11 Comments

I have long admired and learned from your posts, but this one is questionable.

The points you make about China’s grand strategy (foreign policy) are fine, esp. for China as a nation-state. They cover the standard political, economic, and military categories normally used for analyzing nation-states.

However, China’s leaders now regard China as a civilization-state too. They want China to be viewed and treated as such, and are developing policy and strategy fundamentals to advance as a civilization-state. I’m finding that nearly all U.S. experts on China have ignored or dismissed this turn. But if it’s for real (as I think it is), it will mean that U.S. analyses of China’s grand strategy (foreign policy) would benefit from adjustments.

Civilizations, more than empires and nations, are defined primarily by their cultural contents, broadly defined. From what I gather, adopting a civilization-state moniker means upholding one’s identity in terms of the cultural values and formative traditions that are said to define a people, thereby determining their ways of life and their beliefs in themselves as a collectivity, no matter where they reside.  Accordingly, collective identity trumps individual identity; spiritual values are more defining than ideology; and cultural heritage and tradition matter mightily.  

I’m no China expert, but Xi’s regime sure looks to be going in that direction. It’s even developing concepts about cultural sovereignty and cultural security. If so, adding a cultural fundamental to the your list of strategy/policy fundamentals would seem advisable. To some extent, my point is embedded in your allusions to glory, heritage, and ideology — but not clearly or strongly enough.

Accordingly, you write, “4. Chinese leaders imagine they will reshape the global order primarily through economic, not military, tools.” That’s a kind of point I typically see in U.S. analyses these days. But it overlooks seeing that, by thinking and acting as a civilization-state, China is using cultural tools too. It would be more accurate to write that “Chinese leaders imagine they will reshape the global order primarily through cultural and economic, not military, tools.”

I remain baffled that China’s civilizational thrust is so widely disregarded and shrugged-off by U.S. experts on China. It seems part of China’s long game, and might offer new angles for getting along (or not?).

One quibble: Your post is about “the fundamentals of Chinese grand strategy” but then lays out “the essentials of Chinese foreign policy.” Grand strategy and foreign policy are not the same, though they overlap. I’m sure you know this. Maybe keep in mind for next write-up.

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I have always found the civilizational state construct analytically lacking. I do not find any support for it in Chinese government sources.

The cultural security stuff is downstream, not upstream, much older lines of thought on "political security," "ideological security," and "peaceful evolution." All of that stuff remains defensively minded. For a few decades now Chinese leaders have expressed their wish that China develop some sort of positive civilizational countervoice to the west, but over all of these decades they failed to do so. The largest strands in Chinese policy thinking trace back to the Soviet-Leninist political tradition or directly from the modern West. What "China" is or means as a civilization is something hotly disputed within China itself; there is no consensus on this point, and the party has identified few beyond the blandest of banalities. What Nadege Rolland <a href="https://www.nbr.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/publications/sr83_chinasvision_jan2020.pdf">wrote about these efforts</a> in 2020 is still true today:

<i>Surprisingly, though, what comes out of China’s current exercise in collective imagination is not a glittering, positive, forward-looking, enticing vision but mostly a collection of lamentations and grievances about the existing order.... Beyond indications of what is loathed, feared, and unwanted, there is no explicitly elucidated vision about how world affairs would be managed and organized in the “new era,” according to which norms and values they would be managed and organized, and via which kinds of institutional arrangements they would operate. The only certainty that emerges is that, in this vision, the regnant power is China.</i>

In other words, in terms of civilizational or ideological competition the Chinese leadership has defined sharply what it is against but has only the fuzziest of ideas of what it is for. "civilization" talk is more rhetoric than reality--which is very clear when you see the way they resource their economic, military, intelligence and united front tool kits compared to any of their "civilizational"projects.

At the end of the day I focus on the nation because that is what the Chinese leadership focuses on. They do not talk of "the great rejuvenation of Chinese civilization." They talk of the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese <i>minzu</i>--<i>minzu</i> [民族] meaning "nation," or perhaps "<i>ethnos</i>" or even "race." But not civilization. That is not their frame.

The average Beijing foreign policy intellectual has thinks in terms not altogether different from a German or French intellectual of 1890; the higher official operates in the frame of a late 20th century Leninist. It is a small minority who look to traditional China for guidance; for the most part the canons of traditional Chinese culture provide rhetorical garnish for a hyper-modernist regime built in the Western image.

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Helpful. Clarifying. Instructive. Many thanks.

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Wishing that you would present an argument about the military threat to Taiwan at some point in the foreseeable future. To my mind, as to many others, it's less than self-evident.

As for your first point, "the natural role of China being to be the center of human civilization", it is impressive how ambiguous it remains for all these years, even among scholars i.e. people who make a claim on rigor.

For example, you say the goal is to "restore China to a position of glory and influence commensurate with its ancestral heritage," which leads to the question of : What IS commensurate to its heritage in today's world?

Adding to it, even the historical role of China in its region remains a subject of controversy, with its symbolic as well as material domination being disputed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29WJ3sZup-U .

But let's leave that aside, as China's leadership of today has specific goals about what to dominate.

Those goals must be based on deeply seated symbolic reasoning, closely related to a sense of insecurity about one's place in the world. And, they must also be based on what we customarily call 'science,' where claims are rigorously checked against systematic observations. Then the question arises: How do these two components interact with each other?

...

My foremost suspicion is about the tendency of every observer, including Western observer, to project their own attitudes to the world onto China. But since that topic leads to handwaving easily. So, let's be specific :

You say China's leaders will see the West as an existential threat for as long as the West insists on certain values, including "democracy is being described as a universal good by Western leaders." Wait a minute: democracy is being described as a universal good by Chinese leaders, too. That's a weak point in what you say. As for liberal values, ... a good proportion of Western voices perceive liberal values as threatening to the West itself. As for Western protection of voices hostile to the Chinese leaders: well, let's look at China's protection of voices hostile to Western leaders. Perhaps a topic for another time.

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Tanner, I did not expect you to be an egghead. Regardless, I think China is a very long way away from trying to seriously threaten Taiwan.

It's also important to note that China's co-option of Global Southern elites has worked very well for supposed democracies as well as from supposed autocracies.

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Let's import Chinese from Taiwan instead of people from Latin America

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This essay is little more than Fox News in fancy dress. A few notes:

1. “Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution.” China won it years ago, but our media didn't report it. Today, 7 of the world's top ten research institutions are Chinese and one is American., Chinese researchers dominate the majority of peer reviewed papers and top 1%.

2. The overriding goal of the Communist Party of China is to restore China to a position of glory and influence commensurate with its ancestral heritage”. Rubbish. That's last on your list. First is external security, as always. Next is feeding, clothing and sheltering 1.4 billion people. Then comes educating them...

3. "The greatest perceived threat to China’s rise is found in the ideological domain—and in a globalized world that domain is a global one”. We, who have only empty slogans to console us, cannot imagine, let alone match, the maturity (2500 years), depth and fact-based realism of Chinese ideology, with which you are clearly unfamiliar.

3. "Chinese leaders imagine they will reshape the global order primarily through economic, not military, tools”. They just did.

4. "The main exception to this is Taiwan. With Taiwan economic tools have proven ineffective; the possibility of war is very real”. That's straight from the New York Times, but it has zero reality. Ask any Chinese and they'll laugh in your face. (Xi has family in Taiwan, btw).

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Aren’t the Chinese mostly trying to create a (mostly? Exclusively? Han) Chinese state of about 200 copy-variations of Singapore?

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No. I counted nine minority languages on their currency. I have yet to see Chippewa or Navajo thus recognized.

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Tanner, just reading what you have here suggests to me that, if China does take Taiwan, it is not expansionist in the way that Hitler was, or it seems Putin would like to be. Is that your view?

Btw, I ask this not because I think if they're not expansionist, they couldn't become it, but to ask the question where a containment policy should be aimed. So far China and the West have pursued strategic ambiguity over Taiwan and it makes sense for the US to talk tough about it.

But it comes to war over Taiwan, the question is whether the US should go to war then, or focus its efforts on containing China beyond that.

What is your view and why?

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