What Now for China?
A conversation with Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Prospect alum
BY ROBERT KUTTNER DECEMBER 20, 2022
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ANDY WONG/AP PHOTO
Hostesses wearing face masks stand by at an exhibition highlighting Chinese President Xi Jinping and China’s achievements under his leadership, at the Beijing Exhibition Hall, October 12, 2022.
Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He’s written five previous books on China and Southeast Asia, including one on China’s soft power. His latest book is titled Beijing’s Global Media Offensive.
Robert Kuttner: The subtitle of your latest book is “China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.” So let’s talk about the uneven part. You begin your book with an account of how China’s attempt to meddle in the Malaysian elections in 2018 backfired. Where is China’s global offensive to have influence in the world backfiring? Where is it succeeding?
Joshua Kurlantzick: China’s influence offensive has had some significant success in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia and in Latin America, and Eastern and Central Europe as well. A combination of China’s significant lending and aid, and China’s control of a lot of the Chinese-language media in those places, as well as other kinds of backdoor efforts to wield power like paying politicians and influencing student groups and associations, has had impact. But that influence in Central and Eastern Europe has completely collapsed now, because Xi Jinping supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and not surprisingly, that was not popular in much of Eastern Europe.
Other places where it hasn’t been that successful are in Southeast Asia, where many countries are wary of China’s influence. China has had some success in New Zealand and Australia, as well as in Canada and the U.K. China has gained significant control of the Chinese-language media, which is a worrying prospect. China’s influence efforts include economic coercion and aggressive diplomacy. Now, however, in many places where China enjoyed pretty warm receptions, like Australia, Spain, France, the view is far more negative.
The U.S. shot itself in the foot with the FBI’s China initiative, which was supposed to investigate espionage, but went after many people who were innocent and kind of collapsed amid the appearance of racism.
Let’s talk about the broader U.S.-China policy. Biden’s policy, it seems to me, has been surprisingly coherent and tough without being overly bellicose. Just in the past few days, the administration has imposed new restrictions on tech; the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was able to get access to China-based audit firms using the threat of delisting from American stock exchanges. And this is on top of trade sanctions and other policies blocking Chinese companies controlled by the military and the Chinese Communist Party. How successful would you judge these policies?
Some of the things that Biden is doing are actually just a continuation of what Trump was doing on China. Trump himself was saying all sorts of insane things about China, including things that were obviously outright racist about China, and Chinese Americans, and Chinese nationals, but his broad policy wasn’t crazy.
Robert Lighthizer, who was the architect of much of this, was maybe the only good appointee of the Trump administration. But because of Trump’s own crudeness and racism, Lighthizer’s policies were not as coherent or comprehensive as they needed to be. The Biden version seems to me to be more coherent, more strategically focused, and more subtle. The fact that it was Trump who initiated this break doesn’t make the shift bad policy, does it?
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Through Democratic and Republican administrations beginning with George H.W. Bush and extending through Obama, there was this continued belief that China’s prosperity was eventually going to lead to democracy and openness. I’m simply giving the Trump administration credit for rejecting that myth. The Trump administration gets credit for breaking the previous consensus. And to be fair, China is probably the last bipartisan foreign-policy issue.
What’s really fascinating, listening to you, is that we’ve gone from a naïve bipartisan consensus about how trade would change China to a new bipartisan consensus that is more based on a far more realistic view of China. My question is, quite apart from Trump’s role, how good is the current policy?
Some aspects of what Biden is doing are quite successful, and we should have been doing much of this some time ago. Diversifying semiconductor supply makes sense, not only from a U.S. point of view, but from a global economic and supply chain point of view. For instance, 90 percent of the most advanced semiconductor chips in the world are made in Taiwan, an island that not only is under a steady state of threat from China, but also sits right in the middle of the most powerful earthquake fault line in the world. It’s just bizarre that people weren’t worried that 90 percent of semiconductors came from this tiny, vulnerable island.
Secondly, the machines that make advanced chips are all made by one company in the Netherlands. So Biden’s policies to diversify, to prompt Taiwan semiconductor manufacturers and other chip suppliers to build factories in the U.S., is a good idea; and as China policy it makes sense. He’s going to have to do a lot of arm-twisting to make them do this. Japan and Singapore and even Taiwan make tons of money from providing semiconductors to China. None of them are thrilled about U.S. policy, but I think Biden will succeed. Taiwan as a dependent ally is going to go along. I think he will eventually persuade the others to go along, because they see it in their security interest.
China is also actually helping the U.S. promote these policies, because China has become twisted from consensus authoritarianism to one-man rule.
Let’s talk about China internally in a couple of respects. First of all, how could China have screwed up its COVID policy so badly, both as economic policy and as public-health policy. And is their new policy any better, either as public-health policy or as economic policy?
I’m not a public-health expert, although I have done a fair amount of research on China’s COVID policies as part of this book and another project. They screwed this up so badly because they switched away from consensus authoritarianism to one-man rule. When they had consensus authoritarianism, they were much more able to get feedback from actual experts, and process that feedback, and have real debates within the top leadership.
China was not a democracy, but it had a more liberal media environment, in which there were semi-independent publications that produced quality reporting, to which the leadership would have been paying attention. There was also a degree of civil society, which has also been killed.
When SARS happened in 2003 and 2004, at first China handled it terribly, similar to the way they first covered it up with COVID. But within a few months into 2004, realizing that they’d handled it terribly, they dramatically shifted course and pursued a relatively sensible policy.
A good contrast is with Vietnam, one of the more repressive places in the world. But it’s not a one-man state where one person is a godlike figure and you can’t put out different views for fear of alienating him. It’s a consensus authoritarian state run by a party with several leaders at the top, autocrats but not one-man rule.
Vietnam at first had lockdowns; they extended it too long for a while like China. But they listened to public-health experts in Vietnam and from the world. They responded and dramatically switched their COVID policy, bought Western vaccines that were really good. And now they’ve had a very effective overall response.
But everyone in China is so terrified of Xi Jinping, who linked his COVID policy directly to himself and his own legitimacy. Everyone was afraid to tell the emperor the bad news. They put in jail reporters and public-health people who wanted to talk about the reality and that’s how they wound up with this policy, despite the fact that it’s destructive in so many ways.
And that’s why protest spread nationally for the first time since Tiananmen. You had poor people, and rich people, and people from different parts of the country, all under these lockdowns. So you had the making of a nationwide protest, which they basically crushed.
Have they crushed it, or have they substantially given in to the demands?
I would say some of both. At the time that the protests were peaking, some people were saying, oh, this is going to be the end of Xi Jinping. But China is the most powerful authoritarian government in the world, with the most intensive surveillance state in the world. And Xi Jinping has total control of the military as well as the top leadership. I don’t mean to malign the protest. It’s great to see people standing up for their rights. But you can’t conclude from the protests and the policy change that Xi Jinping is going to be overthrown. You would have to come up with a theory of how that happens. And no one I spoke with had a plausible theory of how it could happen, like a coup or a split in the top leadership.
Short of that, do you think Xi has been weakened? Do you think he will be pressured to go back to more collective rule? Or is he just going to tough it out?
I think he’s just going to tough it out. Things have gone too far for them to go back to collective rule, and the entire top level of the Politburo are all his lackeys and sycophants. Let me also address your other question. You mention this dramatic shift away from zero-COVID policy. That’s also a potential disaster.
Every prominent public-health expert who knew something in China has been recommending that if they were going to move away from zero-COVID, they needed to take four to six months of slowly ramping it down while they got a massive vaccination campaign under way, and with better vaccines, not their really bad vaccines—and they certainly have the money to buy better vaccines—and to use that four-to-six-month period, while they ramp down zero-COVID, to vaccinate their older people, most of whom are unvaccinated. Instead, they just dropped it. So you’re going to see insane rates of infection.
China’s hospitals are in terrible shape, except for a few private hospitals. So by ramping this down they run the risk of killing millions of elderly people who have not been vaccinated, or who will get vaccinated and boosted with an ineffective non-mRNA vaccine. I’m reading things from friends of mine in Beijing, and 80 to 90 percent of the people they know already have COVID. If that figure is transferred to elderly people it’s just going to be a catastrophe.
To bring us back to the subject of your book, China has been promoting authoritarian, state-led quasi-capitalism as an alternative model for much of the world. Do you think this model has lost some of its appeal?
Yes, for sure. I would call it more like a combination of authoritarian capitalism and effective managerial governance. Even some Western writers fell in love with this idea. Thomas Friedman has written quite a few embarrassing columns on it. Supposedly, China’s managerial governance is so good compared to liberal democracies. That was their first plank. To be fair, democracy hasn’t had its best last decades. But the Chinese model does not look so good lately.
China did have sustained high growth for long periods of time, and lifted more people out of poverty than any country on record. High growth was the second plank of their appeal. The third plank was that young people would have opportunities and jobs. Young people and students have always been the vanguard of China’s intellectual ferment. A lot of those jobs were provided by the genuinely prosperous and growing private-sector tech companies.
Now all three of those legs with that model have been undermined. Growth is down. It’s unclear whether they can get it back up. Xi Jinping, bizarrely, has undermined the drivers of growth, namely the private sector in China, but not replaced it with any sort of statist model that would restore high growth. Governance is in shambles because they have had three years of complete mismanagement, and now they’re facing the prospect of 80 to 90 percent of the population having COVID.
Finally, they have broken that promise to young people that there would always be a good job. Young people have soured on the Chinese dream. You see that in the immigration numbers, and you see that in the intense competition for the remaining private-sector jobs. So I think it’s a lot harder now for them to sell their model to the world. And liberal democracy seems to be doing a little better. Of course, if Donald Trump is elected in 2024 and Marine Le Pen succeeds Macron in France, liberal democracy doesn’t look so good either.
Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Thank you for a great conversation, and I wish you good luck with the book. The title once again is Beijing’s Global Media Offensive.
The American Prospect
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