^^Perhaps they believe that the only thing that matters is how popular China’s government is in China.^^
Nearly so.
Maintaining its grip on power is front and center in all CCP top leadership calculations, 24/7, always and at all times. If there's a conflict between "doing what's in the national interest" and "doing what's in the interest of solidifying party control" the regime will go with the latter. Every time.
(It's true they'll also never acknowledge there's any daylight between these two things; and some of them no doubt believe that! But too many party members are too intelligent not to comprehend this is BS. The deep-seated knowledge of their lack of moral authority is, I believe, what drives their fury at a base level).
I find it a bit strange that you don't consider the effect of the pandemic, which originated in China, on these polls – it seems like a massive confounding factor! I genuinely don't know how much blame China gets among ordinarily people worldwide, but I think there's definitely an association between the two, and a lot of conspiracy theories as well, and that's pretty likely to have an effect on overall opinion. Not sure most people are even aware of China's bellicose shift in messaging.
I was just thinking about this today. It seems counterproductive, almost Trumpian in the way it goes about making whatever problem you're trying to solve worse for...what? Owning the libs to score points with people who already like you? The Trump era gave a golden opportunity to these guys to go on a PR campaign, and they somehow managed to blow it completely. We sure have to get our ducks in order, but...what's their deal? Do they just believe that fervently in their own hype?
Opinions about China in other countries is massively skewed given near Western monopoly on news. Further, negative views do not mean that these countries will want to actively engage in containment of China. On the contrary, almost all say they don't want to choose, as Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, even Indonesia have made very clear. Japan is a US client state. Let's just call a spade a spade. Let's not forget that Japan isn't the favourite neighbour of other Asian countries as well. The Koreans may dislike Japan more than China does. For Japan to actively engage in taking Taiwan off China, one can only assume that they are merely US puppets, or perhaps they've never really given up their WW2 ambitions. I can only hope it's the former. Noah's surprise that Chinese diplomats are actually starting to stand up for themselves is telling. I consider this view as subconscious racism. The West beats up on China, never let's them tell their side of the story. Then they are incredulous, even outraged, that yellow people talk back to them. It's a veiled form of anti Asian racism. In any case, certainly the develppibg world knows that China can make them prosperous and that the US containment policy cannot. If the US is successfull in containment, then what? What's the end game? To break up China and carve up between north America, Europe and Japan? Surely we are not doing this again are we? I'm actually beginning to think it might be because this is the only outcome that makes sense of the west's foreign policy towards China. And that is a frightening proposition.
I don't understand why people can't hold two concepts in their head at the same time. The US is an evil empire run by and for a handful of oligarchs, commits war crimes constantly, and does not care about human rights or democracy at all except as a cynical propaganda weapon. China is an authoritarian dystopia that does not tolerate dissent. If you can't agree to both of those statements your nationalism is showing.
I lived in Chengdu, China, while finishing my economics degree in 2010. One of the most startling observations I had when there was not that the city was growing by 1,000 vehicles a day, or that there were more NBA viewers in China than there were people in the United States, but that as I was watching the Chinese middle class grow from 400 million to 500 million, that still left nearly a billion people living at or below the global poverty line. This is inherently China's biggest weakness in my opinion, and all of their actions, words, and tactics revolve around the dangerous equation of 1 billion to half a billion. China MUST continue to grow its middle class until it gets to the point that a single major market collapse would not instantly cause a revolution that would topple the ruling regime. It desperately needs its middle class to out-weight its lower class. As such, it is incumbent on US leaders to exploit this need to their advantage. China needs the rest of the world much more than the rest of the world needs China. TPP or a similar approach is an effective way to muzzle the Chinese temporarily. Still, a long term strategy for dealing with an authoritarian regime that is intent on operating as a bad actor evades me.
Reading your piece, quoting tweets of other journalists' quotes of Chinese diplomats, it certainly seems like China is the aggressive party, lashing out at America. If you read articles about the negotiations from the Chinese perspective, they say that American diplomats opened the discussion with a volley of stern lectures about Chinese transgressions. Without being present at the negotiating table with a translator, or a full transcript of the discussions, I don't know how you can get a fair assessment of the situation. From reading media reports of both sides, it seems like two kids slinging mud at each other, not really a calibrated strategy to convince anyone of higher moral authority, except perhaps the domestic audience.
Even if we could play back the chain of tit-for-tat exchanges and somehow get to the bottom of who to blame for aggressive messaging, I'm not sure what that would accomplish going forward.
Just what is it that we as a nation hope to accomplish in the "Indo-Pacific" area? Do we want to make China do what we want it to internally? Do we want to maintain the Pacific as our lake, militarily dominant from LA to Hong Kong? Do we want to suppress the "Yellow Peril"? Do we want China to play by the rules of international commerce most of the rest of the world plays by? What do we envision our relationship with China will be in five, ten, 25 years? Do want to do whatever seems like pundits, militarists, nationalists, etc. convince the public is a good idea? How we answer those questions determines US policy, not what "wolf warriors" do. And I don't see any evidence that we have clear answers to any of those questions, and that failure, I fear, creates plenty of opportunity of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and, god forbid, war.
"Media of U.S. allies is controlled by the U.S." isn't news. Either way, China doesn't need to be popular. It just needs to get elites on its side -look at its ability to muster 64 countries in support of its Xinjiang policies. The idea popular support, rather than elite incentives, drive national policy is a fallacy.
"This newfound bellicosity is earning lots of media attention and Twitter followers. But is it helping China’s cause?"
Yes, it is. The most important thing a country can do in the propaganda sphere to promote its rise is exude domestic self-confidence.
"The aggressive rhetoric online is matched by aggressive action, as China sends increasing numbers of ships and planes to harass its maritime neighbors, pushes on its border with India, steps up cyberattacks, etc. "
Which country has military bases on China's every side again?
"A survey of Southeast Asian elites — policymakers, writers, and businesspeople — at the beginning of this year found rising trust in the U.S. and falling trust in China. 61.5% of respondents said they’d rather align with the U.S., compared to only 38.5% for China — a 7.9% deterioration for China since last year. (Japan was the most popular country.)"
And yet, every country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam is buying vaccines from China (including Indonesia, which is primarily using Sinovac for its vaccination program). This is hardly bad news for China.
"making plans with the U.S. to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion:"
Nobody's going to defend Taiwan. It's not Israel or America's Nagorno-Karabakh.
- I agree the US is diplomatically hamstrung by the rise in anti-Asian hate. I disagree, however, there is no evidence showing a connection between the criticism of China and anti-Asian hate. The perpetrators don't leave a list of citations when they yell, scream, and abuse Asian people, but they do often say things like "you brought this virus here", etc. You're right it will be hard to prove definitively a relationship between the two, China criticism and anti-Asian violence, but as pubic opinion has risen against China, and increasingly ludicrous bad takes have spread (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyE55eB9Afc&t=50s), I think we ought to shift our default assumptions a bit. (Note: It's not clear to me where you come down on the relationship between China criticism and anti-Asian violence, so feel free to tell me if I've misrepresented your position).
- We have our own form of "Wolf Diplomacy": "Obviously this meeting didn't look fun, but good for @JakeSullivan46 and @SecBlinken for forcefully calling China out about their treatment of the Uighurs. Trump gave China a pass on Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Biden will not." (https://twitter.com/TVietor08?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor). It is easy for America to call out China on it's human rights abuses, just as it is easy for Chinese diplomats to do the same about us. What is harder for each is to face their own support for terrible regimes: for the US, Saudi Arabia; for China, Myanmar.
- What happens after we defeat the Anti-Asian hate? What happens after we defeat China in this diplomatic war and/or larger great power struggle? An American vision that is absent a response to China, something China may oppose or opt into, but is not dependent upon them, seems more compelling to me.
- Speculating here, but I think you have a good response to my third point in you (as I'm sure you do to the other two points as well). To me, your article 'Taiwan is a Civilization' seemed like a good building block for a more positive, hopeful vision.
My view is that China learned from European and US imperialism, and kind of looked at it as a long-term model for them. When we backed out of the TPP (they kind of liked it), they saw us as weak, but our reality was that we were attempting to evolve into something better. Then democracy reared it's sometimes confused head and elected Trump. He did some things ok on technology trade, but overall his policies were a failure because of his personality -- he's less evolved that most of humanity. He didn't fit with where the US needed to go with trade policy. He mainly offended them along with the rest of the world, and now they see an even bigger weakness to exploit. Doing so will not make them many friends.
If we'd have followed the failed TPP with a new plan, an evolved plan, a less imperialist and more democratic plan, a more fair plan, then I think they would have respected us again. Now they think we've shown democracy's weakness to the world and feel they can dominate democratic territories. It's a big problem, so the US is probably going to have find a way to make it an undesirable option for them to destroy Taiwan's politics.
Democracy will win in the long term, but China currently has no interest in pursuing democracy, and in the short term it can cause a lot of trouble. It doesn't have to be that way. We really need the western economists to break the bonds of the profit motive to advocate the better plan for world trade and finance. It's already a well-known plan, I think.
The Iraq war seems to have had a positive effect on people’s opinions (the world is complicated, our actions have lots of unintended consequences, the US and its allies do lots of bad things) but also a negative one, (a virtue signaling distrust of the US, even in multilateral contexts). The harder, more complex truth is that diplomacy is slow and hard, not glamorous, that’s how it should work.
> There’s simply no arguing against the idea that criticism of China is the cause of anti-Asian hate; even if it’s bullshit, that argument has too much intuitive power. Unless and until America succeeds in suppressing the tide of racist hate, the “wolf warrior” diplomats will be handed free victories...
Thanks for validating my own suspicions as to who the Chinese government thinks needs convincing and reinforcement. But what do I know about China, having only ever made a brief visit to Hong Kong? [checks Kindle, notes 36 titles containing "China"] A little, maybe. Still learning.
^^Perhaps they believe that the only thing that matters is how popular China’s government is in China.^^
Nearly so.
Maintaining its grip on power is front and center in all CCP top leadership calculations, 24/7, always and at all times. If there's a conflict between "doing what's in the national interest" and "doing what's in the interest of solidifying party control" the regime will go with the latter. Every time.
(It's true they'll also never acknowledge there's any daylight between these two things; and some of them no doubt believe that! But too many party members are too intelligent not to comprehend this is BS. The deep-seated knowledge of their lack of moral authority is, I believe, what drives their fury at a base level).
One part of the puzzle is CCP must be met with TPP-like counterparties, economic, cultural, technological & military
I find it a bit strange that you don't consider the effect of the pandemic, which originated in China, on these polls – it seems like a massive confounding factor! I genuinely don't know how much blame China gets among ordinarily people worldwide, but I think there's definitely an association between the two, and a lot of conspiracy theories as well, and that's pretty likely to have an effect on overall opinion. Not sure most people are even aware of China's bellicose shift in messaging.
I was just thinking about this today. It seems counterproductive, almost Trumpian in the way it goes about making whatever problem you're trying to solve worse for...what? Owning the libs to score points with people who already like you? The Trump era gave a golden opportunity to these guys to go on a PR campaign, and they somehow managed to blow it completely. We sure have to get our ducks in order, but...what's their deal? Do they just believe that fervently in their own hype?
Resurrect the TPP!
Opinions about China in other countries is massively skewed given near Western monopoly on news. Further, negative views do not mean that these countries will want to actively engage in containment of China. On the contrary, almost all say they don't want to choose, as Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, even Indonesia have made very clear. Japan is a US client state. Let's just call a spade a spade. Let's not forget that Japan isn't the favourite neighbour of other Asian countries as well. The Koreans may dislike Japan more than China does. For Japan to actively engage in taking Taiwan off China, one can only assume that they are merely US puppets, or perhaps they've never really given up their WW2 ambitions. I can only hope it's the former. Noah's surprise that Chinese diplomats are actually starting to stand up for themselves is telling. I consider this view as subconscious racism. The West beats up on China, never let's them tell their side of the story. Then they are incredulous, even outraged, that yellow people talk back to them. It's a veiled form of anti Asian racism. In any case, certainly the develppibg world knows that China can make them prosperous and that the US containment policy cannot. If the US is successfull in containment, then what? What's the end game? To break up China and carve up between north America, Europe and Japan? Surely we are not doing this again are we? I'm actually beginning to think it might be because this is the only outcome that makes sense of the west's foreign policy towards China. And that is a frightening proposition.
I don't understand why people can't hold two concepts in their head at the same time. The US is an evil empire run by and for a handful of oligarchs, commits war crimes constantly, and does not care about human rights or democracy at all except as a cynical propaganda weapon. China is an authoritarian dystopia that does not tolerate dissent. If you can't agree to both of those statements your nationalism is showing.
I lived in Chengdu, China, while finishing my economics degree in 2010. One of the most startling observations I had when there was not that the city was growing by 1,000 vehicles a day, or that there were more NBA viewers in China than there were people in the United States, but that as I was watching the Chinese middle class grow from 400 million to 500 million, that still left nearly a billion people living at or below the global poverty line. This is inherently China's biggest weakness in my opinion, and all of their actions, words, and tactics revolve around the dangerous equation of 1 billion to half a billion. China MUST continue to grow its middle class until it gets to the point that a single major market collapse would not instantly cause a revolution that would topple the ruling regime. It desperately needs its middle class to out-weight its lower class. As such, it is incumbent on US leaders to exploit this need to their advantage. China needs the rest of the world much more than the rest of the world needs China. TPP or a similar approach is an effective way to muzzle the Chinese temporarily. Still, a long term strategy for dealing with an authoritarian regime that is intent on operating as a bad actor evades me.
Reading your piece, quoting tweets of other journalists' quotes of Chinese diplomats, it certainly seems like China is the aggressive party, lashing out at America. If you read articles about the negotiations from the Chinese perspective, they say that American diplomats opened the discussion with a volley of stern lectures about Chinese transgressions. Without being present at the negotiating table with a translator, or a full transcript of the discussions, I don't know how you can get a fair assessment of the situation. From reading media reports of both sides, it seems like two kids slinging mud at each other, not really a calibrated strategy to convince anyone of higher moral authority, except perhaps the domestic audience.
Even if we could play back the chain of tit-for-tat exchanges and somehow get to the bottom of who to blame for aggressive messaging, I'm not sure what that would accomplish going forward.
Just what is it that we as a nation hope to accomplish in the "Indo-Pacific" area? Do we want to make China do what we want it to internally? Do we want to maintain the Pacific as our lake, militarily dominant from LA to Hong Kong? Do we want to suppress the "Yellow Peril"? Do we want China to play by the rules of international commerce most of the rest of the world plays by? What do we envision our relationship with China will be in five, ten, 25 years? Do want to do whatever seems like pundits, militarists, nationalists, etc. convince the public is a good idea? How we answer those questions determines US policy, not what "wolf warriors" do. And I don't see any evidence that we have clear answers to any of those questions, and that failure, I fear, creates plenty of opportunity of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and, god forbid, war.
"Media of U.S. allies is controlled by the U.S." isn't news. Either way, China doesn't need to be popular. It just needs to get elites on its side -look at its ability to muster 64 countries in support of its Xinjiang policies. The idea popular support, rather than elite incentives, drive national policy is a fallacy.
"This newfound bellicosity is earning lots of media attention and Twitter followers. But is it helping China’s cause?"
Yes, it is. The most important thing a country can do in the propaganda sphere to promote its rise is exude domestic self-confidence.
"The aggressive rhetoric online is matched by aggressive action, as China sends increasing numbers of ships and planes to harass its maritime neighbors, pushes on its border with India, steps up cyberattacks, etc. "
Which country has military bases on China's every side again?
"A survey of Southeast Asian elites — policymakers, writers, and businesspeople — at the beginning of this year found rising trust in the U.S. and falling trust in China. 61.5% of respondents said they’d rather align with the U.S., compared to only 38.5% for China — a 7.9% deterioration for China since last year. (Japan was the most popular country.)"
And yet, every country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam is buying vaccines from China (including Indonesia, which is primarily using Sinovac for its vaccination program). This is hardly bad news for China.
"making plans with the U.S. to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion:"
Nobody's going to defend Taiwan. It's not Israel or America's Nagorno-Karabakh.
Four Things (three critical, one positive):
- I agree the US is diplomatically hamstrung by the rise in anti-Asian hate. I disagree, however, there is no evidence showing a connection between the criticism of China and anti-Asian hate. The perpetrators don't leave a list of citations when they yell, scream, and abuse Asian people, but they do often say things like "you brought this virus here", etc. You're right it will be hard to prove definitively a relationship between the two, China criticism and anti-Asian violence, but as pubic opinion has risen against China, and increasingly ludicrous bad takes have spread (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyE55eB9Afc&t=50s), I think we ought to shift our default assumptions a bit. (Note: It's not clear to me where you come down on the relationship between China criticism and anti-Asian violence, so feel free to tell me if I've misrepresented your position).
- We have our own form of "Wolf Diplomacy": "Obviously this meeting didn't look fun, but good for @JakeSullivan46 and @SecBlinken for forcefully calling China out about their treatment of the Uighurs. Trump gave China a pass on Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Biden will not." (https://twitter.com/TVietor08?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor). It is easy for America to call out China on it's human rights abuses, just as it is easy for Chinese diplomats to do the same about us. What is harder for each is to face their own support for terrible regimes: for the US, Saudi Arabia; for China, Myanmar.
- What happens after we defeat the Anti-Asian hate? What happens after we defeat China in this diplomatic war and/or larger great power struggle? An American vision that is absent a response to China, something China may oppose or opt into, but is not dependent upon them, seems more compelling to me.
- Speculating here, but I think you have a good response to my third point in you (as I'm sure you do to the other two points as well). To me, your article 'Taiwan is a Civilization' seemed like a good building block for a more positive, hopeful vision.
My view is that China learned from European and US imperialism, and kind of looked at it as a long-term model for them. When we backed out of the TPP (they kind of liked it), they saw us as weak, but our reality was that we were attempting to evolve into something better. Then democracy reared it's sometimes confused head and elected Trump. He did some things ok on technology trade, but overall his policies were a failure because of his personality -- he's less evolved that most of humanity. He didn't fit with where the US needed to go with trade policy. He mainly offended them along with the rest of the world, and now they see an even bigger weakness to exploit. Doing so will not make them many friends.
If we'd have followed the failed TPP with a new plan, an evolved plan, a less imperialist and more democratic plan, a more fair plan, then I think they would have respected us again. Now they think we've shown democracy's weakness to the world and feel they can dominate democratic territories. It's a big problem, so the US is probably going to have find a way to make it an undesirable option for them to destroy Taiwan's politics.
Democracy will win in the long term, but China currently has no interest in pursuing democracy, and in the short term it can cause a lot of trouble. It doesn't have to be that way. We really need the western economists to break the bonds of the profit motive to advocate the better plan for world trade and finance. It's already a well-known plan, I think.
The Iraq war seems to have had a positive effect on people’s opinions (the world is complicated, our actions have lots of unintended consequences, the US and its allies do lots of bad things) but also a negative one, (a virtue signaling distrust of the US, even in multilateral contexts). The harder, more complex truth is that diplomacy is slow and hard, not glamorous, that’s how it should work.
> There’s simply no arguing against the idea that criticism of China is the cause of anti-Asian hate; even if it’s bullshit, that argument has too much intuitive power. Unless and until America succeeds in suppressing the tide of racist hate, the “wolf warrior” diplomats will be handed free victories...
I think there is a flaw in this argument's assumption that reducing anti-Asian hate will reduce the effectiveness of whataboutism. Many of the people who think of "anti-Asian hate" as a problem do so because they've read or heard journalists reporting on it, rather than observing it personally or analyzing crime statistics themselves. However, many journalists recently have been quite willing to shoehorn stories into the narrative of racism even when that didn't really fit, e.g. claiming that even Hispanic Trump voters are motivated by racism (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/15/understand-trumps-support-we-must-think-terms-multiracial-whiteness/), assuming that an educator who talks about black students underperforming academically must be motivated by prejudice (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/georgetown-law-professor-racist-remarks-sandra-sellers-black-students.html), claiming that the motive in the recent Atlanta shooting must have been racism (https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/politics/white-supremacy-racism-asian-americans/index.html) even though the police investigation so far contradicts this (https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/alleged-killer-of-spa-workers-tracked-by-gps/F4BPGOOGSFDFRA7GLPEE4AS4BE/). If the discussion of journalistic culture at https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/non-nitro-edition-substack-and-media is correct, then there is no reason to expect this to change. So, while fighting against anti-Asian prejudice is obviously good and necessary, it is not clear that reducing anti-Asian prejudice will reduce the *perception* of anti-Asian prejudice in the general population, which is what the strategy of whataboutism depends on.
Thanks for validating my own suspicions as to who the Chinese government thinks needs convincing and reinforcement. But what do I know about China, having only ever made a brief visit to Hong Kong? [checks Kindle, notes 36 titles containing "China"] A little, maybe. Still learning.