Not long ago, an 80-page article by an anonymous author was published on the website of the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, titled “The Longer Telegram: A New U.S. Strategy for Dealing with China. The author, whose identity is mysterious, is said to be a former senior official. The article is a parody of a long telegram written by former U.S. diplomat Kennan to the U.S. State Department in 1946, hence the name “The Longer Telegram. The article attempts to set the tone of U.S. policy for the next few decades in response to China’s rise. It argues that China poses an unprecedented strategic challenge to the United States and that Washington urgently needs a comprehensive and bipartisan national strategy to meet this challenge.
The article is wide-ranging, so I will address only two issues here.
First, the article suggests that to meet the challenge of China’s rise, the United States must coordinate fully with its allies and partners in order to take unified action against China. Now that the power gap between the United States and China has narrowed, the surest factor in changing this trajectory depends on the United States getting the support of its key allies. But the authors acknowledge that this will be extremely challenging, as the international community is divided on how best to respond to Beijing and the “economic attractiveness of the Chinese market,” and that “when it comes to the future unity of alliances to meet the Chinese challenge, the enormous influence of the Chinese economy on the global economy is itself the greatest structural challenge. ” As I said earlier, when Trump launched the trade war originally only wanted to balance U.S.-China trade, so that U.S.-China trade can be more fair, but later gradually realized that the problem between the United States and China is not just a matter of trade fairness, but to reduce trade, to contain China economically. Since the second half of last year, the voice of decoupling from China on the part of the United States has been growing, and the decoupling cannot be just between the United States alone and China, but must also be done together with allies for decoupling to be possible; certainly not a full decoupling, which is neither necessary nor possible. But at least in some areas, decoupling is necessary and possible. So far, however, there has not been sufficient consensus on this issue between the United States and its major allies and among individual allies. This is indeed a very urgent and serious issue.
Second, there is the issue of targeting Xi Jinping. The article points out that an effective U.S. and allied strategy toward China must target Xi Jinping. The political reality in China is that the Chinese Communist Party is inherently divided under Xi Jinping, who threatens the lives, positions and entrenched policy positions of many other senior officials in the party.
I agree with this view. We need to distinguish not only between the CCP and the Chinese people, but also between the dictator and the rest of the party at large. The Communist Party’s ability to rule with an authoritarian approach lies first and foremost in its authoritarian approach to the Party. Xi Jinping, in particular, has reached a level of personal centralization of power comparable to that of Mao Zedong. If we oppose the Communist Party, we must first oppose Xi Jinping. Precisely because the CCP system is an authoritarian dictatorship, it makes a big difference who is in charge. If Li Keqiang had taken over instead of Xi Jinping, China would be a different place today. Xi Jinping’s perverse actions have not only created deep resentment among the people, but also made numerous enemies within the CCP, so the potential force against Xi among the people and within the party cannot be underestimated. Of course, China’s problem is the system, but that is not the same as saying that changing people is not important. The history of communist countries tells us that whenever a major dictator steps down, more energy is bound to be unleashed, so there will not simply be a return to square one, but inevitably a breakthrough and an advance. In this way, targeting Xi Jinping is not only practical, but also strategic.
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