Annotations for Speakers: Michael Beckley

Thanks so much for having us, Jeremi.

Yeah, I think Chinese leaders, almost across the board, view China's role in the world as being naturally one of greatness. And China, it's important to remember, is a revanchist power. According to the CCP's narrative, there are lost Chinese territories that one way or another have to be reabsorbed, as Hal has pointed out. And this current situation where the United States is currently the dominant power in China has to grow as a regional power and play by the rules that it didn't have a hand in writing, they see as a giant historical anomaly that they want to set straight. And I think, in addition to all the points that Hal raised, I think it's important to note just how frequently Chinese analysts and leaders look to the United States as the main threat to that "Chinese dream." I mean, part of this is just the obvious fact that the United States prevents the reincorporation of Taiwan, that the U.S. Navy is in the South China Sea, but I think it also reflects historical legacies that color how Chinese analysts and leaders view the United States. There is definitely a dominant sort of strategic culture that tends to portray Eastern culture as harmonious and Pacific and Western culture as inherently militaristic. I think there's a holdover from the Marxist teaching that many of the leaders were raised on that views capitalist powers as inherently imperialist and just using China for its resources and sucking it dry.

And then there's the offensive realist. I mean, John Mearsheimer is incredibly popular on Chinese syllabi. Every school that I've seen in China always has The Tragedy of Great Power Politics on it. And so there's this strong assumption that a country as powerful as the United States will definitely try to hold China down and then they can find all types of evidence for that. So just the key role that the United States plays, I think it's incredible how often it comes up when you start reading through Chinese strategic writings.

That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.

I mean, since the 1970s, you've had US engagement and that was the start also of the period of hyper globalization. So China suddenly has these opportunities to really become the workshop of the world and export its goods all over the place. You have a Chinese government after the death of Mao in 1976 that says, we don't wanna do another cultural revolution, let's try reform and opening. And so they commit to a sort of smarter form of autocracy that's more technocratic and rewards good governance, especially economically. You have the greatest demographic dividend in history with something like 10 to 15 workers per retiree in China's population in the 90s and 2000s. Most countries don't get anywhere close to 5 to 1. And then you just had relative self-sufficiency in resources and easy access to those raw materials made growth very cheap.

But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.

We see that as one of the most important manifestations of this peaking power trap. China is coming off of about a decade of a massive military buildup. It's been churning out warships at a rate that we haven't seen from another country since World War II. And it's been pumping up on ammunition and developing the ability to surge amphibious forces and potentially carry out a blockade of the island. On the other hand, this window of opportunity that China has because of its own military buildup and the sort of slow pace of U.S. and Taiwanese responses in terms of spreading out their forces, making them less vulnerable to a Chinese Pearl Harbor-style attack on U.S. bases on Okinawa and Taiwan. This window of opportunity may not stay open for very long because for one thing, the U.S. and Taiwan have ambitious plans to revamp their defenses to make them much more resilient by the 2030s.

And at the same time, a lot of those strategic headwinds I talked about earlier are gonna really start to kick in within a decade or so. And so China will be in a position where it could be economically stagnant, demographically collapsing. Xi Jinping will be in his 80s by the early 2030s. And so there's just a lot pointing at this period in the 2020s as being China's vital strategic window if it does in fact intend to use force to bring Taiwan into the fold. And for a little bit, this window will open slightly wider because the United States is about to go through a mass retirement of cruisers, guided missile submarines, bombers. Many of these things were built under the Reagan administration. So there's just this moment of sort of maximum vulnerability from the U.S. and Taiwanese side. And just given this, what from a Chinese perspective is a steady slide towards upping Taiwan's international status, upping the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, upping Japan's relationship with Taiwan. Even the Europeans are sending delegations there. They just are likely to feel that peaceful reunification is becoming less and less likely. And so they have to wonder, should we start flexing some of that military muscle that we spent several trillion dollars building up while we still can? And so for us, this is just a moment of maximum danger in the Taiwan Strait.

Yeah, I think there's the lessons that we would hope China would learn, and then there's the lessons I fear that China may have learned from that. I mean, obviously we would hope they would learn that conquest is really difficult and that the West is more united than maybe a lot of people previously thought prior to the invasion. But what I fear is that one, they've learned you've got to go big and brutal from the start. Putin's, one of his mistakes was to kind of stumble into Ukraine on multiple axes and have this really uncoordinated operation and give the Ukrainians time to pick apart those offensive forces. So China may say, look, if we're going to go, we got to go hard. That means hitting American bases to cripple their combat power early. That means pummeling Taiwan with an air and missile barrage. And then second, do not allow our target to be resupplied in the way that the Ukrainians are being resupplied. So that means sealing off any possibility of convoys coming in. I think that's part of the reason why China's been showing off that it can surround Taiwan on all sides, including on the East coast, where presumably the US would have tried to resupply Taiwan in a conflict. And then third is just to rattle the nuclear saber early and often because that seems to induce caution on the American side. So those could be the lessons that they learn. I think, you know, sober defense analysts have to just assume the worst about that and proceed accordingly. Obviously, maybe it's induced some caution, but just given the show of force that we've seen over the last couple of weeks, I just, it just seems like they are, you know, gonna conclude the worst from it.

I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.

So we try to argue that a danger zone strategy, you're trying to prevent war from breaking out, not catalyze it, and so you have to balance strength and caution, and so first of all, it's you have to prioritize that you should really just be focusing on key areas where if China scores a near-term success, it could radically upend the long-term trends that we currently see as favorable overall to the United States, so prioritizing a defense of Taiwan, making sure that China is not able to carve out this sort of authoritarian tech empire across the global south, but if China wants to spend lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects across the world through Belt and Road, I think those are things the United States doesn't necessarily have to oppose everywhere and at all times. And there's also limits that the United States can draw in terms of engaging in political warfare with the CCP and potentially destabilizing the regime in ways that would make it extremely desperate in the short run, and then I think you just have to have an eyes wide open approach to diplomacy, you know, if you can build the strength and then negotiate from that position of strength, then you can do things like have you really work on crisis management and confidence building mechanisms, military to military exchanges, hotlines, all the classic kind of ways to buffer geopolitical competition. I think can be done as long as you're coming at it from a position of strength that doesn't give your rival this potential window to do a smash and grab operation over something like Taiwan in the short term.

Well, I do think one silver lining of geopolitical competition is it tends to promote unity domestically, you know. I think it's no surprise that polarization goes off the charts basically after the end of the Cold War, when we can suddenly turn on each other. So one would hope that if there is this bipartisan agreement among Democrats and Republicans to get tough with China, that it can promote cooperation on on other issues, and I also think it extends to to allies, you know, another silver lining of Russia's recent offensive and China's belligerent behavior is it's forced Western allies to get back together and to really start talking about democracy a lot more than they used to, using that as a focal point of building and revamping an international order that makes the world safe for democracy, that means everything from creating new trade and investment regimes that basically prioritize democratic forms of governance and standards in those, it means more defense cooperation among like-minded democracies to uphold the law of the sea, and so what, what you would hope is that you could have this period of tension, but one that doesn't boil over to catastrophic conflict, and at the same time the fire of that geopolitical competition can actually be channeled in productive directions, everything from international institution building, comedy within countries, as well as a huge increase in research and development spending on all kinds of great technologies that will make life so much better for all of us over the long run, so one would hope that this could be channeled in productive directions, and that's sort of where we leave at the end, saying, look, this, here's some ways that you could actually make that more likely.

(Thanks, Jeremi) Thanks, Jeremi. Thanks, Zach, too really appreciate it.