Strife

The Academic Blog of the Department of War Studies, King's College London

You are here: Home / Archives for Kerry Brown

Kerry Brown

China’s Turbulent Year: 2019

by

by Kerry Brown

Chinese President Xi Jinping faces a turbulent 2020 (Photo Credit: AFP)

2019 was not an easy year for Xi Jinping’s China. The most obvious cause of this was the ongoing tensions with the US, mostly taking the form of trade frictions. While these dissipated to some degree by the year’s end, it was the happenings in Hong Kong and Xinjiang that will probably prove most significant. These are likely to have a long term impact on the trajectory of the People’s Republic, with Xinjiang in particular offering a more profound and worrying set of problems.

For Hong Kong, the perpetual protests from the middle of the year were the issue that attracted most international attention. The city is held in deep affection by anyone who is associated with it, or even knows about it. To see it’s people often divided, with the government some days almost under siege, with acts of violence by police and protesters on the streets, sometimes almost daily, was truly a tragedy. A unique, hybrid place looked, towards the year-end, to be in perpetual decline.

It is easy to seek to defend one of the sides involved in the Hong Kong issue over others. But the fault lies with almost every party. The Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, has been lamentable. Her greatest failure in the long term will probably be the way in which she has illustrated with a stark finality none of her three predecessors ever did the lack of power in her hands and the need to constantly be seeking support from Beijing. From her handling of the original proposal to introduce extradition legislation which was seen as violating the city’s hard-won legal autonomy, to her response to the subsequent demands of the protesters, there is little about her performance that inspires confidence. She remains in power however because she has managed to maintain the support, however, of the one group that matters to her – the leadership in Beijing.

On their part, the Xi leadership has refrained, so far, from direct intervention in the security of Hong Kong, no matter that it might or might not be doing behind the scenes. But its shrill defensive attitude to the plight of the city, and the ways in which it has indicated little real desire to compromise only expose the ways in which it clearly regards the One Country, Two Systems rubric as little more than window dressing. For it, the most worrying aspect of the city’s 2019 travails should be the ways in which they showed the real problems of a Chinese model of governance in a place which is incontestably of Chinese identity, and part of the PRC sovereign territory. The impact of that on views in Taiwan, where many look on in dismay at Hong Kong and fee their rejection of the ways in which it is offered as a model they may one day which to reunify with the Mainland, has been dramatic, and will probably have long term consequences. There is little overt sign at the moment at least that this is the lesson Beijing has drawn from 2019 and Hong Kong – but it should be.

But nor can the protesters be spared criticism. Lionised by many in the west, including the US Congress, some members of whom have sought to reap political capital from the city’s challenges, protesters have proved a diverse, and sometimes disunited and fractious group. While many have shown courage, and the success of more pro-independence parties in the 2019 local elections was a huge moral victory, they still lack coherent political leadership. It is an easy thing to be critical about this, and a hugely hard thing to achieve – but in the end, unless there can be unifying, and pragmatic voices from the protesting groups managing to steer their grievances in a more constructive, political direction, rather than stoking constant protest, it is hard to see how they can create long term benefit for themselves out of the shocks of the last few months.

Hong Kong, however, does have some things worth fighting for – from its legal system, which at least still has some integrity, to the vestiges of freedom of expression which, for all the complaints, are still there, albeit eroded. Xinjiang was, until quite late in 2019, a less exposed issue. But it is likely that this will be the one with potentially the deepest long term consequences. The implementation of harsh security measures there since 2018 have involved, reportedly, up to a million people. Papers obtained by the New York Times in November 2019 showed the extent of the commitment to the clampdown on Uighur’s, along with some evidence of opposition to it by officials locally which had been snuffed out.

Chen Qiangguo, Party Secretary of the autonomous region, and previously the top official in Tibet, has received unwelcome international attention as the protests have increased across the world, from Turkey to Europe to the US, about what has been occurring in the area. Under the guise of security and counter-terrorism, the detention of so many has resulted in some gut-wrenching testimony of families destroyed, and ordinary people swept up in a series of events that clearly have left them incarcerated, evidently judged guilty without even the vaguest pretence of an attempt to follow any kind of due process.

Xinjiang is an issue over which the central government seems unwilling to brook any compromise. Attempts to discuss the issue even in the most placatory way are usually met with defensiveness in China. This is our domestic issue, the line goes, and one that involves serious issues of security concerns. Foreigner’s comments and criticisms are unwelcome.

Despite this, Xinjiang is potentially a long term, deep worry for the Chinese government for a number of reasons. Through the imposition of draconian policies, some, according to the evidence offered by the New York Times leaked documents, imposed with little consideration of the risk of unwanted outcomes, there is a high possibility that a generation of Uighurs ostensibly being re-educated in the camps in the region is actually being radicalised. The official measures here are almost designed to breed deep resentment and anger, something which may take years or decades to manifest itself, but which should not be taken lightly. The very outcome that all the effort the government has expended in Xinjiang over the last few years – greater security – may well be the one put most at risk by the way it has sought to achieve this.

This is a strange position for the Chinese government to be in. Usually so cautious about what it does, and deliberative, it seems that in Xinjiang it has acted according to an almost knee jerk way, bringing in a suite of actions and regulations that show little sign of having been pondered a bit more thoroughly and questioned.

One of these side effects can already be seen – the detrimental effect that Xinjiang has had on international opinion towards Xi’s PRC. Already, a formidable array of critical voices have started to be raised. At a time when the country’s global role is already becoming more prominent, and its potential critics and enemies are seeking for something to rally around, this issue above all has unfortunately given them plenty of highly legitimate material to cast back at the Chinese government.

With some signs at the end of 2019 that the policies in Xinjiang might be softening, 2020 may well see the intense anger at this issue at least decrease. The government may, after all, have been listening, and seek to silently repair some of the damage done. But the odds must very unfortunately be on them harvesting a long term and a serious set of challenges from the 2018-2019 Xinjiang clampdown. What is currently a tragedy for many people in Xinjiang may well end up being one for the whole country, proving one of the most bitter lessons from Chinese history: that its greatest threats come more often from the inner Asian region than its coastal areas.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run from the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg.

Trump and China: Chaos or Harmony?

by

By: Professor Kerry Brown

Narvikk | E+ | Getty Images

In the brutal and divisive presidential election campaign in the US over 2016, if foreign policy figured in the words of the then candidate Donald Trump, it was largely in the context of seeing the outside world as a place which had benefited asymmetrically with the USA in the realm of trade, and been a taker in terms of the expense of security commitments particularly across the Asia Pacific region. Trump’s mantra of ‘Making America Great Again’, despite the often contradictory specific statements he uttered through the course of the year, in this domain boiled down to a simple proposition: the American people wanted a better deal in their relationships in the Pacific and with the wider world. The question was precisely what shape this would take.

Now Trump is President, we are about to find out the answer to this question. Whatever way policy develops, the centrality of managing China for the USA and creating a new kind of relationship is assured. China figured in Trump’s incendiary statements through 2016 as the jewel in the crown of Asian exploitation and manipulation of USA’s largesse – the place that had given the least and gained the most from America’s security guarantees and its trade deals. China through membership of a global rules-based system like the World Trade Organisation, of which it has been a member since 2001, had risen to be the world’s second largest economy, its largest importer and exporter, and its fastest growing market. Despite this, it had managed to dextrously defend its own domestic commercial interests, being a taker rather than a giver.

A very particular gripe by Trump and his supporters was the fact that through overproduction, and unfair state subsidies, China had flooded the global market in commodities like steel or products like solar panels, in ways which destroyed jobs in the mid-West and rustbelt of the US. Bringing back these jobs was a core promise that Trump made – though his limited initial contact with China’s Xi Jinping during the period up to 20th January when he was President-elect showed the Chinese were very aware that achieving this would be next to impossible. Things are evidently more complicated. We are about to find out just how well Trump’s Manichean view of the world will actually help deal with the globe’s most complex and important relationship – that between America and the People’s Republic.

It’s the Stupid Economy

Despite its lack of elegance and tact so far, Trump has made a core point which needed setting out. The bottom line is that China since 1978 has been a massive beneficiary of globalisation. It has lifted 400 million people out of poverty, marketized, and risen to become one of the world’s economic powerhouses. It has done this on the back of manufacturing, and export industries. Put simply, with a huge labour market, and very low wages, it has been able to outcompete almost everyone else, at least till recently. Jobs have flooded from developed markets, into China. For the unskilled and those working in factories in the developed world, this has been a brutal era. They were amongst the constituency who let out a howl of pain in voting for Trump because they are attracted by his promise of a new deal and new kind of relationship with China.

China has evidently engaged with the American-led and inspired global system pragmatically. But it does not buy into the underpinning values of this system. It does not believe in any concomitant political liberalisation, nor the values of freedom and free exchange in the marketplace of values and ideas. It has used the global system and the wealth creation it has provided to bolster its own nationalistic project, aimed at restoring China to its place as the centre of the Asian region, making it a globally respected power. This international system in China’s eyes has been a means to an end – focussed on China and China’s assessment under the Communist Party of its own needs. In this context, trading and working with China means supporting this narrative – and it means that economic engagement by US companies indirectly subsidises this nationalistic mission. The bottom line is that, so far at least, China has won the campaign for globalisation. That was certainly not the intention of the original supporters of engagement with China, amongst the most fervent of whom were the Americans, who believed that through the process of economic co-operation the People’s Republic would slowly develop into a more liberal, democratic system. As of 2017, that simply has not happened.

Trump as President will probably accept that lofty ambitions for China’s internal reform are not likely to happen. But he will focus on the ways in which China needs to offer a better deal in terms of access to its growing domestic market, more commitment and responsibility on issues that matter to it like global climate change, and more responsible behaviour in the context in which it gets much more than most other partners from a stable, secure international environment. Trump’s USA no longer wants to subsidise China’s security indirectly. And it wants to see real bottom line returns for its own economy from China’s new found prosperity.

The Geopolitics

A more isolationist America under Trump will offer a mixture of risk and opportunity for China. On the one hand, it will mean that the US is less likely to want to contain and close space down around China, in the East and the South China Sea area. It will regard these as expensive, remote issues that are not, as Clinton said when Secretary of State, part of its core interests. A transactional American President might even deal with involvement and dominance by China in these areas as issues that can be ‘sold’ through better economic returns for the USA.

Taiwan has already figured as an issue. With his usual instinct to go directly for someone’s vulnerabilities, Trump has honed in on the status of Taiwan, taking a call from the President of the Republic of China on the island Tsai Ing-wen in December, the first time this had happened since 1979, and then tweeting that he did not recognise the One China policy.

Taiwan’s status is one of the great anomalies left over from the Cold War. For most, it is a puzzling, almost nonsensical policy under which people are being asked to regard a place which has its own flag, military, currency, fiscal policy, stamps, and national anthem, and which has been utterly separate from the Mainland since 1949, over which time it has developed its own democratic, multi-party system, as something they cannot confer the word ‘country’ on. Uniquely, Taiwan has all the attributes of a state. It even has over 20 countries that still recognise it as a state, including the Vatican. And yet, for Beijing, the use of the label ‘country’ towards it is disallowed. America and others concur, conferring diplomatic recognition on Beijing alone and adopting variants of the One China posture.

This policy in itself is incoherent. Even so, the aim over the last few decades has simply been to maintain the status quo. Trump and his advisors know that this is the one issue that Beijing cares more about than them. The question is whether some kind of deal can be done whereby the US relaxes its commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 which commits it to a security role with the island and gets things it cares about more in return – trade openness and better returns from Beijing.

If Trump does pursue this path, it is a high risk one. That Beijing cares so much about Taiwan’s status means this matter transcends the idea of doing deals. And even if it can start to edge towards some reunification framework – surely guaranteeing Xi Jinping a position in the history books – there is the massive issue of the 23 million people on Taiwan and the fact that surveys in recent years show over 90 percent regard themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and that they want at best to maintain the status quo, and, in many cases, to go for some form of independence which is recognised. Quite how Beijing handles this massive issue without unacceptable heavy-handed means remains a mystery.

China and the Trump Dividend

For China, the Trump presidency might offer them to have an amazing opportunity to accelerate their path toward becoming the great power of the 21st century. Many people interpret Trump’s rise as a sign of declining US power and prestige, and symptomatic of a dysfunctional political system that needs reform but does not know how to achieve this. Even so, there are massive issues for China even if this positive scenario develops. Uppermost amongst those will be the fact that while China might want to replace the USA regionally, it does not want global responsibilities, and nor does it feel ready with its immense internal challenges to take up this role.

More striking even than this is the ways in which any US withdrawal will push China into the very position it most fears – that of being forced to articulate a system of values and of international co-operation which is not predicated solely on bringing China gain but is something that others in the rest of the world can sign up to. This will be a position and a task that China will never, in modern times, have tried to undertake. It is right to feel wary. But it might not have any choice but to embark on this as the USA simply retreats into its own space.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. From 2012 to 2015, he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this, he worked at Chatham House from 2006 to 2012, as Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He lived in the Inner Mongolia region of China from 1994 to 1996. He has a Master of Arts from Cambridge University, a Post Graduate Diploma in Mandarin Chinese (Distinction) from Thames Valley University, London, and a PhD in Chinese politics and language from Leeds University.