00:00:00.520Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.
00:00:06.820And today, by popular demand, we are going to be talking about China.
00:00:12.380I want to start us off, as usual, with a few maps, and then talk about some of China's strategic imperatives,
00:00:19.960what it is trying to do, and what are some of the problems and limitations that are facing China
00:00:26.140in its bid to become the world's greatest superpower, essentially.
00:00:32.220And it has to be understood that China sees itself in a particular way.
00:00:37.580The traditional way that the Chinese refer to their country is as the Middle Kingdom.
00:00:44.420And the Middle Kingdom doesn't mean that they're in the middle of anything.
00:00:49.900It means that they are the central kingdom, that they are essentially the fulcrum of the world,
00:00:54.480the world's most important nation. And this comes from a very old civilizational tradition.
00:01:02.820Civilization, as far as historians know anything about its beginning, started in the
00:01:10.400valley of Mesopotamia, and then Egypt, and then in China and on the Yangtze River.0.83
00:01:18.940Sorry, in India, and then on the Yangtze River. So this is one of the oldest cultures in the world.
00:01:24.480Unlike all of the others, although it has had a couple of foreign occupations by the Mongols and recently in the 19th and 20th century, its civilization never really changed that much.
00:01:41.080So the comparable old civilizations, modern Iraqis and Mesopotamia don't recognize anything about their own ancient culture.0.82
00:01:52.460Indians were taken over by the Muslims, the Egyptians taken over by the Muslims.
00:01:58.460So China is kind of unique in its civilizational continuity. And this gives the place a very strong sense of itself as the first nation to properly civilize and to maintain its civilization unconquered, undefeated forever.
00:02:18.400I mean, the Mongols invaded China, but they ended up assimilated into China rather than transforming Chinese civilization in the way the Muslims did or the Christians did to these civilizations that they took over.
00:02:35.040And I think it's worth understanding that the Chinese think of themselves in a way that is deeply supremacist.0.99
00:02:43.960And I don't fault people for thinking that they're the best.1.00
00:02:46.680Everybody has some claim to that, although some more so than others.
00:02:53.680And they view themselves as the heirs of something absolutely great.
00:02:58.100They view their decline in the 19th or 20th century as something that was catastrophic and should never be repeated.
00:03:08.120And the entire ideology of the state is built around recovering China's place in the world as the center of the world.
00:03:22.040So let's start off with a few maps, shall we?
00:03:26.180I found this website about sort of, you know, a website for educators.
00:03:32.560And it gives you a bit of a view of where China is and its divisions.
00:03:36.880And I wanted to start maybe with the rivers. You've got the Yellow River, you've got the Yangtze River, which is the origin of Chinese civilization, and you've got the Zhejiang River sitting there.
00:03:51.700This is important because what China is doing as part of its industrialization is trying to deepen internal trade in the country so that prosperity can spread from the coastal areas deep into the interior.
00:04:09.160And the whole challenge for China over the course of the 20th century and its recovery was about building out the prosperity of the Chinese hinterland as a way of proving the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and as a way of ensuring that the faraway provinces of China don't end up falling prey to separatist movements.
00:04:36.660and you will see this because if you look here which map am I looking for I'm looking for this
00:04:45.780one if you look at this map of Chinese civilization sorry it was the Yellow River not the Yangtze
00:04:51.940my mistake this is where ancient China was and you see it in the shaded areas
00:04:58.320And China today is pretty much much bigger than it has ever been in its history, because it's managed to take over Tibet and it's managed to take over Xinjiang.
00:05:18.980Firstly, because Mongolia is so sparsely populated.
00:05:22.060And secondly, because all investments in Mongolia are Chinese,
00:05:26.400or most investments in Mongolia are Chinese.
00:05:28.760So China today is at sort of a peak size, if you will, historically speaking.
00:05:36.600And it's a challenge for it to keep these pieces together.
00:05:40.840You've got in this geography places like the Tibetan Plateau, which maybe do and maybe don't want to be part of China.0.84
00:05:52.280You've got the whole expanse of Xinjiang province here, which is majority Muslim and now is being rapidly transformed into majority Han Chinese.
00:06:04.920And the objective of the state is to assert its control over all of these provinces to prevent the breakup of China and indeed to enable itself to expand further and gain more power over the Russian bits of Asia and over the Republic of Central Asia.
00:06:27.500So this is part of the driver of Chinese policy and Chinese politics.
00:06:34.560And you have to remember that when Mao Zedong took power, a few years later he was asked,
00:06:44.420And his answer was, I could provide a bowl of rice for every single Chinese man.0.94
00:06:50.460So China in the early 20th century was a fundamentally broken society.
00:06:55.660The old traditions had collapsed. The Communist Party had taken over. It tried crazy things like the Cultural Revolution, a bid to erase its connection with the past in order to turn more progressive.
00:12:36.580Then in 1962, they have a little war with India.
00:12:42.620And the war with India was focused on this part of the country, on basically the area that isn't that far from Kashmir and very close to the Himalayas.
00:13:00.680And this was part of a bid to control the waterways that lead into Kashmir and that help basically strengthen China's hand against India.
00:13:17.880And you see that what the Chinese did there was claim one border that is here in, I'm not sure you can see it in the pinkish color, that is actually deep into territories that are claimed by India.0.76
00:13:35.500And after having successfully beaten the Indians, they withdraw to the blue line.0.82
00:13:41.220And this shows a certain aspect of the Chinese temperament, that they'll beat you and then they'll give you some concessions to keep the peace in order to show that they were behaving in a purely defensive manner.0.88
00:13:58.980And you could see this kind of thinking, basically being generous to your enemies a little bit more than you need to, rather than completely humiliate your enemies and break them and create enough grievances for the conflict to become irreconcilable.0.90
00:14:16.500And so they go to war with the Indians, and they actually beat the Indians, partly in order to secure a better grip over Tibet, to improve their position in the Himalayas, and to show, look, we are a great power, even a country as big as India cannot mess with us.
00:14:39.100but the Chinese also end up going into a war with the Soviet Union
00:14:44.520and this was over a it was really over a small border dispute where under international law
00:14:53.020it was the Soviets that were in the wrong but they thought that they were considerably stronger
00:14:56.860than China and the Chinese initiate hostilities and the Soviets do badly enough for them to begin
00:15:05.540threatening nuclear weapons. And they go around Western capitals asking what would their reaction
00:15:12.880be if they were to initiate a first nuclear strike against China. So that's how bad relations
00:15:20.960between the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party ended up being. The Soviets were genuinely0.99
00:15:29.440considering conducting a nuclear strike against China in order to beat China in a border dispute.
00:15:36.640But of course, from the Soviet perspective, it wasn't just the question of a border dispute,
00:15:43.200it was also about the control of Mongolia, which at the part was part of the Soviet Union,
00:15:49.520all of Central Asia, and the Russian Far East, which were basically the natural resource hubs
00:15:58.960of Russia and which together made Russia into a Pacific power rather than just a European power.
00:16:09.920So China's relationship with its neighbors was never really that good. And then the last war
00:16:14.220that's sort of worth mentioning briefly is the war with Vietnam, where in 1979, the Vietnamese
00:16:22.460go in and they destroy the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, famously an insane communist regime
00:16:31.760which had literally murdered a full quarter of their own population.0.92
00:16:37.320They literally killed anybody who had any property and were so unhinged that Vietnam0.62
00:16:45.500had to send its forces into Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge and replace them with a different
00:16:53.440ruling coalition, which kind of survives to this day, in order just to stop the murders and to
00:17:01.400stop the killing and to stop the instability. So as punishment for going against one of their
00:17:08.100proxies, there was a limited border war between China and Vietnam, which the Chinese kind of won,
00:17:15.500They took three or four cities from the Vietnamese, but then they pull out and say, OK, that's enough. We're going to stop here. We've achieved our objectives. We won. We don't need to continue this further.
00:17:28.240And again, the idea being not to create too much of a grievance as to make this irreconcilable, and also not to get sucked into an endless war in Vietnam, having seen how badly it had turned out for the French and the Americans to get drawn into an endless war in Vietnam.
00:17:47.660so you see from the chinese communist party this kind of nationalist realism
00:17:54.440that i would argue has served them quite well you don't see what the chinese claim about themselves
00:18:01.800which is that they're always peaceful we never go to war we only want peaceful development
00:18:06.260that's obviously a lie that's not true they've ended up in a war in each of their neighbors or
00:18:12.360reach of their big neighbors, and they're intervening quite heavily in Myanmar, in
00:18:19.140Burma, in order to prop up the pro-China regime there. But what you do see that is truthful
00:18:26.980is this sense of understanding the limits of their own power and not exceeding them too much
00:18:35.880in a way that would suck them into a conflict, that would draw down their resources,
00:18:42.360turn into a war that exhausts them and that discredits them politically.0.98
00:18:47.720That's the kind of philosophy and attitude that you see from China,
00:18:51.400and we will sort of go over what this means.
00:18:57.320Now, ever since the Communist Party took over,
00:19:01.940a big part of their objectives has been to equalize China's power with the other superpowers in the
00:19:13.100world. So they took on the Soviet Union, they got away with it, and this led to the, or this paved
00:19:22.340the way for Nixon's reconciliation with China when he decided that he was going to try to separate0.64
00:19:29.160the communist bloc and break it up by isolating the Russians and working with the Chinese.
00:19:36.660As this progressed, and as American oligarchs decided to turn on their own public,
00:19:44.600this paved the way for China entering the World Trade Organization.
00:19:50.040By entering the World Trade Organization under Bill Clinton and then George Bush,
00:19:55.980China gained access to the world's markets and was able with the complicity of American oligarchs
00:20:06.280and Wall Street to slowly displace industry from the West and relocate industrial capacity to China
00:20:14.780and they paired this with a very open policy of forcing companies to surrender some of their
00:20:23.220intellectual property, and share it with Chinese firms to enable China's development.
00:20:31.200And you can see that as, oh, they're communists, they're just taking away people's property.
00:20:35.360But I think it's more accurate to see that as nationalists, their main objective is to
00:20:41.840strengthen themselves at the expense of everybody else. They weren't interested in having a
00:20:50.040workers uprising in America that would establish communism there, they were interested in their
00:20:56.720own revolution becoming stronger and strengthening China on the national stage.
00:21:03.900And the effects of that have been genuinely phenomenal. Genuinely phenomenal. If you look
00:21:12.140historically at China's share of world manufacturing output, they went from something
00:21:22.200under 5% in the 90s or around 5% in the 90s to pretty much over 35% now, which means that China
00:21:37.500China is the world's manufacturing superpower because it exceeds the manufacturing output of the next 10 players combined in the same way that American military spending exceeds the military spending of the next 10 global players combined.
00:21:56.740And this has meant that basically everything that we use is somehow coming from China.
00:22:02.320uh this is this is genuinely unprecedented because even like the united states at the
00:22:12.520peak of its power wasn't really in that league the united states in the 1990s a little bit after
00:22:20.880nafta began but well but before the opening up to china was still 25 of global manufacturing
00:22:27.280And then you see China shooting up and becoming close to 35% of global manufacturing.
00:22:35.160And the thing is that the Chinese state has been insanely capable of delivering to its people and delivering to its public.
00:22:46.680That's why it's not really fair to describe it as purely communist, but it is very much a one-party state.