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By PHELIM KINE
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Hi, China Watchers. Today we assess the State Department's China House ahead of its first anniversary on Saturday, parse a congressional move to declare Hong Kong's former media tycoon Jimmy Lai a prisoner of conscience and explore an initiative dedicated to telling China's mostly untold contemporary history. And with just 10 shopping days until Christmas, we profile a book that explores the role that 19th century American Christian missionaries played in driving China's modernization.
Let's get to it. — Phelim
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The U.S. State Department | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images |
'Plenty of growing pains' — China House marks its first year
The State Department's China House — formally known as the Office of China Coordination — launched a year ago this week to supercharge the Biden administration's management of its vexed relationship with Beijing.
The aim was to eliminate silos among sometimes redundant government bodies, giving U.S. officials from within State and beyond a central clearinghouse to share information and shape policy on China.
It's been a busy year. China House has had a key role in dozens of China-targeted sanctions and Commerce Department blacklists of Chinese firms deemed national security threats. It has also helped plan the administration's diplomatic outreach blitz, which included travel by three senior Cabinet officials to Beijing this summer and President Joe Biden's meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco last month.
But China House's first 12 months — a period of soaring bilateral tensions over trade, Taiwan and Beijing's increasingly aggressive posture in the Indo-Pacific — have challenged State's aspirations for it to be the smooth functioning centerpiece of U.S. diplomacy with China.
Within weeks of its launch China House was grappling with the fallout of the Chinese spy balloon incident, which derailed Secretary of State Antony Blinken's long-planned visit to Beijing. China House — led by its then-leader, former assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan Rick Waters — responded to that incident by trying to minimize damage to bilateral ties by hitting the brakes on export controls, human rights-related sanctions and other measures, per Reuters. (Waters retired from the State Department in August.)
That has raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill. "China House seems to have spent 2023 accommodating the CCP and axing key defensive actions like export controls and sanctions," Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement.
Waters disagrees. "The idea that in the middle of the balloon incident, where we pulled down Blinken's trip, that we were somehow pulling our punches didn’t make sense," Waters said in an interview. "If we had been pulling our punches, we would have gone ahead with the trip."
The State Department's response to the balloon incident was the first test of the China House model of swiftly and efficiently linking key personnel to address a diplomatic crisis. That cooperation allowed for rapid processing of key information and production of essential data and talking points to allies amid a media and political firestorm, Waters said. "If you tried to do that with the structures that predated China House, it just couldn’t have been done," he said.
State Department structural constraints hindered China House in its early days. Personnel wrestled with a legacy of "institutional neglect — everything from staffing to the mechanics of how the building functions," Waters said.
Those struggles didn't go unnoticed in Washington China policy circles. "Creating such a working group in a big bureaucracy presents a lot of challenges, especially in a politicized atmosphere in Washington — it had plenty of growing pains," said Danny Russel, former assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Still, as China House marks its first anniversary, some observers say its operations have stabilized. "Even amid shake ups in the personnel working on the China desk, State has been able to maintain policy continuity and adapt to a tumultuous international landscape," said Paul Haenle, a former National Security Council China director.
That experience may help set up China House for success in 2024. A state department spokesperson said China House is going into its second year with a clear sense of the policies it wants to prioritize and the tools to do so.
THREE MINUTES WITH …
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Congress in September that he was working with the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission to declare former media mogul and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai a congressionally-recognized prisoner of conscience. With Lai's trial in Hong Kong on charges of "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces" opening on Monday, Raskin spoke to China Watcher about why Lai's case matters.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Why does Jimmy Lai deserve prisoner of conscience status?
Jimmy Lai is a freedom fighter for democracy and human rights. His case really echoes across the world because he is a very successful businessman and a champion of the public's right to get information. So we've got to do whatever we can to back him up and shine enough light on his case so that he will be released from prison. I have supported the declaration of other prisoners of conscience in the past and a number of them have been released from prison. You just have to be a bulldog in talking about the case and bringing public sunlight to it.
Why should Americans care about human rights in Hong Kong?
All of the world's autocrats, kleptocrats and authoritarians have found each other, from Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Xi in China. They have decided to act together to reinforce each other's power against democracy and freedom and we have to show even more solidarity and strength for democracy, freedom and human rights around the world.
Hong Kong pro-democracy activists accuse U.S. corporations with operations in Hong Kong of passive complicity in the government's rollback in the territory's rights, freedoms and rule-of-law. What's your message to the CEOs of those companies?
The political and moral philosophers who built the concept of market freedom — people like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith — were passionate champions for human rights. They understood that market freedom and civil freedom have to go together. The Chinese government is obviously willing to experiment with the market and with human greed, but they're not willing to experiment with real civil liberties, political expression and human rights. American corporations should side not with authoritarian states, but with the people who are struggling for truly free societies. And ultimately, there's no safety for market freedom in authoritarian societies.
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TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— NSC, PENTAGON BLAST BEIJING'S PHILIPPINE HARASSMENT: The Biden administration presented a united front with key allies on Wednesday in condemning Beijing's intensifying harassment of Philippine vessels in Manila's waters in the South China Sea. Those activities are "dangerous and unlawful" and the Chinese government should "desist from further provocative behavior," said national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his Philippine and Japanese counterparts, Eduardo Año and Akiba Takeo, in a joint call on Wednesday.
The Pentagon had similar concerns. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Philippine counterpart Gilberto Teodoro Jr. discussed in a call on Wednesday the "coercive and unlawful actions" by Chinese ships in the South China Sea that recently "caused a collision and damage to lawfully operating Philippine vessels in the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone," the Pentagon said in a statement. Those statements were a response to reports over the weekend that Chinese Coast Guard units had deployed "water cannons" and "acoustic devices" against Philippine ships operating in Philippine waters near the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal (also known as the Ayungin Shoal).
— CHINA COMMITTEE URGES ECON TIES 'RESET': The House Select Committee on China dropped a 53-page report on Tuesday with 150 policy recommendations to radically overhaul the U.S. economic and trade relationship with Beijing. The report warns that the U.S. is a victim of China's "multi decade campaign of economic aggression" and urges policy changes that put "national security, economic security and values at the core of the U.S.-PRC relationship."
They include a new tariff regime targeted at Beijing's "unfair trade practices" and the creation of an "Economic Security Strategy" to assess and address China-related supply chain vulnerabilities. Farm district Republicans and agriculture lobbies succeeded in softening some of those recommendations over concerns that they might harm American farmers' largest export market — POLITICO's Meredith Lee Hill and Gavin Bade have the full story here. Beijing is not pleased. The committee "is obsessed with attacking and smearing China, is biased and hostile and has no rationality," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Wednesday.
— BURNS BOTHERED BY BEIJING'S NUKE BUILDUP: The Biden administration wants details on Beijing's rapid expansion of its nuclear weapons capacity. "We need to have further illumination into what China is doing on nuclear weapons," U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Tuesday. Beijing is undertaking "a massive buildup of its nuclear arm stockpile but it's not being very clear or transparent with the rest of the world about how it's doing it and why it's doing it," Burns said.
Burns is guardedly optimistic about a deal that Biden struck with Xi last month on counternarcotics cooperation. "Fentanyl is front and center in the relationship given the severity of the public health crisis here. China can help, and it started to over the last month and we're very pleased about that. Can that be sustained in the next year or two? That'll be the great test," Burns said. Biden sealed the deal by dropping sanctions on a Chinese police facility that the Commerce Department had decreed was "complicit in human rights violations" against Xinjiang Uyghurs.
— SMITH SLAMS COPS' APEC VIOLENCE RESPONSE: The chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China has accused the San Francisco police of failing both to stop and investigate attacks by alleged "CCP thugs" on anti-Xi protesters on the margins of last month's APEC meeting. "Reports of the San Francisco Police Department's apparent lack of action against these heinous attacks are deeply troubling," Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said at a commission press conference on Tuesday. Smith said that those protesters "were essentially left alone to be attacked and had absolutely no support during or after the fact." Smith alleged that "orders from above" resulted in police "non-responsiveness" to the attacks.
"The testimonies presented at the press conference … paint a pretty clear picture of coordinated attempts to silence protesters in San Francisco and shield Xi Jinping from even seeing protestors," Smith said in a separate statement to China Watcher on Wednesday. The Chinese embassy in Washington last week counter-accused anti-Xi protesters of assaulting what it calls "Chinese welcoming communities" at the event.
Representatives of nonprofit advocacy groups who have alleged that CCP-backed groups physically assaulted them at APEC echoed Smith's criticism. Those attackers had "the help of the negligence from law enforcement," said Zhou Fengsuo, executive director of the nonprofit Human Rights In China.
The San Francisco Police Department rejected all of the above allegations and said its personnel responded to complaints of violence among protesters, made numerous arrests and is continuing to investigate acts of APEC-related violence. "Any assertion that members of the SFPD policed different groups differently is completely false and ignores many of the challenges present throughout the week as opposing groups had various altercations while protesting," SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky said in a statement.
— TAIWAN'S NEW U.S. ENVOY HAS LANDED: Taiwan has wasted no time in dispatching its new U.S. envoy — Alexander Tah-ray Yui landed in Washington on Monday less than two weeks after Taipei announced his appointment, the self-governing island's diplomatic outpost said in a statement on Wednesday. Meanwhile Yui's boss, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, announced on Wednesday that he'll step down in the coming months, per the Wall Street Journal. POLITICO's Anne McElvoy spoke to Yui about his new posting in the latest "Power Play" podcast. "We want to preserve our way of life. We want to preserve our democracy. We want to preserve liberties, and we will defend it," Yui told McElvoy. You can listen to the entire interview here.
TRANSLATING EUROPE
EU LAWMAKERS RENEW CALL FOR TRADE PACT WITH TAIWAN: European Parliament lawmakers on Wednesday again called on the EU to commit to a formal bilateral trade and investment agreement with Taiwan, a move the European Commission has consistently refused to make out of fear Beijing would retaliate. "We ask the European Commission to increase trade and investment cooperation with Taiwan, building on the progress recorded in the Trade and Investment Dialogue rounds," said Iuliu Winkler, a Romanian lawmaker from the leading European People's Party grouping. The resolution urges the Commission to "swiftly begin working on a resilient supply chain agreement with Taiwan." Earlier this week, the EU's trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis complained about European companies' lack of market access into Taiwan's wind energy sector.
CAMERON TURNED FROM CHINA-HUGGING TO HONG KONG BACKER: U.K.'s new Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the chief architect for the Sino-British golden era while British premier in the 2010s, is now keen to prove that he has updated his thinking given Beijing's increasingly authoritarian path. On Tuesday he met with Sebastian Lai, son of jailed Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai, who's one of Hong Kong's best-known Beijing critics. "The UK opposes the National Security Law and will continue to stand by Jimmy Lai and the people of HK," Cameron wrote on X.
BELGIAN MP PROPOSES JAILED UYGHUR SCHOLAR FOR NOBEL: Belgian lawmaker Samuel Cogolati, sanctioned by China since 2021, has led a coalition of supporters to nominate Ilham Tohti for the next Nobel Peace Prize. Tohti was sentenced to life in prison in 2014, with Beijing alleging him of being a secessionist. "It is our duty to break the silence towards Xi Jinping's totalitarian regime and support the true symbol of the Uyghur people's fight for freedom," Cogolati said in a joint statement with Belgian sinologist Vanessa Frangville. The last time a Chinese citizen — Liu Xiaobo — was awarded the prize, Beijing punished Norway (where the award committee is based) with a six-year freeze of most official and economic relations.
PRAGUE SHEDS LIGHT ON BEIJING-MOSCOW TIES: NATO countries should work hard on "preventing China from supporting Russia on the field," Czech Ambassador to NATO Jakub Landovský said in an interview with Nikkei Asia. Landovsky is among a group of national ambassadors to NATO visiting Tokyo this week, including his British, American, Romanian and Polish counterparts.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
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— BEIJING TARGETS ECONOMIC 'DIFFICULTIES AND CHALLENGES': China's Central Economic Work Conference, an annual meeting of top CCP policymakers, convened on Monday and Tuesday to brainstorm solutions to economic "difficulties and challenges." That's shorthand for multiplying economic challenges including high youth unemployment, a tanking property sector and the emergence of deflation. The conference produced vague recommendations that are already mainstays of Beijing's economic toolkit — central bank support for specific industries, boosting domestic consumption and removing "obstacles for foreigners to come to China for business," Chinese state media reported on Tuesday.
That's unlikely to comfort either consumers or investors. The meeting produced "no surprises and few specifics," said Dexter Roberts, director of China affairs at the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana and an expert on the Chinese economy. The meeting's readout "referenced the deeply damaging drop in consumer confidence, one reason China is now in deflationary territory, and the need to boost employment was mentioned, but with little detail how China will accomplish that," Roberts said.
TRANSLATING CHINA
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Courtesy of China Unofficial Archive |
— 'UNOFFICIAL ARCHIVE' TELLS CHINA'S UNTOLD STORY: The CCP's pervasive censorship system systematically suppresses history that the party would prefer be forgotten. Chinese citizens know little or nothing of epochal events ranging from the famine sparked by the Great Leap Forward, the violent purges and power struggles of Mao's Cultural Revolution and the mass murder of unarmed Beijing citizens in the June 4 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
A new online resource, the China Unofficial Archive, launched yesterday to start to fill those gaps. The archive provides a searchable database of electronic copies of films, journals and books that provide insights into Chinese history absent from the official record. The archive is the brainchild of Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer prize-winning China correspondent and author of "Sparks: China's underground historians and their battle for the future." Johnson is the current pro bono curator of the archive which he has divided into categories of era, theme, creator and format. China Watcher spoke to Johnson about the project and its goals.
Beijing won't like it. China's Great Firewall will likely block the archive's contents to anyone within the country who doesn't have a VPN. Those who do will be able to access and share the archive's materials like modern day samizdat. "All of this material is also downloadable, so you can read the article online, then download the PDFs and spread it," Johnson said.
It's Chinese telling China's story. The archive provides a storehouse of Chinese writers' and historians' accounts of China's history accessible to Chinese people seeking non-sanitized official accounts of their country's past. "We want to counter this idea that critical views of the Cultural Revolution or China's Covid-19 policy are foreigners who have it in for China — these are Chinese voices and I think that will give it a lot more credibility," said Johnson.
It's a work in progress. The archive is still in its infancy, but already includes Chinese language documents covering the pre-1949 CCP victory period to accounts of China's draconian three-year Covid-zero policy that ended in 2022. Browsers of the archive will find an initial collection of 858 works by mostly known Chinese historians including Yang Jisheng as well as electronic copies of the Chinese-language journal Remembrance. "We have some grant money that will allow us to keep adding to the archive —we just acquired 178 new films that I'm going to upload," Johnson said.
Subtitles to the rescue. The archive also includes a treasure trove of Chinese language documentaries with English-language subtitles. Those films offer unique perspectives on Chinese history comparable to the Cold War era Eastern European writers and filmmakers whose translated works provided vivid depictions of oppression in the Soviet Union and the countries under its boot. "In the West we're familiar with people like Solzhenitsyn, or Milan Kundera, Václav Havel or the filmmaker Miloš Forman, but most people don't know their modern Chinese counterparts," Johnson said. The subtitled films reflect "the incredible scope and ambition" of Chinese documentary filmmakers, said Johnson.
HEADLINES
Prospect Magazine: In Taiwan, China is covertly preparing for battle
New York Times: Anti-Chinese laws are on the rise. We've been through this before
Le Monde: At the ‘Hong Kong 47’ trial, almost all the pro-democracy opposition was in the dock
ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS
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Courtesy of Temple University Press |
One Book, Three Questions
The Book: Cultures Colliding: American Missionaries, Chinese Resistance, and the Rise of Modern Institutions in China
The Author: John R. Haddad is a professor of American studies at Pennsylvania State University (Harrisburg) who has written extensively about the American experience in China.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from your book?
The American missionaries who voyaged to China in the 1800s were driven by one purpose – to save souls. But fierce Chinese resistance to evangelism pushed missionaries to the brink of failure. In the face of crisis, some innovated by offering education and medicine rather than sermons. The Chinese embraced the new institutions, shaped them from the inside, and used the knowledge to modernize society. So much of America's 20th century influence in China was born out of 19th century failure.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?
American missionaries initially expected the Chinese to abandon their indigenous belief systems and adopt Christianity. That didn't happen. Most Chinese rejected the faith, and those who accepted it did so without abandoning their existing supernatural catalog of gods, ghosts and demons. Converts asked Jesus to battle it out with ancient demons believed to terrorize rural villages.
What does your book tell us about the trajectory and future of U.S.-China relations?
This is not a sad story of Western domination in China. When you look below the governmental level, you find Chinese and American people and institutions interacting in positive ways. Missionaries are not founding colleges in China any more. But institutions like New York University Shanghai or Duke Kunshan University educate Chinese and American students with a similar spirit. If there is hope for the future, it perhaps lies in such partnerships.
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at pkine@politico.com.
Thanks to: Heidi Vogt and digital producers Tara Gnewikow and XXXX. Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at pkine@politico.com slau@politico.com
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