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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Rudd
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April 6 - May 5, 2023
To put it another way, from the outset, Beijing saw the relationship as a transactional one, as a means of enhancing China’s national security and prosperity. Whereas Washington came to see it, at least in part, as
transformational, carrying with it the deeper objective of changing the fundamental nature of Communist China itself.
China’s view of America is that it is insufferably arrogant, condescending, and systemically incapable of treating China or its leaders with appropriate national respect, let alone as equals.
Over the last twenty years, much of the developing world has seen their economic relationships with China become much more important than those countries’ relationships with the United States—the product of large-scale public and private Chinese trade and investment across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
First, by China becoming a “moderately prosperous society” (defined as doubling China’s per capita income to $10,000 from where it stood in 2010) by the centenary of the party’s founding. This was achieved with great fanfare in 2021. The next goal is China becoming a fully advanced economy by the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic in 2049, with average income levels to be the same as the US. To achieve these goals is to achieve what Xi describes as “the
Xi has also moved to
ban private schooling and the hiring of foreign teachers as well as the use of international textbooks and curricula.
Technology like this is creating a surveillance and police state of unprecedented power.
Many Americans may not appreciate how central the Taiwan question is to the CCP’s political priorities, the extent to which this has intensified under Xi Jinping’s leadership, or how much Taiwan shapes how China views its overall relationship with the United States.
it seems increasingly likely that Xi will want to secure Taiwan during his political lifetime. Xi is a man in a hurry when it comes to Taiwan.
Xi, unlike his recent predecessors, has been indifferent to international reaction. He believes that the national security imperatives of “complete security” are more important than any foreign policy or wider reputational cost to the regime. Xi also believes that the rest of the world now depends on the Chinese economy so much that international political reactions to Chinese measures will, in the main, be superficial, symbolic, and temporary. The Chinese leadership has a long memory and can remember how international political and economic sanctions against China after Tiananmen in 1989
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It is for these reasons that the economy still looms as the political Achilles’ heel for the party’s—and Xi’s—future.
finds himself wrestling with five major interconnected, and in some cases conflicting, challenges in China’s unfolding political economy: (1) to maintain economic growth to
provide employment and rising living standards; (2) to do so while maintaining an optimal internal balance between the state and the market without ceding the party’s political control to a new generation of entrepreneurs; (3) to ensure that growth is better distributed than in the past so that economic inequality is reduced; (4) to impose new carbon constraints on China’s previous economic development model to deal with the now accepted reality of climate change; and ...
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the NDC came to embody the confluence of three key priorities: nationalist self-reliance, his protectionist concept of a dual-circulation economy, and his new redistributive doctrine of common prosperity.
With nominally communist China having one of the most unequal income distributions in the world, in which the top fifth of households have a disposable income more than ten times as high as those in the bottom fifth and the top 1 percent own approximately 30 percent of the wealth (compared with around 35 percent in America), Xi said, “We must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider.”
should not be surprising that Xi’s regulatory crackdown on what he defines as the monopolistic private-sector behavior of China’s massive digital firms—the “trusts” of China’s version of the American Gilded Age—is, so far, immensely popular with the Chinese middle class. Xi, always a keen politician, is clear-eyed about what is at stake here. He has harnessed a form of Chinese economic populism with a view to grafting it on to socialism with Chinese characteristics for his “new era.”
Therefore, while trade remains important to both economies, it is much more important to China. For these reasons, China’s leadership in framing its overall policy response to the US is acutely aware that the US can still inflict more economic damage on China through trade than China can inflict on the US. America—for the time being at least—remains a key component of China’s economic future.
Chinese household domestic consumption has been steadily increasing, replacing exports as the principal driver of economic growth.
Nonetheless, from China’s perspective, foreign direct investment has been an important means of securing access to advanced technology.
Xi Jinping, achieving national self-reliance, particularly in indigenous technology and innovation, has become a key strategic priority, particularly following US efforts to constrict important technology exports to China, such as of advanced semiconductors. Xi’s ambition is for China to achieve national autonomy in all critical technology categories in the decade ahead and—where possible—to achieve technological dominance over its economic and geostrategic competitors. In particular, this applies to the principal drivers of the artificial intelligence revolution; next-generation mobile,
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The list is led by ICT but includes other major strategic technology categories as well, such as industrial robotics and new-energy vehicles.
Artificial intelligence lies at the epicenter of this struggle for technological supremacy.
immediate objective is for the digital RMB to supplant the dollar as the preferred reserve currency for the developing world—including both BRI and non-BRI countries.
although the environment is still likely to come second to economic priorities such as unemployment, which is still seen by the party as the most dangerous cause of social unrest.
Xi sees China’s military strength as the ultimate linchpin of China’s future power in relation to its neighbors, the region, and the world.
Jinping’s emphasis on modernizing the People’s Liberation Army is driven in large part by his personality. Xi is a strategic realist who believes that, as important as economic prosperity is, it is military power that ultimately lies at the heart of state power.
China’s core interest today is to reduce—and eventually eliminate—any significant threats along its borders.
It does mean that the notion of great powers having the right to establish spheres of influence—while publicly rejected as being a part of official Chinese policy—lies well within the parameters of contemporary Chinese strategic thinking.
China’s overall 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.
decision
Xi played Trump like a fiddle.
However, of all the Southeast Asian states, arguably the most important exercise in great power rivalry is unfolding in Indonesia,
Across all of Southeast Asia, three big developments are unfolding that give Xi confidence that the region is moving steadily in China’s direction.
China understands that these deployments are anchored in the long-standing US base on Guam and its array of military, naval, marine, and intelligence facilities scattered across the territories of US allies Japan, Korea, and Australia and the freely
associated states in the North Pacific and supported to a lesser extent by Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Overall, Xi Jinping has therefore achieved mixed success in securing China’s maritime flank. China has had a number of strategic diplomatic successes, but the rise of the Quad has crystallized geopolitical resistance to the sustained weight of China’s economic and foreign policy assertiveness into a focused institutional response. If the Quad—or a Quad-Plus—was in the future to attract both Korea and (a more remote prospect) Indonesia, this would add considerably to the grouping’s overall strategic heft and present a serious challenge to China’s ambitions.
China, at this stage, has no interest in replacing the United States as the principal external provider of regional security. Beijing fully recognizes the financial and political costs accrued to the US from the last thirty years of sustained American military interventions in the Middle East.
China’s management of its political, foreign, and security policy interests across the region has been remarkably deft. China’s
two-thirds of China’s foreign arms sales go to the Middle East.
so). For Macron and those of similar mind in continental Europe, the incident only reinforced the perception—rightly or wrongly—that the US could not be relied upon. Both he and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell declared that it reinforced the need to achieve European “strategic autonomy.”
Over the last twenty years, Beijing’s economic relationship with much of the developing world has become more important to many of them than their relationship with the United States—a fact that policy makers in the United States have missed or dismissed. By contrast, the United States has been largely missing from the field.
the critical factors underpinning Chinese success have been the growing global footprint of the Chinese economy, together with the relative decline in American power, reinforced by American complacency and lack of attention to the importance of its traditional friends and partners around the world.
The global score card, especially in the developing world, therefore appears to be moving in China’s favor, aided by the Trump administration’s widespread withdrawal from multilateral and other international institutions.
Xi was further emboldened by the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on the multilateral system, its defunding of the UN, and its effective withdrawal from a number of UN bodies and Bretton Woods institutions. This included a reduction in annual US funding for the UN, including a whopping $1.05 billion that the US continued to owe in unpaid dues. Meanwhile, the US withdrew or began the process of withdrawing from multiple UN agencies and initiatives, including the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC); the UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the Paris Agreement
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Under Xi, China’s new multilateral strategy has had two arms. The first has been to rapidly expand Beijing’s influence across the existing institutions of global governance through a combination of enhanced funding for the system, the appointment
of Chinese nationals to lead (or be part of the senior leadership team of) major multilateral bodies, and the launching of a series of proactive diplomatic initiatives across the UN system that went beyond C...
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The second arm of Xi’s post-2014 strategy to increase China’s influence over the multilateral system has been to build a new set of institutions altogether—ones where China, not the US, is the central organizing power.
Parallel to this geopolitical game within the wider international order is another ongoing form of competition that is deeply representative of shifting global influence between China and the United States. That is the struggle over the future of the digital world, including the next generation of mobile telecommunications technologies, the internet, and digital payment systems. This also involves competing national, international, and multilateral
At this point, we can safely say that China is likely to support a future order that is more accommodating of authoritarian political systems, with negligible intrusion from human rights bodies in the internal affairs of member states.
Speaking just ahead of the meeting, Blinken summed up the administration’s overall posture toward China with what became an almost standard three-part formulation: “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.”
