• OUR MISSION
• EVENTS
• ANALYSIS
• PROGRAMS
• CONTACT
• SUPPORT

A China Strategy

Edward Lucas

December 7, 2020

DOWNLOAD PDF

In an era of geopolitical competition, the West — the U.S.-led countries of the transatlantic alliance and their East Asian allies — lacks a strategy for dealing with its most formidable competitor: the People’s Republic of China (henceforth China). But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a strategy for dealing with the West. It involves a long-term goal of “national rejuvenation”¹ — making China the world’s most powerful country by 2050 — implemented with decisive leadership; a clear-eyed appreciation of Western diplomatic, economic, political, and social weaknesses; and effective means of exploiting them. These tactics, best characterized as “sharp power,”² include censorship and manipulation of the information system, cyber operations, divide-and-rule diplomacy, leverage of trade and investment, and propaganda, plus military bluff and intimidation.

January 4, 2021  Toshi Yoshihara, Jack Bianchi
Resources: Strategy & Policy

China’s military is going global. In the coming decade, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be well-positioned to influence events and conduct a wide range of missions, including limited warfighting, beyond the Western Pacific. The United States and its close allies, who have enjoyed largely unobstructed access to the world’s oceans for the last three decades, will need to adjust to new military realities as the PLA makes its presence felt in faraway theaters.

In this study, Senior Fellow Toshi Yoshihara and Research Fellow Jack Bianchi argue that a deep study of China’s weaknesses as they relate to its worldwide ambitions is required to formulate an effective allied response. These weaknesses offer insights into the costs that Beijing will have to pay to go global. Importantly, the United States and its close allies enjoy agency over certain Chinese weaknesses, furnishing them leverage that, if exercised, could yield strategic dividends. The report concludes with a range of allied options that exploit China’s weaknesses to constrain and complicate the PLA’s global expansion.  

AUTHORS Toshi Yoshihara Senior Fellow, Jack Blanchi, Research Fellow

DOWNLOAD PDF

Download full “Seizing on Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing With China’s Globalizing Military” report.

READ FULL PUBLICATION

Read the full publication “Seizing on Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing With China’s Globalizing Military” report using our online e-reader tool.

How China Sees the World

And how we should see China

• Story by H. R. McMaster, The Atlantic
• MAY 2020 ISSUEGLOBAL

https://358afed383d4909496d2c7460875e850.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

• Link Copied

I. The Forbidden City

On November 8, 2017, Air Force One touched down in Beijing, marking the start of a state visit hosted by China’s president and Communist Party chairman, Xi Jinping. From my first day on the job as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, China had been a top priority. The country figured prominently in what President Barack Obama had identified for his successor as the biggest immediate problem the new administration would face—what to do about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. But many other questions about the nature and future of the relationship between China and the United States had also emerged, reflecting China’s fundamentally different perception of the world.

Atlantic Council

DOWNLOAD PDF

This strategy was produced in collaboration with experts from ten leading democracies.

Foreword

Following World War II, the United States and its allies and partners established a rules-based international system. While never perfect, it contributed to decades without great-power war, extraordinary economic growth, and a reduction of world poverty. But this system today faces trials ranging from a global pandemic and climate change to economic disruptions and a revival of great-power competition.

A proposal for a full reboot of American strategy toward China.

Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP

By ANONYMOUS, Politico

01/28/2021 08:15 AM EST

The author is a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China.

In 1946, the American diplomat George Kennan wrote a lengthy cable to Washington—since dubbed the “Long Telegram”—laying out the basis for the next several decades of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. He published his work as an article under the simple pseudonym “X.” In that spirit, a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China has published with the Atlantic Council a bold and ambitious new U.S. strategy toward its next great global rival. It is similarly delivered anonymously, which the author requested, and POLITICO granted. Here the author describes the broad outlines of the strategy. The full memo is available here.

by Anonymous

Atlantic Council

Key points

• The single most important challenge facing the United States and the democratic world in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian and aggressive China under Xi Jinping. China has long had an integrated, operational strategy for dealing with the United States. The United States has so far had no such strategy with regard to China. This is a dereliction of national responsibility.
• US strategy and policy toward China must be laser-focused on the fault lines among Xi and his inner circle–aimed at changing their objectives and behavior and thus their strategic course. Communist Party elites are much more divided about Xi’s leadership and vast ambitions than is widely appreciated.
• The foremost goal of US strategy should be to cause China’s ruling elites to conclude that it is in China’s best interests to continue operating within the US-led liberal international order rather than building a rival order, and that it is in the Chinese Communist Party’s best interests to not attempt to expand China’s borders or export its political model beyond China’s shores.

DOWNLOAD PDF

Table of contents

Analysis by CNN Staff

Updated 0327 GMT (1127 HKT) January 29, 2021 CNN

(CNN)Any suggestion that the departure of former US President Donald Trump from Washington would provide a temporary pause in US-China tensions has been swiftly dispelled.In the short time since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, China has flown more than two dozen combat aircraft near to the self-ruled island of Taiwan and passed a law allowing its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels. Meanwhile, the US Navy has sent an aircraft carrier strike group into the South China Sea.Analysts say such moves are likely only the beginning of what is expected to be a potentially uneasy initial relationship between the new Biden administration and Beijing.