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Battlegrounds
CHAPTER 3
An Obsession with Control: The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to Freedom and Security
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
—GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
I HAD never been to China when I arrived with the president and his traveling party on November 8, 2017. From my first day on the job in the White House almost nine months earlier, China was a top priority. U.S.-China policy was a prominent feature of the Trump presidential campaign. The Chinese were eager to arrange a summit between the two presidents at Mar-a-Lago after the warm and successful visit of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo of Japan just three weeks after the president’s inauguration. China figured prominently in what President Obama had identified to President Trump as the biggest immediate problem his administration would face: what to do about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.1 I thought it was vital to frame a long-term strategy for China prior to the Mar-a-Lago Summit, scheduled for April 2017, so that the initial discussions between the two leaders and the two main working groups that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was eager to initiate (one on security, the other on trade and economic relations) would be informed by policy goals and more specific objectives.
In March, the Principals Committee of the National Security Council convened to recommend the agenda and objectives for the Mar-a-Lago Summit. At the outset of the meeting, I highlighted the fundamental assumption underpinning U.S. relations with China since paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and the opening of China in 1978: after being welcomed into the international political and economic order, China would play by the rules, open its markets, and privatize its economy.2 And as the country became more prosperous, the Chinese government would respect the rights of its people and liberalize. I observed that the intentions, policies, and actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had rendered those assumptions demonstrably false. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China is a threat to free and open societies because its policies actively promote a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to the rules-based order. This matters because the CCP aims to accomplish its objectives at other nations’ expense. In particular, its strategy intends to shift global economic leadership and geopolitical alignment toward China and away from the United States. It was past time, I believed, to effect one of the most significant shifts in foreign policy and national security strategy in recent American history.
I spent most of my career in Europe and the Middle East. I knew a little Chinese history but had a lot to learn. My “professor” was the NSC senior director for Asia, Matt Pottinger. Matt learned Chinese in high school in Boston and then studied for two years overseas in Beijing and Taiwan. He was fluent not only in Mandarin, but also in Chinese history and literature. He covered China as a journalist for eight years, including as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. When covering the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, Matt was impressed by the effectiveness, discipline, and compassion of the U.S. Marines who provided humanitarian relief. He decided to seek an age waiver and join the Marine Corps as an officer. After nine months of intense physical preparation, he reported, at the age of thirty-two, to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. Subsequent assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer convinced him that the United States had tremendous capabilities but did not always employ those capabilities well. American leaders often failed to understand the nature of complex competitions with enemies and adversaries. Matt came to the attention of then–Major General Michael Flynn. In 2010, the two coauthored, with Paul D. Batchelor, a monograph entitled Fixing Intel. In 2015, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, Flynn had retired from the army as a lieutenant general, and Pottinger had left the Marine Corps and was working at an investment firm in New York City. After Trump was elected, Flynn, who was named national security advisor, asked Pottinger to join the NSC. I was grateful for the opportunity to serve with Matt. He worked tirelessly to get sound policies and strategies in place not only for China and North Korea, but also for the entire Indo-Pacific region. And his sense of humor brought much-needed levity to the hard work and long hours on the NSC staff.
The discussions at Mar-a-Lago were meant, in part, to convey a significant change in U.S. policy. We communicated to our counterparts that we were particularly concerned about China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, where their People’s Liberation Army was building islands in order to lay claim to 1.4 million square miles of water through which approximately three trillion dollars of trade flows each year. But the main theme of the summit was China’s unfair trade and economic practices, which we described as a form of economic aggression that the United States could no longer tolerate. The discussions were cordial. I got the impression from our guests that they had heard these points before, believed that time was on their side, and doubted our will to back any of our concerns with action.
But when Air Force One touched down in Beijing nearly seven months later, a new China policy was largely in place. Government bureaucracies were shifting away from an approach that regarded China’s growing power at the West’s expense as an inevitable phenomenon that was best accommodated rather than challenged. The new policy acknowledged that we were in a competition with China—a competition that the United States was losing because of a failure to understand the emotions, ideology, and aspirations that motivated Chinese Communist Party policy. Since the 1990s, U.S. policy toward China betrayed all the elements of strategic narcissism: wishful thinking, mirror imaging, confirmation bias, and the belief that others will conform to a U.S.-developed “script.” China aided in that self-delusion as the CCP used co-option and coercion to tighten its control internally and extend its influence internationally while concealing its true intentions. Our two days in Beijing heightened my sense of urgency to infuse our approach to China with a strong dose of strategic empathy.
The first step was to appreciate the influence of historical memory on Chinese Communist leaders. John Fairbank, the godfather of American sinology, noted in 1948, in the first edition of his seminal book The United States and China, that to understand the policies and actions of Chinese leaders, “historical perspective is not a luxury, but a necessity.”3 During the visit, Chairman Xi Jinping and his advisors used history to convey messages to President Trump, to the Chinese people, and to the world. The selective use of history—both the history they invoked and the history they averted—revealed the emotions and worldview that drive Chinese Communist Party goals. State Councilor Yang Jiechi, my Chinese counterpart, had decided on a “state visit plus” of tremendous grandeur that would take us to three sites adjacent to one another at the center of Beijing: the Forbidden City (the seat of Chinese emperors across five centuries), the Great Hall of the People (a vast building completed in 1959 as part of the tenth anniversary of the founding of Communist China), and Tiananmen Square (the site of Mao’s mausoleum and the focal point of the massive protests against Chinese Communist Party rule in 1989 that the People’s Liberation Army brutally suppressed).
OUR HOSTS were State Councilor Yang, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Chinese ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, and Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang. Our party included U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson, White House senior aide Jared Kushner, U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, and director of social media and assistant to the president Dan Scavino. Chairman Xi and his wife, the famous singer Peng Liyuan, greeted President and Mrs. Trump at the gates of the Forbidden City. The leaders and their wives moved ahead of the rest of our party. As we walked through the West Glorious Gate, I looked for Matt Pottinger, who had been walking behind us. I discovered later that the guards had denied him access. Matt knew too much. Our hosts were gracious, but clearly intended to use the visit to the Forbidden City to convey messages without the encumbrance of someone who might subject those messages to skepticism and keen appraisal.
The main message was consistent with a speech Xi Jinping had delivered just two weeks earlier, at the Nineteenth National Congress in the Great Hall of the People: the Chinese Communist Party was relentlessly pursuing the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The Forbidden City was the perfect backdrop for Chairman Xi to place in historical perspective his determination to “take center stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind.”4 The visit portrayed this great rejuvenation as an inevitable return to an earlier era during which Imperial China was a powerful “Middle Kingdom
Xi wanted his visitors to recognize as inevitable that Chinese power would once again underpin an international system in which Chinese leaders granted privileges in exchange for recognition of China’s superiority. The visit by the U.S. president and First Lady was, in part, a continuation of the “coming-out party” to announce China’s return to power that began with the spectacular opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Like that show and the closing ceremony that placed modern technological innovation in the context of five thousand years of Chinese history, the tour of the city and the remarkable performances based on three Chinese operas before dinner were reminders that Chinese dynasties stood at the center of the earth and that Chinese emperors were the guarantors of harmony on earth and the arbiters between earth and heaven.
The chairman’s message was meant for the Chinese people as well as for President Trump and our party. We walked in the footsteps of countless foreign delegations, such as the British mission, led by Lord George Macartney, that visited the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty in the 1790s. Traveling from the port to the Forbidden City, the British found the route lined with banners emblazoned with large characters announcing that the Europeans had come to “pay tribute to the Great Emperor.” During President Trump’s visit, state television’s live coverage served the same purpose: to show the Chinese people a foreign power acknowledging China’s and Chairman Xi’s power. Qianlong and Chairman Xi both saw the narrative of national greatness as necessary for maintaining domestic order.6
While the images broadcast to China and the world from the Forbidden City were meant to project confidence in the Chinese Communist Party, they belied profound insecurity. Like Chairman Xi, the emperors who occupied the Forbidden City practiced a remote and autocratic style of rule vulnerable to corruption and internal threats. Since the end of the Han dynasty, in AD 220, China’s core provinces were ruled only half the time by a strong central authority. Even when China was ruled by powerful governments such as that of the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing dynasties, China was subject to domestic turmoil and foreign invasion. As with those who went before him, Xi’s outer confidence masked a sense of foreboding that he might suffer a fate similar to that of previous rulers.7 A few months later, in 2018, Chairman Xi did away with term limits and extended his rule indefinitely.
In its very design, the Forbidden City seemed to reflect the contrast between leaders’ outward confidence and inner apprehension. Our guide walked us through the three great halls at the city’s center: the Taihedian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (where the emperor presided over ceremonies), the Zhonghedian, the Hall of Central Harmony (where officials kowtowed to the emperor before ceremonies in the Taihedian), and the Baohedian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony (where emperors held banquets to entertain heads of state, kinsmen, and government ministers). Those grand structures were meant not only to impress, but also to defend from threats that might come from inside or outside the city’s walls. The emperor was housed at the center of the walled complex for protection and was constantly surrounded by his guards. The emperors who sat on the elaborate throne in the Hall of Central Harmony made decisions based largely on fear and anxiety.
For example, the Yongle emperor Zhu Dai, who built the Forbidden City, having overthrown his nephew to take power, was even more concerned about internal dangers than he was about the possibility of another Mongol invasion. To identify and eliminate opponents, the emperor set up an elaborate spy network. To preempt opposition from scholars and bureaucrats, he directed the executions not only of those suspected of disloyalty, but also their entire families, including women and children. Among the victims were four scholars who became known as the Four Martyrs. One of these scholars, Fang Xiaoru, when threatened with the elimination of nine kinship lines, replied defiantly that he was “fine with ten.” All his blood relations were murdered along with all his students and peers—a total of 873 people. The Chinese Communist Party used similar tactics several centuries later. 8
I could not help but think of the contrast between the city’s grandeur and its occupants’ insecurity. The art and architectural style, however, reflected the basis for Confucius’s social creed that hierarchy and harmony fit together and are interdependent. Our guide explained that architectural styles conformed to the Treatise on Architectural Methods, an eleventh-century manual that specified particular designs for ranks in Chinese social structure. As we entered the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest building in the Forbidden City, he pointed out that its double-layered-roof design was reserved for the emperor only. The grand throne is surrounded by six immense golden pillars engraved with dragons to evoke the supreme power of the emperor. Behind the throne, a carved gilt screen and incense burners in the shape of unicorns signify the submission of all other kingdoms. After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the new rulers of the Qing dynasty preserved the Ming architecture, but changed the names of some of the buildings. The Hall of Imperial Supremacy became the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Consistent with the Confucian teaching that the fundamental duty is to “know thy place,” the emperors promoted deference to hierarchy (both by the Chinese people and vassal states) as the path to harmony. But their effort to preserve hierarchical order and control was anything but harmonious for those subjected to their brutality. As the Manchu forces advanced into China proper, Chongzhen, the last Ming emperor, left his throne carved with images of dragons and unicorns, and hanged himself from a tree on Meishan, a hill overlooking the palace.
As our guide described the construction of the Forbidden City, it was clear that the rulers’ determination to preserve the hierarchical order and guard against internal threats meant hardship rather than harmony for the Chinese people. Zhu Di mobilized one hundred thousand artisans and one million laborers to build the city; they did so in just fourteen years. Peasants dragged large carved stones seventy kilometers from the quarry to the construction site. Working in below-freezing temperatures, fifty laborers per stone sloshed water in front of the sled that bore the stone to create an icy surface before dragging the sled over rough ground. The most powerful symbol of hierarchy and the deference that Chinese rulers expected lay not in the architectural style of the city, but in the sacrifice the Chinese people made to construct it. Laborers in the Forbidden City, like those who worked eighty kilometers away to strengthen the Great Wall and protect against another Mongol invasion, were on the unfortunate end of superior-inferior relations that underpinned the hierarchical order.
As we walked through the city, it was easy to view Chairman Xi as supremely confident. He wanted to be seen as the unchallenged ruler of an increasingly powerful and apparently harmonious country. Yet for Xi and his predecessors, the pomp of the office masked deep insecurity, and harmony concealed brutal repression. After the tour of the Forbidden City, I thought of the relationship between the emperor and the Chinese people during previous eras as analogous to the dominance that the Chinese Communist Party seeks over all aspects of Chinese political and social life today. Xi and Communist Party leaders expect the same degree of deference to hierarchy and collective effort to achieve the China Dream, what Xi has described as Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory. As China’s power increased, so did leaders’ uncertainty and fear. Danger came in many forms. The sweep of Chinese dynastic history reveals cycles of prosperity followed by increased population; the growth of corruption; some combination of natural disaster, famine, rebellion, and civil war; political and economic decline; and, finally, collapse. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China’s classic texts, warns, “After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur
Our guide showed us where the last royal occupant of the Forbidden City, Emperor Puyi, was stripped of power in 1911, at the age of five, during China’s Republican Revolution. He remained in the old Imperial apartments at the back of the palace until 1924. Puyi abdicated in the midst of the “century of humiliation,” a period of Chinese history that Chairman Xi had described to President Trump and those who joined the two leaders for dinner at Mar-a-Lago six months earlier. The century of humiliation was the unhappy era during which China suffered major internal fragmentation, lost wars, made major concessions to foreign powers, and endured brutal occupation. Humiliation began with Great Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. It ended with Allied and Chinese defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 and Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.9
As the tour ended, I was even more convinced that our dramatic shift in policy was needed and long overdue. The Forbidden City was supposed to convey confidence in China’s national rejuvenation and return as the Middle Kingdom. But for me, it exposed the fears as well as the grand ambitions that drive the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to extend China’s influence along its frontiers and beyond and regain the honor lost during the “century of humiliation.” The party was obsessed with control because control was necessary to allay its fears and fulfill its ambitions.
THE HISTORY that our Chinese hosts omitted was as revealing as the history they promoted. The two leaders and their wives preceded us into the Hospital for Cultural Relics at the National Palace Museum. As we observed craftspeople restoring artifacts, it was clear that Xi was resurrecting what Mao had tried to destroy: historical memory of China’s Imperial past. Mao was an iconoclast; Xi was a nostalgic. Mao destroyed order and invited the chaos of continuous revolution; Xi evoked Confucian moral order to maintain control and encourage conformity.
The 1.5-ton portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong that hung over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, facing Tiananmen Square, was impossible to miss. But our guide did not mention it; nor did he make any mention of Mao, even though the square occupies the space between that great portrait and the mausoleum that holds Mao’s crystal coffin and his embalmed body. It was at the Gate of Heavenly Peace that, on October 1, 1949, Mao announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He and his fellow revolutionaries believed that the state had to be torn down to save it. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia seemed a workable model. By the time Mao gave his speech in 1949, the Chinese people had endured fourteen years of brutal Japanese occupation after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and a costly civil war that followed from 1945 to 1949.
Xi repeatedly spoke of Japan’s brutal occupation of China and portrayed the Chinese Communist Party as a savior that had liberated the Chinese people from Japanese oppressors. Even as we looked out at Tiananmen Square, our hosts cast their efforts to achieve “national rejuvenation” as the party’s triumph over the century of humiliation. But as I looked upon the square’s gray vastness, my mind could not help but replay images of fanatical Red Guards from Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 or the tanks that brutally repressed the student demonstrations of 1989.
Chairman Xi dwells on the century of humiliation for another reason: to gloss over the first decades of party rule that followed, which were even worse. The application of Maoist theory between the end of the Civil War in 1949 and Mao’s demise nearly three decades later killed tens of millions of Chinese through misrule, policy-induced famine, and political purges, to say nothing of the disastrous Maoist-inspired revolutions in other parts of the world.
Six years after National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger orchestrated President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution and forced to work in a tractor factory, succeeded Mao as paramount leader. Deng gradually dismantled Maoist policies. From 1978 to 1989, he focused on economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy. In 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”10 Under Deng and his successors, such as Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012), the rejection of Maoist economic policies and political excesses was explicit. But that changed when Xi Jinping assumed the premiership in 2012.
