The U.S. and China Finally Get Real With Each Other

[Boats]

The U.S. and China Finally Get Real With Each Other
By: Thomas Wright - Fellow @ the Brooks Institute & Defense One - 03-23-21
Re: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/202...-other/172864/

The exchange in Alaska may have seemed like a debacle, but it was actually a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries.

Thursday night’s very public dustup between United States and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, during the Biden administration’s first official meeting with China, may have seemed like a debacle, but the exchange was actually a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries.

In his brief opening remarks before the press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would discuss “our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

Blinken’s comments seemed to catch the Chinese off guard. The last Strategic & Economic Dialogue of the Obama administration, in 2016, began with a conciliatory message from then–Secretary of State John Kerry and resulted in a declaration identifying 120 different areas of cooperation.

In response to Blinken, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, said that because Blinken had “delivered some quite different opening remarks, mine will be slightly different as well.” He spoke for 16 minutes, blowing through the two-minute limit agreed upon in torturous pre-meeting negotiations over protocol. “Many people within the United States,” he said, “actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.” He went on to say that “China has made steady progress in human rights, and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights.” He also took aim at U.S. foreign policy: “I think the problem is that the United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.”

As the press began to leave, assuming that the opening remarks were over and to make way for the private discussions, Blinken and Sullivan ushered them back in and challenged Yang, telling him that “it’s never a good bet to bet against America.” Determined to have the last word, Yang and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, responded again. Yang began by saying, sarcastically, “Well, it was my bad. When I entered this room, I should have reminded the U.S. side of paying attention to its tone in our respective opening remarks, but I didn’t.”

The opening exchange did not appear to materially affect the rest of the meeting. A senior administration official told me that the moment the cameras left, the Chinese side went back to business as usual, working through the list of issues on the agenda, including nonproliferation and Iran. The official told me that the U.S. delegation believed Yang’s opening gambit had been preplanned and was not an off-the-cuff response. The Chinese delegation had come, the official said, with the intention of delivering a public message, which they did in dramatic fashion. China believes that the balance of power has shifted in its favor over the past 10 years, especially during the pandemic, and wanted to play to the audience at home.

For an astonished press, witnessing the exchange was like being present at the dawn of a new cold war and seemed to sum up just how bad the U.S.-China relationship had become. Writing in The New York Times, Ian Johnson warned, “These harsh exchanges will only contribute to the dangerous decay in relations between the world’s two most powerful countries. Both sides seem to be trapped by a need to look and sound tough.”

But this view misunderstands what is needed in U.S.-China diplomacy right now. The meeting would have been a failure if it had resulted in general declarations to cooperate while minimizing competition, a common U.S. strategy when China’s intentions were not as clear. Organizing the relationship around cooperation is theoretically desirable as an end goal but will be unattainable for the foreseeable future, given the unfolding reality of an assertive, repressive China and a defiant America.

Last year, as it anticipated a win for Joe Biden in the U.S. election and then during the transition, China signaled that it wanted to effectively reset the relationship regarding cooperation on climate change and the pandemic. The Biden team saw these overtures for what they were: a trap to get the U.S. to pull back from competing with China in exchange for cooperation that would never really materialize. Biden officials told me that any reset would have been rhetorical only; China would have continued to push forward on all other fronts, including its quest for technological supremacy, its economic coercion of Australia, and its pressure on Taiwan.

Had the Biden administration embraced China’s offer, any agreement would have collapsed beneath the weight of Beijing’s actual behavior, as well as opposition in Washington. Biden would have been forced to adjust course and take a more competitive approach anyway, under less favorable conditions, including nervous allies and an emboldened China.

By skipping this step in favor of a strategy of competitive engagement—meeting with China but seeing it through the lens of competition—the Biden team not only saved time, but it flushed Beijing’s true intentions out into the open for the world to see. In his remarks, contrasting “Chinese-style democracy,” as he called it, with “U.S.-style democracy,” Yang implicitly acknowledged that the U.S.-China relationship is, and will continue to be, defined by a competition between different government systems: authoritarianism and liberal democracy.

The Biden administration understands that a more assertive U.S. approach is jarring to many in the American foreign-policy establishment, which is accustomed to decades of cautious and cooperative engagement in high-level meetings. But friction is necessary, given China’s play for dominance over the past several years. “It is increasingly difficult to argue that we don’t know what China wants,” said the senior administration official, who asked for anonymity so as to speak freely about the meeting. “They are playing for keeps.”

Biden’s priority rightly seems to be creating a greater common cause with allies against China, especially on technology and economics. Sullivan refers to this approach as building a situation of strength, echoing the famous formulation by Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson, who made clear that strengthening the Western alliance was a necessary precondition for any talks with the Soviet Union. The U.S. has had considerable success with the Quad, the informal strategic alliance among the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, although the U.S. needs to be far more imaginative and ambitious in getting European nations on board with its efforts to compete with China.

The question after Anchorage is what role should bilateral diplomacy with Beijing play in America’s overall strategy to deal with China. Now that the dramatic public exchange has set a more honest approach for a competitive era, the two sides can progress to a much harder next phase.

The rules-based international order is over. Beijing and Moscow concluded long ago that a world in which China and Russia generally acquiesced to U.S. leadership, as they did in the 1990s and 2000s, was untenable, a Western trap designed, in part, to undermine authoritarianism. They were not entirely wrong about that—many Americans saw globalization and multilateralism as having the desirable side effect of encouraging political liberalization around the world.

The truth is that the United States does pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests (although not necessarily those of the Chinese people), while the CCP surely poses a threat to liberal democracy and U.S. interests. Ultimately, Washington and Beijing will have to acknowledge this to each other. That will be difficult for the Biden administration, which is accustomed to assuming that American interests are not a threat to any other government, but broadly benefit all major world powers. It will be even harder for Beijing, which goes to great lengths to conceal its revisionism behind a shield of insincere platitudes.

Such an acknowledgment will allow a truly frank strategic conversation to occur about how these two countries’ systems will relate to each other as they compete. These systems are incompatible in many respects, but they are also intertwined in a myriad of ways. The goals of U.S.-China diplomacy should initially be modest, to avoid unintentional provocations and to facilitate transactional cooperation on shared interests. Eventually, if China’s behavior and the geopolitical conditions are favorable, the two sides could explore broader cooperation and even the possibility of a détente—a general thawing of tensions—but that is a long way off.

Historically, the most volatile periods of rivalry between major powers is in the early stages; think of the late 1940s and the 1950s in the Cold War. The red lines become apparent only through interactions in crises. The greatest risk is for either side to miscalculate the resolve or intentions of the other. By getting real in Anchorage, both sides have taken the important first step toward a more stable relationship by acknowledging the true nature of their relationship.
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Is China a Democracy?
By: Alan Wong (explained on 09-10-12
Re: https://www.inkstonenews.com/china-t...rticle/2163522

The short answer is “not really.” So why does China claim to be democratic? Is there such a thing as Chinese democracy, and is China’s “socialist democracy” really democracy?

Is China a democracy? To answer the question, an obvious place to start would be a dictionary, where you can find the textbook definition of democracy.

Regardless of which dictionary you pick up, you’re likely to find democracy loosely defined as a system of government by all members of a state. A country governed under such a system is said to be a democracy.

Chart Link: https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/defaul...ocracy_gif.gif

The definition of democracy can be fuzzy, but there’s one thing we know for sure: that China officially wants it.

In China’s constitution and in Chinese leaders’ speeches, a “people’s democratic dictatorship” and “democracy” are invoked as goals.

But this isn’t just any democracy.

Time and again, China has claimed that it doesn’t want to “copy” the political systems of other countries.

Chinese leaders qualify the kind of democracy they’re after as “socialist democracy.” They describe it as a system in which power is centralized in one authority – the Chinese Communist Party – which in turn acts in the interest of the people.

“The Party believes it perfectly represents the will of the people. In this way, the Party understands its role to be a representative of the people and a form of democracy,” Jessica C. Teets, an associate professor in political science at Middlebury College, told Inkstone.

“The problem with this conception of representation is that the people have no way of selecting their ‘true’ representatives,” said Teets.

To understand how China’s “socialist democracy” differs from liberal democracy practiced in many western countries, consider the China Democracy Party – based in Flushing, New York City.

An unusual party

The look of the party’s website may appear stuck in time, but everything you need to know about the obscure group is there.

To join the China Democracy Party, applicants must swear an oath to pledge their loyalty to the party and declare their will to build a constitutional and democratic China. That is, you email the text of the oath to the party’s chairman, Xie Wanjun, at his Hotmail address.

It is the first political group that tried – and failed – to legally register as an opposition party in China since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949.

Today, the party – and its retro website – is an example of the limits of China’s self-proclaimed form of “socialist democracy.”

The party was founded around the time of former President Bill Clinton's state visit to China in 1998, a time when the political climate was relatively less repressive.

But the party was outlawed months later. And then the Chinese police tracked down and jailed some of its active members.

Some of the party’s founding members, like Xie Wanjun, fled China to the United States and specifically to the largely Mandarin-speaking Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens.

China’s ‘multi-party’ system

The crackdown on the China Democracy Party also clarifies the nature of the officially “multi-party” state.

China has eight legally recognized parties, including the China Democratic League and the China Democratic National Construction Association.

But unlike political parties in western democracies, no party in China is allowed to challenge the Communist Party’s hold on power. The relationship between the eight legal parties and the ruling Communist Party is officially one of cooperation, not competition.

And that is what many observers see as a red line that the Chinese Communist Party has drawn, no matter how it says it seeks to democratize.

This lack of a procedure for the people to choose anything but the Communist Party as the country’s ruling party is one of the main reasons why most political scientists and human rights watchdogs do not consider China a democracy.

Richard McGregor, author of “The Party” and a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, said the main reason China rejects western-style democracy is that it’s a rival system to Communist Party rule.

“The CCP has always feared being marginalized by the emergence of a genuine democracy in China,” he told Inkstone, using the party’s initials.

“China claims it is democratic for historical reasons, because Mao’s rhetoric, and that of the party, always referred to their rule as democratic,” McGregor said. “But you need a different dictionary if you are looking for a definition of Chinese and western-style democracies.”

A rubber-stamp parliament

In terms of structure, the Chinese government has many recognizable elements:

* An executive branch – the State Council.

* A legislature – the National People’s Congress (NPC), which is advised by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

* A judiciary.

In practice, the government exists in parallel with, and subordinate to, the Communist Party.

For example, the NPC is made up of about 3,000 members, not all of whom are Party members. This group is supposed to be responsible for writing laws and supervising the government, but in reality, it is dominated by the Party.

A lot of experts call the NPC a “rubber stamp,” citing the fact that it has never voted down anything proposed by the Party or government since it started running in 1954. This is not to suggest the congress is completely irrelevant or is incapable of evolving.

Sometimes, on less politically sensitive issues, like animal rights or environmental protection, delegates can express a range of views.

Still, it is telling that in 1992, nearly one-third of delegates voted against or abstained from a proposal to build the controversial Three Gorges Dam. Despite this unprecedented show of disapproval, the proposal passed and the dam was eventually built.

Intra-party democracy?

In much of the developed world (China isn’t part of it), multi-party competition is a defining feature of democracies. But in China, there’s something called intra-party democracy – democratic processes within the party itself.

Xi Jinping, for one, has committed the Communist Party to “expand intra-party democracy,” stressing what are supposed to be institutionalized checks and balances within the party.

This sort of collective leadership had defined the Party since Deng Xiaoping adopted it to prevent the rise of another strongman leader like Mao.

But it’s also an idea that is at risk of being reversed under Xi’s presidency.

During his first term in power, Xi was elevated in 2016 to the status of late Deng, if not Mao, and secured dominance within the party as its “core” leader.

And after the Communist Party proposed removing term limits on the presidency – later made law by the Party-led legislature – President Xi can now stay on indefinitely.

The removal, analysts said, signaled an end to China’s move toward collective leadership after the disastrous policies of Mao during the Cultural Revolution.

In this sense, analysts are convinced that even if intra-party democracy is legit, it has shrunk, not expanded.

Intra-party democracy?

In much of the developed world (China isn’t part of it), multi-party competition is a defining feature of democracies. But in China, there’s something called intra-party democracy – democratic processes within the party itself.

Xi Jinping, for one, has committed the Communist Party to “expand intra-party democracy,” stressing what are supposed to be institutionalized checks and balances within the party.

This sort of collective leadership had defined the Party since Deng Xiaoping adopted it to prevent the rise of another strongman leader like Mao.

But it’s also an idea that is at risk of being reversed under Xi’s presidency.

During his first term in power, Xi was elevated in 2016 to the status of late Deng, if not Mao, and secured dominance within the party as its “core” leader.

And after the Communist Party proposed removing term limits on the presidency – later made law by the Party-led legislature – President Xi can now stay on indefinitely.

The removal, analysts said, signaled an end to China’s move toward collective leadership after the disastrous policies of Mao during the Cultural Revolution.

In this sense, analysts are convinced that even if intra-party democracy is legit, it has shrunk, not expanded.

Accountability without democracy

Still, regardless of whether China’s “democracy” is comparable to western democracy, there’s just something about its claims that sound contradictory.

As he acknowledged people’s demands for democracy in a marathon speech in 2017, President Xi Jinping said China practices “both democracy-based centralism and centralism-guided democracy.”

But just what has happened to the democracy part of that formula?

The Chinese government isn’t directly elected, but it has, for example, allowed elections at lower levels of the party-state.

“Although the CCP monopolizes political power, actual implementation of policies can be decentralized and vary throughout the country,” said Kellee S. Tsai, dean and chair professor at the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“There is a certain degree of electoral democracy in village committee elections where there is open selection of candidates and multiple candidates, including non-CCP ones,” she told Inkstone.

That said, such low-level elections in China don’t necessarily lead to the kind of competitive elections at the top of government that we see in many western democracies.

“If we think about the short run, then US democracy today seems less like a model to be followed than it once did. We instead have the sort of ‘turbulence and contention’ to which James Madison referred,” said David Stasavage, a professor at New York University, referring to the founding father’s opinion of democracy.

“Combine this with China's dramatic economic performance over recent decades, and it is hard to see why you would want to suddenly change your model,” Stasavage, who is also author of a forthcoming book, “The Rise of Western Democracy: Why it Happened in Europe and Not China or the Middle East,” told Inkstone.

But that doesn’t mean China can’t improve its governance, which could keep the people happy without giving them direct power over the government.

Middlebury College’s Teets said that although China is not becoming more democratic as far as transferring more political power from the Party-state to the people is concerned, China “has been well governed.”

“China is adopting more quasi-democratic practices to allow citizens to offer feedback on policy, sue in the courts and provide information on local officials’ performance,” said Teets, who researches governance in authoritarian regimes, and is the author of “Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: the China Model.”

“When localities experiment with policies,” she said, “these are times when you see Chinese leaders learning from citizens and businesses about which policies are working and how best to fix persistent policy problems.”

The Chinese world order

The Communist Party’s political dominance goes way back, but it was further cemented after President Xi Jinping came along.

This further sets China on a different course from what some western politicians and scholars had envisioned not too long ago, when China had just started to become the economic powerhouse it is today.

In his famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy has triumphed as a form of government over its ideological alternatives.

And as China became richer, some political analysts predicted the country would turn to liberal ideas that value freedom, the rule of law and individual rights and openness.

But this narrative has stalled.

Considered the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, or even Mao Zedong, Xi has bolstered the party’s hold on all areas of Chinese society.

“Government, the military, society and schools, east, west, south, north and center – the party leads everything,” Xi said in his big speech to the Communist Party congress in 2017.

If China succeeds under Xi, this model could be held up an example of authoritarianism for other developing countries to learn from, or even copy.

That means that not only has China not liberalized, but China’s authoritarian rule – however it has sought to rebrand it – is now seen even as a threat to liberal values.

Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister, warned in 2012 of the rise of a new global and regional order that could turn out to be harmful to western values.

He called how to manage the rise of China “a central question for the first half of the twenty-first century.”

“Very soon we will find ourselves at a point in history when, for the first time since George III, a non-western, non-democratic state will be the largest economy in the world,” he said.

A few years later, in a speech delivered at the National University of Singapore in 2018, Rudd said the fact that China was stepping up efforts to remake global governance in its image had become a much more urgent challenge.

“The world should buckle up and get ready for a new wave of Chinese international policy activism,” the former prime minister said.

The resistance

The Chinese Communist Party’s increasing control of society has spooked outsiders, but you don’t need to look abroad to the China Democracy Party to find opposition to it.

In China, censorship means people have few avenues to express their dissent. In freewheeling Hong Kong, resistance against Chinese authoritarianism is evident everywhere.

The city is a highly autonomous former British colony, and, along with former Portuguese colony Macau, are the only places in China where the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing is commemorated out in the open.

Every year on June 4, thousands of people gather in a park to demand justice for those killed, and to call for an end to one-party rule. When Nobel Peace Laureate and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo died in state custody in 2017, Hong Kong people marched to mourn his death.

Liu called for democratic reforms in China, but he was sentenced to 11 years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge the Chinese government has leveled at many opponents to the party.

In Hong Kong, many people see a distinction between the party and the state.

The year Liu was arrested, the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong band My Little Airport released a song titled, “I love the country but not the party.” It goes like this:

I love the country
But not the party
If you wanna celebrate
Don't even think of calling me

You know it's not easy
Pretending to be happy
There're still many good guys doing time
Can't you see?
...
I'd celebrate Christmas Day
I'd celebrate Easter Sunday
But not this party of your sixtieth birthday
No, not this party of your sixtieth birthday

That’s just one of many ways the Communist Party’s tight control over society has manifested.

In Hong Kong, opinion polls have indicated that the Party has particularly lost the hearts and minds of a generation of young people, who overwhelmingly demand the direct, unfettered election of their local leader.

In 2014, Hong Kong was ready to embark on that election. But when the Chinese government required that candidates be vetted by a committee stacked with Party-backed supporters, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in what became known as the Occupy protests, or the “Umbrella Revolution.”

It’s no wonder why, despite years of effort to make Hong Kong residents more patriotic (including by requiring television stations to play the Chinese national anthem every day), many of them have instead distanced themselves from a Chinese identity.

Hong Kong is the freest city in China. When it returned to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government promised that Hong Kong people would ultimately be able to select the city’s leader democratically.

But, as we can see from the marathon protests of 2014, a significant group of Hongkongers have thoroughly rejected China’s idea of democratic elections – and the Chinese definition of democracy.

**About this writer:** - Alan is the editor of Inkstone. He was a digital editor for The New York Times in Hong Kong.