Battlegrounds Read online

  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 internatio
nal 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