The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State

By Dan Blumenthal

This is a book about China's grand strategy and its future as an ambitious, declining, and dangerous rival power. Once the darling of U.S. statesmen, corporate elites, and academics, the People's Republic of China has evolved into America's most challenging strategic competitor. Its future appears increasingly dystopian. This book tells the story of how China got to this place and analyzes where it will go next and what that will mean for the future of U.S. strategy. The China Nightmare makes an extraordinarily compelling case that China's future could be dark and the free world must prepare accordingly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AEI Press
• Release date: Oct 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780844750323

Book preview

THE CHINA NIGHTMARE

The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State

DAN BLUMENTHAL

THE AEI PRESS

Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute Washington, DC

ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5030-9 (Hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5032-3 (eBook)

© 2020 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

1. Big Ambitions

2. Why Global Centrality?

3. Deng’s National Rejuvenation

4. Closing the Curtain

5. Recentralization of Dictatorship

6. Expansion

7. Weak Points

8. Implications for America

Afterword: The China Nightmare and COVID-19

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

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Guide

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Start of Content

Afterword: The China Nightmare and COVID-19

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Introduction

The geopolitics of the 21st century will be defined by an intensifying strategic rivalry between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States over the future of the world order. The PRC’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has considered the US its main rival since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union soon after. Since then, CCP leaders have felt besieged from within and without and have come to view the United States as the source of their troubles.

At least for now, Beijing does not seek war or conflict with Washington. Rather, it seeks to undermine the pillars of US strategy and foreign policy, especially Washington’s preeminent position of power and influence in East Asia. Interested observers can understand China’s attitude toward the US by viewing a map of East Asia from Beijing’s perspective (Figure 1).

The CCP sees China’s geostrategic position as weak and unsustainable. With only one coastline, which is home to the bulk of Chinese economic activity and its major trading ports, China’s leaders feel surrounded and vulnerable to US and allied forces stationed in Japan and South Korea. They also feel threatened by US security partnerships with the Philippines, Singapore, and, increasingly, Vietnam. Of course, Washington and its allies view things differently; they believe that forward-deployed US military forces, diplomatic and economic leadership, and the American-led alliance system have kept Asia peaceful and set the conditions for the region’s prosperity.

These dueling perceptions and, more importantly, conflicting goals are not the result of misunderstandings. Indeed, the two countries understand each other well. Rather, the two have fundamentally different national interests. The US seeks to retain its position as the prime power in Asia through this continued diplomatic and defense posture so that it can help the region become even more free and open. Beijing wants to carve out an authoritarian sphere of influence that it can control, making Asia repressive and closed.

Figure 1. China’s Ports and Maritime Approaches and the US Alliance System

Figure 1. China’s Ports and Maritime Approaches and the US Alliance System

Source: Shiphub, Top 9 Ports in China, September 30, 2019, https://www.shiphub.co/the-biggest-ports-in-china/; and Felix K. Chang, Sideways: America’s Pivot and Its Military Bases in the Asia-Pacific, Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 16, 2013, https://www.fpri.org/article/2013/04/sideways-americas-pivot-and-its-military-bases-in-the-asia-pacific/.

To this end, Beijing is also obsessed with national reunification, which more precisely means regaining most of the lost territory that the Qing dynasty once held. The CCP has convinced itself that it cannot achieve national greatness or establish its sphere of influence without regaining these territories. In the early years of Mao Zedong, the CCP reestablished control over most of the territories conquered by the Qing dynasty. Now, it is working to solidify its control of Hong Kong and annex Taiwan, the last major holdouts.

Chairman Xi

In November 2012, just days after the conclusion of the 18th CCP Congress, then newly minted General Secretary Xi Jinping made a speech that touched on his desire for China to achieve the great renewal of the Chinese nation.¹ In his speech, Xi emphasized that for 5,000 years China has been a great nation, but in modern times it has endured great hardships. Many have tried before the CCP to renew China and bring it back to its central position in world affairs. In Xi’s narrative, where other Chinese patriots have failed, the CCP is succeeding. CCP leaders have long been animated by the idea that China’s division and weakness after reaching a geopolitical peak in the early 19th century were historical aberrations that will be reversed.

As this book shows, China was the sun around which countries in Asia revolved. While many Chinese empires dominated East Asia, this book focuses on the modern era starting when the Qing ruled. The Qing emperors not only reestablished the Sino-centric tribute system created by their predecessors in the Ming dynasty but also conquered more territory than any other regime in Chinese history. They marched westward to forcefully deal once and for all with the threats posed by the Mongols and other nomadic tribes. Their bravery and wisdom, along with the work of dynasties before them, resulted in what Xi called a beautiful homeland where all ethnic groups live in harmony.²

Today, the CCP still rules over the land the Qing conquered, which is home to many ethnic groups throughout the Chinese heartland and in Tibet and Xinjiang. But they are not living in harmony; the CCP is harshly repressing them. Xi did not mention in his speech that the PRC is heir to a multiethnic empire and that the national renewal he seeks requires even harsher measures to hold this empire together and reunify with other once-imperial territories.

The China scholar Lucian Pye observed that China is a civilization pretending to be a nation-state.³ More precisely, contemporary China is an empire pretending to be a nation-state, run by a Marxist-Leninist CCP regime. It is, in short, a Leninist imperium.

Until the 21st century, the CCP was content to limit the edges of its empire to China’s near abroad. Beijing focused its energies on controlling Xinjiang and Tibet, regaining Hong Kong, preventing Taiwan from being recognized as a country, and resisting perceived US interference in its affairs.

Increasingly, though, the CCP is acting on broader global ambitions. The Sino-American rivalry is no longer confined to the Indo-Pacific. Beijing considers the current global order, created and dominated by US power and influence, highly threatening to the CCP’s survival.

While China embraced elements of an open economic system starting in 1979 and went along with many of the rules and norms set by the West, it is now strong enough to attempt to change the rules to its liking. Xi envisions China moving more forcefully back to geopolitical centrality. This, in his view, is China’s natural place in the world. It is, after all, called the Middle Kingdom.

Now China’s rulers are seeking to make their power felt farther afield. They want to influence the decisions of all East Asian nations and shape a new world order. For over a decade, the CCP has been trying to gain effective control over the South China Sea and the East China Sea, two of the world’s most important waterways. China has developed relationships in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to secure energy supplies. It has aggressively attempted to make good on territorial claims along its border with India. And it has dramatically strengthened relations with Russia.

On October 18, 2017, Xi delivered his work report to the 19th CCP Congress in Beijing. This was a seminal document, a coming-out for China under a new type of leader who felt confident enough in his domination of Chinese politics to speak assuredly about China’s global ambitions. National-level CCP Congress work reports are released to great fanfare. The 2,280 elite delegates who gathered in the Great Hall of the People to mark the 19th Congress were greeted by a stunning three-and-a-half-hour speech by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping.

During his speech, Xi boldly announced his global ambitions. The world, he reported, was entering inexorably into a new era, one in which China has become strong and rich. Xi’s vision now that China is powerful is that Beijing will offer a new option for other countries . . . and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.⁴

For China to be able to do so, to offer something different from the current world order, the Chinese people must strive with one heart to realize the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation. It will be an era that sees China moving closer to center stage.⁵

Xi further explained his vision during the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, a key meeting with his foreign policy advisers in June 2018. He said China will

take an active part in leading the reform of the global governance system, and build a more complete network of global partnerships, so that new advances will be made in major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics to create a favorable environment for . . . building . . . a great modern socialist country in all aspects.⁶

These speeches and reports were the clearest articulation by a Chinese leader that China will move to center stage in international politics. The goal for the Middle Kingdom is to once again dominate global politics. Beijing needs to be central to global affairs to shape the international environment so it can, among other goals, build a great modern socialist country.

The phrase Xi’s China uses for this new Sino-centric order is a community of common destiny. It has a benevolent ring to it, like China’s self-lauded win-win diplomacy. But as Liza Tobin points out, the concept expresses in a nutshell Beijing’s long-term vision for transforming the international environment to make it compatible with China’s governance model and emergence as a global leader.⁷

Beijing is now strong and powerful enough to offer a new global politics that both protects and exports China’s authoritarian political model. Indeed, building this order is now driving China’s foreign policy.⁸

This book’s afterword about China’s approach to COVID-19 explains what this order could look like. For example, Beijing has bent important international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) to its will, to the great detriment of millions of people. The WHO became a partner in Beijing’s efforts to block crucial information about the virus. The free and open order that the US built, however imperfectly, is under attack by China’s desire to hijack institutions to protect its closed dictatorship. This objective is obscured by terms such as a community of common destiny, which sound harmonious and cooperative.

Xi and his chief foreign policy advisers have further articulated what a new world order might entail and how China will achieve global leadership. China will build a network of strategic partnerships with China at the center, eventually replace the US alliance system, expand China’s influence over institutions of global government, and lead efforts to integrate regions it deems most important to its goals into a Chinese-led order.⁹ This is the main goal of Xi’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative. OBOR is supposed to create a Chinese-led political and economic order across Eurasia.

OBOR and other initiatives will help build a new community of common destiny.¹⁰ Xi has pressed diplomats to continuously facilitate a favorable external environment for realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation and promote the building of a community of common destiny.¹¹ In the CCP’s view, in stark contrast to the US-led world order, this community will be based on more equality among nations, more mutuality of partnerships rather than alliances, and national systems of governments based on the Beijing model. According to the CCP, this model promises a fairer distribution of wealth and a better mix of state-led and market economics, or socialist culture.

And Chinese diplomats have done as Xi wishes. The PRC’s recent diplomacy has been marked by a strong push to see international institutions and agencies recognize Xi’s vision of a community of common destiny. Chinese diplomats now regularly attempt to persuade United Nations diplomats and officials of other international organizations to include this Beijing-approved language in their documents.

Consistent with Xi’s stated goal of creating a new global order, China works with developing countries to train their bureaucrats, security forces, and political leaders, instilling in them the Chinese regime’s authoritarian and quasi-socialist practices. For the first time since the days of Mao, China is openly exporting its ideology and actively creating an alternative world order befitting its political and economic system.

Building a global order more consistent with and friendlier to Beijing’s form of governance may be the main driver of China’s grand strategy, but initiatives such as OBOR also have subsidiary goals. For example, China seeks to encourage as many European countries as it can to join the initiative and its various geopolitical forums. It has managed to do so in most cases. A prime motivation of this effort is to cause fissures within and between the US and Europe.

But China has other ambitions propelling it onto the world stage as well, such as its need to protect energy and supply routes from the US and allied navies. Chinese moneys destined for the developing world are largely being used to develop new resource supplies and the infrastructure needed to deliver them back to China. Energy trade has dominated Beijing’s diplomacy with Russia. China’s diplomatic, economic, and military activity from Africa to the Middle East through South Asia aims to build alternative transportation infrastructure, sources of energy, and military strongpoints to safely supply China. It is working with Russia to develop the Arctic Ocean as yet another energy supply route. This energy and infrastructure diplomacy has raised concern in Europe and India, and China has responded with diplomatic initiatives seeking to allay their worries.

Military Buildup

Even as China attempts to construct a new world order through diplomacy and economic inducement, it still heavily relies on coercive instruments of power. China needs what Chinese leaders call a world-class military to advance the more coercive elements of its statecraft. Beijing plans to establish technological leadership by becoming a global leader in innovation while creating a stronger, more advanced defense-technology base through a new military-civilian fusion that seeks to mobilize the Chinese civilian sector to support military modernization.¹² This, in turn, will help China build a world-class military.

The CCP extensively uses its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to advance its worldwide interests. Since the 1990s, the CCP has employed a missile-centric strategy to take advantage of the fact that, unlike the US and Russia, China was never bound by Cold War arms-control prohibitions on theater missiles. This has given China a window of opportunity to catch up, if not surpass, the US in key areas of what military analysts call precision-strike warfare. This is the military strategy the US has used, leveraging its technological advantages to strike its enemies with greater accuracy over the past 30 years.

After a 30-year buildup, the PLA’s massive arsenal of theater ballistic missiles now poses a costly and vexing challenge for Pentagon planners. China’s attempts to change the nature of warfare through doctrinal innovations in the uses of land-based theater missiles, information warfare, and autonomous or semiautonomous weaponry will greatly tax the US in any future fight. The most notable example of the PLA’s transformative weapons is the DF-21D, a road-mobile ballistic missile designed to hit