From Reuters Breakingviews via Nasdaq:
In a 1973 meeting with an American delegation, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai caught his interlocutors off guard by asking: “Do you think China will ever become an aggressive or expansionist power?” When his U.S. counterpart politely replied in the negative, Zhou disagreed. “It is possible. But if China were to embark on such a path, you must oppose it. And you must tell those Chinese that Zhou Enlai told you to do so!”
Rush Doshi, China director on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, quotes this advice in “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order”. He then proposes that the White House take it. A former Fulbright scholar with fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Yale University’s Paul Tsai China Center, Doshi argues that China is not only attempting to sabotage global governance norms led by the United States but is trying to place itself at the top of a new system modelled in its autocratic image. It’s a very hawkish assessment of Chinese intentions. But 60 pages of painstaking footnotes, many of them quoting internal statements by Communist Party leaders and intellectuals, make it rather compelling.
During the Cold War China was a quasi-ally of America. But after the Soviet Union collapsed the Chinese Communist Party grew suspicious. The United States easily toppled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein on the flimsiest of pretexts. That terrified Chinese officials who were convinced the Americans aspired to repeat in Beijing what they had accomplished in Moscow.
The CCP’s strategy to prevent that outcome consisted of two phases which Doshi calls “blunting” and “building”. First, the People’s Republic joined and then hobbled international institutions like the World Trade Organization. This protected the country from tariffs that could have crippled its export sector and made it harder for America to project its influence. Next Beijing built alternatives it could control, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. On the military front it first invested in sea mines and long-range missiles to fend off the U.S. Pacific Fleet, then built aircraft carriers to project sea power further afield....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also Sunday's "Influential Chinese Academic: CHINA will Have To Bail-Out The U.S. (For A Price)" which referenced Doshi's book.
