Politico: “Canada, Covid, Kashmir- Nothing to See Here, Says Beijing”
By David Wertime
Featuring Tsui Yee
Not long ago, Beijing looked to have rescued victory from the jaws of defeat after its belated response to the outbreak of Covid-19 became a showcase of Party unity (not to mention increased social control). China sent front-line medical workers and protective equipment abroad in a gesture of goodwill. But instead of growing, China's soft power seems to be diminishing, fast. Australians now mistrust China deeply. Canadians are faced with the horrible choice of leaving two of their citizens in Chinese prisons or compromising the integrity of their justice system. Indians are outraged after a deadly border clash. In Taiwan, which Beijing views as a core interest, the sense of affinity with China is vanishing. And of course, China and the United States are mostly lobbing insults at each other, with no clear payoff.
Meanwhile, Chinese media shares few of these tensions with the country's citizens, instead rewriting Covid-19 history, celebrating a feared national security law in Hong Kong, and staying mostly mum on hot-button issues like Chinese casualties in Kashmir and John Bolton's bombshell book.
If Beijing wants to win the century, it should consider a more conciliatory turn. Washington has been unkind to its friends recently, but it has more good will to burn. Beijing is still the upstart. It is making some visionary investments in the future, but the future has not yet arrived.
China's soft-power opportunity in Taiwan is slipping away. Research by Nathan Batto of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University shows the percentage of people in Taiwan calling themselves "Taiwanese" skyrocketing to 70 percent, and a dive in those calling themselves Chinese. “70% is completely unprecedented. This is a big deal,” Batto writes.
Chinese authorities further ratcheted tensions with Canada and the West by indicting two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, for espionage. No evidence supporting the charges has been made public, and Beijing has all but admitted the move is retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou and recently offered a prisoner exchange. The State Department has said it is “extremely concerned” about Kovrig and Spavor, who have been held for over 500 days, but there’s no evidence of further movement like sanctions. Washington may get pulled in deeper: POLITICO's Andy Blatchford reported Wednesday that 19 prominent Canadians have asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to release Meng and bring both Michaels home. The drafters acknowledge this would damage ties with Washington: "In normal circumstances, the safer choice would be to stay close to our ally ... but these are not normal times."
— Heart-rending details of Kovrig’s detention emerged Monday in Canada’s Globe and Mail, enough to terrify anyone who’s ever traveled to China. “If there’s one faint silver lining to this Hell, it’s this: trauma carved caverns of psychological pain through my mind,” Kovrig wrote in a letter to his wife obtained by the outlet. “As I strive to heal and recover, I find myself filling those gulfs with a love for you and for life that is vast."
— Kovrig is being housed with Chinese prisoners, whom he describes in his letters as “smart, educated and relatively polite people” who “taught him to play a Chinese card game called Dou Dizhu, or Fight the Landlord.”
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
Trump kills visas for skilled immigrants. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending the entry of foreign workers seeking H-1B, J and L visas through year’s end. The order says such visa holders are a “significant threat to employment opportunities for Americans” affected by Covid-19.
— The announcement is sending shockwaves through the Chinese diaspora, journalist Shen Lu reports. “I’m resigned to the fact that something bad will eventually happen to me; I just don’t know when,” one Chinese applicant awaiting his H-1B in San Francisco told China Watcher.
— Experts warn the move is self-destructive. Yingyi Ma, a professor at Syracuse University who has written a book on Chinese students in the U.S., tells China Watcher the move “seriously undermines American leadership in fields such as technology and medicine where skilled immigrants serve as the backbone.” Michael Pettis, who teaches finance at Peking University in Beijing, tells CW “it is telling [the new rule] is being celebrated by countries that oppose the U.S., by countries that send a lot of their talent to the U.S., and by countries that compete with the U.S. for talent.” Tsui Yee, an immigration attorney based in New York, says the measure creates uncertainty. “Who's to say what else Trump will try to do? He could expand the proclamation in the future. I wouldn't be surprised."
A split within Trump’s China team on the Phase One U.S.-China trade deal briefly emerges. For the approximate length of a solar eclipse, it looked like White House adviser Peter Navarro had declared the Phase One trade deal “over” on Fox News. Hours later, he said those comments had been taken “wildly out of context.”
— Reality check: don't count on China to change. China Watcher told youtwo weeks ago that chief trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer had laid out an elaborate defense of the U.S.-China Phase One trade deal in Foreign Affairs in which he emphasized China's "enforceable" commitment to structural economic reforms. Perhaps he wanted to commit its success to the record in case of rearguard action against it within the White House. Fred Hochberg, former chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, told CW that Navarro and Lighthizer “are both right; the Chinese will probably find a way to meet the purchase commitment [in Phase One] and not the reforms called for.” It's those reforms upon which Lighthizer has hung his hat.
U.S. authorities will designate four more Chinese state media organizations as “foreign missions,” subjecting them to greater scrutiny. Beijing is likely to retaliate against U.S. journalists in China, and that’s a problem, as the Washington Post’s John Hudson noted while asking this question to a State Department official: “The Chinese have a lot of third-rate mouthpieces in this country that aren’t particularly influential, while we have a lot of very intrepid trail-blazing journalists in Beijing that do have a big impact. So as Beijing and Washington go up this escalatory ladder, it seems like we just keep losing and losing.”
THE CHINA WATCHERS
The China watching field is clearly wriggling to break free of old narratives, from Tiananmen to Taiwan; experts responded enthusiastically to our call last week with more terms to "retire" and suggested replacements. Highlights:
Retire: “Hawks” and “Doves.” Replace with: A more granular matrix of categories that include “leverage doves” and “liberal hawks.” Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt Law School: "The usual hawk versus dove breakdown obscures that there are many subgroups within each camp, and their views sometimes conflict. We should try to be more specific about the different groups and arguments in this important debate."
Retire: "Tiananmen 2.0." UC-Irvine professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom: “It’s shorthand for how the Hong Kong protests might be suppressed — via tanks rolling in and soldiers shooting civilians on the streets. One problem with this idea ... is that it can lead some international audiences to be less appalled than they might be otherwise by repressive moves that take other forms.”
Retire: "Taiwan reunifying with the mainland." Replace with "Taiwan being taken over by the mainland.” Dexter Roberts, author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: “It has only ever been very loosely controlled by mainland China and that was long ago before the Japanese got it."
Evan Feigenbaum of the Carnegie Endowment says the Trump administration’s current approach to China is more like "managed enmity" than the more popular “strategic competition” because U.S. policies are not merely trying to “best China, but [are] actually taking steps to attenuate and slow its progress.”
Retire: “Useful idiot.” Replace with: “Helpful handmaiden.” Theresa Fallon of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs: “‘Helpful handmaiden’ doesn't assume that the people who are helping the PRC are necessarily stupid.”
Stephen A. Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors: “Not so much a retirement as a clarification: In between ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power,’ we should include ‘market power,’ the ability of the U.S. and China to use their leverage in the financial system, distinct from economic power, against one another.”
It's clear "hawk" versus "dove" no longer describes the major fault line(s) in China watching. What do you see as the key divides in the field today? Email your host.
TRANSLATING CHINA
Hong Kong’s national security law is about to be enacted, and even its own leader hasn’t seen it. Chinese state media is promising a swift and decisive process to enact a national security law that it says everyone in the nominally autonomous city wants — but that no one outside Beijing leadership has evidently read. On Sunday, state agency Xinhua released a summary of the 66-article-long law, likely to pass before the July 1 anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to the mainland. Provisions particularly alarming to the Hong Kong bar are the inclusion of central government jurisdiction over select cases and the appointment of special judges by the city's chief executive. The South China Morning Post reports the law may also allow for special detention facilities reminiscent of British colonial rule.
— "Operation Thunderbolt" should target CIA and MI5 agents in Hong Kong as soon as the law takes effect, urges an article in the Hong Kong edition of China Daily, a Beijing outlet, penned by a former anti-corruption official. The piece advocates for a special national security police force of up to thousands of people and the ability to demand records from banks and financial institutions without warrants.
— There will be no public input. China Central Television’s evening news broadcast has insisted, night after night, that “every sector fully supports” the law taking effect “as soon as possible.” In a commentary over the weekend, anchor Kang Hui told viewers the law’s drafters “have already conscientiously researched the [Hong Kong] government’s reactions, views and suggestions and have fully considered the actual situation in Hong Kong.” The implication: no further consultation.
— “Dissent of any kind will be criminalized” and “mass arrests” are likely to follow, Notre Dame professor and Hong Kong native Victoria Tin-bor Hui tells China Watcher. "It does not matter if the expected mass arrests — and, worse, extradition across the border — of the most prominent pro-democracy figures will take place on the first day of the law’s enactment or a month or even years later,” as the threat will be chilling enough. Similarly, “it does not matter what is written into the law and what is left out,” because “the law means what the [Chinese Communist Party] wants it to mean,” Hui says.
A reality show featuring over-30 female celebs has taken China by storm. “Older Sisters Who Brave the Winds and Waves” has attracted nearly 14 billion clicks on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. It’s intended as a refreshing take on what Chinese society often calls “leftover women,” those considered beyond marriageable age, but it’s a corporatized and airbrushed version of feminism:
Chinese authorities are rewriting Covid-19 history online in real time, and netizens are pushing back. Earlier this month, Beijing released its official account of its covid-19 response with much fanfare. The government has said the report will preserve the "correct collective memory” of the nation’s response. Shen Lu reports Chinese web users have now coined the term “incorrect collective memory” to refer to those Covid-related incidents and events Chinese authorities would rather expunge. That includes the lack of sanitary pads for female frontline healthcare workers in Wuhan, the human suffering and costs of the pandemic and the detention of volunteers archiving Covid-19 media coverage, to name a few.
The George Floyd protests have Chinese web users discussing anti-Black racism at home. Moving personal essays about the Black experience are making the rounds on social media platform WeChat, providing Chinese readers a perspective about race and racism barely mentioned in mainstream media, Shen Lu reports. One, written by a half-African, half-Chinese resident of the central Chinese city of Changsha, describes how he tested into an elite Chinese university and generally avoided the sting of racism — until encountering another, vicious world online. Independent Chinese-language podcasts like “Loud Murmurs” and “In-betweenness” are springing up to discuss race in a new way, one that no longer “degenerates quickly into a defense of the China model,” Lin Yao, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, tells CW.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
"No middle path" for India after border battle. In the wake of a horrific clash near China’s border with India that killed dozens of people, analysts are earnestly debating just how far Delhi can move away from Beijing. Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman wrote Wednesday of a “now near-consensus in the Indian policymaking elite that China is a hostile power and that India’s only feasible response is to move closer to the U.S. and to Asian democracies.” Brookings Institution senior fellow Tanvi Madan tells China Watcher, “there will be no taking the middle path here. Even if it does not join a bloc ... Delhi will recognize that its interests and approaches will align far more with the U.S. than with China.” But, she adds, India has questions about U.S. responsiveness and the consistency of U.S. policy.
— Don’t expect a formal Washington-Delhi military alliance. Trump’s not and never has been in alliance-building mode. As for the Dems, Michele Flourney at the Center for a New American Security, frequently mentioned as a potential high-ranking member in a potential future Democratic administration, wrote on Friday of the need to “accelerate and deepen security co-operation among like-minded states,” not a bilateral alliance.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam was doomed to fail, argues a recent profile in The Atlantic. Contributing writer Timothy McLaughlin portrays the city’s embattled chief executive vividly and without pity, drawing a throughline from her service to the British to her service to Beijing. He describes a gifted workaholic who “excelled at pleasing those above her, swiftly transitioning from a hardworking colonial subject during British rule to China’s loyal apparatchik,” eventually making her “wholly unrecognizable” to some.
THE NEXT FRONTIER
China’s digital currency push finds a friend in Singapore. China Watcher told you last month China was “getting serious” about a state-backed, digital currency. At a June 15 forum in Shanghai, Ravi Menon, head of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, expressed interest in working with China on the platform. “China’s plan to launch its own digital currency is definitely a big deal,” Emily Parker, co-founder of LongHash, an Asia-focused blockchain data platform, told China Watcher, and it appears to be a “hedge against U.S. ‘hegemony.’” Eurasia Group’s Paul Triolo tells CW the effort springs from concern “about the dominance of private sector payments platforms such as WeChat Pay and Alipay, which have a huge stranglehold on consumer transactions,” as well as worries about dollar-denominated platforms like Facebook’s proposed Libra. In the future, China’s digital currency could be deployed “along countries involved in Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, as part of the Digital Silk Road.” But there are “major structural hurdles” to getting it off the ground.
Meet the new second-richest man in China, Colin Zheng. He’s the 40-year-old founder of Pin Duoduo, an e-commerce platform focused on Chinese markets in the huge yet obscure metropolises not named Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou. Forbes reported Monday that Zheng’s moved past Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Access Partnership’s Xiaomeng Lu tells China Watcher observers were surprised by Pin Duoduo’s success because they didn’t understand its promotional model. “Instead of enlisting national celebrities, which play well in 'first-tier' cities, Pin Duoduo gets prominent members of local communities, like local officials, to talk up their products. This speaks more to the people who live in those smaller communities,” she says. “It’s also cheaper.” American business people still keen on China should take a page from Zheng's book; over 100 Chinese cities boast populations of 1 million or more.
— Among the bestselling Father's Day gifts for Chinese dads this year on Pin Duoduo: Yeezy/Air Jordan sneakers, the Nintendo Switch, drones and Maotai hard liquor.
The Justice Department is opposing a new undersea cable that would link Hong Kong to Asia and America via next-gen high-speed Internet.POLITICO’s John Hendel and Betsy Woodruff Swan reported that a DOJ official complained it could offer "unprecedented opportunities for collection by the Chinese intelligence services.” The FCC will make the ultimate decision, but it appears Facebook and Google, who are organizing the venture, have conceded Hong Kong will be cut out. Julia Voo, Research Director at the China Cyber Policy Initiative at Harvard’s Belfer Center, tells China Watcher, “Stopping million-dollar business deals is a sort of sexy power move — installing a firewall, updating software, and teaching basic cyber hygiene is not.” But that’s going to be more useful, as “right now there are other direct cables between the U.S. and mainland China in service that will continue to be in service for at least the next decade.”
They seem fine in Chengdu. Speaking of “second-tier” cities. Writer Tanner Brown shared video of spontaneous dancing that broke out at a night market right before closing. Note: no masks.