For decades, corruption has characterized China’s political system. Andy Wedeman adds to his impressive body of work on the subject with an essay analyzing Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaigns. Butler Cain shifts attention to Taiwan and demonstrates in detail how the island has been “remarkably effective” at navigating the international system despite its nebulous political status. At a time when western democracies are being challenged by authoritarian forces, China Currents Managing Editor Penelope Prime reviews three books that analyze the effectiveness of the “China model.” Jessica Teets offers ideas about how civil society organizations can help prevent decoupling of the U.S.-China relationship. Frank Neville also takes on the subject of U.S.-China relations, arguing that the United States must abandon the idea of containing China and jettison the notion, long held in many quarters, that economic development in China will inevitably lead to a more open, western-style political system. Paul Foster rounds out the issue with a fascinating look at what Chinese science fiction tells us about the link between ideology and a dystopian world view.

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

In February 2012, it was revealed that Gu Kailai, the wife of Bo Xilai — a Politburo member and Party Secretary of Chongqing, a provincial-level city in southwest China — had been arrested and charged with murdering an English businessman. It appeared to be a money laundering relationship gone bad. The following month, Bo was expelled from the Politburo and was accused of corruption. That same month, news leaked out that Ling Gu, the son of Ling Jihua, Director of the General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and widely believed to CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao’s right-hand man, had been killed in an early morning car accident that left two female passengers critically injured. Rumors quickly spread that protégés of Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and Secretary of the Central Committee’s Politics and Law Committee, had tried to cover-up Ling Gu’s death. Zhou, who oversaw China’s sprawling internal apparatus and who had previously served as Minister for Public Security, Party Secretary of Sichuan Province, Minister for State Land and Resources, and Party Secretary and General Manager of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), soon came under suspicion and dropped out of sight. Talk about attempts to assassinate Hu Jintao’s successor, Xi Jinping, and coup plots involving Zhou, Ling, Bo, and more than two dozen senior party leaders began making the rounds. In early January, newly elected General Secretary of the CCP Xi Jinping ordered a new all-out attack on corruption and vowed that he would to not only “swat flies” (low-ranking officials) but also “hunt big tigers” (senior officials). Over the next eight years, almost 300 senior state officials, party cadres, and military officers were implicated.

The ferocity of Xi’s attack on high-level corruption immediately evoked questions about who was being targeted and why. While these were obviously important questions, the more critical questions were actually “what” and “where?” That is, what was the nature of the corruption that Xi confronted when he became party leader in 2012 and where did it come from?

Answers to these questions can be found in the backgrounds of the corrupt senior officials whom Xi “pulled from their horses.” These data reveal that the high-level corruption Xi began attacking in 2012-2013 had its roots in mid-level corruption during the Hu Jintao (2002-2012) and Jiang Zemin (1989-2002) periods. Many of the so-called “tigers” entered public service as junior officials at the county-department level. Others began their careers as rank-and-file public functionaries or technicians. Over a span of years, these low-level officials (i.e., “flies”) climbed up through the layers of the party-state apparatus and morphed into “rats” and “wolves” (mid-level officials) before ultimately becoming “tigers” (senior officials) when they were promoted to ranks at or above provincial vice-governor, deputy provincial party secretary, or vice minister.

These background data also suggest that prior anti-corruption drives failed to prevent corruption among low- and mid-ranked officials from forestalling promotion into the senior ranks in the years before the 18^th Party Congress. Xi’s attack was hardly the opening round of the party’s “war on corruption.” On the contrary, the CCP has been battling corruption since its early days. During the 1950s and 1960s, the party launched repeated drives aimed at rooting out corrupt officials and party cadres. Since the advent of economic reforms in the late 1970s, the party leadership has ordered three major crackdowns down on rank-and-file corruption (1982, 1986, and 1989) and significantly escalated the attack on mid-level corruption in the mid-1990s. The apparent proliferation of high-level corruption that necessitated Xi’s tiger hunt thus came in the wake of a decades-long struggle to cull the corrupt flies, rats, and wolves who then morphed into tigers. Xi thus has not been fighting some “new corruption,” but rather corruption that was spawned under his predecessors and then metastasized upward into the leadership.

Tigers Everywhere

Xi’s attack on corruption fell most heavily on the upper-ranks. Whereas an average of four tigers were “bagged” (i.e., detained) annually between 2000 and 2012, in 2018 – six years after the crackdown began – 29 senior officials were charged, over sevenfold more than the four charged in 2012. In 2019, another 29 were charged with corruption, as were 20 more in 2020.¹ At the same time, the number of low- and mid-level officials charged dropped back to pre-crackdown levels. Thus, the answer to the “what” is clear: Xi was responding to an apparent surge in high-level corruption. That being the case, the next big question is “where did this high-level corruption come from?”

Data on the tigers make clear that high-level corruption had not surged immediately before Xi became General Secretary. Of the 250 tigers I classified as “Xi Tigers,”² data were available on when they first became corrupt for just more than 170. These data show that a third were corrupt by 2000 and two-thirds by 2003 (see Figure 1). Only 15 percent, or 10 percent of the total, became corrupt after 2007 and none turned corrupt after 2013.³ Sixty percent of the tigers bagged during Xi’s crackdown had been corrupted during the Jiang Zemin period and the other 40 percent turned corrupt during the Hu Jintao period. More critically, the data suggest that the number of tigers exploded in the decade-and-a-half preceding the 18^th Party Congress in 2012, not only as senior officials succumbed to corruption, but also because corrupt lower-ranking officials (wolves) were promoted and hence were transformed into tigers. (See Figure 2.)

Source: Publicly available reports in English and Chinese compiled by the author.

Source: Author’s database.

Absent hard data on the actual extent of high-level corruption, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that high-level corruption was just as extensive in the 1980s and 1990s. High-level corruption would have been largely invisible if Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, and Jiang Zemin turned a blind eye to evidence of widespread malfeasance by senior officials. The apparent drop in the number of “free tigers” after 2012 is also likely misleading because data on those tigers, who had been detained but not formally indicted, are missing and hence these tigers are not included in the estimated number of “wild tigers.” Other tigers, finally, are obviously still at large, including some who may never get caught. Even with these caveats in mind, the data nevertheless suggest that the tigers Xi have bagged since 2012 were involved in corruption long before 2012.

Given that on average Xi’s tigers had been corrupt for 14 years, with only eight being corrupt for five years and more than a quarter corrupt for over 17 years, it is also reasonable to assume that most were not senior officials when they became corrupt, but were likely mid-level or perhaps even junior officials. An analysis of four “biggest” civilian tigers, in fact, shows that all were in fact climbing their career ladders, and that it took most over a decade to reach ranks that would qualify them as a tiger.

Climbing the Ladder

The four civilian members of the Politburo taken down during Xi’s crackdown all spent extended periods as mid-level officials or even low-level functionaries. Zhou Yongkang, for example, came from a poor village outside Wuxi in Jiangsu, earned admission to the university, and started as a technician working in the Daqing oilfield in the late 1960s. Thereafter he rose steadily and was named deputy party secretary of the Liaohe Oil Exploration Bureau in 1983. That year, Zhou became a mayor and in 1989 was named party secretary of the Tarim Oilfield Exploration Bureau. In 1992, Zhou was elected an alternate member of the 14^th Central Committee and was then elected a full member of the 15^thCentral Committee in 1997. He was named general manager of the China National Petroleum Commission in 1996, a post that likely bestowed him tiger rank and if not, Zhou definitely achieve that status in 1998 when he was appointed Minister for State Land and Resources. Zhou thus reached tiger status roughly three decades after he started out as a fly. After 1998, Zhou rose fast. He was elected a member of the 16^th Politburo in 2002 and named a deputy secretary of the Central Committee’s Politics and Law Committee. Concurrently, Zhou moved to Sichuan as provincial party secretary in 1999 and then back to Beijing as Minister for Public Security in 2002. Five years later, Zhou became a member of the 17^thPolitburo Standing Committee and named Secretary of the Politics and Law Committee, making him one of the most powerful members of the party leadership.

Like, Zhou, Ling Jihua started out as a fly. The son a local cadre in Shaanxi, Ling was “sent down” to the grassroots during the Cultural Revolution where he worked in a factory before serving as a county and prefecture level cadre in Shanxi province during the 1970s. In 1985, he joined the staff of the Communist Youth League Central Committee where he became a protégé of league leader Hu Jintao. In 1997, Ling moved over to the staff of the Central Committee. In 1999, Ling was named a deputy director of its General Office and a deputy director of the Central Committee Organizational Department in 2000, positions that gave him considerable status and arguably made him a tiger 15 years after he started climbing through the ranks. In 2002, Ling was elected an alternate member of the 16^th Central Committee and became a full member of the 17^th Central Committee in 2007. That same year, he cemented his status as a “big tiger” when he was appointed director of the General Office and hence CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao’s private secretary. It was widely assumed that Ling would be elected to the Politburo at the 17^th Party Congress in the fall of 2012. The death of his son in March 2012, however, apparently blocked his rise to the innermost political circle, and he was instead shunted aside to head the Central Committee’s United Front Department to serve as a vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Bo Xilai, on the other hand, was the son of a first-generation revolutionary, Bo Yibo, who headed the powerful state planning apparatus in the 1950s and came back from being purged in the Cultural Revolution to become one of the “Eight Immortals” who formed the core of Deng Xiaoping’s reform coalition in the 1980s. Bo Xilai also rebounded from being sent down to the grassroots as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, and started his official career as a staff researcher attached to the offices of the Politburo. He was appointed to the staff of the Central Committee’s General Office in 1982. Four years later, Bo was promoted to director of the Liaoning Provincial Transportation Bureau and then deputy mayor of Dalian City in 1989. Bo was promoted to mayor in 1993 and party secretary of Dalian in 1999. The following year, 18 years after he started his official career, Bo entered the senior ranks and became a tiger when he was named a deputy party secretary of the Liaoning. He was elected a full member of the 16^th Central Committee in 2002 and then to the 17^th Politburo in 2007.

Born into a farm family in Shandong, Sun Zhengcai began his official career in 1997 as a deputy party secretary and magistrate of Shunyi County outside of Beijing. He earned a doctorate in agronomy and held a series of posts at the China Agricultural University from 1993 to 1996. In 2002, he was promoted to party secretary of the recently restructured Shunyi District. In short order, Sun was named secretary-general of the Beijing government, a post which pushed him closer to the lower rungs of senior officialdom. Sun achieved tiger status in 2006 when he was appointed Minister for Agriculture, nine years after he started his career. In 2007, Sun was elected a member of the 17^th Central Committee and the following year he was appointed party secretary of Jilin. In 2012, he replaced Bo Xilai as party secretary of Chongqing and was elected a member of the 18^th Politburo.

In many ways, Xi Jinping’s own career trajectory paralleled these four corrupt tigers. The son of Xi Zhongxun, a first generation revolutionary, Xi found himself under a political cloud when his father fell out with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1963. Sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution where he served as a grassroots party cadre, Xi began his official career in 1979 as a staff secretary for Minister of Defense and Politburo member Geng Biao. In 1982, after Geng fell out with Deng Xiaoping, Xi returned to the countryside as a deputy party secretary of Zhengding County in Hebei. In 1988, Xi moved to Fujian where he served as party secretary of Ningde Prefecture and then Fuzhou City. Seven years later in 1995, Xi reached the level of a tiger when he was named a deputy party secretary of Fujian, 16 years after he started as a fly. Thereafter, Xi rose rapidly, getting elected an alternative member of the15th Central Committee in 1997, named governor of Fujian in 1999, governor and party secretary of Zhejiang in 2002. That same year, he was elected a member of the 16^th Central Committee. In March 2007, Xi was transferred to Shanghai to replaced Chen Liangyu as party secretary after Chen, who was also a member of the Politburo, fell in a corruption scandal that ended in his arrest. That fall, Xi became a member of 17^th Politburo.

Not only were Zhou, Bo, Ling, and Sun climbing the career ladder during the decades of the 18^th Party Congress, they were all climbing while corrupt. According to prosecutors, Ling and Sun started taking bribes in 2001. Bo was officially accused of turning corrupt in 1999. There is evidence to suggest that he began taking bribes in the early 1990s. Prosecutors never specified when Zhou started taking. It seems likely, however, that he also had turned corrupt sometime in the early 1990s. The four big tigers thus managed to evade detection for extended periods, even though the party leadership had ordered repeated crackdowns, including a drive against mid-level corruption that saw the number of rats charged increase more than threefold from 652 in 1992 to 2,313 in 1995. The number of wolves charged more than doubled from 64 in 1993 to 143 in 1995. It is, of course, possible that Zhou, Bo, Ling, and Sun were able to get away with corruption because they had powerful patrons. But not all the senior officials charged with corruption after 2012 were born with “red spoons” in their mouths, or were said to be linked to the high and mighty. The spread of corruption upward into the senior ranks was likely a function of structural parameters that gave mid-level officials incentives to engage in corruption and allowed them to evade detection for the extended periods required to climb up out of the mid-levels of officialdom and into the senior ranks.

Payoffs, Probabilities, and Penalties

Although corruption is largely an individualized crime involving a small circle of parties, the aggregate extent and severity of corruption is presumably governed by a combination of payoffs, probabilities, and penalties. Payoffs — the gains from accepting bribes, embezzling monies, or misappropriating public funds — create the incentives for corruption. Probabilities determine the risk of getting caught. Penalties — in the form of prison terms, fines, and confiscations — set the negative disincentives for corruption. In combination, payoffs, probabilities, etc., determine the “expected value” of corruption. That is, the size and likelihood of corrupt gains if the individual “gets away with it,” or the likelihood and severity of punishment if they get caught. In theory, individuals weigh the expected gains against the potential costs. Where payoffs are minimal, the probability of punishment is high, and the penalties are high, the objective incentives for corruption will be low. Conversely, where payoffs are large, the probability of punishment low, and the penalties are minimal, the incentives for individuals to parley their delegated authority into personal gains will be high.

To an extent, payoffs and penalties are knowable parameters because we can use data from individual cases to measure how much individuals would have gained if they had not been caught and the losses, mostly in terms of prison time, they incurred because they got caught. The probability or risk of getting caught is, however, almost impossible to estimate because while we may know how many of those engaged in corruption have been caught, there is really no way other than simply guessing how many of those engaged in corruption did not get caught. It is possible, however, to use longevity as a proxy for risk. We might think of corruption as an iterated game of chance in which an individual who has engaged in corruption must repeatedly “roll the dice,” with a chance of getting caught each time. The lower the risk of getting caught, the more times the “dice” will come up with a “winner” that allows the individual to keep “playing the game.” Conversely, the higher the risk of getting caught, the most likely the individual will roll a “loser” and have to abruptly exit the game.

Because risk affects duration, it also shapes careers. Corrupt Chinese officials face two sets of risk. First, they face an ambient, background risk in the form of the “random” chance their misdeeds will get exposed. Second, supervisory- and management-level officials face more intense periodic risk because when such officials are promoted or transferred, they undergo audits specifically designed to detect malfeasance. Either way, exposure can result in punishments ranging from administrative warnings, demotions, and termination to criminal referrals.

Thus, if the probability of detection is high, those who resort to corruption will presumably not last long and hence will have short “careers.” If we assume most officials enter officialdom at the rank-and-file or lower supervisory levels, it then follows that if risk is high, corrupt officials are apt to be weeded out before they can rise up through the ranks. If the probability of detection is low, on the other hand, individuals who turn corrupt while junior officials are more likely to enjoy longer careers and thus rise upward from the rank-and-file into the senior ranks. Low risk, in other words, should increase extent of high-level corruption.

Payoffs, probabilities, and penalties may be uniform or may vary by level. Low-ranking officials, for instance, might enjoy a certain “safety in numbers” because anti-corruption monitoring resources may be insufficient to allow for more than episodic oversight. If they get caught, however, low-ranking officials might face a significant chance of punishment because they lack powerful patrons who can act as “protective umbrellas” for their protégés. By a similar logic, although their fewer numbers might make it easier to monitor senior officials, senior officials may be powerful enough to deflect unwanted scrutiny and block sanctions if malfeasance is uncovered. Senior officials may also have “friends in high places” who can protect them if they run into trouble.

Quantifying payoffs, probabilities, and penalties is complex, and I offer only preliminary data on payoffs and probabilities herein. Even these relative crude measures suffice, I believe, to explain why mid-level officials would opt to engage in corruption and why they had a good chance of evading punishment long enough to rise into the senior ranks and hence become tigers.

Wide variations in the amount of corrupt monies and the length of time individuals engaged in corruption make simple averages unreliable measures. I have, therefore, first normalized corrupt monies by dividing by the length of time an individual was corrupt and then estimating the median amount of corrupt monies for official working at the:

Village, township, and neighborhood level (aka fly);

County and district levels (aka rat);

Prefecture and city levels (aka wolf); and

The provincial and central levels (aka tiger).

This division imperfectly parallels the fly-rat-wolf-tiger hierarchy, which is based on an individual’s rank not their location in the bureaucracy pyramid. For simplicity, I have nonetheless retained the flies, rats, wolves, tiger labels. In addition, I calculated the lower and upper quartile bounds and thereby estimated the maximum size of “small corruption” and the minimum size of “big corruption.” The data reveal that even the small amounts of monies taken by corrupt officials at the grassroots level was almost double the per-capita income of the poorest fifth of rural residents, while the minimum size of big corrupt monies at the upper levels was a staggering 55-plus times the per capita disposal income of the richest fifth of urban residents (see Table 1).

Source: Author’s database.

Data on the lag between when an official first became corrupt and when they were detained also suggest that the risk of getting caught within a year was fairly substantial (40 percent) for those at the bottom. The risk for those at higher levels were substantially lower and the most senior officials tended to evade capture for extended periods (see Figure 3).

Source: Author’s database.

Note: Based on data for 3,444 cases at the “fly level,” 4,106 at the “rat level,” 5,248 at the “wolf level,” and 25,81 at the “tiger level.”

These “risks,” of course, apply only to those corrupt officials who got caught. Given that we must assume some not insubstantial percentage of corrupt officials never get caught, the actual probability of getting caught would be, of course lower, perhaps even substantially lower. Such a lower possibility, however, reinforces the evidence that corrupt officials, particularly senior officials, had a good chance of “getting away with it.”

For those corrupt officials who got caught, penalties were substantial. Six percent of the 14,740 officials for whom I had sentencing data were sentenced to life in prison or given a “suspended death sentence.”⁴ A third of those given fixed-term sentences were given more than 10 years while another third was sentenced between four and nine years. Ultimately, corruption is a gamble and the available data on payoffs, probabilities, and penalties strongly suggest that systemic conditions in the years before Xi launched his attack on corruption in 2012 were conducive to extensive corruption and, more critically, to the rise of corruption mid-level officials into the senior ranks.

Conclusion

The data presented herein suggest that high-level corruption exploded in the two decades before Xi launched his so-called tiger hunt in 2012-2013. Despite three burst-like attacks on rank-and-file corruption during the 1980s and a sustained drive against mid-level corruption in the mid-1990s, the payoffs from corruption, the risks of getting caught, and the penalties that those caught using their authority for private gain faced did not deter officials at all levels from engaging in corruption. Over time, the failure of the anti-corruption effort during the Jiang and Hu periods allowed corrupt low-level officials to climb the career ladder and enter the senior ranks. Flies thus became rats; rats grew into wolves; and wolves morphed into tigers. As a result, corruption apparently spread upward. Consequently, corruption was likely considerably worse when Xi assumed leadership than it had been in the boom years of the 1990s when China’s transition from the plan to the market putatively created a pool of rents that ought to have fueled a wave of corruption as officials cashed in on the windfall gains created by the commodification of theretofore undervalued state assets and positioned officials to profitably leverage their control over access to profit-making ventures.⁵ The rapid worsening of corruption in post-Mao China appears to have thus been not only a function of the transition from the plan to the market but also the failure of the party to sustain efforts to confront and control corruption.

The post Flies into Tigers: The Dynamics of Corruption in China appeared first on China Research Center.

This essay examines how Taiwan has navigated the international system from three distinct vantage points: its activities and relationships with intergovernmental organizations; its domestic adoption of international agreements that it cannot legally join; and its use of humanitarian assistance to aid other states and promote the island’s political and diplomatic interests.

Intergovernmental Organizations

Forging relationships with intergovernmental organizations is perhaps the most wide-ranging and complex component of Taiwan’s international strategy. Despite lacking state sovereignty, Taiwan maintains membership in many international organizations (Hickson, 2003). In the 1990s, Taiwan’s government began “seeking to expand its presence on the international stage by emphasizing that the territory… and the people within that territory deserved to participate in international forums” (Hickson, 2003, p. 1). Though not an exhaustive list, the following examples reveal how Taiwan has leveraged its intergovernmental organization memberships to improve its international standing.

World Trade Organization

Under the name “Chinese Taipei,” Taiwan became the 144th member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on January 1, 2002 (“Chinese Taipei,” 2020). It took almost 12 years of negotiations to gain membership (“WTO,” 2001). This was a momentous achievement for Taiwan on the global stage because the WTO is a “large, robust, and highly important international organization” (deLisle, 2011). Unlike other such groups, the WTO does not require its members to be states, and WTO membership is arguably Taiwan’s “most important achievement in revitalizing its status on the international plane” (Charnovitz, 2006, p. 402). At the time of its accession to the WTO, former Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian called it a “significant milestone” and promised the Republic of China was “willing to engage in constructive cooperation and play a more active role in the international community” (McMillan, 2002).

WTO membership offered immediate benefits for Taiwan’s global standing by providing recognition of the island’s ability to function as a state. Charnovitz (2006) noted that while WTO membership did not grant state status to Taiwan, it did afford “greater economic and political respect” internationally (p. 424). Membership provided Taiwan with more room to conduct international trade relations (Meltzer, 2013). It essentially granted Taiwan most favored nation treatment in accessing other WTO members’ markets, and it relieved pressure on Taiwan to negotiate free trade agreements (Meltzer, 2013). Furthermore, WTO membership gave Taiwan a voice in creating and administering global trade rules; Taiwan also gained the ability to invoke the WTO dispute settlement process against other organization members (Charnovitz, 2006, pp. 424-425). It is the “only international tribunal in which Taiwan has standing to insist upon the rule of law” (Charnovitz, 2006, p. 425).

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

When Taiwan entered the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in 1991, APEC was the first intergovernmental organization Taiwan joined since becoming a contested state in 1971 (Chu, 2016). It participates as an APEC “member economy” under the name “Chinese Taipei” (“U.S.-APEC,” 2019), and it joined the organization at the same time as the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong (Chu, 2016). The mission of APEC member economies is to create prosperity for people throughout its region by “accelerating regional economic integration” (“About APEC,” 2020). Economic integration through APEC membership has been a boon to Taiwan’s regional standing. Chu (2016) suggested APEC participation has enhanced Taiwan’s external recognition as a de facto state, and has enabled better cooperation with APEC member economies on numerous global issues (p. 186). Its association with APEC also has improved Taiwan’s image domestically as a government capable of international engagement, and it provides a platform to promote Taiwan’s interests through bilateral diplomacy with individual APEC members (Chu, 2016, p. 186).

Association of Southeast Asian Nations

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is another regional intergovernmental organization that has provided Taiwan with an opportunity to pursue global engagement. Taiwan does not have diplomatic ties with ASEAN because the organization adheres to the “One China” policy recognizing the People’s Republic of China as the country’s sole legitimate government (Hsieh, 2020a). However, Taiwan has strong economic ties with the organization (Hoang, Truong, & Dong, 2020). Trade between Taiwan and ASEAN members increased significantly during recent decades, and by 2015, ASEAN had taken the top spot as Taiwan’s biggest trading partner (Hoang, Truong, & Dong, 2020). That year, ASEAN accounted for almost 31% of Taiwan’s total trade, which was significantly higher than trade with mainland China (23%), the United States (12%), Hong Kong (12%), and Japan (11%) (Hoang, Truong, & Dong, 2020, p. 2).

Its relationship with ASEAN has also created a system in which Taiwan enjoys several of the diplomatic privileges that traditionally come with recognized sovereignty. Taiwan’s representative offices in ASEAN countries are not embassies, and their leaders are not ambassadors (Hsieh, 2020a). However, they are treated as “functional equivalents” that have received a wide range of diplomatic privileges and immunities (Hsieh, 2020a, p. 213, 221). By providing better treatment to Taiwan, ASEAN member countries ensure similar treatment for their diplomats and representative offices (Hsieh, 2020a). Hsieh (2020a) concluded that successful bilateral trade and investment agreements between Taiwan and ASEAN have enhanced Taiwan’s treaty-making capacity and increased its legitimacy in official cooperative endeavors (p. 221).

European Union

Taiwan has established a strong economic relationship with the European Union, as well. European Union member states, and the EU organization, adhere to the “One China” policy and therefore maintain non-diplomatic relations with Taiwan (Hsieh, 2020b). That has not damaged Taiwan’s standing as a partner in global trade and investment. Taiwan is the EU’s sixth largest trading partner in Asia, and the EU is the largest investor in Taiwan, accounting for about 30% of its foreign investment stock (Hsieh, 2020b, p. 689). The EU-Taiwan Bilateral Investment Agreement (BIA) permits the EU to cooperate with Taiwan and confer varying degrees of legal recognition upon it without formally recognizing it as a state (Hsieh, 2020b, p. 694). For example, the European Union has stated that the EU and Taiwan “share the same values of democracy and respect for human rights and the rule of law, and are seeking closer cooperation where their interests and values converge” (Hsieh, 2020b, p. 694). Hsieh (2020b) determined that the EU-Taiwan BIA provides recognition of Taiwan’s “legal competence to effectively exercise jurisdiction and represent nationals” while also bolstering “Taiwan’s status claim associated with sovereign equality in international affairs” (p. 704). Taiwan’s participation in the EU and other intergovernmental organizations gives it access to information, provides an opportunity to follow international standards, increases its visibility as an actor in the international system, and strengthens relationships with other countries through organizational networks (Winkler, 2011). This strategy has helped Taiwan achieve both diplomatic and political gains (Li, 2006).

“As-If” Participation

Hickson (2003) suggested Taiwan revealed its modern internationalization strategy in November 1999 when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) issued its “White Paper on Foreign Policy for the 21st Century.” Historically the political opposition in Taiwan but the majority party in 2020, the DPP recognized that:

Taiwan is unfairly excluded from many international organizations. But as an important member in the international community, Taiwan should commit itself, as a sovereign nation, to abide by the U.N. Charter and various international conventions, and to exercise its proper rights and obligations by contributing to world peace and development. (“White,” 1999)

Describing this principle as “new-internationalism,” the white paper stated Taiwan should not “passively subject itself to the rules of the game played by the great powers” but instead should participate in international activities and establish “sustainable, long-term friendships” (“White,” 1999). deLisle (2011) called this strategy “as-if participation” (p. 5). In practice, Taiwan commits to act as if it is a member of an international organization and pledges to uphold the organization’s standards (deLisle, 2011). Fulfilling the obligations of international membership strengthens Taiwan’s case for access to global institutions, but:

(M)uch of the point of “as if” participation is about the question of Taiwan’s international status…. The more Taiwan can walk and talk and act like a member of a regime that is open primarily or exclusively to states, the more hope it has of securing the benefits of state (or nearly state-like) status in the international system. (deLisle, 2011)

Taiwan has employed a strategy of following international covenants by approving them domestically. Yu-chiao (2019) noted that Taiwan’s exclusion from United Nations membership also excludes it from U.N. human rights bodies, meaning “Taiwan must go its own way to meet international human rights standards.” Taiwan addresses this by “endowing U.N. human rights treaties with domestic legal status” (Yu-Chiao, 2019). In 2009, Taiwan’s legislature passed the Two International Covenants Enforcement Act, which included the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Yu-Chiao, 2019). The United Nations General Assembly adopted both multilateral treaties in December 1966. Taiwan also has granted domestic legal status to other U.N. human rights treaties, and all of them include provisions requiring scheduled reviews by international experts (Yu-Chiao, 2019). Bringing non-governmental organizations, international specialists, and Taiwan officials together to monitor domestic human rights practices gives Taiwan a global platform to promote its commitment to the international system (Yu-Chiao, 2019).

Global nuclear proliferation and weapons controls agreements provide additional examples in which Taiwan does not hold official memberships but adheres to international standards. It is not a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because Taiwan is not a recognized sovereign state (Stricker, 2020). However, it still observes the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it applies the IAEA’s highest standards for safety to its civilian nuclear program, and it follows the IAEA’s Additional Protocol verification agreement (Stricker, 2020). Because it lacks recognized state sovereignty, Taiwan is not a party to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, or the Missile Technology Control Regime, but the Taiwan government has repeatedly stated it will follow these conventions (Bullard, 2005). Because statehood is required for membership in multilateral export control regimes such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Australia Group, and the Wassenaar Arrangement, Taiwan cannot officially join but has chosen to follow global non-proliferation standards as if it were a member (Kassenova, 2012). Kassenova (2012) stated Taiwan’s non-proliferation policy has been driven by its desire to be part of the international community. Through its “as-if” strategy, Taiwan demonstrates its capability and commitment to adhere to global norms and expectations.

Humanitarian Efforts

Taiwan’s unresolved status made it necessary to pursue unconventional means to establish its place in the international system (Brown, 2010), and its approach to humanitarianism has been described as “unique” (Guilloux, 2016). Guilloux (2016) argued that while many governments provide humanitarian assistance, Taiwan’s history and practices make it different because of its status as a non-state. Though this area is “a limited resource for Taiwan’s effort to break its isolation in the global arena,” Guilloux (2019, p. 209) stated that Taiwan has expanded both its ambitions and capabilities. There is a strong belief domestically that humanitarian aid from the United States helped Taiwan survive and prosper, and it is Taiwan’s duty to repay its debt to the international community (Guilloux, 2016). The International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF) is Taiwan’s main international development assistance agency (Alexander, 2015). Its mission includes “boosting socio-economic development, enhancing human resources and promoting economic relations in a range of developing partner countries” (“About us,” 2020). The ICDF has undertaken humanitarian or technical assistance projects in Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Asia Pacific (“Projects,” 2020).

Taiwan’s global humanitarian work has been criticized as a tool to advance its political and diplomatic interests (Guilloux, 2016). The ICDF has adjusted its conduct to match domestic political movements, bringing Taiwan into the international mainstream “regarding universal values and engagement with the underdeveloped world” (Alexander, 2015, p. 136). Alexander (2015) observed that the ICDF is dedicated to “communicating with foreign elites who look favorably on Taipei,” and it continues to “engage with international fora as de facto representatives of the Taiwan government” (Alexander, 2015, p. 136). Alexander (2015) identified four primary audiences for Taiwan’s development assistance: publics of countries with ICDF missions, elites of formal diplomatic allies, wider international audiences, and Taiwan’s domestic audience (p. 127). Regarding the elites of diplomatic allies, Taiwan’s motivation for engagement includes maintaining formal diplomatic recognition and ideological patronage (Alexander, 2015, p. 127). Its motivation for engaging wider global audiences includes creating opportunities for positive international discussions of Taiwan and demonstrating compatibility with international projects and norms (Alexander, 2015, p. 127).

Taiwan-based non-governmental organizations also play a significant role in Taiwan’s global humanitarian efforts. NGO engagement in international activities has emerged as an “alternative approach to the expansion of Taiwan’s international space” and represents “an important forum in which Taiwan can share its experiences, learn from the experiences of others, and develop networks of connections” (Lee, 2012). Taiwan NGOs have extended cooperation to more than 90 countries despite only having official recognition from 14 of them (Lin & Lin, 2017). This suggests Taiwan NGO expertise in international development and cooperation is “highly sought despite the country’s diplomatic situation” (Lin & Lin, 2017, p. 487). Taiwan NGOs’ specific efforts to expand their geographical boundaries across several continents make them “an indispensable component for Taiwan’s international development and cooperation” strategy (Lin & Lin, 2017, p. 487). Their efforts contribute positively to Taiwan’s global reputation, as well (Lin & Lin, 2017, p. 488).

The work of Taiwan NGOs is also lauded for implementing the island’s “warm power” initiative regionally and globally (“Taiwan,” 2020). “Warm power” is Taiwan’s practice of sharing resources, experiences, and support, and Yang and Chen (2019) identified three of its primary features. First, Taiwan wants its Asian neighbors to “feel the good will and warmth of [the] Taiwanese government and people” (Yang & Chen, 2019). Second, Taiwan promotes inter-governmental cooperation and civic collaboration regionally (Yang & Chen, 2019). Third, Taiwan’s “warm power” focuses on establishing stable, long-term collaborative frameworks with its international partners (Yang & Chen, 2019). NGOs have played such an indispensable role in Taiwan’s efforts to create space in the global arena that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs established an NGO International Affairs Committee in 2000, which became the Department of NGO International Affairs in 2012 (“Non-governmental,” 2020). The department has “cultivated partnerships… to support international development and cooperation” and has empowered NGOs to expand their global activities (“Non-governmental,” 2020). Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs planned to celebrate the department’s 20th anniversary in October 2020 with an awards ceremony that included “foreign representatives of the nations that have collaborated with the NGOs” (Chia-nan, 2020). Through its global humanitarian efforts, Taiwan portrays itself as a dedicated, responsible, and cooperative member of the international community.

Conclusion

Taiwan’s strategy for navigating the international system without recognized state sovereignty has been remarkably effective. Its successful participation in intergovernmental organizations has granted Taiwan political and economic standing that has been traditionally reserved for sovereign states. Though not officially recognized by its global partners as a state within the international system, Taiwan is often treated with a similar level of privilege and consideration. Taiwan’s domestic adoption and implementation of international agreements have earned plaudits from human rights groups and security experts, and in some cases Taiwan’s adherence to established requirements and expectations outperforms efforts by legally-recognized convention signatories. Taiwan also has significantly expanded its humanitarian assistance efforts across a wider geographic area, placing it in a stronger position to cultivate diverse relationships and shape its own narrative.

Taiwan’s narrative includes successes and failures. The United States remains Taiwan’s most powerful political ally in the international system, and lawmakers recently expressed support for expanding Taiwan’s global memberships (Stricker, 2020). In March 2020, Congress approved the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act of 2019. It directs the United States government to advocate, as appropriate:

for Taiwan’s membership in all international organizations in which statehood is not a requirement and in which the United States is also a participant; and … for Taiwan to be granted observer status in other appropriate international organizations…. (“S.1678,” 2020)

Taiwan also has recently undertaken a new effort to enhance its position in international society through President Tsai Ing-wen’s New Southbound Policy (NSP) (Marston & Bush, 2018). Calling it a regional strategy for Asia, President Tsai said Taiwan will work with countries regionally and globally “to deepen and broaden our presence in South and Southeast Asia” (Marston & Bush, 2018). The NSP aims to create a new model of cooperation by promoting economic collaboration, conducting talent exchanges, sharing resources, and forging regional links (Marston & Bush, 2018).

However, Taiwan is frustrated by its persistent failure to gain United Nations recognition and join the World Health Organization (WHO). China has used its “One China” policy and its status as a permanent UN Security Council member to block Taiwan’s membership in both organizations (Chen & Cohen, 2020). Taiwan achieved a promising victory in 2009 when the World Health Assembly granted it observer status under the name “Chinese Taipei,” and supporters had hoped the change would provide Taiwan with an eventual pathway into WHO networks (van der Wees, 2016). That has not happened, and in May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, Taiwan was not invited as an observer to the World Health Assembly meeting (Ching, 2020). The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “deep regret and strong dissatisfaction” with the decision and promised that Taiwan “will never give up our quest for international participation” (Wu, 2020). The United States issued a statement that it was “deeply disappointed” by the decision and strongly urged WHO to resume its practice of inviting Taiwan to participate as a WHA observer (“U.S. statement,” 2020). As of early November 2020, however, Taiwan had not received an invitation to join that month’s World Health Assembly meeting to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic (“Taiwan not,” 2020).

Taiwan is able to use these snubs to push for increased access within the global community. Its continuing campaign for greater recognition by the United Nations and World Health Organization is intended to “rally domestic support and challenge deficiency and injustice in the current [international] system” (Li, 2006, p. 612). Jaushieh Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, expressed assurance that “as the voices around the world supporting Taiwan continue to grow louder, we are getting ever closer to achieving our goal” (Wu, 2020). Even with such high-profile disappointments, Taiwan has achieved enviable international success through its persistent efforts to engage with the world community. By pursuing relationships with intergovernmental organizations, adhering to global norms and expectations, and providing intercontinental humanitarian assistance, Taiwan has honed a strategy that could prove useful for other non-recognized states seeking a path through the international system.<

References

About APEC. (2020). Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2020 from

https://www.apec.org/About-Us/About-APEC

About us. (2020). International Cooperation and Development Fund. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020

from http://www.icdf.org.tw/ct.asp?xItem=4470&CtNode=29840&mp=2

Alexander, C. (2015). Development assistance and communication: The case of the Taiwan

International Cooperation and Development Fund. Global Governance, 21, 119–139.

Bradley, J. (2015). The China mirage. Little, Brown and Company.

Brown, K. (2010). Taiwan, humanitarianism and global governance [Review of the book

Taiwan, humanitarianism and global governance, by A. Guilloux]. The China Quarterly, 203, 746–747.

Bullard, M. (2005, May 1). Taiwan and nonproliferation. Nuclear Threat Initiative. Retrieved

Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/taiwan-and-nonproliferation/

Carolan, C. (2000). The “Republic Of Taiwan”: A legal-historical justification for a Taiwanese declaration of independence. New York University Law Review, 75, 429–468. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020, from https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYULawReview-75-2-Carolan.pdf

Charnovitz, S. (2006). Taiwan’s WTO membership and its international implications. Asian

Journal of WTO & International Health Law and Policy, 1(2), 401–432.

Chen, Y., and Cohen, J. (2020, April 9). Why does the WHO exclude Taiwan? Council on

Foreign Relations. Retrieved Nov. 13, 2020 from https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/why-does-who-exclude-taiwan

Chia-nan, L. (2020, Sept. 30). NGO department set to mark 20th anniversary. Taipei Times.

Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2020/09/30/2003744341

Chinese Taipei. (2020). World Trade Organization. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from

https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/a1_taipei_chinois_e.htm

Ching, N. (2020, May 18). US condemns WHO for excluding Taiwan. Voice of America.

Retrieved Nov. 13, 2020 from https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/us-condemns-who-excluding-taiwan

Chu, M. (2016). No need to beg China? Taiwan’s membership of the Asia-Pacific Economic

Cooperation as a contested state. The China Quarterly, 225, 169–189.

Cucchisi, J. (2002). The causes and effects of the Chinese Civil War, 1927-1949. [Master’s thesis, Seton Hall University.] Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from  https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3416&context=dissertations

deLisle, J. (2011). Taiwan: Sovereignty and participation in international organizations. E-Notes,

Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1–5.

Glaser, B., and Green, M. (2017, Jan. 13). What is the U.S. “One China” policy, and why does it matter? Center for Strategic & International Studies. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-why-does-it-matter

Guilloux, A. (2016). Taiwan’s humanitarian aid/disaster relief: Wither or prosper? Brookings.

Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/taiwans-humanitarian-aiddisaster-relief-wither-or-prosper/

Guilloux, A. (2019). Taiwan’s evolving humanitarian space. Orbis, 63(2), 209–224.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2019.02.009

Hickey, D. (1997). U.S. policy and Taiwan’s bid to rejoin the United Nations. Asian Survey, 37(11), 1031–1043. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2645739?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Hickson, C. (2003). Taiwan in international organizations: Internationalization of the Taiwan-China relationship. The Atlantic Council of the United States, 1–8.

Hoang, N., Truong, H., and Dong, C. (2020). Determinants of trade between Taiwan and ASEAN countries: A PPML estimator approach. SAGE Open, April-June, 1–11.

Hsieh, P. (2020a). Rethinking non-recognition: Taiwan’s new pivot to ASEAN and the one-

China policy. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 33(2), 204–228.

Hsieh, P. (2020b). Rethinking non-recognition: The EU’s investment agreement with Taiwan under the one-China policy. Leiden Journal of International Law, 33, 689–712.

Kassenova, T. (2012, March 22). Global non-proliferation and the Taiwan dilemma. Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/22/global-non-proliferation-and-taiwan-dilemma-pub-47675

Lee, W. (2012, July 16). Diplomatic impetus and altruistic impulse: NGOs and the expansion of Taiwan’s international space. Brookings. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/diplomatic-impetus-and-altruistic-impulse-ngos-and-the-expansion-of-taiwans-international-space/

Lee, Y. (2019, Oct. 9). Taiwan leader rejects China’s ‘one country, two systems’ offer. Reuters.

Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-anniversary-president/taiwan-leader-rejects-chinas-one-country-two-systems-offer-idUSKBN1WP0A4

Li, C. (2006). Taiwan’s participation in inter-governmental organizations: An overview of its

initiatives. Asian Survey, 46(4), 597–614.

Liao, P. (2006). Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, 1895-1945: History, culture, memory. Columbia University Press. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/liao13798.6?refreqid=excelsior%3Aa86fbcd420eac170c3a39028e6200e5c&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Lin, T., and Lin, J. (2017). Taiwan’s foreign aid in transition: From ODA to civil society approaches. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 18(4), 469–490.

Lynch, M. (2010). Essential histories: The Chinese Civil War 1945–49. Osprey Publishing Ltd.

Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472895202.0005

Marston, H., and Bush, R. (2018, July 30). Taiwan’s engagement with Southeast Asia is making progress under the New Southbound Policy. Brookings. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/taiwans-engagement-with-southeast-asia-is-making-progress-under-the-new-southbound-policy/

McMillan, A. (2002, Jan. 1). Taiwan enters WTO with eye on China. CNN. Retrieved Nov. 12,

2020 from http://edition.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/01/01/taiwan.wtoofficial/index.html

Meltzer, J. (2013, Oct. 9). Taiwan’s economic opportunities and challenges and the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Brookings. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/taiwan-and-trans-pacific-partnership-meltzer-paper-final.pdf

Non-governmental organizations of Taiwan: A force for good in the world. (2020, Oct. 23).

Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.roc-taiwan.org/ph_en/post/5496.html

O’Connor, T. (2019, Sept. 20). Which countries still recognize Taiwan? Two more nations switch to China in less than a week. Newsweek. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://www.newsweek.com/who-recognizes-taiwan-two-change-china-1460559

Projects. (2020). International Cooperation and Development Fund. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from http://www.icdf.org.tw/ct.asp?xItem=5293&CtNode=29880&mp=2

S.1678 – Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act of 2019. (2020, March 26). United States Congress. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1678/text

Scott, S. (2017). International law in world politics: An introduction (3rd ed.). Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Stricker, A. (2020, Aug. 24). Add Taiwan to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Defense

One. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/08/add-taiwan-international-atomic-energy-agency/167927/

Taiwan: NGOs ahead of country’s warm power. (2020, Oct. 14). Unrepresented Nations &

Peoples Organization. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://unpo.org/article/22095

Taiwan not invited to WHO meeting despite COVID-19 success. (2020, Nov. 9). Aljazeera.

Retrieved Nov. 13, 2020 from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/9/taiwan-not-invite-to-who-meeting

The Taiwan Relations Act at forty and U.S.-Taiwan relations. (2019, April 9). Center for Strategic & International Studies. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://www.csis.org/events/taiwan-relations-act-forty-and-us-taiwan-relations

United Nations. (1971). Restoration of the lawful rights of the People’s Republic of China in the

United Nations. In General Assembly – Twenty-sixth session. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/2758(XXVI)

U.S.-APEC trade facts. (2019, Oct. 24). Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Retrieved Nov. 10, 2020 from https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/other-initiatives/asia-pacific-economic-cooperation-apec/us-apec-trade-facts

U.S. statement on Taiwan’s participation at the World Health Assembly. (2020, May 19). U.S.

Department of Health & Human Services. Retrieved Oct. 30, 2020 from https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/05/19/us-statement-on-taiwan-participation-at-the-world-health-assembly.html van der Wees, G. (2016, May 10). Taiwan and the World Health Assembly. The Diplomat.

Retrieved Nov. 13, 2020 from https://thediplomat.com/2016/05/taiwan-and-the-world-health-assembly/

Wang, J. (2011). In the name of legitimacy: Taiwan and overseas Chinese during the Cold War era. China Review, 11(2), 65–90. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2020 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/23462345

White paper on foreign policy for the 21st century. (1999, Nov. 28). Democratic Progressive Party. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2020 from http://www.taiwandocuments.org/dpp02.htm

Winkler, S. (2011, Nov. 17). Biding time: The challenge of Taiwan’s international status.

Brookings. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/research/biding-time-the-challenge-of-taiwans-international-status/

WTO Ministerial Conference approves accession of Chinese Taipei. (2001, Nov. 11). World Trade Organization. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres01_e/pr253_e.htm

Wu, J. (2020, May 18). Remarks at a press conference concerning Taiwan’s WHO campaign.

Retrieved Nov. 13, 2020 from https://www.mofa.gov.tw/Upload/RelFile/662/172592/a4b18c69-bfeb-4640-934e-70428da86b95.pdf

Yang, A., and Chen, D. (2019, Oct. 18). The Yushan Forum and Taiwan’s warm power. Foreign

Policy Research Institute. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2020 from https://www.fpri.org/article/2019/10/the-yushan-forum-and-taiwans-warm-power/

Yu-chiao, C. (2019, April 25). The ‘Taiwan Model’ of adopting human rights treaties without UN membership. The News Lens. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2020 from https://international.thenewslens.com/article/117711

The post “To Deepen and Broaden Our Presence:” Taiwan’s Strategies for Participating in the International System appeared first on China Research Center.

The Carter Center recently released a report, entitled Finding Firmer Ground: The Role of Civil Society and NGOs in U.S.-China Relations, that highlights the issues of domestic and international concern requiring American and Chinese cooperation, and asks how can the U.S. and China reverse the current trend toward decoupling. Authors from both the U.S. and China examine how Chinese and American civil society, including nongovernmental organizations, might improve cooperation, dialogue, and management of security risks between the U.S. and China. They contend that issues such as climate change and global health should be established as pillars of critical cooperation where both countries could create high-level frameworks to identify shared goals and lay out long-term visions for climate change and global health. They point out that for civil society to be effective in these two areas, key obstacles to engagement must be addressed, including revising China’s Foreign NGO Law, mitigating fears of arbitrary detention, preventing the weaponization of visa policies, educating NGOs on the risks of cooperation, and countering xenophobia in both countries.

After spending two decades researching how civil society improves Chinese governance, I appreciate the goals expressed in the report, specifically how greater civil society engagement might improve cooperation and dialogue between the U.S. and China. However, the current time is more similar to the early 1990s than the early 2000s, with high and persistent levels of distrust prevalent in the relationship. As noted in the report, “Chinese and American government actions have made cooperation more challenging than in the past, and security pressures have increased risk aversion for participants on both sides.”

In the U.S., even though the Biden administration has signaled they want more proactive engagement with China, they also have not changed the Trump administration’s wariness and competitive strategy toward China. This is expressed by many government officials who argue that we can engage China, including Chinese scholars and civil society, as an important way of learning, but that we must be careful in assuming that they are independent (meaning, of course, that they should be understood as agents of the state). Although this stance casts doubt on the ability of non-state actors to meaningfully change the bilateral relationship, there might be a more limited role in helping state actors identify non-obvious areas of potential cooperation.

In China, this distrust can easily be seen in the new five-year plan highlighting the danger of “hegemonism” from the United States. For civil society, distrust manifests in the form of challenges for foreign NGOs to work in China, especially in partnering with or funding Chinese NGOs. Restrictions and the general distrust of Western civil society again casts doubt on any strategy to encourage U.S. NGOs and government agencies to directly fund or influence project choices in that it might unintentionally endanger domestic NGOs.

Relying on civil society groups in China to help achieve policy goals might create unrealistic expectations, and even more worryingly, place these groups in harm’s way for state monitoring or action. As in the 1990s, civil society engagement offers ways to improve the Sino-U.S. relationship, and more importantly governance outcomes for Chinese citizens; however, this must be done carefully, with realistic expectations about what civil society can do, and always with a “do no harm” principle.

I contend that we must leverage the lessons from civil society engagement from that time to inform current decisions. Although distrust on both sides makes engagement complicated, the lessons of the 1990s offer some pragmatic ways forward. In the 1990s, we learned that it is important to do two things: create policy access for civil society and develop civil society capacity. Below I first outline the ways these two goals were accomplished, and then apply these lessons to the current situation.

I. Create Policy Access

1. Elevate concerns raised domestically by civil society to a bilateral level during talks and meetings without directly identifying the groups.
2. Mandate the participation of civil society in all bilateral or multilateral platforms.

As the 1995 U.N. conference for women’s rights hosted by China, and as the Global Fund did with its health projects, we have observed that mandating the participation of civil society creates space for the growth of civil society groups and enhances their voice in certain policy areas. The Global Fund projects on HIV/AIDS, for example, created a number of civil society groups that then participated in creating anonymous testing sites as well as education for many hard-to-reach groups in China such as sex workers, drug users, and its gay population (e.g., the “men sleeping with men” groups). These policy interventions were then further supported through the GF platforms and inserted into Chinese law. Without policy access, it is challenging for civil society to have this sort of impact in China.

II. Develop Civil Society Capacity

3. Invest in creating strong civil society technical capacity.
4. Share resources with domestic groups, such as policy research, lessons from demonstration sites in other countries, access to experts, tax policies to allow for donations and philanthropy, etc.

Investing in improving the governance capacity of NGOs is even more important now because directly funding group projects is challenging under the new FNGO law. However, improving technical capabilities so that groups can better contract (服务购买) from the government is still encouraged. These government contracts are becoming a larger part of domestic NGO budgets, along with domestic fundraising allowed under the 2016 Charities Law; however, it is challenging for groups to cover salaries and professional development costs with these funds given strict fraud regulations. Often these funds may only cover direct project costs. This is a gap into which foreign funders may step, and improving the technical capacity of these groups means that they are more likely to contract and consult with local governments, creating access points in a closed policymaking structure that often lacks societal information about policy preferences and impact.

Many local officials cite a lack of group capacity for not working with local civil society, followed by a fear that the groups are puppets or trojan horses for Western interests. Increasing civil society access to policymaking by elevating issues, mandating participation in international platforms, investing in capacity, and sharing policy resources will help domestic groups play a more active role in China, and avoid the negative repercussions of close association with foreigners.

Applying These Lessons to the Current Situation

Given the likely persistence of distrust between China and the U.S., both the ability of Chinese civil society to achieve policy goals and the desirability of overtly partnering with these groups is in question. However, I do see a role for civil society collaboration, but perhaps in a looser sense, and where U.S. NGOs and foundations follow the lead of Chinese NGOs in determining what would help them versus what might unintentionally hurt them.

As outlined above, this role would focus on allowing for the process of interest aggregation and advocacy, where at the least NGOs might serve as a voice for their communities and help the U.S. identify areas of potential collaboration. The report identified some obvious areas of collaboration such as climate change and health; however, civil society groups often work in areas where collaboration might be possible but not obvious, such as municipal waste policies, poverty alleviation, and income inequality. As one potential example, China and the U.S. share large domestic coal sectors located in poor areas, and policies devoted to transitioning coal miners and their communities to other sectors is an important challenge.

The potential of closer collaboration will likely depend on issue area and group type. For example, certain types of civil society groups, such as arts organizations, might be good bridges in that they are not issue-driven, which allows complex and otherwise sensitive conversations. This impact has been seen in the past with “ping-pong diplomacy” and during the Olympics and other sporting events.

In short, I believe engagement with Chinese civil society is a good strategy, but it must be carefully balanced to avoid or mitigate the distrust in both countries. The policy suggestions in the report focus on ways to decrease distrust, but unfortunately this is being driven by powerful geopolitical concerns so it is unclear how actionable these recommendations are. Additionally, recommendations such as persuading China to revise the Foreign NGO Law is also unlikely given the persistence of the domestic politics concerns that caused the creation of this law in the first place. None of these larger challenges is likely to change in the foreseeable future, so although I support all of these long-term suggestions made by the report authors, I would also propose focusing on increasing policy access and capacity of Chinese NGOs as a dual-track strategy.

The post Pursuing Mutual Benefit and Win-Win Cooperation: Sino-U.S. Civil Society Engagement appeared first on China Research Center.

At the same time, China’s spectacular economic rise has an ominous side as it secures control over the South China Sea with a navy that increasingly rivals the U.S.  China also has begun to behave in more belligerent ways toward its neighbors, for one thing by instigating skirmishes on the India-China border. And some of China’s domestic policies, such as increased digital surveillance of citizens, treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and rising nationalism, have led to wariness of China’s authoritarianism.

These developments beg the questions: How can we define the China model, and in what ways has it been successful or not? In this essay, I review three recently published books with these questions in mind:

Dexter Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The worker, the factory, and the future of the world (St. Martin’s Press, 2020)

Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, Invisible China: How the urban-rural divide threatens China’s rise (The University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Thomas Orlik, China: The bubble that never pops (Oxford UP, 2020)

The Migrant Dilemma

In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts argues that rural migrant workers have been the bedrock of China’s growth model since economic reforms began in 1978.  Following Guizhou villagers who worked as migrants in Guangdong, Roberts provides personal examples of the challenging lives these migrants have faced.

One of the most serious challenges, and one Roberts spends a lot of time on, is the household registration system, or hukou.  Chinese citizens are assigned official residences tied to their rural or urban places of birth.  Many aspects of a person’s life are then also tied to whether they have a rural or urban hukou, such as access to education and health care, permission to marry and have children, and the right to purchase a home. This social structure prevents rural citizens from achieving a better urban life or even sending their children to urban schools while they live and work in the cities as migrant workers. Meanwhile, in the countryside, the lack of property rights over land stifles their options at home because they cannot sell land and use the profits for other pursuits. As Roberts describes it, the lack of reforms in the labor and land markets hits rural migrants the hardest. He sees capitalist market reforms as falling short of the rhetoric, and hence, the “myth.”

From Roberts’ perspective, the economic model’s fundamental characteristic is an urban bias created by state policies that systematically hurt, however inadvertently, non-urban hukou holders. Roberts’ analysis suggests that the development process has been extremely beneficial for urbanites, but that constraints on rural citizens will need to change for progress to keep spreading to the rest of society.

He acknowledges that some things have improved for rural migrants, such as wages. Still, he emphasizes that without reforms allowing land sales by individuals and freedom for rural people to live where they choose, China’s development will not succeed because it will leave out too many people.

From an economic development perspective, China’s policymakers understand that moving up the value chain is the right way to go, even in rural villages, as Roberts describes. They promote innovation and entrepreneurship, using the state to push development goals through incentives and directives. However, leaving half of the population out could lead to failure.  And although Roberts does not say so explicitly, if ending the hukou system and state ownership of land would undermine Party control, these steps are not likely to be taken.  In an optimistic sign, the latest National People’s Congress in March 2021, approved some reforms of the hukou rules.   

Human Capital is Key

Invisible China: How the urban-rural divide threatens China’s rise, by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, makes the case even more forcefully that China must pay attention to the health and well-being of rural citizens, or its growth may well stagnate. The authors fully recognize the impressive progress that China has made, leaving most people much better off than before the reforms began in the late 1970s. Poverty reduction has been real and widespread. However, Rozelle and Hell argue that the lack of adequate education and health, which are the basics of investment in human capital, for 70 percent of the labor force could leave China in the dreaded “middle-income trap.” Their conclusions are based on thousands of interviews and surveys over several decades.

The middle-income trap refers to the process of industrializing based on low-skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing and exports. Once wages begin to rise, workers cannot move to higher value-added, relatively more skilled jobs. This problem emerges when the workforce lacks the needed higher level of skills. The result is economic stagnation and social challenges such as unemployment that arises from that stagnation.  Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey are examples of initial development success stories that have failed to grow into high-income economies. In contrast, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Ireland were able to transition to higher-skilled manufacturing and services, and then on to innovation and become some of the world’s richest economies.

What makes the difference between countries that become high-income and those that do not?  Rozelle and Hell argue that the percent of the population with a high school or greater education level is the critical factor. They point out that countries that have succeeded in moving from middle to high income had over 70 percent high school attainment for decades (p.25-26).  And surprisingly, despite all of China’s successes and focus on education, only 30 percent of China’s labor force has a high school degree or higher today.

Many years of meticulous research led by Rozelle uncovered challenges such as myopia in elementary school children and poor nutrition affecting youth development, leading to large achievement gaps between rural and urban students. The result is a large, mostly rural, increasingly unemployed or underemployed population as the country moves to more sophisticated manufacturing and services as the drivers of growth.

Rozelle and Hell are hopeful that China can build an education system that will serve all citizens and match needed skills. They point out that China has been able to address seemingly intractable challenges over time. China’s focus on education has been extensive. The authors describe how investments in buildings, textbooks, teachers, and meals have greatly improved schools.

However, timing remains a problem. Since obtaining a proper education takes many years, rural youth are at least two decades away from achieving this, even if the existing challenges are solved now. There is also a matching problem.  Although China’s economy has been good at creating new jobs, Rozelle and Hell argue that there is a mismatch — skilled workers will find work, but unskilled workers may not. There simply are too many unskilled workers for the forecasted number of unskilled jobs. The authors estimate that perhaps between two and three million people may not be employable in formal jobs (p.48). If so, they argue, China will unlikely be able to move up the income ladder.

Dealing with Debt

Thomas Orlik looks at a different slice of China’s growth process — that of the financial sector — in China: The bubble that never pops. He argues that China has been able to overcome serious challenges time and again. Given the high debt levels that China has incurred, analysts wonder why the country’s “coming collapse” has not occurred yet.¹ However, Orlik views the reform process as working just the same. He documents the various parts of China’s enormous debt levels with extensive detail and yet sees the system continuing to thrive. Orlik argues that the strength of the system rests in part on the creativity of policymakers and the vast resources available to them through the country’s high savings rate managed by a single-party state.

For example, a major concern has been the high debt levels in “shadow banking,” which operates outside the formal banking sector. This sector emerged initially to help finance the many investments, small and private, that state banks shunned. Eventually, the state banks also participated in lending to this sector because the rate of return was much higher than with formal lending. This non-transparent, high-risk debt grew to an estimated 36 percent of China’s GDP by 2016 (p.43).   Policymakers were worried that a crisis in the sector might spill over to the formal economy, but they did not want to restrict lending for fear of seeing a major part of China’s growth engine disappear.

However, Orlik suggests that as part of China’s moves to control its debt levels, reducing shadow lending has been successful — without serious negative growth consequences. He argues that lending was kept open for productive projects funded within the traditional banking system even as funding was restricted for property speculation and emergency loans to companies near bankruptcy, which shadow lending largely funded by that point (p.133).

Another major part of the deleveraging process deals with the over-building of housing and real estate generally. Outsiders are shocked by the “ghost city” phenomena in China.  How can so much empty real estate be supported financially? A debt or financial crisis is certainly coming.

Contrary to other analysts’ gloom and doom scenarios, Orlik describes how Chinese policymakers have been tackling the real estate challenge while spurring growth. The policy’s thrust was to increase demand for housing to absorb inventory and help bolster developers’ profits to lessen their debt. When the developers have incentives to invest, they buy land from local governments, filling public coffers. To increase demand when there is an oversupply of apartments, policies such as favorable mortgage rates, access to urban residency permits, teardowns of slum housing, and subsidies have worked in many areas. Where housing is tight and prices are high, such as in Beijing, restrictions and incentives not to buy are used instead.  Orlik lauds the variability of the policies depending on the needs. The focus is on helping all stakeholders — buyers, banks, developers, and governments — by considering the interests of each. Orlik is clear that China’s approach has been government action rather than a market solution. He acknowledges that this approach has most likely led to inefficiencies but avoided the high costs of a major financial crisis.  

Defining the China Model

How can we describe the China model? Table 1 summarizes China’s economic system’s key elements based on these three books and my research on China’s economy.

The characteristics in Table 1 reflect a prominent role for the state in setting priorities and directing resources, but also a large role for the private sector. Sufficient savings to fund high investment underlies rapid growth rates. These characteristics are similar to those of other East Asian countries as they developed from low to middle income and then succeeded in becoming high income.

Table 1: Defining the China Model

 Is the “China model” special? Does China have tools that others do not?

High savings and investment are key, but this is not country-specific. As Roberts, and Rozelle and Hell, describe, China followed a typical development process of starting with low-skill, low-wage production and moving up the value chain over time. Granted, China has been consistent in pushing this process forward, while other countries seem to have a shorter time perspective and less political will. One might argue a difference is that China’s leaders have state control, secured by a single-party state, over land, labor and other resources. However, the high-income countries succeeded without as much control, authoritarian rule, or as many resources. Development can occur in a variety of ways.

From China’s official view, there is no “China model.”² Leaders claim to share methods of good governance and problem-solving that worked for China, with the underlying message that a country does not have to be democratic to succeed. East Asian high-income countries have shifted the balance from government to more reliance on markets as their economies have matured, and they have become more democratic. These shifts are not apparent in China and by some measures are in reverse today.

The maintenance of the Chinese Communist Party’s power is one reason. While the Party is not the focus of these studies, the authors acknowledge the Party as a key factor in China’s development. The Party can define national goals and marshal resources toward them, maintain law and order, and build national consensus through propaganda and surveillance. When the regime faces risks, the Party can act ruthlessly, unlimited by law.  But the Party’s legitimacy rests on continued economic growth and solving problems people care about, such as environmental degradation. To date, the Party has pushed development forward and avoided most challenges to its monopoly power using both sticks and carrots.

While the authors of these books document that China has many elements needed for success, each contains warnings about possible constraints going forward. Roberts argues more freedom for rural citizens will be necessary for China to continue to develop; Rozelle and Hell argue that China has underinvested in one critical ingredient: human capital; and Orlik, the most optimistic of the group, lists difficult structural transitions needed for the fifth cycle of growth driven by innovation. All the authors conclude that China’s long-run success is far from assured. However, they all also emphasize China’s willingness to be flexible, imaginative, and forward-thinking in dealing with challenges that arise. This political will to develop may be the most important lesson that countries can learn from China.

The post The China Economic Model in Global Context: A Review of Three Books appeared first on China Research Center.

The last few years have been unsettling for Sino-American relations as administrations on both sides have steadily ratcheted up tensions — intentionally or unintentionally — with domestic politics taking a front seat, particularly since the onset of COVID-19. This coincided with my research on Chinese science fiction and preparation to teach a class on author Liu Cixin’s 刘慈欣 internationally renowned sci-fi trilogy, The Three Body Problem 三体 (serialized 2006).¹ When I taught my new Chinese sci-fi class in the fall of 2020, it seemed fitting that we all stared hard at computer screens to see each other and discuss the language and literature of an increasingly dystopian Three Body universe while simultaneously attempting to cope not so bravely with our own non-fictional new world of mostly isolating from social contact.

As my class studied Liu Cixin’s plot motivator, the cruel excesses of the idealistic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (circa 1965-1975), the U.S. administration was gearing up for a reelection campaign and determined not to “panic” the population with fears of pandemic, thus choosing instead to ignore science and downplay its seriousness. The resulting millions of U.S. cases leading to more than 400,000 deaths by the time of the transition to the new administration in January 2021, in comparison to scientifically, socially, and politically adept places like Taiwan which effectively minimized the virus threat to about 976 cases and 10 deaths (as of March 9, 2021),² suggests a Cultural Revolution parallel in which political extremes result in the exact opposite of their intended purpose – a flip from idealized utopia to realized dystopia. Science was spun as fakery and conspiracy theories occupied the vacuum created by downplaying the situation. The previous administration staged a science fiction reality show that continues to afflict us despite cancellation of the show and the new administration’s corrective course of action.

These developments found me contemplating dystopia and confronting big questions about truth, fiction, reality, humanity, and how science fiction can help us navigate our reality. More specifically, what does science fiction tell us about the relationship between ideology and a dystopian world view?

A look at the last century of science fiction in China facilitates exploration of this question. Science fiction came into China during the late Qing and early Republican eras introduced by Liang Qichao and Lu Xun.³ Liang’s 1902 magazine New Fiction 新小说 “extolled a genre he called ‘philosophical science fiction’”⁴ and Lu Xun’s first published work was his translation of Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon 月界旅行)from Japanese in 1903.⁵ Soon thereafter Chinese writers began publishing their own works of science fiction,⁶ but the genre didn’t come to the fore in China until the 2000s, with the major exception of Hong Kong author Ni Kuang (1935 – present). In the following paragraphs, I briefly analyze three works of Chinese science fiction that provide clues to the propensity toward an ideologically driven dystopian “future” faced by humanity. First, I introduce the extreme satire in the form of socio-political allegory in the Republican Era Cat Country 猫城记 (1933 by Lao She 老舍 (1899-1966)), which is narrated by a character who crash-lands his spaceship on Mars and finds a cat person civilization even more vile than his own. Next, Ni Kuang’s 倪匡 Virus 病毒 (1995) researches the relationship between ideology and biology in search of an uninfected brain. Finally, Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem extrapolates ideological excess to a (not so) future environmental and political dystopia to imaginative our harrowing destiny.

I. Lao She’s Cat Country and the Transposition of Satire in the Solar System

Lao She’s Cat Country 猫城记 (1933) is a satirical allegory about life under political division and social upheaval in the early Republican period. In his sarcastic preface to the novel, Lao She states from the outset that “Cat Country is a nightmare.”⁷ In response to complaints that the novel being too pessimistic he says that “cat people are cat people, and they’ve got nothing to do with us.”⁸ The protagonist and first-person narrator of Cat Country travels to Mars and finds a civilization of Cat People (maoren 猫人) whose social, political, and moral culture outstrips that of his native China. The story begins with a crash-landing, after which the narrator proceeds to explore and critique Cat Country culture from the point of view of a “foreigner.”

The narrator is hired by a wealthy landowner named Big Scorpion to protect his forest of drug-leafed trees (the only food Cat People eat). Big Scorpion’s psyche represents Cat Country moral character (and Chinese warlordism) in a microcosm, summed up by his assertion: “Our abilities to kill one another get better day by day, and our methods of killing are almost as marvelous as making poetry.”⁹ The narrator befriends the landowner’s enlightened son, Young Scorpion, who introduces him to and helps him understand society. Cat Country’s social and political evils parallel those of Chinese society: drug addiction, warlordism, foreign influence and incursion, an irrational education system, generational divide, urban-rural divide, women’s rights, concubinage and child sex slavery, environmental destruction, prostitution, famine, poverty, crime, corruption, sloth, filth, cowardice, disloyalty, and superciliousness.

In the manner of a sociologist conducting field research, the narrator documents the deteriorating cat civilization while exploring the country. He checks off the ills in each segment of society from chapter to chapter. The narrator visits a government office, a school, a library, and a social organization. He talks with the locals, as he develops “a diagnosis of Cat Country’s illness.”¹⁰ The narrator describes the chaos of a generationally and politically divided country in which young people and “scholars of the new” (xin xuezhe 新学者) demonstrate their learning with foreign words that nobody understands, adding the nonsensical suffix fusiji 夫司基 to their names and other ideas.¹¹ For example, the belief in revolutionary new ideas is “everybody-fusiji-ism” 大家夫司基主义 which the narrator notes is “an ideology that is really good at killing people.”¹² The problems are both societal and individual, and the narrator sticks with allegorical allusions using the highly charged contemporary Chinese code word “patient” (bingfu 病夫) in describing the state of national essence, moral integrity, and revolution. Young Scorpion is too pessimistic, the narrator notes, “but naturally I’m from peaceful, happy China, so I always thought Cat Country had hope; a person who isn’t sick can’t easily understand the reason a sick person (bingfu) is pessimistic.” ¹³ The narrator speculates existentially:

I don’t know which god created this group of low-lives. They neither have the kind of ability that ants have nor the intelligence of humans. The god that created them is probably intentionally joking with them. They have schools but not education, they have politicians but not political process (government), they have people (ren 人) but not moral character (renge 人格), they have face but not shame. This joke is just played way too extreme.¹⁴

The “important people” among the revolutionaries have a simple solution: the equal division of drug leaves that are society’s food, which is referred to as new “ism” called “drug-leaf everybody fusiji-ism” (miye dajia fusij zhuyi 迷叶大家夫司基主义).¹⁵ Allusions to China’s bleak internecine warfare continue right up to the end of the novel. Cat Country’s self-annihilation (civil war) is facilitated with the help of foreign “short soldiers” (Japanese invaders) who put the country’s remaining two cat people in a cage and watch as they bite each other to death. The book closes with the narrator luckily escaping Mars and returning to his “great, brilliant, and free China.” ¹⁶

The issues and ills of Cat Country and Cat People that Lao She virtually catalogues could have been selected from the titles in New Youth (Xin qingnian 新青年) or New Tide (Xin chao 新潮) magazines in the 1900s and 1920s. Topics include science, literature, women’s issues, education, philosophy, labor, capitalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and even Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freudian psychology. Through science fiction Lao She put his first-person narrator on Mars to critique the state of Chinese society which concludes, through extrapolation, with the self-annihilation of the Chinese people in his contemporary dystopian nightmare.

II. Virus (1996) and Ideological Metaphor

While Cat Country critiqued the ideological illness of China’s society and politics in the most obvious of satirical allegories, approximately 60 years later Ni Kuang’s Virus presented a subtler critique of the illness afflicting society. Virus is one of some 150 novels in Ni Kuang’s Wisely Series (Weisili xilie卫斯理系列) that take the name Wisely for the main character. It is number 89 in Ni Kuang’s series of sci-fi novels published by Taiwan Crown Publishing.¹⁷ The novel is focused on the hunt for a criminal who steals the heads of corpses and is thus termed Head Robber (rentou da dao 人头大盗). The protagonist Wisely is a first-person narrator and detective who travels broadly, from Hong Kong to Europe to Singapore and elsewhere, as he investigates these mysterious crimes.

In his brief preface, Ni Kuang alludes to the allegorical scope of the novel as well as the ideological component of a virus, almost giving away the plot that is about to unfold over some 200 pages:

[Some people] consider that the view of the main character of the story who believes herself to be ‘humanity’s public enemy’ (renlei gongdi人类公敌) is too extreme. Well, please try to tell those who call themselves “people’s saviors” (renmin jiuxing 人民救星) that they have been inflicted by an extreme virus and are traitors to humanity (renjian 人奸) and don’t know it themselves. What would be the result? Would those afflicted with the virus consider you an enemy or friend?

Or tell those who’ve secretly had contact with criminals that they should face facts and not be harmed by an ‘ignorance virus’ (wuzhi bingdu 无知病毒) or a ‘shamelessness virus’ (buyaolian bingdu 不要脸病毒). Would they consider you an enemy or a friend?

Viruses run rampant. How about the true faces of humans?¹⁸

The story starts with Wisely at a biology conference where he is contacted by a Scotland Yard acquaintance who informs him of the disappearance of heads from recently deceased people in funeral homes all over Europe. Upon returning home, presumably in England, Wisely finds a group of women visiting. He knows these women from a magical sect that practices the “falling head technique” (jiangtou shu 降头术), which is of unclear purpose but seems to involve mysticism about separating the consciousness from the body. These sorceresses ask for his help solving the death of their famous grandmaster the Guess King (Cai wang dashi 猜王大师), who also turns up headless after a magical regimen. The allegorical nature of the technique and the mystery here is directly indicated by this nomenclature. Wisely agrees to help find the murderer. The grandmaster is connected to a princess of Asian extraction at an unnamed Royal Palace. The princess is also a scientist doing research on how viruses affect people’s minds and thus their behavior and actions. The plot slowly builds the concept of ideology as virus as Wisely investigates, facilitated by the introduction of one of the princess’ collaborators, a scientist named Tian Huo who has separately been exploring this virus theory without knowledge that the princess is also a sorceress:

There are all kinds of bacterial viruses that harm people in today’s earth. They are all called pests (haichong 害虫), but they aren’t what humanity recognizes as low-level life forms. It’s just that their bodies are small. But they are actually a high-level form of life. What he means is: a high-level life form with thought (sixiang 思想). ¹⁹

This explanation is framed as a war between humanity and bacterial viruses, driven by the biologically founded fear that “while both sides suffer huge losses, bacterial viruses adapt no matter what weapons humans attack them with and nobody knows from where they originate.”²⁰ Tian Huo has two possible conclusions: “First, they [viruses] are being directed by some kind of power and acting on the orders of this kind of power.”²¹ Tian Huo notes another option: “The second possibility is that there isn’t a power leading them, but rather bacterial viruses organize themselves, group together and form a giant army and do battle with humanity.”²² This is an insinuation that viruses might be a non-human alien power in which the virus resembles an alien species, thus subtly justifying the sci-fi designation of what at first glance appears to be a detective novel.

The second sci-fi element of Virus is the “magic” used by the grandmaster sorcerer and his female disciples. Through conversations with Tian Huo, who believes Wisely is a sympathizer, Wisely zeroes in on the princess, eventually meeting her in the palace. It turns out that she is also one of the grandmaster’s disciples, unbeknownst to the others, and has been working with him to hunt for one uninfected brain in all humanity (besides the grandmaster and herself). The goal of their search for a virus-free brain is to establish a baseline against which to measure other brains for degree of infection in their attempt to prove their theory of viruses. Although they steal the heads of famous people and thinkers from funeral parlors throughout Europe, none of them appears uninfected.

Wisely’s meeting with the princess provides the final narration of the motivations and events that created this mysterious case. The princess seeks to save humanity but laments being labeled as “humanity’s public enemy.” Moreover, the princess and grandmaster are faced with failure to prove that humanity’s afflictions are caused by viruses, which are not recognized by science itself. People are zombies (xingshi zourou 行尸走肉) and diseases such as cancer and even a person’s longevity, as well as all kinds of abnormalities in their thinking – greed, cruelty, cowardice, and slavishness – are caused by viruses.²³ Their theory views viruses as creating thought (sixiang 思想) and the virus manifests thought as abnormal (bingtai 病态), although this is unrecognizable to its human carriers.²⁴ The princess concludes: “If you want to cure this illness you must first know you’re sick. And virtually all of humanity is sick, controlled by viruses.”²⁵ The worst virus is termed “slave/slavishness virus” (nuxing bingdu 奴性病毒) that manifests in the afflicted slave who will “kneel down and lick the toes of the powerful (qiangquanzhe 强权者).”²⁶ Those powerful leaders have what the princess calls a “traitor to humanity virus” (renjian bingdu 人奸病毒) and act in common “to help the virus harm humanity.”²⁷

Unable to find an uninfected brain, the grandmaster and princess conclude that besides the princess herself, the only healthy brain to be found is that of the grandmaster sorcerer himself, who thereupon donates his own head to “science.”

Readers learn that “invisible” viruses are so infinitely small they are undetectable by any measuring instruments but produce infected thought – a metaphor for ideology. There is a collaboration between viruses and political leadership wherein the powerful use viruses as a weapon to wield power against humanity. Enlightenment in the form of recognizing this theory and the act of proving the theory by locating uninfected brains is apparently possible, but a steep uphill battle especially as leadership is culpable in the “crimes.” Ni Kuang’s critique of ideology and power through the virus metaphor indicates that the infection afflicts all of humanity (quan renlei 全人类). Power virus-infected political leadership are traitors to humanity and operate to cause immeasurable destruction that is simultaneously invisible to humans and science – a dystopia in which we all live. It is a small leap to see this idea replicated in 21st century conspiracy theories. Is there even an infinitesimal hope of humanity’s survival? The dystopian pessimism of Virus continues in extremis in Liu Cixin’s three-volume epic, The Three Body Problem.

III. The Three Body Problem (2006) and the Fatal Ideological Nature of Humanity

Cat Country author Lao She died by his own hand during the Cultural Revolution, a fact noted by Liu Cixin in The Three Body Problem when he lists the prominent intellectuals who chose to commit suicide rather than suffer the ignominy of public political persecution in mass struggle sessions during China’s “continued revolution.” Liu uses detailed description of struggle sessions that pit children against their parents, wives against husbands, and students against teachers to depict the atrocity of the Cultural Revolution to set up the psychological rationale to justify his main character Ye Wenjie’s appeal to an alien civilization for help: “Come here, I’ll help you obtain this world. Our civilization is already powerless to solve its own problems and needs your power to intervene.”²⁸

Technology changes from the 1930s to the 1990s to the 2020s, but human ideological issues appear to stay the same. Cat Country’s Mars traveling narrator, who chronicles the final stage of dissolution of Cat People civilization, is replaced by the international detective in Ni Kuang’s Virus who searches out head hunters trying to free humanity from ideology infection. The homicide continues in Liu Cixin’s epic depiction of a global catastrophe facing humanity in The Three Body Problem. Ni Kuang’s theoretical narrative metaphor of ideology is replaced by ideological practice depicted throughout the broad sweep of metanarrative in The Three Body Problem and its sequels. Socio-political critique in The Three Body Problem is even bleaker than Virus and transcends even the malevolence of stealing brains from corpses for “scientific” research. Politics and political movements inspire tragic action that begets greater tragedy as humanity is depicted as an infinitesimally small species in a universe inherently eviler than any biological agent participating in a meta-Darwinian struggle for survival.

The Three Body Problem depicts the wholesale reorientation of the world due to the breakdown of social norms over the last thousands of years of so-called “civilization.” The basis of this threat is narrated partly through the genius of the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie 叶文洁 who knowingly initiates the global crisis in to take revenge on Chinese society for the devastation visited upon her family and society in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (circa 1966-1976). As a university student she witnessed the brutal murder of her famous scientist/professor father at the hands of the Red Guards in a struggle session. She herself is almost killed a couple years later as the political machinations of the Cultural Revolution leadership reach into her remote work camp in the northeastern Greater Khingan Range (Da xingan ling 大兴安岭) and a political faction attempts to gather crucial incriminating material to leverage against its powerful enemies (her father was peripherally related to the development of China’s atomic and hydrogen bombs). Science is always subservient to ideology as proven in Liu Cixin’s depiction of persecution of many scientists and their families for their adherence to so-called “reactionary” scientific theories, standards, rules of protocol, evidence, logic, and reason in their research.

The pivotal Chapter 7, titled “A Crazy Era” (fengkuang niandai 疯狂年代), has special significance for the author since “the Cultural Revolution had torn Liu Cixin’s family apart,”²⁹ along with the families of many other Chinese at the time. Liu originally wanted to start the Chinese version of the novel with the Cultural Revolution but reportedly buried it in flashbacks instead of giving it up-front prominence. The English translator, Ken Liu, suggested moving the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the story from its seventh chapter location in order to clarify why Ye Wenjie welcomed an alien invasion for English readers.³⁰

Political persecution against academic intellectuals through struggle sessions was particularly intense during the early part of the Cultural Revolution, as expressly described by the narrator of The Three Body Problem:

Compared with other evildoers, reactionary academic authority figures have a special characteristic: when they were first attacked, they were always arrogant and stubborn. This is also the phase when their death rate was highest. In the capital, over forty days  more than 1,700 objects of struggle that were beaten to death. Even more people chose an even faster channel to escape the craziness. Lao She, Wu Han, Ge Bozan, Fu Lei, Zhao Jiuzhang, Yi Qun, Wen Jie, Hai Mo and others, all ended their own seriously respectable lives.³¹

Ye Wenjie’s father was one of the survivors of this “first stage” of struggle against the “reactionary academic authority figures:”

Ye Zhetai lived from the start of the Cultural Revolution until now, and furthermore was always stuck in phase one. He didn’t confess, didn’t commit suicide, and wasn’t numbed either. When this physics professor walked onto the criticism stage, his spiritual air clearly said: let me bear an even heavier cross!

Professor Ye’s uncompromising righteousness made his brutal public murder even more cruel. Ye Wenjie’s personal experience of such cruelty imbued her with deep pessimism about ideology and human nature. Liu Cixin describes his interest in using sci-fi to explore the extremes of good and evil in terms of near addiction that led to his use of the Cultural Revolution as a plot device:

A true turning point [in my development of sci-fi] originated in a discovery. I saw a peculiar function of science fiction literature: In the real world a parallel for kind of evil can be found in the world design of science fiction and can be normalized and justified. The opposite is also the same, in the orthodox and unorthodox, the good and evil of science fiction, there is only meaning in the corresponding world. This discovery fascinated me and I sunk into it unable to extract myself, having derived a kind of evil pleasure in it.³²

Liu explores the limits of that evil in the first book of the trilogy primarily through Ye Wenjie. A few years after her father’s death, Ye Wenjie is saved from near death at her work camp by a researcher at the nearby top-secret space research center, Radar Peak, who was one of her father’s former students. The secret purpose of the so-called radar facility, however, is to make contact with alien life in the cosmos and thereby garner glory for the revolution and nation through a shocking “first” in human history, an implied follow-up to the glory attributed to China’s 1964 nuclear development successes. It turns out that Ye Wenjie is the only one brilliant enough to accomplish this tremendous feat.

Ye Wenjie has her own motivations – to find a far grander solution to the reality of human depravity. She is driven by extreme disillusion with the morality of her fellow humans. She figures out how to use the sun to amplify the signal of Radar Peak’s cosmic antenna and penetrate the depths of the universe, resulting in a response from a Trisolaran listening post. There are “good” aliens it seems, as a particular listening post worker warns her not to ever respond again because doing so would result in his own people coming to colonize Earth and exterminate all its people. Unfortunately, Ye is traumatized and welcomes wholesale human genocide because it is better than the unending catastrophes brought down upon humans by fellow humans over the course of thousands of years of “civilization.” Here we find echoes of modern Chinese literature’s leading voice, Lu Xun 鲁迅 [1881-1936], whose critique of the Chinese civilization and culture as “cannibalism” 吃人 through the moon-gazing figure of the madman from his 1918 masterpiece short story “Diary of a Madman” 狂人日记. “A Crazy Era” directly indicts the inhumanity of her compatriots and also nods toward allegorical association with Lu Xun’s moon-gazing “madman.”

Lu Xun’s caustic critique analyzes the maliciousness of traditional Chinees culture which doctrinarily enables persecution and humiliation of its members. The direct allegory of “Diary of a Madman” is bracketed by the madman’s mental illness when he recorded his diary and satirical “recovery” from it thereafter. The irony in “Diary of a Madman” and Lu Xun’s critique of national character through the 1926 novella “The True Story of Ah Q” 阿 Q 正传 are given new voice by Liu Cixin through flashbacks to the events of the Cultural Revolution as well as jumps into the future of Earth when the Trisolaran aliens prepare to invade. Liu Cixin’s trilogy delineates 450 years of Earth future events through the use of time travel enabled by cryogenics. Liu’s sci-fi plot explores the “Dark Forest” paradigm (also the title of volume 2 of the trilogy Hei’an senlin 黑暗森林 [2008]) that elucidates the dangers of making one’s own civilization accessible to aliens.

An outline of the entire trilogy and its multitude of intriguing characters is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that Liu Cixin draws upon his own abundant sci-fi imagination informed by the likes of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1951), who is cited by name in the text, to depict the factors that cause his nation’s people to turn on one another during the Cultural Revolution. Liu further explores the consequences of such ideological fanaticism and political struggle as it informs the thinking (eventual fascism) of the international community as the tragedy is extended to a global scale in response to imminent Trisolaran invasion. Various other sci-fi story elements include spaceship battles and the scientific pursuit of travel near or at light speed which the author employs in his endeavor to imagine the implications of an intergalactic struggle for survival. When all humans are rounded up and packed into concentrations camps in Australia prior to being sent to colonies on Mars, the reader is certain that Liu has accomplished his purpose of imagining the extreme consequences of evil. But this measure of extremity lasts only briefly. By the end of the trilogy the annihilation of civilization is surpassed through the process of intergalactic Darwinian struggle into dimensions unrecognizable to humans and aliens, resulting in eventual obliteration of the universe. Dystopia in extremis.

VI. Contemporary Virus Politics

The U.S. experience with the coronavirus pandemic that emerged under the Trump administration mirrors the undermining of reality that ideology brought to the sci-fi novels analyzed above. The alternate ideological positions and interpretation of reality of competing political parties that manifested during the Trump years and continue today have produced a cloud of disorientation. The politics of anti-science and anti-reason during the Cultural Revolution are analogous to the socially irresponsible rejection of science in public health reflected by persecution of doctors for warning about the coronavirus danger, or an administration whose leadership contended that face masks and social distancing were not necessary and that the virus would “magically disappear” and cases would go down to zero.

Extreme ideological spin in socio-political discourse served a national leadership deeply insecure about its own legitimacy. Campaign chants of “Fire Fauci” two days before the 2020 election amount to an ironic public eulogy for the hundreds of thousands dead at the hand of anti-science fanatics as if ideology has the fire power to defeat the virus. Politics over science actually amounted to unilateral disarmament in the battle against the virus. It appears that Ni Kuang’s ironic critique that viruses are ideological organisms that cause moral character abnormalities is prescient. This unilateral disarmament in the war against the coronavirus is true to form for the former U.S. administration, which had already chalked up an impressive list of retreat from strategic initiatives designed to hold the battle lines against Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other international competitors, as demonstrated by withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, the World Health Organization, the Iran Nuclear Treaty, and starting a trade war with China that could be “won” only by accepting defeat measured in the loss of more jobs than it created,³³ and renegotiation of the NAFTA treaty that was “won” by simple tweaking of the terms which do nothing to bring back manufacturing to rust belt states such as Michigan.

The Cultural Revolution chapters set the story up for this metanarrative through depiction of ideological weaponry exposed in practice by Red Guard factions and their use of dialectical materialism (weiwu zhuyi 唯物主义) to battle reactionary idealism (weixin zhuyi 唯心主义) in persecution (struggle) sessions. While the 10-year Cultural Revolution turns out to be a “blip” of history in comparison to the 450 years it took for the Trisolaran invasion to arrive, the ideological battle of how society is organized and governed is consequential, especially considering that 450 years seems “insignificant” in comparison to 100 million years later when the entire cosmos is vaporized at the end of volume three, Death’s End (2010), for which a literal translation of the title may be more appropriate: “the god of death lives forever” (Sishen yongsheng 死神永生).

Here we are today in a coronavirus-infected world where deaths are in the millions globally, and where the first reaction of supposedly competent governments is to protect their own images and lie to their people in order to protect them from panic, even to the extent of persecuting those who would bring the truth out, be they physicians in Wuhan or leaders of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda. This is an international, intercultural phenomenon that engulfs the world, from Brazil to Iran, whose science denial and news suppression subsequently made them competitive in the race to top infection rates. Think of a White House that tried desperately to keep the stock market from tanking by fighting the virus with a rosy public relations campaign and lies that became clear as authorized recordings of the president acknowledging the seriousness of the situation surfaced more than half a year later in Bob Woodward’s book Rage (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

In the U.S. the virus has split the population into madmen engaging in “cultural wars” with a political divide between science and ideology. Those afflicted with Ni Kuang’s “traitor to humanity virus” and “slavishness virus” spend time “licking the toes” of the power leadership, perhaps exemplified by the racism of an administration that leveraged linguistic tropes to assign blame for the virus and deflect its own bungling of a response and attempted to spin 400,000 virus deaths into a “success” [think “Operation Warp Speed”]. Would Liu Cixin be surprised that such political dystopianism has divided the country and even families into political extremes, even as members of those same fragmented families are dying? Virus politics creates a severe challenge to the political system and undermines beliefs in democracy by pitting mysticism against scientific practice and reasoning, a state of affairs that would surprise neither Lao She or Ni Kuang. It seems we’re back to idealism versus materialism. In the context of the U.S. presidential election of 2020, the writer Roxane Gay takes a similarly bleak view of humanity:

I expect to hear a lot of frenzied political discourse over the next several months. I imagine pundits will try to understand how the 2020 election panned out and why. Too many white liberals will obsess over early exit polls indicating that 20 percent of Black men and a significant number of the overly broad categories of Latinos and Asians voted for Mr. Trump. They’ll do this instead of reckoning with how more white women voted for the president this time around and how white men remain the most significant demographic of his base. They will say that once more, Black women saved America from itself, which of course, we did, even though some things don’t deserve salvation.³⁴

“Some things don’t deserve salvation” recalls Professor Ye Wenjie’s decision to invite the Trisolarans to invade Earth, as cited above: “Come here. I will help you obtain this world. Our civilization is powerless to solve its own problems and needs your power to intervene.”³⁵ These lines point to the idea that Liu Cixin and Roxane Gay are trying to make the audience think about the values we propagate.

Dr. Anthony Fauci was sidelined by the previous administration, and here in Atlanta many epidemiologists warned that the threat wasn’t going away soon. The high-level political appointee from the Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps an ironic designation of the time, ranting on Facebook about the threat of medical scientists (and their calculators?) to the president’s reelection is a good example of cult power transcending science. Those who don’t view the virus as a “hoax,” however, needed to help prepare their social circles, and their students, to cope with a deadly health crisis until vaccines were delivered.

Taking a lesson from Ni Kuang’s Virus, we are not only fighting a deadly pathogen but also fighting the invisible effects of ideology, something the U.S. shares with Brazilian, Chinese, and Iranian victims of politics and radicalism over the eons. Ni Kuang and Liu Cixin have rightly, albeit obliquely, analyzed the political reality, and although Western sci-fi filmmakers typically find “heroes” among the milieu who appear to save the world, Liu Cixin’s dystopian ending should be a reality check to such imagined Hollywood happy endings. Science says that even vaccines are not going to help the U.S. out of coronavirus dystopia until the poorer countries of the world are also vaccinated. Can a happy ending be achieved at the current rate of virus mutation?

A happy ending lie is not requisite in every culture’s literary enterprise. Depressingly, Liu Cixin’s sci-fi world manifests unimaginable human suffering, concentration camps in Australia holding the world’s population as they wait to ferry to Mars colony, and allied international starships turning on one another even as the Trisolarans wipe out the human race. Projecting this logic, the lies of our illustrious leaders will come back to haunt us despite the eventual defeat of the virus. “Who could have known” how bad the virus would hit us and that it could be transmitted asymptomatically? Probably Liu Cixin and Anthony Fauci, but certainly not political leaders who sold their stock and invested after insider briefings on the forecast extent of the coronavirus at the same time they and the president were downplaying it. The next few months and years of political strife in the U.S. and worldwide may prove The Three Body Problem an apt allegory for these times, especially as Netflix prepares for a television adaptation produced by the producers of The Game of Thrones.³⁶ Fiction is less strange than true life, again, an example of the invisible “virus of ideology.” Consider the calls by Georgia Republican senators for the Republican Georgia Secretary of State to resign after the election, asserting “mismanagement and lack of transparency” and “embarrassment.”

Wouldn’t you know it, those senators had to head to a runoff in January 2021 because they didn’t win 50% +1 vote on election day, and thus doubled down on their propaganda games, which meant licking toes (thanks to Ni Kuang for the metaphor). But the Secretary of State fired back: “The facts are the facts, regardless of outcomes,” he said, adding, “In this state, this time, this election on Election Day was an amazing success.”³⁷

Although we’ve been “safe” in our isolated studies, facing students in the classroom through masks and plexiglass, our hybrid world of physical and virtual classrooms are two new types of “spaceships” designed for hygiene and carrying us toward a new normalcy. Dystopia is as dystopia does and creates meaningful metaphors in the process. If the “real” world suddenly resembles science fiction dystopia, can this literary genre act as a roadmap to help us navigate our reality? The struggle between truth and fiction highlights a reality that not only resembles but potentially surpasses science fiction. Or perhaps better put by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”³⁸

References

Brancaccio, David, Nova Safo, and Alex Schroeder. “Has Trump kept his promises to U.S. manufacturing and Carrier?” Marketplace Morning Report, November 2, 2020. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/11/02/trump-carrier-manufacturing-jobs-indiana-china-tariffs-factories-steelworkers/, accessed March 14, 2021.

Friedlander, Peter. “International best-seller ‘The Three Body Problem’ to be adapted as a Netflix original series.” September 1, 2020. https://about.netflix.com/en/news/the-three-body-problem-netflix-original-series, accessed October 1, 2020.

Liu Cixin 刘慈欣. Santi《三体》[The Three Body problem]. Chongqing: Chongqing chu ban she 重庆: 重庆出版社, 2008.

Liu Cixin 刘慈欣. “Chongfan Yidian yuan – kehuan chuangzuo shinian huigu” 重返伊甸园——科幻创作十年回顾[Returning to the Garden of Eden – a look back on ten years of science fiction works]. Nanfang wentan 南方文坛[Southern cultural forum], Issue 6 (November 15, 2010). Reprint in Xianggang shangbao wang 香港商报网(August 24, 2015). https://www.hkcd.com/content/2015-08/24/content_953575.html, accessed March 14, 2021.

Ni Kuang 倪匡. Bingdu: Ni Kuang kehuan xiaoshuo 89  病毒：倪匡科幻空间 89 [Virus: Ni Kuang science fiction 89]. 1995. Taibei: Huangguan wenxue chubanshe, 1996.

Rojas, Rick and Richard Fausset. “Georgia Senators Ask Election Official to Resign in G.O.P. Squabble.” New York Times. November 10, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/kelly-loeffler-david-perdue-raffensperger.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage, accessed November 10, 2020.

“Santi (Liu Cixin zhu kehuan xiaoshuo)” 三体 (刘慈欣著科幻小说). https://baike.baidu.com/item/三体/5739303, accessed May 13, 2021.

Wang Jiashui 王加水. “ Wo guo jindai xuezhe  dui kexue xiaoshuo de tansuo” 我国近代学者对科学小说的探索 (Our modern scholars’ investigations into science fiction), Science Times 科学时报 (August 2008), http://news.sciencenet.cn/sbhtmlnews/2007815234459373187063.html?id=187063, accessed March 10, 2021

Wu Yan, Yao Jianbin & Andrea Lingenfelter (Translator). “A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction,” Chinese Literature Today, 7:1 (June 29, 2018), 44-53.

“Zhongguo kehuan xiaoshuo tuijian top20 中国科幻小说推荐top20 [Top 20 recommended works of Chinese science fiction], https://www.douban.com/doulist/1595565/, accessed February 6, 2020.

The post Chinese Sci-fi, Viruses, Politics: Three Dystopian Bodies appeared first on China Research Center.

The Challenge

Thank you, Yawei [Liu, China Program director at the Carter Center and China Research Center board member], for your comments about engagement and the role of The Carter Center, because that is a great foundation on which to start the conversation tonight. Unfortunately, it is not the foundation that most people are on right now.  It is no secret there is a lot of controversy and tension in U.S.-China relations. Right now in Washington, I do not know if it is confusion but certainly a searching for answers and a sense that past practices, past policies are no longer a guide for us going forward. But I do believe that engagement and focus on common purpose and common benefit is the path that will take us forward.

I will come back to this point in terms of what specifically I mean, but I want to lay out that I think it is important to be grounded in hope for the future as we just heard from Yawei, but also be cognizant of reality and not be naïve about where we are in terms of the challenges currently facing us.

When I say “us” I mean all of you who are involved in U.S.-China relations, including commercial relations, or in my case, educational relations or whatever other relationship you have with China. All of us feel this tension between the growing importance of China globally and the need to engage but also challenges that are being brought about by virtue of China’s changing role in the world. China is becoming much more assertive in a lot of different dimensions, which is challenging global norms, and that has unsettled people.

This situation is different than when I first became involved in China in 1989 when I joined the State Department. Today, we find ourselves with the United States and China as the two most powerful, most consequential nations in the world. In 1989 we all saw that future, but now it is here. We need to have the wisdom and the patience and skill to be able to deal with what is a very new reality. What people are feeling on an individual level again is a degree of uncertainty and frustration and concern. For example, there’s a lot of frustration on the part of U.S business about market access, about an unequal playing field within China, and China’s been very forthright about an assertive industrial policy. These things have unsettled the commercial relationship between our two nations and pose significant challenges for the path forward. Another example is workers concerned about lost jobs here in the United States due to China’s success in exporting and particularly in the wake of the WTO accession about 20 years ago. We’ve seen that rumble through our political landscape.

A third example is considerable concern among national security experts about how to engage with China on issues such as how to deal with China in the South China Sea or with cybersecurity. Finally, human rights groups are concerned about recent events in Hong Kong or what’s going on in Xinjiang.  At this point, people have more questions than answers.

The Biden Administration

The old measures of dealing with these issues when viewed from policymakers or interested parties’ points of view, particularly in Washington, no longer seem to be applicable. There is a growing consensus that the United States needs new thinking regarding its relationship with China. We’ve seen some of that already coming from the Biden administration.

For example, we’ve seen some tough signals that the administration will try to distinguish itself from the policies of the Obama administration. That was necessary to acknowledge because there’s a pretty firm bipartisan consensus in support of a more firm China policy.  This may not include all the things that we’ve seen in recent years with the trade war and some of the other things that the Trump administration did, but definitely there is a general consensus that the United States needs to be more active in defending what people consider to be U.S. interests.

There are also important signals in terms of what we have not seen, such as discussion over decoupling. In fact, President Biden has talked about intense competition, which is a nod to the reality of the political climate currently in Washington. But he is trying to frame it in a way that provides for a more productive agenda as opposed to confrontation or decoupling or some of these other words that have gotten tossed around in recent years.

Lessons

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on how to go forward in this environment. I’d like to frame my comments by being cognizant of my assumptions and things that I’ve learned in the 30 years of being involved in U.S.-China relations. I’ll go back to my first day on the job, which was June 4, 1989. Things changed on that day in the U.S.-China relationship. We were thrown into a period of turmoil, which meant that my first years dealing with China were dominated by the fallout of that day. During the time I was in the embassy working in China throughout the ‘90s, in addition to rebuilding bridges on the ground, our job was to go back to Washington to explain to members of Congress who were mainly opposed (from the executive branch’s point of view) to engagement with China at that point. Our job was to explain how China was changing in terms of openness or human rights or commerce, among other trends. We were met by strong skepticism on the Hill. It was a tough road because there was a desire to punish China. There was also the sense that China had a different political model that we didn’t agree with and so we should not engage. We talked past one another, and in retrospect, we were both wrong. Today we’re having that same discussion, but again we are talking past one another and even within Washington, we’re taking positions that are extreme. That is not going to bring us to a consensus.

Let me give you a couple of specific lessons that I’ve learned from those early experiences. A key takeaway was the idea that China could be isolated or that its rise could be thwarted by strong U.S. pressure.  In hindsight, this was clearly naïve. What was happening in China was related to dynamics within Chinese society. Of course, the accession to the WTO was obviously a choice on the part of the U.S. administration, but it was not a real choice in that China was heading in that direction anyway, becoming more and more connected to the global economy. So, bringing it into the WTO, yes, was a choice, but it was an eventuality that the United States could not really stop.

So, to re-emphasize, the idea that the United States could somehow stop, or block or thwart China was naïve then, and that idea is still naïve now.  The idea that Chinese development would automatically lead to a political model that looked like the United States, what we would call a Liberal Democratic model, was also naïve. I was one of the ones who probably believed more in that eventuality than being able to block China’s rise, but in retrospect, again, what we misunderstood then, and in some cases we misunderstand now, is that China’s development has its own internal dynamic. External forces can maybe shape or adjust that but cannot significantly bend that trajectory.

Given these lessons, then, in thinking about what we can do with China, or what should we do vis-à-vis China, is we need to drop this false dichotomy of either trying to stop China or leaving China alone because it will become a western liberal democracy if we just give it enough space. The past 30 years have proven that both of those views are wrong. So, we’re not going to isolate China, as it’s not North Korea or Cuba, and decoupling would certainly hurt the U.S. economically and strategically. We’ve already seen some decoupling to the detriment of the United States both commercially and strategically. China has started to build its own — I won’t call it a world order — but at least regional structures and alliances and supply chains. The less the United States is a part of changes in the world order, the more our interests are damaged, but at the same time, we can’t force China to adopt American values and should not see shared values as a precondition for engagement.

To repeat, China is not going to become the United States, and U.S. policymakers and Americans more generally need to understand that. The ultimate goal for the United States should be to find an acceptable, reasonable, and realistic role for China in a rules-based global order. When I say acceptable, I mean acceptable to the United States from the United States perspective.  Not ideal, but acceptable.

An Eight-Point Strategy

Let me lay out my eight-point strategy. This could have been a six-point or 10-point strategy, and I am sure once I share these things, you could add or subtract your own, but since eight is a lucky number, I am going with eight.

Number one is we need to put the U.S. house in order. We have heard some talk about that in Washington and just as China’s source of global strength and global emergence was the result of changes happening domestically within China so should the United States’ global strength be grounded and emanate from domestic strength, such as the strength of our economy, our educational system, our technology, etc.

Number two is the United States needs to champion a rules-based international order. As I mentioned, we cannot stop China’s emergence, we cannot block China, we cannot isolate China, but we can steer it by championing a rules-based order. That will be a change from previous years where there was a lot of concern about the international order not serving U.S. interests.  But the international order was largely built by the United States principally to serve American and western European interests. In my view, it still does that quite well, and we are better served strengthening and updating the order rather than stepping outside it.

Third, we need to rebuild alliances with like-minded nations. We have seen traditional American allies head in different directions on China policy, but there is strength in numbers. This will help us shape the rules-based order if we have allies who are working in concert, maybe not on everything, but with a general shared interest in strengthening international institutions and by building international cooperation that steers China toward outcomes that we believe are more aligned with a stable, long-term relationship.

The fourth issue is we need to live up to our values and for those of you who remember June 4, 1989, you’ll remember that there was a makeshift Statue of Liberty built in Tiananmen Square. Fast-forward 30 years and the Chinese people do not see the U.S. as a model to emulate and that is largely our fault. The values upon which this country was built have served us well in times of crisis and the values that made the United States a model for others are ones that we need to embrace to strengthen our leadership. Doing so will not corrode our power.

Fifth, we need to be realistic about what China will and will not do in response to outside influence. China’s dynamics are domestic dynamics. There are things that are core to Chinese interests that will not bend to outside pressure just like there are things in the United States that are core interests which will not bend to pressure.

Sixth, we need to compete hard where our interests are really at stake. I’m encouraged by President Biden’s choice of characterizing the relationship as “intense competition.” I hope that gains traction and helps to frame both the reality but also to center the thinking of American policymakers and others here in the United States in terms of what we need to do to deal with all these U.S.-China issues that have caused so many concerns. We need to win in technology, but this requires a different approach in terms of the public-private division of labor. In the U.S. model of individual responsibility and somewhat limited government, there are public goods that government needs to invest in. We have lagged in investing in things like basic research, education, infrastructure, and I would add primary health care and public health, as we’ve seen in the past year. Also, having a society where some people are providing fewer and fewer contributions to economic activity so there’s an increasing inequality of wealth distribution does not serve our interests well. If you are a sports team and 30 percent of your players can’t play, you’re not going to be a very competitive sports team. Similarly, with a nation, if you have large segments of your population who, just by virtue of their birth, are destined to unproductive economic lives, even leaving out all the other sufferings, you are holding yourself back as a nation.

Seven is to separate issues where we can and link them where we must. In my 30 years of watching China relations, trying to link issues has led us to dead ends where we couldn’t reach agreements. We tended to assume that negotiations were a zero-sum game, and if any of you who has studied or taught negotiation knows that in zero-sum games you better be considerably stronger than your opponent to win consistently. If we take a zero-sum approach against China, which is an immensely powerful nation in so many dimensions, the likelihood that we are going to end up with significant net benefits is highly naïve in my view. We need to be smarter about how we connect issues and be more thoughtful in how we negotiate.

Finally, the more we can tone down the political rhetoric and focus on tangible outcomes that really matter, I think all of us will be better off.

In conclusion, I hope that outlines at least a framework and a starting point for discussion that provides a realistic, yet hopeful, view of a path forward.

Thank you very much.

The post Frank Neville Presentation appeared first on China Research Center.