Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani on US-China Competition

[Riaz Haq]

Kishore Mahbubani, a prolific writer, speaker and former Singaporean diplomat, believes that the western domination of the world over the last 200 years is "aberrant" when seen in the context of the last several thousand years of human history.  In his book "Has China Won", he writes that "we are also moving away from a black-and-white world". "Societies in different parts of the world, including in China and Islamic societies, are going to work toward a different balance between liberty and order, between freedom and control, between discord and harmony". 

Kishore Mahbubabi

In a recent interview, Mahbubani made the following points about US-China competition: 

1. The United States with about 240-year history likes to pass judgement on China which has over 2,400 year history. What makes the US think China would listen to the American advice? 

2. The West is in the habit of judging everyone, including the Chinese. The Chinese have just had the best 30 years of their history. Would the Chinese listen to the American advice on "democracy" and political freedoms after they have seen what happened to Russia when the Russians decided to adopt democracy in the1990s and their economy collapsed? 

3. More than 120 million Chinese tourists go to other countries freely and willingly return to China every year. Would they return freely if China was an oppressive stalinist regime? The fact is that while political freedoms have not increased there has been an explosion of personal freedoms in China over the last 30 years.

Global Power Shift Since Industrial Revolution

A recent post-COVID survey conducted by the Washington Post shows that Chinese citizens’ trust in their national government has jumped to 98%. Their trust in local government also increased compared to 2018 levels — 91% of Chinese citizens surveyed now said they trust or trust completely the township-level government. Trust levels rose to 93% at the county level, 94% at the city level and 95% at the provincial level. 

An earlier 2018 World Values Survey reported that 95% of Chinese citizens said that they have a great deal or quite a lot of trust in the national government. Comparatively, about 69% felt the same way about their local government. 

Here's a video of Mahbubani's interview:

https://youtu.be/KaPFmYxWMzI

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KaPFmYxWMzI"; title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" />

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[Riaz Haq]

How Xi Jinping Transformed China—and His Challenges Ahead
Key findings from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage as China’s leader looks to another five-year term

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-china-third-term-11666439758


As Xi Jinping locks in another five years as China’s leader, The Wall Street Journal examined the changes he wrought during his first decade in power—and the risks they pose for China and the world in his third term.

Here are some of the key findings.

1. Mr. Xi is driven to ensure China can win a possible confrontation with the West.

Mr. Xi has come to see the possibility of a showdown with the West as increasingly likely, according to people familiar with his thinking. That belief has added urgency to many of Mr. Xi’s biggest initiatives, including his push to expand China’s military, reduce China’s reliance on Western technologies, and take bold foreign-policy risks—including a crackdown on Hong Kong that drew harsh criticism from across the world.

Many experts fear Mr. Xi will next try to take the democratic, self-ruled island of Taiwan, a move that could destabilize the region and bring China into open conflict with the U.S.

2. Mr. Xi is more powerful than ever within China—but his purges of rivals come at a cost.

Mr. Xi became China’s most formidable leader in decades through an increasingly sophisticated campaign of anticorruption purges that sidelined opponents and suppressed potential challenges to his power. Few are beyond Mr. Xi’s reach—not even one of his oldest friends, Wang Qishan, who once ran Mr. Xi’s campaigns. Over the past two years, antigraft enforcers have increasingly gone after people inside Mr. Wang’s political and personal circles, curtailing his influence.

Mr. Xi’s antigraft purges have antagonized members of the political elite and discouraged lower-level officials from making decisions for fear of running afoul of Beijing.

The unrelenting purges could make China’s political system less resilient over time by leaving senior leaders less willing to challenge Mr. Xi and debate policies.

3. Mr. Xi’s prioritization of politics over economic goals is clouding China’s long-term growth prospects.

Mr. Xi has said he wants to double the size of China’s economy by 2035—a goal that would require China’s economy to grow an average of nearly 5% annually. But many economists now believe 5% won’t be achievable.

A major challenge, they say, is Mr. Xi’s insistence on greater state control at the expense of China’s more dynamic private sector.

That shift is a reversal of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” process starting in 1978. It’s helping Mr. Xi achieve political objectives, including a redirection of capital into industries Beijing sees as strategically important as U.S.-China tensions deepen, like artificial intelligence.

But by carving out a bigger role for less-efficient state-owned enterprises, and putting private businesses at a disadvantage, Mr. Xi is exacerbating long-term problems for China, including slowdowns in productivity and wage growth.

4. Mr. Xi has extended the state deeper into citizens’ lives. Censorship and surveillance are making it hard to express opposition publicly.

Mr. Xi’s zero-tolerance policy toward Covid has pushed his controls over society to entirely new levels. Many people start their days with government-mandated Covid tests from workers in white hazmat suits. Without proof of a negative result, public spaces are off limits, including grocery stores. People who have merely crossed paths with people infected by the virus are often forced into quarantine.

Such measures are testing people’s faith in a government that is no longer delivering the rapid economic growth that underpinned popular support for decades.

[Riaz Haq]

The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
US President Joe Biden's administration has doubled down on the claim that China is mounting a genocide against the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region. But it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge and support a UN-based investigation of the situation in Xinjiang.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/apfjc5yg352d554k2ar2ww...


NEW YORK/LONDON – The US government needlessly escalated its rhetoric against China by claiming that a genocide is being mounted against the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region. Such a grave charge matters, as genocide is rightly considered “the crime of crimes.” Many pundits are now calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, dubbing them the “Genocide Olympics.”

The genocide charge was made on the final day of Donald Trump’s administration by then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who made no secret of his belief in lying as a tool of US foreign policy. Now President Joe Biden’s administration has doubled down on Pompeo’s flimsy claim, even though the State Department’s own top lawyers reportedly share our skepticism regarding the charge.

This year’s State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices(HRP) follows Pompeo in accusing China of genocide in Xinjiang. Because the HRP never uses the term other than once in the report’s preface and again in the executive summary of the China chapter, readers are left to guess about the evidence. Much of the report deals with issues like freedom of expression, refugee protection, and free elections, which have scant bearing on the genocide charge.

There are credible charges of human rights abuses against Uighurs, but those do not per se constitute genocide. And we must understand the context of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which had essentially the same motivation as America’s foray into the Middle East and Central Asia after the September 2001 attacks: to stop the terrorism of militant Islamic groups.

As the Hong Kong-based businessman and writer Weijian Shan has recounted, China experienced repeated terrorist attacks in Xinjiang during the same years that America’s flawed response to 9/11 led to repeated US violations of international law and massive bloodshed. Indeed, until late 2020, the US classified the Uighur East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist group, battled Uighur fighters in Afghanistan, and held many as prisoners. In July 2020, the United Nations noted the presence of thousands of Uighur fighters in Afghanistan and Syria.

The charge of genocide should never be made lightly. Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behooves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here.

Genocide is defined under international law by the UN Genocide Convention (1948). Subsequent judicial decisions have clarified its meaning. Most countries, including the United States, have incorporated the Convention’s definition into their domestic legislation without any significant alteration. In the past few decades, the leading UN courts have confirmed that the definition requires proof to a very high standard of the intentional physical destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

[Riaz Haq]

China Index

https://china-index.io/

Doublethink Lab and the China In The World network present the China Index, the first cross-regional project to objectively measure and visualize the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s overseas influence through comparable data.

This edition ranks the PRC’s influence in 82 Country Profiles across nine Domains: Academia, Domestic Politics, Economy, Foreign Policy, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Society, and Technology. Each Domain comprises 11 Indicators devised by the China Index Committee, a group of renowned China experts, each of which corresponds to an observable phenomenon of PRC influence.

The Indicators are distributed to local experts in Index countries who provide factual evidence for whether the phenomenon is observed or not. Local experts’ responses are reviewed, quantified, and normalized to provide Country Profile and Domain rankings. Together, the Indicators comprise the first and only research effort to compile PRC influence into a single set of observable phenomena. The Country Profiles, Domains, and Indicators will be periodically updated to assist academia, civil society, media, and policymakers in analyzing and understanding the evolving nature and impacts of the PRC’s global influence.

As of November 2022, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Singapore are ranked as most exposed to PRC influence. Paraguay, North Macedonia, and Albania are ranked as least influenced. Globally, PRC influence is assessed to be most prominent in the Domains of Technology, Foreign Policy, and Domestic Politics, and weakest in those of Military and Society.

[Riaz Haq]

#China is #SaudiArabia’s largest #trading partner, with #Chinese exports to #KSA reaching $30.3 billion in 2021 & Saudi exports at $57 billion in the same year. #Saudi #oil makes up 18% of #Beijing’s total crude #oil imports — worth about $55.5 billion January-October in 2022.

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1603108539383263232?s=20&...


https://www.vox.com/2022/12/10/23502903/china-saudi-arabia-united-s...

“The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency,” economist Gal Luft, co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, told the Journal at the time. “If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse.”

------------------

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has great ambitions to diversify its economy, which has for decades relied on crude oil output. But in order to do that, it needs money — oil money. That’s at least part of why Saudi Arabia limited production in the midst of a global oil crisis and prices for crude oil remain high.

Both nations also tout ambitious infrastructure projects. The Belt and Road initiative, China’s effort to create a 21st-century Silk Road international trade route by providing the finances to develop series of ports, pipelines, railroads, bridges, and other trade infrastructure to nations across Asia and Africa, is a milestone effort for Xi. It’s also received major criticism for potentially exploiting poor nations by essentially loaning them money they can’t pay back, in some cases granting China control over these critical hubs.

Xi’s presence in Saudi Arabia, both with MBS and as part of a larger summit with Arab and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, present multiple opportunities to strengthen ties with a host of nations in the region — and to make sure that in the global power competition, those nations are, at least, not aligned with the US, as Shannon Tiezzi wrote in The Diplomat Wednesday.

Critically, Saudi Arabia knows it cannot depend on generous US weapons sales under Biden, so China is an increasingly viable alternative. In fact, Reuters reported, Saudi Arabia is thought to have signed $30 billion in defense contracts at this summit with China.

In forging their alliance, both nations get a strong trading partner who won’t question their policies; Saudi Arabia gets a more predictable relationship in Xi than it has seen in the switch from former President Donald Trump to Biden.

How does this affect the US and its global position as a superpower?
The US-Saudi relationship is longstanding. It officially started toward the end of World War II, and the basic oil-for-security trade has lasted for decades, becoming increasingly important to the kingdom between Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s and the increasing influence of regional rival Iran. Despite Saudi repression and alleged human rights abuses, Riyadh could count on US weapons, and the US could almost always count on cheap Saudi oil.


Of course, there have been tensions in the relationship before. The 1973 oil embargo in retaliation for the US decision to resupply the Israeli military during the Arab-Israeli War, as well as Saudi involvement in the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, tested the alliance, but US leadership maintained that the kingdom was a key regional partner nonetheless.

Under Trump, the relationship between the two nations was somewhere between transactional and downright chummy — Trump even reportedly bragged that he defended MBS against criticism from Congress over Khashoggi’s death.

But the relationship has become the most strained it has been in recent memory due to MBS’s abuses and Biden’s criticism. In March, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a fuel shortage, MBS refused to take Biden’s calls to negotiate increased oil production and help ease prices. When they finally met in July, Biden was extremely uncomfortable — and he left almost empty-handed.

[Riaz Haq]

Derek J. Grossman
@DerekJGrossman
The US and India are putting pedal to the metal on decoupling from China. Doubt it will work, but I'd like to be pleasantly surprised.

https://twitter.com/DerekJGrossman/status/1620557287671869440?s=20&...

------------------

U.S. Pursues India as a Supply-Chain Alternative to China
Biden administration turns to New Delhi as it seeks to steer critical technologies away from Beijing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pursues-india-as-a-supply-chain-al...

India’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, led New Delhi’s delegation this week in meetings with Mr. Sullivan and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other officials.

The meetings underscore a broader U.S. effort to meet challenges from China through alliances with other countries. The Biden administration has given priority to Washington’s relationship with what is known as the Quad—an alliance between India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. that has focused on countering Beijing.

“President Biden really believes that no successful and enduring effort to address any of the major challenges in the world today…is going to be effective without a close U.S.-India partnership at its heart,” a senior administration official said.

[Riaz Haq]

China is right about US containment | Financial Times

By Edward Luce

https://www.ft.com/content/bc6685c1-6f17-4e9e-aaaa-922083c06e70

But encircling Beijing is not a viable long-term strategy


The one positive feature of today’s cold war compared with the last one — China and America’s economic interdependence — is thus something Biden wants to undo. Decoupling is taking on an air of inevitability. When Xi refers to “encirclement”, he is thinking about America’s deepening ties to China’s neighbours. Again, Xi mostly has himself to blame.

Japan’s shift to a more normal military stance, which includes a doubling of its defence spending, probably worries China the most. But America’s growing closeness to the Philippines and India, and the Aukus nuclear submarine deal with Australia and the UK, are also part of the picture. Add in increased US arms transfers to Taiwan and the ingredients for Chinese paranoia are ripe. How does this end?

This is where a study of Kennan would pay dividends. There is no endgame to today’s cold war. Unlike the USSR, which was an empire in disguise, China inhabits historic boundaries and is never likely to dissolve. The US needs a strategy to cope with a China that will always be there.

If you took a snap poll in Washington and asked: one, are the US and China in a cold war; and two, how does the US win it, the answer to the first would be an easy “yes”; the second would elicit a long pause. Betting on China’s submission is not a strategy.


Here is another way to look at it. The US still holds more of the cards. It has plenty of allies, a global system that it designed, better technology and younger demographics. China’s growth is slowing and its society is ageing faster. The case for US resolve and patience is stronger today than it was when Kennan was around. Self-confident powers should not be afraid to talk.

[Riaz Haq]

China is right about US containment | Financial Times

By Edward Luce

https://www.ft.com/content/bc6685c1-6f17-4e9e-aaaa-922083c06e70

But encircling Beijing is not a viable long-term strategy

Here is a thought experiment. If Taiwan did not exist, would the US and China still be at loggerheads? My hunch is yes. Antagonism between top dogs and rising powers is part of the human story. The follow-up is whether such tensions would persist if China were a democracy rather than a one-party state. That is harder to say but it is not obvious that an elected Chinese government would feel any less resentful of the US-led global order. It is also hard to imagine the circumstances in which America would willingly share the limelight.

All of which suggests that loose talk of a US-China conflict is no longer far-fetched. Countries do not easily change their spots: China is the middle kingdom wanting redress for the age of western humiliation; America is the dangerous nation seeking monsters to destroy. Both are playing to type. The question is whether global stability can survive either of them insisting that they must succeed. The likeliest alternative to today’s US-China stand-off is not a kumbaya meeting-of-minds, but war. This week, Xi Jinping went further than before in naming America as the force behind the “containment”, “encirclement” and “suppression” of China. Though his rhetoric was provocative, it was not technically wrong. President Joe Biden is still officially committed to trying to co-operate with China. But Biden was as easily blown off course last month as a weather balloon. Washington’s panic over what is after all 19th-century technology prompted Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, to cancel a Beijing trip that was to pave the way for a Biden-Xi summit. Washington groupthink drove Biden’s overreaction. The consensus is now so hawkish that it is liable to see any outreach to China as weakness. As the historian Max Boot points out, bipartisanship is not always a good thing.


Some of America’s worst blunders — the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to the Vietnam war, or the 2002 Iraq war resolution — were bipartisan. So is the new House committee on China, which its chair, Mike Gallagher, says will “contrast the Chinese Communist party’s techno-totalitarian state with the Free World”. It is probably safe to say he will not be on the hunt for contradictory evidence.

A big difference between today’s cold war and the original one is that China is not exporting revolution. From Cuba to Angola and Korea to Ethiopia, the Soviet Union underwrote leftwing insurgencies worldwide.


The original idea of containment, laid out in George Kennan’s 1947 Foreign Affairs essay, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, was more modest than the undeclared containment that is now US policy. Kennan’s advice was twofold: to stop the expansion of the Soviet empire; and to shore up western democracy. He counselled against the use of force. With patience and skill the USSR would fold, which is what eventually happened.

Today’s approach is containment-plus. When Xi talks of “suppression”, he means America’s ban on advanced semiconductor exports to China. Since high-end chips are used for both civil and military purposes, the US has grounds for denying China the means to upgrade its military. But the collateral effect is to limit China’s economic development.

There is no easy way round this. One possible side-effect will be to accelerate Xi’s drive for “made in China” technology. The Chinese president has also explicitly declared Beijing’s goal of dominating artificial intelligence by 2030, which is another way of saying that China wants to set the rules.

[Riaz Haq]

China is right about US containment | Financial Times

By Edward Luce

https://www.ft.com/content/bc6685c1-6f17-4e9e-aaaa-922083c06e70

But encircling Beijing is not a viable long-term strategy


The one positive feature of today’s cold war compared with the last one — China and America’s economic interdependence — is thus something Biden wants to undo. Decoupling is taking on an air of inevitability. When Xi refers to “encirclement”, he is thinking about America’s deepening ties to China’s neighbours. Again, Xi mostly has himself to blame.

Japan’s shift to a more normal military stance, which includes a doubling of its defence spending, probably worries China the most. But America’s growing closeness to the Philippines and India, and the Aukus nuclear submarine deal with Australia and the UK, are also part of the picture. Add in increased US arms transfers to Taiwan and the ingredients for Chinese paranoia are ripe. How does this end?

This is where a study of Kennan would pay dividends. There is no endgame to today’s cold war. Unlike the USSR, which was an empire in disguise, China inhabits historic boundaries and is never likely to dissolve. The US needs a strategy to cope with a China that will always be there.

If you took a snap poll in Washington and asked: one, are the US and China in a cold war; and two, how does the US win it, the answer to the first would be an easy “yes”; the second would elicit a long pause. Betting on China’s submission is not a strategy.


Here is another way to look at it. The US still holds more of the cards. It has plenty of allies, a global system that it designed, better technology and younger demographics. China’s growth is slowing and its society is ageing faster. The case for US resolve and patience is stronger today than it was when Kennan was around. Self-confident powers should not be afraid to talk.

[Riaz Haq]

Opinion Washington has succumbed to dangerous groupthink on China

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/02/china-hearings-b...

By Fareed Zakaria


We are often told that the United States is deeply divided, that polarization makes it impossible to make any progress in policy, and that our country is so internally conflicted that it cannot project unity and strength to the world. But on the most important foreign policy issue confronting policymakers, the problem is closer to the opposite. Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.

To watch Tuesday’s hearing of the new House select committee on China was to be transported back to the 1950s. Members of both parties tried to outdo one another in their denunciations of China, describing — as committee chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) did — the Communist Party as an “existential” threat to the United States, and blaming it directly for every problem in America, from drug use to covid-19 to unemployment. (An odd charge since unemployment is currently at its lowest in more than 50 years.)

One could dismiss some of this more extreme rhetoric as the usual congressional grandstanding, but it creates a dynamic that makes rational policy difficult. Consider what happened a few weeks ago. The president of the United States, in what can only be described as a panic, ordered the U.S. military to shoot down three balloons that were probably private weather balloons — similar to hundreds of such objects in the sky around the world — that posed no threat to anyone. The sorts of balloons used by hobbyists and meteorological clubs can cost as little as $12. The missiles used to shoot down the recent offending objects cost more than $400,000 each. The shootdowns were ordered, of course, so that no one could claim Joe Biden was soft on China.

China is a serious strategic competitor, the most significant great-power challenger the United States has faced in many decades. That is all the more reason for Washington to shape a rational and considered foreign policy toward it — rather than one forged out of paranoia, hysteria and, above all, fears of being branded as soft. Whenever policy is made in those latter circumstances, as in the cases of Vietnam or Iraq, it turns out badly. In 2003, when then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) tried to make the case for more diplomacy before war with Iraq, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) suggested Daschle was giving comfort to the enemy. The select committee on China spoke of those who dared to suggest improving relations with Beijing in similar terms.

Six years ago, before Donald Trump came into power, one would have described the U.S.-China relationship as difficult, perhaps even strained — and yet manageable, with regular dialogue between the two nations at the highest levels. When Washington confronted China on certain issues, such as currency manipulation and economic espionage, Beijing would make some effort to address the charges.

Today, U.S.-China relations are a mess. China continues to do things that alarm Washington but there is no discussion between the two sides. Beijing is actively supporting Russia economically and diplomatically in its war in Ukraine. Were that support to expand to include military assistance, Russia would gain an almost unlimited supply of armaments, transforming the war. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan gave the People’s Liberation Army a golden opportunity to practice a multi-day blockade of the island, their most likely military intervention in the event of a crisis. Were current Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to visit Taiwan, the PLA would likely use it as a pretext to practice a longer and more complete cutoff strategy, showing Taiwan that it could be isolated at will.

[Riaz Haq]

China's trade with Russia surges at double-digit pace in Jan-Feb | Reuters


https://www.reuters.com/business/chinas-trade-with-russia-surges-do...

BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) - China's exports and imports with Russia surged at a double-digit pace in January-February from a year earlier, customs data showed on Tuesday, as China said it had to advance relations with its northern neighbour in an increasingly turbulent world.

China's exports to Russia jumped 19.8% in the first two months, to a total of $15 billion, while it recorded shrinking demand from markets elsewhere. Imports from Russia soared by 31.3% to $18.65 billion.

That left the world's second-biggest economy's trade deficit with Russia at about $3.6 billion.

China's seaborne imports of Russian oil are set to hit a record this month after refiners took advantage of cheap prices as domestic fuel demand rebounded following the lifting of COVID-19 curbs, Reuters reported last week.

Foreign Minister Qin Gang told a news conference on the sidelines of an annual parliamentary session in Beijing on Tuesday that China had to advance its relations with Russia as the world becomes more turbulent.

Asked whether it was possible that China and Russia would abandon the U.S. dollar and euro for bilateral trade, Qin said that countries should use whatever currency was efficient, safe and credible.

"Currencies should not be the trump card for unilateral sanctions, still less a disguise for bullying or coercion," he said.

China's trade with Russia hit a record high in 2022 as Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.