RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: General McMaster, thank you for coming to Toronto to be part of this debate. We’re really looking forward to your words tonight.
H. R. MCMASTER: Thanks, Rudyard. It’s a real privilege to be here. I’m looking forward to it.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: It’s a privilege to host you. Let’s jump right in here and talk a little bit about your overall view of China and its role in the world today. It’s interesting that you see this conflict as not necessarily just about economics; you think that there’s almost an existential dimension to it, that it’s a conflict between the democratic world order and a very powerful rising regime that has, in your view, authoritarian characteristics. Explain that for us.
H. R. MCMASTER: I wouldn’t say it’s an existential conflict. I think it’s a competition; it’s a competition with the Chinese Communist Party and the policies of that party that aim to stifle any kind of freedom and individual rights within their own society, but also to export that model to other countries in an effort to challenge the international system as it exists and replace it with a new order that’s sympathetic to Chinese interests, with China, as President Xi has said, at the centre. In many ways, this is an attempt, I think, to re-establish the tributary system in Chinese dynastic history, in which countries that sign up can enjoy free trade as long as they are in a servile relationship with China. So, I think China poses a significant threat to our free and open societies.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Now, you’re going to hear an argument at this debate about who is the biggest beneficiary of the liberal international order, at least over the last several decades. Surely that’s China. So why would China threaten a global system that has been so favourable to them in terms of their economic indicators, in terms of the health of the society that they’ve created?
H. R. MCMASTER: Right. It’s important to remember that the Cultural Revolution that Mao used to purge the party really destroyed the Chinese economy. Their economy in the 1980s was a basket case. So, it was really the West, the international order, welcoming China in that helped them have a tremendously successful period of economic growth, lifting 800 million people out of poverty. And the way China did that was to reform. So, there were reasons to be optimistic in the post–Cold War period that China, having been welcomed into the order, would continue to liberalize its economy, and, as it prospered, China would play by the rules and then ultimately liberalize its political system as well.
Well, what’s happened is that those economic reforms stalled under Hu Jintao, and they completely went into reverse under Xi Jinping. Last year, 2018, was the first year in which the Chinese private sector did not grow, and it was the first time that the percentage of the Chinese economy that is state-driven grew relative to the private economy. This is because what Xi Jinping is endeavouring to do more than any other objective is tighten the party’s exclusive grip on power. And the party sees these structural aspects of the state-driven authoritarian capitalist model as essential to maintaining its grip on power.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Another question that will probably come up in this debate is: Why is America paying attention to this now? I mean, you had the last twenty, thirty years to think through what your China policy should be. It seems to be a hard pivot right now from the more dovish view earlier to something you might describe as hawkish. Why is that happening?
H. R. MCMASTER: I think it’s because of the recognition that the assumptions on which previous policies were based are false. I mean, you hosted a great debate here eight years ago on China, and David Li was one of the debaters. In that debate, he said, “Look, we are liberalizing,” and he gave some examples. He said, “Chinese people can express their opinions now,” and he said, “Our young generation won’t be satisfied and they’re going to demand even more reforms.”
Well, that young generation is being brainwashed and brutally repressed by the state’s really tight grip on the information that they have access to, then also by the stifling of any kind of ideas or discussions involving concepts like rule of law. If you talk about rule of law and you’re a professor or a student, you get arrested. Many of these students were arrested and they disappeared — until they reappeared later in confession videos. Books on rule of law are taken down from university bookshelves and destroyed.
Even with Marxist organizations that were advocating for workers’ rights, those universities in which that was happening were raided and the students arrested. So, what’s happened is, I think, a broad recognition — not just not in the United States but throughout the world — that China does not intend to liberalize. China does not intend to play by the rules and, in fact, wants to break apart the international order and replace it with a new order sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party. And so what you see in response is sixteen other nations joining Canada in December 2018 in calling out the sustained campaign of industrial espionage against Western companies. What you see is a great deal of co-operation internationally in confronting China’s efforts to control the ocean by developing the South China Sea and militarizing the islands. And nobody controls the ocean.
I think this is really one of the few issues in the United States these days that brings both parties together. But there is also, I think, a recognition on the part of our free and open societies, as the European Union just announced last month, that China is advocating a system that would undermine everything we hold dear in terms of universal rights, and free and open and fair and reciprocal trade and economic relations.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: A couple of other counter-arguments to try out on you: the first is that some people will posit that the reason America is focusing on this trade issue now is that they realize that China is a technological and economic threat, and so in a sense the United States is trying to create a global alliance to push back against China — not to defend the liberal international order or universal values but to defend America’s narrow national interest. Why do you reject that assumption?
H. R. MCMASTER: I reject that because what the Chinese Communist Party is doing is pursuing a strategy that they call military-civil fusion. There is a directive called Document No. 9 that leaked out a few years ago — and if you’re Chinese and you even talk about it you get thrown into prison — that essentially revealed the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party, which is to direct an integrated effort across academia, private companies and industries, and the military. What they want to do is to gain global dominance of the emerging economy, and then also apply emerging technologies to military capabilities in a way that allows them to pursue their objectives, which are dangerous to all nations. Those that are on the periphery of China would essentially become vassal states as China endeavours to develop exclusionary areas of influence across the Indo-Pacific region and then challenges the United States and other free and open societies globally.
If you look at who their client states are, it’s Venezuela in the Western Hemisphere, it’s Zimbabwe in Africa, it’s Cambodia on its periphery. These are oppressive regimes, and what you might say is that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to make the world safe for authoritarianism, because that’s how they can extend their influence most effectively.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Another argument in this debate is that China can say, “Look, we’re actually a good global citizen. We’re a member of the Paris Accord. We didn’t pull out of that agreement like the United States. You complain obviously about our assertion of territorial rights in the South China Sea, but we’re a signatory of the U.N. Law of the Sea. The United States is not.” There’s a whole series of examples like that, where China seems to be a good multilateral actor, whereas the recent tenor of American engagement with the world seems more unilateralist. How do you respond to that?
H. R. MCMASTER: Well, China actually participates in international fora so that they can undermine those institutions and bend them toward their agenda to achieve this hegemonic influence and put China back at centre stage. So, for example, China was welcomed in 2001 into the World Trade Organization [WTO] and pledged to liberalize its economy, to stop state subsidies to state-owned enterprises, and to stop the forced transfer of intellectual property just for the privilege of doing business in their economy. They didn’t make good on any of those promises. Also, even though the United States is not a signatory to the Law of the Sea in terms of freedom of navigation and so forth, the U.S. adheres to it and is a good international participant and enforcer of international law. China is breaking that law every day in continued reclamation efforts and militarization in the South China Sea.
Also, I think that what China is doing with the Paris Accord, for one example, is portraying their behaviour as supportive of the international order even as they undermine these efforts. China is poisoning the global environment even as they adhere to an agreement that’s pretty flawed. The problem with the Paris Accord is that it gave us a false sense of security. It didn’t really address the world’s biggest polluters — India and others, but mainly China. And China, under the Belt and Road Initiative, is exporting 260 coal-fired plants to places like South Africa and Kenya. They’re trying to appear as if they’re a good citizen while they’re actually undermining the system.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: This is obviously a very personal issue for you, and I’m wondering why you’ve chosen to speak out about it. Was there something that happened in your career? Were you previously part of that other foreign policy establishment that thought, “Oh, look, China’s not a threat; they’ll reform,” and then you had an epiphany? Or was it your experience in the White House that led you to this firm set of beliefs?
H. R. MCMASTER: The vast majority of my career was spent in Europe and in the Middle East and Central Asia. Of course, China always figures prominently across the world. And I had been a student of Chinese history; I taught it as part of our survey course at West Point. But I really didn’t focus on China very much until I came into the job as national security advisor. One of the important aspects of that job, I think, is to examine existing policies and challenge the assumptions on which those policies are based.
Once we took a look at the old policy of strategic engagement with China and identified that it was underpinned by this really implicit and demonstrably false assumption that China would behave in a way that’s supportive of the international order, we recognized that we really needed a shift. We needed to move toward a policy that acknowledged that we are in a competition with an authoritarian closed system that is not only repressing its own people but also exporting its model to other regimes.
So, after recognizing the need to compete with China, we thought the best way forward was to have a conversation with the Chinese Communist Party and say, “This is not in your interest to behave this way,” and to get off the path that could lead to confrontation. Because China had gone unchallenged for so long, it was becoming more and more aggressive, and so this strategy of competition, rather than just engagement under the belief that China would liberalize, was appropriate.
I think what you’re seeing is the adoption of that approach across the world. Within the European Union and throughout North America, our friends in the Western Hemisphere are very concerned about, for example, the effect of the Chinese debt trap that they use to try to co-opt and then coerce countries into supporting Chinese foreign policy.
Ecuador is a great example. They built a $2.6 billion dam in a lake at the base of an active volcano. The turbines in this dam are clogged with silt and trees. The first time it was fired up it blew out the whole electrical system in the country; it already had cracks in it! Of course, what China has done with this sort of predatory economic strategy that they’re implementing is that, in exchange for building this dam, and for Ecuador to service the debt associated with it, China now takes 80 percent of Ecuador’s oil exports at a discount and resells it on the international market.
Look at Venezuela. China is making money on the backs of the starving Venezuelan people. And they’re doing that by propping up Nicolás Maduro with continued cash flow while Maduro now sells almost all of Venezuela’s oil to the Chinese, who don’t use any of it but just sell it internationally at a markup. China is profiting while the Venezuelan people starve. And so, this has tremendous non-partisan support, not just from the United States or the Republican Party: the recognition that we have to really confront this pernicious danger to our free and open societies.