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In recent times, social media platforms have become important tools for PD with more than 200 Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign ministers active on Twitter. The targets of PD have also undergone some fundamental changes. The target of influence and manipulation is no longer the foreign audience alone but now includes the domestic public as well. A “Returning Power” like China² – eager to rebrand itself through PD – regards social media tools like Twitter (now known as X), YouTube, and Weibo, along with the others, to be highly effective in this respect.

Having blocked Western social media platforms like Twitter, Google, Facebook (FB), and WhatsApp, China employs homegrown alternatives in its PD. Local networks like Sina Weibo, the most popular online platform in China that functions similar to Twitter, Baidu, a Chinese parallel to Google, WeChat, an app similar to WhatsApp, and Renren, a net equivalent to FB, are aggressively and extensively deployed to connect with the domestic audience. However, despite the preference for its homegrown platforms, a fascinating dimension of China’s social media landscape is the state’s willingness to embrace Western platforms like Twitter and YouTube wherever and whenever necessary, for reaching out to the digitized global community.

In addition to adopting Western social media platforms in an agenda-specific fashion, Beijing also consciously employs China-owned TV channels like the CGTN (formerly known as the CCTV-News and CCTV-9) with an eye toward influencing and manipulating the foreign English-speaking audience. Based in Washington, the CGTN is not only a 24/7 English language station, but is also active on Twitter with the purpose of shaping perceptions in the Western world and beyond. Although CGTN’s audience in the U.S. is still minimal, it is considered important for promoting China’s brand abroad. There are other similar Chinese news channels available on Western social media platforms like the Global Times and the China Daily, as well. These “glocal” (global and local) platforms provide the state an opportunity to get noticed and be heard – making international and domestic engagement imperative and on its own terms. The Chinese leadership skillfully controls and frames contents for communicating state narratives to the targeted audience, aligned to its “national security.”

The reach of digital technologies and its power to influence, monitor and manipulate global perceptions, has been significant in shaping China’s PD while helping to construct international and domestic public opinion (PO) on major global issues. This article examines Beijing’s contemporary PD employing both foreign and local social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube on the one hand, and Weibo on the other. It analyzes occasions when the Chinese state has preferred one platform over the other and attempts to identify the circumstances that influence the choice.

Twitter (now X)

Officially plugged into the virtual community since 1994, China’s new media landscape is unique in its attempt to alter the social and political fabric of the country and for transforming its conduct of PD. China’s general rejection of many widely used Western platforms, including FB and WhatsApp, for domestic use has been a part of its overall media strategy based on the conviction that the Western media has been unfair to China. Unfairness is characterized by playing up its weaknesses, exaggerating its potential as a regional threat, and ignoring its achievements. However, China’s embrace of Twitter for connecting with the international online public demonstrates a realist streak, for example during the COVID-19 pandemic. To present an alternate perspective and favorable stories on China to the outside world, Chinese diplomats used Twitter – which has been banned in China since 2009 – to communicate with foreign audiences without hesitation. The outbreak of the Coronavirus was an occasion when Beijing was heavily engaged in Twitter-driven PD, largely forced by the fact that the pandemic was proving heavily damaging to its global reputation and hurting its brand. Encountering sharp global criticism over claims that it intentionally misled the world by covering up the true extent of the damage caused by the virus first detected in Wuhan, China decided to use Twitter to rebut foreign criticism. Data from the official Twitter accounts of various Chinese embassies and spokespeople revealed that official Chinese Twitter activity had gone into overdrive during the pandemic and continued thereafter, indicating China’s desire to influence and shape the narrative on the virus via the platform.³

How exactly did China go about shaping the broader narrative in its support? Domestically, a major state priority emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Airwaves and chatrooms were inundated with government-friendly “positive” content, and at the same time stricter internet controls regarding sensitive issues were instituted.

Given that China’s PD system operates under the principle of democratic centralism, implying state control, its international communication has been distinct and conforms to propaganda tactics. Since Xi Jinping’s assumption of office in 2012, China has witnessed a rise in media policing while its control over its cyberspace has increased significantly. During the pandemic, Beijing’s assertive dominance of cyberspace, including online propaganda, was highly conspicuous. A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute revealed that China’s “rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts” used “for amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people – often without disclosing the fact that the content is government-sponsored.”⁴

As part of its wider digital diplomacy strategy, senior Chinese diplomats were urged to amplify and spin messages regarding the origins of COVID-19⁵  with Twitter playing a major role. The platform was embraced as an effective “crisis messaging tool”⁶ for pushing out swift rebuttals targeting the global audience in real time. An assertive external information campaign was launched, including wolf warrior diplomacy,⁷ to not only influence global perceptions for deflecting blame from Beijing’s own failings, but also for highlighting missteps of other governments, which would thus portray China as both the model and partner of first resort for other countries. The campaign focused on promoting and amplifying positive narratives about the Communist Party of China (CCP) while suppressing information unfavorable to it.⁸

It is important to note though that the social media ecology makes its total control by the CCP almost impossible. Notwithstanding the tight internet control that China exercises, the “ephemeral, anonymous, and networked nature of internet communication”⁹ has also given rise to an active civil society which has resisted internet control and aggressively used local online platforms for expressing public discontent, opinions, and alternate views criticizing the government and its anti-COVID policies.¹⁰ Even the official press erupted in outrage over the government’s mishandling of the virus during the early days of the pandemic, a revealing indication of how fragile the Party’s control over information had become. This gives a sense of a disconcerted leadership uncomfortable with the online criticism resorting to employing the internet police to threaten the public posting about its failure to handle the pandemic.¹¹ The domestic frustration over COVID -19 – pervading social media at the same time when China was using Twitter to project a more positive account of managing the pandemic – underscores a dimension of frailty of social media that in certain situations might make digital tools risky alternatives for achieving specific strategic goals.

‘Glocal’ Platforms for Promoting a ‘Benign’ Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

China’s efforts to control information flow stems from authoritarian tendencies¹² that are connected to its history outside of contemporary ideology. In fact, the ban of the Western online platforms in China can also be viewed from a great power status perspective.

The First Opium War (1839 – 42) not only denied China its historical great power status, but also eroded China’s confidence and self-respect throughout an ensuing century of foreign humiliation. This directly contributed to the development of “post-imperial ideology”¹³ and had long-lasting implications for diplomatic strategy. Contemporary power politics and the polymedia landscape has further altered its internal and external communication approach. The reality of a hostile world order uncomfortable with China’s “rise” has been compelling enough to push Beijing to try to improve its global image while simultaneously attempting to shape a favorable domestic and international PO.

Beijing’s use of “glocal” platforms like Twitter and YouTube on the one hand, and Weibo on the other, for promoting its flagship BRI or the One Belt One Road (OBOR), is a classic example of a leadership trying to impress its “non-threatening character” upon the “glocal” public. In response to the international community growing increasingly wary of the geostrategic implications of the mega project, initially launched in 2013 to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and other parts of the world, Beijing eventually recast it as an ideological initiative to promote shifting the balance of geopolitical power in China’s favor.¹⁴ Emphasizing the project’s resolve to pursue “a better cross-cultural dialogue, broad shared interest,” and a “deeper understanding of different localities in a world map of civilizations,” the BRI was picked up as a key effort of China’s PD. Indeed, communicating right with the purpose of conveying China’s benign intent behind the BRI for influencing global PO has evolved as a critical goal for the leadership for implementing the new Silk Road. An example of the considerable effort to sustain this image in the South Asian region is the Chinese Ambassador’s highly visible activity in Maldives on both social and traditional media platforms to counter debt-trap diplomacy allegations.¹⁵ Similar tendencies are visible in Nepal as well, where digital outreach has helped Beijing counter negative reactions regarding its growing economic and military clout in the country.

The Chinese leadership has also used hashtags for creating collective conversations¹⁶ about the BRI’s controversial international perception. Beijing launched its first online Friends of #BRI forum in February 2021 for sharing knowledge, experience, opportunities and understanding of the OBOR to develop lasting collaborations with partners. It has also been pushing Belt and Road Bedtime Stories – a series of films produced by China Daily targeting overseas children through its YouTube channel, a platform inaccessible in China but accessible outside the mainland. This is yet another example underscoring the state’s flexibility and willingness to embrace domestically proscribed Western platforms like YouTube (blocked in China since 2009) for the purpose of demonstrating its arguably “benign” intentions to the global community.

Notwithstanding the Beijing leadership’s attempts to reboot the BRI, China’s overt influence operations to generate support for such projects have unsettled many. This is specifically visible in countries like Kazakhstan where Beijing’s PD seems to have “succeeded in shoring up the support of Kazakhstan’s political elites,” but “has fallen short of its aspirations to strengthen ties with the average Kazakh.”¹⁷ Responding to anti-China online campaigns by domestic nationalist groups over the project, Kazakh authorities set up an information ministry to control the spread of such disinformation, particularly those related to Beijing. This was partly motivated by the rapid increase in China’s investments in Kazakhstan’s key strategic sectors, which now exceed those of Russia.

BRI-focused PD targets both the foreign and domestic audiences alike. Beijing has been mindful of engaging its domestic constituencies, including the youth on the subject as well, showing how critical the domestic audience is in shaping Chinese diplomacy and foreign policy-making. A promotion video titled Belt and Road is How on official Chinese social media channels demonstrates the leadership’s equal focus on the local audience on the issue.¹⁸ In fact, the wide sharing of the We Make it Happen promo on Weibo specifically targeted the Chinese youth. The People’s Daily deployed another video, The Belt and Road-We Make it Happen, to communicate China’s international efforts to the local viewers. This is in line with Robert D. Putnam’s explanation that foreign policy decision-making is influenced by a two-level interaction between diplomacy and domestic policy, which functionally pushes leaderships, at least occasionally, to communicate with the domestic public on foreign policy and PD matters.

While employing local online platforms is deemed critical for shaping and building domestic support for the government’s policies, they are also useful for communicating strength and confidence abroad. The latter holds traction for connecting with the Chinese youth as well. In fact, the splash created on social media around the CCP’s centenary celebration in 2021 targeted both. While conveying strength to the foreign audience, it was also an attempt to reconnect with domestic youth – many of whom favor an aggressive foreign policy on certain foreign policy matters.¹⁹ The #China Communist Party Founding 100 Anniversary not only appeared over 11.7 billion times on Weibo but also on other platforms such as WeChat and Baidu, all of which revised their websites to mark the Party’s centenary. As foreign embassies in China embraced local platforms like Weibo to connect and communicate with the local online public, several hashtags were also used to push China’s powerful brand abroad.

Digital Tools and Winter Olympics 2022

Beijing’s major PD goals include national identity building and promotion, and it actively engages in these through vigorous employment of tech platforms. The CCP centenary celebrations were designed and orchestrated online in part for whipping up emotions of the Chinese youth, many of whom prefer not to be aligned with the “red gene.” The government’s priority has thus been to promote a China brand that all can relate to and take pride in. The Winter Olympics organized in 2022 was one of the many occasions in recent history manifesting “glocal” promotion of the China brand. Such megasport events provide contemporary states the opportunity to showcase their abilities and promote their brands at home and abroad.

The Winter Games was aggressively marketed using digital media to communicate China’s benign and confident image both domestically and internationally. On Twitter, the state media outlets, journalists, as well as diplomats, tried to promote the image of the Games, raving about venues and glorifying the Olympic mascot. The state media, including China Daily, even claimed that the mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a giant panda wearing a suit of ice, had not only dominated all discussions on Weibo but was enormously popular with the foreign public as well. However, these assertions ran into credibility problems when The New York Times and ProPublica identified more than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with identical comments amplifying official Chinese voices.²⁰

On the Outcomes

The Chinese leadership has been mindful of the information and communication revolution which has placed the public at the center of diplomatic efforts. With online platforms making the “glocal” audience equal partners and participants in diplomacy, Beijing has demonstrated its efforts to adopt social media platforms for increased communication and diplomacy. However, given its political system, its efforts to change how it is perceived by others through online platforms ring of propaganda. In fact, such assertiveness when communicated through the use of new tools and technology indicates a synergy of censorship and propaganda to manage unfavorable opinions on China.

China’s digitalization process has been amplifying the state’s capacity to monitor others and has also been formidable in manipulating and controlling narratives that fit their national agendas. Utilizing such PD and political communication, Chinese state behavior has muddied the “glocal” perception of China, despite the promise that new technology would strengthen and perpetuate democracy. Beijing has not hesitated to exploit online search engines to disseminate state-backed media information that amplifies the CCP’s agenda in pursuit of influencing and manipulating audiences around the world. Fake accounts, fake stories, and vigorous promotion of “wolf warriors” have complicated the online media landscape and led tech giants like Twitter to increase their scrutiny of the Chinese media. The dominant perception of China remains that of a “surveillance state” trying to reassert its dominance “glocally,” while manipulating the social media tools for influence-building and control of the domestic and foreign POs.

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India’s development strategy in recent years has been “India for India” and “Make in India.” A form of self-reliance, or “strategic autonomy,” India’s policy approach is a reaction to insufficient progress with prior policies that opened India’s economy to global investment.² Today’s measured approach to foreign investment is not indicative of India’s insularity but of a deliberate and judicious decision-making process regarding foreign investments.

This policy of prudential engagement has also led India to step back from China’s outward investment under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) platform. India cannot – and does not want – to respond to BRI with the scale of investment that China has committed. However, there is a new emphasis on outward foreign investment from India. The Indian government has encouraged international investments by reducing the restrictions on Indian companies investing abroad and substantially raising the annual overseas investment ceiling to establish joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries. There has been an evolution in the upper limit for overseas investments with fewer restrictions on approvals over time. Since 2003, Indian firms have been granted permission to invest 100% of their net worth overseas in foreign joint ventures or wholly owned subsidiaries.³  In 2010, the ceiling was increased to 400% of net worth.⁴

This article aims to explore India’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), focusing on China’s BRI initiatives in India’s neighbors, which include Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We analyze similarities and differences between India and China in terms of the timing, scale, scope, and number of OFDI projects and financial commitments, using monthly investment data for Indian and Chinese projects in India’s neighbors during the period 2011-2022.⁵ The two data sets we use report overseas investments by entities in India and in China by project and by host country, reporting the total amount of the investment. We argue that China is moving aggressively to influence countries in India’s neighborhood using large-scale investment projects under the BRI initiative as an investment platform, while India has not responded in a major way to this challenge.

China’s BRI Investments

Before the year 2000, China severely restricted its companies from investing abroad. The “Go Out Policy,” later called the “China Goes Global” strategy, was decided on in 1999 and formalized in 2000. Initially, only state-owned companies were approved for OFDI, but later, large private companies were allowed to invest abroad, followed by others who qualified. This loosening of the regulations was reversed in 2017, with certain types of investments, such as entertainment, hotels, and real estate, being restricted to focus OFDI on technology, infrastructure, and resources and to manage the overall outflow of capital.⁶ Chinese OFDI increased steadily, initially in emerging markets and subsequently in developed economies, including the U.S. and EU. According to the Ministry of Commerce, as reported by the Rhodium Group, China’s annual outward investment peaked in 2016 at $181 billion, including $158 billion in mergers and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions began to drop substantially after 2018. Still, in 2022, the Ministry reported $117 billion dollars of investments, including $24 billion of mergers and acquisitions.⁷

In 2013, President Xi Jinping launched One Belt One Road, later renamed in English as the Belt and Road Initiative, as a channel for much of China’s OFDI. According to a joint working paper by the Green Finance & Development Center and the Griffith Asia Institute, 148 countries have officially joined the BRI platform.⁸ A 10-year celebration of the BRI was held in Beijing in October 2023. Representatives from many participating countries attended. Xinhua, China’s news agency, reported:

Statistics show that the BRI has helped lift about 40 million people out of poverty in participating countries. It has also galvanized up to 1 trillion U.S. dollars of investment globally and created more than 3,000 projects and 420,000 jobs over the past decade.⁹

After many years of large-scale infrastructure and energy projects, the future focus of BRI is changing toward more green projects, with smaller and private sector-led investments. Beijing is also approaching other countries, such as Saudi Arabia,
to help finance the next stages. The number of projects and amounts invested have fallen substantially since 2016. This decrease in Chinese OFDI is partly due to a growing sovereign debt burden in the BRI countries.¹⁰

The Regional Context

India is surrounded by countries that have formally signed memorandums of understanding related to BRI, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. (See Table 1.) Pakistan is one of the largest recipients of investment from China, which began many years before the official launch of BRI in 2013. Bhutan is the only neighbor that has not joined the BRI. However, even Bhutan, which does not have diplomatic relations with the PRC, recently began talks with China to resolve their border dispute, adding to India’s concerns.¹¹

Table 1. Timing of India’s Neighbors joining BRI¹²

Numerous corridors also connect the BRI countries with China and China to distant lands, including Europe. Table 2 lists the four corridors that concern India the most. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is one of the most established and has been a concern to India for many years. It provides easy trade access to China, bypassing the Strait of Malacca, and provides Pakistan with significant military benefits.

Table 2. Four BRI Corridors in India’s Neighborhood¹³

At the start of China’s “Going Out Policy” in 2013, Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister of India (2004-2014). Initially India saw economic integration with China as a way to promote development by moving the long-time bilateral border dispute to the background. The Singh government welcomed the promotion of regional connectivity. When the Modi government came to power in 2014 the approach to BRI changed. The response was to reject BRI and instead to invest in India’s own connectivity projects, and to revive others.

For example, Project Mausam was begun in 2014 to promote connection between countries in the Indian Ocean via communications, culture and trade. The “Cotton Route,” initiated in 2015, aimed to connect India with Russia in one direction, and with SE Asia and East Africa, in the other direction. The “Spice Route” initiative is led by the State of Kerela to connect with countries that were involved in the ancient spice trade. Another major project was the revitalization of the Chabahar Port in Iran. India built the port in the early 2000s, committed to renovate it in 2015, and began the work in 2017.¹⁴ These were seen as part of a renewal of India’s long-standing “Look East” policy, now referred to as “Act East Policy,” which was directed toward strengthening India’s relationships with countries in South and Southeast Asia.¹⁵

This approach of promoting India’s connections with its neighbors was strengthened after President Xi visited Pakistan in May 2015 to announce the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which would connect Kashgar in Xinjiang, China, to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan. India strongly opposed the project, mainly because it would go through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The proposed corridor between China and Pakistan triggered a significant change in India’s perception of the security relations in the region. The border clash with China in 2020 was another major setback in relations between India and ChinaTable 3 and calculations using the two databases..

The timing of these connectivity projects is consistent with an interpretation of India countering China’s BRI initiatives in the region. India’s official statements regarding BRI suggest that its objections to the BRI arise from a lack of consultation regarding the strategy and process of project selection and formulation and concerns over the debt burdens of BRI participant countries arising from Chinese investments. Although Beijing welcomed India’s participation in BRI, which could have been signaled by India’s participation in the 2017 BRI Forum, India decided not to attend.

While large Chinese investments tied to the Belt and Road Initiative may improve infrastructure development and increase opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, India has been increasingly guarded about China’s outward foreign investment motives. The scale and number of Chinese investments in India’s continental and maritime neighborhood are of particular concern. India’s cautiousness stems from a worry that China’s expansive OFDI may increase China’s political influence in the region.

In the next section, we examine Chinese and Indian investments in India’s neighboring nations to understand if India’s investments are a reaction to China’s BRI investments. As noted previously, we focus on the following neighboring countries: Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. While India has no investments in Pakistan according to our database, China’s investments in Pakistan are important in understanding China’s political, military and economic motives.

Regional Outward FDI

At the regional level, as seen in Table 3, China has made a small number of very large investments in India’s neighbors. From 2011 to 2018, China steadily increased the number of investments from 14 to 26 in these nations. The value of these investments totaled $6.3 billion in 2011 and climbed to $27 billion by 2015, and then dropped to $14.65 billion by 2018.There was a significant drop in Chinese investments to $7.3 billion from 2019 to 2020, coinciding with the pandemic. Post-COVID, China’s investments in these nations declined steeply, both in the number and value of investments, with only 12 investments valued at $2.3 billion in 2022. The 2022 level was even lower than the pre-BRI level of Chinese investments in these countries.

An examination of China’s investments in India’s neighboring nations shows that over 53% of China’s OFDI went to Pakistan, 27% to Bangladesh, and 10% to Sri Lanka, with the remaining 6% going to Myanmar, 3% to Nepal, and less than 1% to Afghanistan. The largest Chinese investment, both by number and value, was in Pakistan (87 investments worth $57.7 billion), with about half that value in Bangladesh (64 investments at $29.2 billion), followed by Sri Lanka (31 investments at $10.98 billion). China’s 19 investments in Myanmar were at $6.23 billion, 18 in Nepal at $3.51 billion, and two in Afghanistan at $0.61 billion.¹⁶

As Table 3 indicates, over the period 2011-2022, India made hundreds of small investments in its neighboring nations while never remotely approaching the amounts that China invested in. A large drop in India’s OFDI in 2014 coincided with China’s anticipated introduction of the overall BRI policy and the Modi government’s election in India that year.

India’s pattern of OFDI, measured as the percent of the total value of investment, primarily focused on Sri Lanka (52%), Myanmar (21%), and Bangladesh (21%), followed by a little over 6% in Nepal and less than 0.2% in Afghanistan. The number of India’s investments was highest in Sri Lanka (1197), followed closely by Bangladesh (1094) and about half the number in Myanmar (575), and fewer in Nepal (328) and Afghanistan (14). India’s focus on Sri Lanka contrasts with China’s relatively small investments.

Table 3: Total Number and Value of Investments by year in neighboring countries

*In USD Billions

Note: Neighboring countries include Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan

While some India government policies have directly encouraged Indian OFDI, other events within India during this period may also have spurred Indian OFDI, which is mostly private capital seeking profits. For example, the demonetization in 2016 and the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax in 2017 may have made Indian exports more expensive, incentivizing domestic firms to look for alternate investment options. Given India’s increasing technology prowess and the fact that OFDI technology spillovers are significantly positive in India, this further incentivizes firms to look outside India for investment options to complement exports.¹⁷ The rapid decline in the economic growth rate in India from a little over 8% in 2016 to approximately 4% in 2019 may also be a reason for Indian firms to seek investment options abroad to diversify their portfolios. Around the 2014 through 2019 period, the Indian financial sector faced one of its worst crises due to many non-performing assets in the banks, which hamstrung lending.¹⁸ Moody’s downgrading of India’s economic outlook from “stable” to “negative” in 2019 may have also incentivized Indian firms to invest outside India to hedge their bets and move their production abroad, increasing OFDI.¹⁹

Conclusion

Indian and Chinese entities have increased investment in South Asia. OFDI incentives differ between the two countries: private firms lead the way in India, while in China, it is the government. The BRI is the most apparent, explicit tool that China is using to increase its influence in the region, but even more importantly, to build infrastructure to be able to acquire resources from afar.

India’s policymakers and leaders are aware of China’s growing presence and are considering ways to respond. While the Indian government has initiated several projects, such as the Spice and Cotton Routes, Project Mausam and the revitalization of Chabahar Port in Iran, they are significantly smaller than China’s investments in terms of the number of OFDI projects, their scale and scope. India has indicated an interest in improving regional interconnectivity, which is similar to the goals of many of the BRI projects. However, the lack of transparency and the scale and geopolitical aspects of BRI have made India cautious about joining the BRI.

India has long maintained economic, political and military alliances, particularly with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. Given this, China’s value, type, and sectoral investments in these three nations may particularly draw interest from India about China’s OFDI motives. Given that these three nations are among the BRI nations, India’s investments in them may also be strategic from geopolitical and economic points of view.²⁰

However, our analysis indicates that while China is likely using BRI as a strategy to increase its presence and influence in India’s neighboring countries, the Indian government has yet to respond in a significant way to China’s moves. We also do not see any patterns of increased Indian OFDI in response to its neighbors joining BRI.²¹

Indian companies have invested in the region, primarily in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. However, our data show no priority for OFDI in neighboring countries or specifically in response to BRI. We do not find any OFDI response to BRI measured by timing or investment size.

Most Indian OFDI is driven by private sector companies that make investment decisions that align with their profit strategies. They have initiated many small projects and often favor Western, developed countries. In contrast, Chinese OFDI includes considerable investments by state-owned enterprises and potential governmental influence over the location and scale of OFDI. Chinese projects tend to be very large, funded by loans offered to the host countries by state-owned financial institutions, and led by state-owned companies. Finally, while not large in scale as measured by financing, India’s small, numerous, privately funded projects in this region may prove more sustainable with long-term positive impacts than China’s large-scale investment schemes.

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Around the same time in the latter half of the 2010s, the popularity of the HBO show Game of Thrones (hereafter, GOT), based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novels, was at its peak, including in China, where it found an audience eager to download it across the Great Firewall and interpret it as a political allegory for Xi Jinping’s first term in power.⁷ Chinese and western media were each using GOT as a kind of comparative template for inventive Chinese television series such as Nirvana in Fire⁸ 瑯琊榜⁹ (BTV, 2015) and Story of Yanxi Palace¹⁰ 延禧攻略¹¹ (iQIYI, 2018), which have little to do with GOT’s narrative fantasy of medieval, quasi-European kingdoms, much less replicate its brand of gruesome violence or exploitative sex.

Like the presumed similarities between The Three-Body Problem and Star Wars (seemingly based on nothing more substantial than that each is a sci-fi narrative originally packaged as a trilogy), it is easy to write off such facile comparisons as simple clickbait or marketing schemes. Beneath the ad copy glibness, though, we should consider how such correspondences also gesture toward changing understandings of the spectacular representation of historical and technological fantasy in China’s popular culture. The media industry’s adoption of strategies for global, digital distribution is reconfiguring Chinese narratives on screen for our spectacular age. So it made perfect sense when, in September 2020, Netflix announced a huge deal for the rights to produce The Three-Body Problem by the creative team behind GOT, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who walked away from a contract with Lucasfilm to develop further Star Wars films to pursue this adaptation), along with producer Alexander Woo.¹² Excited speculation and weary skepticism on how the producers would adapt Liu’s novel began immediately.¹³ On the one hand, Benioff and Weiss had already proved their skills at translating epic source material on a blockbuster scale, but on the other, the final season of GOT, especially, revealed a tendency to over rely on set-piece spectacular at the expense of narrative coherence. What seemed certain was that the Netflix adaptation, which premiered in March under the stylized name of 3 Body Problem, would necessarily indulge in the contemporary global vernacular of visual spectacle.

Spectacularity is at the heart of the wildly inventive novel series, as well as one of the keys to its production and circulation as a cultural narrative and object. My focus on spectacle in the Netflix adaptation highlights not just the epic scale of the story and its massive CGI budget (at $160 million, the first season is one of the most expensive scripted series in Netflix history),¹⁴ but also its relation to the show’s global audience through translation and adaptation, the fan communities and media speculation that it has spawned, and the overdetermined space it occupies as the biggest popular culture phenomenon to come out of China in decades. The scale of the narrative’s diegetic spectacle, in other words, is reproduced in its discursive circulation and proliferation.

The series sets the terms of its narrative spectacle in its opening scene, which depicts a Cultural Revolution-era struggle session. One of the protagonists, Ye Wenjie 叶文洁 (a character who, unlike most of the others, largely remains unchanged from the novel), witnesses a group of Red Guards brutally murder her father, a renowned physics professor who maintains an unrepentant belief in scientific reason until his dying breath. The stage upon which his execution takes place faces a crowd of thousands, whipped into political fervor and hungry bloodlust. The spectacle of mass violence not only recalls the kind of gruesome barbarity that GOT is famous for, but also signals a spectacular dynamic between the perspective of a lone spectator, Wenjie, fighting against a tide of overwhelming, apocalyptic forces that structures the show as a whole. Following this traumatic experience, Wenjie is sent to a labor camp in Inner Mongolia and loses all faith in humankind through her own persecution there. Her nihilistic view on a future for humanity leads her to initiate contact with the alien civilization called the San-Ti (termed “Trisolarans” in Ken Liu’s translation), who are intent on conquering Earth in order to survive the destruction of their own planet.

Liu Cixin famously placed the struggle session scene in Chapter 7 of his original novel in order not to attract attention of the censors (it was, with Liu’s blessing, moved to the beginning of the novel in the English translation).¹⁵ The uncompromising intensity of the revolutionary spectacle serves as an impetus for the similarly zero-sum, world-shaking drama that follows. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo pay particular cinematic attention to the sublime convergence of technology, power, and collectivity wielded by the San-Ti through their sophons, such as the blinking of the stars that introduces their visual might to the rest of the world in episode one, or the globe-spanning montage of every electronic screen simultaneously displaying the ominous, collectivized message “YOU ARE BUGS” in episode five.

The effect the visual spectacle has on the adaptation is at once its best feature and its limiting factor. 3 Body Problem looks awesome (the 30 million-soldier “human abacus” in episode three is as breathtakingly sublime as the nanofiber shredding of a tanker filled with San-Ti sympathizers in episode five is insanely violent). But the attention paid to visual spectacle also produces the consequential effect of leading the story away from its Chinese origins. Many viewers, especially fans of the original novel, have been vociferous in their criticism of the Netflix series, justifiably wondering which “Chinese” elements are left in the adaptation. Liu’s mostly China-based and unconnected characters, for example, are relocated from China to London and ethnically diversified, and some have been created out of whole cloth in order to create relationships (the so-called “Oxford Five” group of beautiful and brilliant friends) that never existed in the novels. While this alteration may be justified for the televisual format, it also signals something about the limits of the show’s spectacular horizon. The only storyline in the adaptation that is set in China are flashbacks to Ye Wenjie’s growing disassociation from humankind during the Cultural Revolution. This narrative thread gestures to the story’s Chinese origins, but also marks the show’s departure from them. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo’s internationalization of the series’ plot line in the Netflix adaptation may be seen as a culmination of the novel’s global popularity, but making the Cultural Revolution flashbacks the sole representation of China has another effect of containing China in its own history. While the Oxford Five gear up to counter the San-Ti in London, the image of China imprinted on the viewers is not just from another era, but one culpable for the impending alien invasion. The traumatic spectacle of the mass politics in China’s past produces a menacing specter in the global future.

What’s more, Ye Wenjie’s origin story complicates the show’s own circulation by showcasing the darkest period of modern Chinese history, ensuring that the show will face criticism from audiences in China, where many commenters took issue with the scene as an example of the West’s attempt to humiliate China¹⁶ (Netflix is officially prohibited in China). Chinese media conglomerate Tencent released its own adaptation of Liu’s novel a year before the Netflix premiere.¹⁷ The 30-episode series faithfully – at times literally — translates the story (with the exception, of course, of the crucial struggle session scene, which is omitted) and won high ratings in China, but still left some viewers wishing for a bigger special effects budget.¹⁸ While some Chinese critics of the Netflix series, including state media,¹⁹ seek to protect what they see as an essentially Chinese narrative from becoming diluted through politically-correct diversification, the adaptation’s creators (and Liu himself, it should be noted) have explained these decisions through their particular narrative focus on the global scope of the story.²⁰ The “universal” scale of Liu’s The Three-Body Problem does push us to consider a shared sense of the global and the future of humanity. But the Netflix showrunners’ decision to visually and narratively prioritize epic spectacle ends up distorting the Chinese features of the story in a way that both foregrounds the Chinese manifestation of the spectacular dynamic that anticipates the invasion of the San-Ti, but also erases much of the characters, settings, and nuances of language that mark the story as a product of Chinese culture. As compelling and entertaining as it may be, Netflix’s show does nothing to challenge China’s secondary position in the superficial comparisons that plague so many Chinese cultural productions in the global market. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo seem more interested in perpetuating the idea of a “Chinese Star Wars” or “Chinese Game of Thrones” rather than disrupting the comparative order of things, or even producing a “Chinese Three-Body Problem.”

The post The Global Spectacle of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem appeared first on China Research Center.

Mao’s regime was one of the most contentious in history. One may argue that its accomplishments were remarkable. For the first time since the mid-19th century, it effectively unified mainland China, which had been torn apart by constant warfare, political turmoil, and natural disaster. The revolution instilled in the Chinese people a sense of unity and national rejuvenation. Life expectancy at birth grew from 35–40 years when the Communists took power to 65.5 years by the end of the Mao era, one of the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.¹ The regime also presided over what has been described as “perhaps the single greatest educational effort in human history.”² In 1949, China’s illiteracy rate stood at roughly 85–90%. By 1979, this figure had dropped to about 25%.³

On the other side of the ledger, Mao’s China was one of the most repressive and disaster-ridden regimes in the world. Acting according to the principles of communism, the state seized all land and largely eliminated private property. The CCP apparatus was established in every village, urban workplace and neighborhood, policing every aspect of people’s lives to a level unprecedented in history. It was the only country that had tens of millions of people who starved to death — caused not by war or natural disaster, but by government policy failures during the Great Leap Forward.⁴ It purged hundreds of thousands of intellectuals during the Anti-Rightist campaign, and condemned many so-called rightists and their families to decades in “labor reform” camps. Nearly 20 million urban youths were involuntarily sent to border regions and barren rural areas to be “re-educated” by “poor and lower-middle peasants,” causing tremendous hardship and countless tragedies to both urban and rural populations.⁵ Finally, in the last 10 years of Mao’s rule, the Cultural Revolution brought catastrophic destruction of culture and social values, placing the country on the verge of collapse and bequeathing a legacy of destruction and violence to generations of Chinese to come. 

Looking at the Weberian tripartite classification of political authority — rational-legal, charismatic, and traditional — it is clear the Mao regime successfully rolled the first two into one but failed to encompass the third.⁶ The establishment of the PRC provided the Communists legal-constitutional authority that throughout Mao’s time (and indeed to this day) met no effective challenge. Mao excelled at what Daniel Leese has called “charismatic mobilization” as a way either to implement the party’s policies or to circumvent the party as an institution by appealing directly to the masses.⁷ His extraordinary qualities and personality cult accounted for his charismatic authority. Mao’s revolution attempted to challenge and ultimately eliminate traditional authority (i.e., one where power derives from long-established culture, customs, and social structures), but in the end largely failed.⁸

The Maoist party line condemned anything and everything that did not meet its “proletarian” values as “bourgeois” or “feudal.” Such “reactionary” remnants were to be attacked, purged, and eliminated. The political and ideological goal, especially in the last decade of the Mao era, was to spark “a revolution deep in one’s soul,” with the impossible mission of ridding human nature of “selfishness.”⁹ But the standards were arbitrary, often rendering the political climate of a given time contradictory with that of other times. This kind of contradiction was not acknowledged as an error or insistency, but rather was rationalized as in line with “Marxist dialectical materialism.” Maoist ideology became a conglomeration of terms and symbols which were wielded as a weapon in factional infighting, spouted as a testament to loyalty, and manipulated by individuals scrambling to get ahead. On the ground, competent party cadres skirted ideological rigidity to cut and fit party policies to suit diverse situations and individuals.

Scholars have pointed out that in their daily operations CCP cadres had become bureaucratic technocrats who attempted to modify or change the “structure,” which is “broadly defined to refer to everything that lies outside a political actor and sets limits to what is politically possible at any particular time through dynamic manipulations.”¹⁰ In such manipulations, as Aminda Smith has noted, cadres and officials recognized “the limits of simplistic solutions to complex social problems, and the frequently meditated on the tensions between the theory and the practice of ideological remolding.”¹¹ Sociologist Erving Goffman called this type of maneuvering “a working understanding.”¹² As this study has revealed, even when purges and “class struggle” were most severe, there were local cadres who commiserated with people who had been politically condemned, obeyed age-old cultural enactments, followed common sense, or blended party policies with old values and practices. In other words, functionaries at various levels of the party-state apparatus found ways to practice political tai chi, so to speak.

The most formidable force opposing Maoist ideology, however, was not something that was organized or confrontational. Rather, it was the sheer indifference of the people. The tai chi type of circuitousness and wangling was more commonly found among ordinary people at the grassroots level than in officialdom. It was not carefully planned but extemporaneous. The Shanghai way of coping with communism depicted in this study had no established ideology, no perceptible organization, no given agenda. At one level it was a spontaneous struggle for survival; at another, it was a clever and persistent pursuit of comfort and pleasure. Either way, it constituted a pattern of unintended and also informal resistance against Maoist heavy-handed interference in everyday life. “The general pattern of life is important,” sociologist William Foote Whyte once wrote, “but it can be constructed only through observing the individuals whose actions make up that pattern.”¹³ What my book has provided is precisely such observations of individual actions and behaviors that constituted that pattern. To borrow James Scott’s concept, we may call the pattern “Chinese-style weapons of the weak.”¹⁴

As we have seen in the book, Mao’s era was marked by a constant shortage of virtually every daily necessity. To get by, people devised ways to put extremely limited resources to best use. In an age of material scarcity, creativity and ingenuity were often reflected in trivial ways, ways that might be thought to be insignificant and might be easily overlooked. But as Georg Hegel said, “The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.”¹⁵ It would take effort to discern fashion in a time when every inch of fabric was rationed, to know how fine food could be when every drop of cooking oil was controlled, to appreciate a little flowerpot culture when aesthetics were condemned as bourgeois — in short, it would require an attentive eye to see colors and individualities in the vast ocean of monotony and uniformity and to recognize the significance of the insignificant.¹⁶

These small manifestations of individuality reveal a type of everyday resistance to party-dictated norms in private life. At the private level, Shanghainese, from the old rich and best minds to common people living in crowded back alleyways, struggled to keep their lifestyle intact as much as possible, using the party’s own policies and programs to maintain a way of life that the party might well condemn as “bourgeois decadence.” The essence of such a lifestyle – for some it was no more than the pursuit of a simple pleasure – never died out during Mao’s time, but instead became a powerful undercurrent beneath the surface of Communist asceticism. There were colors among the humdrum and monotony, interests that diverged from official doctrine, and individuality hidden in uniformity.

Elizabeth J. Perry has pointed out that central to Maoist mass mobilization was “the role of cultural positioning, or the strategic deployment of a range of symbolic resources (religion, ritual, rhetoric, dress, drama, art, and so on) for purposes of political persuasion.”¹⁷ There was another side of cultural positioning as well, one in which people were apathetic toward official mobilization while in subtle and savvy ways they circumvented Maoist norms and, in daily life, “positioned” themselves with their own deep-seated cultural norms. This was done informally, in the way that “people employ various forms of action that are not premade” but are created ad hoc to “make the most of the possibilities in given circumstances.”¹⁸

The tai chi type of resistance that this study explores found fertile ground in Shanghai largely because it could be enacted in everyday life where “being informal” was the order of the day. If there is a “tyranny of informality,” as a social theory on contemporary cultural practices has argued, then the power of informality applies perfectly to daily life in Shanghai in the time of Maoist tyranny.¹⁹ As we have seen in this study, the power of informality was typically executed quietly and often invisibly. It was like “an underground movement of secret freedom fighters, each acting individually and independently to ignore, evade, resist, and thwart the increasingly heavy hand of government power.”²⁰ The informality and invisibility exerted a subtle but sure influence on one’s character without one being consciously aware of the influence. In silence, people crafted an insurgence to defend the city’s character.

By the end of the Mao era, the legacy of the city’s capitalist spirit and its associated bourgeois lifestyle survived just below the surface of Maoist socialism. A percipient observer could almost smell the remains of the past after decades of revolution. Historian Ross Terrill, who visited China in 1974, exclaimed, “It is amazing how often socialist Shanghai talks about capitalism, how insistently a visit to Shanghai evokes thought about the bitch-goddess of capitalism. Twenty-five years of Liberation, yet not quite liberated from this specter. You see no sign of capitalism, but it remains a psychic dragon, to be looked in the eye and slain.”²¹

Shanghai was not alone in preserving old values and practices that undermined the Maoist dictatorship and cultural positioning. Scholars have noted that a “second society,” underground and mostly invisible, existed nationwide by the end of Mao’s rule.²² Mao famously proclaimed that in the struggle for communism, “Either the East Wind [communism] prevails over the West Wind [capitalism] or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind; and there can be no compromise.”²³ Mao apparently was too categorical in his claim. Even in the most radical years of Mao’s revolution — in what Michael Dutton described as “the years that burned” — the wind did not always blow in one direction.²⁴ At the end of Mao’s era, anthropologist James L. Watson rightly pointed out: “There is often a discrepancy between the expressed goals of political campaigns and the practical consequences of social engineering. In this China is by no means unique.”²⁵ In numerous more recent research, scholars have noted that “heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tension between official and unofficial cultures were persistent features of grassroots society during the Mao years.”²⁶ In that regard, Shanghai was not a unique case of deviation and resistance.

As mentioned earlier, to this day, Maoism has never died. It only faded away, incompletely. While it is uncertain if Maoist governance will come back to China someday in some form or to some extent, we can be certain that the tai chi type of meandering resistances, involuntary accommodation, silent deviation, and spontaneous manipulations — in short, the art of being ruled — will be there in the society and particularly at the grassroots level in coping with autocracy, in the way that is not always readily visible but tenaciously effective and, to ruler’s dismay, ultimately powerful.

The post The Chinese Style Weapons of the Weak: A Think Piece of Shanghai Tai Chi appeared first on China Research Center.

Marketus: I got to see myself not just as a black man in America, but just as a young man in the world, in China. When you’re somewhere else, you can reinvent yourself. You can experience who you are by yourself.

Interviewer: How did studying abroad in China influence you?

Marketus: I first studied in China, in Beijing, in 1997. I was the only black student in my program. I went on, it was CET academic programs, and I was one black student, only black student, a class of like, there were probably 50 students. That was not jarring. I mean, I was prepared for that. I was prepared for that experience, in a sense. But I didn’t know what to expect.

Like, you know, I had one semester of Chinese before that, so I didn’t, my Chinese wasn’t good. I could say hello, goodbye. I could probably order, mumbled my way through ordering food and trying to buy something in the shop. But my Chinese level at that time was really low. And until the end of the semester, it got, of course, a lot better.

But my experience, I felt a number of different things, right? One, there was definitely a curiosity from Chinese people towards, you know, my body, my, towards my blackness, rather. And I didn’t feel that it was virulent or that threatening at any point. It was kind of an innocuous, like, curiosity about who I was, where I was from. You know, people had a hard time imagining that I was from America. It was like, “No, you’re black. You got to be from Africa, right?”

You know, so this was a thing I would go out to, like, stores and the shopping malls. And when I would go out to a big store, inevitably large crowds would, like, form around me. And people were curious. And again, it never felt threatening. It never felt like someone was out to get me or hated me. But there were experiences where I felt like, okay, the experience of, you know, a white American and a black American are definitely different in China.

Ostensibly, it looks the same because people are kind of reacting to you the same way. Oh, they’re trying to touch your hair because it’s blond, or they’re trying to touch your hair because it’s, you know, you’re black. And some of those outside things are the same. But what I really understood later towards the end of my stay was that the difference was internal. There’s an internalization of the difference between black and white.

I had maybe three really good Chinese friends during my stay there that were really interested in me, really took…really sweet, kind people, right? That was definitely ingratiating. I really had a really good time with that and enjoyed that and loved them for that. But I don’t think that many people were as endearing or wanting to get to know me in the same way that they wanted to get to know my white classmates, right? I mean, it was almost a default was like, “Oh, yeah, we’re trying to get to know white people.” And that was because, you know, white Americans were seen as, you know, I’ll get educated, they’re coming from educated families or having money.

I mean, again, this is 1997 in China, right? There was a different sort of expectation or a different kind of thought process or tropes that they had for like whiteness. But as a black person, you know, I would always get these questions about my life and, you know, and poverty and all these other tropes about blackness that pop up, right? And I’m there and I’m trying to communicate the best I can, but I’m realizing like, huh, they have a very skewed opinion of blackness, right, and who I am and what I am and what I can do, what I can’t do, you know, my intellectual capacity and all these other things and your family life and if we have money or not.

That took me aback a little bit. I was a little bit jarred by that. And so I did notice that, that I didn’t have as much of an opportunity to really meet people or people to really meet me in the same way that some of my white colleagues did, right? And also being on study abroad with majority, like, white students, no one ever invited me to go to stuff, right? I had to really work hard to like inject myself in like activities and stuff, but no one ever said, “Hey, Marketus, let’s go.” I mean, I hung out with international students, had like really three really good Russian friends, Italian students. I was hanging out with people, you know, other than Americans, because the Americans, I mean, nobody was inviting me to go places and travel and stuff like that. And so I felt in some ways, a little isolated, right?

And then gaslighted about my experience, right? And things that, that I was going through. There was this one experience I had, I was with a Chinese American friend and we were out shopping and she had to get a pair of glasses. So we went to this glass, this eyeglass store and she was being fitted for glasses and things like that. So she had to go to a different room and the guy behind the counter made a comment and she just burst out laughing. And I was like, “What’s so funny?” And she said, “Oh, this man just said, ‘Is your thing following us?'” He referred to me as a thing.

And I was, I was upset with her for laughing, right? And, and I was like, “Hey, that’s not cool.” You know, that really stuck with me, right? That was a form of other-ization, right? Things like that would happen, right? Or I had a friend of a friend, Chinese friend of a friend who referred to me as a little black or Xiaohei, you know, which can have several different meanings, right? One, I was, I was a very small person. I was 160 pounds, you know, 5’10” when I was in college, I was super skinny. So, you know, I mean, Xiaohei could be a term of endearment if I knew you, you know, maybe, but it had some other more pejorative meanings that I, you know, that I wasn’t quite comfortable with that I learned, you know, later on.

So I started realizing and understanding that, oh, okay, there is a difference with blackness and whiteness. There is a certain privilege that comes with whiteness, you know, in China, and that may be receding now, right? You know, but, but there was definitely when I was there, there was a, you know, in the preceding years, because I’ve lived in China for, you know, for a long, for almost 12 years, right, 12, 13 years. And so, yes, there was this white privilege.

And this is not to say that every Chinese person believes in, adheres to, follows like this anti-blackness, but everyone understands it, right? Everyone knows that it exists, right? And so I’ve had several experiences when I was there, it was like, whoa, that was, that was pretty shocking, right? But I’ve also had wonderful friendships, you know, work relationships with, with many Chinese people who, you know, didn’t feel that way. And so, yeah, but it is there, you know, it’s definitely there.

My brother told me this one story when he was working for an English company in Beijing. And part of the assignment for the day was if you could be anyone else in the world, who would you be? And so everyone in the classroom was saying, I want to be this person, this person, this person. Some of them were Chinese. Some of them were like famous white people. And then there was one guy who said, “I would want to be Michael Jordan.” And the class was like, “Huh, what? But he’s black.” You know, like, like, like, why would you want to like be black? Like, you know, so there was this sort of like group acknowledgement of blackness. And it was something that they didn’t want to be, right?

There is this difference even today, you know, that we have to acknowledge. It’s a little bit disconcerting and disingenuous that the Chinese government officially says that racism doesn’t exist in China, because that’s not true. And I would love for them to start to just to deal with their own biases of you want to call it racism, I can call it that, towards like, you know, darker skin people within that country, because it’s there, right? It’s there. I don’t think it should deter students from going. Because you experience that here in America, right?

But I think that it’s something that needs to be worked on, resolved, addressed, in the same way that we’re still trying to work on, you know, our problems with race relations in this country, right? There is no panacea, but, but it’s something that we have to engage with, right?

Interviewer: What makes study abroad a valuable experience?

Marketus: Study abroad is crucial, because we have to have one-to-one contacts between people of various different groups and culture, right? That’s the only way to move forward, right? We have to really get to know and understand who we are, individually, as a group, as a culture, as a people, and it can only really happen… I mean, there’s sort of educational things that you can do at universities, at high schools, at elementary schools. But I think the key is really getting people together to see that they have more in common than the things that they differ on, right?

So study abroad helps with this, right? It really helps once you’re out of your own country. And for me, what it did for me was that it allowed me to see myself out of my own cultural milieu. I was out of my own environment. And I got to see myself not just as a black man in America, but just as a young man in the world, in China, without the interference of the racial hierarchy, the racial dynamics, and all of the static that you have to deal with on a quotidian basis when you’re living in your own country.

When you’re somewhere else, nobody knows you. You can reinvent yourself. You have time to breathe and experience who you are by yourself. And that’s very rewarding and refreshing. And that’s what happens with study abroad. I mean, it’s an elixir. I mean, I wasn’t a great student undergrad my initial two, three years, but when I got back from study abroad, it seemed that everything had clicked for me. I realized why I was doing this. I had so much more energy and excitement about my classes and about what I was doing and my purpose in life. It just rejuvenated me and energized me.

I became a better student that second half of my undergraduate career that helped propel me to the master’s degree, to the Ph.D. I do credit study abroad with that. So I recommend that all students have a study abroad experience, even if it’s just for the summer. But if you can get a semester program, go on a semester program, that will be life-changing, especially for students who are first-generation college students. I was a first-gen student undergrad and that was life-changing for me.

Interviewer: How can institutions encourage study abroad for American students of diverse backgrounds?

Marketus: There needs to be a lot, a lot more money allocated to study abroad, right? I thought the 100,000 Strong project was a good initiative, but there was no money behind it. So for first-gen students, they need money not only for the program to study abroad and while they’re there in the country, they may even need a little bit of money for when they get back, right? Because they’re probably working a part-time job, paying rent, taking care of themselves. They’re going to need some like, what do I do when I get home? I’m going to have to have some money to cushion me until I get my next check, right, or until school starts back again and work-study. So there are all these hidden costs with study abroad for first-gen students that need to be addressed.

And then another thing is that representation is important. There’s one organization now, Student Teens of Color Abroad, that’s a person of color is actually running an organization and taking high school students to different countries, right? And that’s commendable. We need 10, 20 more of those, right? In doing this, it doesn’t mean that that’s anathema to what study abroad is about — broadening horizons, getting people around different cultural groups.

There is a need for the HBCU. There is a need for the Hispanic-serving institution. This doesn’t mean that the students who attend HBCUs or Hispanic-serving institutions are somehow cloistered or themselves away from other people or segregated themselves from other people. It’s actually the exact opposite. It’s that they need a specific space to thrive in, to be able to do some of these things, to get their feet wet. And then they can go out there into the world and relate with anyone and be just as good and to deal with anyone, engage with anyone in the world.

We need to look at those institutions and those students who, you know, they may not have a 3.5 or 3.8 GPA. They may be borderline 3.0, 2.8, 2.7, whatever, but those students still deserve a chance and an opportunity. They’re still very deserving. And I would argue that an experience like study abroad will help put things in perspective for them and propel them to be not just better students, but more globally-minded citizens.

Lastly, I just say that we need government, we need private enterprises to donate and give money to this endeavor. It’s not just for personal reasons, but it’s also national security stuff. There are a number of reasons why we want our citizens to be more globally minded, to have linguistic skills that not only serve our country, but can be used to help maintain peace throughout the world. We need that.

The post Marketus Presswood: What it is like to study in China as a Black Man appeared first on China Research Center.

Next, we focus on another potential flash point: Taiwan. The issue features a full video of a panel discussion at Spelman College in Atlanta on Nov. 16 titled “Taiwan as a factor in U.S.-China relations.” The three panelists — Mao Lin from Georgia Southern University, John Wagner Givens from Spelman College, and Yawei Liu from The Carter Center — also provided short summaries of their arguments. Dr. Mao warns against the U.S. drift toward “strategic clarity” regarding Taiwan. Dr. Givens argues that Taiwan, despite its powerful economic and technological successes, is still invisible on the world stage. Dr. Liu writes about the difficulty in maintaining peace and stability between Taiwan and China. He argues that the U.S. should re-emphasize Washington’s long-held position that the U.S. doesn’t support Taiwan independence and that the Taiwan issue should be settled peacefully between China and Taiwan.

John Garver turns to another flashpoint: China-India relations. In an interview with his spouse, our Managing Editor Penelope Prime, he discusses the causes and prospects for India-China relations. And finally, Mary Brown Bullock, the former president of Agnes Scott College and member of the China Research Center’s Advisory Board, introduces her memoir, which chronicles her family’s long engagement with China and “how an American family was affected by China’s civil war, the Korean War, Nixon’s opening, rapprochement, collaboration, and competition.”

The post Editor’s Note appeared first on China Research Center.

Wu worries about the future of the bilateral relationship, and about his status as a Chinese American at a time when it may not be safe to be one. He hopes for the best but prepares for the worst. He has a plan. In fact, he has three plans – A, B, and C – just in case. These plans consist of staying in the United States, creating different businesses that don’t involve China, or moving his family to a third country that is more open to trade and is friendlier to Chinese Americans.

The rabbit metaphor suggests adaptability, flexibility, persistence, and pragmatism – characteristics that Wu and thousands of Americans display in their dealings in and with China. These smaller businesses may not form the backbone of the commercial relationship, 51 years after President Nixon’s dramatic visit. But they arguably comprise key vertebrae that now support several million jobs in the United States and helped maintain a half-century of now-tenuous peace between nuclear-armed superpowers.

Our Smart Rabbits are not emotionally neutral about current tensions between the United States and China, which include a trade war, bellicose rhetoric, accusations about the origin of the COVID pandemic, alleged slave labor in Xinjiang, many pieces of U.S. legislation seeking to restrain and punish China, “blacklists” of sanctioned people and companies, growing nationalism in China, spy balloons, China’s relations with Russia, moves to force the popular TikTok social media channel to sell to American buyers or shut down in the United States, even threats of war over Taiwan.

These businesspeople overwhelmingly oppose decoupling, or significantly reducing trade between the world’s largest economies. Their solution is to increase trade and people-to-people exchanges with due respect to matters of national security. They want to keep working the trade channels and people-to-people connections while governments work harder on other problems bedeviling the relationship – and there are plenty of them.

These business owners speak of a middle way that deliberately avoids extreme positions: loving China whatever it does, or treating it like an existential adversary, closing national borders and minds to keep goods and people out. Rather, they engage with Chinese customers and suppliers as Americans who follow America’s laws and support American values. They earnestly believe that their engagement with Chinese counterparts improves worker rights and human rights generally by the way they treat their own employees and, if they have them, their Chinese employees. They rightly bristle when referred to as naïve or unpatriotic.

These businesses see two parallel realities. One is that China is uniformly bad and needs to be opposed and separated from. The other is that China is an important trading partner, generator of American jobs, profit center, muse of global competitiveness for American corporations, and indispensable partner for dealing with existential threats facing the world. Today, the dominant narrative is that China is a menace and an implacable adversary. The businesses see this perspective as detrimental to their companies and their desire to see better bilateral relations, or less bad than they are today.

“Bad China” was the target of former President Trump’s tariffs cum trade war and President Biden’s continuation of them despite substantial evidence they do not work as promoted. President Biden admitted as much during the election that put him in the White House. But as of this writing, the tariffs are still on despite reports that they have cost U.S. businesses and consumers $125 billion and counting over three years and increasing by $3 billion each month. Smaller businesses have suffered from the added tariffs more than larger corporations, which have much deeper pockets and myriad ways of making money.

A U.S.-China Middle Way for Smart Rabbits and Their Elected Representatives

The businesspeople who contributed personal reflections for this article share six common perspectives on the need to find a middle ground between the opposites of “Bad China” and “Good China.” 

First is the belief that trade with China is important and that a headlong rush to decouple will damage the economies of both countries and the world. 

Robert Fisch, a business consultant with offices in Florida and Shanghai, said: “A major rupture between these two great powers would be very destabilizing for the world. One of the major concerns is not COVID-19 or trade policy, but rather the war of words, which does not help either side.”

Fisch added: “Look, I’ve lived there for decades. I feel part Chinese. I don’t want bad things to happen.”

George Wang owns a contract manufacturing business based in Oregon and is a native of China. He said: “The U.S. is worried about China’s influence around the world, which in time could change how the influence game is played. I don’t want to see confrontation take place in my lifetime. Mutual understanding should be sought through increased collaboration and communication.” 

Inna Prikhodko, who owns a South Carolina business that helps Chinese hospitals source pharmaceuticals from the United States, said: “I think about this problem all the time. Every year I am still open for business, I am grateful. If President Biden decides not to trade with China, we’ll have to find something else to do.” 

Second is the belief that trade can and must be conducted even amid disagreements about other issues, such as human rights or who has the better political and economic system. A “middle way” is needed that avoids being reflexively for or against the people and leaders of the other country.  

Kimberly Kirkendall, who operates a consultancy in Ohio with clients in China, said: “The labels are extreme. Either you are a pro-China mouthpiece of the Communist Party, or you hate China. The truth is usually in the middle, but it is getting harder to walk the middle. I try.”

Part of trying involves speaking to college students, Kirkendall said. “I want people to think critically. I tell students that the policy of the U.S. government has been to contain China. I ask students to flip that. If China or Russia were saying their goal is to contain the U.S., how would you feel? It’s important to understand the other side of any argument. Challenging our own perspective is largely missing from official discourse, and I’m constantly amazed by the fuzzy thinking I confront.”

Other contributors, including David Mathison, owner of a furniture cover manufacturer in North Carolina, agree about the fuzzy thinking. He said: “There is no way [the U.S. government] could make a case that making leather in China using U.S. materials undercuts the industry in the United States. There is no leather-making industry in the United States. We sell upper-end products, and we can only do that by working in China.” 

Third is a belief that business is a force for good because it strengthens individual relations, improves mutual understanding, and creates broad economic benefits by transacting with others. 

Chinese American business owner Jeff Ji of Philadelphia with clients in China said: “You have to have the fixer, the matchmaker, the cultural translator. Keep trying to build strong relationships. Many of our politicians have never had to make a payroll. They don’t get it. Americans and Chinese have built many useful relationships. It will be a disaster for all of us if they are systematically broken.” 

Fourth is frustration with governments who are overly antagonistic toward each other and largely dismissive or ignorant of the economic and informal diplomatic roles played by smaller companies and their support systems.

Longtime China entrepreneur Mitch Thompson of California is one of the few Americans we talked to who is planning to give up on China after years of working there, learning the language, and marrying a Chinese woman. He said: “In China, the role of the foreigner is not useful anymore. It’s shocking how closed China is right now. It’s much more than COVID. COVID is an excuse.”

Mathison, the furniture covering manufacturer, is one of the few small businesspeople who have testified before Congress. He was dismayed by the experience. “I was totally shocked. The members weren’t really interested in what the answers were. They requested a statement in advance of the hearing, but instead of discussing the points outlined in that statement, they requested it just be read. I was disappointed and disgusted to have to sit through that as an open hearing.”

Fifth is the sense of disappointment bordering on sadness that many of these entrepreneurs feel as they contemplate decades of work learning languages, traveling back and forth — all coming to naught because of geopolitics and extreme attitudes.  

Dan Digree is a loudspeaker maker whose products are now more expensive than foreign competitors because of the Trump-era tariffs. He said: “I’m very disappointed that the Biden administration hasn’t taken time to look at the China trade policy from the perspective of small business. With all the supply chain disruption happening, I’m very angry that the government hasn’t dealt with it or provided any help. The dangerous state of U.S.-China relations is an existential threat to many small businesses.”

Utah businessman Dan Stephenson, a Chinese speaker who wants Utah school kids to study the language, said: “We need a politician who will stand up and say: ‘China has the biggest middle class in the world, and they are ready to buy stuff from our state.’ If state legislators understood more about how China works and could distinguish legitimate concerns from fear-mongering rhetoric, it would be a real boost for both sides.”

Paul Swenson is Asia director for Wisconsin-based AMSOIL Industrial, a maker of lubricants for wind turbines. He said: “The relationship has long periods where things are good followed by periods when they’re not; it is like being married. The current bad patch may be part of this pattern, but it could also signal a change in direction. China is my second home and I’m deeply worried that one day it might not be as welcoming for foreign companies. 

“I believe we Americans must keep a strong hand on what is right and wrong and what our values are. But does it make sense to end our business relationships after we’ve invested so much? Does it make sense to throw money down the drain on tariffs? There must be a better way.” 

Jeanne DeMund, founder of Seattle-based Echo Products, has done business with China for several decades. She observed: “Caving in to China’s demands will not get us anywhere. But we need a calm, reasonable series of interactions to lower the temperature as much as possible. Draw on old relationships that do exist: the NGO relationships, the universities, the diplomatic relationships, the people-to-people relationships. We really need to work this out because it’s in our best interests.” 

Last is a sense of guarded optimism that common sense will prevail, and the two countries will arrive at a place where important areas of bilateral cooperation can coexist with profound disagreements. Should this not be the case, additional homes will be needed for our Smart Rabbits. 

Jacob Cluver, founder of a custom-bred pig company in Illinois, said: “China is at the point where they need to develop outside the big cities and coasts. Rising incomes mean higher demand for better quality food and other goods. It would be foolish for the U.S. to quit China now.” 

David Halm, a project manager for Georgia-based Project Success, said: “I hope to be doing business in China 10 years from now if the governments can figure out how to coexist. I’m optimistic about a change, but it will require strong leadership to find a solution that is best for the American worker and consumer. It has to be more than just a masquerade.” 

Added Robert Fisch, the Florida and Shanghai business consultant: “Things in China tend to happen in waves. China will open, then crack down a bit, then open and then crack down. I’m hopeful that the opening part of the cycle is not too far off in the future. While there is much saber rattling and posturing, I’m still bringing on new clients, including a large online and brick and mortar company for different verticals that just got $400 million of funding.” 

Thomas Biju Isaac, founder of Oregon-based Allied Technologies, said: “I’m an optimist. Things will get better. But we will pivot, doing more automated design and production in the U.S. We expect China and India to grow, even faster than the U.S. – and we’ll be there, too.” 

Jimmy Robinson is a founder of New York-based PingPong Digital, which helps American universities recruit Chinese students. He said: “The instability in the relationship we’re seeing now is likely to be short-lived, as China will likely start to return to more stabilizing policies prioritizing trade and business. They have a lot of optimism and hope. And so do I.

“A major rupture between these two great powers would be very destabilizing for the world. We need more and more, rather than less and less, communication. Active dialogue and engagement rather than just propaganda going back and forth.”  

Robinson added: “A country that is the second largest economy in the world, we will always have a business relationship with China.  I don’t think you can have a complete decoupling. It doesn’t make sense in the board rooms or the legislatures anywhere in the world.” 

Other business owners see the glass as half empty: Business relations will continue at some level, major improvement will not be possible without major changes in both counties. Mitch Thompson, the entrepreneur from California, said: “The magnitude of trade will be enough to hold things together for my business and for many other Americans. But culturally we’ve never been further apart, and I’ve been going there for many years. About the relationship improving, I’m about as hopeful as I am about us having elections in the future without significant violence and chaos. Little hope for improvement with the current regime there, politics here. Very sad.” 

The discovery of a middle way for policymakers is necessary to achieve progress on the diplomatic front. A first step is to realize that radical uncoupling is not desirable or even feasible, then identify and ring-fence those areas where cooperation can flourish. The stories collected for this article include ample examples of poorly conceived policy, especially tariffs, producing poor results.

Recommendations to Help Smart Rabbits

Weeks have passed since Presidents Biden and Xi last talked. Meanwhile, bad blood between the two countries continues to flow. There are steps that should be taken now to ensure that trade and people-to-people relations can continue while larger geopolitical issues play out. Nothing can be taken for granted as the constituencies for even modestly resetting the bilateral relationship remain in the minority.

Direct support for small business

• Lift the tariffs set in place by President Trump. If for some reason the tariffs can’t be lifted, the U.S. should expand the tariff exemption program and make it easier for smaller companies to apply. If an application is denied, the reason should be shared with the business along with advice on how to become eligible. Tariffs disproportionately harm small businesses and lower income people.
• Redouble efforts to boost sales of U.S. products, especially from smaller and minority-owned companies, through China’s $3 trillion per year e-commerce marketplaces.
• Increase support for government programs that help U.S. companies export to China. Encourage the Chinese government to appreciate the role played by U.S. small businesses and their supporting ecosystem in building the bilateral commercial relationship.

Federal policy

• Take small business into account when making trade policy. Carefully listening to their concerns will help avoid polices such as tariffs that inadvertently harm U.S. business. As David Mathison, the North Carolina furniture cover manufacturer said: “Why does the U.S. tariff leather from China when there’s no leather industry in the U.S. to protect?”

-U.S. and Chinese leaders should meet frequently and talk face-to-face about differences. Issuing press statements is no substitute for diplomacy.

• Push China to complete its purchase of U.S. goods under the Phase One Agreement and shift immediately to negotiating a Phase Two involving the removal of structural barriers to trade.

• Create a rapid dispute resolution process that both countries can use. This was envisioned in the Phase One Agreement but never fully implemented.

• Resume and increase people-to-people exchanges as soon possible. Continue to welcome students from China to our college campuses. Many Chinese students contemplating study in the U.S. say they no longer feel welcome and have accepted placements in the UK, Canada, and Australia. The Chinese side needs to reduce ad hominem criticisms of the United States and American culture, realizing that students populate an important bridge between cultures and set the stage for future cooperation.

State policy

• Continue to support small and midsize businesses to do lawful business with China.
• Avoid harmful legislation such as prohibiting the sale of agricultural land to Chinese nationals just because they are Chinese nationals.
• Welcome Chinese students to private and public universities. Resume outward and inward trade missions as soon as possible. Continue to sponsor state trade delegations and welcome Chinese investment that creates jobs.

-Hold regular conversations with Congressional representatives in order to promote balanced and reasonable trade policy with China.

Overcome negative perceptions

• Expand programs for workers and families who have suffered disproportionately from job losses regardless of cause. Improve and expand job training and retraining, which was proposed by the Biden Administration in 2022 but stalled in Congress.
• Make trade and global competitiveness a national priority again instead of a subject to be downplayed or avoided. Work to improve economic literacy in schools so that Americans have an informed foundational knowledge of how the national and world economies work. Critical thinking skills are needed to prevent the pernicious effects of groupthink and the seductive untruths magnified by social media.
• Support immigration reform so that STEM workers can more readily enter the United States. The need for this expertise is widespread and includes many smaller companies that make products to sell to global customers. Congress has kicked this can down the road for years. Now the government wants to provide support for the semiconductor industry but finds we do not have the skilled labor.

• Acknowledge the need for more and smarter diplomacy going forward. Key supply chains involving solar panels and electric vehicles, among other technologies, are controlled by Chinese companies, which have leads of many years. It will not be possible, perhaps for decades, for the United States to become exclusive producers of these components and finished products. California will ban internal combustion car engines by 2035, and China will be needed to provide batteries for replacement vehicles. This requires trade agreements, which would be difficult to negotiate in the diplomatic climate that exists today.
• Continue to push China to level the playing field for foreign businesses by improving market access and limiting distortive industrial policies.

• Narrow the scope of national security issues – on both sides – to avoid unintended consequences to trade and investment. Both governments should also look for areas of cooperation around global public goods such as climate and public health.

Long Night’s Journey into Day

The United States needs to remain engaged with China. In large part, this involves people-to-people contact and the satisfaction that comes from connecting with people different from yourself. Commerce is one way to develop and sustain connections. The exchange of things is an activity that has occupied humans since dim antiquity. Even today, in the most remote corners of the world, people gather at dusty roadsides to buy, sell, and socialize, having figured out systems to weigh, measure, and price. As humans, it’s harder to kill those you do business with, although the old notion that “when goods cross borders armies don’t” has been repeatedly disproved.

Our Smart Rabbits – and their counterparts in China – face challenges everywhere they look. Where will their next metaphorical home be? How will they get there and what will they need to make the journey safely? They have been working on the U.S.-China relationship for half a century, and both countries have been lucky for it. It wasn’t only big government and big American corporations that did the trail-blazing. Thousands of Americans made this journey. Many Chinese have also made their own journeys, navigating a different culture, values, and political system. It is in the interests of both countries to ensure that they do not end up in a dead end.

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Washington’s general policy toward the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle is often called “strategic ambiguity.” By refusing to spell out whether and how America would intervene in a war between China and Taiwan, the U.S. was attempting to deter military conflicts in the Taiwan Strait and protect America from being dragged into a war not on Washington’s own terms. With the rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, the increasingly bipartisan consensus to end U.S.-China engagement, and China becoming more assertive both in its rhetoric and actions toward Taiwan, Washington has seen a growing call to replace strategic ambiguity with strategic clarity. Critics of the former argue that strategic ambiguity can no longer deter China from taking Taiwan by force, and America must clearly make a commitment to defend Taiwan if the island is attacked by mainland China. Unsurprisingly, the proposed shift to strategic clarity has immediately become controversial, as it does not fully explain how this shift can be made considering the long and complicated U.S.-China-Taiwan triangular relations. While strategic clarity has yet to replace strategic ambiguity as Washington’s official stance — notice how the White House tried to assure China that there was no change in America’s Taiwan policy after President Joe Biden’s 2021 statement that America would defend Taiwan should China launch a military attack²—America has increased its support for Taiwan short of supporting the island’s de jure independence through high-profile visits, trade agreements, arms sales, and naval patrols of the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. With Beijing being angered by those moves, policy makers and analysts are rightly concerned that the Taiwan Strait may become a military flashpoint between two nuclear powers. 

The current call for strategic clarity, however, suffers from two flaws. First, critics of strategic ambiguity more or less ignore the historical context of that policy and underestimate its usefulness in maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait. After all, there has been no war between America and China over Taiwan in the past decades despite multiple Taiwan Strait crises. Second, supporters for strategic clarity focus too narrowly on defending Taiwan against a possible Chinese military attack and fail to address the security of Taiwan in the broader context. In other words, the future of Taiwan does not rely exclusively on the military balance across the Taiwan Strait. Rather, it involves complicated historical and political issues, many of which are beyond American control. 

Strategic ambiguity has its origins in the historical context shaped by the Korean War, the two Taiwan Strait Crises in the 1950s, and the Cold War confrontation between America and China. As the historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker has put it, strategic ambiguity functioned as “an excellent tool of triple deterrence. It protected the United States against demands from and miscalculation by Taiwan and China. China would not seek to capture Taiwan or the offshore islands because it could not know what the United States would do, and Taiwan would not take provocative actions since it could not be certain of U.S. support.”³ Indeed, strategic ambiguity was largely successful in preventing multiple Taiwan Strait crises from escalating into shooting wars between America and China. 

To argue that strategic ambiguity was successful is not to ignore the changed historical context since the 1990s. The rise of China as a major economic and military power certainly has changed the strategic environment of the Taiwan Strait, and critics of strategic ambiguity rightly point out that with China becoming stronger, strategic ambiguity might be understood in Beijing as strategic weakness and thus encourage Beijing to launch a war against Taiwan. This leads us to the second flaw of strategic clarity, that is, America’s policy toward Taiwan must be viewed in the context of broader U.S.-China relations and not purely as a military issue. 

The root problem of the Taiwan issue is the legal status of Taiwan, which is mainly expressed via the so-called One China principle despite the different interpretations of that principle held by Beijing, Washington, and Taipei. Beijing’s stance has been consistent since 1949: Taiwan is part of China and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) should be the sole legitimate government of China. Taiwan under the Nationalist rule accepted the One China principle but insisted that the Republic of China was the sole legitimate government. While the call for a de jure independent Taiwan became louder after Taiwan became a democracy, the majority of Taiwanese still prefer maintaining the status quo.⁴ The Nixon administration “acknowledged” the One China principle, although Washington has never accepted that the PRC should be the sole legitimate government of China. While America’s understanding of the One China principle is subject to various interpretations, Washington has been consistent on two points. On the one hand, America has never claimed itself to be the ultimate arbitrator of the Taiwan issue. On the other hand, successive American administrations have insisted that the problem of Taiwan must be solved peacefully. The effectiveness of strategic ambiguity, which continued after the U.S.-China rapprochement, should be measured against this context. A good policy should align means with ends. The goal of America’s Taiwan policy had been deterring a war across the Taiwan Strait, and strategic ambiguity was a sufficient means to achieve that end. Washington has never officially pursued the goal of making Beijing abandon the One China principle, which both sides understand is out of the question. The current call for strategic clarity, if not properly managed, could be constructed as America’s de-recognition of the One China principle. In fact, the recent Taiwan White Paper issued by Beijing already suggested that China now believes America is doing so.⁵

The effectiveness of strategic ambiguity, furthermore, was embedded within the larger U.S.-China relations. History has proven that Beijing and Washington were willing to downplay or postpone the Taiwan issue when the two shared larger common strategic interests. During the U.S.-China rapprochement negotiations, for example, both sides downplayed the Taiwan issue to pursue an anti-Soviet alliance. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger that China did not want to use force to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, although China did not want to see “two Chinas” in the world. Kissinger told Zhou that the Nixon administration was “prepared to begin reducing our other forces on Taiwan as our relations improve” and America would “not [advocate] a ‘two Chinas’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution.”⁶ The Chinese stance, which did not insist on immediately terminating diplomatic relations between Washington and Taipei and setting a firm timetable for withdrawing American forces from Taiwan, made it possible for the two sides to negotiate a joint communiqué for the anticipated Nixon visit. When Nixon told Zhou that the two sides should refrain from making Taiwan “a big issue” in the next two or three years, Zhou agreed that “we would rather let the question of Taiwan wait for a little while.”⁷ During the normalization negotiations under the Carter administration, Deng Xiaoping told Leonard Woodcock, head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, that “we hope the U.S. will be very cautious and prudent in tackling your relations with Taiwan and will not prevent China from finding a rational and peaceful solution with Taiwan.” Woodcock ensured Deng that America would not try to “fulfill the defense treaty in a different form” by arms sales. Deng agreed that “we can continue to discuss this question later on without affecting the issuance of the [joint] communiqué [on normalization].” Deng hoped that if the issue of arms sale was raised by the American media, “the President will be very vague and ambiguous in answering this question so that no problem will be raised.” He also agreed that China would not contradict American statements that the Taiwan issue would be solved peacefully.⁸ While the anti-Soviet rationale disappeared after the Cold War, both sides continued to believe that the overall relationship was too important to be destroyed by the Taiwan issue. That’s why Beijing and Washington tried to repair relations after each crisis, including Lee Teng-hui’s visit to America, the NATO bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Chen Shui-bian’s visit to America, and the mid-air collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet. The George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror provided another rationale to downplay the Taiwan issue in exchange for China’s cooperation. 

America’s strategy to deter a cross-strait war, therefore, worked best when China believed that the overall relationship was on a constructive track. The push toward strategic clarity, especially in the context of the death of engagement, may backfire and force Beijing to accept war as the only option to take Taiwan. Strategic clarity implicitly assumes that China’s use of force against Taiwan is inevitable, unless checked by America. This assumption, however, needs to be further analyzed. Beijing, despite its harsh rhetoric, is fully aware of the domestic and international implications if a war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait. A recent study even suggested that domestic support in China for a war against Taiwan is much lower than the official propaganda assumes.⁹ While it’s difficult to know Beijing’s exact intention, the Chinese perception that America will defend Taiwan and delay unification may force China to risk a war, given the central role of Taiwan in the Chinese nationalism. Moreover, strategic clarity can encourage Taipei to take increasingly provocative actions, thus making war a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of focusing solely on beefing up Taiwan’s defense, therefore, America should continue to engage China to build up constructive relations and shape China’s strategic behavior. Some strategic clarity is needed after all: America should make it clear that America will not be the ultimate arbitrator of the Taiwan issue and it’s not in China’s interests to use force against Taiwan. 

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Taiwan faces a more imminent and credible threat to its existence than almost any country. It may well need both U.S. military support and general global backing to survive. Wars in Ukraine and Israel demonstrate how powerful Western, and especially U.S., assistance can be, and how staunchly the Unites States may support those it deems allies. In any potential conflict with China, Taiwan may have some branding advantage: 65% of respondents had favorable views of Taiwan in an August 2023 Pew Research Center poll. This line of thinking reinforces a common complaint by Taiwanese, that the U.S. only pays attention to Taiwan in terms of its relationship with China. Still, this compares well with other Pew polls which show 83% of Americans with unfavorable views of China. Yet, 91% of Americans view Russia unfavorably and the ongoing example of Ukraine shows that this may have its limits. On diplomatic, cultural, and economic fronts, Taiwan has advantages it can and should press.

Partially, Taiwan’s invisibility comes from the profound disadvantage of not generally being recognized as a country or even a self-governing entity, forcing the expenditure of soft power and resources simply to gain recognition. Some rankings of soft power do not even include Taiwan, which is, in some sense, the ultimate condemnation of its soft power. The Soft Power 30, a report by Portland, a strategic communications consultancy, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy ranks Taiwan fifth in its Asia Soft Power 10, behind China, Japan, Korea, and even tiny Singapore. The Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index ranks Taiwan 22nd out of 26 in Asia for diplomatic power, arguing its lack of “participation and influence in multilateral forums and organizations” is the low point that drags it down. Yet even in diplomatic matters where Taiwan is at its biggest disadvantage, there are opportunities. With impressions of China having become quickly and dramatically unfavorable in many democracies, Taiwan has a unique opportunity to step into the gap. Confucius Institutes, once common on U.S. campuses as educational and cultural promotion programs, have declined from almost 100 to five as of November 2023. These closures “reduced opportunities for Chinese language learning and China-related cultural and academic programming.” Leveraging its Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Offices, Taiwan should be doing more to facilitate education and cultural exchange, providing Chinese teachers, support for cultural events, and making itself an alternative destination for study abroad as China has become less popular. Taiwan has strong cultural assets and good timing on its side. This is not the same as getting a seat at the UN or WHO, but it is still an opportunity for Taiwan to expand its soft power and thereby global support.

The Lowy Institute ranks Taiwan 13^th out of 26 on its cultural power, below countries like Russia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This shows how Taiwan has been unable to capitalize on what should be a substantial cultural impact. Taiwanese beef noodle soup and guabao cannot compete in popularity with ramen or tacos, but the global market for bubble tea is worth billions with more than 3,000 bubble tea shops in the U.S. alone. This easily makes it Taiwan’s most popular and profitable cultural export, yet many people in the United States do not associate it with Taiwan. K-Pop devotees can speak at length about their idols’ connections to South Korea, yet even regular consumers are often unaware of the Taiwanese origins of bubble tea.

The Taiwan Creative Content Agency was established in June 2019 and is supervised by the Ministry of Culture. In this respect it lagged the creation of the Korea Creative Content Agency by just over four decades. Taiwan and Taiwanese Americans have had a meaningful impact. Director Ang Lee, Taiwanese American basketball player Jeremy Lin, and singer Jay Chou are all prominent in their fields. Taiwan cannot come close to competing, however, with the dominant trio of East Asia cultural products: Korean pop-music (K-pop), Korean television (K-drama), and Japanese animation, comics, and video games (anime). 

Taiwan’s economy has continued to enjoy relatively rapid and steady growth over the past four decades and its GDP is essentially level with South Korea and Japan on a per capita basis. Yet, the Lowy Institute ranks Taiwan 12th out of 26 in economic relationships. Its score is lowered by a lack of free trade agreements, another result of its difficult diplomatic status. Despite its very real economic success and importance in global trade, Taiwan lacks the hyper-modern glitzy veneer that K-pop, K-drama, and anime have provided Korea and Japan, or the wide brand recognition of their biggest companies.

By market capitalization Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) is larger than any non-American company bar Saudi-Aramco, making it bigger than China’s Tencent, South Korea’s Samsung, or Japan’s Toyota. Yet, it has nothing like the brand or name recognition of these companies. In part, this is due to a low-profile business model focused on making chips for other better-known brands. People recognize the name Samsung on their phone and associate it with Korea. They might recognize that the chip inside is branded as Qualcomm, a San Diego based chip designer, but they are unlikely to know that it was made by TSMC in Taiwan. Initially, this was part of Taiwan and TSMC’s strategy to make themselves indispensable as the manufacturer for chip designers — especially American — rather than competitors to them. Similarly, the Taiwanese company Foxconn produces 70% of iPhone shipments for Apple, but their name is hardly recognized. The founders of TSMC and Foxxcon, Morris Chang and Terry Guo, are well known in Taiwan, but are hardly global household names on par with Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, Jobs, or Bezos.

 This vital but business-to-business focused economy means that the average global citizen does not see Taiwan in the devices and brands they so strongly identify with. According to Theodora Ting Chau and other scholars, another part of the low profile of Taiwanese brands may be associated with the Chinese practice of dividing assets between heirs (coparcenary). Historically, this led to a lack of emphasis on developing a valuable brand which could not be easily split. By contrast, the style of inheritance practiced in Japan and Korea (primogeniture) led to an emphasis on the value and continuity of a brand. This is why so many of the world’s oldest companies today are famously Japanese. It also helps explain why even though the economies and exports of greater China (comprising the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) are much larger, far more Japanese and Korean brands are global household names: Sony, Uniqlo, Seiko, Hitachi, Canon, Asics, Nissan, Toshiba, Panasonic, Yamaha, Subaru, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Hyundai, Kia, Samsung, and LG.

Despite tremendous economic success and substantial cultural offerings, Taiwan remains the almost invisible almost country.  This seems to be partly by design, as with TSMC, and partly due lack of emphasis, for example a lack of government backing for Taiwanese cultural exports. There is, however, no time like the present. If relations between China and the world’s democracies continue to sour, there will be a China-sized hole to be filled, from manufacturing to Chinese language and culture. Film, TV, music, and education could all offer opportunities for Taiwan to highlight its open and democratic values and respect for human rights. In a neat illustration of this conundrum, Taiwan’s government claims it ranked seventh in the world and first in Asia according to the U.N.’s Gender Inequality Index. Yet, the claim and underlying data are provided directly by Taiwan’s government because the U.N. cannot include Taiwan. If Taiwan can enhance its global reach, it has a compelling story to tell.

The expansion of soft power will not immediately secure a seat at the U.N. or WHO, but it can increase global awareness and support for Taiwan’s unique position on the world stage. Taiwan’s successes — from democracy to bubble tea to semiconductors — indicate potential pathways for it to assert its identity. By weaving these threads together, Taiwan can enhance its global narrative and become more visible in a way that would not only help it claim its place in the international community but continue to exist.

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