For Generations of P.R.C. Leaders, a World ‘Alive with Danger’

An Excerpt from ‘Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping’

By Sulmaan Khan on September 30, 2018

There can be few jobs more difficult than that of paramount leader of China: the surrounding world invariably alive with danger, the extent of the state, its integrity and stability forever uncertain. For an outsider, it is easy to observe that the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) is far more secure now than it used to be. To a Chinese leader, that is far from sufficient reassurance. The Korean War and the Taiwan crises, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square—they are all burnt into the Chinese official mind. And behind them there are the lessons of a farther past, of Opium Wars and the warlord era, reminders of how complacency in a dangerous world can lead to dismemberment and despair. One cannot take national security for granted. That the P.R.C. was cobbled together is remarkable. That it has endured is even more so. Luck has played a role, of course, but so too has grand strategy.

Haunted by Chaos

By Sulmaan Wasif Khan on September 30, 2018

Harvard University Press: Before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, China lay broken and fragmented. Today, it is a force on the global stage, and yet its leaders have continued to be haunted by the past. Drawing on an array of sources, Sulmaan Wasif Khan chronicles the grand strategies that have sought not only to protect China from aggression but also to ensure it would never again experience the powerlessness of the late Qing and Republican eras.

Excerpts

09.30.18

For Generations of P.R.C. Leaders, a World ‘Alive with Danger’

Sulmaan Khan
There can be few jobs more difficult than that of paramount leader of China: the surrounding world invariably alive with danger, the extent of the state, its integrity and stability forever uncertain. For an outsider, it is easy to observe that the...

The dramatic variations in China’s modern history have obscured the commonality of purpose that binds the country’s leaders. Analyzing the calculus behind their decision making, Khan explores how they wove diplomatic, military, and economic power together to keep a fragile country safe in a world they saw as hostile. Dangerous and shrewd, Mao Zedong made China whole and succeeded in keeping it so, while the caustic, impatient Deng Xiaoping dragged China into the modern world. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao served as cautious custodians of the Deng legacy, but the powerful and deeply insecure Xi Jinping has shown an assertiveness that has raised both fear and hope across the globe.

For all their considerable costs, China’s grand strategies have been largely successful. But the country faces great challenges today. Its population is aging, its government is undermined by corruption, its neighbors are arming out of concern over its growing power, and environmental degradation threatens catastrophe. A question Haunted by Chaos raises is whether China’s time-tested approach can respond to the looming threats of the 21st century.

Book Review: 

Publishers Weekly (July 2, 2018)

Related Reading:

“China’s Grand Strategy in a New Era,” Zhong Feiteng, East Asia Forum, March 5, 2018

“Globalisation and Chinese Grand Strategy,” Aaron Friedberg, Survival, January 29, 2018

“China’s Search for a Grand Strategy: A Rising Great Power Finds Its Way,” Wang Jisi, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2011

“Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy,” Michael Swaine and Ashley Tellis, RAND, 2000

Author’s Recommendations:

China’s Search for Security, Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell (Columbia University Press, 2014)

Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, Odd Arne Westad (Basic, 2012)

Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Red China Blues, Jan Wong (Anchor, 1997)

Abigail Grace

on September 28, 2018

Abigail Grace is a Research Associate in the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for New American Security (CNAS). Her work focuses on U.S. strategic competition with China, China’s foreign policy, U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, and Chinese approaches to multilateralism.

Prior to joining CNAS, Grace was a member of the National Security Council staff from 2016 to 2018. There, she contributed to the development and operationalization of the competitive approach to U.S.-China relations, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy, and the international campaign to maximize pressure on North Korea.

A frequent commentator to the media on Asian security issues, Grace’s commentary and analysis has appeared in several media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, CNN.com, BBC Radio, USA Today, PBS, US News & World Report, Foreign Policy, Axios, Vox News, and others. Her writings have been featured in Foreign Policy, The Straits Times, The National Interest, China Brief, Global Security Review, Cornell International Affairs Review, and the Ohio State Journal for Politics and International Affairs.

Grace received her B.S.F.S. degree with honors in International Politics and a certificate in Asian Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Katherine Alexander

on September 27, 2018

Katherine Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on popular religious literature of the late Qing, specifically looking at works that spread during and after the Taiping Civil War, when religious-motivated conflict threatened to collapse the empire from within even as concurrently the Second Opium War threaten the empire from without. Most of this literature appealed to traditional religious values held common among Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians, forming a conservative backlash against destabilizing forces of religious and social change. During and after the wars, these stories were one way, among many others, that some feeling lost in the face of national crises sought stability, by rebuilding the moral foundations of their shared culture along with the reconstruction of homes, farms, and villages. Alexander is currently working on a book manuscript exploring this literature and its contexts in greater detail, based on her 2016 Ph.D. dissertation “Virtues of the Vernacular: Moral Reconstruction in Late Qing Jiangnan and the Revitalization of Baojuan.”

Mission Impossible

By Roderick MacFarquhar on September 27, 2018

The name of George C. Marshall, one of only six U.S. Generals of the Army in modern times, is indelibly linked with the Marshall Plan that was critical to the rebuilding of Western Europe after the devastation of World War II. When he spoke at Harvard’s commencement in June 1947 after receiving an honorary degree, Marshall, then secretary of state, made Europeans an offer of economic assistance, but only if they came up with a plan. The president of Harvard, James B.

Breaking Eggs Against a Rock

By Ian Johnson on September 27, 2018

Blood Letters is an important new biography of Lin Zhao, the journalist who was executed 50 years ago this spring for criticizing the Communist Party’s misrule in the 1950s and 1960s. After years of imprisonment, torture, and mental deterioration, she was hauled out of the prison hospital where she had shriveled to 70 pounds, taken to a thousand-seat prison auditorium in her hospital gown, gagged with a rubber ball, sentenced to death, and shot. Sustained by her Christian faith, Lin wrote hundreds of thousands of words in prison, but all were confiscated and locked away. Yet her writings somehow survived and slowly spread, despite censorship. Today she is counted as one of the most remarkable dissidents of the Mao era, one whose reputation grows by the year.

Registrations in Jiangsu, Hubei, and Chongqing; Training in Beijing, Tianjin, and Fujian; Inspection Visits in Yunnan

Ministry of Public Security WeChat Posts—August 30, 2018

on September 26, 2018

Recently, the Jiangsu Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Office held a ceremony to give a registration certificate to the China Cross-Strait Exchange Association (Taiwan). PSB representatives offered their congratulations and expressed their hope that the group would strictly abide by the Foreign NGO Law as they promoted people-to-people exchanges. The Association’s chief representative expressed thanks for the PSB’s warm service and stated that the group would use its office as a platform to carry on the idea of “two shores, one family,” as well as strengthen communications with its PSU.

Should the Vatican Compromise with China?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Pamela Kyle Crossley, Francesco Sisci & more on September 25, 2018

Amidst a crackdown on Christianity in China, on September 22 the Vatican and Beijing provisionally reached a major agreement: Pope Francis will recognize seven excommunicated bishops Beijing appointed, in exchange for more influence on who Beijing appoints as bishops in the future. Perhaps mindful of the role the Catholic Church played in the Eastern European democratic revolutions in the 1980s and ’90s, Beijing has long been hesitant to engage with the Vatican. What is at stake in this changing dynamic between Beijing and Rome? Would a deal help protect China’s millions of Catholics, or leave them more exposed?

Reporting from Xinjiang

A Discussion with Journalist Megha Rajagopalan

on September 21, 2018

On September 20, 2018, ChinaFile and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) co-hosted a discussion with BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan on her reporting on state-sponsored ethnic and religious repression in Xinjiang and, in particular, on the recent mass detentions of Xinjiang’s Uighur and Kazakh residents. The discussion took place at CNAS’ offices in Washington, D.C. and was moderated by Ely Ratner.

Topics: 
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Politics
Religion
Keywords: 
Uighur
Xinjiang
Detention
Human Rights
ChinaFile Presents
Journalism
Police
Xinjiang Reeducation Camps

North Korea Diplomacy and U.S.-China Relations

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle & Kaiser Kuo on September 20, 2018

Paul Haenle joined Kaiser Kuo to discuss next steps for DPRK diplomacy and tensions between the United States and China over trade, Taiwan, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Haenle shared his experience working as White House representative to the six-party talks in the Bush administration, and said China’s relations with North Korea reached a historic low in 2017 due to the leadership’s frustration with Pyongyang’s provocative nuclear and missile tests, leading to Beijing’s increased willingness to join the international maximum pressure campaign. He argued the Singapore summit reduced U.S. leverage with North Korea and produced a vague statement which failed to advance denuclearization.