Opening Remarks to a Workshop on China Policy

Opening Remarks to a Workshop on China Policy

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
July 24, 2024

[As delivered.  Introductory comments omitted.]

I’ve spent sixty years watching and dealing with China.  Full disclosure.  I do not share either the stated or unstated presuppositions that are driving our current policies.  I do not believe that they form part of a coherent strategy.  I do not think they will help Americans deal with China or the emerging world order of shifting power balances, in which the United States can no longer compete internationally with wealth and weaponry alone.

I have lived through several wars in which Washington attributed objectives to the other side that they didn’t have.

Deductive reasoning by analogy as opposed to inductive reasoning from empirically verified reality has a bad track record.  It took a while but, in the end, we came to realize that the Korean and Vietnam Wars were not – as we had supposed – wars of conquest by either China or the Soviet Union.  They were civil wars that lent themselves to becoming proxy wars.  The fact that they were not in fact motivated by a strategic challenge to us by other great powers is why we were able to limit them.

China is not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union.  China would love to see our hubristic global hegemony disappear.  But it has no desire to assume the burdens we bear.  It is not in search of Lebensraum, the annexation of its neighbors, or the imposition of its largely incomprehensible ideology on them or on us, still less the replacement of our global dominance by its own or that of any other overlord.   “Heute Taiwan, morgen die Welt” does not compute.  Leninism with Chinese characteristics is introverted, unlike the globally ambitious Soviet Communist Party (CPSU).  China demands respect from its neighbors.  It does not demand subservience from them or anyone else.

We’ve picked a fight with China.  We are in its face.  For now, it is not in ours.  Any fight will be mostly on China’s turf, not ours.

Both deductive reasoning by analogy and self-fulfilling paranoia are dangerous.  Both deny reality and, with enough charismatic effort, can be contagious.  We profess to be defending China’s neighbors against it, but we have had to make a significant effort to persuade them to agree that they need us to do that.  Most would rather we backed them as they come to grips with China’s return to wealth and power.

In many respects, China now not only overmatches us, but is widening the gap.  It produces thirty-six percent of the world’s manufactures to our one-sixth.  Its domestic economy is one-third larger than ours in purchasing power.  It lends the world $1 trillion or more each year, while we borrow more than that just to keep our government operating and our economy afloat.   China has become the undisputed center of its region’s economy.  It has more diplomatic representation in more places around the world than we do.  And, of course, it now has a larger navy, a highly competitive air force, and the world’s most capable rocket force.  China is, of course, no match for us in power projection capability but that is irrelevant.  It is focused on defending its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and periphery against us, not crossing the Pacific Ocean to attack us.  In anticipation of a showdown with us, it is building a very credible nuclear second-strike capability.

Enough said.

Declared policy and actual policy are seldom the same.  We are not blind to the hypocrisy of others.  We should not assume that they are blind to ours.  To the extent that our China policy now has identifiable goals, our de facto objectives appear to be:

• To retard or reverse China’s rise to wealth and power, including its scientific and technological progress, thereby preventing the eclipse of our own.
• To deny China a sphere of influence in Pacific Asia or political or economic influence in other regions and countries.
• To perpetuate the political and strategic separation of Taiwan from the rest of China through a combination of overt military deterrence and covert subversion of any cross-Strait negotiation of unification.
• To limit Chinese dual-use exports to Russia for use in the production of weapons it might deploy in Ukraine.
• To delegitimize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ruling Communist Party (CPC) in hopeful anticipation of regime change in Beijing.

The successes or failures of policies do not depend on their political righteousness but on their results.  So far, our vociferous antagonism to China has:

• Nurtured a strategic partnership between China and Russia that looks very much like the Eurasian hegemonic coalition that U.S. strategists have always feared and sought to preclude. This partnership now leads the BRICS grouping and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which are merging into a rapidly expanding global coalition against U.S. hegemony.
• Boosted transfers of Russian weapons and military technology to China as well as joint Sino-Russian research and development (R&D) of weapons systems and activities in space, as symbolized by the plan for a joint Sino-Russian lunar base. We can no longer rule out the possibility that Russia will actively support a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military operation against Taiwan.
• Transferred the U.S. role in shaping the evolving trade and investment regimes in Pacific Asia to China, Japan, and ASEAN. We have abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its Japanese-sponsored successor, ignored the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and sabotaged the World Trade Organization (WTO) while adopting national security-based protectionism and refusing to negotiate bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs).
• Significantly increased the danger of a Sino-American war, including a possible nuclear exchange, over Taiwan. Current U.S. policies are diplomacy-free, leave no apparent path to peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue, and rely exclusively on military support for Taipei that demonstrably provokes rather than deters Beijing.
• Turned territorial disputes between rival claimants in the South China Sea into a focus of Sino-American naval confrontation that risks the accidental outbreak of hostilities, while making no effort to promote the peaceful resolution of these disputes.
• Supercharged the Chinese effort to achieve scientific and technological supremacy. The Australian Strategic Technology Institute’s (ASTI’s) “critical technology tracker” reports that China has now seized the lead in thirty-seven of the forty-four technologies it tracks.
• Stimulated an intensified search by ever more nations for ways to avoid the dollar in trade settlement. Should they succeed, U.S. global hegemony will collapse, the American standard of living will abruptly fall, domestic inflation will reach catastrophic levels, and the U.S. national debt will become utterly unsustainable.

We should honor the rule of holes.  When in a deepening hole, stop digging.  Our China policies are not keeping China down or pushing it back.  They are doing the opposite, and they are at the same time progressively reordering the world to our disadvantage.

We cannot afford continued hubris and complacency.

It is a mistake to imagine that China policy can be fixed in isolation from overall U.S. grand strategy.  A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a desired objective through the lowest possible investment of effort, resources, and time with the fewest adverse consequences for oneself.  At the moment we have a determination to sustain our global primacy and our post-World War II sphere of influence in Pacific Asia but no strategy to accomplish this.  Doubling down on military spending will not do so.  Neither will isolating our economy from international competition with higher tariffs.  We must consider not only what might sustain our global and regional hegemony but whether it is, in fact, sustainable, and, if not, what alternatives to attempting to do so will yet “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

In my view, that is what we should be discussing in this forum.

[Subsequent discussion was off the record.]