Report reveals Beijing faces ‘Tiananmen-like’ backlash
Internal document presented to President Xi predicts China-US confrontation
BEIJING: An internal Chinese report warns that Beijing faces a rising wave of hostility in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak that could tip relations with the US into confrontation, people familiar with the paper told Reuters.
The report, presented early last month by the ministry of state security to top Beijing leaders including President Xi Jinping, concluded that global antiChina sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the sources said.
As a result, Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment led by the US in the aftermath of the pandemic and needs to be prepared in a worst-case scenario for armed confrontation between the two global powers, according to people familiar with the report’s content.
The report was drawn up by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank affiliated with the ministry of state security, China’s top intelligence body.
Reuters has not seen the briefing paper, but it was described by people who had direct knowledge of its findings.
“I don’t have relevant information,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson’s office said in a statement responding to questions from Reuters on the report.
China’s ministry of state security has no public contact details and could not be reached for comment. CICIR, an influential think, did not reply to a request for comment.
Reuters couldn’t determine to what extent the stark assessment described in the paper reflects positions held by China’s state leaders, and to what extent, if at all, it would influence policy. But the presentation of the report shows how seriously Beijing takes the threat of a building backlash that could threaten what China sees as its strategic investments overseas and its view of its security standing.
Relations between China and the US are widely seen to be at their worst point in decades. In recent days, US President Donald Trump has been ramping up his criticism of Beijing and threatening new tariffs on China. His administration, meanwhile, is considering retaliatory measures against China over the outbreak, officials said.
The paper concluded that Washington views China’s rise as an economic and national security threat and a challenge to Western democracies, the people said. The report also said the US was aiming to undercut the ruling Communist Party by undermining public confidence.
Chinese officials had a “special responsibility” to inform their people and the world of the threat posed by the coronavirus “since they were the first to learn of it”, US State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in response to questions from Reuters.
‘NOVIKOV TELEGRAM’
One of those with knowledge of the report said it was regarded by some in the Chinese intelligence community as China’s version of the “Novikov Telegram”, a 1946 dispatch by the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Nikolai Novikov, that stressed the dangers of US economic and military ambition in the wake of World War II.
Novikov’s missive was a response to US diplomat George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow that said the Soviet Union did not see the possibility for peaceful coexistence with the West, and that containment was the best strategy.
The two documents helped set the stage for the strategic thinking that defined both sides of the Cold War.