Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 24

Obama, Clinton Asia Blitz Underlines US Commitment

President Obama will make a whirlwind visit to Bangkok, Rangoon, and Phnom Penh from November 17–20. It will be the first time a sitting American leader has gone to Burma or Cambodia.

The stopover in the former Burmese capital has become the story of the trip, largely because there are misgivings about the astonishing speed of the reconciliation with the generals, who are very much in control of the impoverished nation. Also of concern is the visit to another hard-line regime, the one that runs Cambodia.

Despite these legitimate concerns, the main theme of the trip is that the White House is serious about the “pivot” to—or “rebalancing” with—Asia, code in either case for hedging against recent Chinese belligerence. That’s why members of the Politburo Standing Committee in the Chinese capital know they now have one more problem they cannot solve: a popular American president touring countries that once were under Beijing’s sway.

Many American security analysts are concerned that a dominant Chinese military will be able to overwhelm America’s armed forces. Therefore, analysts have been saying Obama’s new Asia policy is “unresourced,” that Washington cannot afford the military commitments made to East Asia in the last 12 months. Asian leaders are also worried—with justification—that the US will not be able to make good its various promises of additional soldiers, sailors, and pilots for the region.

The pivot, however, was always more than just a military initiative. True, last November the president announced his commitment to send Marines to Australia and the Pentagon unveiled its Air-Sea Battle concept. Yet at the same time, Obama also revealed the non-military side of the pivot, which included launching the nine-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and the sending of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma to explore ties with the troubled state.

Clinton is the one official who will be at the center of America’s interaction with the region this month. She will visit Perth, in western Australia, where she will meet up with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for the annual Australia-US Ministerial Consultations with Foreign Minister Bob Carr and Defense Minister Stephen Smith. She will then travel to Adelaide as well as Singapore. From there, Clinton joins the president in Bangkok and travels with him to Rangoon and Phnom Penh. She will be at Obama’s side in the Cambodian capital when he attends the East Asia Summit and meets with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Washington, as evident from Clinton’s itinerary, is back in the center of East Asian diplomacy. It did not take an additional aircraft carrier or a wing of F-22s. All that was required was a series of short trips to the region by a handful of Americans. In Asia, nations are looking to Washington, and it is a coalition of countries that will be the real foundation for security there. The effort to stitch that together is the real pivot, an attempt to build the diplomatic and trade interactions that will unite the region and avoid the conflict that all fear. 

The US needs to commit more forces to the region, but at least from the perspective of this month, the administration’s pivot to Asia looks fully resourced.

 

Photo Credit: Gobierno de Chile

 

Western Engagement Meets Chinese Obstructionism

Last Thursday, two weeks of talks to establish a 640,000-square-mile sanctuary off the coast of Antarctica ended in failure as three nations—China, Russia, and Ukraine—blocked agreement. The 25-member Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) will meet next July in Germany to see if it is possible to resurrect the US-New Zealand proposal to protect the Ross Sea, “the world’s most intact marine ecosystem.”

Chinese officials delighted in stopping the plan to create a preserve. As an unnamed official told AFP, “I think there was a little bit of ‘Don’t tell us what we can or can’t do,’ as well as keeping their options open.”

Beijing has traditionally played an obstructionist role in international organizations. It has, for instance, consistently blocked initiatives on Syria and Darfur from its seat on the Security Council, it has lent diplomatic support to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs from its position on the Governing Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and now it is taking on penguins and whales through its membership in CCAMLR.

How did China ever become a CCAMLR member in the first place? For four decades, nations have wanted to “engage” the Chinese and enmesh them into the international system. China was invited to join every international organization in sight and asked to sign treaties and covenants.

For a time, that enmeshment strategy seemed to work. For instance, China settled its trade disputes inside the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2001. And Chinese fishing craft ended their pursuit of toothfish in Antarctic waters after Beijing became a member of CCAMLR in 2006. Beijing also participated in various multilateral talks that had been convened to solve the problems of the moment, such as those to “denuclearize” North Korea.

Yet as a Chinese saying goes, the fox eventually showed its tail. Beijing, the fox, went on a bender at the end of 2009. It dropped its “smile diplomacy” and acted arrogantly at virtually every opportunity. China, as a result, lost friends fast.

But China’s rapid loss of friends did not matter in one sense. Beijing had already been given—or it had taken—a central role in the organizational architecture connecting states great and small. It now can, as it pleases, act as an obstructionist. And that matters because Chinese obstructionism means these vital organizations can no longer work as they should. And because these institutions have become ineffective, they will eventually fail.

Ronald Reagan opposed the Soviet Union because he knew the form of its government mattered, that it prevented Moscow from evolving to better policies and serving as a reliable partner. Yet, despite all that has happened in the last two years, governments around the world still engage Beijing in the hope that China will not become a Soviet-like challenger to global peace.

The hope, we can now see, was misplaced. The issue is whether the international community can craft a new set of policies—and do so fast enough—to deal with Beijing’s increasingly destructive external policies.

The failure to establish a sanctuary in the Ross Sea is not just about the Antarctic. It is about a failed idea that hard-line leaders can become part of a liberal international system that they had no hand in creating—but which they can now destroy.

China Stumbles Toward Leadership Transition

After a year of turmoil, the Communist Party will convene its 18th Congress on November 8th in Beijing. If all goes according to plan, 2,270 delegates will elect a new Central Committee. 

On the day following the close of the Congress, the new Central Committee will convene the First Plenum to appoint the next leadership, specifically a new Politburo, Central Military Commission, and Secretariat. All eyes will be on who steps out from behind the curtain—literally—as the new Politburo Standing Committee is unveiled. Analysts universally believe the first person to appear will be Vice President Xi Jinping. That will mean he is the party’s new general secretary, the leader of China.

This leadership transition, from the so-called Fourth Generation to the Fifth, was supposed to be uneventful, predictable even. According to the accepted view, the Communist Party had institutionalized its politics with rules, guidelines, practices, and limits. Even critics of the regime accepted this storyline. 

A year ago, America’s messy, divisive, and noisy politics were sometimes compared—unfavorably—with the orderly Chinese transfer of power. Yet this has turned out to be a tumultuous year for the party, beginning with the early-February confrontation around the American consulate in Chengdu, a bizarre incident that appears to have been triggered by the political struggle between Hu Jintao, the current leader, and Bo Xilai, then China’s most charismatic and openly ambitious politician. Bo has since been detained and will soon stand trial, perhaps for one or more capital crimes.

Since February, there has been intense infighting at the top of the Communist Party, and much of this has been playing out in public. There has been an ever-widening drama of ambition, corruption, intrigue, lust, murder, and treason. In recent months, officials have been purged, businessmen arrested, and military officers reprimanded. There have been two sets of rumors of attempted military takeovers. In March, Premier Wen Jiabao issued a public warning that the country could descend into another Cultural Revolution.

At the time, Wen’s dire warning sounded to some like an exaggeration, but the new leadership then and now faces unprecedented challenges. The economy is faltering, the authority of the central government is eroding, the military is breaking free of civilian control, and the Chinese people are losing their fear. In Beijing, the disgruntled are defacing traffic signs with subversive slogans such as “Strike Down the Communist Party.” China is a volatile society, changing faster than could have been imagined just months ago.

The party’s problems are by no means insurmountable, but the organization has lost its self-assurance at a crucial juncture. The series of sensational and lurid events this year has delegitimized its rule, and now even its second-tier leaders are openly questioning its direction. Qiushi, the top Communist theoretical journal in China, in the middle of this month published an article essentially maintaining that the party would die if it did not embark on political reform.

China’s unreformed system has obviously become a kleptocracy. Last week, the New York Times reported that the family of Premier Wen had accumulated assets worth at least $2.7 billion. These revelations, undermining the current head of China’s government, follow Bloomberg’s groundbreaking reporting at the end of June on the wealth of Xi Jinping’s family. 

Perhaps Chinese leaders are grabbing all they can because they know their system cannot sustain itself. There is an end-of-regime feel to China at the moment, something evident from the party’s desperate-looking efforts to prevent its officials from running away. Last month, the organization established a “Command Group to Fight Against Communist Officials and Government Employees Fleeing the Country” to be headed by Wen Jiabao’s successor as premier, Li Keqiang.

As the party tries to stabilize itself, Chinese citizens and businesses are taking their money out of the country. Global Financial Integrity, the Washington-based watchdog, this month released a report (pdf) estimating that last year there were $602.9 billion in illicit transfers out of China, a part of the $1.05 trillion that left the country that year and in 2010.

Many Chinese, we can see, no longer believe in China.

The US Navy to Japan's Rescue?

On Friday, Japanese media reported that the US and Japan will not hold a naval drill, scheduled for November 5th to 16th. The exercise, a rehearsal of the recapture of an island, was to take place on Irisunajima, an island in the Okinawa prefecture. Jiji Press, a Japanese news agency, stated the cancellation “reflects the opinion of the prime minister’s office.”

Tokyo reportedly pulled out of the drill to avoid further angering Beijing, which had been behind nationwide anti-Japanese protests—some of them violent riots—that shook Chinese cities last month. Beijing, through its aggressive actions, is challenging Tokyo’s sovereignty over islands it labels the Diaoyus. The Japanese, who actually administer these barren outcroppings in the East China Sea, call them the Senkakus. The US takes no position on which nation has sovereignty but has a treaty obligation to help Japan defend them because they are in fact under Tokyo’s control.

Japan, like many nations on China’s periphery, is concerned about Beijing’s new assertiveness and is willing to go to some lengths to avoid irritating the Chinese. Unfortunately, Beijing cannot be placated these days, and the Japanese government should learn from the Pentagon’s recent mistakes.

The Obama administration confronted a similar situation after the sinking of the Cheonan in March 2010. A North Korean submarine torpedoed the South Korean frigate, and 46 sailors died in that horrific and unprovoked surprise attack.

To deter Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul planned to send the mighty George Washington carrier strike group into the Yellow Sea as a show of resolve. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in July of that year, the US was going to send a “clear message” to the North Koreans.

Washington did send a message—but not the one intended. China, which borders the Yellow Sea, vehemently objected to the presence of the carrier so close to its shores. In the face of increasing threats, the Pentagon backed down and did not send the George Washington. In early September, it pledged to do so sometime in the indefinite future.

The idea was that the postponement would placate China. The tactic, however, backfired, only emboldening Beijing hard-liners.

The Chinese most likely believe their intimidation worked—and their North Korean allies saw a green light to commit another act of war. That November, the Kim regime shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing four South Koreans, two of them civilians.

Now, two years later, we are witnessing the same dynamic. Beijing has just successfully intimidated Japan.

And what is the China military doing? It has just concluded a naval exercise of its own. The drill included 11 vessels from the Chinese navy’s Donghai Fleet, the fisheries administration, and the marine surveillance agency, along with eight aircraft, including jet fighters. More than 1,000 personnel, both military and civilian, participated.

China is backing its expansive territorial claims by preparing for a sea battle, while Japan seems squeamish. The George Washington strike group is cruising in nearby waters, which means the task of opposing Chinese adventurism may end up being left to America.

China's Self-Defeating Arrogance Toward Japan

“Regrettable.” That’s the word both Japan’s finance minister and the head of the Bank of Japan used to describe their Chinese counterparts who canceled appearances at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank this month. 

Why would high Chinese officials skip the two gatherings? State media initially referred to scheduling conflicts, but Beijing then went mum.

Yet it’s clear to most observers why Chinese Finance Minister Xie Xuren and central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan pulled out at the last minute and sent deputies instead. China wanted to register its displeasure at Japan, and the two meetings were held in Tokyo.

Beijing had recently stirred up a nasty territorial dispute over the the Senkakus, a string of Japanese-controlled islets in the East China Sea. Beijing calls the barren islands the Diaoyus, and its claim is far weaker than Japan’s as a matter of international law. Unfortunately for China, Beijing acknowledged the islands belonged to Japan up until the beginning of the 1970s. There are official Chinese maps that show the Senkakus as Japan’s.

Beijing’s prior acknowledgement of Japanese sovereignty does not seem to bother the current crop of Chinese leaders, who are now insistently pressing their claim. Last month, they exerted pressure on Japan by orchestrating nationwide protests, which resulted in firebombings and looting of Japanese businesses, and by employing extra-legal tactics to undermine Japanese business operations in China. At the same time, Communist Party and state media conducted an unrelenting campaign against Tokyo. 

Yet Beijing is nothing if not thorough. It is not surprising, therefore, that Chinese leaders decided to teach Tokyo a lesson by trying to spoil the IMF and World Bank meetings, as if that would put pressure on Japan. Commenting on Beijing’s decision to send only junior officials to Tokyo, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “The arrangement of the delegation for the meeting was completely appropriate.”

Few outside China agreed with him, however. “The snub makes China seem petty and begrudging, especially since it is the IMF, an institution in which China is expanding its influence,” said Damien Ma of Eurasia Group, the geopolitical consulting firm.

The boycott of the IMF and World Bank meetings may well be a sign of things to come. As Yoshikiyo Shimamine of Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute put it, “It was an example of how China won’t always act within the Western-dominated framework and doesn’t see any contradiction between such absences and its responsibility as a major power.”

The Chinese have every right to reject that framework, but if they do, they should not be allowed to participate in its constituent institutions. If China wants a larger voice in the IMF and the World Bank—as Beijing insists it has a right to—then we should insist it accepts that framework and work constructively within it.

China throws tantrums because it feels it can get away with them. Now is the time to show the Chinese they cannot have it both ways. “They want to be seen as major players on the world stage, and yet they don’t turn up,” said the finance minister of a major economy to the Wall Street Journal. Now is the time to make Beijing choose whether it is in or out.

Where’s Our ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech?

In recent weeks, President Obama and Governor Romney have, directly and through surrogates, sparred over Iran, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Each has, in different ways, told us how he would deal with terrorism. Both have talked about China when discussing jobs. On Monday, Mitt Romney gave his first major campaign address on foreign policy.

Yet there is one thing that both the incumbent and challenger have largely ignored. Neither of them has given the American public context, an explanation of why there are so many crises at this moment. Winston Churchill in 1946 supplied context with his Iron Curtain speech, and we need a speech of this kind for our times.

What is the context for the second decade of the 21st century? What makes the world so challenging these days is that two authoritarian giants, China and Russia, are empowering rogues and other dangerous elements. So in a sense, we do not have a Syria problem. We have a Russian one. Similarly, we don’t really face intractable challenges from Iran’s “atomic ayatollahs” or North Korea’s Kim dictators because, more fundamentally, we have an all-encompassing disagreement with China’s rulers, who back these rogues. To put this another way, we could solve many global problems in short order if we could take Russia and China out of the picture.

But of course that is not possible. So Obama and Romney need to address the challenges that these two powers pose to the American-led international system. Since the end of the Cold War, we have sought to engage China and Russia and integrate them into the international system. 

Therefore, American policymakers have subordinated important goals in order to maintain positive relations with Beijing and Moscow. For instance, we have tried to recruit both of them in what has to be our most important national objective: stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. In this decade and last, Washington has accepted, in the Security Council and the Governing Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, compromises and half-measures to win the support of the Chinese and Russians with regard to the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs.

Yet America’s optimistic vision of great-power unity has not produced positive results. After so many failed efforts to enlist Beijing and Moscow, we have to recognize that China and Russia are not our partners in solving the world’s problems. They are, in many respects, the problem.

In the past two decades, Washington almost always sought to handle the crisis of the moment without dealing with what was really behind it. We need solutions, but ignoring the larger issues in the pursuit of quick fixes proves costly in the long run. Ultimately we will have to recognize that the great power authoritarian states contribute to—and sometimes cause—instability. America needs not just new policies but a new foreign policy framework.

Perhaps it is too much to expect thoughtful discussions of foreign policy in the middle of a tight political race, yet America’s adversaries will not halt their troubling behavior until we finish voting.

We need another Iron Curtain speech. The great democracies are now being challenged.  

Cyber Attack Hits White House Military Office

On Monday, an unnamed Obama administration official confirmed to Fox News that Chinese hackers had breached computers used by the White House Military Office. Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon was the first to report the cyber intrusion, which occurred sometime last month.

The Military Office is responsible for, among other things, the “football,” the suitcase device that permits the president to transmit commands to the country’s strategic nuclear forces. “This is the most sensitive office in the US government,” a former American intelligence official, speaking to the Free Beacon, said.

The White House has tried to minimize the incident. “This was a spear phishing attack against an unclassified network,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “In this instance the attack was identified, the system was isolated, and there is no indication whatsoever that any exfiltration of data took place.” Yet as Fox reported, “it remains unclear what information, if any, was taken or left behind.” The truth is, at this moment, the White House cannot speak with assurance. For one thing, Beijing’s hackers are extremely skillful at hiding their digital tracks.

The US needs substantially better cyber defenses. China’s military, security ministry, and other government units have conducted a relentless cyber warfare and espionage campaign against American government, military, and business targets as well as against individuals and private organizations.

Yet Chinese capabilities—or even Beijing’s brazenness—are not the fundamental issue. An official said the attack, in Gertz’s words, “highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks.” Officially, the White House would not even confirm the attack came from China.

We of course have the capabilities to know whether an attack originated in China or used that country as a conduit. If either is the case, given the country’s extensive Internet controls, Beijing is responsible.

To its credit, the Obama administration, following the Senate defeat of its Cybersecurity Act of 2012, is contemplating an executive order on this matter. And Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talked about the matter in public last month.

Those are important steps in the right direction, yet President Obama needs to go to the next level and take a page out of the playbook of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In August 2007, Der Spiegel reported that Chinese hackers had penetrated German networks, including those in the Chancellery and three ministries, and infected them with spyware. That month, Merkel went to Beijing and, standing in public next to Premier Wen Jiabao, criticized his government for its attacks.

If the German chancellor can openly raise the issue in the Chinese capital, why can’t American presidents?

Riots at Foxconn, Turbulence in China

On Tuesday, Foxconn Technology Group reopened its factory in Taiyuan after approximately 2,000 workers rioted, setting fires and overturning at least one government vehicle. Authorities brought in 5,000 police earlier in the week to quell the disturbance at the northern Chinese facility, which reportedly manufactures, among other items, the back plate to Apple’s iPhone 5.

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, has been plagued by highly publicized labor troubles, beginning with more than a dozen suicides at another of its Chinese factories in 2010. Since then, the Taiwan-owned company—and Apple—have come under global scrutiny for harsh working conditions.

There are conflicting stories as to the origin of the disturbance in Taiyuan. Local authorities maintain that a brawl between workers from two different provinces caused the disruption, but bystanders say the fighting was triggered by company guards beating employees. Foxconn quickly issued a statement declaring that the origin “appears not to have been work-related.”

Really? Foxconn runs what has been described as the world’s most efficient factories, but its system is extremely regimented and oppressive. Geoffrey Crothall, of the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, states that Foxconn treats its workers “simply as units of production, essentially robots, not human beings.”

Foxconn has tried to improve conditions at the margins and has raised pay repeatedly in the last two years, but its system is the problem. “Clearly there is deep-seated frustration and anger among the employees and no outlet, apart from violence, for that frustration to be released,” said Crothall in a statement this week. “There is no dialogue and no means of resolving disputes, no matter how minor. So it is not surprising when such disputes escalate into violence.”

The same can be said for China as a whole. Last week, protests scarred more than a hundred cities as authorities permitted—and even encouraged—the outpouring of anti-Japan sentiment. Yet at the same time many Chinese used the opportunity to voice frustration with society in general and the one-party system in particular, sentiments evident from the banners decrying corruption and urging political reform. Also striking were the many posters of Mao Zedong, who has become an icon for those opposing the current crop of leaders.

At the moment, Chinese society is restive, with people lashing out at just about any target. During the demonstrations of September 16th, a crowd of at least 2,000 protestors tried to charge the American consulate in Chengdu. On the 18th, anti-Japan demonstrators surrounded the car of US Ambassador Gary Locke, and damaged it while he was inside. Last week, some of the looting and destruction targeted non-Japanese brands like Rolex, Dior, McDonald’s, and Samsung.

Observers have likened the country-wide demonstrations, many of which were violent, to the Cultural Revolution and the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion, which began at the end of the 19th century. China is a volatile society, and the Communist Party’s coercive system—like Foxconn’s—has just about reached its limits. Many, if not most, Chinese believe that a one-party system is no longer appropriate for China’s modernizing society. People want a new bargain, and it looks like they are even willing to use violence to get it.

China seems to be entering a new phase of instability—in which any incident can start a riot. That’s the greater meaning of the most recent troubles at Foxconn.

Conflict on Asia’s Horizon

On Tuesday, Japanese officials spotted 12 Chinese vessels approaching the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea as part of Beijing’s continuing effort to aggressively challenge Japan’s claims of sovereignty over the barren outcroppings.   

Perhaps in a burst of bombast, Chinese state media is claiming that more than 1,000 Chinese fishing boats are heading for the islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyus. Tokyo says there is no evidence that a massive fleet is coming its way.

China analysts worry that Beijing might flood the waters around the Senkakus with small boats and land Chinese citizens or military personnel on the desolate islands. If China were to go ahead with a plan of that sort—as it may be doing now—the United States would likely become entangled in a diplomatic conflict with China, and perhaps worse.

Washington takes no position on which nation has sovereignty over the contested islands, but America is obligated to come to Japan’s defense in the event of an attack, according to the terms of the US-Japan mutual defense treaty. Under this pact, America has committed itself to protect all territory under Japan’s control.

The People’s Republic of China essentially acknowledged that the islands were Japan’s until the early 1970s. Then, Beijing formally made claims but did not actively pursue them. In the last several years, however, as China’s sea power has grown to match its stated territorial aspirations, China has made the “return” of the islands a principal object of its diplomacy. Beijing’s undiplomatic and increasingly threatening rhetoric, backed by ongoing maritime incursions in the waters around the disputed islands, has raised concerns throughout the region—and in the US.

In the last couple of weeks, Chinese state media went silent on the disappearance of Vice President Xi Jinping but ramped up propaganda against Japan over the simmering dispute. In one particular moment of overreach last week, the state-run Beijing Evening News posted this message on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter: “Why waste energy? Skip to the main course and drop an atomic bomb. Simple.”

This propaganda blitz might not be a coincidence. The leadership transition now under way in China is not going well—and various Communist Party officials have been mired in scandal in recent months—so it would not be out of character for party leaders to use the seizure of the islands as a way to whip up anti-Japanese nationalist sentiment while conveniently diverting their citizens’ attention from their own crises.

There are clear indications that the recent propaganda has achieved the desired aim. There have been large demonstrations in China over the Senkakus. Protests were staged in more than 50 cities over the weekend, and they continued into this week. Some of them turned violent, and many Japanese businesses shuttered their China operations temporarily.

Amid these tensions, the American government’s public response has been cautiously diplomatic. While in Beijing for a round of talks apparently intended to ease China’s concerns over the administration’s “pivot,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Tuesday said the US wants stronger military ties with China to help avoid misunderstandings. Referring specifically to the disputed territories he urged all sides to resolve the disputes through diplomacy. We can only hope he was tougher with his Chinese counterparts in private discussions because the problems in North Asia are not the result of miscommunication. Washington may intend Panetta’s words as gestures of friendship, but Chinese officials will undoubtedly see them as signs of weakness.

China’s increasingly aggressive posturing, now backed with a naval capacity to bully the region, should be matched by resolute talk and actions from the US. We cannot be sure what American officials say in private to their Chinese interlocutors, but if American private comments reflect the generous and deferential tone of their public statements, the Chinese government will be unimpressed. They will increase the pressure, further testing Washington’s resolve.

The Beijing Evening News made its stark suggestion of nuking Japan because it thought China could do so before America came to Japan’s aid. Deterrence is breaking down in Asia, and usually nothing good happens after that occurs.

China’s Next Leader Goes Missing

Xi Jinping, slated to be China’s next leader, has gone missing. China’s vice president canceled appointments with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Singapore’s prime minister last week, and now he has completely disappeared from public view. Perhaps the worst sign is that on Saturday Xi missed an emergency meeting of the all-important Central Military Commission.

Officials say the cancellation of Xi’s sit-down with Clinton was due to a normal “adjustment of itinerary,” but no one is buying that line. There are competing outside explanations for his startling disappearance from public view. Xi, according to various assessments, hurt his back swimming, suffered an injury playing soccer, or had a heart attack. The latest theory is that he has developed Bell’s palsy, a nervous disorder.

Other observers say Xi had been preoccupied by the press of domestic business. For instance, some have suggested that Xi snubbed Clinton to go to Shenzhen to meet Hong Kong’s embattled chief executive, Leung Chun-ying. Wang Xiangwei, the editor of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, debunked this particular rumor, however, by showing that Xi did not in fact meet Leung because Leung remained in Hong Kong on the day in question.

By far the most inflammatory rumor, originally posted on the Boxun citizen-journalism website, is that Xi and He Guoqiang, another member of the Politburo Standing Committee, were wounded in coordinated assassination attempts. Other rumors had it that Mr. He was actually killed. In both versions, security forces loyal to the now-disgraced Bo Xilai were behind the attempts. Mr. He has also been out of view since August 28th, and that too is strange. Boxun took down the story within two hours of its posting.

These assassination stories cannot be true—can they?—but they are similar to the reports that the vice president in March narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet inside Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party leadership compound in the center of Beijing.

Of course, no one outside a tight circle in Beijing knows what is going on. Xi and He could turn up at any time—or never be seen again.  

Intriguingly, Jiefangjun Bao, a newspaper controlled by the People’s Liberation Army, recently seems to be devoting an unusual amount of space to Hu Jintao, China’s current leader and sometime adversary of Xi. There’s no secret that the vice president was not Hu’s first choice as his successor. Li Keqiang, slated to become the next premier, was Hu’s pick to lead the so-called Fifth Generation.

Xi, on the other hand, was acceptable to all factions in the increasingly divided Communist Party. Moreover, Comrade Jinping had the advantage of not being from Hu’s Communist Youth League faction—unwritten rules say no faction can produce two leaders in a row. Might the Jiefangjun Bao stories mean that, with Xi Jinping incapacitated, Hu will continue to rule China with the military’s support?

These days, little can be ruled out, as China has become the land of the wildly improbable. Although everyone insists that Xi’s spot in the new leadership lineup is secure, there is no such thing as a sure thing in Chinese politics, especially at this moment. Only when the new Standing Committee emerges from the curtain at the First Plenum of the 18thCentral Committee, which occurs immediately after the 18th Party Congress, will we know for sure who will be ruling China. The Congress, which now meets every five years, will take place within a few months if the party adheres to prior practice.

Then again, with the way things are going, we should not assume there will be an 18th Congress—or even a People’s Republic as we have known it—by the end of the year.

China is unstable.