“What do you think is unique about the Chinese model? That’s the question a TV reporter asked me the last time I was in Beijing. My response was that I don’t think there is a specific Chinese economic model.
There is a East Asian development model of rapid export-oriented industrialization that was initiated by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. What China has done is follow the same pattern – on a large scale. I added that the only real innovation from China was that the country had not liberalized politically because it had become rich. This distinguishes China from South Koreans and Taiwanese.
After we were done talking, I asked the reporter if she would be able to use part of my answer. “No, I don’t think so,” she replied. “But it must be nice to be able to say what you think.”
I thought about this exchange this week, as China prepares to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. It is a central claim by President Xi Jinping that, under the party’s wise leadership, China has discovered a unique path to development that the rest of the world can now learn from. In a speech at the party convention in 2017, Xi proclaimed that China “was opening a new path for other developing countries to achieve modernization.”
The Chinese leader’s claim to have discovered a new path to economic growth is questionable. The early stages of China’s post-Mao economic reform followed a formula that was recognizable to anyone familiar with East Asia’s previous economic “miracles”.
Many of the first factories in southern China were established by Chinese investors abroad from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and elsewhere. They were carrying a model that had worked in those countries in a new, low-cost environment. The fact that China has continued to grow at double-digit rates for decades is remarkable. But it is not without precedent. Japan achieved a similar feat for many years after World War II. South Korea was poorer than parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s, but today it is a wealthy country.
But while the Chinese model economy is derivative, the politics are new. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, which moved from one-party states to democracies as they got richer, China under Xi strengthened the dominance of the Communist Party.
When Chinese commentators talk about offering a new model to the developing world, they also have a political proposal in mind. Why not adopt the order of Chinese-style authoritarianism rather than the chaos of Western-style democracy?
China has also questioned the geopolitical environment that has served as the backdrop for Asia’s rise. The original Asian tigers were all American allies. In the context of its Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States saw the benefits of opening its market to exports from its East Asian allies. Washington was also willing to tolerate their protectionist policies longer than it could otherwise.
The emergence of Asian economic competitors has never been an easy proposition for Americans. There was panic about the rise of Japan in the 1980s. But the backlash was controllable because Japan was an ally and another democracy.
China was never going to be an ally of the United States. But, until recently, he was very careful to avoid openly challenging American power in the Pacific region. That changed under Xi, as China built military bases in the South China Sea.
As an authoritarian country, increasingly open to its ambition to challenge the military, political and economic might of the United States, China belatedly provoked a backlash in Washington. The Trump administration has largely focused on the national trade deficit with China. Under Joe Biden, however, the backlash became more explicitly ideological. The new president frequently says that the United States and China are locked in an ideological and political struggle to provide the model for the 21st century – democracy or authoritarianism.
The Chinese government has reason to hope that the United States left it too late to rethink its support for the Asian growth model that facilitated China’s rise. China is already the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. The country now has a huge domestic consumer economy, which offers an alternative source of growth to the export markets that were so essential in the early decades of China’s rise.
China has also just become the first global recipient new foreign direct investment. Chinese companies are expanding all over the world. The US and Chinese economies are so deeply intertwined that true decoupling would be extremely difficult – not to say unpopular with many companies on both sides.
Despite this, Xi took a great risk by openly defying American power. During the first decades of China’s rise, the consensus in Washington was that China too would liberalize politically, as it grew richer. The United States has therefore taken an encouraging and permissive stance in the face of China’s rise, similar to its approach to other East Asian tiger economies.
In the case of China, the American “permission” has now been withdrawn. The United States is restricting China’s access to certain advanced technologies and is organizing its allies to push back Beijing. In this new geopolitical environment, Xi really needs to find a new “Chinese model” – separate from the East Asian model – if China’s rise is to continue uninterrupted.
Chinese President Xi Jinping rubs his eye as he arrives for the seventh plenary session of the first session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. FRED DUFOUR/AFP via Getty Images
It was a bad week for China on the world stage.
President Biden is getting a warm reception in Europe rallying our democratic allies in the G7, the EU and NATO.
And at home, our squabbling US Senate somehow managed to pass a $250 billion bill countering China.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
This week the leaders of the Western world turned their eyes toward China, and as a result it was one of the worst weeks for Beijing on the world stage in some time.
In Washington, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate set aside their differences to pass a $250 billion industrial policy bill aimed at preparing US commerce and government for competition with Beijing. And while on a diplomatic trip to Europe, President Joe Biden is reinvigorating our ties to our allies in Europe, the G7 group of nations, and NATO. On the top of the agenda in these meetings is the question of how to counter an aggressive, totalitarian China on the rise.
This comes as every indication points to China moving farther and farther away being an open, even remotely democratic society.
Earlier this week Amnesty International published an in-depth look at life for Muslims living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, calling it a "dystopian hellscape" where Muslims are terrorized and arbitrarily forced into labor camps as part of "part of a larger campaign of subjugation and forced assimilation." The Times also reported the Chinese government is seizing Uyghur Muslims who flee abroad.
On the economic front, the Chinese legislature rushed through a bill expanding the government's means and methods to retaliate against foreign sanctions including the ability to seize foreign companies' Chinese assets, deny visas, and block the ability to do deals in China. Foreign businesses in the country were caught flat-footed.
At the heart of China's bellicose behavior is the belief, held among many elites in the Chinese Communist Party, that the US and its partners in the West are in a state of decline. This idea took root during the 2008 financial crisis, and then was reaffirmed by the European debt crisis, the election of Donald Trump and his agression towards our European allies, and the United State's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
To the CCP, our way of life looks like chaos - a cacophony of voices sometimes forcefully pulling our discourse to the right then back to the left. They've convinced themselves that we can no longer organize and unify our societies to do the ambitious things that need to be done to win the future. This week the West showed China signs that - when it comes to countering a strengthening totalitarian power - that may not be the case.
A matter of trust
China squandered a massive opportunity over the last four years. As president, Donald Trump snubbed America's traditional allies and made overtures to the world's thugs and petty dictators. That could have been a moment when China cozied up to Europe as a more stable alternative, instead China wound up alienating the continent with its overbearing behavior.
For example, at the beginning of this year it seemed certain that the European Union and China would sign a trade deal, against the wishes of the United States. But in March, when the EU sanctioned China over its treatment of Uyghur Muslims, Beijing - in keeping with its policy of aggressive "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy - responded by sanctioning members of EU Parliament. This put the EU-China trade deal on an indefinite hold.
That brings us to Biden and his current trip to Europe, where the president is trying to rebuild trust among nations. His administration is working on undoing the tariffs the Trump administration put on its EU partners with an aim to lift them by the end of the year. He is encouraging unity on the European continent, urging UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to settle his differences with the EU over Brexit and keep the peace on the Ireland-Northern Ireland border. Biden also announced that the US would donate 500 million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to over 100 countries "no strings attached."
Trump's betrayal of our allies left commentators around the world wondering if US-led groups like the G7 would be able to cooperate enough to do hard things again. This week we're seeing signs that they can and will. The first sign was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's momentous announcement that the G7 had come to an agreement on an international minimum corporate tax to stop the race to the bottom in taxing the world's richest companies.
And now it appears Biden is also rallying our allies to counter China. Before he left for Europe, Biden met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House. Addressing the press after their meeting Stoltenberg said China "doesn't share our values." Biden will attend a NATO summit on Monday, and it will produce the strongest statement in its history on NATO's stance on China, according to the Wall Street Journal.
From the comfortable primeval mud
Legendary American diplomat George Kennan - known for outlining the US policy of containing the USSR during the Cold War - used to say that the US people are always about 10 years behind its diplomats when it comes to seeing danger from abroad. Lecturing back in 1950 he compared democracies to a giant prehistoric monster "with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin" that needs to be directly confronted with a problem before it awakens from the "comfortable primeval mud." But when a challenge does gain our attention, Kennan said, the country lashes out with "such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat."
Perhaps the US has learned something from Kennan. Consider the Senate's passage of a 2,400 page bill aimed at shoring up the US as an economic and technological superpower. The size and scope of the bill shows that our leaders are trying to meet a challenge before it's an emergency.
The bill allocates $52 billion to building up the semiconductor industry in the US in order to decrease our dependence on semiconductors from China and Taiwan. The bill also funds major research, allocating $81 billion to the National Science Foundation from 2022 to fiscal 2026 and $120 billion into technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
There are also diplomatic and intelligence measures. It bars US diplomats from attending the Olympics in Beijing, and requires the intelligence community to produce a report about China's efforts to influence international bodies like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organizations and United Nations. It passed the fractious US Senate - sometimes sardonically referred to as Mitch McConnell's "legislative graveyard" - on a vote of 68 to 32.
China responded to the bill saying that it "slanders China" and is "full of Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice."
In a time when the leaders of the richest country in the world are squabbling amongst themselves over whether or not to fund the building of roads and bridges, this bill is a heartening sight. The most important ways the US can counter China are by strengthening itself domestically and by preparing for the worst with its allies. If the giant prehistoric monster hasn't awakened, this week shows that it now at least has one eye open.
Apple executives like CEO Tim Cook like to repeat, often, what’s become a kind of mantra inside the company as well as during public events like this week’s annual developer showcase, WWDC 2021: Namely, that privacy is a “human right,” and that as much as possible, the iPhone maker is going to bake privacy into the core of its expanding line of products and services.
But this human right, based on the company’s actions, doesn’t seem to extend to the People’s Republic of China. The latest example of this was evident, in fact, from an important new Apple privacy feature announced during this week’s developer conference. That feature is Apple’s new so-called “private relay,” an iOS 15 feature which masks the web browsing behavior of Internet users from ISPs and advertisers, and certainly tracks with the high-profile new ad that Apple just launched as part of its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” ad campaign. In that ad, we see a visualization of an iPhone owner stopping all the creepy trackers and snoops from following him around. It’s pretty entertaining, overall, and neatly sums up Apple’s admirable commitment to not being as invasive and privacy-flouting as most of the other tech giants you can point to. Not mentioned, however, are all the exceptions that Apple carves out for China — where Apple derives almost 15% of its revenue and where the company accepts distasteful compromises to keep itself in the good graces of the country’s totalitarian, communist regime that engages in genocide, among other things.
It’s certainly no surprise that a feature like Apple’s private relay would be unavailable in the country ruled by a Community Party that uses a breathtakingly expansive surveillance apparatus to not only keep close tabs on its citizens but monitor everything they do online. Here’s a little bit about how the new private relay feature works:
Basically, Web traffic first gets sent to an Apple-controlled server. At that point, the traffic is stripped of an identifying IP address, before getting routed onward to another third-party-controlled server where a temporary IP address is assigned before the traffic is sent on to its destination. This setup hides both the identity of the user as well as the websites they visit from Apple, which is also not making this feature available in the following places in addition to China: Belarus, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Colombia, South Africa, and the Philippines.
This is one major point of distinction currently between Apple and Facebook, the former chief security officer of which chided Apple on Twitter this week for its approach to privacy vis a vis China. Facebook, it should be noted, does not operate in China today, unlike Apple, even though the social network is frequently a target of Apple’s ire over privacy violations. As far as Facebook staying out of China, though, it’s not for want of trying, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would start doing business tomorrow in the country if the government there allowed it. But, for now, the distinction stands.
In a high-profile speech earlier this year focused on privacy, Cook warned that too many encroachments by private enterprise as well as governments risk robbing us of “the freedom to be human.” Just a few months later, The New York Times published a deep-dive into the compromises along these lines that Apple has made in China, including details about data centers in the country where “Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.”
It’s a reminder of the ever-so-small difference between compromise — which is generally regarded as a good thing — and abandoning one’s principles so much that end up, well, compromised.
Illustration of the Battle of the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas, March 6, 1836. Credit - Getty Images
Imagine if the U.S. were to open interior Alaska for colonization and, for whatever reason, thousands of Canadian settlers poured in, establishing their own towns, hockey rinks and Tim Hortons stores. When the U.S. insists they follow American laws and pay American taxes, they refuse. When the government tries to collect taxes, they shoot and kill American soldiers. When law enforcement goes after the killers, the colonists, backed by Canadian financing and mercenaries, take up arms in open revolt.
As an American, how would you feel? Now you can imagine how Mexican President Jose Lopez de Santa Anna would have felt in 1835, because that’s pretty much the story of the revolution that paved the way for Texas to become its own nation and then an American state.
If that’s not the version of history you’re familiar with, you’re not alone. The version most Americans know, the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” that has held sway for nearly 200 years, holds that American colonists revolted against Mexico because they were “oppressed” and fought for their “freedom,” a narrative that has been soundly rebutted by 30-plus years of academic scholarship. But the many myths surrounding Texas’ birth, especially those cloaking the fabled 1836 siege at the Alamo mission in San Antonio, remain cherished in the state. Even as the nation is undergoing a sweeping reassessment of its racial history, and despite decades of academic research that casts the Texas Revolt and the Alamo’s siege in a new light, little of this has permeated the conversation in Texas.
Start with the Alamo. So much of what we “know” about the battle is provably wrong. William Travis never drew any line in the sand; this was a tale concocted by an amateur historian in the late 1800s. There is no evidence Davy Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960 movie The Alamo, a font of misinformation; there is ample testimony from Mexican soldiers that Crockett surrendered and was executed. The battle, in fact, should never have been fought. Travis ignored multiple warnings of Santa Anna’s approach and was simply trapped in the Alamo when the Mexican army arrived. He wrote some dramatic letters during the ensuing siege, it’s true, but how anyone could attest to the defenders’ “bravery” is beyond us. The men at the Alamo fought and died because they had no choice. Even the notion they “fought to the last man” turns out to be untrue. Mexican accounts make clear that, as the battle was being lost, as many as half the “Texian” defenders fled the mission and were run down and killed by Mexican lancers.
Nor is it at all clear that the Alamo’s defenders “bought time” for Sam Houston to raise the army that eventually defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto the following month. Santa Anna had told Mexico City he expected to take San Antonio by March 2; he ended up doing so on March 6. In the end, the siege at the Alamo ended up costing him all of four days. Meaning the Alamo’s defenders, far from being the valiant defenders who delayed Santa Anna, pretty much died for nothing.
So why does any of this matter? What’s the harm in Texans simply embracing a myth?
Census data indicates that Latinos are poised to become a majority of the Texas population any year now, and for them, the Alamo has long been viewed as a symbol of Anglo oppression. The fact that many Tejanos — Texas Latinos— allied with the Americans, and fought and died alongside them at the Alamo, has generally been lost to popular history. The Tejanos’ key contributions to early Texas were written out of almost all early Anglo-authored histories, much as Anglo Texans ran Tejanos out of San Antonio and much of South Texas after the revolt. For too long, the revolt has been viewed by many as a war fought by all Anglos against all of Mexican descent.
“If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin,” says San Antonio art historian Ruben Cordova. “We killed Davy Crockett.”
It’s a lesson many Latinos in the state don’t learn until mandatory Texas history classes taught in seventh grade. “The way I explain it,” says Andres Tijerina, a retired history professor in Austin, “is Mexican-Americans [in Texas] are brought up, even in the first grade, singing the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance and all that, and it’s not until the seventh grade that they single us out as Mexicans. And from that point on, you realize you’re not an American. You’re a Mexican, and always will be. The Alamo story takes good, solid, loyal little American kids and it converts them into Mexicans.”
And Mexican-American history isn’t the only piece of the past that’s distorted by the Alamo myth. Academic researchers long tiptoed around the issue of slavery in Texas; active research didn’t really begin until the 1980s. Since then, scholars such as Randolph Campbell and Andrew Torget have demonstrated that slavery was the single issue that regularly drove a wedge between early Mexican governments—dedicated abolitionists all—and their American colonists in Texas, many of whom had immigrated to farm cotton, the province’s only cash crop at the time.
His correspondence shows conclusively that Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas,” spent years jousting with the Mexico City bureaucracy over the necessity of enslaved labor to the Texas economy. “Nothing is wanted but money,” he wrote in a pair of 1832 letters, “and Negros are necessary to make it.” Each time a Mexican government threatened to outlaw slavery, many in Austin’s colony began packing to go home. In time, as we know now, they put away their suitcases and brought out their guns.
This, by and large, is not the Texas history many of us learned in school; instead, we learned a tale written by Anglo historians beginning in the 19th century. What happened in the past can’t change. But the way we view it does—and, as a state and a country, now is the time to teach the next generation our history, not our myths.
Vaccination in Bahrain Mazen Mahdi/AFP/Getty Images
The World Health Organization recently granted emergency use approval to China's Sinopharm and Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines, but the countries that have put the Chinese-made vaccines in the arms of their residents are reporting mixed results, at best.
"In the Seychelles, Chile, and Uruguay, all of whom have used Sinopharm or ... Sinovac in their mass vaccination efforts, cases have surged even as doses were given out," The Washington Post reports. And in Bahrain, one of the first countries to embrace the Sinopharm shot, The Wall Street Journal adds, "daily COVID-19 deaths have leapt to 12 per million people in recent weeks — an outbreak nearly five times more lethal than India's — prompting the island nation's government to shut down shopping malls and restaurants in an effort to limit the spread."
Dr. Waleed Khalifa al Manea, Bahrain's undersecretary of health, told the Journal that the recent upsurge in cases "came mainly from family gatherings — we had Ramadan, which is a very social event in Bahrain," but he also said the country is urging older people and those with chronic illness to get a six-month booster shot with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Bahrain and the neighboring United Arab Emirates started offering booster shots in late May "after studies showed that some of those vaccinated had not developed sufficient antibodies," the Post reports.
"In Dubai, the most populous of the seven members of the UAE, the emirate's health authorities have also quietly begun revaccinating with Pfizer-BioNTech those residents who had been fully inoculated with Sinopharm," the Journal reports.
"Despite the concern about Sinopharm's effectiveness, experts say the vaccine still works as intended in most cases and that it could play a significant role in shortages of vaccine doses around the world," the Post reports. The WHO says it has a low level of confidence in the vaccine's effectiveness in older people, due to a lack of data.
A peer-reviewed study published May 26 found the Sinopharm vaccine was 78 percent effective against symptomatic illness, but the trial participants were mostly healthy young men, the Journal reports. "In a separate, unpublished, real-world study of Sinopharm in Serbia, 29 percent of 150 participants were found to have zero antibodies against the virus three months after they received the first of two shots of the vaccine. The average age of the people who participated in the Serbian study was higher than 65."
