing strategies to undermine NATO, says top US diplomat
Henry Foy, Financial Times, December 19, 2022
56. S Jaishankar: India beefs up military at tense China border
BBC, December 20, 2022
India's foreign minister has said that the country has scaled up troop deployment along a disputed border with China to an unprecedented level.
S Jaishankar added that India wouldn't let China "unilaterally change" the status quo at the border.
His comments came days after Indian and Chinese forces clashed in a disputed area along the border in Arunachal Pradesh state.
India said that the encounter began due to "encroachment" by Chinese troops.
SkyNews, December 18, 2022
58. Wary of China, Japan unveils sweeping new national security strategy
Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Julia Mio Inuma, Washington Post, December 16, 2022
Japan on Friday unveiled sweeping changes to its national security strategy and a major ramp-up of its defense budget, a dramatic shift to shed its longtime postwar pacifist constraints as it grapples with increasing security threats and risk of war in the Indo-Pacific.
Wary of the growing military threat posed by China, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Japan is poised to take a tougher stance to defend itself and improve its capabilities to do so.
Among the notable changes is the move to acquire “counterstrike” capabilities, or the ability to hit enemy bases with long-range missiles and coordinate with the United States in such circumstances, and an increase of its defense budget to 2 percent of gross domestic product over five years, making it the third-largest in the world.
59. As regional threats rise, Japan eases defence-only strategy
ABC News, December 17, 2022
Key points:
Japan names China its biggest strategic challenge in new national security strategy
Counterstrike missile capability won't be implemented until at least 2026
Japan says it will continue a pacifist principle of high standards for arms equipment and technology transfer
60. US State Department opens ‘China House’ to coordinate policy toward Beijing
Kylie Atwood, CNN, December 16, 2022
The US State Department announced it is opening a “China House” on Friday which will serve as the convening point for US policy toward Beijing and boost the number of diplomats focused on the country.
“China House will ensure the US government is able to responsibly manage our competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system. Our goal in creating China House is to help deliver on elements of the Administration’s approach to the PRC,” a department spokesperson said in a statement.
61. India moves to build military road along border with China
Joe Wallen, The Telegraph, December 19, 2022
The two-lane ‘frontier highway’ will allow Delhi to rapidly deploy troops and equipment to combat potential aggression.
62. China Accused of Fresh Territorial Grab in South China Sea
Philip Heijmans, Bloomberg, December 20, 2022
China is building up several unoccupied land features in the South China Sea, according to Western officials, an unprecedented move they said was part of Beijing’s long-running effort to strengthen claims to disputed territory in a region critical to global trade.
While China has previously built out disputed reefs, islands and land formations in the area that it had long controlled — and militarized them with ports, runways and other infrastructure — the officials presented images of what they called the first known instances of a nation doing so on territory it doesn’t already occupy. They warned that Beijing’s latest construction activity indicates an attempt to advance a new status quo, even though it’s too early to know whether China would seek to militarize them.
63. U.S. Support for the Philippines in the South China Sea
U.S. Department of State, December 19, 2022
The United States supports the Philippines’ continued calls upon the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to respect the international law of the sea in the South China Sea, as reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its legal obligations pursuant to the 2016 arbitral ruling.
The reported escalating swarms of PRC vessels in the vicinity of Iroquois Reef and Sabina Shoal in the Spratly Islands interfere with the livelihoods of Philippine fishing communities, and also reflect continuing disregard for other South China Sea claimants and states lawfully operating in the region. Furthermore, we share the Philippines’ concerns regarding the unsafe encounter that the PRC Coast Guard initiated with Philippines naval forces in the South China Sea, as documented before the Senate of the Philippines on December 14.
The United States stands with our ally, the Philippines, in upholding the rules-based international order and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea as guaranteed under international law.
64. U.S. and China trade barbs over South China Sea
Karen Lema, Reuters, December 20, 2022
China's embassy in Manila accused the United States on Tuesday of driving a wedge between the Philippines and Beijing, deploring Washington's "unfounded accusations" that it said sought to stir up trouble in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea has become one of many flashpoints in the testy relationship between China and the United States, with Washington rejecting what it calls unlawful territorial claims by Beijing in the resource-rich waters.
ONE BELT, ONE ROAD STRATEGY
65. China and Saudi Arabia Sign Strategic Partnership as Xi Visits Kingdom
Vivian Nereim, New York Times, December 8, 2022
Saudi Arabia and China signed a strategic partnership agreement on Thursday during a visit by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the kingdom, underlining the growing ties between Beijing and a longstanding American ally that is seeking greater self-reliance.
66. Gwadar protest leader warns Chinese to leave key Belt and Road port
Adnan Aamir, Nikkei Asia December 22, 2022
Pakistani government faces increasingly confrontational local rights movement.
OPINION PIECES
67. Strategy, not economics, should govern high-tech trade with China
Bradley Thayer, The Hill, December 22, 2022
The Biden administration’s creation of a “China House,” the Office of China Coordination, in the Department of State could be a positive step forward to address the China threat. The office is tasked with providing information regarding the China threat and accelerating and coordinating the government’s reaction to it. Last year, the CIA created the “China Mission Center” to aid the Intelligence Community with direct resources, funding and personnel to counter Beijing’s expanding diplomatic, technological and military power.
However positive, these actions are overdue. Together, they indicate that the flame of strategic thought is not completely extinguished in Washington. Sadly, for decades it was. Wall Street and the United States government supported China’s economic growth in the disastrous belief that a wealthier, more prosperous China would be more democratic and peaceful, becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the liberal international order. The camarilla of the “engagement school” held profoundly mistaken, naïve and misguided assumptions regarding the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
68. TikTok Is Running Out of Time in the US
Tim Culpan, Bloomberg, December 18, 2022
69. Europe Must Avoid Wishful Thinking on China in 2023
Matthew Brooker, Washington Post, December 20, 2022
It was the year that the scales fell from Europe’s eyes on China. Heading into 2023, the clarity engendered by Beijing’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in danger of being lost. Leaders of a continent beset by soaring energy prices and economic hardship show signs of wanting to pick up again with the world’s largest trading nation as if nothing has happened. That would be a mistake. Wishful thinking was never the basis of a sound relationship.
It’s worth recapping to see just how the tone has changed since Vladimir Putin’s troops crossed into Ukraine in late February. The attack came less than three weeks after Chinese leader Xi Jinping proclaimed a “no limits” partnership with Russia that amounted to a blueprint to remake the rules-based international order. After the invasion, Beijing professed to be neutral and reiterated its respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty. But it has consistently refused to criticize Russia. Officials blamed the US for the conflict and state media echoed its pro-Moscow narrative, while excluding reports of Ukrainian suffering. It is clear where the Chinese government’s sympathies lie.
China’s Communist Party has never hidden its hostility to the liberal values that underpin the US-led world order, though that antipathy has acquired increased openness and confidence under Xi. For Europe, witnessing the largest military conflict on its soil since the end of World War II, China’s de facto support for Russian aggression gave a new level of reality to that clash of values. Perhaps the most striking expression of the shift in consciousness that this produced came from European Commission Vice President Josep Borrell who, in a speech after April’s EU-China Summit, called it a “dialogue of the deaf.” The 75-year-old former Spanish foreign minister went on:
China wanted to set aside our difference on Ukraine – they did not want to talk about Ukraine. They did not want to talk about human rights, and other issues, and instead focus on the positive things. The European side made clear that this “compartmentalization” is not feasible, not acceptable. For us, the war in Ukraine is a defining moment for whether we live in a world governed by rules or by force. That is the question. We condemn the Russian aggression against Ukraine and support this country’s sovereignty and democracy - not because we “follow the US blindly,” as sometimes China suggests, but because it is our own position, our genuine position, we believe in that. This was an important message for the Chinese leadership to hear.
Compare that impassioned statement of European principle with the comments of French President Emmanuel Macron after his meeting with Xi at the Group of 20 gathering in Bali in November. Macron said he was convinced China could play “a more important mediating role” in Ukraine in the coming months. At the subsequent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Thailand, he called for engagement with Beijing and urged Europe to take a middle path between the “two big elephants” of the US and China.
That will have given satisfaction to Xi, who also met Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni in Bali. China has concentrated efforts on driving a wedge between Europe and the US, and tensions over Washington’s green energy incentives and semiconductor restrictions have given it an economic opening. Macron intends to visit Beijing in the new year, following in the steps of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who took a delegation of top business executives to the Chinese capital in early November.
All this will sit uneasily with those who see China’s position on Ukraine as fundamentally altering the security equation for Europe (Chinese officials including Xi have expressed periodic disquiet over the course of the war, though have never relinquished their pro-Russian stance). Days before traveling to Beijing, Scholz’s government agreed to sell a stake in a Hamburg port terminal to China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. — a decision that put Germany’s leader at odds with his economy, foreign affairs, finance, transport and defense ministers, as well as the country’s security services.
In early December, Scholz penned a 5,000-word article in the US magazine Foreign Affairs that said the world is facing a Zeitenwende, or an epochal tectonic shift, as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The piece denounced Putin’s aggression and defiance of the principles of the UN charter, and contained some stirring affirmations of democratic values in the face of authoritarian challenges. Scholz devoted a section to China, saying its growing power doesn’t justify claims to hegemony in Asia and criticizing the country’s turn away from openness. But, he wrote, China’s rise doesn’t warrant isolating Beijing or curbing cooperation. Not a single sentence in this long essay places China and Russia together, or addresses Beijing’s stance on Ukraine. This looks a lot like the compartmentalization that was unacceptable to Borrell back in April.
The EU and China have a $700 billion trade relationship. Such a vast economic entanglement makes it necessary to talk and cooperate, where possible. The tone of some European leaders, though, hints at a view of Beijing that is looking distinctly outmoded: a regime that, nominally, is an ideological rival, but one that can be kept onside and coaxed through trade and investment links. It’s reminiscent of how Germany once viewed Putin’s Russia. We know how that worked out. There would be no excuses for repeating the mistake.
70. Germany Shirks Its Defense Pledge, Imperiling the Asia ‘Pivot’
Mike Watson, Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2022
Japan, by contrast, is rearming, alarmed by China’s aggression and America’s distraction.
There have been growing calls in Washington foreign-policy circles for a “pivot to Asia,” a strategic shift of American military, diplomatic and economic resources away from other parts of the world and toward the Indo-Pacific. With China as the main U.S. adversary, the case for the pivot is obvious enough. But it’s a move that comes with costly trade-offs. The U.S. is a global power and has global interests. A pivot can work only if America’s allies tend to those interests in its absence.
Advocates of a pivot have hoped to shift focus to the Indo-Pacific while U.S. allies pick up the slack in Europe. Over the past year, many European states have responded appropriately to Russia’s belligerence. Eight North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are contributing a greater share of their gross domestic products to Ukraine than the U.S. is. The British and the Eastern Europeans have especially distinguished themselves.
There are laggards, however, the major one being Germany. There was a brief moment of hope in February, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany “will now—year after year—invest more than 2% of our gross domestic product in our defence.” But since then Germany has fallen back into old habits. Mr. Scholz’s spokesman offered only a “cautious expectation” last week that Germany will hit its defense spending target by 2025. The buildup is kaput.
This announcement undermined any chance of a safe U.S. pivot away from Europe. For the moment, the Kremlin’s relative power is declining as the Ukrainians slog it out with the Russian military. But Russia still has formidable capabilities, and its ability to rebound from catastrophe is legendary. Without German leadership, other European nations would have a much harder time acting as a counterbalance to Russia. For now, the U.S. needs to keep a foot in Europe.
COMMENT – This decision by Berlin to AGAIN fail to meet its NATO defense spending obligations is particularly disappointing just days after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lectured the United States with his piece in Foreign Affairs, “The Global Zeitenwende.” Scholz’s refusal to match rhetoric with action makes his fellow allies and German citizens less secure.
For more, see: Germany backtracks on defense spending promises made after Ukraine invasion, Politico, December 5, 2022
71. Why Didn’t China Prepare Better for Covid Chaos?
Minxin Pei, Bloomberg, December 18, 2022
The country’s Communist system excels at mobilizing resources to fulfill the leadership’s top priority. But it’s not so good at multi-tasking.
China ended its Covid Zero policy only weeks ago, after nationwide anti-lockdown protests. But President Xi Jinping’s government may already be losing its grip on the virus. Hospitals are filling up with Covid patients and an alarming number of medical staff have been infected. Pharmacies are running out of fever medication. In Beijing, deaths attributed to Covid-19 appear to have jumped, according to anecdotal reports from city crematoriums.
If the initial chaos following China’s abandonment of Covid Zero looks bad, a far worse calamity may be looming as a tsunami of infections spreads to the Chinese countryside. Modeling by experts forecasts as many as 1.5 million deaths in the coming months.
72. China’s Dangerous Decline: Washington Must Adjust as Beijing’s Troubles Mount
Jonathan Tepperman, Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2022
The last two months have been among the most momentous in recent Chinese history. First came the 20th Party Congress, which President Xi Jinping used to extirpate his few remaining rivals. Then, a few weeks later, the country erupted in the most widespread protests China has witnessed since the mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in 1989. And then, barely a week later, came the startling denouement: in a rare (if unacknowledged) concession, Beijing announced it was loosening some of the “zero COVID” policies that had driven so many angry people into the streets.
It has been a head-spinning season, even by the turbulent standards of contemporary China. But underneath the noise, the events all carried the same signal: that far from a rising behemoth, as it is often portrayed by the U.S. media and American leaders, China is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Ten years of Xi’s “reforms”—widely characterized in the West as successful power plays—have made the country frail and brittle, exacerbating its underlying problems while giving rise to new ones. Although a growing number of Western analysts—including Michael Beckley, Jude Blanchette, Hal Brands, Robert Kaplan, Susan Shirk, and Fareed Zakaria—have begun to highlight this reality, many American commentators, and most politicians (ranging from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to President Joe Biden), still frame the U.S.-Chinese contest in terms of Beijing’s ascent. And if they do acknowledge China’s mounting crises, they often cast them as either neutral or positive developments for the United States.
73. Funding the CHIPS and Science Act is a national security imperative
Keith Krach and Bob Hormats, The Hill, December 21, 2022
A few months ago, we celebrated the signing of the CHIPS and Science Act. This landmark bipartisan legislation will supercharge U.S. semiconductor production and boost the next generation of technological research to maintain our competitive edge over authoritarian adversaries such as China. But our country’s work was not finished on that August morning. To fulfill the promise of the CHIPS and Science Act, Congress must move quickly to fully fund the bill.
We’re urging action not as former public officials who held the same position — one in a Republican administration, the other in a Democratic administration — but as Americans committed to strengthening our country’s technology preeminence, geo-political leadership and security. The reality we face as a nation and the free world is one of ever-increasing cyber and military threats based on ceaseless variations of intense technological competition.
74. The US can shape the future of semiconductors if Congress thinks ahead
Rafael Reif, the Hill, December 21, 2022
Spurred by strained supply chains, growing concerns about China, and the landmark CHIPS and Science Act Congress enacted last summer, U.S. semiconductor manufacturing seems poised for a renaissance.
News of chip manufacturing facilities slated for Ohio, upstate New York and most recently Arizona should buoy all Americans for their promise of good new jobs and because these factories will make us less dependent on others for the chips that are the building blocks of most modern products, from phones to automobiles.
Important as they are, however, these new factories will mainly serve to increase access to current chips, including those manufactured with state-of-the-art technologies. While that’s vital, it’s a short-term solution. To secure national leadership and prosperity over time, the U.S. needs to be the birthplace of the new ideas that will determine the future — including the future of semiconductor technology, design, and manufacturing. Guaranteeing that future requires swift federal action.
The semiconductor industry does not stand still; there is a perpetual race to advance chip capability. When it comes to chip fabrication, U.S. companies need to regain their lead. In chip-making equipment, the U.S. needs to retain its premier position. In design, the U.S. still leads but faces intensifying competition from China and elsewhere.
Advancing all aspects of the chip-making process — from design to manufacturing at scale — increasingly requires not just incremental improvements, but fundamental leaps to overcome the physical limitations on how many transistors can fit on a chip and on how many chips can fit on a package and a circuit board — both keys to increasing product capability.
In other words, no matter how many chip factories are built on U.S. soil, we will still be caught in a trap of dependence on other’s technologies unless the nation acts to lead in creating the next generations of chips. Retaining our leadership in design and technology equipment will help attract more chip manufacturing to the U.S. because having state-of-the-art design, technology and manufacturing close together creates a powerful feedback loop for rapidly advancing innovation.
75. China's dismal closeout of 2022 suggests shaky start for 2023
Tianlei Huang and Mary Lovely, Peterson Institute for International Economics, December 21, 2022
China is closing out the year 2022 with the most dismal economic and social welfare performance in recent decades. President Xi Jinping entered the Year of the Tiger last February full of promise, pride, and prospects for an unprecedented third term in office. Now with his abrupt and chaotic exit from the zero-COVID policy, he and China’s other leaders have effectively acknowledged that the widespread testing, lockdowns, and long quarantines exacted an intolerable burden on China’s economy and its citizens. And the latest data from the Chinese statistical authority show still further slowdown of the Chinese economy in November, threatening to pull this year’s growth rate below 3 percent.
The data also showed that retail sales last month shrank by almost 6 percent compared with a year ago. Industrial output growth dropped to a six-month low with an outright contraction of production in cement, automobiles, electronic devices, and integrated circuits. Investment growth through November further slowed as the divergence between state-led and private investment growth further widened. The property slump worsened with property investment and sales both continuing to shrink and property prices again dropping.
76. America’s Indo-Pacific Strategy Runs Through Ukraine
Luis Simon, War on the Rocks, December 16, 2022
Over the past year, Washington has helped rally Europe to support Ukraine’s heroic defense of its sovereignty. Yet amidst the enthusiasm that this has generated, some observers remain concerned that the war in Europe will distract the United States from the more profound threat that it faces from China. They shouldn’t be. Given the deepening interdependence between Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and the growing cooperation between Moscow and Beijing, decisively defeating Russia remains the best way for the United States to successfully compete against China.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently argued that the United States “wanted to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”. If the United States managed to achieve this, it could neutralize the existence of a threat to the European balance of power for the foreseeable future. And that could set the foundations for redirecting the bulk of U.S. strategic attention towards the threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific. In contrast, abandoning Ukraine to its own luck could lead to the unraveling of the European security order. That would end up demanding a considerably higher share of America’s strategic bandwidth down the line, and thus constitute a far more serious drag on a much-needed rebalance to the Indo-Pacific.
77. New Zealand is done with speaking softly to China
Derek Grossman, Nikkei Asia, December 21, 2022
78. China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Obsession Is Gone, but the Trauma Lingers
Eva Rammeloo, New York Times, December 21, 2022
For nearly three years, leaving my apartment involved a routine not unlike an aircraft pilot’s before takeoff. Mask: check. Anti-viral hand sanitizer: Check. Green code on my smartphone reflecting latest negative Covid test: Check. Courage to actually go outside and risk getting ensnared in an abrupt lockdown somewhere: Check.
And then, suddenly, China’s cumbersome “zero Covid” system and alarmist propaganda was gone. Almost overnight, a government that had only recently pledged to “unwaveringly stick” to its no-tolerance approach has swung to the other extreme, spinning the roulette wheel of public health and letting the virus rage among an anxious and utterly confused population.
For much of the pandemic, China was relatively safe. We dined, danced and worked with little risk of infection compared with the rest of the world. But we had our own fears of sudden harsh lockdowns, of ending up in a giant quarantine hall with a thousand beds, portable toilets and bright lights. At any moment, the mall where I shopped or the building where I worked could be locked down for days because of a suspected case. Word of a coming lockdown was enough to send workers and shoppers fleeing for the exits. Passing a restaurant in my Shanghai neighborhood once, I saw customers inside curling up against the window, trying to get comfortable so that they could sleep. I started taking my phone charger and toiletry bag everywhere.
In 2020, early in the pandemic, I sent my two young children back home to the Netherlands. I’ve shuttled back and forth since then, splitting my time between them and my work as a journalist in China. The all-too-brief family visits were weighted with the anxiety of staying Covid-free so that I would be allowed back into China. I spent almost three months of my life in re-entry quarantine in Chinese hotels.
Others, foreigners and Chinese alike, had it far worse. Many who had relatives overseas didn’t see them for months or even years because of tighter Chinese border controls. Travel restrictions, arbitrary citywide lockdowns and the economic damage caused people to lose jobs or businesses. Shanghai’s harsh two-month lockdown beginning in late March grabbed world attention because of food shortages, the mental toll on citizens, needless deaths as people couldn’t get to hospitals and pets brutally killed by health workers and the police. But it was hardly the only Chinese city to suffer.
79. Solving America’s Strategic Metals Supply Crisis
Carl Delfeld, National Interest, December 19, 2022
Relying on China for the supply of critical materials is foolhardy. America's current situation requires a sense of urgency, a hedge, and a smart stockpile insurance policy.
Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors, The Atlantic, December 23, 2022
As Beijing’s ambition of overtaking the American economy stalls, its strategy is shifting to economic coercion. The U.S. must be prepared.