Battlegrounds Read online

  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.

  Chapter 4

  Turning Weakness into Strength

  If names cannot be correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things. And if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. (名不正, 则言不顺; 言不顺, 则事不成 míng bùzhèng, zé yán bù shùn; yán bù shùn, zé shì bùchéng)

  —CONFUCIUS

  OUR LAST meeting in the Great Hall of the People was with Li Keqiang, the premier of the State Council, the titular head of government. If anyone in our party, including President Trump, had any doubts about China’s view of its relationship with the United States, Premier Li’s long monologue should have removed those doubts. He began with the observation that China, having already developed its industrial and technology base, no longer needed the United States. He dismissed U.S. concerns over unfair trade and economic practices, indicating that the U.S. role in the future global economy would be to provide China with raw materials, agricultural products, and energy to fuel its production of the world’s cutting-edge industrial and consumer products. President Trump listened for as long as he could and then interrupted the premier, thanked him, and stood up to end the meeting.

  As we drove to the hotel to prepare for the state dinner back at the Great Hall, Matt Pottinger and I discussed how starkly Premier Li’s monologue had revealed the CCP’s break from Deng Xiaoping’s guidance during China’s opening and reform period in the 1990s: “hide our capabilities and bide our time, never try to take the lead, and be able to accomplish something.”1 After the 2008 financial crisis, Chinese leaders gained confidence in their economic and financial model as Western economies lost confidence in theirs. Many in China believed that the United States had caused the crisis due to the subprime mortgage problem. The U.S. inability to regulate its own banks had led to a loss of faith in the Western capitalist model and the search for a new one. Chinese leaders aggressively marketed their statist economic model across the Indo-Pacific region and globally brandished their growing power. They also made clear that they expected servile relationships with their neighbors. In 2010, Yang Jiechi, who was then China’s foreign minister, told his counterparts at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Hanoi, Vietnam, “China is a big country and you are small countries.”2

  The next day, as we departed Beijing on the way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Danang, Vietnam, I was grateful for the extraordinary hospitality and the grandeur of the “state plus” visit. Pottinger and I knew, however, that our Chinese counterparts would be disappointed in the result. The United States and like-minded nations were undergoing a fundamental shift from strategic engagement with China to competitive engagement. It was an inevitable course correction as China’s aggressive foreign and economic policies, having gone unchecked for so long, could no longer be ignored. The range of CCP actions under China’s strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment cast doubt on the assumption that positive engagement with CCP leaders would convince them to become responsible stakeholders in the rules-based international order. We were entering a new era, one that required us to use new tactics to convince party leaders that it was in their interest to play by the rules internationally, relinquish a degree of control, and return to the path of reform and openness.

  U.S. policy toward China has suffered from strategic narcissism since the American Revolution, as businessmen, missionaries, and diplomats over two centuries have tended to define China based on economic, religious, and political hopes rather than realities.3 After the break in relations that followed the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War, China was receptive to President Nixon’s overtures in the 1970s because of the two countries’ shared enemy. During the Cold War, Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, pursued “triangular diplomacy,” which took advantage of the PRC’s and Soviet Union’s mutual wariness by forging a closer relationship with each of the Communist powers than they had with each other. Even Mao became an enthusiastic partner under the construct of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” “We were enemies in the past, but now we are friends,” Mao told Kissinger in 1973. “A horizontal line—the U.S.—Japan—China—Pakistan—Iran—Turkey, and Europe” could “together deal with the bastard” (i.e. the Soviet Union).4 But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. relationship with the PRC returned to the hope that the United States could change China.

  U.S. leaders and policymakers from the George H. W. Bush administration through the Obama administration believed that economic, political, and cultural engagement would lead to the liberalization of China’s economy and, eventually, its authoritarian political structure.5 Hopeful aspirations for reform overwhelmed any desire to confront China’s unfair economic practices, technology theft, abysmal human rights record, and increasingly aggressive military posture. Only one year after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, President George H. W. Bush maintained, “As people have commercial incentive, whether it’s in China or in other totalitarian countries, the move to democracy becomes inexorable.”6 President Bill Clinton argued for China to join the World Trade Organization, despite the risk that its state-directed economy could distort global markets to its advantage. To sell China’s membership, Clinton claimed that “By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.”7

  Though President Obama announced a “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia, the policy rested on vestiges of hope that a cooperative relationship with China would finally emerge. In April 2012, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon cut language from a speech referencing human rights and U.S. military presence and instead added the phrase “pursuing a stable and constructive relationship with China.”8 In November 2013, Susan Rice, who had replaced Donilon as national security advisor, announced that the United States would “seek to operationalize a new model of major power relations.”9 It did not take long for Chairman Xi to embrace that language while taking a series of actions to undermine U.S. interests. First, the CCP began to build islands in the South China Sea and directly challenge territorial claims of East Asian nations. Next, China declared unilaterally an air defense identification zone above a large area of the East China Sea, including the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which are Japanese territory. Soon thereafter, news broke that China was building multiple military bases on the islands in the South China Sea. The PLA Navy and maritime militias intruded into other nations’ territorial waters. In 2015, when the United States and other nations objected to the reclamation efforts, Chairman Xi promised that the islands were only for maritime safety and natural disaster support.

  In 2015, President Obama demanded that China halt its campaign of economic cyber espionage. At a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House later that year, Chairman Xi and President Obama announced that they had reached a “common understanding” that neither government would knowingly support cyber theft of corporate secrets or business information. But the Chinese attempted a large-scale cyber attack the next day.10 In an ineffective effort to cover their tracks, the CCP shifted the lead of its cyber offensive from the People’s Liberation Army to the Ministry of State Security and began to use more sophisticated techniques.11 Some thought that because America’s decline relative to China’s rise was inevitable, that China should be accommodated to avoid competitions that might lead to confrontation. “We
have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China,” Obama once stated.12 But avoiding competition only emboldened the CCP. China became more aggressive in cyberspace as well as in the South China Sea.

  When, in July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s specious claims of control and its unlawful building of islands in the South China Sea, the PLA Navy maneuvered warships into those waters, rammed fishing vessels, and sailed recklessly near U.S. Navy ships on the grounds these activities violated the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). And by 2018, it was clear that Xi had lied, as satellite imagery showed construction of missile shelters and radar facilities. Later, the PLA added air defense and anti-ship missiles to those facilities.13 False hope allowed the CCP to conceal its actions and intentions while developing the ability to coerce other nations into recognizing its claims.

  The Obama administration was not the first to base its China policy on the belief that engagement would foster cooperation, but Pottinger and I believed that it should be the last. We set out to build bipartisan support for the most significant shift in U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War.

  By the time Pottinger and I worked on the China strategy, evidence overwhelmingly proved that the CCP was neither playing by the rules economically nor going along the expected path of reform. Moreover, its policies were actively undermining U.S. interests. By incentivizing China’s transition to a free-market economy and a more liberalized government with favorable trade terms, access to advanced technology, investment, and membership in international organizations, the United States had actually enabled the growth in power of a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.14

  * * *

  OUR NATIONAL Security Council staff’s assessment of China policy in 2017 began with an emphasis on strategic empathy. We needed to ground our approach to China in a better understanding of the motivations, emotions, cultural biases, and aspirations that drive and constrain the CCP’s actions. The recognition that the CCP was obsessed with control and determined to achieve national rejuvenation at the expense of U.S. interests and the liberal international order led to the adoption of new assumptions.15 First, China would not liberalize its economy nor its form of government. Second, China would not play by international rules and would instead try to undermine and eventually replace them with new ones more sympathetic to its interests. Third, China would continue to combine its form of economic aggression, including unfair trade practices, with a sustained campaign of industrial espionage to dominate key sectors of the global economy and lead in the development and application of disruptive technologies. Fourth, China’s aggressive posture was designed to gain control of strategic locations and infrastructure to establish exclusionary areas of primacy. Finally, absent more effective competition from the United States and like-minded nations, China would become more aggressive in promoting its statist economy and authoritarian political model as an alternative to free-market economics and democratic governance. For me, the trip to Beijing confirmed those new assumptions and reinforced my belief that the United States and other nations with a stake in this competition could not remain passive in countering the CCP’s strategy. We could no longer adhere to the narcissistic view that defined China in aspirational terms: what the West hoped China might become.

  Any strategy to reduce the threat of the CCP’s aggressive policies must be based in a realistic appraisal of how much influence the United States and other outside powers have on the evolution of China. There are structural limits on influence because the party will not abandon practices it deems critical to maintaining control. Despite the CCP’s best efforts, however, China is not and will never be monolithic. There are opportunities to expand engagement with entities that are not dominated by the party, such as true commercial, academic, religious, and civil society enterprises. And while there are historical, cultural, and structural limits on U.S. and other foreign influence in China, those limits should not be an argument for passivity in confronting the CCP’s oppression of the Chinese people domestically or its economic and military aggression internationally.

  We concluded, as we crafted a new strategy, that there was reason for optimism. The 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the protests in Hong Kong thirty years later, and the thriving democracy in Taiwan demonstrate that the Chinese people are neither culturally predisposed toward dictatorship nor happy to surrender fundamental rights, including having a say in how they are governed. Despite our limitations, the United States and like-minded partners possessed tremendous latent potential for influencing the party’s behavior because we had been largely absent from arenas of competition. Those who worked on the strategy felt that the shift from engagement to competition had initiated a multigenerational effort. The need to compete enjoyed growing support across the political spectrum in the United States and from other nations, international corporations, and academic institutions. Awareness of the threat that the policies of the CCP posed to freedom and prosperity was growing.

  Before we departed Beijing, at the press conference held at the end of a long day of meetings, President Trump summarized China’s unfair trade and economic practices. He then looked over to Chairman Xi and said, “I don’t blame you. I blame us.” The message was that it would be unnatural for the United States and its partners to remain passive as the CCP undermined democracy, liberal values, and free-market economic practices abroad while repressing its people at home. But competition should not be seen as leading to confrontation. Pottinger and I believed that if the United States and our allies and partners began to compete effectively, it would be possible to turn what the CCP saw as weakness into strength. Competing might also generate confidence in the principles that distinguished our free and open societies from the closed, authoritarian system China was promoting. We saw competitive advantage in freedom of expression, of assembly, and of the press; freedom of religion and freedom from persecution based on religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation; the freedom to prosper in our free-market economic system; rule of law and the protections it affords to life and liberty; and democratic governance that recognizes that government serves the people rather than the other way around.

  * * *

  THE CCP views freedom of expression as a weakness to be suppressed at home and exploited abroad. The free exchange of information and ideas, however, may be the greatest competitive advantage of our societies. We have to defend against Chinese agencies that coordinate influence operations abroad—such as the Ministry of State Security, the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association—but we should also try to maximize positive interactions and experiences with the Chinese people. Those who visit and interact with citizens of free countries are most likely to go home and question the party’s policies, especially those that stifle freedom of expression. So, the people who direct academic exchanges or are responsible for Chinese student experiences should ensure that those students enjoy the same freedom of thought and expression as other students. That means adopting a zero-tolerance attitude for CCP agents who monitor and intimidate students and their families back home.

  Foreign students at universities abroad, regardless of their country of origin, should gain an appreciation for the host nation’s history and form of governance. When universities and other hosting bodies protect the freedoms that these students should enjoy, it serves to counter the propaganda and censorship to which the students are subjected in their home country. Perhaps most important, Chinese and other foreign students should be fully integrated into student bodies, to ensure they have the most positive academic and social experience.

  The protection of students’ ability to express themselves freely should extend to expatriate communities. The U.S. and other free nations should view their Chinese expatriate communities as a strength. Chinese abroad, if protected from
the meddling and espionage of the CCP, are capable of making their own judgments about the party’s activities. As the party becomes more aggressive in controlling its population to maintain its exclusive grip on power, Chinese expatriates may further appreciate the benefits of living in societies that permit freedom of expression. It is appropriate, for example, for free and open societies not only to disabuse their Chinese visitors of the party’s anti-Western propaganda, but also to create safe environments for Chinese expatriates to question the CCP’s policies and actions. Investigations and expulsions of Ministry of State Security and other agents should be oriented toward protecting not only the targeted country, but also the Chinese expatriates within it.

  Expatriates also have the potential to counter the party’s predatory actions under Made in China 2025, One Belt One Road, and Military-Civilian Fusion. As the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security concluded in November 2018, the United States should not only block efforts to recruit Chinese expatriates for espionage, but also provide “more incentives for highly educated Chinese talents to participate in the U.S. economy.”16

  Freedom of expression and freedom of the press also play a key role in promoting good governance to inoculate countries from bad deals under One Belt One Road (OBOR). Uganda provides an example of how the combination of law enforcement and investigative journalism countered China’s predatory economic behavior to U.S. advantage. In 2015, the Ugandan government agreed to borrow $1.9 billion from a Chinese bank to build two dams. An investigation in 2018 revealed shoddy construction in the unfinished dams, later that year, a New York court convicted a Chinese energy company representative of paying bribes to African officials. Ugandan leaders then asked a U.S. consortium to bid on a new oil refinery project, a bid it won.17 Uganda demonstrates the potential associated with freedom of the press enabling public accountability under the rule of law. Over time, the combination of exposing China as an untrustworthy partner and providing alternatives to its predatory behavior will give the CCP incentives to alter its behavior.