Asia and Pacific
Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo BY MICHAEL J. GREEN. Columbia University Press, 2022, 328 pp.
Green knows Japanese foreign policy like few others. He argues that Shinzo Abe, who served as Japan’s prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020, reoriented Tokyo’s strategy in a way that will persist, despite his tragic assassination in July 2022. Proactive rather than reactive, he created the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” that became part of American thinking; strengthened military cooperation between the two allies; consolidated the quasi-alliance of Australia, India Japan, and the United States known as the Quad; and resuscitated Washington’s abandoned trans-Pacific trade pact in the form of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (which the United States has yet to rejoin). These initiatives reflected a “maritime and cosmopolitan” approach that aims to secure Japan’s access to the surrounding oceans on the basis of rule of law and free commercial transit. In Southeast Asia, Abe advanced a “values-oriented diplomacy” and positioned Japan as a trusted partner of countries seeking to hedge against China. At home, he embedded his vision in a strengthened security establishment. Despite its failure to bridge intractable differences with South Korea, Japan today “arguably has the clearest conceptualization, consensus, and implementation of a grand strategy of any of the democracies confronting Chinese hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.”
Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World by alex joske. Hardie Grant, 2022, 272 pp.
America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger by isaac stone fish. Knopf, 2022, 288 pp.
Two books consider the subtle and covert ways Beijing is seeking to spread its influence abroad. China’s Ministry of State Security (mss) engages in traditional spycraft, but unlike most countries’ intelligence agencies it also has a large portfolio of campaigns designed to influence opinion in the
West and among Chinese overseas communities. With prodigious digging on the Internet, Joske has been able to expose many of the ministry’s senior operatives and their achievements. A vice minister who worked under the pseudonym Yu Enguang charmed Westerners while serving as a journalist in London and Washington, created the China International Culture Exchange Center (whose mission was to “use culture to make friends” abroad), and infiltrated George Soros’s China Fund, which attempted to promote liberal reforms in China in the year and a half before the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Zheng Bijian, known for the emollient concept of “China’s peaceful rise” (which he described in an article for this magazine), was not an mss employee but chaired an mss-created think tank called the China Reform Forum, which encouraged Western academics and officials to support engagement with China. The ministry’s Tenth Bureau infiltrates overseas student and dissident groups; the Eleventh Bureau runs a foreign policy think tank that engages Western diplomats; the Twelfth Bureau manages front organizations designed to sway unwitting Western targets of influence—many of whom Joske identifies by name.
Stone Fish looks at Chinese influence operations from the side of the targets, naming numerous American consultants, chief executives, Hollywood big shots, and academics who have said and done things that China wants said or done, either for the sake of access or out of an idealistic sense of “friendship” cultivated by warm treatment from Chinese officials. He focuses especially on Henry Kissinger, whom Stone Fish accuses of “monetizing” his relationship with China by charging business executives for introductions to Chinese leaders after he left government service. Other major figures Stone Fish criticizes for falling victim to Chinese blandishments include members of the Bush family, executives of the Disney corporation, sports figures, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Hollywood has bowed to tacit Chinese censorship to avoid being excluded from the enormous Chinese market. Many academics have steered clear of sensitive topics or softened their language to avoid visa denials for themselves or trouble for their students. But it is hard to find purely disinterested discussions of China: those who have something valuable to say usually also have interests or need access. Many Westerners named in both these books could plausibly argue that influence goes in both directions and that their contacts with China make their understanding of the country more, not less, well informed.
Ultimate Economic Conflict Between China and Democratic Countries: An Institutional Analysis
BY C. Y. C. CHU, P. C. LEE, C. C. LIN, AND C. F. LO. Routledge, 2022, 204 pp.
Four prominent legal and trade specialists from Taiwan argue that China should be seen not as a market economy that gets away with transgressing international norms but as a different type of system that prospers under different rules. The authors use case studies of Chinese e-commerce
platforms, social media companies, corporate governance structures, antitrust legislation, and inbound and outbound investment practices to show that the Chinese system works through direct and indirect mechanisms of state guidance, subsidization, protection, and data control. These practices apply to both state and nominally private large enterprises. Such a complex and well-functioning system could not be taken apart and reassembled into a Western-style market economy even if Chinese leaders wanted to—and they like their economic model the way it is. The authors suggest that instead of complaining about inequitable trading practices, market economies should create a separate trading community outside the wto that implements market principles among themselves. But they acknowledge that this will be difficult, given the huge stakes that key Western companies have in China.
Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi
BY VICTOR C. SHIH. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 232 pp.
In the last ten years of his life, Mao Zedong purged his senior colleagues and installed in high positions very young officials or those with checkered records. Shih is the first scholar to draw theoretical insight from this curious fact. He suggests that at moments of vulnerability, dictators may surround themselves with “coalitions of the weak” to prevent challenges from powerful rivals. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, and his fellow elders followed a similar strategy near the end of their lives, putting a weak group of leaders in place. Shih bases his narrative of intricate factional strife on the biographies of Chinese elites, enabling him to assess who was strong and who was weak partly on the basis of how many connections each politician had generated with other ranking actors on his path to high office. Xi Jinping, who came to power with a strong personal network, was able to step into the postDeng power vacuum and start a new cycle of one-man control, backed by his own coalition of the weak.
We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks
BY ILHAM TOHTI. TRANSLATED BY YAXUE CAO, CINDY CARTER, AND MATTHEW ROBERTSON. Verso, 2022, 192 pp.
Tohti is the most famous of the hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals imprisoned by the Chinese state in its effort to destroy Uyghur culture and identity. In 2014, he was a professor at the Chinese government’s special university for the study of ethnic minority issues when he was arrested and given a life sentence on the charge of “separatism.” This selection of his writings shows what this separatism consisted of: bracingly honest analyses of the racism, discrimination, marginalization, and coercive policies that shape Beijing’s treatment of the country’s 55 recognized “national minorities”; nuanced analyses of the social tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese; and thoughtful recommendations for how to realize the promises of equal
citizenship and minority cultural self-rule laid out in the Chinese constitution and the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law. Describing himself as a “Chinese patriot,” Tohti warned for years against a rising tide of “totalitarian ethnonationalism,” until that tide swept him away.
Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class
BY DOROTHY J. SOLINGER. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, 332 pp.
Although the Chinese Communist Party has received much credit for “lifting millions out of poverty,” Solinger delves into how the party’s economic reforms have also left millions behind. Scholars have fixated on the lot of poor peasants, but she focuses on the urban poor created by the shuttering and privatizing of state-owned enterprise in the late 1990s. Solinger argues that dibao, China’s social assistance program for the urban poor, is shaped by political motivations. It is designed to pacify its recipients rather than to lift them up. Based on outdated benchmarks, the minimum income guarantees condemn the urban poor to being a permanent underclass, offering a sufficient threshold to both keep them silent and prevent them from becoming upwardly mobile.The book obviously benefits from Solinger’s decades of experience studying this issue, evidenced in copious firsthand interview notes and government statistics, but it buries some of its key insights in the latter half. Solinger compares the Chinese case with those of other countries to reveal the irony of China’s avowed “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which, by neglecting the plight of the proletariat, shows that there is really nothing socialist about the party any longer.