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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Rudd
Read between
August 19 - September 1, 2023
China is also acutely aware that the United States is China-dependent for a range of consumer goods that cannot be readily replaced in the near term without producing an American consumer revolt.
While the economy is not everything, it is nearly everything when it comes to our efforts to understand the underlying dynamics of US-China relations. Its impact on politics, social stability, the environment, international relations, and the military is profound.
(1) the impact of sustained environmental degradation on the party’s and his personal political legitimacy, especially over the next decade and a half, when he wants to remain in power and when climate impacts on the Chinese people will become progressively worse;
(2) the political and economic impact on China of intensifying and more frequent droughts, floods, storms, and other extreme weather events if climate change impacts continue unabated;
(3) the potential for failure—that China’s emissions do not come down, along with those of a “brown” BRI, and that this derails Xi’s efforts to use ...
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that the nuclear factor is seen as so irrelevant to the risk of conventional conflict over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea that this perceived “minimal risk” of nuclear escalation actually serves to exacerbate the risk of conventional conflict? These are all critical considerations for the future. Too often in the US-China debate, they are pushed to one side because they are too complex, too unknowable, or too remote. I would argue the risk of nuclear escalation between the US and China must be considered afresh.
maintain strategic ambiguity
future American president would sacrifice San Francisco to nuclear attack as the price of defending Taipei. Nevertheless,
The Chinese military are acutely conscious of their lack of direct field experience. They are not lacking in courage. Far from it. But their level of professional prudence was striking.
This applies to China’s fourteen land neighbors (North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam).
strategy with its neighbors is to economically overwhelm them and make them so dependent on continued access to Chinese trade, investment, and capital markets that any remaining foreign and security policy objections to Beijing’s territorial claims are rendered politically futile and economically debilitating.
Xi and Putin have transformed what had been a bitter rivalry into a de facto political, economic, and strategic alliance—
It also caused a reluctant Moscow to accept, over time, its newfound junior status in the relationship. This was not an easy pill for the Russians to swallow, especially given their sense of vulnerability arising from the small Russian population in the Far East—
Moscow looked to Beijing with greater urgency than ever before. As economic sanctions began to bite and were compounded by sliding oil and gas prices, Putin recognized that Russia had nowhere else to turn for economic relief other than China.
Russia’s supply of oil and gas will reduce China’s chronic dependency on imports from the Gulf, alleviating China’s vulnerability to the interruption of these critical energy imports through the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca—two strategic choke points that have long preoccupied Chinese military strategists.
Moscow being prepared to act far more adventurously than China itself. Moscow has always been prepared to push back, both militarily and in foreign policy, against the Americans and Europeans much more aggressively than Beijing.
India has also been a long-standing rival of China’s for the affections and support of the wider developing world. While at the dawn of the current century, India and China were seen as having comparable economic potential, twenty years later, China became five times the size of India.
Washington regarded the Senkaku Islands as Japanese territory for the purposes of the US-Japan security treaty of 1954, and the islands have been administered by the Japanese government since the war.
US and China know Jakarta has the potential to become the critical swing state in the “great game” for strategic influence
China has a long-standing strategic objective of fracturing US alliances if at all possible. China’s strategic logic is clear: America,
without its alliances, would be considerably weakened, if not pushed out all together from the Indo-Pacific.
China has sought to wield its political and diplomatic muscles, along with its economic power, against individual allies that have proven to be particularly recalcitrant in their insensitivity to Chinese national interests.
Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Mike Pompeo bluntly declared that Washington’s goal was ultimately to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.”
“Spirit of the Quad,” the statement agreed to “strive for a region that is free, open, inclusive, healthy, anchored by democratic values, and unconstrained by coercion” and to “facilitate collaboration, including in maritime security, to meet challenges to the rules-based maritime order in the East and South China Seas.”
Beijing’s eyes, they were using “multilateralism as a pretext to… stir up ideological confrontation.”
The emergence of the Quad, and China’s response to it, is likely to accelerate the regional arms race that is already underway.
China therefore sees the economic development of the wider region as the most effective long-term antidote against religious extremism, terrorism, and cross-national, pan-Muslim solidarity.
Central Asia is a significant source of energy and raw materials for China—hence the decision to fund and construct a twenty-five-hundred-kilometer oil pipeline from the Kazak oilfields on the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang. As with many other parts of the BRI, China sees central Asia as a useful new market for the Chinese construction industry as demand within China itself slows over time.
The economic utility of each of these investments appears marginal, given the relative size of the Cambodian, Sri Lankan, and Pakistani economies and the modest cargo throughput for each. In other words, commercial opportunity alone does not justify the level of investments that have been made. Of greater strategic significance over the longer term will be the future use of adjacent airports (for example, at Koh Kong) by the Chinese military,
China seems to be emulating the American historical playbook in rolling out its global network of port facilities and airfields capable of sustaining a blue-water navy.
“In the face of Thucydides’s Trap… the military must accelerate further the increase in its capacity”—implying that military conflict with the US was a serious possibility in the face of continuing structural tension.
Xi Jinping’s political modus operandi, when confronted with a challenge—either foreign or domestic—is to double down: to either crash through or crash.
The most credible would be any self-inflicted economic crisis, decline, or even financial collapse.
To undo the unspoken social contract between party and people (i.e., political control in exchange for economic prosperity) in any way would rebound badly on Xi.
Xi’s real political vulnerability lies with the economy.
state over the market, and his new restrictions on the Chinese private sector pose a real political danger to his leadership if growth,
Xi Jinping Thought is designed to navigate the party and the country along a new course that will deal with the “imbalances,” “inadequacies,” and “inequalities” of that previous era of unrestrained capitalist growth.
Xi Jinping Thought has been designed to be politically elastic: to expand and contract to absorb new political and policy developments as they arise and, as a result, ideologically legitimize them by attaching the Xi Jinping Thought mantra to them.
Chinese ideological orthodoxy is to be an amalgam of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese tradition, and Chinese nationalism—with the precise weighting of the amalgam to be defined by the party leadership from time to time depending on the need. (2) This orthodoxy embraces the current move toward the left on politics and the economy and to the right on nationalism. (3) Beyond intellectual cognition and moral legitimization, this new ideology legitimizes struggle as a necessary means of practical action for realizing progress, both at home and abroad.
Xi Jinping Thought textbook available for compulsory study for every school student, printed under the snappy subtitle Happiness Only Comes Through Struggle.
gray rhino
These include the focus on common prosperity by reducing income inequality, achieving national technological self-reliance, and, most importantly, embracing state leadership over the market at most levels of the economy.
Under Xi’s new development model, domestic consumer demand is also meant to drive much of China’s economic growth for the coming decade.
With the income and spending gap between China’s rich and poor widening significantly during the pandemic, it is far from certain that China’s overall consumption growth can maintain previous momentum.
