An Obsession with Control: The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to Freedom and Security
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
—GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
I HAD never been to China when I arrived with the president and his traveling party on November 8, 2017. From my first day on the job in the White House almost nine months earlier, China was a top priority. U.S.-China policy was a prominent feature of the Trump presidential campaign. The Chinese were eager to arrange a summit between the two presidents at Mar-a-Lago after the warm and successful visit of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo of Japan just three weeks after the president’s inauguration. China figured prominently in what President Obama had identified to President Trump as the biggest immediate problem his administration would face: what to do about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.1 I thought it was vital to frame a long-term strategy for China prior to the Mar-a-Lago Summit, scheduled for April 2017, so that the initial discussions between the two leaders and the two main working groups that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was eager to initiate (one on security, the other on trade and economic relations) would be informed by policy goals and more specific objectives.
In March, the Principals Committee of the National Security Council convened to recommend the agenda and objectives for the Mar-a-Lago Summit. At the outset of the meeting, I highlighted the fundamental assumption underpinning U.S. relations with China since paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and the opening of China in 1978: after being welcomed into the international political and economic order, China would play by the rules, open its markets, and privatize its economy.2 And as the country became more prosperous, the Chinese government would respect the rights of its people and liberalize. I observed that the intentions, policies, and actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had rendered those assumptions demonstrably false. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China is a threat to free and open societies because its policies actively promote a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to the rules-based order. This matters because the CCP aims to accomplish its objectives at other nations’ expense. In particular, its strategy intends to shift global economic leadership and geopolitical alignment toward China and away from the United States. It was past time, I believed, to effect one of the most significant shifts in foreign policy and national security strategy in recent American history.
I spent most of my career in Europe and the Middle East. I knew a little Chinese history but had a lot to learn. My “professor” was the NSC senior director for Asia, Matt Pottinger. Matt learned Chinese in high school in Boston and then studied for two years overseas in Beijing and Taiwan. He was fluent not only in Mandarin, but also in Chinese history and literature. He covered China as a journalist for eight years, including as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. When covering the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, Matt was impressed by the effectiveness, discipline, and compassion of the U.S. Marines who provided humanitarian relief. He decided to seek an age waiver and join the Marine Corps as an officer. After nine months of intense physical preparation, he reported, at the age of thirty-two, to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. Subsequent assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer convinced him that the United States had tremendous capabilities but did not always employ those capabilities well. American leaders often failed to understand the nature of complex competitions with enemies and adversaries. Matt came to the attention of then–Major General Michael Flynn. In 2010, the two coauthored, with Paul D. Batchelor, a monograph entitled Fixing Intel. In 2015, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, Flynn had retired from the army as a lieutenant general, and Pottinger had left the Marine Corps and was working at an investment firm in New York City. After Trump was elected, Flynn, who was named national security advisor, asked Pottinger to join the NSC. I was grateful for the opportunity to serve with Matt. He worked tirelessly to get sound policies and strategies in place not only for China and North Korea, but also for the entire Indo-Pacific region. And his sense of humor brought much-needed levity to the hard work and long hours on the NSC staff.
The discussions at Mar-a-Lago were meant, in part, to convey a significant change in U.S. policy. We communicated to our counterparts that we were particularly concerned about China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, where their People’s Liberation Army was building islands in order to lay claim to 1.4 million square miles of water through which approximately three trillion dollars of trade flows each year. But the main theme of the summit was China’s unfair trade and economic practices, which we described as a form of economic aggression that the United States could no longer tolerate. The discussions were cordial. I got the impression from our guests that they had heard these points before, believed that time was on their side, and doubted our will to back any of our concerns with action.
But when Air Force One touched down in Beijing nearly seven months later, a new China policy was largely in place. Government bureaucracies were shifting away from an approach that regarded China’s growing power at the West’s expense as an inevitable phenomenon that was best accommodated rather than challenged. The new policy acknowledged that we were in a competition with China—a competition that the United States was losing because of a failure to understand the emotions, ideology, and aspirations that motivated Chinese Communist Party policy. Since the 1990s, U.S. policy toward China betrayed all the elements of strategic narcissism: wishful thinking, mirror imaging, confirmation bias, and the belief that others will conform to a U.S.-developed “script.” China aided in that self-delusion as the CCP used co-option and coercion to tighten its control internally and extend its influence internationally while concealing its true intentions. Our two days in Beijing heightened my sense of urgency to infuse our approach to China with a strong dose of strategic empathy.
The first step was to appreciate the influence of historical memory on Chinese Communist leaders. John Fairbank, the godfather of American sinology, noted in 1948, in the first edition of his seminal book The United States and China, that to understand the policies and actions of Chinese leaders, “historical perspective is not a luxury, but a necessity.”3 During the visit, Chairman Xi Jinping and his advisors used history to convey messages to President Trump, to the Chinese people, and to the world. The selective use of history—both the history they invoked and the history they averted—revealed the emotions and worldview that drive Chinese Communist Party goals. State Councilor Yang Jiechi, my Chinese counterpart, had decided on a “state visit plus” of tremendous grandeur that would take us to three sites adjacent to one another at the center of Beijing: the Forbidden City (the seat of Chinese emperors across five centuries), the Great Hall of the People (a vast building completed in 1959 as part of the tenth anniversary of the founding of Communist China), and Tiananmen Square (the site of Mao’s mausoleum and the focal point of the massive protests against Chinese Communist Party rule in 1989 that the People’s Liberation Army brutally suppressed).
OUR HOSTS were State Councilor Yang, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Chinese ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, and Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang. Our party included U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson, White House senior aide Jared Kushner, U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, and director of social media and assistant to the president Dan Scavino. Chairman Xi and his wife, the famous singer Peng Liyuan, greeted President and Mrs. Trump at the gates of the Forbidden City. The leaders and their wives moved ahead of the rest of our party. As we walked through the West Glorious Gate, I looked for Matt Pottinger, who had been walking behind us. I discovered later that the guards had denied him access. Matt knew too much. Our hosts were gracious, but clearly intended to use the visit to the Forbidden City to convey messages without the encumbrance of someone who might subject those messages to skepticism and keen appraisal.
The main message was consistent with a speech Xi Jinping had delivered just two weeks earlier, at the Nineteenth National Congress in the Great Hall of the People: the Chinese Communist Party was relentlessly pursuing the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The Forbidden City was the perfect backdrop for Chairman Xi to place in historical perspective his determination to “take center stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind.”4 The visit portrayed this great rejuvenation as an inevitable return to an earlier era during which Imperial China was a powerful “Middle Kingdom (中国).” The Forbidden City was built during the Ming dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years (from 1368 to 1644), a period considered one of China’s golden ages, in which its economy, territorial control, and culture reached unprecedented efflorescence. It was during this dynasty that Zheng He, an admiral in the Ming fleet, embarked on seven voyages around the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, more than half a century before Columbus. Zheng He’s “treasure ships,” among the largest wooden ships ever built, brought back tribute from all parts of their known world. But despite the success of the seven voyages, the emperor concluded that the world had nothing to offer China. Citing the expense of the fleet, he ordered the treasure ships scuttled and Chinese ports closed. Xi viewed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an aberrational period during which European nations and their colonies, and then, later, the United States, achieved economic and military dominance.5 The 2017 visit to the Forbidden City was meant to depict China’s increasingly active foreign policy as a return to a natural order. The Forbidden City was the destination for foreigners to bow before the emperor’s authority, pay tribute, and to supplicate for privileges that the emperor might bestow upon them.
Xi wanted his visitors to recognize as inevitable that Chinese power would once again underpin an international system in which Chinese leaders granted privileges in exchange for recognition of China’s superiority. The visit by the U.S. president and First Lady was, in part, a continuation of the “coming-out party” to announce China’s return to power that began with the spectacular opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Like that show and the closing ceremony that placed modern technological innovation in the context of five thousand years of Chinese history, the tour of the city and the remarkable performances based on three Chinese operas before dinner were reminders that Chinese dynasties stood at the center of the earth and that Chinese emperors were the guarantors of harmony on earth and the arbiters between earth and heaven.
The chairman’s message was meant for the Chinese people as well as for President Trump and our party. We walked in the footsteps of countless foreign delegations, such as the British mission, led by Lord George Macartney, that visited the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty in the 1790s. Traveling from the port to the Forbidden City, the British found the route lined with banners emblazoned with large characters announcing that the Europeans had come to “pay tribute to the Great Emperor.” During President Trump’s visit, state television’s live coverage served the same purpose: to show the Chinese people a foreign power acknowledging China’s and Chairman Xi’s power. Qianlong and Chairman Xi both saw the narrative of national greatness as necessary for maintaining domestic order.6
While the images broadcast to China and the world from the Forbidden City were meant to project confidence in the Chinese Communist Party, they belied profound insecurity. Like Chairman Xi, the emperors who occupied the Forbidden City practiced a remote and autocratic style of rule vulnerable to corruption and internal threats. Since the end of the Han dynasty, in AD 220, China’s core provinces were ruled only half the time by a strong central authority. Even when China was ruled by powerful governments such as that of the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing dynasties, China was subject to domestic turmoil and foreign invasion. As with those who went before him, Xi’s outer confidence masked a sense of foreboding that he might suffer a fate similar to that of previous rulers.7 A few months later, in 2018, Chairman Xi did away with term limits and extended his rule indefinitely.
In its very design, the Forbidden City seemed to reflect the contrast between leaders’ outward confidence and inner apprehension. Our guide walked us through the three great halls at the city’s center: the Taihedian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (where the emperor presided over ceremonies), the Zhonghedian, the Hall of Central Harmony (where officials kowtowed to the emperor before ceremonies in the Taihedian), and the Baohedian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony (where emperors held banquets to entertain heads of state, kinsmen, and government ministers). Those grand structures were meant not only to impress, but also to defend from threats that might come from inside or outside the city’s walls. The emperor was housed at the center of the walled complex for protection and was constantly surrounded by his guards. The emperors who sat on the elaborate throne in the Hall of Central Harmony made decisions based largely on fear and anxiety.
For example, the Yongle emperor Zhu Dai, who built the Forbidden City, having overthrown his nephew to take power, was even more concerned about internal dangers than he was about the possibility of another Mongol invasion. To identify and eliminate opponents, the emperor set up an elaborate spy network. To preempt opposition from scholars and bureaucrats, he directed the executions not only of those suspected of disloyalty, but also their entire families, including women and children. Among the victims were four scholars who became known as the Four Martyrs. One of these scholars, Fang Xiaoru, when threatened with the elimination of nine kinship lines, replied defiantly that he was “fine with ten.” All his blood relations were murdered along with all his students and peers—a total of 873 people. The Chinese Communist Party used similar tactics several centuries later. 8
I could not help but think of the contrast between the city’s grandeur and its occupants’ insecurity. The art and architectural style, however, reflected the basis for Confucius’s social creed that hierarchy and harmony fit together and are interdependent. Our guide explained that architectural styles conformed to the Treatise on Architectural Methods, an eleventh-century manual that specified particular designs for ranks in Chinese social structure. As we entered the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest building in the Forbidden City, he pointed out that its double-layered-roof design was reserved for the emperor only. The grand throne is surrounded by six immense golden pillars engraved with dragons to evoke the supreme power of the emperor. Behind the throne, a carved gilt screen and incense burners in the shape of unicorns signify the submission of all other kingdoms. After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the new rulers of the Qing dynasty preserved the Ming architecture, but changed the names of some of the buildings. The Hall of Imperial Supremacy became the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Consistent with the Confucian teaching that the fundamental duty is to “know thy place,” the emperors promoted deference to hierarchy (both by the Chinese people and vassal states) as the path to harmony. But their effort to preserve hierarchical order and control was anything but harmonious for those subjected to their brutality. As the Manchu forces advanced into China proper, Chongzhen, the last Ming emperor, left his throne carved with images of dragons and unicorns, and hanged himself from a tree on Meishan, a hill overlooking the palace.
As our guide described the construction of the Forbidden City, it was clear that the rulers’ determination to preserve the hierarchical order and guard against internal threats meant hardship rather than harmony for the Chinese people. Zhu Di mobilized one hundred thousand artisans and one million laborers to build the city; they did so in just fourteen years. Peasants dragged large carved stones seventy kilometers from the quarry to the construction site. Working in below-freezing temperatures, fifty laborers per stone sloshed water in front of the sled that bore the stone to create an icy surface before dragging the sled over rough ground. The most powerful symbol of hierarchy and the deference that Chinese rulers expected lay not in the architectural style of the city, but in the sacrifice the Chinese people made to construct it. Laborers in the Forbidden City, like those who worked eighty kilometers away to strengthen the Great Wall and protect against another Mongol invasion, were on the unfortunate end of superior-inferior relations that underpinned the hierarchical order.
As we walked through the city, it was easy to view Chairman Xi as supremely confident. He wanted to be seen as the unchallenged ruler of an increasingly powerful and apparently harmonious country. Yet for Xi and his predecessors, the pomp of the office masked deep insecurity, and harmony concealed brutal repression. After the tour of the Forbidden City, I thought of the relationship between the emperor and the Chinese people during previous eras as analogous to the dominance that the Chinese Communist Party seeks over all aspects of Chinese political and social life today. Xi and Communist Party leaders expect the same degree of deference to hierarchy and collective effort to achieve the China Dream, what Xi has described as Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory. As China’s power increased, so did leaders’ uncertainty and fear. Danger came in many forms. The sweep of Chinese dynastic history reveals cycles of prosperity followed by increased population; the growth of corruption; some combination of natural disaster, famine, rebellion, and civil war; political and economic decline; and, finally, collapse. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China’s classic texts, warns, “After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur (分久必合, 合久必分).” Communist Party leaders and their dynastic progenitors viewed control through autocratic hierarchy as the best guarantor of harmony and protection against chaos. Control then and today required protecting China not only from internal influences that might challenge the hierarchical order, but also from threats along China’s vast frontier. (China today shares its 13,743 miles of border with fourteen countries, including Russia, India, Vietnam, and North Korea).
Our guide showed us where the last royal occupant of the Forbidden City, Emperor Puyi, was stripped of power in 1911, at the age of five, during China’s Republican Revolution. He remained in the old Imperial apartments at the back of the palace until 1924. Puyi abdicated in the midst of the “century of humiliation,” a period of Chinese history that Chairman Xi had described to President Trump and those who joined the two leaders for dinner at Mar-a-Lago six months earlier. The century of humiliation was the unhappy era during which China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost wars, made major concessions to foreign powers, and endured brutal occupation. Humiliation began with Great Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. It ended with Allied and Chinese defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 and Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.9
As the tour ended, I was even more convinced that our dramatic shift in policy was needed and long overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and return as the Middle Kingdom. But for me, it exposed the fears as well as the grand ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond and regain the honor lost during the “century of humiliation.” The party was obsessed with control because control was necessary to allay its fears and fulfill its ambitions.
THE HISTORY that our Chinese hosts omitted was as revealing as the history they promoted. The two leaders and their wives preceded us into the Hospital for Cultural Relics at the National Palace Museum. As we observed craftspeople restoring artifacts, it was clear that Xi was resurrecting what Mao had tried to destroy: historical memory of China’s Imperial past. Mao was an iconoclast; Xi was a nostalgic. Mao destroyed order and invited the chaos of continuous revolution; Xi evoked Confucian moral order to maintain control and encourage conformity.
The 1.5-ton portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong that hung over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, facing Tiananmen Square, was impossible to miss. But our guide did not mention it; nor did he make any mention of Mao, even though the square occupies the space between that great portrait and the mausoleum that holds Mao’s crystal coffin and his embalmed body. It was at the Gate of Heavenly Peace that, on October 1, 1949, Mao announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He and his fellow revolutionaries believed that the state had to be torn down to save it. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia seemed a workable model. By the time Mao gave his speech in 1949, the Chinese people had endured fourteen years of brutal Japanese occupation after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and a costly civil war that followed from 1945 to 1949.
Xi repeatedly spoke of Japan’s brutal occupation of China and portrayed the Chinese Communist Party as a savior that had liberated the Chinese people from Japanese oppressors. Even as we looked out at Tiananmen Square, our hosts cast their efforts to achieve “national rejuvenation” as the party’s triumph over the century of humiliation. But as I looked upon the square’s gray vastness, my mind could not help but replay images of fanatical Red Guards from Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 or the tanks that brutally repressed the student demonstrations of 1989.
Chairman Xi dwells on the century of humiliation for another reason: to gloss over the first decades of party rule that followed, which were even worse. The application of Maoist theory between the end of the Civil War in 1949 and Mao’s demise nearly three decades later killed tens of millions of Chinese through misrule, policy-induced famine, and political purges, to say nothing of the disastrous Maoist-inspired revolutions in other parts of the world.
Six years after National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger orchestrated President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution and forced to work in a tractor factory, succeeded Mao as paramount leader. Deng gradually dismantled Maoist policies. From 1978 to 1989, he focused on economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy. In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”10 Under Deng and his successors, such as Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012), the rejection of Maoist economic policies and political excesses was explicit. But that changed when Xi Jinping assumed the premiership in 2012.
To master the past as a means of securing his future, Xi cultivated a more benign interpretation of Chinese Communist Party history, one based on three phases of progress. First, Mao Zedong ended the century of humiliation. Second, Deng Xiaoping and his successors generated wealth. Third, Xi Jinping returned China to greatness. Xi’s portrayal of Mao as savior rather than tyrant represented more than a manipulation of history; it required the suppression of personal trauma. Xi and his family suffered physical and psychological abuse during the Cultural Revolution. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior party official and veteran of the revolution, was imprisoned and tortured. The Red Guards ransacked his childhood home and forced his family to flee. One of Xi’s sisters died from the hardship. Xi was brought before a jeering crowd during a “struggle session,” a humiliation ritual used during the Cultural Revolution, where his own mother denounced him. Like many of his contemporaries who are now at the top of the party, Xi was forced to work in the countryside. He rarely speaks of the horrors inflicted on his family at the outset of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1968. Instead, his propaganda apparatus portrays his seven years of hard labor as an uplifting coming-of-age story that explains his resilience as well as his empathy for the hardships suffered by the less fortunate people of rural China. Xi’s reluctance to criticize Mao and the Cultural Revolution is more than a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which victims develop positive feelings toward their captors and sympathy for their causes. Xi is unwilling to renounce the Mao era mainly because he understands that any historical questioning of the Communist Party past could morph into skepticism of and opposition to the Communist Party present. Contemplation of the Maoist period’s failures might raise doubts about the party’s ability to deliver on the China Dream through absolute control. Losing control of the past is, for autocrats, the first step toward losing control of the future.11
MANIPULATING THE collective memory of the Chinese people requires ever greater feats of censorship and nationalistic education under Xi. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms generated prosperity, but they also caused ideological incoherence. The contradictions between Communist orthodoxy and a highly globalized economy were starker than ever thirty years after Deng said, “Let some people get rich first” and “Getting rich is glorious.”12 Authoritarian capitalism created ample opportunities for corruption and produced a bourgeois class larger than any other self-proclaimed Communist country has ever seen. When he assumed leadership of the party in 2012, Xi was determined to reemphasize the ideological underpinning of CCP rule but to couch it in a rhetoric of Chinese chauvinism and national destiny. In speeches, he revived Mao’s claim in his Little Red Book (a collection of 267 of the dictator’s aphorisms) that it was “an objective law independent of man’s will [that] the socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system.” In tandem, he has promoted a “community of common destiny for mankind,” a bid for global leadership that strongly echoes his dynastic forebears, based on the idea that China reigns supreme over tianxia—“everything beneath heaven.”
Xi was the consensus pick to lead the party in 2012, a bona fide member of what Australian journalist John Garnaut has labeled the “princeling cohort.” The princelings, direct descendants of the party elders who fought and won the revolution in 1949, share existential angst that they may succumb to the historical cycle that destroyed every dynasty that came before them. For Xi and his contemporaries at the top of the CCP, maintaining control and achieving national rejuvenation can be matters of life or death.13
This attitude was further reinforced by the Tiananmen Square protest. In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square to demand democratic governance, free speech, and a free press. Within a week, many of the protesters began hunger strikes. The Chinese government declared martial law and dispatched mechanized PLA units to the capital. On the night of June 3, the PLA closed in on the center of Beijing, firing live ammunition into crowds of people on the streets. The army stormed the square at 1 a.m. on June 4. Estimates of civilian deaths ranged from several hundred to ten thousand. The massacre generated global outrage. As I glimpsed Tiananmen Square, I remembered that history and thought once more about the paradox of China’s growing power and fragility.
For the CCP’s leaders, the lesson of Tiananmen was never to loosen its grip on power. Xi and the party see 1989 as a period during which the Chinese Communist Party might have joined the Soviet Union in collapse. As with Putin and the Russian Siloviki, party leadership viewed Mikhail Gorbachev as weak. Gorbachev, who visited Beijing amid the Tiananmen Square protests to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Soviet-Communist China relations, lost faith in the primacy of the Soviet party elites and compromised. Xi and his cohort believe that Gorbachev’s effort to make the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a “party of the whole people” was misguided and led to the Soviet Union’s demise.
While obsessed with party purity and order at home, the CCP is determined to advance its system of authoritarian capitalism abroad to expand Chinese power and influence at the expense of countries that adhere to democratic principles and free-market economic practices. On the morning of the second day of our visit, we stood on the steps of the Great Hall of the People as the American and Chinese leaders, clad in overcoats against the brisk autumn air, reviewed a People’s Liberation Army honor guard. Off to one side was a throng of Chinese and American elementary school children leaping up and down and enthusiastically waving the flags of the two nations. The kids, who had been cued to begin their cheering too soon, were visibly exhausted by the time the two leaders passed in front of them to enter the Great Hall and begin the day’s talks. Pottinger (who wouldn’t be stopped from attending the second day’s meetings) leaned over and deadpanned into my ear, “The children are getting an early start on their social credit scores.” Such bits of humor were what made our intense schedule feel tolerable—and would have landed a Chinese blogger in jail.
The ceremony and the tour of the Forbidden City left me with the impression that the party’s leaders believe that they have a fleeting window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor. To seize upon this opportunity, the CCP integrates internal and external efforts to expand its comprehensive national power. Internally, realizing the so-called China Dream requires unprecedented economic growth, popular support for national rejuvenation, and tight control of the population. Externally, satisfying the narrative of national rejuvenation renders a dramatic expansion of Chinese economic, political, and military influence indispensable. The CCP’s strategy relies on co-option and coercion to influence China’s population, other nations, and international organizations to act in the party’s interests. The party also attempts to conceal its intentions and its actions to preclude competition. This strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment integrates a range of cultural, economic, technological, and military efforts. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous, not only to the United States and the free world but also to China’s citizens deemed a threat to the party’s ambitions, is the integrated nature of the party’s effort across government, industry, academia, and the military.
TO MAINTAIN its exclusive grip on power in the post-Mao period, the party strove to meet the population’s rising expectations mainly through increased economic opportunity. Since Deng’s reforms, the Chinese people achieved an astonishing rate of growth, which pulled more than 800 million people out of poverty. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, China’s middle class grew by 203 million people. China became the world’s second-largest economy and the largest exporter. Infrastructure and construction projects transformed China’s harbors, airports, railways, and roads, connecting the Chinese people to one another and the world to an unprecedented degree. By the early 2000s, half the world’s cranes were building gleaming skyscrapers in China’s rapidly expanding cities. The party’s goal was to double income levels between 2010 and 2020. This proved unsustainable. Since 2015, China has marked less than 7 percent growth every year, and by 2020, China’s leaders saw this key pillar of their legitimacy, economic growth, fracturing. Policies designed to maintain high rates of growth generated long-term frailties in the economy.14 Vast debt fueled inefficient growth but did not produce profitable returns. Overinvestment in particular sectors led to overcapacity and losses. By early 2020, economic growth had decelerated to the lowest rate in twenty-nine years as capital investment by Chinese firms dropped. To boost the decelerating economy, China cut banks’ reserve rates to free up $126 billion for loans. But then the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in early 2020 and the associated quarantine and travel restrictions affected nearly half of China’s population, slowing China’s economy further. It seemed possible that China’s economic policies designed to keep the party’s exclusive grip on power and allow China to sprint to catch up to the United States might risk what party leaders feared most: internal dissent based on a failure to meet the peoples’ rising expectations.
The logical way to continue the economic growth that began with Deng’s reforms in the 1980s would have been to reform markets even further, unleashing free enterprise and deemphasizing large, inefficient state-owned companies that lacked incentives to increase productivity and pursue innovative technologies. Instead, under Xi, the party strengthened the primacy of state-owned enterprises (SOE). Although SOEs are inefficient and major sources of waste and corruption, they are critical to maintaining the party’s control over the economy and co-opting the population. SOEs are also foundational to the party’s plans to shift the economy toward high-end manufacturing and dominate critical sectors of the emerging global economy. Xi moved to “strengthen, optimize, and enlarge” state companies, directing more than $1 billion in mergers to create national champion industries such as railway, metals, mining, shipping, and nuclear energy.15
UNDER THE party’s strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment, China’s authoritarian system has become ubiquitous. To ensure their grip on power even if they fail to meet their goals for improved standards of living, party leaders emphasized propaganda and accelerated the construction of an unprecedented surveillance state that is more intrusive than that imagined by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Indeed, the party invented the term brainwashing, and today’s efforts have their roots in the thought reform movement that Zhou Enlai initiated in 1951 and the CCP perfected during the Cultural Revolution. Twenty-first-century brainwashing has been upgraded with new technology. For 1.4 billion Chinese people, government propaganda is a seamless part of everyday life. Chinese television news follows a regular agenda: ten to fifteen minutes on Chairman Xi and other CCP leaders, five to ten minutes on Chinese economic achievements, and five to seven minutes on the failures of the rest of the world. There is also routine coverage of the theme that the United States wants to keep China down. Students in universities and high schools must take lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the chairman’s fourteen-point philosophy that emphasizes the party’s “people-centric” approach to governance and the many benefits of the CCP’s supreme leadership over everything. Xi Jinping Thought is the subject of the most popular app in China. The app, whose name translates to “Study Strong Country,” requires users to sign in with their mobile numbers and real names before earning study points through reading articles, commenting daily, and taking multiple-choice tests about the party’s virtues and wise policies.16
The social credit score is one of the party’s many tools for co-opting the population into conformity and coercing recalcitrant individuals. The party uses its control of the internet and all forms of communication in combination with artificial intelligence technologies to monitor activities and conversations. The resulting social credit score is meant to determine eligibility for almost all social services, such as loans, internet access, government employment, education, insurance, and transportation.
Like its dynastic predecessors, the party leadership is particularly concerned about dissent in China’s border regions. The party has acted most aggressively toward the ethnic minority populations and in territories annexed in recent history. In western Xinjiang, for example, where the ethnic-majority Uighurs mainly practice Islam, the party has engaged in systematic repression designed to coerce the population into forswearing their religious and cultural identity in favor of the party’s nationalist ideology. By 2019, the party had detained at least a million Uighurs in concentration camps where they are subjected to systematic brainwashing. Uighur families are forced to house loyal party members so their progress in reeducation can be monitored. The CCP has demolished historic mosques. Ethnic Han have been forcefully resettled into Xinjiang to dilute Uighur culture. Xinjiang has become a testing ground for maintaining ideological purity and psychological as well as cultural control. In Xinjiang’s concentration camps, prisoners begin the day with a flag-raising ceremony; they pass time singing Communist Party songs, praising the party and Xi Jinping, and studying Chinese language, history, and law. The CCP responded to international criticism of these repressive tactics with denial, but evidence mounted. In November 2019, the New York Times uncovered a startling cache of documents allegedly leaked by a member of the CCP. The more than four hundred pages of records revealed party orders to crush all minorities’ opposition, imprison more than one million people in concentration camps, and carry out systematic brainwashing and cultural control. Included in the documents were internal speeches by Chairman Xi directing officials to show “absolutely no mercy” as they crack down on minority populations. He also directed follow-up efforts to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China. Local officials who resisted the party’s orders were purged; a county head in southern Xinjiang was jailed for quietly releasing more than seven thousand inmates.17 The CCP is also repressive, albeit more subtly, in Tibet, and it has continuously chipped away at local autonomy and individual rights in the former colonial territories of Hong Kong and Macao.
In Tibet, where the Buddhist majority regards the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader, the party blended co-option with coercion under a campaign of “stability maintenance.” To appear as a benefactor, the party refurbished rather than razed temples and historical sites. As in Xinjiang, however, Communist Party cadres monitor every village, oversee political education, and manage every monastery and religious institution. Enabled by new technology, the party intends to scrutinize daily behavior so it can identify and swiftly punish dissent. The party also claimed the right to approve “high reincarnations” that select future Dalai Lamas, the foremost leader of the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism.
In June 2019, the party’s effort to tighten its control over Hong Kong’s population sparked sustained protests that continued into 2020. The protests were initially in response to a law that would allow local authorities to extradite criminal fugitives wanted on the mainland. The demonstrators demanded suspension not only of the bill, but of other means of eroding Hong Kong’s democratic autonomy. The party responded by waging a sustained campaign of propaganda to discredit the protestors and by carrying out coercive measures against companies and individuals that supported them. A landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates in the November 2019 election indicated widespread support for the protest movement and Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status. Demonizing dissent and blaming foreign forces were the same tactics employed after the Tiananmen Square massacre thirty years earlier. After President Trump signed a bill expressing support for the protestors and authorizing sanctions against individuals and entities that used force against them, thousands of people assembled in front of the Hong Kong City Hall for a pro-American and pro-democracy rally.18 The party conducted a global propaganda campaign to portray the protests as a foreign-backed color revolution designed to destabilize China.
Efforts to prevent dissent and maintain control through co-option and coercion span the entire country. Religion is one of the party’s perceived threats because it encroaches on the void left after the collapse of Maoism. Mao attacked religion as “vulgar superstition,” but his effort to replace spirituality with Communist ideology and his own cult of personality failed. The Catholic Church and fast-growing Protestant religions concerned Xi and the party, although their campaign against Christianity was less brazen than the campaign against Islam. In 2018, for example, the party attempted to co-opt the Catholic Church by ceding veto power to the Vatican over bishop nominees in return for Rome’s recognition of party-appointed bishops. Despite its effort, about half the country’s ten million Catholics continued to worship underground and reject churches run by the state. When Protestant congregations proved difficult to control because of their diversity, the party forcefully removed crosses from the tops of churches and even demolished some churches to make an example of those that had failed to register with the government. To provide an alternative to Christianity and Islam, Xi and the party resurrected the Confucian moral code, with its emphasis on deference to hierarchy and preservation of harmony, as a form of folk religion intended to strengthen the CCP’s grip on power. The party has also significantly boosted patronage of Buddhism and Daoism as “Chinese” alternatives to what it regards as foreign belief systems.19
Suppression of religion extended to suppression of ideas associated with Western liberalism. Any principles or values that might challenge the absolute control of the party had to be eliminated. Particularly dangerous were materials that extolled individual rights, including freedom of expression, representative government, and rule of law. In 2019, for example, the Ministry of Education ordered a nationwide check on all university constitutional law textbooks. Within weeks, a popular textbook written by Beijing University law professor Zhang Qianfan was pulled from bookstores throughout the country. Zhang noted in an interview that “constitutional law, as an academic discipline, should not be politicized.” Not long after it was posted on a social media platform, the interview also disappeared.20
THE PARTY’s effort to stifle human freedom and extend authoritarian control does not stop at China’s borders. China uses a combination of co-option and propaganda to promote its policies and its worldview. China’s expanding influence in the world, what scholars and policy makers call tianxia (天下, meaning “everything under heaven”), goes beyond the peaceful development of a new international order sympathetic to Chinese interests. Chinese leaders aim to put in place a modern-day version of the tributary system that Chinese emperors used to establish authority over vassal states. Under that Imperial system, kingdoms could trade and enjoy peace with the Chinese Empire in return for submission.21 If the Chinese Communist Party succeeds in creating a twenty-first-century version of the tributary system, the world will be less free, less prosperous, and less safe. China intends to establish the new tributary system through a massive effort organized under three overlapping policies: Made in China 2025, One Belt One Road (OBOR), and Military-Civil Fusion.
Made in China 2025 is designed to make China a largely independent science and technology innovation power. To achieve that goal, the party is creating high-tech monopolies inside China and stripping foreign companies of their intellectual property through theft and forced technology transfer. SOEs and private companies work in concert to achieve the party’s objectives. In some cases, foreign companies are required or coerced to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies to sell their products in China. These Chinese companies mostly have close ties to the party, making routine the transfer of intellectual property and manufacturing techniques to their partners and, by extension, to the Chinese government. Thus, foreign companies entering into the Chinese market often make huge profits in the short term, but after transferring their intellectual property and manufacturing know-how, they see their market share diminish as Chinese companies, advantaged by state support and cheap labor, produce goods at a low price and dump those goods into the global market. As a result, many international companies lose market share and even go out of business. Made in China 2025 aims to fuel China’s economic growth with a vast amount of transferred technology and eventually dominate sectors of the emerging global economy that will give it military as well as economic advantages.
The party’s international efforts to achieve national rejuvenation and realize the China Dream come together under the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, later labeled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for foreign audiences, to mask its China-centric nature. OBOR calls for more than one trillion dollars in new infrastructure investments across the Indo-Pacific and Eurasian continents and beyond. While the initiative initially received an enthusiastic reception from nations that saw an opportunity both for economic growth and to satisfy their need for improved infrastructure, by 2018 it had become clear to many of those nations that CCP investment came with many strings attached, most prominently unsustainable debt and widespread corruption. Under the CCP’s integrated strategy, economic motives are inseparable from strategic designs. OBOR projects are meant to gain influence over targeted governments and place the “Middle Kingdom” at the hub of routes and communications networks. New or expanded transportation and shipping routes will ease the flow of energy and raw materials into China and Chinese products out. More routes would significantly reduce the risk that the United States or other nations could interdict those flows at critical maritime chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca (the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific).22 To ensure control at key geographic points, the CCP uses investment and indebtedness as the basis for servile relationships between the Middle Kingdom and modern-day vassal states. OBOR is, in large measure, a colonial-style campaign of co-option and coercion.
Belying the party’s description of OBOR as development of a “community for shared future for mankind,” the initiative has instead created a common pattern of economic clientelism that the Chinese Communist Party eagerly exploits.23 The CCP first co-opts countries with large, high-interest loans from Chinese banks. Once they are indebted, the party coerces that country’s leaders to align with the party’s foreign policy agenda and goal of displacing the influence of the United States and its key partners (e.g., Japan, Australia, India, and European nations). Although Chinese leaders often depict these deals as “win-win,” many OBOR projects have proven to be a one-way toll road that ensures China’s access to a client country’s energy and raw materials, creates artificial demand for Chinese products and a Chinese labor force, and allows China to control critical physical and communications infrastructure. These deals, rather, fit the description of “triple wins” solely for China: Chinese companies and workers abroad cycle money back into the Chinese economy, Chinese banks enjoy high-interest payments, and the Chinese government gains powerful influence over the target country’s economic and diplomatic relations.
For developing countries with fragile economies, the OBOR sets a ruthless debt trap. When countries are unable to service loans, China sometimes trades debt for equity to gain control of the debtor country’s ports, airports, dams, power plants, or communications networks. The list of countries for whom China set the debt trap reveals a shrewd strategy to control routes vital to commerce and freedom of navigation. By 2020, the risk of debt distress was growing in thirty-three countries with OBOR financing, and eight poor countries (Pakistan, Djibouti, the Maldives, Laos, Mongolia, Montenegro, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) already had unsustainable levels of debt.24
China’s tactics vary based on the relative strength or weakness of the target states’ leaders and institutions. When faced with large-scale investment projects, countries with weak political institutions often succumb to corruption, which makes them even more vulnerable to China’s strategy. In Sri Lanka, for example, then-president Mahinda Rajapaksa incurred debts far beyond what his nation could bear. He agreed to a high-interest loan to finance Chinese construction of a port, despite no immediate or apparent need for a new harbor on the small island nation. The prime minister was later defeated electorally, but the Sri Lankan government remained severely indebted. Following the commercial failure of the port, Sri Lanka was forced to sign a ninety-nine-year lease to a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Although Chinese officials announced that the port would not be used for military purposes, two Chinese submarines docked there in advance of Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to the country in 2014.
The Maldives, a small island nation of four hundred thousand people off the coast of India, was another attractive target because it controls a maritime territory of high strategic importance, one more than three times larger than the United Kingdom. When China approached the country and struck a deal with President Abdulla Yameen (who, along with other officials, greatly profited from the inflated value of contracts), the Maldives incurred a combination of debt and guaranteed loans of more than $1.5 billion, more than 30 percent of their GDP. (Unreported guarantees could make the total loans as high as $3 billion.) In 2018, Chinese efforts to influence the presidential election in the Maldives failed due to a backlash against corruption, indebtedness, and the associated loss of sovereignty.25
Malaysia, the second-largest recipient of OBOR funding after Pakistan, was another important target for the CCP due to the country’s strategic location at the heart of Asia, with 4,500 kilometers of coastline and a shamelessly corrupt government. After Prime Minister Najib Razak and his co-conspirators embezzled $4.5 billion from the country’s sovereign wealth fund—$681 million went into Najib’s personal bank account—China arrived to bail him out. China also financed a Malaysian rail project for $16 billion, over twice the actual cost, a scheme that Chairman Xi personally approved. Five months later, Najib flew to Beijing to sign the deal. Beginning in mid-2017, the much-needed cash flow from Chinese state-owned banks was initiated, helping the president of the third-wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia cover for his embezzled funds.26
In Kenya, the railway project to connect the port city of Mombasa with Nairobi significantly underdelivered in revenue and increased public debt to unsustainable levels. Kenyan economist David Ndii described the railway in harsh terms as heralding “a new age of Oriental colonialism.” Seeing Kenyan government officials “groveling” to the Chinese and making excuses for excesses, such as the maltreatment of Kenyan workers, Ndii was reminded of “the chiefs who sold their people into slavery . . . and signed away their lands to European imperialists for blankets and booze.”27
The new vanguard of the CCP is a delegation of bankers and party officials armed with duffel bags full of cash. Corruption enables a new form of colonial-like control that extends far beyond the strategic shipping routes in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In Ecuador, China financed a great dam in the jungle at the base of an active volcano. The $19 billion agreement allowed China to receive 80 percent of Ecuador’s oil exports at a discount; China sells the oil at a markup for profit. Two years after the dam opened in 2016, thousands of cracks appeared in its machinery, and the reservoir was clogged with silt and trees. The first time the turbines were activated, the power surge shorted out the national electrical grid.28
In Venezuela, China profited from the corrupt authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro even as the dictator destroyed the country’s economy. China kept the dictator’s regime on life support with a $5 billion credit line in 2018, and in return secured oil at a discount and resold it at a markup, profiting as the Venezuelan people became destitute.29 The CCP also supports other dictatorships with new technical means of co-option and coercion, such as surveillance technologies, facial recognition, and restricted internet.
The Military-Civil Fusion policy is the most totalitarian of the three prongs; it reveals starkly how Xi has moved away from the market-reform trajectory of Deng Xiaoping. Under Xi’s rule, SOEs and private companies alike must act at the direction of the party. First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence. “All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.” Chinese companies work alongside universities and research arms of the People’s Liberation Army not only to achieve its economic goals but also to extend China’s influence internationally. Chinese companies have become arms of the party as it dominates key sectors of the global economy, leads in the development of dual-use technologies, and modernizes the PLA. Capturing private companies under its systemic efforts through Made in China 2025 allows the party to conceal its intention to move ahead of the forerunning nations (e.g., the United States) that lead in technologies with both economic and defense applications. Chinese companies steal or force the transfer of intellectual property; abet the party’s bribery and compromising of foreign political and business leaders; and create financial and infrastructural vulnerabilities to allow espionage or intelligence operations.30
But Military-Civil Fusion extends beyond the use of Chinese companies to include efforts that are varied, comprehensive, and unconventional. In addition to espionage through traditional channels such as cyber-theft by the Ministry of State Security or undeclared intelligence personnel at Chinese diplomatic missions, the party tasks some Chinese students and scholars in U.S. and other foreign universities and research labs to extract technology. Many of the returning scholars and scientists are then received in one of more than 150 “Overseas Chinese Scholar Pioneering Parks,” located in high-technology development zones, for what is essentially an intelligence debriefing.31 Chinese entities marking themselves as nongovernmental science and technology organizations and advocacy groups are particularly effective. Founded in 2015, the Shenzhen-based China Radical Innovation 100 (CRI 100) is a self-described nonprofit development platform that targets innovation hubs overseas such as Silicon Valley and Boston in the United States and Tel Aviv in Israel. CRI 100 boasts a “new international cooperative innovation model” that, in fact, consists of extracting and sending back the results of cutting-edge research in U.S. universities and labs via the centers it has established overseas, such as the Radical Boston Innovation Center. In 2019, the CRI listed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, and Oxford University as partners. At the Boston-based North America Chinese Association of Science and Technology, over 85 percent of the members have doctoral degrees from top U.S. universities and work in the top research labs in corporate America. Also affiliated with CRI is the six-thousand-member Silicon Valley Chinese Engineers Association, which provides “channels to allow members to engage in China’s rapid economic development.”32
Military-Civil Fusion fast-tracks transferred and stolen technologies to the People’s Liberation Army in such areas as maritime, space, cyberspace, biology, artificial intelligence, and energy. Military-Civil Fusion also encourages state-owned enterprises and private companies to acquire companies or a strong minority stake in companies with advanced technologies so they can be applied not only for economic, but also military and intelligence, advantage. China is known to have more than a dozen organizations that direct a nationwide effort to access foreign technologies and recruit the scientists and engineers to work in China. An example is the Thousand Talents program that targets for recruitment professors and researchers who have access to cutting-edge technology. In January 2020, Professor Charlie Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry, who had received a $50,000 monthly salary, $150,000 in annual living expenses, and more than $1.5 million under the program for a special laboratory in Wuhan University of Technology, was arrested for lying to FBI investigators. Sometimes, U.S. national defense funding supports the CCP’s highly organized technology transfer activities.33 Scientists affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army have worked on projects funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. One of many examples is the Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi Group, described in the PRC media as “a military-civilian enterprise.” The Kuang-Chi Group was founded largely on U.S. Air Force–funded research on metamaterials at Duke University. The group is applying research as it works with the People’s Liberation Army’s space-based reconnaissance platforms.34
Under Military-Civil Fusion, so-called “private” companies in telecommunications are the CCP’s most valuable tool for industrial espionage. China’s use of communications infrastructure for espionage is not a theoretical possibility; it is ongoing and gaining in scale. In 2018, for instance, African Union officials accused China of having spied on its headquarters’ network system in Addis Ababa over a period of five years. The headquarters building had been built by a Chinese SOE as China’s gift to the African Union.
Chinese cyber espionage is responsible for what former NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” In fact, a U.S. Council of Economic Advisers study estimated that the loss from malicious cyber activities to the U.S. economy in 2016 alone could have been as high as $109 billion.35 A grim revelation of China’s cyber capabilities came in December 2018, when American and U.K. law enforcement exposed a sustained Chinese hacking operation of tremendous scale. The Chinese Ministry of State Security used a hacking squad known as APT10 to target U.S. companies in the finance, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and medical industries as well as NASA and Department of Defense research laboratories. APT10 hacked into internet service providers in the United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France, Switzerland, South Korea, and other countries, extracting clients’ intellectual property and sensitive data. For example, the hackers obtained personal information including Social Security numbers for more than one hundred thousand U.S. naval personnel.36
China’s theft and development of cutting-edge technologies is fundamental to its military modernization program. The party’s narrative of national rejuvenation prioritizes the development of a powerful military capable of defending expanding global interests. The PLA has used stolen technologies to pursue advanced military capabilities such as hypersonic missiles, anti-satellite weapons, laser weapons, modern ships, stealth fighter aircraft, electromagnetic railguns, and unmanned systems.37 Their vision is of a force capable of overmatching the United States in future war. Much of the technology needed is dual use. U.S. venture capital and private equity companies help the PLA achieve its vision by providing much of the capital to Chinese companies engaged in research and development of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies.
Some transfers from U.S. companies have permitted the Chinese defense industry not only to develop its own capabilities, but also to drive the U.S. defense industry out of the international arms market with inexpensive knockoffs. For example, the Chinese drone company DJI controlled over 70 percent of the global market share in 2018 thanks to its unmatched prices. The company’s unmanned systems even became the most frequently flown commercial drones in the U.S. Army until they were banned for security concerns.38
Chinese espionage is successful in part because the CCP co-opts individuals, companies, and political leaders to collect intelligence and turns a blind eye to their activities. The party cultivates sympathetic agents in the United States and other nations with the lure of short-term profits. Companies from the United States and other free-market economies often do not report theft of their technology because they are afraid of losing access to the Chinese market, hurting their stock prices, harming relationships with customers, experiencing professional embarrassment, or prompting federal investigations.
Co-option crosses over to coercion when the CCP demands that companies adhere to the party’s worldview and forgo criticism of its repressive and aggressive policies. For example, when a Marriott social media account manager “liked” a pro-Tibet tweet in 2018, the hotel company’s website and app were blocked in China for a week, and the manager was fired after pressure from the Chinese government. In the same year, Mercedes-Benz, the German car manufacturer, was forced to apologize to the Chinese people for quoting the Dalai Lama in an Instagram post. In late July 2019, a young pilot of Cathay Pacific Airways was arrested by Hong Kong police during a protest. After being chastised by the CCP for not acting fast enough against employees involved in the protests, Cathay’s CEO and chief commercial officer resigned. Other leading Hong Kong companies rushed to condemn the protests.39
A glaring example of China’s coercion of American companies came in October 2019, when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, tweeted his support for the Hong Kong protesters. Intensely sensitive to any hint of intrusion into its internal affairs, Chinese state-run television canceled its broadcast of Rockets games. The NBA lost contracts totaling approximately $100 million, and Chinese officials demanded that the league issue an apology. The party also threatened to cut off the extremely lucrative revenue stream from China if Americans did not silence their opinions about Hong Kong. Immediately, leading NBA figures, including star players James Harden and LeBron James and coach of the Golden State Warriors Steve Kerr, obliged, chastising the Rockets general manager for expressing his opinion. This external application of the methods used for internal control, such as the social credit score system, succeeded with Orwellian efficiency.
The brilliance of the social credit score is that it coerces by co-opting people’s social networks. If, for example, a Chinese citizen protests against the government in a way deemed threatening, not only will the protester’s score fall (preventing him from purchasing train tickets, renting apartments, obtaining loans, etc.), but so will the scores of all his friends and family because of their association with him. This then prompts his friends and family to “unfriend” or ostracize the protester, and possibly speak out against his antigovernment “unsocial” behavior. The Chinese Communist Party thus has co-opted its citizens to enforce and reinforce the state’s coercive measures. The party also co-opted the NBA in an eerily similar fashion, using the mere threat of losing access to the profitable China market.
The muted international response to China’s oppression of its people and coercion of its neighbors attests to the effectiveness of the party’s campaign of political and economic co-option. China uses both foreign investment and access to its market to incentivize countries and foreign companies to conform to its interests and position on sensitive issues. The party develops a broad range of incentives and influence efforts to manipulate political processes in target nations and engineer policies favorable to Chinese interests. In 2018 and 2019, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States uncovered sophisticated CCP influence campaigns that augmented China’s considerable economic leverage with the purchase of influence within universities, the bribery of politicians, and the harassment of the Chinese diaspora community to become advocates for CCP policy.40
China’s influence efforts are also designed to promote a “China model” as an alternative to liberal democratic governance and free-market economics. China exploits the openness of free societies to promote views and policies sympathetic to the CCP. China’s influence campaign is well organized and sophisticated. Consistent with its long-standing Maoist motto “We have friends all over the world,” the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries cultivates relationships with local officials through sister city and state-to-province relationships. Those relationships are based on “principles” consistent with China’s foreign policy. While some relationships are positive financially and culturally, many aim to co-opt officials and influence them to take positions that strengthen the CCP initiatives and undermine U.S. policy.
As Xi intensified efforts to control his own population and co-opt or coerce foreign entities to support his policies, the CCP curtailed or stopped many long-standing dialogues and projects between Chinese organizations and U.S. think tanks and universities. Chinese archives and libraries closed. Yet, the CCP maintained access to programs with U.S. institutions that advanced its interests and gave it access to key technology while constraining or shutting out U.S. researchers. Chinese think tanks and universities mandated centralized approval of topics and foreign participants for conferences. Think tanks work as arms of the CCP and follow Xi Jinping’s directive to “go global” and advance the Chinese narrative. A scholar with long experience in China observed that Chinese interlocutors no longer had “much to say beyond the Xi Catechism.” Instead of demanding reciprocity, some U.S. think tanks and universities chose self-censorship because they feared losing access to China completely if they criticized CCP practices, such as the establishment of a surveillance state, the incarceration of political prisoners, the internment of Xinjiang’s Muslim population in reeducation camps, or the party’s intensifying campaign of intimidation of Taiwan to achieve unification.41
THE CHINESE Communist Party’s obsession with control and its drive to achieve national rejuvenation converge on Taiwan, the island territory that gained autonomy as the last bastion of the Republic of China after the ROC’s defeat at the hands of the Communists during the 1945–1949 Civil War. Taiwan constitutes a particular danger to the mainland’s autocracy and authoritarian capitalist economic system because it presents a democratic, free-market alternative. Taiwan liberalized its economy in the 1960s and undertook political reforms in the 1980s that transitioned governance from one-party rule to a multiparty democracy. Taiwan’s tremendous success confronts the Chinese with a thriving system that implicitly debunks the CCP’s oft-cited contention that Chinese people are poorly suited for representative government and individual rights.
Understanding that Taiwan’s success heightens the party’s most fundamental insecurities and undercuts the promise of the China Dream, the party under Xi intensified rhetoric concerning the final annexation of Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China dwarfs Taiwan, geographically as well as economically, but some numbers paint a vastly different picture. For example, compare Taiwan’s per capita income, in purchasing power terms, of $57,000 (higher than that of Germany, the United Kingdom, or Japan) with China’s $21,000 (below that of Kazakhstan, Mexico, or Thailand). Taiwan is a threat because it provides a small-scale, yet powerful example of a successful political and economic system that is free and open rather than autocratic and closed.42
Taiwan has been the object of a relentless CCP campaign of co-option and coercion. Although the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with China in 1979 was accompanied by the Taiwan Relations Act, which stipulated the peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s future status, the CCP immediately began a campaign to bolster political sympathies in Taiwan for reunification. Co-option efforts included expanding investment and trade to make the island more dependent on the mainland. By 2000, China became Taiwan’s biggest export market, accounting for more than a quarter of its exports.43 Expanded trade with China made Taipei more vulnerable to Beijing’s economic leverage.44 To punish unfriendly Taiwanese political leaders, for example, the CCP temporarily stopped issuing individual travel permits just prior to Taiwan’s 2019 parliamentary elections.45 Other coercive measures against Taiwan included diplomatic isolation as China made renouncing Taiwan a condition for foreign investment and access to its market. Between Xi Jinping’s ascension to power in 2012 and the year 2018, The Gambia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Burkina Faso ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan in exchange for Chinese investment and access to the Chinese market for their exports.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in Taiwan, the party did its best to ensure defeat of the incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, and the Democratic Progressive Party due to her party’s position that Taiwan is an independent country. Those efforts, based in part on the CCP’s erosion of citizens’ rights in Hong Kong and its heavy-handed tactics, backfired. Tsai secured over 57 percent of the ballot and a record 8.2 million votes, well ahead of her rival, Han Kuo-yu, and his Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China. The setback is likely to heighten Xi’s desire to push for unification. Xi’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, commented after the election that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory” and that “those who split the country will be doomed to leave a stink for 10,000 years.”46
A cause for greater concern is the possibility that the PLA will intensify preparations for a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. After Xi removed term limits on the presidency, a move that allowed him to rule indefinitely, some speculated that he did so to force unification on Taiwan during his tenure. Statements of CCP officials under Xi were aggressive; many implied military action. In 2019, Chairman Xi said in a speech that Taiwan “must and will be” reunited with the mainland. China’s preparations for a cross-strait assault include rapid modernization and expansion of its navy and air force and increased patrols around Taiwan of bomber, fighter, and surveillance aircraft.47
The sustained campaign of co-option and coercion aimed at Taiwan may represent the most dangerous flashpoint for war, but it is only the first priority in a much larger CCP campaign designed to achieve hegemony in the Asia Pacific region. Since 1995, when China occupied Mischief Reef, a low-tide elevation within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), China has become increasingly assertive in the South China Sea. Occupying an area twice the size of the state of Alaska, the South China Sea lies east of Vietnam, west of the Philippines, and north of Brunei. It is a vital waterway through which one third of the world’s cargo transport flows. While the PRC made expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea since its establishment, it has since 2012 acted to seize control of the area through quasi-military and military deployments and the construction of military bases on reefs and artificial islands. When its neighbors protested China’s attempted “land grab,” the PLA conducted belligerent shows of force. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal in The Hague ruled the Chinese claim as having no legal basis. Yet, in encounters that followed, heavily armed China Coast Guard patrol vessels threatened to shoot foreign fisherman in the disputed waterway. Economic coercion was even more effective than military intimidation. After The Hague ruling, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte said he would ignore the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision and instead advance partnership with China in oil exploration plans. In return, he received $24 billion in pledges of investment and credit lines. Later, that number grew to $45 billion, including railways, bridges, and industrial hubs.48
China continues to expand its military systems around the South China Sea, Taiwan, and in the East China Sea, near Japan’s Senkaku Islands. China’s military strategy in the region is often dubbed “anti-access and area denial,” or A2/AD. Aimed at establishing exclusionary control, the strategy integrates cruise and ballistic missiles and air defenses. The PLA has modernized its land, maritime, and air systems to extend military power out to the “second island chain,” comprising the Ogasawara and Volcano Islands of Japan and the Mariana Islands of the United States. It is also demonstrating the ability to impose costs on American air and naval forces should they attempt to intervene during a conflict. China hopes to gain coercive power over nations and territories in the region through not only demonstrated military prowess, but also economic coercion and the use of information warfare and maritime militias. Its efforts to create exclusive areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region are particularly challenging because they are integrated as components of a “total competition” that is “the peaceful equivalent of total warfare.”49
WHAT CHINA’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment has in common with Putin’s playbook is the objective of collapsing the free, open, and rules-based order that the United States and its allies established after World War II, the order that some believed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, was no longer contested. What Russia’s annexation of Crimea and China’s imposition in the South China Sea have in common is the strategic behavior of probing. Historians A. Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel describe probing as the use of aggressive diplomacy, economic measures, and military actions to test the willingness of the United States and its allies to contest efforts to displace U.S. influence and to replace the free and open order with a closed, authoritarian system sympathetic to Russian and Chinese interests. The revisionist powers of Russia and China increasingly coordinate their actions under what they deemed in June 2019 a “comprehensive strategic partnership of a new era.”
During my second full day in the White House in 2017, I hosted an “all hands” meeting with the NSC staff during which I shared my assessment that China and Russia were emboldened by what they perceived as American retrenchment and disengagement from arenas of competition. The trip to Beijing convinced me even further that it was past time to reenter those arenas and compete to counter China’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment.