where i compare China's miracle to the miracle of Prussia two centuries ago.
So where does sinophobia come from?
Let's start from the obvious points.
There is certainly an asymmetry in "access" between the two countries.
Chinese journalists can do anything they like in the USA and write any kind
of report about the evils of the USA (it is not difficult, as we in the USA
specialize in writing about our own evils). On the other hand, the list of
non-Chinese media that are banned from China is very long: BBC, New York Times,
and so on. Worse: foreign journalists and historians do not have access to Chinese politicians, often do not have access to Chinese archives, and, if they write anything that China doesn't like, they may never be allowed to enter China.
Any Chinese journalist can interview politicians who disapprove of the current
president. Even if you could find a Chinese polician who disapproves of China's
president, it would be impossible to even meet with such a person, let alone
work on an interview.
China's national TV station in English (China Global Television Network), established and funded by the Communist Party, is available anywhere in the world:
the whole world can listen to China's version of the facts. On the contrary,
no Western station is available in China: the Chinese cannot listen to the
Western version of the facts.
There is asymmetry also in ethics and laws. China can do in the USA a lot
of things that the USA cannot do in China, from investment to competition.
China's famous "Great Firewall" bans Google, Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of
Silicon Valley companies from competing in China against China's own social
media. But those Chinese social media are perfectly free to compete in the USA against
US social media. Chinese tourists, students and business people who travel to
the USA can use China's WeChat, whereas foreign tourists in China cannot use
Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. This is clearly unfair.
Google was fined by the European Union and
Facebook is under attack in the USA for not protecting privacy and not fighting disinformation, whereas Baidu and WeChat (that routinely censor information)
are not under such pressures (in fact the Chinese government uses their data
to access private information and spread disinformation): Western governments are not exactly helping Facebook and Google, whereas the Chinese government
protects and de facto nationalized their rivals.
Less publicized, but possibly even more damaging, are the limitations imposed
on foreigners in the lucrative fields of telecommunications, transportation,
construction, and media, while Chinese investors are free to invest in the
corresponding US fields.
Incidentally, the asymmetry in freedom of speech is allowing China to rewrite
history. Westerners cannot defend their version of the facts on Chinese media
(let alone in Chinese), whereas fans of the Chinese Communist Party (whether
paid or not) can defend the official Chinese version of the facts on Western
media (in English, French, German, Italian, etc).
The result is that in China very few people dispute the official
version of the facts, whereas in the West even the most obvious facts of
communist China's past and present are under constant attack.
A Chinese communist can write
what she wants on Facebook or Reddit, whereas a Western anti-communist cannot
write anything on Wechat or Weibo, and the Chinese public has no way of knowing
what gets written on Facebook or Reddit because they are banned in China.
But this is not a problem unique to China: this asymmetry has always existed
between the countries with freedom of speech and the countries with no
freedom of speech.
There is no question that the USA's "open" behavior towards China has not been
reciprocated by China, which has remained as "close" as necessary in order
to protect its national businesses and its regime.
In fact, when my Chinese friends ask me about the "trade war" between China
and the USA, i reply that China started it when it banned Google.
Why did successive US presidents accept China's behavior? Economically,
it made a lot of sense: the USA escaped inflation thanks to cheap Chinese
goods, and, in the globalized economy, US corporations got more competitive
thanks to offsourcing a lot of manufacturing to China.
Last but not least, China has been buying a lot of US debt. If you meet
a staunch anti-Chinese in the USA, ask him/her whether s/he ever bought
US bonds: most likely no. China is the biggest creditor of the USA, owning more than $1 trillion of US bonds.
Now let's move to the view inside China. There is very little crime.
The streets are clean. There are 20,000 kms of high-speed railways.
There are brand new subways in all major cities, and not just one line, but many
lines. Mobile payment is commonplace: even street vendors accept Alipay
and WeChat payments. The bureaucracy is fairly efficient and friendly.
Last but not least, the middle class has experienced real improvements,
unlike the middle class of the USA, thanks
to a growth rate that is unthinkable in the West
(Trump hailed a growth rate of 4%,
which was actually just 3%, when China was lamenting a decline to... 6.5%).
Hence the average Chinese citizen would ask: "Where's the problem?"
After two successive air disasters involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane, China immediately ordered its airlines to ground all such planes; the USA didn't. Which government do you trust better for your safety?
There is another view from China that is important, the view of the leadership.
The leadership notices a different kind of asymmetry with the USA.
China has no soldiers or warships deployed anywhere the USA. The USA, on the
other hand, has military bases or allied military forces in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Afghanistan, Mongolia, plus air carriers in the Chinese Sea,
plus a nuclear treaty with India. Basically, China is completely surrounded.
Imagine if China had soldiers and warships deployed in Canada, Mexico and the
Caribbeans...
Which is the only country ever to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations? and that deployed the first computer virus as a weapon (Stuxnet, to neutralize Iranian centrifuges)? Who is more likely
to be using satellites to spy on the other, given that the USA has three times
more satellites than China despite having one fourth of the population?
Who has invaded two countries since 2001 (Afghanistan and Iraq)?
Who has killed hundreds of civilians in at least six countries
using drones (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia)?
The list can go on and on. There is no question that the USA has been
way more aggressive than China around the world.
And who pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change?
Add to this list the fact that mainland China considers Taiwan a
runaway province, and the only reason it hasn't yet invaded it is that the
USA protects it: imagine if Arizona declared independence and China
sent troops to protect it.
In June 2019, at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, China's defense minister Wei Fenghe gave a simple explanation for mainland China's attitude towards Taiwan: what did US president Abraham Lincoln do when the southern states decided to secede from the USA?
These days, China clearly resents being lectured on democracy.
The Chinese system has mostly produced
competent leaders, a fact that cannot be said of Western democracies (especially
presidents George W Bush and Donald Trump, not to mention the Brexit farce
and the endless Italian saga).
Trump owes his political fortune, largely, to noncollege voters
(white voters with no college degree favored Trump over Clinton by a 62% to 32% margin), whereas China's leaders are all highly educated.
Trump made his fortune with casinos and TV shows, whereas
the Chinese leaders ran cities and provinces of tens of millions of people.
Which system produces the most competent leaders?
All my Chinese friends are convinced that Xi would win democratic elections,
whereas Donald Trump lost by three million votes. Congress has an even lower
approval rating than Trump, and, yet, nobody resigns or is fired.
Corruption is rampant in Congress and in the White House
(see The Trump Scandals).
The Supreme Court is not elected. California has the same number of senators
as tiny Delaware. And so on.
It is not so obvious to the Chinese which is the more democratic country.
China also resents being lectured on human rights.
Many political dissidents have been free to write documents against the regime,
and they are still alive and free, and most of them still have their jobs
(they won't get promoted, for sure, but better than in Russia where they
would be corpses).
Xu Zhangrun, the Tsinghua University professor who in August 2018 published a lengthy anti-Xi essay kept his position until March 2019 (he is currently suspended, but alive and well).
Political killings have been extremely rare since the
fall of Mao: the victims of political purges are sentenced to prison, which
is often house arrest, they are not shot or hanged
(for example, Gao Yu, a journalist who has spent her life
criticizing the Communist Party when she's not under house arrest, or Bo Xilai,
Xi's main rival, who is still in a federal prison).
Compare with the murders of prominent Putin enemies in Russia
(for example journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, both assassinated in 2006, or human-rights activist Natalya Estemirova and anti-corruption attorney Sergei Magnitski, both assassinated in 2009, or the mysterious "suicide" of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky in 2013).
Outrage at the ubiquitous surveillance system in China?
The US was the first country to fingerprint foreigners.
Yes, there are "reeducation camps" for Muslims in Xinjiang province
(China just published a white paper in English titled "The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang")
but these are neither Hitler's extermination camps nor Stalin's gulag.
So far we only know of one person who was "killed" in the camps (and it is not
clear how he died), and there is certainly some kind of physical torture
(see for example this testimony);
but compare with the 200,000 killed by Putin in Chechnya (Xinjiang is a restive
Muslim province just like Chechnya in Russia).
For mysterious reasons, the Western press rarely talks about torture in Russia despite what documented in the report by the European Court of Human Rights and despite easily verifiable cases of torture (see for example "7 Jehovah's Witnesses Brutally Tortured in Russia" just to mention the most recent one).
The USA defends Israel that has been keeping millions of Palestianians
prisoners in a narrow strip of land, deprived of all civil rights (Gaza is
de facto the largest concentration camp in the world).
China, therefore, doesn't feel it is doing anything that others haven't done
before, especially since in this case it is singling out what it considers
the most likely perpetrators of future terrorist attacks.
Meanwhile, the USA has been assassinating Muslims all over the world, mostly
using drones, with no trial:
we'll never know why someone was killed and whether the evidence
was strong enough to justify the drone strike.
Imagine if China or even Japan decided to kill a US citizen with no trial, and imagine if Mexico used a drone to kill a US citizen inside the USA!
The number of innocent civilians killed during
these strikes is unknown but estimated to be over 1,000. The USA also
supports regimes like Saudi Arabia that fare much worse in human rights
(at least women in China have equal rights).
Trump even called North Korea's dictator a "honorable man": that's a dictator
who has killed an uncle and a brother.
Since nobody is perfect, China resents being singled out:
if you want to defend the human rights of Muslim minorities, talk about Chechnya to Putin first;
if you want to defend the human rights of political opponents, talk to Saudi Arabia about its thousands of political prisoners;
if you want to grant autonomy to a restive Muslim population, talk to Israel first;
and so on.
And if you want to defend the rights of people in general, talk to the USA that routinely assassinates people with drones all over the world.
Only one country in the world has explicitly complained about the concentration camps: Turkey. No other Islamic country has dared to openly criticize China.
Russia did not, Trump did not (never mentioned the issue once), and the
European governments were hipocritical as usual, welcoming Chinese investment
while slapping China on the wrist (Italy didn't even slap at all).
As far as we know, those reeducation camps are not extermination camps:
they are meant to "brainwash" Muslims to be more loyal to the country than
to their religion, especially the literal version of it.
China correctly wonders why is this any different from Western schools in
which children are routinely indoctrinated to respect the law of the land
and to reject violent ideologies.
China does not view the West as very successful at taming violent
Islamic movements. For example, repeating that Islam is a peaceful religion and that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim doesn't seem to have helped France avoid terrible terrorist attacks. China is not willing to try the same
strategy and see if it works with its own Muslim population, which is mainly
located near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
From China's point of view (not only the leadership but also the general
population), reedducating the Muslims of that province is very similar to
educating children in school.
Ethical concerns rank very low in the Chinese mind: ordinary people as well as politicians will justify
a blatant injustice against a group if it leads to improvements in the well-being of the vast majority.
The goal is not to be "righteous" all the time.
The goal is to make sure that the nation as a whole gets better all the time.
That's why the Chinese still admire Stalin more than Russians themselves do.
Starting with Krushev, Russians gave Stalin an ethical judgement.
The Chinese have always judged him based on how much he did for his nation, the Soviet Union.
The fact that he murdered millions of innocents is irrelevant,
just like the fact that Mao murdered millions.
What the Chinese hold against Mao is the fact that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
caused great damage to the Chinese nation, not that millions were persecuted.
Mao is revered as the man who created the current Chinese empire, including his forceful annexations of Tibet (all of today's Xizang province plus
regions annexed by the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan)
and of East Turkestan (now renamed Xinjiang).
The Chinese leaders would never do to Mao what Krushev did to Stalin.
The Chinese blame Krushev and Gorbachev for the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.
They admire Putin who is rebuilding it.
They now admire the dictator of North Korea (who used to be mocked on social
media) because he outsmarted the US president.
The methods are not important, the results are.
Unity is a virtue, hence dissidents are frequently frowned upon if not despised by ordinary people:
whether the dissident is right or wrong is not as important as the unity of the nation.
This attitude rejects "abstract" values like "truth", "justice" and even simple empathy.
Modern materialist China is very different from ancient moralist China.
At the same time China's state-driven economy is more Confucian than
communist, and its citizens are probably influenced by 2,500 years of
Confucian thinking in accepting it passively.
Each imperial dynasty since ancient times has prided itself in organizing
vast infrastructure projects (like the Great Wall and the Grand Canal)
by drafting thousands of people who were supposed to obey and not argue.
Thoughout the history of China the crucial sectors of the economy (including
commerce) have been controlled by the state while allowing ordinary people
to conduct their business and to rise through the hierarchy (according to a much
more meritocratic system than anything in monarchical Europe).
The Communist Party doesn't need to use extreme violence to impose its
model on the nation because its current post-Mao model is much more
traditional than its ideologues would like to admit.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had a much more difficult task with
a Russia population that had no tradition of loyalty to the state because the
state had never done much for them.
And, by the way, China's much reviled (in the West) "social credit score" system is nothing new for the Chinese people.
For those who missed the news: the Communist Party announced in 2014 the
intention of assigning a score to each citizen based on how well the citizen
behaves in several areas, the original one being financial (equivalent to
the "credit score" of the USA) but soon expanded to social behavior
("State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System").
When the score is low, the citizen is denied jobs and even
flights or and train tickets.
The score is definitely low if you are not able to pay your debts or if you
have committed a crime. It has been extended to businesses. The Communist
Party intends to use artificial intelligence to also check what people are
writing on social media such as WeChat and adjust the score according to its
own criteria of what constitutes "good behavior".
The West (including me) views this as a "Big Brother" kind of mass surveillance.
But something similar to this social credit score has always been part for
centuries of traditional life in China, especially in rural communities.
Citizens have traditionally helped the state perform this kind of
pervasive surveillance in return for security and, again, for a chance to
rise up the ranks of the meritocracy.
(For mysterious reasons,
the same US citizens who find China's social credit scoring system abhorrent are
perfectly happy that, in their country, private companies decide their credit
score and that the Department of Motor Vehicles decides, without appeal,
whether they are good or bad drivers based
on how many times a police officer caught them making a traffic violation,
which largely depends on luck, as my good friend Ross can testify - he got
two speeding tickets in one year and i got none when in fact i exceed
the speed limit way more often than him).
As hard to swallow as it is, the fact is that
the Chinese people trust their government better than Westerners trust theirs.
"Democratic" governments used to be accountable only to a tiny section
of the population, the ones who had the means to understand what is going on
and/or who had the means to influence public opinion.
Over the last 30-40 years, Western governments have become much more transparent
and accountable. An army of journalists and lawyers watches over their every
step. Historians have published countless books that revealed disturbing
facts about past governments. Parliaments feel more empowered to scrutinize
the leaders. In theory, these factors are leading to more and more democratic
systems. For example, originally the European Union was not created
democratically: the
voters of the various European nations were asked to rejoice at the news that
their enlightened leaders had achieved a historical feat, a little bit like
when the Roman emperor returned to Rome in triumph after winning a war that
he had decided to wage without consulting his people. Now Europeans
demand referendums on European Union matters.
The effect of this democratization, however, is to empower people to doubt
the politicians and the experts. For example, each referendum within
the European Union (not only the "Brexit" referendum) has weakened the union.
The USA, where presidents had to resign and have been impeached,
the public is constantly bombarded with scandals and conspiracy theories.
The general rule seems to be:
when government becomes more transparent, public trust in its
institutions plummets. China's government is not transparent at all, and
the psychological effects on its population are exactly the opposite: the
Chinese trust their government in all matters, from security to economics.
The rule seems to be that, sadly, the more a government allows people to
see what it is doing, the less people trust it.
That's another fact that the Chinese Communist Party has learned from watching
the West.
China feels that it has accomplished a lot. Not only it created a
system that its citizens love, but it has become a global competitor.
They are unlikely to change model. For example,
buying technology and copying it
is a model that has worked so well that nobody in
China wants to change it, and they even resent any talk of being forced to
change it. China feels that it is entitled to "stealing" from foreign firms
because it provides well-being to its population: what's wrong with a process
that makes people more prosperous?
It is hard to explain to a modern Chinese (who, individually, are very
hospitable towards foreigners) that stealing from foreign firms is a crime.
(I must admit that i am of two minds when it comes to intellectual property.
The "shanzhai" movement in Shenzhen was the closest thing to Silicon Valley,
characterized by an open-source attitude and rapid prototyping, yielding
collective bottom-up progress. One is tempted to tell other developing
countries to imitate the shanzhai movement. But it was made
possile by the fact that back then China was not enforcing IP laws at
all: the shanzhai "inventors" were shamelessly ignoring foreign and even
domestic IP in their "anything goes" frenzy. So are IP laws good for
developing countries or are they a form of imperialist pressure to keep poor
countries poor and under-developed forever?)
Ditto for the political model, the one-party dictatorship that has worked so
well in providing security and service to citizens: pressures to
open up to multi-party democracy are interpreted as an attempt by foreign
powers to sow discord and cause yet another implosion of China.
Back to sinophobia. It looks like the USA, if not the whole West, is now
revising the world order. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the
main threat were the jihadists, followed by some rogue states
(Iraq, North Korea, Iran and Syria), then Russia, then China.
Now the order has been reverted by many US and international observers:
the main threat to the USA is not terrorists (which are now mostly viewed
as criminals, not particularly different from the many psychos armed by the
NRA who commit mass shootings in the USA), and it is not rogue states
(whose ability and motivation to attack the USA is viewed as greatly reduced),
but it is the two adversarial powers, Russia and China,
both of which have greatly expanded both their military and their geographical
reach.
And not so much Russia, which is now protected by the US president in person,
but China. It is telling that few US politicians spent time commenting on
Russia's new hypersonic weapons announced by Putin in december 2018, the
Kinzhal missile and the Avangard glide vehicle, whereas several politicians
were alarmed by the Dong-Feng 21 missile (also known as the "carrier killer") and the DF26 (also known as the "Guam Express") introduced by China, missiles
of the kind that Russia has had for decades.
But there is also a new "world order" viewed from China:
1. The US foreign policy is dictated by lobbies, mainly the military industrial complex (that constantly needs excuses to build more weapons), the oil lobby, and the Israeli lobby (that constantly wants the USA involved in the Middle East, and now specifically targets Iran);
2. China's only foreign policy fear is that South Korea absorbs North Korea and becomes one big ally of the USA right there in China's background; or, worse, that North Korea becomes a friend of the USA (the way Vietnam is doing);
3. As the USA becomes less of a reliable ally (especially after Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP), East Asia is quickly realizing that its future fortunes are tied to its stable neighbor China not to the distant and messy USA. The USA, increasingly run by unstable, erratic and/or gridlocked regimes, looks like a banana republic compared with China's stable, reliable and fast-paced regime.
The USA would do well to be more "phobic" about its own structural shortcomings
than on sinophobia.
Reader:
Yi Wen: "The Making of an Economic Superpower" (2015)
Gordon Chang: "Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China" (not the idiot with the same name who wrote "The Coming Collapse of China" in 2001)
Elizabeth Economy: "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" (2018)
David Lampton: "Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping" (2014)
John Carlin: "Dawn of the Code War: Inside America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat"
Michael Pillsbury: "Hundred Year Marathon"
P.S.
The report "Chinese Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance", jointly issued in November 2018 by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society, urged US governments, organizations and individuals to engage in "constructive vigilance" to counter a systematic program
by China to influence US organizations, institutions, firms and individuals.
One of the cardinal points of the report is that
China exports censorship: it suppress dissenting voices abroad.
First of all, it intimidates its own citizens abroad, who know that they can
face retaliation when they return home and may also fear for their families.
Secondly, China restricts visas
for US scholars who want to study modern China (and who are likely
to criticize what they will discover, or
at least likely to refuse to praise what they will discover).
This way China
intimidates not only its national scholars but also foreign ones.
On the contrary, Chinese scholars and tourists can travel freely in the USA,
and are free express any negative opinion both in the USA and back home in
China.
This asymmetry clearly favors China's image in the world.
Concerns about the activities of the Confucius Institutes that China opened inside Western universities dates from at least 2012 and is absolutely legitimate. The Confucius Institute bans the very use of the words "Dalai Lama" (let alone any visit by the Dalai Lama), bans any discussion about the independence of Tibet and Taiwan, bans any discussion of China's militarization of the Chinese Sea, bans any discussion of the "reeducation" camps in Xinjiang, and bans any discussion about the many politicians purged by the Communist Party. A Confucius Institute is automatically a force on campus to erase from campus activities a lot of facts about China.
The report then discusses how
China uses money to shape the research agenda of universities.
If a department wants a donation from China, it certainly cannot invite
the Dalai Lama or a Taiwanese politician to speak.
It is unknown how many university professors accepted this tacit requirement.
The report charges that the Chinese government targets all ethnic Chinese in
the world, all of which are pressured to contribute to China's greatness or
be treated like traitors at home. I find this one hard to believe.
I have no evidence that it is true.
It may be true that
the Chinese-American community is vulnerable to China's blackmail, but
most Chinese-Americans can provide very little of value to China (very little that China doesn't already know).
A very tiny percentage can indeed be a valuable "spy" for China, but China could as well recruit blonde blue-eyed Iowans or Texans by using the old fashioned method: money.
One has to be careful not to return to the traditional bigotry of the US population against Chinese immigrants.
According to the report, China is actively lobbying US politicians and
pressuring the news media.
Here the report is not fair because it implies that ONLY China does those things when in fact every major country does them, to some extent or another.
For example, a similar report on Israel's efforts to influence US government and public opinion would be ten times thicker, including the names of certified spies.
In 2019 Israel was even suspected of having deployed spying devices near the White House.
Why is Israel considered a friend and an ally whereas China is considered a threat to national security if they do the same things to influence our government and media?
The report says "During his time as ambassador, Zhou Wenzhong boasted that he had visited some 100 members of Congress". But nothing is said of how many members of Congress received visits by the Saudi ambassador or the Polish ambassador. The statement doesn't even tell us if he was ambassador for 2 years or 20 years: 100 members of Congress in how many years? And which members did he visit? If they were all in districts that export goods to China, what is wrong with it?
A fair report would start with a survey of how countries look for ways to influence our government, how they try to appropriate US technology, how they try to recruit spies in the USA, and then one can place Chinese actions in this context.
The report is instead too gentle on other issues.
China is refining its program of mass surveillance in the age of the Internet.
The Internet makes a difference. Today, China's surveillance is limited to
what its citizens write on Wechat and Weibo, but tomorrow it could expand
to what all citizens of all countries write on all social media:
it is not terribly difficult for China to create "bots" that will read all posts
by all people on all social media, and then create a "social credit score"
for each individual of the planet, rated according to the Communist Party's
criteria.
Then this score will determine how China treats you when you apply for
a tourist or business visa or when your firm wants to do business in China.
It could be that some day the Chinese social credit score will become so
important for foreigners that many foreigners will voluntarily start using
the Chinese social media and write appropriately about China for the simple
reason of increasing their social credit score over competitors or
for the purpose of obtaining a Chinese scholarship.
Some day the social credit score may ban from entering and/or doing business
in China all individuals who do not abide by Chinese values.
The other point is that all countries in the world are already under pressure
to delegitimize Taiwan. Any country that wants to do business with China has
to severe its diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
This is likely to be just the beginning. The day may come when India will
have to surrender the Dalai Lama if it still wants to sell textiles to China
and receive aid from China.
China may slowly change the history of the world, pressuring people and
organizations to remove from history
books and websites what it doesn't like about Mao or its current leaders,
and changing facts such as the history of Tibet or erasing facts such as
the massacre of Tiannamen Square.
See also the study by the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies or MERICS, "Authoritarian Advance: Responding to China's Growing Political Influence in Europe" (2018). Quote: "Beijing aims to present its political concepts as a competitive, and ultimately superior, political and economic model. Driven by these motivations, Beijing pursues three related goals. First, it aims to build global support on specific issues and policy agendas. This includes fostering solid networks among European politicians, businesses, media, think tanks, and universities, thereby creating layers of active support for Chinese interests. Second, China seeks to weaken Western unity, both within Europe, and across the Atlantic. Third, Beijing pushes hard to create a more positive global perception of China's political and economic system as a viable alternative to liberal democracies."
P.S.: The United Front has attracted attention for its work to influence (and sometimes blackmail) Chinese communities living outside China. Some good background studies:
More articles on China in 2019
TM, ®, Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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