China

Philippine Foreign Minister Teodoro Locsin Jr. was peeved at Beijing. It was early May, and hundreds of Chinese vessels had been regularly intruding into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea, where the Chinese government has made expansive maritime territorial claims. After lodging numerous complaints through formal diplomatic channels to no avail, Locsin took to Twitter and unleashed an expletive-filled tirade. “China, my friend, how politely can I put it?” he wrote. “Let me see… O…GET THE [F**K] OUT.” (Locsin didn’t bother with the asterisks.) It was not only Philippine officials and diplomats who were angry at Beijing’s willingness to raise tensions in disputed waters. In a poll conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore earlier this year, before the latest Chinese incursions into Philippine waters, roughly 87 percent of Filipino respondents said that they considered China’s encroachments into other countries’ exclusive economic zones and continental shelves to be the “top concern” in the South China Sea. The same proportion, 87 percent, said that if forced to align with either the United States or China, they would choose the U.S.—the highest share of any country in Southeast Asia. But even as Filipinos of all stripes vent their anger at Beijing, they should be equally furious with their own leader. His policy toward China has failed to either protect the Philippines’ national security or to boost its economy. Since taking office in 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte has courted Beijing, playing down its construction of military facilities on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea and the aggressive behavior of China’s maritime militia vessels. He has also ignored, for the most part, a 2016 international tribunal ruling that unequivocally rejected China’s stated claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. At the same time, Duterte has consistently undermined his country’s alliance with the U.S. He has stalled on renewing the Visiting Forces Agreement, or VFA—which allows U.S. troops to maintain a presence in the Philippines—after initially trying to kill it. Duterte also vetoed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a deal that would make it easier to move U.S. troops and weapons into bases near the South China Sea. To be sure, the Philippines and the U.S. still enjoy strong strategic ties, and security officials who value the alliance provide a counterweight to some of Duterte’s impulses. It was likely the country’s military and national security establishment that pushed Duterte to buy a new supersonic cruise missile that would provide a deterrent capability against China, to backtrack from trying to jettison the VFA and to make other quiet efforts to restore warmer ties with the U.S. Yet Duterte remains intent on currying favor with Beijing. After Locsin’s outburst, Duterte declared in a briefing that “China remains our benefactor.” The following day, Locsin took to Twitter again, this time to apologize to his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, “for hurting his feelings.” But the reality is that Duterte’s mostly hands-off approach to the South China Sea has failed to change China’s behavior. In fact, when it comes to territorial issues, Beijing has treated the groveling Duterte the same way it has treated leaders of countries like Vietnam, which have taken a more hard-line approach toward disputed maritime claims. The incident that prompted Locsin’s Twitter tirade was just one of many occasions when China has sent hundreds of boats into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone during Duterte’s presidency, intimidating Philippine naval vessels and making it easier for Chinese forces to seize contested islands and fortify them. Last year, as COVID-19 ravaged the Philippines, including its top military commanders, Beijing declared administrative control of the disputed Spratly Islands. It also continued building up military facilities on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea and sent ships to encircle and menace Thitu, the most strategically vital of the disputed archipelagos that the Philippines still controls. China has also increasingly used aggressive fleets to turf Philippine fishers off rich fishing grounds. Duterte seemingly hoped that, by shifting toward Beijing, aid and investment would flow into the Philippines, bringing jobs, growth and much-needed infrastructure projects. Yet his approach has brought few economic benefits during his single six-year term, which ends next year. In splashy announcements in 2016, Beijing pledged tens of billions of dollars in new investments in the Philippines. But construction has only begun on two proposed Chinese infrastructure projects—a bridge and an irrigation system—and they remain far from completion. China’s vaunted plans for energy, rail and other infrastructure projects have not even broken ground. As the analyst Richard Heydarian has noted, much of the investment that China has actually delivered on in the Philippines under Duterte has gone to online casinos and modest projects like small bridges. For the most part, these projects have utilized Chinese workers rather than local labor, even as the Philippines is suffering its worst economic downturn since 1947. The lack of follow-through on investments China promised to the Philippines in 2016 contrasts sharply with other Southeast Asian states. In Indonesia, China is financing a multibillion-dollar high-speed railway project connecting the capital, Jakarta, with Bandung city, as well as another high-speed rail line in Thailand. Both projects were contracted on relatively favorable financing terms. China’s development aid to the Philippines also remains small by comparison with other major donors. A recent report on aid inflows prepared by the Philippine government’s economic planning body showed that Japan remained by far the country’s biggest donor. During the first half of 2020, Japan provided nearly 40 percent of the Philippines’ official development assistance—about 17 times more than what China provided. Aid from the Asian Development Bank and South Korea also surpassed Beijing’s. More recently, China has stepped up to provide Manila with some COVID-19 vaccines, though the effectiveness of the Chinese shots remains somewhat uncertain. Duterte’s approval ratings remain very high, but the Philippine public has noticed how little he has gotten from his dealings with Beijing. A wide range of opinion polls show heightened levels of anti-China sentiment among Filipinos. Perhaps aware of that trend in public opinion, several candidates for next year’s presidential election, including the boxer-turned-politician Manny Pacquiao, have been talking tough on China. If elected, he could reorient the country’s foreign policy back in a direction skeptical of Beijing, closer to the United States, and in favor of building a multilateral coalition to defend freedom of navigation and territorial rights in the South China Sea. The front-runner for the 2022 presidential election, though, remains Duterte’s daughter, Sara, mayor of the southern city of Davao, though she has not confirmed her intention to run. Sara Duterte’s views on China are not as openly favorable as her father’s. But if she does run and succeed him in office, inheriting his political machine as the bulwark of her support, she would be hard-pressed to reverse her father’s China policy, no matter how disastrous it has been for the country. And no matter who wins the presidency next year, Beijing will have spent Duterte’s term in office strengthening its hold on disputed maritime features that are critical to Philippine national security, in addition to providing livelihoods to the country’s fishers. The damage from Duterte’s disastrous China policy has already been done.

Cheng-Chwee Kuik is associate professor and head of the Center for Asian Studies at the National University of Malaysia. Southeast Asia occupies a central place on the map of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). President Xi Jinping chose to announce the maritime prong of the BRI in Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, in October 2013, a month after he had launched the overland prong of the BRI in Kazakhstan. Southeast Asia is where the land “Belt” and sea “Road” of the massive initiative converge. Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the six economic corridors of the BRI, while maritime Southeast Asia is where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converge, sitting on the intersection of sea lanes vital for communication, trade, and transportation of energy and other critical resources. As indicated by the title of David Shambaugh’s 2020 book, Where Great Powers Meet, Southeast Asia is also significant strategically to both China and the United States. Thus, Southeast Asia is China’s “strategic throat” and is crucial to its ascendancy as a world power. To mitigate risks and maximize benefits in multiple domains, China has been financing and building a chain of ports, pipelines, highways, high-speed rails, land bridges, industrial parks, and digital connectivity centers across Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. While some of these endeavors predated the launch of the BRI, they have been accelerated since 2013. Together, these hard and soft infrastructure projects form a network of “dots” and “lines” on the BRI map, connecting interests, cultivating stakes, and consolidating interdependence between Beijing and other capitals along its peripheries. David Lampton and his colleagues thus observe: in this eventful century, all roads lead to Beijing, one way or another. The story of the BRI in Southeast Asia is about the power of proximity, as much as the proximity of power. Geography aside, there are other fundamental factors that show the importance of Southeast Asia to China’s BRI and its wider interests. These include: the imperatives of creating external demand for Chinese firms and remedying internal overcapacity in some Chinese industries in the wake of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, neutralizing what China perceives to be U.S.-led “regional encirclement,” as exemplified by Obama’s “rebalancing to Asia” and the ongoing Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy, as well as narrowing the domestic socio-developmental gaps between China’s western and eastern regions, securing sustainable resources and energy supplies, and managing internal transitions and tensions after the decades-long reform and opening up policies. Each of these imperatives is central to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s regime legitimacy and political future. Each imperative highlights the increasing salience of Southeast Asia to China’s national interests and external strategies, even and especially when the CCP is struggling to cope with an increasingly challenging external environment. Indeed, as Sino-U.S. relations become more uncertain and China’s relations with the second-tier powers (other members of the Quad and other Indo-Pacific partners, including those in Europe) become more unstable, Southeast Asia will become more important to China. And as Beijing exhibits a growing inclination to use military coercion and political intimidation to safeguard what it sees to be its sovereign interests in the South China Sea and on other fronts, the BRI and other tools of cooperation and persuasion will become more important, not least to offset the adverse effects of China’s coercive actions and optimize its broader interests, while seeking prestige and power. These seemingly contradictory actions are likely to continue, as Beijing develops its dual circulation strategy, which maximizes synergies between domestic and international markets, in response to growing pressures from Washington’s China policy, including the decoupling pursuit. Under President Joe Biden, Washington is determined to rebuild U.S. global leadership by revitalizing its military alliances and partnerships in Asia and Europe, while collaborating with like-minded nations to push back against China on issues related to security, technology, infrastructure connectivity, development, supply chains, and human rights, among other matters. Big-power rivalries are being intensified across the twin chessboards of high- and low-politics (i.e., security and nonmilitary domains, respectively), increasing pressures and sparing scanty space for smaller states to maneuver and hedge for survival. For a further assessment of BRI in Southeast Asia, and its future trajectory, see the entire paper by Cheng-Chwee Kuik here.

Dai Mochinaga is a senior researcher at the Keio Research Institute at SFC. China has expanded its influence over Southeast Asia's technological development through its Digital Silk Road (DSR) initiative, a newer part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper shows that China utilizes the DSR in Southeast Asia for several reasons. First, the DSR helps implement Beijing's cyberspace principles and norms in other countries. Second, it promotes Chinese investment in certain industries in Southeast Asia, and helps convince other countries to use technology standards common to Chinese firms. Finally, Beijing exerts its influence over Southeast Asia, via the DSR, to help promote its models for data privacy and security on the internet. Despite efforts via the DSR and other avenues to exert influence over Southeast Asian cyberspace, China has not been fully successful in its aims in the region, in part due to local resistance, and in part because Japan, the United States and other actors have responded to Beijing’s efforts with their own proposals for cyberspace, conceived as part of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy. For the full paper about the Digital Silk Road and China’s influence in Southeast Asia, see here.

Eric Schluessel is assistant professor of modern Chinese history at George Washington University. The Xinjiang region of northwest China (or East Turkestan) is the homeland of the Uyghurs, a group numbering roughly eleven million people. Uyghurs speak a language closely related to Turkish, generally practice Islam, boast a history of political independence, and otherwise have a broad range of cultural practices that distinguish them from the majority Han Chinese. Since 2017, thousands of eyewitness reports and leaked official documents have emerged that attest to an ongoing effort on the part of the People’s Republic of China to quell dissent in the Uyghur homeland through detention, incarceration, and a now-pervasive network of surveillance. They describe a system of reeducation camps, which the Chinese government insists are merely mandatory boarding schools, where many Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others deemed deviant, including some Han Chinese, are sent to be “cured” of their ideological diseases. Some characterize this as a systematic effort to eliminate not just dissenting voices, but an entire way of life—a genocide, powered by cutting-edge technology. Crimes against humanity tend imply the existence of a criminal mastermind who could someday be put on trial. However, in The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, journalist Geoffrey Cain demonstrates that no single architect designed this system. Rather, we are presented with an indictment of unfettered state power and the unethical pursuit of profit, told through the intimate stories of eyewitnesses. Cain delineates two narratives that gradually intertwine: One is China’s drive for technological dominance. The other is China’s fumbling effort to define and defeat an internal enemy of its own creation. Ethnoreligious oppression in Xinjiang and the effort to create an all-encompassing system of digital surveillance grew together haphazardly in the hands of security-obsessed officials and amoral executives, while ordinary people paid the price. Uyghurs’ own stories are at the core of this book, and Cain’s chief interviewees, out of a sample of 168, are a surprising mix of well-informed insiders. We meet a former IT worker who helped create the surveillance system; a onetime spy for the Chinese; and the most sympathetic and central figure, a young, bookish woman named Maysem who simply wanted to finish her degree. Maysem’s journey guides us through the system of reeducation that quickly encompassed her whole life in and beyond China. When we meet her, Maysem is a thoughtful young woman and former student of imprisoned Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, now studying abroad. Maysem returns to China and faces arbitrary bureaucratic bungling that suddenly lands her in a camp, facing beatings and mind-bending interrogations. Like any clever abuser, China has learned not to leave too many marks on its victims, but instead to chip away at their grasp on reality and sense of self-worth. Maysem recounts the effects of reeducation on her psyche as she was forced to deny her own senses and internalize the state’s demands on her thoughts and comportment. The Perfect Police State helps us understand how this kind of arbitrary violence came about through a story about technological innovation bereft of ethical guidance. In the 2000s, the Chinese state realized that, despite all outward claims to totalitarian omniscience, it did not actually know itself very well. Cain’s interviews with Irfan, the Uyghur IT worker, show how Xinjiang for many years was the testing ground for piecemeal systems of surveillance that gave the illusion of control. Those attempts at discipline accompanied a push for economic development that left Uyghurs behind and the implementation of ill-considered and divisive policies aimed at cultural assimilation. The deadly July 2009 protests and backlash, which began as peaceful protests against cultural restrictions and economic inequality, could have prompted Chinese leadership to reverse their most arbitrary and divisive policies. Instead, they made increasingly ham-handed and invasive interventions in Uyghur communities and families. These interventions focused on rooting out what the state perceived to be Islamist “extremism,” which in most cases meant criminalizing ordinary Islamic practices. Scholars such as Sean Roberts have argued that China created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which the determination to locate and punish terrorists instead led to more discontent and, eventually, actual terrorist attacks. As the perceived threat increased, so did securitization, which in turn produced new threats and the demand for better intelligence and more powerful computers to counter them. Nevertheless, the state’s ability to surveil remained limited. Even as video cameras and checkpoints multiplied across Xinjiang, the information they collected was not integrated into a single network. That changed around 2016 with a shift in Chinese thinking about Xinjiang and its people. Previously, the government had focused on economic development as a means to achieve stability in what it had long regarded as a “restive” region. Now Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders finally realized that economic development, which overwhelmingly favors Han Chinese settlers, was not winning hearts and minds. (This is to say nothing of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or bingtuan, a massive pseudo-military corporation that exists in Xinjiang but is governed separately.) However, rather than remedy the underlying sickness in Xinjiang—the inequality and discrimination that caused the most discontent—they identified Islamist extremism as a “virus” of which Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others needed to be cured in order to become “normal people.” That is, a primarily socioeconomic problem was treated as an ideological and cultural problem, a drive, as it were, to “kill the Uyghur, save the man,” that often confuses religion and culture. According to government documents, the symptoms of “extremism” include a broad range of mostly innocuous practices that may or may not have any relation to religion per se. Indeed, the interpretation of “Islamic extremism” reflects a suspicion towards any behaviors that are perceived to deviate from Chinese norms. In The Perfect Police State, for example, Maysem is found suspicious because she enjoys reading and pursues an education in Turkey. The result is the criminalization of ordinary Uyghur and Kazakh cultural practices. Regardless, treating the “virus” required identifying and isolating the patients. Chinese companies and global capital provided the means to do so as their “patriotic” competition for market share and government contracts produced more refined technology, such as facial recognition software and new kinds of cameras. Cain is an experienced business journalist, and he interviewed executives at such globally recognized corporations as Huawei, as well as lesser-known but key players, such as Megvii, SenseTime, and Hikvision, who produced the key components of the new surveillance state. In 2016, cutting-edge advancements in neural networks finally made it possible to integrate those disparate technologies into a single system: the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). The IJOP could combine biometric data with masses of other information to track, monitor, and identify potentially deviant behavior. The IJOP is intended as a “Minority Report”-style system to identify future criminals. Yet, Cain demonstrates, it even fails in that respect. The platform was trained on data from human beings, a system of nosy neighborhood monitors who tracked changes in people’s schedules and habits. Their reports in turn were driven by vague political directives issued by overambitious officials, who set strict quotas requiring them to identify certain numbers of potential terrorists. This targeted tool for surveillance and discipline, trained on bad data, created the dragnet that detained an estimated 10 percent of the Uyghur population. Even members of loyal and “good” families such as Maysem’s were labeled enemies of the state. Reports demonstrate that many senior citizens have been sent for “job training” at reeducation centers, while longtime Chinese Communist Party members, including many cadres and secular academics, were sentenced to prison or even death on absurd charges of extremism. Cain’s story thus seems to prove the programmer’s adage: “Garbage in, garbage out.” The IJOP provides not omniscience, but the illusion of control as defined by an ignorant machine. Predictive policing in the United States is correctly found to reinforce racial prejudices in policing—we should expect no less in China, where several companies have offered the government facial recognition software that purports to identify Uyghurs automatically. At the same time, some Uyghurs themselves draw parallels with the Cultural Revolution, when people scrambling to display their loyalty to Mao Zedong reported others for fictional thought crimes. While it would be reasonable to assume that China is deploying arbitrary punishment strategically in order to create an atmosphere of paranoia, Cain is careful not to ascribe precise motivations to leaders without textual evidence. Rather, the book presents a tragedy of errors, a series of unforced mistakes driven by ideology as, at every step, people in power strengthened their commitment to bad policy. Scholars often analyze China’s bungling in Tibet and Xinjiang as a product of bad incentives that lead to perverse implementations of directives from the top. However, as the former spy recounts, officials in Xinjiang increasingly bought into their own paranoid propaganda and began to see enemies everywhere, which the IJOP obligingly served up. This result was, frankly, predictable. In this way, The Perfect Police State presents a lesson about the amoral pursuit of profit, as companies fulfilled state demands without considering the human consequences or even their products’ effectiveness. One interviewed executive declared, “First we need to survive as a business, and then we can build our moral values.” Pursuing government contracts is not only a priority for these companies, but something that the state can demand of them, and this “non-political” stance serves their bottom lines. Cain points to a number of international companies, from venture capital to biotech, who have similarly involved themselves in Xinjiang by providing investments and technology. Some of those international corporations withdrew from the abuse of surveillance technology or suspended their operations in light of human rights concerns. While that is laudable, we ought to be troubled that privacy and freedom depend to such a great extent on companies choosing to act against their self-interest. Ultimately, the international community is recognizing that one of the few effective means to address the situation in Xinjiang is to pressure businesses who may be entangled in the region’s surveillance and reeducation system, or with the forced labor that some Chinese companies evidently source from the camps. The Perfect Police State provides a partial map to that tangled web. Meanwhile, however, The Perfect Police State reminds us that Maysem’s story is far from unique. Cain points to others who have recorded countless eyewitness reports, such as the international Uyghur activist Abduweli Ayup, who introduced most of the book’s interviewees to him, or the Kazakh activist Serikzhan Bilash. People have shared their stories for four years, first in whispers, then in a torrent that has not abated. It is time that the world simply listened.

Benjamin Zawacki is a senior program specialist with the Asia Foundation’s office in Thailand, focused on regional security and cooperation, and the author of Thailand: Shifting Ground between the US and a Rising China. The Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges the Ford Foundation for its generous support of this project. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) means many things to many people—including to the Chinese. Introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, just a year into his term, it was most precisely translated into English as “One Belt, One Road.” With the intended meaning lost in translation, however, it was reprised as the BRI and explained as an overland “belt” and a maritime “road.” Both would run from eastern China and converge, eventually and circuitously, in Venice, Italy. While the belt generally runs west by northwest, with its route on a map appearing as a long lower-case “z,” the maritime road is literally all over that map: It runs southwest down China’s coast and through the South China Sea, west by series of zigs and zags across the Indian Ocean, then north by northwest via the Red and Mediterranean Seas. And those are just the main streams of the project; the tributaries spread out, double back, and link up like circuitry. At any given time, the number of countries said to be participating in the BRI varies—but almost always grows—and with them does the number of projects that constitute, connect, and expand the initiative. The breadth of BRI is further complicated by Beijing’s having empowered Chinese provinces (such as southern Guangxi and Yunnan provinces bordering Vietnam, Laos, and/or Myanmar), as well as state-owned enterprises, to negotiate and designate BRI projects with other countries on their own. In rare cases, such as in Australia’s Victoria province, this empowerment is reciprocal. Yet, what constitutes the projects themselves has also been an ever-evolving matter, and with it—crucially—the very nature and purpose of the BRI. In other words, what is it? By most accounts, the Belt and Road Initiative was introduced to advance “connectivity” between China and its neighbors, and via its neighbors with places further afield, primarily through traditional infrastructure like roads and railways, seaports and airports, bridges and tunnels, and pipelines and canals. Underlying the concept was the promotion of economic growth, whereby investment in transportation would lead to increases in trade, tourism, and other income-generating activity for all involved. China’s own meteoric economic growth over previous decades, partly the result of having done domestically what it aimed to do abroad, added credibility to its idea that BRI would spark growth in other countries. Analysts were quick to point out, however, that a lot of infrastructure is “dual use;” that it might have military as well as commercial uses. China’s denial of such intentions, particularly vis-à-vis Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and more recently Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, have not quieted foreign states’ concerns about the potential dual use of BRI projects. To the contrary, they have led to increased challenges on geopolitical grounds, whereby China is seen as extending not only its patronage abroad but its presence in strategically sensitive areas as well. The case of Hambantota, of which China took possession in 2017 after Sri Lanka failed in its loan obligations, gave rise to accusations of the BRI’s “debt trap diplomacy.” While this idea that China’s BRI projects trap recipient countries in debt has been challenged by researchers at a wide range of institutions, it is still a dominant narrative in Washington and elsewhere. Moreover, at least as early as 2015, when it established the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) forum, China has broadened BRI projects beyond physical infrastructure. The LMC’s earliest public statements expressly placed its very founding, meetings, agreements, and initiatives under the rubric of the BRI. This in turn has brought to the fore questions concerning Chinese influence, in addition to its more concrete economic, security, or geopolitical interests. Beijing doubled down on broadening BRI beyond physical infrastructure, introducing in 2016 a “Digital Silk Road” (DSR) in addition to the original BRI. This Digital Silk Road would promote fifth generation (5G) mobile internet capacity, particularly in countries behind or lacking in such critical twenty-first century technology, as well as other new technologies including smart cities, fintech systems, and others. At the same time, the inception of the DSR raised fears that it could enable the mining and utilization of data belonging or relating to foreign citizens, and that China would export its cybersecurity laws and other internet controls to foreign countries. Influence of perhaps a more welcome nature appeared in 2019, when in response to foreign criticism regarding environmental impacts, President Xi introduced the “Green BRI.” According to Beijing, BRI projects would henceforth account for environmental and ecological concerns, and in some cases be expressly designed to respond to them. Optimists welcomed this as imperative amidst growing alarm at climate change; pessimists judged it a rhetorical device that would not be followed by action. This past year, in the midst of a pandemic that originated in China, Beijing’s leadership further began promoting a new “Health Silk Road” to promote its “mask diplomacy” and make available its COVID-19 vaccine beyond its borders. The BRI in Thailand The BRI’s evolution, and the ambiguity of the overall project, are critical to understanding how BRI operates in Thailand. To a greater degree than in most other Southeast Asian countries, the BRI’s evolution and ambiguity are reflective of the project’s relationship with Thailand and with Thai civil society. This paper presents five main points concerning the ways in which Thai civil society has both challenged and been challenged by the BRI, resulting in a kind of split verdict as to the initiative’s present and future standing in the kingdom. First is that civil society in Thailand cannot interact with what it cannot identify. There is no single understanding of the BRI in Thailand and certainly no prevailing narrative concerning the BRI’s nature, purpose, and effects. This is symbolized by confusion as to when Thailand officially became a participating country and as to which projects count as part of BRI. Thais agree that the high-speed rail project, running from the Thai-Lao border to Bangkok and continuing south to its border with Malaysia, is a BRI project—in no small part because the rail actually starts in China and ends in Singapore. Yet on the one hand, the Thai section was agreed in concept and principle as far back as 2010, three years before the BRI was announced; on the other hand, Thailand did not appear on most BRI maps for several years after that 2013 announcement. And for a brief temporary period in 2016, Thai Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-ocha actually canceled the project. Furthermore, the rail line is one of the few projects in the kingdom that Beijing and Bangkok agree is actually part of the BRI. A list from inside China in early 2019 contained seven BRI projects in Thailand, although most had not been notably publicized as part of the initiative, and several hardly publicized at all. Conversely, the high-profile Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) and the rail network linking Bangkok’s two airports with U-Tapao Airport, were not listed. Nor was a potential canal across Thailand’s southern isthmus, despite press reports in Thailand going back to 2017 that it was being discussed as a possible BRI project. Of course, a project need not be considered part of the BRI for Thai civil society to promote or oppose it, or to seek more information or provide its points of view. But given the various conceptions of the BRI discussed above, as well as its close association with a larger but equally complex and contested “Brand China,” it stands to reason that the BRI label makes a difference in how Thai civil society views a project. Whether this ambiguity concerning projects’ BRI status is intentional or incidental is related to a second main point: Thai policymakers and business partners cannot help but be influenced by the approach of their Chinese counterparts, and China’s approach simply does not include an express role for civil society. While protests and petitions in China concerning infrastructure projects, particularly at a local level, are far more numerous than is generally reported, neither China’s various levels of government nor its state-backed banks and business are encouraged—much less required—to consult or consider views on the ground.[1] This is not to suggest that, while U.S. companies might expressly condition certain projects on social, human rights, or environmental impact assessments, Chinese liaisons would expressly prohibit them. Rather, the fact that China’s civil society does not generally see itself as a monitor or watchdog of the government, means that it is simply not factored into the equation on the Chinese side of the table. Civil society participation would need to be proactively introduced by the Thai side on any BRI project. This would invariably infuse the prospect of delays into a project’s timing and even doubts as to its viability, which generally disadvantages a negotiation. Add to this that Thailand has had either a military or military-backed government since 2014, just a year after the BRI’s introduction. The Thai governments’ own efforts to silence critical voices, centralize policy and power, and privilege big businesses and mega-projects in growing Thailand’s economy, have only signaled a stronger receptiveness to China’s state-driven approach. Indeed, in a recent book, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia, the authors note that the Thai government’s prioritization of the Eastern Economic Corridor over the high-speed rail, may be partly on account of the rail’s location in the stronghold of the military’s electoral, civil society, and grassroots opponents.[2] China’s high growth rates at home also are attractive to Thailand. After long periods of high growth in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, Thailand’s own yearly growth has ranged from just 1 percent to 4.2 percent since 2014.[3] Yet at times Thai policymakers, even under military governments, have pushed back against aspects of BRI projects. Regarding the high-speed rail at least, the Thai government has arguably achieved much of what might otherwise be expected of civil society. The State Railway of Thailand took the lead in summarily denying China’s request for development rights along the rail’s right-of-way and on the land on either side of its route. Controversy over whether Chinese engineers would be permitted to work in Thailand was also largely driven by officialdom, seriously delaying progress on the rail and resulting in Prime Minister Prayuth being excluded from China’s first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in 2017. While a compromise on the engineers was reached, Thailand managed to secure considerable technology transfer from Beijing in the process. In January 2021, only the third of fourteen contracts concerning the rail’s initial section was signed, the result of extended and intensive negotiation by Thailand. Critically, the Thais have also assumed the lion’s share of financing for the project; in effect refusing to engage in “debt trap diplomacy” in favor of a more empowered—if initially expensive—approach. A third main point is similar: Alongside the influence of China’s negotiators vis-à-vis Thai officials, a more constant and persistent presence of other Chinese actors in Thailand has undeniably influenced Thai civil society. Spread throughout the kingdom, Thailand hosts the most Confucius Institutes of any country in Asia and more than in the rest of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) combined. They are designed to promote official versions of Chinese history, society, and politics. In 2019 in Bangkok’s prestigious Thammasat University, a new Pridi Phanamyong Learning Centre was opened, devoted exclusively to China and featuring an initial collection of over two thousand books. Alongside the thousands of Thais who study in these institutions were, in 2018, some 8,400 students from China—double the number from the previous year. Enabling the Chinese’ studies has been an explosion in recent years of Mandarin language courses throughout Thailand at all levels, as well as a rise in non-language courses taught in Mandarin itself. The rising number of Chinese students and classes in Thailand has been further enabled by three additional factors: For one, significantly more Thais have studied in Chinese universities than nationals from any other ASEAN country.[4] Two, a long and deep relationship exists between China’s leadership and Thailand’s popular Princess Sirindhorn, who studied in China, speaks and writes Mandarin fluently, and in 2019 was awarded China’s Friendship Medal, the highest honor given to foreigners. And three, there has been a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers and media outlets across Thailand; previously such news outlets were limited primarily to Bangkok’s Chinatown. In addition, China’s state media outlets are producing copy in Thai for the kingdom’s audience. At least twelve of Thailand’s most popular news outlets are provided free articles from China’s Xinhua News, translated into Thai, while the Thai-language “China Xinhua News” Facebook page has millions of followers.[5] Chinese state media also provide the English-language China Daily to many sites in Thailand. Last year at a bookshop in Bangkok known as a gathering spot for civil society, a young, genial Chinese man introduced himself and kindly asked whether he might send something to this author’s address. The next day a copy of the China Daily arrived, whose stories and ads on the BRI absolutely dominated coverage. When this author politely asked for a reprieve several months later, he was assured that dozens of other coffee shops, college cafes, and NGO co-working spaces were receiving daily copies free of charge. Religion is another area of Chinese influence in the kingdom concerning the BRI. In late 2020, the Australian scholar Gregory Raymond published “Religion as a Tool of Influence: Buddhism and China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Mainland Southeast Asia.” In Raymond’s words, “It presents early evidence that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is evolving to incorporate people-to-people links as one of its five official goals.”[6] Indeed, in 2015, the visiting Communist Party secretary of Hainan province told Thailand’s foreign and cultural ministers that his province had just established a college to promote “Buddhist cooperation between China and Southeast Asia consistent with the framework of the One Belt One Road initiative.” Thailand’s Sangha Supreme Council sent a delegation to the opening two years later. Since then, Buddhist abbots and associations in Yunnan, Guangdong, and Hainan provinces have both sent and received delegations of their counterparts and fellow believers in Thailand, explicitly to discuss the BRI. Thailand’s Mahachula Buddhist University also sent monks to participate in a 2017 conference in Hong Kong, focused on “Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism along the ‘One Belt, One Road’.” Again, however, the extent and effects of this Chinese influence on Thai civil society are debatable. In late December 2020, the Bangkok Post reported that the State Railway of Thailand and a provincial governor had just presided over a public hearing on the rail’s second phase, to “provide information to the local community so they could comment and help the developers improve the project.” The story made reference to past and future hearings as well, concluding that “[s]ome 800 million baht (roughly $25 million) will be spent on a study and environmental impact assessment.”[7] Whether these consultations have preempted or addressed any local concerns is not clear. But aside from the role played by the State Railway Workers Union in the government’s rejection of China’s land-use requests, neither this author’s observations nor queries to Thai civil society contacts has revealed strong negative views on the high-speed rail. At the same time, Thai civil society has clearly resisted any implicit or explicit attempts at influence with respect to another project placed under the BRI umbrella: the blasting of a final inlet of rapids on the Mekong River to allow for larger vessels traveling to and from southern China. Already linking southern China to the “Maritime Silk Road” via its delta on the Gulf of Thailand, the Mekong River is also being connected to the Andaman Sea via an east-west railway across Thailand’s narrow peninsula. All of this “connectivity” has been subsumed under China’s 2015 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation forum, which in turn is officially part of the BRI. Three years after Thailand agreed to China’s 2016 request to blast the final rapids in northern Thailand, it reversed course in 2019 after sustained protest by civil society organizations and local community groups, and as the Mekong itself was experiencing its lowest levels ever recorded. Both Thai and foreign officials informed this author that the main reason for the cancelation concerned the river’s “thalweg,” defined as the middle of the primary navigable channel defining the boundary between two countries—in this case Thailand-Laos. The blasting, in other words, could cause Thailand to lose a sliver of territory to Laos. That said, publicly both the Thai and Chinese governments cited civil society’s concerns—the environment, ecology, culture, livelihoods, food security—as the main reason for the cancellation. Whatever the case, and public relations and face-saving concerns aside, Thai civil society clearly identified the blasting project as being driven by China; and activity, openly, and successfully opposed it. A fourth point is related to the involvement of Thais at the local level. Besides the ambiguities of the BRI itself, how we define and conceive of civil society in Thailand also affects our assessment of its impact on the BRI in the kingdom. Consider a potential canal across Thailand’s Isthmus of Kra, which has often—but not always—been discussed under the BRI since 2017, including by China’s ambassador to Thailand. The idea of a canal across the narrow isthmus has been raised and tested intermittently for literally three and a half centuries. A modern canal’s main proponent has been one Thai Canal Association, whose name has all the trappings of a civil society organization and whose membership overlaps considerably with the Thai-Chinese Economic and Cultural Association. At the same time, the Thai Canal Association’s chair is a former army chief and the secretary-general of a foundation named after a late prime minister and chair of the Thai king’s Privy Council, his group of close advisors. Other retired senior military and political figures, including another former prime minister, are also members. Their advocacy for a canal is focused on projections of economic growth and claims that it will bolster national security. Further muddying the waters, the association claims to have several hundred thousand signatures in support of a canal, from villagers and other Thais living in the relevant peninsular provinces but not formally organized as a civil society organization.[8] Or consider as civil society businesses, which are sometimes but not always thought of as civil society. Thai businesses range from small- and medium-sized enterprises to multinationals and are organized in an array of associations. Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the kingdom in 1921, and eventually became the first foreign investor in Communist China. Today CP is a rich and powerful conglomerate present in every Chinese province. It is a giant in Thailand as well, employing several hundred thousand Thais, and is a key domestic player in the BRI’s Eastern Economic Corridor. In 2019, a CP-led consortium was awarded the concession to build a railway linking three Thai airports, another BRI project. CP had never ventured into transportation before, but a revolving door between the company and Thailand’s Foreign and Commerce ministries has existed for decades. In Thailand and elsewhere, civil society is commonly thought of as the domain of a younger demographic with progressive agendas; and frankly not of people with powerful alternative sources of leverage and legitimacy. Yet this denies civil society membership to older generations based simply on age or agenda, and denies people their right to trade one community for another (or to be part of multiple communities simultaneously). It also speaks to the fact that in Thailand, many of the new, vibrant, and progressive civil society organizations formed during the 1990s, were coopted, marginalized, and/or discredited by Thailand’s color-coded and reactionary interest groups during the 2000s. Finally, it is important to ask whether the distinction between civil society and civil society organizations, or CSOs, is a meaningful one. For instance, must southern Thai villagers even confer with one another on an issue, much less organize themselves around it, to count as Thai civil society? Indeed, the Kra canal may seem like only a sub-issue of the BRI in Thailand, but it exposes a much larger challenge confronting the country and its citizens. A fifth and final point is that, regarding the BRI’s programs beyond physical infrastructure, Thai civil society is plainly conflicted. China’s Digital Silk Road, according to CFR’s Joshua Kurlantzick, “goes toward improving recipients’ telecommunications networks, artificial intelligence capabilities, cloud computing, e-commerce and mobile payment systems, surveillance technology, smart cities, and other high-tech areas.”[9] Fifth generation (5G) mobile internet technology, able to carry enormous caches of data at almost instant speed, is a major aspect of the DSR. Not only is China’s Huawei Technologies already a global leader in 5G’s development and application, but in 2019 Thailand indicated that Huawei was leading the race for building out 5G across the kingdom. Some of Huawei’s investment runs through CP, which operates the leading telecommunications firm in Thailand and which was invited to participate in Huawei’s 5G test networks in the Eastern Economic Corridor. Thai civil society has not notably opposed the government’s favorable view of Huawei—and it is not difficult to see why. In 2018, 74 percent of Thai citizens had regular access to the internet, and Thailand led the world in time spent online each day with a jaw-dropping 9.4 hours. Nearly half of that time—4.6 hours daily—was spent on mobile internet, also a world-leading figure. Bangkok had (and likely still has) the largest number of active Facebook accounts among cities globally, and Instagram was not far behind.[10] Thailand also ranked number one in the world in 2019 in mobile banking penetration.[11] As for mobile devices, sales of Huawei brand phones have taken off in recent years, cutting into the traditionally popular iPhone and Samsung markets. Yet in mid-2020, as Beijing threatened the use of force against Taiwan and substantially tightened control over Hong Kong, a collection of Thai netizens criticized China’s moves on social media. This sparked a backlash from Chinese social media users, which in turn led to netizens in Taiwan and Hong Kong reciprocating their support from Thailand and the formation of a so-called “Milk Tea Alliance,” after the trendy drink popular in all three locations. Illustrated by a new #MilkTeaAlliance hashtag, this social media activity created a kind of de facto online community. Moreover, when Chinese users pointed out free speech violations in Thailand itself, Thais undermined the critics by readily agreeing with them about the suppression of speech in the kingdom. Indeed, Thai civil society has long opposed Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act, which the government has used to censor or chill free speech. While the law predates the DSR by nearly a decade, its 2017 amendments were passed less than a year after the DSR’s announcement. Thai civil society has accused these amendments of having been inspired and informed—if not enabled—by China’s “Great Firewall” and other domestic digital policies and practices. They allow Thai authorities nearly unfettered authority to censor speech, engage in surveillance, conduct warrantless searches of personal data, and curtail the utilization of encryption and anonymity online. Analogous to this dynamic has been the mixed reaction in Thailand to China’s new Health Silk Road: like all Thais, leaders of Thai civil society want access to a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as possible, and China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac have impressed with the speed at which they have produced one. Yet as early as April 2020, Sophie Boisseau de Rocher of the French Institute of International Relations noted “angry voices emanating from civil society” toward a Thai government that “failed to take strong action to fight the virus (in a bid not to offend China),” while Thai netizens were questioning the efficacy of China’s vaccine even before recent tests have cast further doubt.[12] In conclusion, just as China’s Belt and Road Initiative is many things to many countries, and to the many and diverse people within those countries; so is its relationship with Thai civil society a varied, nuanced, and evolving picture. As Thailand itself presents a unique situation to the BRI as a U.S. treaty ally, the world’s twenty-second largest economy (2019), an authoritarian democracy, and a superlative social media consumer; its civil society alternately ignores, accepts, welcomes, and opposes its numerous elements. This has been the case in Thailand for the past eight years, and can be expected to hold for the foreseeable future.  Endnotes ^ See, among others, Megan L. McCulloch, “Environmental Protest and Civil Society in China,” Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, September 2015, http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/47303. ^ See David M. Lampton, Selina Ho, and Cheng Chwee Kuik, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). ^ See the World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=TH, accessed on February 1, 2021. ^ See David Shambaugh, Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 158. ^ See Kerry K. Gershaneck, Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win Without Fighting,” (Quantico: Marine Corps University Press, 2020), 91. ^ Gregory V. Raymond, “Religion as a Tool of Influence: Buddhism and China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Mainland Southeast Asia,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, 42, 3 (2020), 347. ^ “Hearing Held on High-Speed Rail Project,” Bangkok Post, December 23, 2020. ^ See Benjamin Zawacki, “America’s Biggest Southeast Asian Ally is Drifting Toward China,” Foreign Policy, September 29, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/29/its-on-trump-to-stop-bangkoks-drift-to-beijing/. ^ Joshua Kurlantzick, “China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative: A Boon for Developing Countries or a Danger to Freedom?,” Diplomat, December 17, 2020, http://thediplomat.com/2020/12/chinas-digital-silk-road-initiative-a-boon-for-developing-countries-or-a-danger-to-freedom/. ^ See “Thailand Tops Internet Usage Charts,” Bangkok Post, February 6, 2018, http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/1408158/thailand-tops-internet-usage-charts. ^ See Murray Hiebert Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s China Challenge, (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020), 305. ^ See Gershaneck, Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win Without Fighting,” 88.

Chinese trolls are beginning to pose serious threats to economic security, political stability, and personal safety worldwide.

Tenzin Dorjee is a Senior Researcher and Strategist at the Tibet Action Institute and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. In a post published on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Asia Unbound blog on March 29, Tibetologist Robert Barnett admonishes what he sees as the blurring of lines between advocacy and scholarship in the discourse on Tibet. The article, whose stated goal is to dispel the notion of a “Xinjiang-Tibet equivalence,” begins with legitimate arguments for distinguishing knowledge from speculation, urging the media and the academic community to refrain from overstating China’s repression in Tibet.  However, in cautioning against overstatement, Dr. Barnett goes much too far in the opposite direction, downplaying the severity of China’s repression and painting a picture of Tibet that deviates sharply from the lived reality of Tibetans. The version of Tibet that he depicts has little in common with the experience of ordinary Tibetans, who are routinely deprived of their freedom of expression, movement, religion and assembly. His description also sits uneasily with the fact that Freedom House has ranked Tibet as one of the least free places in its 2021 “Freedom in the World” report, assigning it a combined score of 1 out of a possible 100 for civil liberties and human rights –– by comparison, Syria scored 1/100 and North Korea scored 3/100.  The titular argument of Dr. Barnett’s article is that the level of repression in Tibet cannot be equated with that in Xinjiang. There is nothing novel or controversial about his thesis that the internment camps of Xinjiang do not exist in Tibet. So why bother to state the obvious? Because, according to Dr. Barnett, “a number of commentators, journalists, and politicians” have equated Tibet with Xinjiang “in terms of mass abuses.”  Among those guilty of this transgression, he first names Dr. Lobsang Sangay, the outgoing head of the Tibetan government in exile. To be sure, Dr. Sangay drew comparisons between Xinjiang and Tibet. But he was quick to point out where the comparison ended. In a BBC interview in July 2019, Dr. Sangay said there were “detention camps” in Tibet but “not as large” as in Xinjiang. If analyzed in its proper context, it is clear he was referring not to Nazi-style death camps but to the garden-variety re-education centers that have been a feature of China’s indoctrination programs in Tibet.  Dr. Sangay’s main message was that Chen Quanguo, the architect of the Uyghur internment camps, was deploying against the Uyghurs the tools of tyranny he had sharpened in Tibet. This was hardly an overstatement: before Chen took the reins in Xinjiang, he had indeed been the Party Secretary of Tibet Autonomous Region from 2011 to 2016. Xinjiang specialists like James Leibold as well as rights monitoring groups like Human Rights Watch have also made the observation that Tibet served as a laboratory of repression for Chen’s dystopian vision. Dr. Sangay was simply trying to connect the dots between Tibet and Xinjiang, which is not the same as equating them. In accusing him of equating the two regions, Dr. Barnett basically erects a straw man that he then proceeds to demolish.  Another individual who comes under censure is Adrian Zenz, the author of a report that points to the existence of a mass program of labor training in Tibet. Dr. Zenz, it is worth noting, is the German scholar whose research on Xinjiang was pivotal in alerting the world to the Uyghur genocide. In critiquing Dr. Zenz’s report on Tibet, Dr. Barnett contributes some interesting details that enrich and complicate our understanding of the labor training program. Yet the essence of his critique suffers from several flaws, two of which merit special attention. Dr. Barnett’s first error is a conceptual one. Dr. Zenz, in discussing the nature of China’s labor training programs in Tibet, has highlighted the “systemic presence of numerous coercive elements.” While noting that there were “clear elements of coercion during recruitment, training and job matching,” he explicitly acknowledges in the report that there was “so far no evidence” of force being used. However, Dr. Barnett misses that conceptual distinction between force and coercion, using the terms interchangeably and thus misinterpreting one of Dr. Zenz’s key arguments.  In the voluminous literature on the strategy of conflict, coercion is said to operate when the threat of retaliation plays a role in getting someone to do something against their will. The direct use of brute force is not necessary for coercion to obtain; the threat of punishment often lurks in the shadows without ever appearing onstage. Dr. Barnett contends that there is no evidence of force having been used to recruit people into the labor training program and rushes to argue that coercion is therefore absent, basically conflating the two terms. This is akin to saying, “Since there is no evidence for the presence of A, we can conclude B is absent.” Besides, in the highly repressive climate of Tibet, the line between choice and coercion is extremely blurry, and yet Dr. Barnett fails to consider the range of direct or indirect negative repercussions Tibetans may face if they do not participate.  Second, one of the reasons he cites for questioning the validity of Dr. Zenz’s report is that its release was “coordinated with a prominent media campaign,” which included the publication of op-ed pieces in leading newspapers and a report by a political advocacy group. In Dr. Barnett’s view, Dr. Zenz’s report is tarnished by his ties to the media and the advocacy community. But this notion that engagement with the non-academic community disqualifies a research enterprise belongs to an elitist, and highly exclusivist, model of scholarship. True, in a bygone era, academics were expected to keep the subjects of their research at a distance –– though such an approach usually led to less knowledge, not more. In today’s more inclusive and decolonized models of scholarship, which put a premium on real-world impact, dialogue between academia and advocacy is considered not only ethically desirable but also epistemically beneficial. Finally, Dr. Barnett rebukes the Australia-based hosts of the Little Red Podcast for equating Tibet with Xinjiang in a recent episode on which I was one of the guests. “Tibet is not Xinjiang,” he repeats. I find it strange that he ignores the entire first segment of the show where we discuss the historical and political reasons why Beijing’s repression in Tibet is different from that in Xinjiang. Starting at 11:45 minutes, I go to great lengths to suggest that the current repression gap between the two regions may be largely attributed to two factors: (1) the Dalai Lama effect, which includes a highly dedicated and fairly influential global network of advocacy groups using political leverage to constrain Beijing’s behavior in Tibet, and (2) the United States’ global “war on terror” that put the Uyghurs, who are Muslims, in an exceptionally vulnerable position vis a vis China. While noting that the tactics of repression are more sophisticated and therefore less brutal in Tibet –– largely out of necessity because of the transnational network of activists monitoring China’s behavior –– none of the guests on the show equate the two regions in terms of mass abuses. Even so, the biggest problem with Dr. Barnett’s article is not how it misrepresents the Little Red Podcast, or Dr. Sangay or Dr. Zenz, but how it normalizes repression by minimizing the scope and scale of China’s totalitarian rule in Tibet. In his rosy view, Tibetan language, culture, and religion are neither under threat nor being targeted for eradication. He insists Xi Jinping’s China is merely trying to “adapt popular understandings of Tibetan Buddhism,” not seeking to destroy it. He points out that “publications of traditional religious texts run into the thousands.” The quantity of scriptural publications, however, is a misleading metric of religious life, which is more meaningfully measured by variables such as monastic enrollment and graduation rates, the breadth and depth of the curriculum, and the doctrinal and liturgical knowledge of the Sangha, etc.  In reality, Chinese authorities strictly control and suppress monastic enrollment in Tibet, forbidding anyone below eighteen to join the cloister. Tibetan children in Lhasa, for instance, are banned from visiting the Jhokhang temple or the Potala Palace –– such bans on religious activity often do not exist on paper and are easily missed by scholars relying purely on documentary evidence. Photos of the Dalai Lama have long been banned in monasteries and homes, but now Chinese authorities are seeking to expunge him altogether from Tibetan Buddhism, which goes far beyond merely “insulting the Dalai Lama.” (To understand what Tibetan Buddhism without the Dalai Lama might actually mean, imagine the Catholic Church without the Pope.) Whereas once the monastery used to be a liminal space relatively impervious to the state, now it is a panopticon filled with surveillance cameras watching the monastics at all times. Instead of spending their day studying the scriptures, monks and nuns are forced to attend political indoctrination programs and immerse themselves in Xi Jinping thought, which can hardly be called a “popular adaptation” of what the Buddha taught. Even more pernicious than Beijing’s attack on Buddhism is its assault on the Tibetan language, a campaign that bears all the hallmarks of a multigenerational project to render a language dead and thus eliminate a people’s identity. In a report published by Human Rights Watch, Tibetan sources on the ground describe how China’s new education policy, deceptively labeled “bilingual education,” has been replacing Tibetan with Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction not only in primary schools but in kindergartens across the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). What Beijing calls “bilingual education” is more accurately described by the International Tibet Network as a “cradle to grave” education system, where “new methods of 'controlling minds' have been imposed from an early age, with Tibetan toddlers increasingly being subjected to ideological education in hundreds of new and expanded kindergartens across Tibet.”  In Lhasa, for instance, parents are required to place children as young as three in these kindergartens, where the children’s mother tongue is first downgraded, then marginalized, and finally banished into irrelevance. By some estimates, around 81,000 Tibetan children above the age of 3 were “in pre-schools and kindergartens” in the TAR by 2017. According to Xinhua, this number has now grown to 150,000, and the number of kindergartens in the region has increased tenfold over the last decade to roughly 2,200. Even the pro-Beijing Global Times has reported that recent policies have “left the Tibetan language in a precarious situation,” as parents complain that “there is nowhere to study Tibetan language.”   One story that was relayed to me by a Lhasa native illuminates the micro-level mechanism by which a language, and the culture it carries, can undergo annihilation. A Tibetan toddler, after attending the “bilingual kindergarten” for a couple of months, came home one day speaking only in Chinese. Her parents were horrified when they realized that their daughter could no longer communicate with her grandparents, who spoke only Tibetan. In Tibet, as in many traditional societies, grandparents play a foundational role in shaping children’s cultural development and orienting their worldview — if children inherit genes from their parents, they inherit culture from their grandparents. Seen in this light, the vast and growing network of state-led “bilingual kindergartens,” which permanently damage the children’s relationship with their grandparents, are clearly designed to stem the intergenerational transmission of culture and fundamentally reconfigure Tibetan identity.  Much of this is underreported in the media, for the simple reason that Tibet remains an information black hole. Even North Korea, the hermetically sealed nation, has allowed the Associated Press and the Agence France-Press to establish bureaus on the ground, but there is not a single foreign reporter in Tibet. Beijing uses big-data technology of surveillance and state-of-the-art infrastructure of repression –– including the “convenience police stations” and the “double-linked households system,” innovated by Chen Quanguo during his tenure in Tibet –– to keep Tibetans, much like Uyghurs, in a general state of fear. But China’s ambition goes beyond mere physical control of its restless peripheries. Calling its ethnic unity education “an engineering project of the soul,” Xi Jinping’s China aims for nothing less than to “transform ethnic cultures and identities” as a permanent solution to what it views as the two biggest challenges to its cultural unity and political stability: Tibet and Xinjiang.  To conclude, imagine a detective who, after failing to find a gun or a knife in the house of an abusive husband, decides that his battered wife calling for help has no reason to fear for her life. When, in fact, any number of items in the house can be retooled into a deadly weapon. Dr. Barnett looks for a single fatal wound on Tibetan culture, and failing to find it, is quick to exonerate the Chinese government. Meanwhile, as China wages its multifaceted campaign to displace Tibetan language, erase Tibetan Buddhism, and relocate the nomads from the grasslands into the ghettos, Tibetans get the unmistakable feeling that their culture is undergoing death by a thousand cuts. There is no single policy that destroys a people, no single bullet that kills a culture. It is the totality of state policies and strategies whose interaction creates a complex process that ultimately chokes a culture and lowers it into its coffin, not overnight but over time.  Reference 1. Human Rights Watch, China’s “Bilingual Education” Policy in Tibet: Tibetan-Medium Schooling Under Threat (2020) 2. International Tibet Network, Shaping the Soul: China’s New Coercive Strategies in Tibet (2021) 3. Schelling, Thomas, The Strategy of Conflict (1960) 4. Zenz, Adrian and James Leibold, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,” China Brief, Volume 17, Issue 12 (September 2017). 5. Human Rights Watch, “China: Tibetan Children Banned from Classes,” January 30, 2019. 6. Human Rights Watch, “China: Ban on Tibet Religious Activity Toughened,” September 11, 2019. 7. Leibold, James, “Planting the Seed: Ethnic Policy in Xi Jinping’s New Era of Cultural Nationalism,” China Brief, Volume: 19 Issue: 22 (December 31, 2019).    

The Quad, composed of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan, is not a formal alliance. Still, the group has intensified its security and economic ties as tensions with China rise.

Incidents like the Evil Eye campaign show an empowered China increasingly willing to use cyber attacks and information operations in pursuit of its political goals.

Any doubts about the bipartisan consensus in Washington around the need to compete with China in Africa were erased in the early months of 2021, when senior Biden administration appointees like U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield took pains to agree with Republican Senators about the threat that China’s activities in Africa pose to U.S. interests, an argument that has since been reiterated by USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Secretary of State Blinken. Clearly, everyone was on the same page; the United States cannot be complacent about China’s decades-long, multifaceted campaign for access and influence on the African continent. Major powers’ interests in Africa encompass everything from concerns about geostrategic maritime chokepoints to the continent’s greater integration into the global economy, the promise and the peril of Africa’s demographic transformation, and the power of Africa’s voice and vote in global forums. While Africa need not be a theater for conflict, real tensions will persist as external powers compete not just for access to resources, but for African support for preferred governance norms and technology regimes that will shape the international order in the decades to come. But one can acknowledge that reality, find ways to mitigate U.S.-China tension, and compete more effectively and successfully without adopting major power rivalry as the primary lens through which to understand U.S. engagement in the region. That approach misunderstands African desires, and U.S. policy is unlikely to be very successful without reckoning with partners’ priorities. As diverse as African interests are, some generalizations hold true. African states seek security, prosperity, and influence in the international system commensurate with the reality that by 2050, one-quarter of the world’s population will be African. They want multiple partners and options, not a forced choice in some binary geopolitical tussle. In addition to blinding Washington to African interests, a tunnel vision focus on U.S.-China rivalry ignores the potential of U.S. relations with African states. In a narrow quest to avoid losing ground to others, the United States misses a chance to think big about the upside of Africa’s growing importance on the international stage, and to envision the possibilities of a future in which vibrant, stable African states are partners in reforming the rules-based international order in the interest of tackling global problems and advancing shared norms. Working to prevent one outcome—total Chinese political and economic dominance in Africa—is absolutely essential.  But it cannot be permitted to preclude a more strategic focus on the kind of partnerships we wish to develop, and cannot be allowed to obscure opportunities to make that vision reality. Click here to read "Major Power Rivalry in Africa" by Michelle Gavin, the fifth discussion paper in the Center for Preventive Action (CPA)'s Managing Global Disorder series.

The Joe Biden administration has framed its main foreign policy paradigm primarily in terms of competition between democracy and authoritarianism, emphasizing cooperation among like-minded allies as its fundamental strategy for confronting China. There should be no questions as to where South Korea stands, both as a security ally and a vibrant democracy. And when South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in meets with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House Friday afternoon (local time), the decades-long U.S.-South Korea alliance will have an opportunity to address two distinct challenges to the proposition that the alliance is sustained by shared democratic values. The first challenge stems from the Biden administration’s conflation of shared values with shared interests in defining its approach to China and its expectations for allies. This approach has put considerable pressure on Seoul to join in a U.S.-led coalition to confront China’s challenge to the rules-based order. South Korea is an obvious candidate for membership in the Quad, especially given that last year the country had touted itself as a model in its initial pandemic response and in view of the potential importance of South Korean semiconductor production to supply chain resilience. But despite having the potential to forge extensive value-based cooperation in many functional areas, the Moon Jae-in’s government has expressed almost no public interest in joining the Quad. Instead, South Korea has thus far clung to choice avoidance as its primary approach to Sino-U.S. rivalry. The Biden administration’s framing of the Quad summit as an opportunity for cooperation among like-minded nations to provide public goods in the Indo-Pacific by emphasizing pandemic response, has helped to ease South Korean concerns that joining would label the country as part of an anti-China coalition. But South Korea’s geographic proximity to China and fear of economic retaliation from its largest trading partner have induced policy paralysis in Seoul. Also, South Korea retains an abiding interest in preventing China from exercising a veto power over inter-Korean reconciliation efforts by further enabling North Korean hostility. Seoul has tried to square the circle by aligning its policy approach to Southeast Asia with the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, and hedging in relations with Beijing by holding out the possibility of economic cooperation in infrastructure projects through China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Asian International Infrastructure Bank. South Korea’s approach to values-based cooperation is akin to a shy student that aces the test, but who goes to great lengths to avoid class participation. The second challenge to values-based U.S.-South Korea alliance cooperation relates to the Moon administration’s conciliation of North Korea with regard to efforts to promote information penetration inside North Korea. Following inter-Korean pledges not to slander each other, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong issued belligerent statements last year aimed at North Korean defectors in South Korea who sent leaflets across the border. In December 2020, South Korea’s National Assembly passed a vaguely worded anti-leaflet law imposing harsh penalties on the spread of outside information into North Korea of virtually any type of information from almost any location. The law rests on the premise that prevention of North Korean retaliation superseded both the rights to freedom of expression of those sending the information, and those in North Korea who suffer under the regime’s control over dissemination of information. The Moon administration’s support for the anti-leaflet law pits South Korean appeasement of the Kim Jong-un regime against Biden’s strong emphasis on human rights promotion and freedoms of expression. A U.S. Congressional hearing on the matter elicited bipartisan pleas for South Korea’s legislature to reverse course and rescind the law, and the South Korean government has acknowledged deficiencies in the draft law by pledging to make revisions. However, Moon’s progressive supporters in South Korea view external criticisms of South Korean law-making as U.S. meddling in South Korea’s domestic affairs, while conservative critics see Moon as simultaneously appeasing the Kim regime and betraying the very pro-democratic values on which he has fashioned his political image. Moon’s first face-to-face meeting with Biden provides a clear opportunity for them to address these cleavages and shore up the foundations of the alliance. As a first step, the Biden administration should welcome South Korean proposals for a vaccine swap to meet Moon’s domestic need to increase vaccine availability in South Korea, in return for South Korean engagement with Quad priorities through enhanced roles in supply chain resiliency and in production and distribution of vaccines within the region. On the human rights front, Biden and Moon should stand firm on preserving freedoms of expression as a distinguishing characteristic of democracies and by speaking out on North Korean human rights abuses; while acknowledging Kim as an inevitable counterpart for addressing mutual security concerns such as denuclearization and reduction of inter-Korean military tensions. These joint actions will align the interests of the two countries, while affirming common democratic values as the bedrock for U.S.-South Korean cooperation.