China’s state broadcaster CGTN also stopped broadcasting in Germany: The state media authorities have initiated a license review, writes Marcel Grzanna, and Vodafone has already taken the station off the air as a precaution. After the shutdown in the UK, CGTN is threatened with the worst-case scenario of no longer being able to broadcast throughout the EU.
The two most powerful men in the world talked on the phone for two hours. That is a long time! Christiane Kuehl analyses the briefings that Beijing and Washington published after the call. Biden leaves no doubt about the seriousness of the conversation: “They’re going to, if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.”
In China, nine-nine-six is synonymous with exploitation – and merciless exploitation at that. No less a figure than Alibaba founder Jack Ma once praised the working hours model as a “blessing” in the fight against “lazy people”. From 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Such capitalist excesses are by no means exclusive to communist China (an antagonism in itself). In the democratic West, we know the culture of permanent overwork, too, which often goes hand in hand with a culture of self-exploitation. Joern Petring and Gregor Koppenburg trace the social debate about working hours in a country where the law mandates an eight-hour day.
How does one manage to become one of the 25 most powerful communists under Xi Jinping and his chief propagandist? Jonas Borchers traces the career of Huang Kunming. Newsletter colleague Gabor Steingart would recommend Borchers’ portrait as “worth reading!” and I’m more than happy to echo that sentiment. The Table.Media team wishes Gabor’s crew, currently frozen in the Berlin ice on the Pioneer editorial ship, a swift thaw and smooth sailing.
The Chinese Global Television Network (CGTN) could also disappear from German TV screens following its license revocation in the UK. According to information from China.Table, the state media authorities have called on German network operators to review their contractual relationships with CGTN. To remain receivable in Germany, the broadcaster must now prove to its contractual partners that it still has a valid broadcasting license for the European Union (EU). If it fails to do so, the English-language channel will be threatened with cancellation in this country.
CGTN is fed into the German network via the cable network operator Vodafone, among others. The satellite provider Eutelsat also lists CGTN in its channel list. However, Vodafone has currently suspended the program and refers to “technical faults” via freeze frame. “Currently, we are in exchange with the state media authorities and the broadcaster to clarify the legal situation due to the license revocation. We have therefore decided to pause the broadcast of the program content for the time being and hope that we will soon be able to resume the transmission,” Vodafone informs.
CGTN reportedly argues the license revocation by the British media regulator Ofcom only applies to the British market and the broadcasting license in the EU countries is not affected. In principle, a broadcaster from the third countries only needs a license from a single EU country, which is then valid for all member states. The international television agreement ensures that a license in the UK will provisionally remain valid for the EU market even after Brexit.
In a statement last week, CGTN stressed that it would abide by the “laws and regulations of every country.” The broadcaster blames “extreme right-wing organizations and anti-Chinese forces” for Ofcom’s launch of an investigation that eventually led to the license being revoked. It remained open who these organizations should be. The broadcaster left an inquiry unanswered as to whether CGTN was seeking a license elsewhere in the EU. The state media authorities confirm that CGTN has not yet applied for a license, at least in Germany. “If the network operator wants to continue broadcasting CGTN’s program, it must prove a license from another European country. If there is no longer a license, then the reason for a cable feed also ceases to apply,” said a spokeswoman for the state media authorities.
Ofcom justified its decision by citing CGTN’s lack of state neutrality. The station, formerly CCTV9, is part of Chinese state television, controlled by the ruling Communist Party and described as a mouthpiece for its propaganda. It broadcasts in several languages around the world. However, CGTN had not held its license itself but transferred it to Star China Media Limited (SCML). However, Ofcom’s investigation found that SCML did not influence the editorial content of the station but left programming to CCTV headquarters. This provided the regulators with sufficient grounds for their decision. The principle of state neutrality also applies in Germany, which is examined in the licensing procedure via the shareholding ratios. Due to harmonized European law, broadcasters only have to go through a corresponding procedure in the EU. Anyone who receives a license in Spain or Hungary may also broadcast in Germany.
To avert the withdrawal, CGTN applied to transfer the license from SCML to a company called China Global Television Network Corporation (CGTNC). Ofcom rejected the application because it lacked “crucial information”. It said the broadcaster had been given sufficient time to provide the necessary information. In addition, Ofcom said it believed CGTNC was also ineligible to be a license holder because it was “controlled by a body which is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party”. The broadcaster disagreed with Ofcom’s account. Instead, it said it had proactively and cooperatively provided “detailed explanations”.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, Chinese state media announced that the British broadcaster BBC World News would no longer be allowed to broadcast in China with immediate effect. The reason given was its coverage of alleged systematic rapes in re-education camps for Uyghurs in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region. “The BBC is carrying out a public opinion crusade against China. It has become a propaganda tool for secessionist and separatist forces of China, threatening China’s national security with false reports,” comments the Global Times. Observers see the banishment as retaliation for Ofcom’s decision.
On top of the allegations of lack of government neutrality, Ofcom is also taking action against CGTN for other license breaches. “We expect to conclude separate sanction proceedings against CGTN for reasonable impartiality, fairness, and data protection breaches shortly,” it said. Among other things, the regulator has targeted the broadcaster’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, finding a lack of objectivity. In addition, British citizen Peter Humphrey had filed a complaint against the broadcaster. According to his own statements, he had been forced to make a public confession in front of TV cameras in China in order to justify a prison sentence against him for obtaining “illegal data from Chinese nationals.” The images were also broadcast in the UK via CGTN, violating the entrepreneur’s privacy. Humphrey was sentenced to several years in prison. He has since returned to live in England. There have been no complaints against CGTN from Germany so far, according to the state media authorities.
Should CGTN not meet the necessary requirements for broadcasting in Germany, the station would still be accessible via its online live stream. The new State Media Treaty from November of last year now also assigns the State Media Authorities with the supervision of streaming offers from the network. However, cross-border interventions are extremely difficult due to, for example, violations of the journalistic duty of care. The state media authorities can only take action against providers established in Germany. In addition, there are possibilities to cooperate with other regulatory authorities to take action across borders.
So now they actually did talk on the phone before the Chinese New Year: The new US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Admittedly, we are far from knowing every word exchanged. But both presidents made their own statements known. According to this, one thing stands out above all: The tone is civil again.
Both countries presented different transcripts with statements from their respective presidents. Joe Biden, in particular, rammed in key US policy stakes, according to the brief summary on the White House website. Biden reiterated his priorities, it said: “Protect the security, prosperity, health and way of life of the American people and preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific.” In addition, Biden expressed concern about Beijing’s “unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
Chinese state media contrasted this with Xi Jinping’s statements. “Cooperation is the only right choice for China and the USA,” Xi said, according to the statement. A confrontation between them would lead both countries to disaster. Xi also advocated “resuming various dialogue mechanisms to accurately understand each other’s political intentions and avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations.” He said the foreign ministries of the two countries should “deepen communication on a wide range of issues in bilateral relations as well as important regional and international affairs”. Further contacts could also be established between economic, financial, and law enforcement agencies, as well as the militaries of both countries. Many of these dialogues already existed but were not cultivated during the Trump presidency.
It can be assumed that both sides will emphasize those statements they would like to make public – in front of domestic and international audiences. And so it seems that Biden wants to present himself as resolute, while Xi wants, above all, to sound cooperative. According to the Xi memo, the warning of a “catastrophe,” which some see as a threat, would affect both sides in the event of a conflict.
Biden had already set his tone last week in his first foreign policy keynote address to the State Department. There he described China as the US’s “most serious competitor” – but not as an opponent or rival. But at the same time, Biden clarified that cooperation is not at any price: “We’re ready to work with Beijing – when it’s in America’s interest to do so.” Biden reiterated this point on Twitter after the phone call. The US news portal Politico described this as a kind of “America First 2.0”, minus Trump’s shredding of alliances.
But even the supposedly innocuous tone from Beijing conceals that China is, of course, also pursuing interest politics and remains tough on the issue. Both sides hold positions that were already clear before the phone call: The US sees China as a competitor for values and economic and political supremacy in the world. China, on the other hand, is also increasingly self-confident as its level of development increases: Beijing wants to cooperate with the West – but to determine as many of the rules as possible. Interference in what Beijing always calls “internal affairs” remains – unsurprisingly – a taboo for China.
These lines of conflict became very clear in the transcripts from the preparatory telephone call between Foreign Ministers Antony Blinken and Yang Jiechi. Both had not attracted attention with conciliatory statements in the past anyway and seemed to want to clarify the fronts first. The US must confront China “from a position of strength,” Blinken recently said on CNN. It is unlikely that China will not claim the same for itself.
Which areas are suitable for possible cooperation is, despite everything, in principle, obvious. The White House listed the points in the transcript: According to the transcript, Xi and Biden exchanged views on combating the Covid 19 pandemic and on “common challenges” such as safeguarding global health, climate change and preventing global armament.
“I’ve said to him all along, that we need not have a conflict. But there’s going to be extreme competition,” Biden said in an interview with the CBS television network about Xi, whom he knows from when they were both Vice Presidents. “I’m not going to do it the way Trump did. We’re going to focus on international rules of the road.” Biden wants to consult with allies in Europe, among others, on future China policy. A debate over the right China course is also underway in the EU. The formula “extreme competition” could well become formative for the relationship between China and the West. It remains exciting in the Year of the Ox.
I don’t know whether US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their foreign-policy advisers have read Robert Axelrod’s classic book on international relations, The Evolution of Cooperation. But they should heed Axelrod’s central insight about how countries can benefit from cooperation and punish cheating.
Through countless simulations, Axelrod – now a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan – found that the most beneficial long-term strategy for an actor such as a nation-state is to cooperate first and then play tit-for-tat. In other words, a country will gain in the long run if it offers a goodwill gesture and then responds in kind to its opponent’s subsequent moves.
This insight is especially applicable to today’s US-China stalemate. Although both Biden and Xi know that their countries are in an open-ended geopolitical rivalry, they also want to put guardrails around it in order to avert potential catastrophes, such as a runaway arms race or a direct military conflict.
True, in the short term, both leaders have far more urgent priorities than de-escalating bilateral tensions. Biden needs to repair the damage to American democracy and society caused by Donald Trump’s one-term presidency, while Xi plans to reorient the Chinese economy to make it less vulnerable to “decoupling” with the United States.
But Biden and Xi appear to face the same dilemma: whether to be the first to extend an olive branch with the aim of stabilizing bilateral relations in the short term and gaining an enduring strategic edge in the bilateral rivalry.
Biden faces strong bipartisan opposition in Washington to undoing Trump’s policies toward China, such as tariffs and sanctions against Chinese technology firms. And although Xi may be more eager to end the free fall in Sino-American relations, he has been reluctant to make any substantive moves to demonstrate goodwill. Instead, China has intensified its crackdown in Hong Kong this year, and the Chinese military is continuing its campaign of intimidation and harassment against Taiwan.
If neither Biden nor Xi wants to risk any political capital to make the first move, the US-China relationship is highly likely to worsen further. On the national-security front, the two countries’ militaries are busy preparing for a face-off, creating a dangerous dynamic of deterrence and counter-deterrence.
Diplomatically, Biden will soon seek to rally America’s democratic allies to confront China, a move Xi implicitly denounced in his recent address to this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting. Economic tensions also could escalate, because China seems unlikely to be able to meet the target for additional purchases of US products set in the “phase one” trade deal that Xi’s government concluded with the Trump administration a year ago. In the meantime, continuing human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and against the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang will fuel demands in Washington for additional sanctions against China’s political leaders and economic entities.
The only way to prevent a new round of deterioration in US-China relations is for either Biden or Xi to take the first concrete step signaling willingness to cooperate, and then adhere strictly to the reciprocity rule thereafter. The costs of making the first move are likely modest, but the potential long-term payoff could be disproportionately large.
Although the two countries would remain strategic competitors, their rivalry would be based on more stable expectations and mutually accepted rules. Cooperation in areas of shared interest, in particular climate change, would be possible. Most important, the de-escalation of tensions would reduce the risk of a catastrophic military conflict.
If US and Chinese leaders find Axelrod’s insight compelling enough to translate into actual policy, their next challenge is to figure out what their respective first moves should be, given uncertainty about the other side’s response.
Since the long-entrenched Xi seems to have more room to maneuver than Biden, he is better positioned to take the initiative. Moreover, he has a rich menu of options to demonstrate goodwill – and likely elicit a positive US reaction – without risking too much political capital.
For example, China should immediately allow the return of the American journalists it expelled last year in response to US restrictions on reporters working for state-run Chinese media outlets in the USA. Another possibility would be to dismiss the charges against the 53 pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong arrested in early January.
Releasing a non-trivial number of arbitrarily detained Uyghurs on grounds of poor health – or, to use China’s official rationale for holding them, completion of “vocational training” – would signal Xi’s pragmatism in dealing with arguably the most difficult bilateral issue. Likewise, suspending provocative incursions by Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone would help sides both to mitigate the risk of an accidental conflict and defuse tensions with the US.
Whether Biden would respond to any of these gestures positively is unknown. But Xi should try. China has little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain.
Minxin Pei is a Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
www.project-syndicate.org
To make it in the Communist Party with its more than 80 million members, you not only need good contacts, a flair for power and patience – but also a little luck. Huang Kunming was often in the right place at the right time. He is part of the so-called “New Zhijiang Army” – a lineup of prominent Chinese politicians who held posts in Zhejiang province between 2002 and 2007, when Xi Jinping was forging alliances for his rise there during his time as Zhejiang Party Secretary. Four of them now sit on the Politburo, the 25-member power center of the Communist Party of China. Among them is Huang Kunming, whom Xi also made Propaganda Chief, a post with little publicity but enormous importance and power.
But Huang Kunming’s ties with the current state president go back even further than Zhejiang. Both spent much of their political bull-riding in the 1980s and 1990s in Fujian, Huang’s home province and Xi’s second stop on his road to power. Companions from Fujian, like the “New Zhijiang Army”, play a central role in Xi’s power apparatus.
Huang Kunming was born in 1953 near the city of Longyan, not far from the world-famous round Tulou houses of the Hakka Chinese. His political career began in the late 1980s with administrative posts in his hometown, and he became Party Secretary there in 1993. Xi’s career also took off in Fujian: He came to the region in 1985 as Deputy Mayor of Xiamen City and made it to the Provincial Governor in the following seventeen years. Huang Kunming’s career took him to the neighboring northern province of Zhejiang in 1999, where Xi Jinping became Governor and then Party Secretary three years later. He promoted Huang to Party Secretary of the prosperous city of Jiaxing in 2003 and finally to Party Secretary of the provincial capital, Hangzhou, in 2007. A year after Xi took over as Party Leader, he brought Huang to Beijing as Vice Director of the propaganda department in 2013. In 2017, he got a seat in the Politburo and also became the new number one in the propaganda department.
Although readily derided online as the “Ministry of Truth”, the Propaganda Department is not a state ministry but is located directly within the party structure. Huang’s agency writes the rules of censorship and enforces them together with other organizations. How efficiently this works under Huang’s leadership was recently demonstrated in the Covid crisis. What was initially perceived as a botched response, even in China, is now seen as a successful national show of force. The Internet, long considered uncontrollable and a headache for China’s leadership has not only long since been tamed by censorship but is now its most important medium. The best example is the state-run app “Xuexi Qiangguo”, in English, “Learn about the strong nation”. Here, more than 100 million Chinese playfully study Xi Jinping’s political theory. Jonas Borchers
China’s state broadcaster CGTN also stopped broadcasting in Germany: The state media authorities have initiated a license review, writes Marcel Grzanna, and Vodafone has already taken the station off the air as a precaution. After the shutdown in the UK, CGTN is threatened with the worst-case scenario of no longer being able to broadcast throughout the EU.
The two most powerful men in the world talked on the phone for two hours. That is a long time! Christiane Kuehl analyses the briefings that Beijing and Washington published after the call. Biden leaves no doubt about the seriousness of the conversation: “They’re going to, if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.”
In China, nine-nine-six is synonymous with exploitation – and merciless exploitation at that. No less a figure than Alibaba founder Jack Ma once praised the working hours model as a “blessing” in the fight against “lazy people”. From 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Such capitalist excesses are by no means exclusive to communist China (an antagonism in itself). In the democratic West, we know the culture of permanent overwork, too, which often goes hand in hand with a culture of self-exploitation. Joern Petring and Gregor Koppenburg trace the social debate about working hours in a country where the law mandates an eight-hour day.
How does one manage to become one of the 25 most powerful communists under Xi Jinping and his chief propagandist? Jonas Borchers traces the career of Huang Kunming. Newsletter colleague Gabor Steingart would recommend Borchers’ portrait as “worth reading!” and I’m more than happy to echo that sentiment. The Table.Media team wishes Gabor’s crew, currently frozen in the Berlin ice on the Pioneer editorial ship, a swift thaw and smooth sailing.
The Chinese Global Television Network (CGTN) could also disappear from German TV screens following its license revocation in the UK. According to information from China.Table, the state media authorities have called on German network operators to review their contractual relationships with CGTN. To remain receivable in Germany, the broadcaster must now prove to its contractual partners that it still has a valid broadcasting license for the European Union (EU). If it fails to do so, the English-language channel will be threatened with cancellation in this country.
CGTN is fed into the German network via the cable network operator Vodafone, among others. The satellite provider Eutelsat also lists CGTN in its channel list. However, Vodafone has currently suspended the program and refers to “technical faults” via freeze frame. “Currently, we are in exchange with the state media authorities and the broadcaster to clarify the legal situation due to the license revocation. We have therefore decided to pause the broadcast of the program content for the time being and hope that we will soon be able to resume the transmission,” Vodafone informs.
CGTN reportedly argues the license revocation by the British media regulator Ofcom only applies to the British market and the broadcasting license in the EU countries is not affected. In principle, a broadcaster from the third countries only needs a license from a single EU country, which is then valid for all member states. The international television agreement ensures that a license in the UK will provisionally remain valid for the EU market even after Brexit.
In a statement last week, CGTN stressed that it would abide by the “laws and regulations of every country.” The broadcaster blames “extreme right-wing organizations and anti-Chinese forces” for Ofcom’s launch of an investigation that eventually led to the license being revoked. It remained open who these organizations should be. The broadcaster left an inquiry unanswered as to whether CGTN was seeking a license elsewhere in the EU. The state media authorities confirm that CGTN has not yet applied for a license, at least in Germany. “If the network operator wants to continue broadcasting CGTN’s program, it must prove a license from another European country. If there is no longer a license, then the reason for a cable feed also ceases to apply,” said a spokeswoman for the state media authorities.
Ofcom justified its decision by citing CGTN’s lack of state neutrality. The station, formerly CCTV9, is part of Chinese state television, controlled by the ruling Communist Party and described as a mouthpiece for its propaganda. It broadcasts in several languages around the world. However, CGTN had not held its license itself but transferred it to Star China Media Limited (SCML). However, Ofcom’s investigation found that SCML did not influence the editorial content of the station but left programming to CCTV headquarters. This provided the regulators with sufficient grounds for their decision. The principle of state neutrality also applies in Germany, which is examined in the licensing procedure via the shareholding ratios. Due to harmonized European law, broadcasters only have to go through a corresponding procedure in the EU. Anyone who receives a license in Spain or Hungary may also broadcast in Germany.
To avert the withdrawal, CGTN applied to transfer the license from SCML to a company called China Global Television Network Corporation (CGTNC). Ofcom rejected the application because it lacked “crucial information”. It said the broadcaster had been given sufficient time to provide the necessary information. In addition, Ofcom said it believed CGTNC was also ineligible to be a license holder because it was “controlled by a body which is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party”. The broadcaster disagreed with Ofcom’s account. Instead, it said it had proactively and cooperatively provided “detailed explanations”.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, Chinese state media announced that the British broadcaster BBC World News would no longer be allowed to broadcast in China with immediate effect. The reason given was its coverage of alleged systematic rapes in re-education camps for Uyghurs in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region. “The BBC is carrying out a public opinion crusade against China. It has become a propaganda tool for secessionist and separatist forces of China, threatening China’s national security with false reports,” comments the Global Times. Observers see the banishment as retaliation for Ofcom’s decision.
On top of the allegations of lack of government neutrality, Ofcom is also taking action against CGTN for other license breaches. “We expect to conclude separate sanction proceedings against CGTN for reasonable impartiality, fairness, and data protection breaches shortly,” it said. Among other things, the regulator has targeted the broadcaster’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, finding a lack of objectivity. In addition, British citizen Peter Humphrey had filed a complaint against the broadcaster. According to his own statements, he had been forced to make a public confession in front of TV cameras in China in order to justify a prison sentence against him for obtaining “illegal data from Chinese nationals.” The images were also broadcast in the UK via CGTN, violating the entrepreneur’s privacy. Humphrey was sentenced to several years in prison. He has since returned to live in England. There have been no complaints against CGTN from Germany so far, according to the state media authorities.
Should CGTN not meet the necessary requirements for broadcasting in Germany, the station would still be accessible via its online live stream. The new State Media Treaty from November of last year now also assigns the State Media Authorities with the supervision of streaming offers from the network. However, cross-border interventions are extremely difficult due to, for example, violations of the journalistic duty of care. The state media authorities can only take action against providers established in Germany. In addition, there are possibilities to cooperate with other regulatory authorities to take action across borders.
So now they actually did talk on the phone before the Chinese New Year: The new US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Admittedly, we are far from knowing every word exchanged. But both presidents made their own statements known. According to this, one thing stands out above all: The tone is civil again.
Both countries presented different transcripts with statements from their respective presidents. Joe Biden, in particular, rammed in key US policy stakes, according to the brief summary on the White House website. Biden reiterated his priorities, it said: “Protect the security, prosperity, health and way of life of the American people and preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific.” In addition, Biden expressed concern about Beijing’s “unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
Chinese state media contrasted this with Xi Jinping’s statements. “Cooperation is the only right choice for China and the USA,” Xi said, according to the statement. A confrontation between them would lead both countries to disaster. Xi also advocated “resuming various dialogue mechanisms to accurately understand each other’s political intentions and avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations.” He said the foreign ministries of the two countries should “deepen communication on a wide range of issues in bilateral relations as well as important regional and international affairs”. Further contacts could also be established between economic, financial, and law enforcement agencies, as well as the militaries of both countries. Many of these dialogues already existed but were not cultivated during the Trump presidency.
It can be assumed that both sides will emphasize those statements they would like to make public – in front of domestic and international audiences. And so it seems that Biden wants to present himself as resolute, while Xi wants, above all, to sound cooperative. According to the Xi memo, the warning of a “catastrophe,” which some see as a threat, would affect both sides in the event of a conflict.
Biden had already set his tone last week in his first foreign policy keynote address to the State Department. There he described China as the US’s “most serious competitor” – but not as an opponent or rival. But at the same time, Biden clarified that cooperation is not at any price: “We’re ready to work with Beijing – when it’s in America’s interest to do so.” Biden reiterated this point on Twitter after the phone call. The US news portal Politico described this as a kind of “America First 2.0”, minus Trump’s shredding of alliances.
But even the supposedly innocuous tone from Beijing conceals that China is, of course, also pursuing interest politics and remains tough on the issue. Both sides hold positions that were already clear before the phone call: The US sees China as a competitor for values and economic and political supremacy in the world. China, on the other hand, is also increasingly self-confident as its level of development increases: Beijing wants to cooperate with the West – but to determine as many of the rules as possible. Interference in what Beijing always calls “internal affairs” remains – unsurprisingly – a taboo for China.
These lines of conflict became very clear in the transcripts from the preparatory telephone call between Foreign Ministers Antony Blinken and Yang Jiechi. Both had not attracted attention with conciliatory statements in the past anyway and seemed to want to clarify the fronts first. The US must confront China “from a position of strength,” Blinken recently said on CNN. It is unlikely that China will not claim the same for itself.
Which areas are suitable for possible cooperation is, despite everything, in principle, obvious. The White House listed the points in the transcript: According to the transcript, Xi and Biden exchanged views on combating the Covid 19 pandemic and on “common challenges” such as safeguarding global health, climate change and preventing global armament.
“I’ve said to him all along, that we need not have a conflict. But there’s going to be extreme competition,” Biden said in an interview with the CBS television network about Xi, whom he knows from when they were both Vice Presidents. “I’m not going to do it the way Trump did. We’re going to focus on international rules of the road.” Biden wants to consult with allies in Europe, among others, on future China policy. A debate over the right China course is also underway in the EU. The formula “extreme competition” could well become formative for the relationship between China and the West. It remains exciting in the Year of the Ox.
I don’t know whether US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their foreign-policy advisers have read Robert Axelrod’s classic book on international relations, The Evolution of Cooperation. But they should heed Axelrod’s central insight about how countries can benefit from cooperation and punish cheating.
Through countless simulations, Axelrod – now a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan – found that the most beneficial long-term strategy for an actor such as a nation-state is to cooperate first and then play tit-for-tat. In other words, a country will gain in the long run if it offers a goodwill gesture and then responds in kind to its opponent’s subsequent moves.
This insight is especially applicable to today’s US-China stalemate. Although both Biden and Xi know that their countries are in an open-ended geopolitical rivalry, they also want to put guardrails around it in order to avert potential catastrophes, such as a runaway arms race or a direct military conflict.
True, in the short term, both leaders have far more urgent priorities than de-escalating bilateral tensions. Biden needs to repair the damage to American democracy and society caused by Donald Trump’s one-term presidency, while Xi plans to reorient the Chinese economy to make it less vulnerable to “decoupling” with the United States.
But Biden and Xi appear to face the same dilemma: whether to be the first to extend an olive branch with the aim of stabilizing bilateral relations in the short term and gaining an enduring strategic edge in the bilateral rivalry.
Biden faces strong bipartisan opposition in Washington to undoing Trump’s policies toward China, such as tariffs and sanctions against Chinese technology firms. And although Xi may be more eager to end the free fall in Sino-American relations, he has been reluctant to make any substantive moves to demonstrate goodwill. Instead, China has intensified its crackdown in Hong Kong this year, and the Chinese military is continuing its campaign of intimidation and harassment against Taiwan.
If neither Biden nor Xi wants to risk any political capital to make the first move, the US-China relationship is highly likely to worsen further. On the national-security front, the two countries’ militaries are busy preparing for a face-off, creating a dangerous dynamic of deterrence and counter-deterrence.
Diplomatically, Biden will soon seek to rally America’s democratic allies to confront China, a move Xi implicitly denounced in his recent address to this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting. Economic tensions also could escalate, because China seems unlikely to be able to meet the target for additional purchases of US products set in the “phase one” trade deal that Xi’s government concluded with the Trump administration a year ago. In the meantime, continuing human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and against the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang will fuel demands in Washington for additional sanctions against China’s political leaders and economic entities.
The only way to prevent a new round of deterioration in US-China relations is for either Biden or Xi to take the first concrete step signaling willingness to cooperate, and then adhere strictly to the reciprocity rule thereafter. The costs of making the first move are likely modest, but the potential long-term payoff could be disproportionately large.
Although the two countries would remain strategic competitors, their rivalry would be based on more stable expectations and mutually accepted rules. Cooperation in areas of shared interest, in particular climate change, would be possible. Most important, the de-escalation of tensions would reduce the risk of a catastrophic military conflict.
If US and Chinese leaders find Axelrod’s insight compelling enough to translate into actual policy, their next challenge is to figure out what their respective first moves should be, given uncertainty about the other side’s response.
Since the long-entrenched Xi seems to have more room to maneuver than Biden, he is better positioned to take the initiative. Moreover, he has a rich menu of options to demonstrate goodwill – and likely elicit a positive US reaction – without risking too much political capital.
For example, China should immediately allow the return of the American journalists it expelled last year in response to US restrictions on reporters working for state-run Chinese media outlets in the USA. Another possibility would be to dismiss the charges against the 53 pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong arrested in early January.
Releasing a non-trivial number of arbitrarily detained Uyghurs on grounds of poor health – or, to use China’s official rationale for holding them, completion of “vocational training” – would signal Xi’s pragmatism in dealing with arguably the most difficult bilateral issue. Likewise, suspending provocative incursions by Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone would help sides both to mitigate the risk of an accidental conflict and defuse tensions with the US.
Whether Biden would respond to any of these gestures positively is unknown. But Xi should try. China has little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain.
Minxin Pei is a Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
www.project-syndicate.org
To make it in the Communist Party with its more than 80 million members, you not only need good contacts, a flair for power and patience – but also a little luck. Huang Kunming was often in the right place at the right time. He is part of the so-called “New Zhijiang Army” – a lineup of prominent Chinese politicians who held posts in Zhejiang province between 2002 and 2007, when Xi Jinping was forging alliances for his rise there during his time as Zhejiang Party Secretary. Four of them now sit on the Politburo, the 25-member power center of the Communist Party of China. Among them is Huang Kunming, whom Xi also made Propaganda Chief, a post with little publicity but enormous importance and power.
But Huang Kunming’s ties with the current state president go back even further than Zhejiang. Both spent much of their political bull-riding in the 1980s and 1990s in Fujian, Huang’s home province and Xi’s second stop on his road to power. Companions from Fujian, like the “New Zhijiang Army”, play a central role in Xi’s power apparatus.
Huang Kunming was born in 1953 near the city of Longyan, not far from the world-famous round Tulou houses of the Hakka Chinese. His political career began in the late 1980s with administrative posts in his hometown, and he became Party Secretary there in 1993. Xi’s career also took off in Fujian: He came to the region in 1985 as Deputy Mayor of Xiamen City and made it to the Provincial Governor in the following seventeen years. Huang Kunming’s career took him to the neighboring northern province of Zhejiang in 1999, where Xi Jinping became Governor and then Party Secretary three years later. He promoted Huang to Party Secretary of the prosperous city of Jiaxing in 2003 and finally to Party Secretary of the provincial capital, Hangzhou, in 2007. A year after Xi took over as Party Leader, he brought Huang to Beijing as Vice Director of the propaganda department in 2013. In 2017, he got a seat in the Politburo and also became the new number one in the propaganda department.
Although readily derided online as the “Ministry of Truth”, the Propaganda Department is not a state ministry but is located directly within the party structure. Huang’s agency writes the rules of censorship and enforces them together with other organizations. How efficiently this works under Huang’s leadership was recently demonstrated in the Covid crisis. What was initially perceived as a botched response, even in China, is now seen as a successful national show of force. The Internet, long considered uncontrollable and a headache for China’s leadership has not only long since been tamed by censorship but is now its most important medium. The best example is the state-run app “Xuexi Qiangguo”, in English, “Learn about the strong nation”. Here, more than 100 million Chinese playfully study Xi Jinping’s political theory. Jonas Borchers
