Ajay, I totally enjoyed reading this summary. Thanks for writing it up.
Reading the chapters now. This is the sort of topic I feel as if I should be much more interested in than I organically am, so being nudged into reading this book is a good thing for me.
The sense I got wasn't so much distant past (though there's all kinds of retro-Sovietism we'll be coming back to repeatedly) as "heard all this before". I was annoyed by how little I learned. In a way that's comforting (and annoying in a different way) but more usefully I think suggests an underlying continuity; not that Chinese politics is moving faster but that it's getting noisier. That was going to happen anyway as the PRC's relative importance grew, but it's been accelerated by exogenous events - Trump, Covid.
1: thanks! It was an interesting read, though I echo Mossy in 3 that there wasn't alot of novelty. (Typo accidental but preserved for sentimental reasons https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html)
I think we can flatter ourselves that that's because we read quite a bit about China anyway. But I must admit that Jamie Kenny in particular is a rather better read than Economy, and picks up alot of material that Economy missed or doesn't mention. She seems to take a very top-down approach - "what can we tell from analysing Xi's speeches?" is literally the question she poses in Chapter 1 - and that seems unnecessarily limiting for China. For DPRK it's justifiable and BR Myers has done some very interesting stuff by analysing their propaganda. But China is much more open.
Also the typo here is almost certainly mine
that was Xi Zhongxun's doing - he was the driving force behoind.
But I'd be really grateful if someone could remove it and replace it with "behind it" or similar.
4.2 Jamie employs some really interesting and useful heuristics which stem from his deep and informed interest in matters involving the criminal underworld, organized crime, and that sort of thing.
sterilisation
Is this known? I remember seeing claims (quit a long time ago) but not independent confirmation, which I would have expected by now.
Chinese dynasties fall, historically...aggressive central Asians
While maybe this does actually affect Xi/CCP thinking, I seriously doubt it. Horse archers aren't a thing anymore.
The Xinjiang/Tibet contrast is interesting, but I think the OP overstates it. No mass internment, yes, but increasing curbs of Tibetan language and religious instruction, destruction of cultural sites, and increasing "sinicization" of the party-approved venues and instruction which remain. A much softer cultural genocide, but still happening (and I suspect more likely to succeed for its softness). Link, link, link, link, link, link, link.
The family-dynamics bits in the OP are very interesting. Recommended sources on that?
7: detainee reports of sterilisations have been common - along with at least one former detainee being medically examined. Not proved beyond reasonable doubt, but it doesn't sound unlikely.
Horse archers aren't a thing anymore.
I'm not suggesting that Xi is actually consciously worrying about the risk of a Uighur horde barrelling down the G7 on stout little ponies, horsetail standards flying and vengeance in their hearts (though it wouldn't be a bad thing if it happened)... just that he's a historically-minded sort of person, obsessed with Chinese history and restoring Chinese greatness, and so it's not impossible that he'll have an instinctive affinity for analogies to the Hordes, even if they don't stack up in the cold light of reality, just as Hitler was historically-minded and liked analogies to the Seven Years' War and the Teutoberger Wald and Napoleon and let these affect his strategic thinking.
Fair point on Tibet.
8: just Wikipedia, mostly, and Frank Dikotter, and Jamie Kenny again. He did a good series of posts on Xi in his first year or so - bloodandtreasure.typepad.com and search back to end of 2012 or so.
Dikotter makes the point that among the leading lights in Mao's massive (and incredibly bloody) anti-corruption purge of 1952 were Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi, and Bo Yibo, father of Xi's future rival and victim Bo Xilai. It really is Game of Thrones stuff over there.
Incest is avoided by use of concubines.
During the Great Leap Forward Mao ordered a huge mass-mobilisation campaign against incest, as one of the Four Pests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Protestant religious reformers in early modern Britain were also in favour of banning incest from churches.
10 B&T truly a singular blog. Much missed.
5: fixed. It's all behoind you now.
Thanks very much.
8: I was quite surprised about how little pre-2012 biography Economy included. It isn't a long book, she could have managed a bit more background on Xi and his family. Especially his family.
That is excellent, thank you. I'm excited for the rest of the summaries (thanks as well to MC for pushing this book).
I don't follow Chinese politics as much as they deserve, and that level of detail is helpful in contextualizing (for example the stat about the relative size of the HK economy -- I knew that approximately, but having a number (attached to a date) is good).
I was thinking it was like someone from Jersey exaggerating a Brooklyn accent. Or maybe someone from Brooklyn exaggerating the accent of New Jersey.
And, good job aj. Looking forward to this one.
22: I think of it as a Michigan accent. "Dyad! Dyad! Where's my boike?"
tl;dr, I think Xi's colonial policy is less pragmatic, more ideological, and drastically worse news than the OP credits.
As Ajay points out different flavors of policy have been taken toward different minorities, and security considerations likely are important there, but I suspect the OP's security-and-economics focus is excessive, and policy actually is rooted in theory (IIRC pretty much identical in the CCP and the KMT) going back to the 1920s.
The parties at the time wanted self-determination, in line with the post-WWI moment, but also wanted to succeed to all Qing territories. So they cooked up an idea of a "Chinese Nation"* (basically everyone inside the Qing frontiers) which was subdivided into other races (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Uighur, Tibetan, mirroring Qing practice). By this trick the "Chinese Nation" got self-determination inside the Qing frontiers, while the five sub-nations got "self-determination" under the umbrella of the big-brother Great Nation. In practice of course that meant the Han ruled everyone else. Under Mao though, and AFAIK until at least Hu, the non-Han were mostly ruled quite lightly (I assume not out of conviction but simply to keep the peace in very difficult borderlands), and even got some substantial perks.
But none of this resolved the basic contradiction that the non-Han aren't actually getting self-determination; and considering the PRC's theological commitment to absolute sovereignty in internal affairs I think Xi feels this can no longer be glossed over. ITSM Xi has chosen to resolve this by pursuing total cultural assimilation of the non-Han (which was vaguely envisioned back in the 1920s but not really elaborated). We've mentioned XUAR and Tibetans, but this is being extended also to Han Muslims and Christians. If all the nations and races have in fact been homogenized there can be no grounds for actual self-determination and hence secession (cf HK and TW).
The exception is the non-Han of the southwest, who were included under the Zhonghua minzu framework, but AFAIK haven't been subjected to the same kind of assimilationist pressure; Xinhua for instance still cranks out ethno-tourist puff-pieces on the SW in a way it doesn't for XUAR or TAR (though impressionistically they're doing so less frequently). Maybe that's because those ethnicities are just smaller, or don't have creedal religions, maybe I'm just wrong, maybe things will get worse if serious security problems develop with Vietnam/Myanmar/ the Golden Triangle (which I think likely).
*Zhonghua minzu (中華民族). AIUI the Mandarin minzu is actually used interchangeably with "race", in roughly the Anglophone sense. Note here promotion of Han-Uighur marriage.
Also, it struck me as singularly appropriate that Xi rose in part on the strength of his handling of Beijing's Potemkin Olympics.
Bit late here, but just wanted to mirror what was said above about how the book felt like a lot of old news. It reinforced my pre-existing biases about how China operated, which I feel are six or seven years out of date. That can't be an accurate story. Also would have liked a bit more detail on the specific politicking Xi did to accrue power, and more details on the networks he maintains to keep it. I know Kremlinology can be hard, but a years-later book is precisely the venue for that.
27: In fairness, I don't think Economy is trying to write that book. (In fairness to me, I picked the book based on reviews from professional China-watchers, which led me to expect the Kremlinology.)
biases about how China operated, which I feel are six or seven years out of date. That can't be an accurate story.
I'm also worried about confirmation bias, but I think what we're watching right now demonstrates that that is exactly how China operates.
28: Yeah, I wanted to read it for the same reason. I'm a bit more concerned about the "China just copies the West and makes incremental progress" story. Can that really still be true? Anyway, we can talk about that when w get to the innovation chapter.
What a good summary, Ajay, especially for Xi and Bo's dads. After Ch 1 I was also not delighted with her- Bo Xilai is not indexed outside the superficial references to him in this chapters, and definitely this chapter is from easy to find public sources.
I had the impression from the handful of Chinese-born and raised people I talked to after his arrest (none of whom have returned since, youngest at the time about 30, 4 people) that he was seen as Xi's main competition, and was supposedly preferred by the young.
I think for every section of this book so far for me, thinking about sources of information is worth as much attention as is Economy's impressive ability to assemble this much this quickly, uneven as the outcome of that process may be.
27. Hard to think of more tightly classified information in China, aside from bank account details Ajay mentions.
It's a tough call for someone who doesn't want to rely on unsourced hearsay (she does this later but judiciously). If I was her, I would definitely be thinking of Chinese visa status while choosing what to include in such a book.
I don't have the book, so I don't know if he is mentioned, but if you're comparing Tibet and Xinjiang policy you have to talk about Chen Quanguo. Until 2016,during the burning monk years, he was Party Secretary of Tibet, and since then he's been Party Secretary of Xinjiang. More than any other single individual, with the possible exception of Xi Jinping, he is the man responsible for the camps.
32: He is not mentioned. Not explanatory. As you say, he implemented grid security in both places, yet XUAR is so far much harsher.
33: I'd argue it's more than just the grid cops, it's the de facto ethnocide. It's more dramatic in Xinjiang, but the goals were there in Tibet, too.
34: Ok. I'm just saying Chen's presence alone doesn't explain the difference in intensity. I was (sloppily, ok) using the grid as shorthand for everything mentioned above.
32: this is a book about Xi in power, not about Xinjiang, so I think I can understand Economy leaving him out. Me leaving him out is less forgivable and I should have mentioned him.
Great summary, ajay. When I went to China, part of the trip was in the SW (Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge). The locals (Naxi) have a distinct culture (including their own script and a large role for women) which is being stamped out by Han-ization. The nearest comparison I can come up with is Hawaii. The local culture has been mostly overrun with tourists and people moving there from the Han parts of China. What is left is largely a show put on for tourists, so China can say, "See how nice we are to our minorities?" My understanding is that the same is true in other minority areas in the southern provinces. The local cultures are small, isolated, and make great tourist attractions, even better than Indian Reservations in the US!
The situations in Tibet and Xinjiang are different. Xinjiang is just a replay the cultural (and literal) genocide that happened in Tibet. China's destruction of Tibetan culture is mostly complete, and Xinjiang is not as far along but moving faster. Larger numbers of people are involved, including the obligatory influx of people from the Han parts of China into those two "autonomous" provinces. In both places the Chinese are in charge, and locals are subordinate. It is literally colonialism in the old-school sense of taking land by moving your own people into it.
What is different is that China's economic success and the collapse of the West has put them in a position where they can do exactly what they want within their empire. HK will be crushed with a Potemkin village of finance companies remaining, but even that will morph to full Chinese control. If it fails and western bankers decamp completely, Xi doesn't care. By then China will have its own system up and running. The real question is whether China is serious about TW. I think they are. They usually do what their speeches say they will do.
The real question is whether China is serious about TW. I think they are. They usually do what their speeches say they will do.
Well, they can try. But an actual invasion of Taiwan would be doomed from the start.
Is it? Let's say everyone else sits it out, and it's only Taiwan versus China. Is an amphibious invasion that easy to defeat?
Not doomed, just very difficult. More worried about a blockade.
Assume they have all the time in the world. Taiwan's economy is export oriented, and the island doesn't have much arable land relative to population. A long-term naval blockade would ruin it.
41 before seeing 40. The PRC can wait until the most opportune time. They could even use Quemoy and Matsu for a trial run.
Is an amphibious invasion that easy to defeat?
Yes.
The PLAN has almost no landing ships - it's got a total of 35 Landing Ships Tank, for example, which is fewer than the allies put in to a single beach on D-Day. It's shifting over a longer distance - about 100 miles. At 14 knots, that's a fourteen-hour round trip, plus loading and unloading time. So fewer ships, and each doing less. They also have very little airlift.
All the "Anti-Access/Area Denial" worries that come up when you're talking about the US projecting power into the western Pacific apply here too, much more so, and against China. Taiwan has a lot of missiles and is buying more; they're worried that at present they might only have enough to sink 45% of the Chinese fleet on T-Day, when their target is 50%. (The Taiwanese submarine fleet will no doubt be getting involved as well. How good is China at anti-submarine warfare? We'll find out.) Things like Harpoon and its derivatives have the range to reach all the way across the Strait.
If China goes in from a standing start, it has to worry about the Taiwanese air force as well. If it takes the time to achieve air superiority first, that'll take a while, and that gives the US and Japan more time to intervene.
And then, when you're on shore, you have a highly motivated defending force, who probably outnumber the attackers (at least initially) and who know where all the minefields are, and have the population behind them.
Assume they have all the time in the world
But do they? China's got an export-driven economy, and overwhelmingly that's seaborne exports. It's at risk of a retaliatory blockade.
And could China really enforce a blockade? How long would those blockading forces last?
How many landing ships did the United States have in 1941?
And if they're going to do it they'd best do it soon while there's still doubt whether or not the US would actually intervene under Trump.
Meanwhile things have been getting hairy at the Indo-Chinese border in Ladakh and Sikkim.
How many landing ships did the United States have in 1941?
How many opposed amphibious landings did it conduct in 1941?
Yes, if there's a significant US/other-Taiwan-allied naval presence in the strait, and the South China Sea, and the East China Sea--really, it'd be a hell of a blockade--that's very different from Walt's 39.
Deeply speculative, since I'm imagining this would occur on the 20-50 years timescale: I would assume that when the PRC wants to do this, they'll spend a few years preparing their military for it. How many landing ships did the Allies have in '39, or even early '42? There's no reason to do it now. And the trend is for the world to become more pro-China. They can wait for a favorable time. Th inland portion of BRI allows for more land-based trade, if that matters. They'll continue to diplomatically isolate Taiwan (recognition is already well into declining marginal gains territory). Maybe they'll be able to move further into the high-value-add electronics done in Taiwan, reducing Taiwan's economic and hence diplomatic importance further. Perhaps they can also find a president, like Trump, who is more concerned for short-term gains and is willing to trade Taiwan protection for something they don't care as much about.
My point is that if you are the world's largest manufacturing power, you can go from a standing start to the largest fleet of landing craft ever in just a couple years.
Didn't see 46, but I don't think they can do it now. It's just too big of a project, and I'm pretty sure there are enough China hawks (Navarro) in the administration that they'd at least move carriers into the strait again. Never waste a crisis, but I think there's smaller but still important gains for the PRC to make out of coronavirus/Trump.
49: yep. And if China starts churning out LSTs by the hundred, then the situation will be different; at present it has not very many, and is not building a lot more. Apart from anything else, if Chinese shipyards start building LSTs, Taiwan will start buying a lot more anti-ship missiles, which are a great deal cheaper than landing ships packed full of troops and tanks.
And getting some of your troops on the other person's beach is the easy bit. The hard bit is over the next few days and weeks, building up your forces in the beach head faster than the enemy builds up his forces around it. That was what worried the planners of Overlord, and they had sea control - virtually no ships were lost in the Channel to air or sea attack.
They'll continue to diplomatically isolate Taiwan (recognition is already well into declining marginal gains territory)
Whats the case for the US not recognizing Taiwan at this point? We are already quarreling about trade and whatever, might as well do it now.
How many Trump hotel rooms can they book when travel is shut down?
52: It's certainly more in play than it used to be, but that's pretty intense escalation. Presumably that'd mean the end of the One China Policy (the alternative is pretty absurd). If the US is going to play that card, they should do it at the right time. In terms of practical effects on Taiwanese people, I doubt recognition would mean much (unless it messes with the politics of independence vs co-existence there)--it won't change Taiwan's ability to participate in international forums unless the US could get a critical mass of countries to follow them, and I doubt they'd be able to. So it's main effect would be spiting the CCP, which should be done strategically.
52: How many US potential hostages, sorry, nationals are there in China right now? How many of them can you afford to lose? China, like a few other countries, has the double advantage that it is willing to use hostages in international affairs, and is largely invulnerable to hostage-taking tactics being used against it. Unless you can somehow grab a few of the people that the Chinese leadership actually cares about, hostages won't affect Chinese policy at all. But _any_ US hostage will affect US policy.
I'm much less invested in the well being of many other Americans than I was four years ago.
56: It's funny, the CCP simultaneously does not give a shit about large numbers of their citizens, yet retains the ability to be huge drama queens regarding anybody of Han descent anywhere in the world.
Nazi were the same way about Germans.
Harpoons can reach right across the strait, yes, but so too can Chinese SAMs; ROC missiles need targeting and Chinese BMs can do a lot of damage to radars and C3 nodes (and power and water supply); ROC has only two operational submarines, pushing 40 years old; the indigenous sub program is finally on its way, but won't show results for a long time; the reserves are large but low quality (compulsory service only four months) and ill-organized; China is nearly as vulnerable to blockade as TW, yes, but who exactly is going to enforce that blockade, and how? Etc. Broadly I agree with Ajay, but I think he is far more sanguine than is warranted.
60: Regarding aging RoC military tech, I was recently reminded that I made this probably slightly unfair tweet a year ago.
Sure, ROC kit isn't top notch, but I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling a kind of instinctive dread at the thought of having to push across 100 miles of sea to invade a country of 23 million people using an army that hasn't done any sort of amphibious operation since 1949, and then having to land on one of a double handful of possible beaches which said country has spent the last 70 years pre-registering. And, yes, Chinese SAMs have reach; so do Taiwanese SAMs, and the fighting will be happening over Taiwan.
You'd think there'd be much better, softer ways to get at this. Instead of the dopry two-husband thing making the rounds, maybe the folks in charge of China need to be thinking of ways to entice TW women to marry mainland men.
Once you go KMT, you never go commie.
Issuing ten million permanent EU visas to Russian women in the right age bracket would basically inflict a demographic catastrophe from which the country would not recover.
Wrenching the topic off wargaming for a moment, this is interesting and relevant:
https://www.ft.com/content/d8c7c12b-b3cf-490a-989b-d64c089a8164
For non-subscribers and tldr:
Anbang, enormous Chinese insurer, now being wound up after discovery of fraud and misuse of funds, owns a load of US hotels - Chinese govt trying to sell them to a US investor, US investor pulls out (who wants hotels right now?), China sues, US investor whips out document showing that hotels not Anbang's anyway but transferred by Anbang chairman (now doing 18 years) to Delaware shell companies, possibly owned by his family and his wife's family - oh, yeah, his wife is Deng Xiaoping's grand daughter...
That isn't really much shorter. Worth a read anyway
40. Yeah, I don't think they would try to invade any time soon. Blockade is more likely in the near term. I may be wrong, but I don't think Xi has ever explicitly said they might invade TW, but his speeches and those of his parrots have intimated the possibility of active measures. China is also getting a lot of backlash from African (mostly) and other countries who are noticing that the deals China struck with them leave them with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Poor performance and lots of debt.
The other end of the lollipop is the stick, which I think is worse.
66 I already made a derogatory comment about Delaware Chancery in the other thread. Feel free to make your own cock jokes below.
Isn't the buyer a Korean outfit?
A good, fun way to understand what is happening in China is to watch the 2002 movie Hero through a political lens. I enjoyed the action and the melodrama, but it was hard to miss the takeaway, "one land" and the implied "one people". Those people are the Han, and implicit in the movie was the raw respect for the mystical as well as the temporal power of the emperor. Now, the emperor is being restored, and Xi figures that it might as well be Xi. It's an old historical cycle. This time it was the western powers that destabilized the empire. Then came the rebellion, and now the celestial peace of the empire can be restored. It's been like this since the Han dynasty, and pesky minorities who get in the way are destroyed or assimilated.
Of course, China is going to run into the same limits every society runs into. He may favor the rising urban middle class, but he can't afford to let them get upplty. China needs them to build an internal market, especially given the slim pickings available to the Belt and Road initiative, but he can only offer them so much, and odds are that they will fight for China but not for Xi. (It's like Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a valuable entrepot, but it needs to be politically neutralized. It's a tricky operation, destroy just enough autonomy without ruining its value as an independent polity. I don't have much hope for Hong Kong. The writing was on the wall at least five years ago. A friend of mine worked at HSBC, and he got plenty of advance notice as to where things were going.)
Just putting this here - Xi's personal links to his Politburo (via Adam Tooze)
https://macropolo.org/analysis/the-ties-that-bind-xi-people-politburo/
Sure enough, independent confirmation.
China needs them to build an internal market, especially given the slim pickings available to the Belt and Road initiative
This continues to puzzle me. Your route to world economic power status is... to prioritise the creation of (inherently expensive, unreliable and inefficient) overland transport routes to the wealthy, import-hungry cities of, er, Kyrgyzstan?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/world/asia/china-protest-mongolian-language-schools.html
Are they brave or is the censorship sufficient that they don't know about Tibet and the Uighur?