What Are Xi Jinping’s Global Ambitions for China?

>> Elizabeth: Thanks very much for the introduction. I should say that I have actually retired from the Council on Foreign Relations after 26 years. And I'm currently on leave at the Department of Commerce for two years, which is important because I'm working as a senior advisor to Secretary Raimondo for China.

Which is important because I need to make it clear that the views that I express here this morning are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US government. I am gonna focus my remarks primarily on China and leave the US response more for the Q&A because I think there's a lot to talk about with regard to China.

And I'm gonna ask one very basic question, which is, what does Xi Jinping want? Or more specifically, what are Xi's global ambitions for China? When he talks about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, reclaiming centrality for China on the global stage, what does that actually mean? Now, he's been in power for ten years, he started as general secretary of the Communist Party back in November of 2012.

As I'm sure many of you are aware, he's slated to be reselected this fall for his third, an unprecedented third term as general secretary. And then likely to be reselected again as president of the country in the spring. But we've had a decade of Xi Jinping now in power, so it seems to me that the answer to that question should be pretty clear.

But I can tell you that it is still a very hotly debated topic in the sort of China analytical community. So I'm gonna offer you my perspective on what she wants, how he's going about trying to attain his objectives, and a little bit on is he likely to succeed.

But I'm also happy, either in the Q&A or afterward, to offer you some thoughts about other scholars and analysts writings that you can read, who present different perspectives. So I'll take away a little of the mystery right up front and say that I believe that Xi's ambitions are not simply to reform the international system around the margins.

But rather to transform the system and really nothing short of reordering the world order. So what does that look like in practical terms? I think it plays out across five dimensions, sometimes I think about it as five concentric circles of Chinese influence. First, and I think Xi Jinping's highest priority is really just to redraw the very geographic boundaries of China.

To reclaim what the Chinese leadership considers to be Chinese sovereign territory. In the first instance, this is Taiwan, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, they're often called China's core interests. Hong Kong, of course, is already now well on its way to becoming just another mainland Chinese city. And Taiwan, we saw what happened in the wake of Speaker Pelosi's visit, significant military activity that China launched just over the past few weeks.

Xi Jinping has said that there can be no great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation without reunification with Taiwan. He's called it one of his 14 must do items. So I consider this to be something that, notwithstanding, speaker Pelosi's visit is top of mind for Xi Jinping. And I consider something that we have to keep our eyes on at all times.

But even beyond these core interests, China claims territory like the Diaoyu Senkaku Islands that are administered by Japan, claims territory in Bhutan. We saw India and China's first deadly border conflict sort of during the May, June period of 2020 on the border dispute. And of course, it has sort of claims territorial water areas in Indonesia and Malaysia.

So basically, what Xi Jinping wants is in his mind, to make China whole again. The second dimension is to replace the United States as the dominant power in the Asia Pacific. People often ask, does China want to replace the United States as the sole superpower? I think China wants to replace the United States in terms of the rights that belong to a superpower, but not the responsibilities.

But it does want to push the United States out as the dominant power in the Asia Pacific. How is it going about doing this? I mean, some of it is simply rhetorical, a lot of commentary about Asia is for Asians to govern. China is creating and embedding itself in regional institutions, like the regional comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Or it's now made a bid to join the comprehensive and progressive agreement for the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is, of course, the old TPP Trans Pacific Partnership. Which the United States originally negotiated, but which the Trump administration decided not to pursue. So now we have China looking to join in this.

China's also proposed its own regional security initiative, and it's tried to work through a code of conduct with a number of the claimants in the South China Sea. That would include a provision that would bar the United States from conducting military exercises in the South China Sea unless all the claimants agreed.

And of course, that would never happen, because China would never agree. And it's also, I should say, called for the dissolution of the US led alliance systems in the Asia Pacific, calling them anachronistic, cold war relic, and anti-China. So second push is this effort to displace the United States.

Beyond that, I think we can look over the past ten years. And see pretty clearly that China has moved to transform the geopolitical, economic, and strategic landscape on the global stage. I think the Belt and Road Initiative is probably the most well known of Xi Jinping's foreign policy initiatives.

And it is one, I think, that is geared toward accomplishing this objective. It began in 2013, really as just a hard infrastructure initiative and a connectivity effort China wanted to export overcapacity. It wanted to connect some of the poor interior regions of China to external markets. And so it proposed the Belt and Road Initiative three overland and three maritime corridors that would connect China through to the rest of Asia and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Since that time, however, this initiative has evolved and morphed into something much bigger. And so we have a digital silk road, that is subsea cables and e-payment platforms and satellite systems and smart city technology. There is a health silk road that kind of started to blossom during the pandemic.

So China used it to export, for example, traditional Chinese medicine, which is something that's actually personally important to Xi Jinping. And to establish traditional Chinese Medicine Centers in other countries and some of their e-health technology. There's a green Silk Road where an environmental Silk road, where China will be exporting EVs and solar panels and wind turbines.

And there's a polar Silk road where China's trying to sort of look to connect to Europe more directly through the Arctic. So this has become a much larger initiative than, What was originally conceptualized, again, just as a hard infrastructure initiative. And it also has a military component. So China's established its first military logistics base in Djibouti.

And for those of you that haven't studied China, you may not appreciate just how radical that really is for China to have established a base in another country. It has always said that it would never do that, that this was sort of the provenance of the United States and other colonial or hegemonic powers.

Of course, it says that Chinese bases are different from others bases, but nonetheless, it now says that it will continue to develop bases. And I think we'll see one pretty soon in Cambodia. Equatorial Guinea is another place that they've talked about but some Chinese military officials have said we want to have 100 bases globally.

So really a fundamental transformation in China's military doctrine. And there's a political component. So along with exporting technology, China's also exporting values and norms and training opportunities. So cybersecurity, you just had Jackie's fantastic talk, but training on how to do real-time censorship of the Internet. So helping Tanzania to write its Internet governance laws.

So China's now established training centers, one in Tanzania for six African countries and one in Guangxi province, that supports training of officials from Southeast Asia. And it's training officials on everything from poverty alleviation to how to develop a stronger political party, right. One that has a stronger core to it and delivers a coherent and cohesive message to how do you control the Internet and social media and manage civil society.

So when Xi Jinping back in 2017 talked about China as a model, as offering a model that's distinct from that of a liberal democracy, right. For countries that weren't interested in sort of western style democracy, he's now giving life to that through these training opportunities. I would also point out that in some respects, and this is another big debate in the China field, this idea of whether China is actually exporting its model, a lot of people say it's not.

I say that it is. It's not imposing its model, but it is indeed exporting elements of its model. But if you think about the Belt and Road writ large, and I'm sure many of you have seen a lot of the press around sort of the issues that have arisen about debt.

Sort of emerging economies in the debt that they've taken on as a result of some Belt and road projects, that China is exporting its development model through the Belt and Road. China developed through infrastructure led growth, rapid infrastructure led growth that incurred a lot of debt with a lot of environmental externalities.

A lack of transparency, and a lot of labor issues. And so the Belt and road is, in effect, also the export of China's own, a development model, both the strengths and the weaknesses of it. In addition to the Belt and Road, I think there are other ways in which China attempts to embed its values and its priorities and its interests in other countries.

And it uses the leverage of its market both to induce and to coerce. So an inducement might be something like Confucius Institutes, right? These are the Chinese language and cultural training centers that China has established globally. I think, in fact, Stanford has one. Many universities in the United States have them.

And so this is a way of China spreading ostensibly goodwill, as well as helping students learn Chinese and develop more of an affinity for Chinese culture. And hopefully, at the same time, I think, in the minds of China sort of sharing the Chinese perspective on some critical issues.

And there's the other side of it, which is the coercive side. And we've seen this play out many times. The hotel industry, the airline industry, the movie industry have all been subjected to Chinese threats. That if they didn't recognize Taiwan, for example, as part of China, that they were going to lose access to the Chinese market.

One of the interesting things that's happened just in the past couple of years. However, is that we used to always think that as long as you didn't touch on those core issues of Taiwan, South China Sea, and Hong Kong, that China wouldn't really bother you. But what we've seen just in the past few years is that when Australia has called for an investigation into the origins of COVID.

Or Germany threatened not to use Huawei 5G technology in its telecommunications infrastructure. Or the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Walter Russell Mead in which it used the title The Sick Man of Asia, that all of these things incurred punishment by Beijing. And I think this speaks to something that CCTV, China Central Television said in the wake of the sort of Darrell Morey incident.

I'm sure most of you remember this, when the Houston Rockets general manager tweeted, fight for freedom stand with Hong Kong. And then China punished the NBA by not broadcasting the games and pulling the licensing deals for the Houston rockets, etc. But what was interesting to me was that CCTV came out and said that issues related to sovereignty and social stability do not fall within the purview of free speech.

Basically saying that China had the right to control or to try to control the speech of people outside the country on issues that are considered to be tied to its social stability. And for those of you that have studied China, you know that almost anything can be considered a threat to Chinese social stability.

So this represented a pretty significant expansion in how China was trying to shape the views of people outside the country and also just the expression of those views. Okay, so that's the third dimension. The fourth is more recent. And I think it's an effort in many respects, to insulate the Chinese economy from the pressures of the global economy while enhancing the dependence of the global economy on China.

And this began with China's project program made in China 2025, which Xi Jinping announced in 2015. And the essence of the program is basically that China has said. Chinese companies need to dominate in the manufacture of components for the Chinese economy within ten critical, cutting-edge areas of technology.

AI, semiconductors, new energy vehicles, new materials. And so they set targets and timetables. So by 2025, and for some, it might be 70% of all the components needed to be manufactured in China. For some, they had to be by Chinese companies. Some could be joint ventures. So there was some flexibility, some difference in there, but the basic idea was that they didn't want to have to be importing any of these critical components from outside the country.

And then in 2020, Xi Jinping announced his dual circulation theory, which said that China should be innovating, manufacturing and consuming all within one loop, right? That its economy was big enough that it could do that. And yes, it would continue to export to the global economy, it would continue to import for certain technologies or certain know-how that it still needed.

But by and large, you were moving toward a much more self-sufficient Chinese economy. And this is going to include areas like tourism and sports and cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. In fact, many areas where US and other multinationals really dominated in in the Chinese market. But at the same time, it was quite interesting.

Xi Jinping was very explicit. And so even as he said that we need to develop greater self-sufficiency, he also said, we want to encourage multinationals to continue to locate their supply chains in China because that is a source of political leverage for us. So really a very explicit articulation of that element of the strategy.

And then finally, Xi Jinping has called for China to lead in the reform of the global governance system. What does this mean? It means that Xi is looking to have Chinese values and norms kind of cemented in international institutions and organizations like the United Nations. So this applies mostly to areas like human rights and Internet governance, to some extent, development, finance, and technology standards.

Those are kinda four big areas that the Chinese government has been focused on. And you might think, what's the big deal? The UN, does it really matter? I think a lot of people feel that way. But, in fact, it does matter. And let me just give you a couple of examples.

So China has managed to get Belt and Road Initiative written into more than two dozen UN agencies and programs as a priority. So, for example, to say to Interpol, that Interpol now has written into its documents that protecting Belt and Road projects is an Interpol priority. In 2019, when the UN Security Council was reviewing the reauthorization bill for the UN mission to Afghanistan, China insisted on having the Belt and Road written into that.

And when the United States and others said, no, the Belt and Road has nothing to do with this, we're not going to simply insert this, China threatened twice to veto that initiative. So you see how it's using an element, really, of coercion to try to force, right, its programs to be written to things that have nothing to do with China's Belt and Road.

China also has blocked many human rights activists, Uyghur activists, from speaking before UN bodies and agencies. Chinese officials have, at some points, held as many as 4 of the top 15 positions in UN agencies. But they are very deeply embedded and hold many important positions that aren't even just the top leadership position.

And sometimes it can seem quite petty. For example, China has been the head of the International Civil Aviation Organization. And all of a sudden, you found that the organization was blocking the tweets, blocking access to its Twitter feed for people who were calling for Taiwan to become a member of the organization.

So what you find is that Chinese officials who are nominally now supposed to be acting as international officials are actually using these positions to advance Chinese domestic interests. And indeed, it was actually really fascinating. One Chinese official, he was the Deputy Secretary of blocked Dolkun Isa, who's the head of the World Uyghur Congress, from speaking.

Physically had him removed from the hallways of the UN by security guards, even though he had a pass to speak. And then later went on Chinese television to say that as a UN official, it was his duty to protect the motherland's interests. So I think, again, we tend to think of these things as not important, but really what China is doing is sort of constraining voices in this space and using it to advance its own interests.

China has spent a long time cultivating countries within the UN system, too. And I think one of the things that has become very clear, as the United States and others have tried to censor China, for example, for its detention of a million or more Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, in labor and reeducation camps.

Every year, the United States and its allies bring more countries to the table, have more countries that support the sort of censure in the United Nations. But every year, China also has more, and it has more countries than we bring to the table. So there is real power and real influence to be had in these international institutions, and China has become a master.

And I would just point out the last, and I think an area that's now become a very significant interest in the US government. Area where China's become very, very active is in the area of technical standards setting, right? So as new technologies come on board, China is flooding the technical.

These, again, were very sort of sleepy things. Mostly, you have private companies. Some standard setting bodies are only made up of private actors, some are a mix of government and private. But China is now flooding the committees with both government and nominally private actors who all vote the same way.

And I'll say at the Commerce Department, we did a request for information on this topic of what has been the influence of the Chinese government in standard setting bodies. We've got about 300 pages of responses back, mostly from associations that are involved in standard setting. And to a one, they said it wasn't so much that China was winning in all of their efforts to get Chinese technologies accepted as the standard.

But that they were undermining the governance process by the way that they behaved in the bodies, right, by flooding them, by voting as a bloc, by oftentimes putting forward 10, 20, 30, 40 proposals for technologies that were either not relevant or weren't even fully developed and basically wasting the time of the people there.

So all of this is to say that Xi Jinping has a vision that is transformative, and I would say, it is long-term. So many of its projects, like Xi Jinping has said he wants China to be a standard setting power by 2035, right, or you had Made in China 2025, which was a decade-long program.

But it's also multilevel. And I think that, to me, is what makes it so difficult and so challenging in many respects to respond to. Because what you have is really China taking what it does at home, then exporting it through the Belt and Road, and then, again, trying to cement to the same sort of norms, values, and priorities in these global governed institutions.

And it is devoting both an enormous amount of human capital and financial capital to this effort.