The origins of China’s overreach

Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Susan Shirk.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

If you had to identify a single question that threads through the, what, 12 or more years that Sinica has been running, one good candidate would be where did things go so terribly wrong? I know that’s been a question that, at least for me, has been kind of an obsession. And that is in part because I’ve experienced it so personally and because the shifts on both the Chinese side and the U.S. side have really happened before my eyes. I mean, affecting people like me especially, who study China and whose life straddles China and the U.S. so directly. But I think that all of us who work on understanding, not just contemporary China, but also America today, its politics and its foreign policy. We’re all obliged to try to come to a better understanding of the whole complicated chain of cause and effect that took us from the bright promise of the turn of the millennium, or pick your starting point really, to this moment when, if we aren’t already in a new Cold War, we are pretty close.

One of the most insightful explanations that I’ve heard, and one that I heard first some six years ago, came from my guest today who returns to Sinica for, I believe, the fourth time. Susan Shirk was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific during the second Clinton administration from 1997 to 2000, and went on to helm one of the best China-focused programs in the U.S. at the University of California at San Diego. She is research professor and chair of the 21st century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD, which has really produced some of the best people in the China field today. A great many of whom I’m proud to say have been on this program. She’s the author of the widely claimed book, Fragile Superpower, and has a new book coming out, in fact, tomorrow. That is October 18. It’s called Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise, and that will be the subject of today’s conversation.

Susan, welcome back to Sinica.

Susan Shirk: Well, thanks Kaiser. I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation.

Kaiser: Yeah. It’s always just such a pleasure to have you on for all sorts of reasons, but you always give me a whole lot of food for thought. I always have a lot to think about after a conversation with you. So, congratulations on the new book, which also, plenty of food for thought for me there. Before we get into your book, though, let me get your takeaways from the first day of the 20th Party Congress, and especially from Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 speech. It’s being picked over and parsed by lots and lots of pundits. I happened to have been in rural Georgia winding up three days of Chinese archery training. And so, I didn’t actually watch the speech and I just read some of the excellent recaps, and only this morning I started reading it in Chinese.

What, though, in particular, were you, going into the speech, what were you listening for? I mean, given your book and its theme, which is right there in the title, in terms of what Xi signaled with his language on foreign policy-related matters, were you able to get a sense for what might be in store, and what were you looking for as you started the speech?

Susan: Well, I was looking for any hint of possible course correction in the third term, whether or not the costs that China is enduring because of the overreaching of the Xi administration. Because of course, overreach means to take things too far in an exaggerated manner in a way that’s harmful to yourself, and we certainly see the costs of overreach piling up now. So, I was looking for any hint of adjustment in the third term. I really didn’t see any. To me, this looks like more continuity than change.

Kaiser: Definitely a lot of continuity, but there was one thing that I did hear. I mean, Chris Buckley from the New York Times and some others noted that Xi Jinping didn’t talk about the international situation being a favorable one right now for China. Actually, as Chris pointed out, that was the first time, since 2002, that that phrase had been omitted from the speech.

Susan: Strategic period of opportunity.

Kaiser: Right, exactly. That was the phrase.

Susan: Yeah. That phrase was absent, but I don’t know how much to make about that. Certainly, the view of China’s threat environment is pretty dire. He sees threats, international threats, and he describes them as blackmail, extortion. He doesn’t say the United States, but he implies it’s the United States and the West that is doing all these unfair coercive actions to China. And he’s trying to rally the Party around him because with this external threat, but then also his view is that there are tremendous internal threats as well related to China’s security. Certainly, the focus on security is even more prominent than five years ago, more mentions of national security. Even though he gave a nod to development as being the priority objective of the Party, which I know investors and other business people will be relieved to see, it’s pretty clear that in the security development dyad that security is number one for him.

Kaiser: Yeah, actually, I saw quite a few mentions of national security. In fact, I think we did a quick count. There was 17 mentions of national security. But as you say, in that dyad, there was still 108 mentions of development. It’s, by the way, a very auspicious number in China. So, this is a count that was provided me by Dave Rank. So, I think there was a shift. Yeah, there was certainly an increase from the 19th Party Congress speech, and even from the 18th Party Congress speech 10 years ago in the number of mentions of national security. That’s probably not surprising. What about Taiwan? I know Bonnie Glaser, who used to be at CSIS and is now at the German Marshall Fund, she had a really good thread about the Taiwan-related sections of the speech, a thread on Twitter. I’m not sure whether you saw that, but the upshot was-

Susan: I did.

Kaiser: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you think about-

Susan: I think her main message is that continuity, not that much has changed. He got an applause line when he said that reunification was inevitable and would definitely occur. No timetable, but an expression of resolve and confidence that it was going to happen. Of course, he still says that he favors peaceful reunification, but I’m a little concerned about that because of the most recent white paper, which left out several of the key assurances to Taiwan about what peaceful reunification under one country two systems could look like, and how China, the PRC would not need to base military forces or government personnel in Taiwan. Dropping that, I thought, was an indication that Xi was narrowing the path to peaceful reunification in a way that could create more pressure on him, and he might feel more pressure to actually achieve reunification through non-peaceful means.

Kaiser: Okay, great. Yeah, I’m in broad agreement about that. I think that it was definitely continuity. A lot of that was boilerplate. It’s always boilerplate to say that unification will take place. But yeah, I think I should make sure to point everyone toward Bonnie’s thread, which I think was excellent.

Susan: Kaiser, maybe I can make one other observation, which is one…

Kaiser: Absolutely.

Susan: One of the things that interested me a lot was his description of what sorry shape China and the Communist Party had been in 10 years ago when he took over. And it was really his continuing to make the case for strong centralized leadership, such as the system he has established over the past decade. So, he said that, in addition to corruption, that the Party was weak and had all sorts of problems due to a decentralized leadership, really, although he didn’t use that term, a more collective leadership. So, it’s as if he was continuing a debate with the Party elites who believe in collective leadership and agree with Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 that over-concentration of authority leads to arbitrary decision-making, policy mistakes, some of which, in the case of Máo [Zédōng 毛泽东], were tragic, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.

But we see policy mistakes under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 as well. I thought it was Xi’s debate with maybe the ghost of Deng Xiaoping, as I put it in my book, about what type of system really works best for China.

Kaiser: And this really does lead us directly into the substance of the book. And we are going to get right into that centralization, decentralization debate in just a second. But before we do that, I think we have to wrestle with the title of the book, which again, is Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. There are sentences in your book, even in the very prologue to it that can be pulled out and quoted out of context to sort of thesis statements, which seem clear, very clear restatements of what the title says that China derailed what had been a peaceful rise through overreach. And that’s that. When I’ve seen people invoke that title to make this kind of simple case, that everything we’re now experiencing can be laid squarely at Beijing’s feet, though. I’ve said that that’s actually not a good read of the book.

If you actually read the book, you would find that Susan complicates it a whole lot more. And for years, you’ve been saying that… You’ve used this pair of words, overreach and overreaction. I mean, that was part of the task force report that you wrote. It was there all the way along from at least as far back as 2016. So, do you have any caveats about the directness of the title and the propensity for people to interpret it too simplistically?

Susan: Well, I’m a comparative politics political scientist, and what fascinates me is the connection between the Chinese political system, internal politics, and foreign policy. That was the subject of China: Fragile Superpower. And in a sense, this book is a kind of sequel to that. But with more of a focus on the policy-making process itself and what goes on inside elite politics, inside the black box of leadership politics in China. So, it does sound as if my emphasis is on the Chinese side, and I will plead guilty to that. But I do have a, especially a final chapter in which I am quite critical of American policy. And certainly, in talking about U.S.-China relations, in a chapter called “Downward Spiral,” I see this as very much an interaction between U.S. policy, which jumps too quickly to be very hostile in a manner that now, I think when we look at the work report to the Party Congress, we can see how we are reinforcing Xi Jinping’s narrative about how the West, and maybe even the whole world has ganged up on China.

There’s definitely a very perverse kind of interaction that’s underway. But in talking about, for example, the Trump administration, where things really become much more hostile in terms of U.S. policy and very heavy handed confrontational, I do say that it’s not just the result of these two authoritarian leaders, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, but that, especially the nature of the Chinese institutions that Xi Jinping has established of this highly concentrated personalistic rule, if you ask me, “What’s the number one cause of the problem right now?” I would identify that. But I am increasingly critical of Biden administration policy as well.

Kaiser: And we’ll get into that at some length. But it’s great that we’ve already brought up some of the main features of the argument that you make, the central argument, and I think a very compelling one. I remember, actually, when Jeremy and I spoke to you for a live Sinica Podcast some years ago, I think it was in Irvine, that you were already really onto this one really important piece of the explanation for why China did take this more authoritarian turn. And it’s one that I referenced just now in introducing you. That is this role of the collective leadership of the Hú [Jǐntāo 胡锦涛] and Wēn [Jiābǎo 温家宝] era, and the perception within the Chinese leadership that this had allowed too much corruption, factionalism, disunity, and it needed to be corrected.

Deng himself, as you point out, did much to advance institutionalization and to dismantle this whole apparatus of over-concentration, but he did not govern directly through any institution either. So, that’s a really ambiguous legacy. To what extent did this legacy actually sort of set the stage for the return of over-concentration? Can you talk about this as a factor in Chinese politics after ’08?

Susan: Yes. Well, Deng Xiaoping didn’t take de-Maoization far enough in my view. And I think there are many intellectuals and political politicos in China who would agree with that because he never was willing to see the People’s Congress, China’s parliament and its courts, its legal system establish authority over the actions of Party politicians, government politicians. The only check comes from the collective institutions inside the Party itself. And sad to say, even though I had put my money on the Central Committee decades ago as serving to provide oversight of the Party leadership, it really hasn’t done so in China. I mean, in the Soviet Union, it did twice reject the nominees for top leadership. And in Vietnam, they have quite a competitive election by the Central Committee of the top leadership. But in China, the top-down authority, the fact that all of those Central Committee members who are in their day jobs, provincial Party secretaries and governors, and ministers, and generals, and the military, all of those people hold their positions because they were appointed by the top leaders.

So, this is what I’ve, for years, talked about, is reciprocal accountability between the top leadership and the people in China selectorate in the Central Committee. But the problem is that those folks in the Central Committee are too dependent for their own career security on the top leadership, and they haven’t had the courage to challenge the nominations from above of the top leadership. So, that’s what we see happening right now before our eyes, that they just fall into place and do what the top leadership wants to do, which is really tragic. And there’s no oversight by any other institutions outside the Party.

Kaiser: That selectorate that you described is actually in full action right now.

Susan: That’s correct.

Kaiser: It’s happening right now. Today is October 17. There is this wonderfully useful two-page summary in your book about how the Central Committee actually selects politburo members and then the Politburo Standing Committee. Because of where we are right now in the midst of the 20th Party Congress, I think it’d be really useful to, to maybe go over that basic process, if you would. And then maybe I’d like to talk about what happened in 2012, the 18th Party Congress and Lìng Jìhuà 令计划 role in that straw poll. Maybe you could just talk about sort of how this tip is supposed to work, and we can start there.

Susan: Okay. Well, of course, this is a form of the institutionalization of Party rule that Deng encouraged in order to prevent Party elders from hanging on forever and to prevent the over-concentration of authority in the hands of one leader. So, the Central Committee has, according to the Party charter, they have the authority to choose the top leaders. But the people in the Central Committee, as I said, are all officials who hold their jobs just by virtue of having been selected by the top leaders. So, it’s a form of reciprocal accountability. So, how is it supposed to work? Every five years at the Party Congress, what happens is you get a new Central Committee that’s chosen. And then in a smoke-filled room somewhere in Zhongnanhai, I assume, I’m not sure where, you get a small group of top leaders. And who’s in that smoke-filled room?

We don’t actually know for sure, but it’s certainly the incumbent leader, and it used to be the retired leader, and it also used to be the anointed successor, but we don’t have one right now. And maybe some of the other, and maybe the Politburo Standing Committee members now, the other eight of them, and then maybe some of the retired Politburo Standing Committee members too. We’re really not sure.

Kaiser: The CMC as well?

Susan: No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. I’ve never really seen that…

Kaiser: Right. We don’t know.

Susan: … Made clear. Because of course, the General Secretary of the Party is right now the only civilian member of the CMC. As far as I know, the military, the generals are not in the smoke-filled room, but I might be wrong. And so, they come up with the slate, who’s going to be in the Politburo Standing Committee, the discipline commission, all of the politburo itself, and, of course, the General Secretary of the Party. And then, according to some accounts, it gets vetted by the presidium of the Party Congress, which is a larger group of about 150 people. But it seems pretty pro forma that one. Then it goes to an actual vote by the Central Committee. But what that means is that the top leaders in the smoke-filled room, they never know for sure when the Central Committee might revolt against the slate of nominees.

They can’t be sure that what happened twice in the Soviet Union won’t also happen in China. And that’s why I believe, back in 2007, for the first time, they held a straw poll of mostly the Central Committee members with a few others added in as a kind of popularity contest for the politicians who would be eligible by age to go into the Politburo Standing Committee and general secretary position. But this straw poll, they never announced the results. It’s kept secret, the results. It just becomes information for the top leaders when they come up with their slate of nominees. I think the main reason is to anticipate the reactions in the formal vote by the Central Committee and make sure there are no surprises. So, they did that twice. They did it in 2007 and 2012, but they didn’t do it five years ago.

Xi Jinping rejected the whole notion of a straw poll and using elections, even though he himself may have been the beneficiary of that straw poll, because reportedly he did very well in it, and that’s why he’s China’s number one leader today instead of Lǐ Kèqiáng李克强 , who would’ve been Hu Jintao’s first choice. But five years ago, he just did a whole bunch of interviews, had the Politburo Standing Committee folks also do a bunch of interviews, and they came up with the slate in that more old-fashioned top-down manner.

Kaiser: My understanding was that in 2012, though, that process was nearly subverted then that Ling Jihua had a fix-in, and then this was part of the reason why this didn’t happen again later.

Susan: That’s what many people say that Ling Jihua, who was Hu Jintao’s… The head of his office in the Party center, there was a lot of talk at the time that he was going to move up himself to be on the, well, at the time, he was already in the politburo, but he could have joined the Politburo Standing Committee, and that he manipulated the outcome in some manner. We don’t know exactly how. He was later fired and purged because his son was in a lurid accident with some partially dressed young women, car auto accident, was killed along with the young women, and then reportedly worked together with Zhōu Yǒngkāng 周永康, who was the internal security’s czar at the time to try to cover it up. But many people say that in fact, the real reason he was brought down was because he manipulated the straw poll. So, who knows? I mean, that’s all rumor. I have no hard evidence, one way or the other.

Kaiser: So, Susan, you focus quite a bit on the Hu Jintao years in what I think is the core chapter to your book. It’s called “The Rise and Fall of Collective Leadership.” Or maybe a core chapter. It actually made me intensely nostalgic, on the one hand, for certain features of that time. While you write really persuasively about how the seeds were sown for the hardline turn later on, you do bring up what many, both within China and outside of China, regarded then as the very good things. I mean, collective leadership was a deliberate choice, a feature at the time and not a bug. And, as you mentioned, certain Party intellectuals like Hú Yàobāng 胡耀邦 even wrote books arguing for the superiority of collective leadership over presidential systems, say, in the West. Can you go through, what was in the plus column for collective leadership before we then get into the other less fortunate side of the ledger?

Susan: Well, collective leadership brought more diverse points of view into the high-level policy-making process because you had all the main parts of the party state represented. You had the state council economic ministries, you had the internal security apparatus. You had the propaganda apparatus. You had local, well, local officials are not actually in the standing committee, they’re in the Politburo. And what Alice Miller, who is really the leading scholar of institutionalization within the Chinese Communist Party, helped us see is there was consistency in the balance among all of these different bureaucracies that govern China. Presumably, you would get more debate about policy and you’d come up with policies that actually could be implemented more effectively because these people have a better sense of what’s going on, on the ground than one leader can have.

And they should also, we thought, operate with restraint. Because in effect, they would make decisions by consensus, and with the kind of mutual veto system, they would check one another. And if there was a problem with it, it would be stasis or inertia rather than overreach. When I started digging deeper into it, I found that, instead of checking one another, they in fact log rolled with one another in the sense that they operated as an oligarchy, and each of them allowed the others to run their own domain, their own sector, however, they wanted. And so, you got a very incoherent set of decisions with overreaching because of decentralization rather than because of centralization.

Kaiser: Give us some examples of how that worked. I mean, what are some of these sort of domains that individual leaders in this collective leadership had unfettered control over where the result was overreached? Maybe we can start with something like the South China Sea. That would be a pretty good one. Yeah?

Susan: Sure. This is where the nine dragons roiling the waters became more obvious to other researchers, and to me, as we looked at what was happening around 2006, 2007, when these maritime agencies, and they weren’t all strong ones by any means, like fisheries.

Kaiser: Fisheries. Coast Guard.

Susan: Yeah. Not a bureaucratic heavy hitter, but they were just going off on their own, and they were using the defense of the sovereignty claims in order to make the case for bigger budgets, more ships and planes and bureaucratic influence for themselves. That was really interesting because up until that time, the South China Sea had not been a focal point of Chinese popular nationalism. If you look at treatment in the media, it’s rarely discussed compared to Japan or Taiwan, which were focal points, hot buttons of Chinese popular nationalism. So, it wasn’t that the nationalist public had created pressure on Beijing to be more assertive in the South China Sea, which would’ve been my argument in Fragile Superpower. I mean, that’s sort of the way I viewed the dynamics of domestic nationalism in Chinese foreign policy.

But it didn’t appear that way for the South China Sea until these gray zone civilian maritime agencies started pushing around other claimants who also, according to international law, have rights over the waters and the rocks along their coast. So, that was a puzzle. That’s actually the puzzle that got me started on the research for this book a long time ago.

Kaiser: Right. You also point to another factor, which was interesting, was the expansion of the size of the Politburo Standing Committee to include a portfolio for security and one for propaganda. And you say that that actually contributed again to the sort of hardline turn and to this perceived need for recentralization. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Susan: Sure. I mean, I talk about the control coalition, which consists of the internal security bureaucracies, the political legal bureau of the party, the propaganda agencies, including internet control, and that they had much more clout because they were part of this oligarchy. And especially Zhou Yongkang, I’d say.

Kaiser: Of course.

Susan: Zhou Yongkang was a very powerful and effective politician who really took over the internal security domain. He was the head of the control coalition, and that really starts before the Olympics, I argue in my book, before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So, they just went their own way and nobody tried to tell them not to. And of course, it’s also important to point out that Chinese society was becoming more restive, more pluralistic, more cosmopolitan, a lot more information coming in from abroad. And you did have quite a lot of, admittedly small-scale protest activity, but still a lot more protest activity. So, it enabled the control coalition to make the case that they needed more money, more budgets, and more power, and they enforced the grid surveillance system, which now we see having evolved to, in its more hi-tech version, combined with this mutual watching of neighbor by neighbor, into a really dystopian kind of surveillance state.

Kaiser: So, the question of why it was so easy for China to return to personalistic rule, as you say, that question really haunts the book. I mean, it threads throughout. What is your answer to that question? After pondering this for so long and doing so many interviews, so much research about this, why was it so easy for China to return to personalistic rule?

Susan: Well, I think the main reason is the lack of authority. Again, Deng Xiaoping, who is kind of my hero and the hero of my story, didn’t go far enough. His own vision was limited, and he hoped that the Central Committee would be able to constrain over-concentration of authority, but he didn’t allow the ideas of some of these bold political reformers from the ’80s who wanted a more autonomous legislature and legal system to go ahead and carry out those reforms. Also, after Tiananmen, Deng Xiaoping was concerned that Jiāng Zémín 江泽民 wouldn’t have enough authority. Coming up from Shanghai without his own faction, his own national following. So, he, at that point, introduced a top leadership role, which would include being general secretary of the Party, being president of the state, which is a job that really has no power, and then being head of the military commission. So, when you melded those three powers together in the hands of one person, I think it definitely made it easier to restore strongman rule.

Kaiser: So, if overreach and hubris really began in Hu Jintao’s years as a result, in large part, of the ineffective and under centralized leadership of Hu, why was overreach only compounded during the last decade that we’ve seen under Xi Jinping who was over centralized? So, there seems to be like… Okay, so do you see what I’m saying? Is…

Susan: Oh, totally. It’s not a very clean argument for me as a social scientist, I suppose, because I see two types of arrangements, both of which lead to overreach. I’m sure some critics would say, “Oh, none of that stuff really matters, Susan. What matters is China’s always had these overambitious goals, or China’s just like an imperial system, and this is just culture and emperors returning to govern China.” But I actually see them as two different types of communist authoritarian rule, the collective leadership version and the strongman rule version. And both of them can lead to overreach. And so, how could Hu Jintao have prevented this? How could he have maintained the momentum that he had in his first term to reform the state society relationship to open up more channels for the public to respond to Chinese policy, to make governance more responsive, more stable, keep the opening to the world?

How could he have done that? And I think the answer is that he could have, first of all, put the term limits for Party leader, the general secretary of the Party in writing in the Party charter, which his advisors had recommended, but he just didn’t do. The other thing he could have done was to try to figure out a way to build a counterweight to the control coalition among the groups in Chinese economy and society who really benefited from market reform and opening and opening of society as well. In other words, that would’ve meant find a way to give the private sector more of an institutional voice in Chinese politics. Find a way that coastal provinces and provincial leadership, per se, could have more of a voice at the center; intellectuals, professionals. Probably the best way of doing that probably would’ve been through strengthening the National People’s Congress. Which, of course, other authoritarian regimes have done. They have introduced more of a parliament.

Kaiser: Unfortunately, in the narrative of the control coalition itself, it’s precisely these elements in society that represent a kind of threat. And, on top of that, they can point to an external environment which is where we see color revolutions bubbling up and all that sort of stuff. All these negative forces being amplified by the internet, all this stuff. And that plays too much into their hands. I want to talk about this chapter of yours, this chapter 10, State of Paranoia. You make the case that while there was a lot of continuity from Hu Jintao’s stability maintenance because of the wéiwěn 维稳 thing was very much a feature of Hu Jintao. I mean, that’s when we had where it’s like to harmonize and stuff like that. I mean, already spending on domestic security was surpassing, even in Hu’s time, expenditures on national events overall, the proportion of it. I didn’t say that clearly, but I think you know what I mean.

It’s quite comparable to Xi Jinping’s fixation on security, this overall national security outlook that Xi has talked about so much. Now, from Beijing’s perspective, though, I mean just channeling Beijing here, what accounts for this shift? What justifies this increased paranoia that they have clearly manifested?

Susan: Well, I think strongman rule is inevitably going to be more paranoid than collective leadership because Xi has focused so much on guaranteeing the loyalty of subordinates to him and to the Party. And, of course, he’s puts tremendous top-down pressure on officials through the anti-corruption campaign, which was both a cleanup and a purge, and continues to this day in a kind of what Zbigniew Brzeziński has called a ‘permanent purge.’ And now we have the inquisitor, the police and disciplinary officials who were in charge of doing investigations of high-level officials, they themselves became the targets of the purge.

Kaiser: We’re talking about like Wáng Qíshān’s 王岐山 nephew in-law, for example, right?

Susan: Yeah. But also, Fu and Sun…

Kaiser: I think it’s Sūn Lìjūn 孙力军 that you’re talking about. I don’t know who the Fu person was.

Susan: But the two senior officials from the public security and disciplinary domain who’d been in charge, I think it’s Fu who is in charge of the investigation of Zhou Yongkang. These are big heavy hitters, and they’ve been accused, of themselves, forming a political clique against Xi Jinping. What you see is that when you’re a strongman leader, a more dictatorial leader, and you put so much pressure on subordinates to prove their loyalty, and they all gush how wonderful you are, and you have a cult of personality, you’re always going to suspect them for being insincere because you are going to know that they are under pressure to say these things. And even Mao himself, I have a quote in there that Mao said to Ho Chi Minh that, “Never believe what they say about you.” So, I think all strongman leaders are going to be more paranoid just because of that dynamic.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do want to make sure that everyone is aware of this really excellent piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal by Chun Han Wong, that was actually published just yesterday in the journal, Xi Jinping’s Quest for Control Over China Targets Even Old Friends. And it’s a really very, very thoughtful and well-reported piece about the corruption campaign and what it’s become now in this kind of permanent purge as you’re talking about. Still, I should note, very, very popular among the people and a source of Xi’s popular legitimacy in many cases. But as you say, it’s become this permanent feature of Xi’s leadership.

Susan: Yeah. And what that means, of course, is that, how does this fit into overreach? It fits into overreach because the subordinate officials, in order to save their own careers and to try to move up in the system, they bandwagon on Xi’s policy preferences. They pay close attention to hints about what direction he’s heading in. And because they’re in competition with one another, they’re rushing to get out ahead and be noticed by the upper level and by Xi himself, ideally. And this means that they over comply with his policy directives and they overdo his orders. And you see this so clearly and tragically in the zero COVID implementation today, where local officials are going all out to test everybody. The more often, the better. Just one case will lock down a whole neighborhood.

And all of that is designed to demonstrate how loyally they’re following the instructions from Beijing. So, this dynamic for overreach is typical of dictatorships and it’s very difficult to reverse it once you have it in place.

Kaiser: I’m going to get into American overreaction, which is the other important piece of this. But before we do that, I do want to say one thing. I can imagine somebody sitting in Beijing, even somebody who is broadly sympathetic to the idea that Beijing’s truculence has actually set China back in many, many ways, as you say, that it’s derailed its peaceful lives. Even somebody who’s sympathetic to that idea still saying to you, “So, Susan, what, you want China to go back to acquiescence before untrampled American hegemony? Or you want it to be forever a rule taker, not a rule maker? You want China to be content, just going on hiding and biding?” I mean, what would you say to that?

Susan: No, I actually believe that it’s quite natural for people in China to be ambitious for China to be a world leader. And I’m totally comfortable with that. I think that, in fact, U.S. policy was remarkably generous and welcoming towards China for a number of decades until Chinese behavior took this more bellicose and repressive turn in the mid-2000s. So, Wáng Yìzhōu 王逸舟, who’s a political economist in China, international relations guy, he’s argued for years that China, to be a world power, to have that status and respect, that it can achieve that if it does things that are welcomed by other countries and contributes to global public goods. So, it can be a constructive, positive player in the world, and leader in the world. Fine. That’s the direction things were headed in. That’s the way Chinese Jiang Zemin and the first term of Hu Jintao were certainly behaving.

I’m not saying to be so weak or slow down China’s growth, or anything like that. I’m simply saying, behave in a way that is acceptable to your neighbors. I mean, China is surrounded by 20 Asian countries. If they can have good relations with those countries, because being the number one trading partner of most of all of these countries, and by engaging in give and take so that they don’t impinge on the rights of these other countries or expect them to just fall into line like tributary states, then they’re going to have this wonderful security blanket surrounding them. And that’s what Wáng Yì 王毅 was actually doing.

Kaiser: That’s what he was hoping to do. Yeah.

Susan: Yeah. Absolutely. The Asia policy was incredibly successful. I think all of this is because the system of this over-concentration and then earlier collective leadership dominated by control coalition, these things are problematic and lead to overreach. But on the other hand, these are all policy choices. I mean if Xi Jinping now wanted to restore stability and relations with the United States and with his neighbors, all the power to do that is in its own hands.

Kaiser: Do you think that American policy in the previous and the current administration has nudged him toward that or incentivized him to do that, or even successfully deterred him from doing the opposite?

Susan: I worry that now we’re nudging him in the opposite direction by overreacting, especially in our rhetoric and in the tech embargo on China, and decoupling. I mean, you can go back several steps and say, “Oh, well, China actually is containing itself.” Joe Nye many years ago said, “Only China can contain China.” But still, I’d say that we have played into that and we haven’t done enough to communicate that we’re still open to working together with China. And the problem with that is that other senior leaders in China, they may not have the power that they once had, but we’d like them to realize that there is still an opening for a more constructive Chinese policy. Right now, I fear that they may believe that it really doesn’t matter what Beijing does, that we’re going to try to trip them up and keep them down no matter what they do.

Kaiser: Yeah. Well, I’m very afraid that they’ve come to that conclusion already.

Susan: Yeah. So, what we need to do is, for one thing, we need to recognize and acknowledge when they do something right. For example, not assisting the Russians tangibly in the Ukraine war. Why are we not hearing from the administration acknowledgement of that? And try to keep them there in that position, obviously is extremely important. We do have only one instance, really, of any serious diplomacy in recent years, actually for six years, and that’s the agreement on the accounting standards for Chinese companies listing in the United States. Well, let’s acknowledge that as a success, and let’s take it as a model for trying to negotiate some other issues in dispute.

Kaiser: Hopefully, it’s not all going to be so eleventh-hour and skin of the teeth either. Susan, the seriousness with which people should take your critique of American policy, I think, is really, really buttressed by the clear-eyed way you talk about China’s culpability in this as well. So, I think it, it’s a very effective way to do this. I think that nobody can accuse you of being misty-eyed about what China has been in. So, I think they hopefully will take more seriously your critiques of what Trump and Biden administration policy has been. I really hope that people read this book and don’t just read the title and read selectively just for those pieces that will make them feel sort of secure in blaming China for this whole fiasco that we’re in. But what a phenomenal book. It’s a great piece of history.

I mean, it really walks through this crucial period of historical change and does a thorough multifaceted analysis of it that really explores many, many aspects of domestic policy that are really invisible to people who aren’t as soaked in this stuff as you are. So, congratulations on the book. I’m sure it’s going to do splendidly, and I encourage everyone to get a copy of it right away and to give it a read, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it as well. Susan, let’s move on to recommendations. First, I know I started sounding almost boilerplate when I talk about this, but really, if you like the work that we are doing with Sinica and the other shows in our network, if you like the work that this company, The China Project, is doing, really the thing that you need to do to help us out is to subscribe to our newsletter.

If you become an Access member, you get not only our [Edge] business focused newsletter and our big afternoon newsletter, which is written and edited by Jeremy and his crack team, you also get all sorts of other goodies. You get to hear this podcast early. We put this out on Monday afternoons and everyone else has to wait until Thursday, and no advertisements. That helps too. So, really, just don’t treat what I’m saying here as boilerplate. Get out and do your part to help us out if you think that what we’re doing is valuable. All right, let’s do recommendations. Susan, what do you have for us this week?

Susan: Well, I’m reading a splendid book by a writer and journalist I respect tremendously, Howard French.

Kaiser: Oh, I love Howard.

Susan: Born in Blackness.

Kaiser: I read it. It’s great.

Susan: That book, Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, I learned so much about how the role of Africa in world history has just been completely neglected. And it’s fascinating, the many ways, starting with exploration for gold and then, of course, the slave trade. It’s just a truly remarkable book and a great read as well.

Kaiser: Howard is one of these rare people who is not just an excellent reporter, but he is a genuine intellectual. He has this academic bent to him. He’s an historian. I mean, he’s a humanist. And he’s a beautiful writer, I have to say. I just love his stuff. Yeah, that’s a great book. I have it as well, and I’ve read it and really, really enjoyed it. Yeah, I can’t see enough good things about it. Actually, I was saving it for a recommendation of my own, but not this time, but now I’ll have to find another one, but thanks. That was fantastic. So, Born in Blackness by Howard French. Definitely read that. I just came back from a three-day Chinese archery camp held in southern Georgia.

Susan: Oh, I’m so glad you’re getting back to that. I want to hear about that.

Kaiser: Oh my gosh, it’s wonderful. So, it was at a bamboo farm, which is owned by actually one of the greatest living bowyers. Somebody who makes traditional Asian bows that are made out of horn, water buffalo horn, and sinew from different animals, and wood like these rare woods, and bamboo, which he grows at his farm. And they’re all glued together with high glue. We’re talking about the Kyudo or Yumi bows, those Japanese-style bows, really long ones, or the central Asian kind of composite bow that you use from horseback or otherwise. His wife, Kay, is an academic. She’s focused on nontraditional Asian archery, and she’s wonderful. The two of them hosted this and brought in these really skilled teachers who are sort of the core of this really fantastic community of people.

Not only did I just significantly improve my form and my technique, and learn a lot about whole process of making bows, but I feel like I found a tribe of my own. These people who are drawn to this. There were about 20 of us. I mean, they’re just amazing human beings. They flew in from all over North America to be a part of this academics, including people in the China field. There was a guy who was one of the foremost experts on the Kharijites of the early Umayyad dynasty. They were part of this pious opposition. I remember reading about them when I was taking Islamic history in college. Then there’s like that guy, I mean, he speaks Russian. He was on the way home from the bamboo farm one night.

He was reciting the Pushkin poem in Russian, and it was amazing. And just guys who were coders by day but are deeply steeped in reconstructions, philological reconstructions of middle Chinese by night. Authors. One woman who I thought was just lovely was writing a work of historical fiction about the Mongols, and she herself is a horse archer. She goes and rides horses and shoots bows from a horseback, and there were actually three people there who’d do that. It was just extraordinary. These are all just these top-flight individuals. Felt like I made so many friends. It was really moving. So, my recommendation really is just to find something that you love outside of your professional life and just be a part of that community. It was joyous. And if anyone out there wants to learn more about my new obsession, Asian archery, please get in touch.

I’d be so happy to share what I’ve learned with other people and grow it. Yeah, that’s my recommendation. I feel totally refreshed and ready to deal with all this punditry on the 20th Party Congress. Anyway, Susan, what a delight to talk to you. And congratulations once more on the book.

Susan: Well, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk with you about it. I feel like we have been, you and I have been having this conversation about why did things go wrong for quite a few years here. So, it’s great to have the chance to have it all out in a book and to talk with you about the book. So, thanks so much.

Kaiser: Well, thank you. I mean, like I said at the beginning, I mean, you really persuaded me of this. You were the first person I heard to really talk about the perverse fact that it was the decentralization itself of the leadership, that it was that deliberately collective leadership that really set the stage for, ironically, for such a kind of dictatorial turn. Anyway, thank you so much, Susan, and I look forward to having you back on the program again soon.

Susan: Thank you.

Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.