China's Response To War In Ukraine

>> Glenn Tiffert: On behalf of the Hoover Institution's project on China's global sharp power, I'd like to welcome you to our first research talk of 2023. I'm Glenn Tiffert, a Hoover Research fellow, and along with senior fellow Larry Diamond, I co-chair this project. It's our pleasure today to introduce someone we've long wanted to feature in this series.

Her work is an exemplary blend of academic rigor and policy relevance, the sort many of us aspire to. Sheena Chestnut Greitens is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT's Asia policy program. She's also a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Her work focuses on national security and authoritarian politics in East Asia. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police, won a number of academic awards, and she's currently finishing a book manuscript on internal security and Chinese grand strategy. Her research has analyzed how PRC state repression affects the choices American academics make in their scholarship on China and the PRC's export of surveillance technology around the world.

But today, at what may be an inflection point in the escalating contest of wills in the heart of what the historian Timothy Schneider aptly called the Bloodlands, she joins us to discuss China's response to war in Ukraine. As a program note, we'll have audience Q&A towards the end of our session, and we hope that you'll submit your questions using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screens.

Sheena, welcome and over to you.

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thank you, Glenn, and it's really a pleasure to join you all today. I'm going to share my slides. I'm absolutely delighted to be talking to you about this question today of what China's response to the war in Ukraine has been, how we can understand what motivates that policy and where that means China is likely headed in the future.

As we come up on the one year anniversary of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I think it's important to stop and take stock of the role that a critical global actor like China has played in this conflict and the role that it's chosen not to play. And so I'll talk a little bit about that in the course of the next few minutes.

Look forward to all of the audience questions and comments. So I wanted to start by talking about how I think we can understand China's priorities prior to the invasion going into February 2022, so a year ago today, really. And I would argue that China's thinking and approach to Russia and to Ukraine were shaped by three different factors.

The first is a set of what China commonly refers to as traditional foreign policy principles. These go back to the 1950s, things like sovereignty, non-aggression, and non-interference in other countries' domestic affairs, which you will frequently hear someone like the spokesperson at the foreign ministry of the PRC mention from the podium.

And so that is a latent factor shaping Chinese foreign policy rhetoric that has existed in the background for a long time. But a more immediate factor in 2022, I think, was China's desire for domestic stability, which includes some measure of economic stability in a year of political transition.

And in a year that was already shaping up to be quite difficult for China economically due to a combination of zero Covid global developments in the global economy and some of China's own political choices that had constrained its economic growth. And all of that is the backdrop for the 20th party congress that was set to take place in October, where Xi Jinping was set to assume a third term and appoint many of China's top leaders in this political party transition.

And so I think there was a desire for some level of domestic, and probably international stability for China. And the invasion of Ukraine really called that into question very quickly. And then the final factor is probably the most visible one that we saw in February 2022, because you had this visit by Vladimir Putin to the Olympics and on February 4, the signing of what's been referred to as this no limits, high level partnership between China and Russia.

And that partnership, I would argue, has a lot of dimensions. There's a personal connection between the two leaders. They've met 30 something times in person over the course of their respective careers. It also has dimensions of sort of shared regime type and shared approaches to governance, as well as just concrete economic and security interests where the two countries are aligned.

One of the really important places where we saw alignment that was new in the 2022 joint statement was a sort of articulation of a shared threat perception of the United states that seemed to really be informing and shaping the partnership between Moscow and Beijing. And I actually wanted to quote one line from that because I think it's really telling, and I will come back to it when I talk about where China is likely to go in the future.

But the line that I think really stood out to me, and that is new language not appearing in previous joint statements, was the Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter outside interference in the affairs of sovereign countries, under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.

This is fundamentally not just about external defense. It's actually about regime security and the idea that in particular the United States on the periphery of these two countries, could pose not just an external security threat, but actually a regime security threat. And again, I think that is really important implications for understanding China's global positioning that I'll come back to in a few moments.

But if we look at China's response, it is trying to reconcile these competing priorities. It's very difficult to square this partnership with Russia against these traditional foreign policy principles. Armed invasion of another country is a pretty blatant violation of non-aggression, of non-interference in a sovereign country's external affairs, in Ukrainian sovereignty, right?

So China was immediately put in a position where it was trying to reconcile conflicting objectives. And I think what it's done is to actually disaggregate its response and to try to weigh the costs and benefits of supporting Russia in each of four different domains to see how it can extract the most benefit for China at minimal cost.

So in the information domain, Beijing has been actively supportive of Moscow. It has echoed and in some cases amplified Moscow's talking points beyond the reach that Russia would have had on its own, whether that's via social media or in diplomatic fora or in its own press statements. And that has gone up to and included repeating and amplifying Russian disinformation claims, such as the claim in the middle to late spring of last year about bio warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

So the informational domain is the area where China has been all in on its support of Russia and its support for its partnership with Russia. Similarly, diplomatic activity has been pretty supportive. The PRC diplomats have been supportive of Russia in both bilateral ties, which have remained robust. There have been high level meetings that have continued.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin had a call, I think it was on Xi Jinping's birthday in June. And so bilateral ties have remained robust, both in the frequency of contact, actually in the frequency of contact, in the level of contact. Contact and in what is actually said during those bilateral exchanges where Chinese officials have expressed very strong support for Russia.

In multilateral diplomacy, in multilateral fora, China has combined support with a certain amount of free-riding. And what I mean by that is in the UN General assembly, it's abstained a couple of times. The UN General assembly is kind of the most visible multilateral forum. But then if you drop down to some of the specialized UN or international agencies and more specialized multilateral settings, China has been much more supportive of Moscow, including willing to diplomatically isolate itself at, for example, the ICJ, where a chinese jurist was the only jurist that sided with Russia in a particular ICJ decision calling for Russia to halt its military activities in Ukraine.

And so I would say that the multilateral diplomacy has been supportive, but with just a touch of free-riding, again, to try to minimize potential blowback or costs to China and to the PRC. In the third domain, economically, China has again been very supportive of Russia on its rhetoric.

So its rhetorical opposition to long arm unilateral sanctions has been very strong and stridently voiced, repeatedly over the course of months, and including recently. And China has really continued its economic cooperation with Russia, even expanding economic cooperation in areas like agriculture and maybe energy cooperation. Again, things that benefit China and that are not likely to trigger sanctions responses.

Now, where we've seen a little bit of a limit, again, a very self interested limit on the PRC's part is that chinese, both the chinese state and chinese companies, as sort of firm actors, have continued to seek ways to benefit from and expand or pursue trade with China, but have been very careful to avoid triggering major sanctions being applied.

There are some companies that have been sanctioned for supporting the russian war effort, but us officials have also said that they don't think that this is a systematic pattern, that these are specific cases in general that they're sanctioning. And so we'll come back to this, I think, because there's an interesting question about where that might go in the next few months as the sanctions appear to be tightening.

But the way I would describe this is essentially self-interested, that Chinese companies and Chinese actors in the economic space are doing what they can to benefit economically from cooperation with Russia, up to and including providing some indirect in parts and material support to the Russian defense industry, but have tried to do so in a way that doesn't trigger sanctions.

Again, this is partly, I think, because the European response on economic sanctions was perhaps stronger than Beijing expected. And one of the implications of China needing domestic stability is that its two largest trading partners are Europe and the United States. It's gotten itself into a very tense relationship with the United States.

There's a lot of trade friction and sort of targeted decoupling going on. And so there has been, I think, some care for sanctions, sort of walking a careful line on sanctions, in part because to have the bottom drop out of your economic relationship with your two largest trading partners would have jeopardized that economic and political stability that Xi Jinping sought for the third term transition that he was undergoing in 2022.

So the economic realm has been a little bit more of a mix, and its support with a heavy dose of calibrated self interest. Then finally, on the military realm going into 2022, Russia China military relations had been on an upward trajectory. And I would describe China's response in this particular realm as maintaining that recent increase in security cooperation, but again, stopping short of direct support for the war effort that would lead to major blowback or consequences for the PRC.

But certainly we've seen things like joint exercises continue at the expanded level that they had recently sort of achieved right before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So if you look at this mix of, or this spectrum of behavior, and there were sort of three main explanations that got offered over the course of 2022 for why China was behaving in this particular manner.

One that we heard, particularly in the early months of the invasion, was that chinese leaders were surprised. They were caught off guard by Putin's decision to launch the invasion and then by the invasion's sort of short term consequences, particularly how poorly it went for the Russian military. And that explanation seems plausible.

We have some indication that perhaps Xi Jinping and the chinese leadership did not have a full read on what Russia's intentions were. But it's also clear that Russia itself and Putin seems to have been surprised by how poorly his invasion went. This initial plan to take Kiev very quickly and sort of decapitate the regime and move the conflict through to termination very quickly doesn't seem to have worked.

And so it's possible that part of what happened is that Putin conveyed some of his own misconceptions to Xi Jinping. Regardless if Chinese leaders were surprised, they've now had almost a year to recalibrate and really haven't done much recalibrating from their initial position. So this explanation really loses a lot of its power and its explanatory value the longer we get from the initial invasion, because we simply haven't seen much recalibration over time in China's position.

So that suggests at this point, there's something other than surprise driving China's behavior and its pattern of support for Russia. Another possible explanation, and this is one that I have focused a lot on in some of my previous and current work, is that features of China's personalist authoritarian system have effectively locked the PRC into a pro-Russia strategic alignment.

So Xi Jinping has put his name to this no limits, high level partnership in early February. Just can't back away from that because Xi Jinping so thoroughly dominates decision making and policy agenda setting in the Chinese political system. And there's also sort of an open question about how much information about the costs of that alignment is actually getting to Xi Jinping.

And this is often really hard for outside observers to understand. But in looking at a range of authoritarian systems over the course of history, I have consistently been surprised how poor the information sometimes is provided to the top leadership. So things that seem obvious about the costs of this alignment to us may not be reaching Xi Jinping because there's no one there willing to sort of effectively speak truth to power.

It may also just be that because Xi Jinping has set this course, no one is willing to deviate from it. So there could be a sort of domestic politics explanation that is driving a lot of this lock in effect. Third is that China's position on the war has really been shaped not just by its desires or its objectives and policy toward Russia and Ukraine, but actually toward this overarching global orientation of strategic competition with the United States.

And we see a lot of evidence for that. So the joint statement that passage I quoted at the beginning a few minutes ago, talks about Russia and China sharing a view of the United States as both an external and a regime security threat. And Under Xi Jinping, regime security has become the paramount metric by which most policy decisions are judged.

Previously, I think you could have said economic development and economic growth were the primary metric. And under Xi Jinping, part of what I'm arguing in this book project I'm working on now is that national security and regime security has really sort of overtaken economic development as the CCP's key priority and metric for success.

To see this articulation in the joint statement of a shared view of the United States as a regime security threat tells us, I think, that this is a fundamental sort of issue for China that informs and shapes its partnership with Russia. The other data points that we see on this are that China's consistent response has been to say, well, it's NATO's fault.

NATO has aggravated this. The United States and NATO have backed Russia into a corner. They had no choice, etc., etc. Again, these are talking points that echo what Russia has said about the origins of the conflict, but they also play into chinese policy and arguments about asian regional security architecture, which I'll talk more about in just a moment here.

And so this idea of competition with the United States, using Ukraine and leveraging narratives about Ukraine to make arguments about China's immediate periphery and the United States role in China's periphery, I think, also informs and shapes the policies it's adopted toward Russia and toward Ukraine. And so Ukraine becomes a data point in these larger Chinese arguments about the American led alliance and partnership network as fundamentally destabilizing and exclusive and zero sum.

It benefits a few at the expense of everyone outside that network. And that therefore, there's this need to revise global security governance which China has openly called for and which Xi Jinping himself sort of put, again, put a personal stamp on in April of 2022, two to three months after the invasion, when he launched the Global Security Initiative, a big part of which has to do with revising what China argues are inadequate global security structures and mechanisms.

Now, so these are three factors, I think, especially two and three explain some of the durability and the consistency of China's support for Russia over the past year. But I think it's important also to note that none of these predict much change in China's behavior going forward. And so the question is, is there anything that is likely to shift China away from its current pathway of support for Russia, tempered only really by PRC and CCP self interest?

And we'll come back to that, I think, in just a moment, because I don't see much likelihood that that changes, although I think China will make some tactical adjustments, especially as sanctions, regimes evolve. And now that China is through this year of political transition with the 20th party Congress over and behind Xi Jinping.

But I do want to touch briefly on the implications of what does this say? What is our understanding of China's approach to the war in Ukraine say about Taiwan? This is a million dollar question where there's tons of discussion on this topic because it's so centrally important for the security and freedom of the Indo Pacific.

But if we think about this and how China views it, one of the interesting things about this is that that joint statement sort of primes us to think that China views Ukraine and Taiwan as similar. And almost immediately after the invasion happened, China started disavowing direct comparisons and saying, no, they're totally different.

Taiwan is a matter of secession and separatism, that's not what's happening in Ukraine. And so really trying to separate and define the two conflicts quite differently. But at the same time, China has tried, right, and there's a little bit, I think, of logical inconsistency here, that China, the PRC at the same time has tried to link Ukraine to its arguments about how destabilizing American security architecture is worldwide.

Look, the American security architecture, NATO destabilized Europe, it's also destabilizing in Asia. Look at what the United States is doing. These alliances are bad for the world. And Ukraine is a data point in trying to make that broader argument that then has implications for China's regional backyard. And so I think, as we look at how China is processing the conflict in Ukraine, I do think it's watching very carefully in an attempt to draw implications and lessons for a potential crisis or conflict scenario in the Taiwan Strait.

But I think we need to be careful. And luckily, there's been a lot of good work done on this already. And I anticipate there will be even more done in the near future to really carefully catalog not just the similarities, right? These are small places that are non nuclear who are threatened by a much larger nuclear armed adversary that is intent on taking over their territory.

That basic comparison makes a lot of sense, those similarities stand. But I also think there are some really important differences that will shape which lessons translate from Ukraine to Taiwan and which don't. So the physical geography of conflict is one that people have talked a lot about already.

There's no Polish land border to bring weapons across or to evacuate refugees and noncombatants. And so both the sort of civilian noncombatant evacuation operations and resupply potentially look much different in Taiwan just by virtue of geography. There are open questions about the evolution of Chinese nuclear doctrine, the expansion of missile and nuclear programs, and what that means for managing escalation risk in a Taiwan conflict.

Third factor is that the United States security architecture actually is very different in Europe than in Asia. NATO in Europe has a sort of very specific coordination mechanism that's multilateral. And the United States has a bilateral hub and spokes model in Asia that could make coordination, even among american alliance partners, much harder to do in a Taiwan contingency.

And I know there's a lot of movement and discussion on this exact topic. So if we talk about this a year from today, that may look very different, and the assessment of how that would play out in a Taiwan scenario might look very different. But I think it is important to note that the structure is still fundamentally different, and that will have implications.

And then finally, the role of appeals to both sovereignty and democracy are more constrained in a Taiwan case. So Taiwan doesn't have a seat at the UN. There will not be the Ukrainian ambassador asking the General Assembly or the UN Security Council to pray for the soul of his Russian counterpart is not a moment, at least right now, that would be replayed at the UN in the Taiwan case.

Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign country by the majority of the international system, and that will have implications for diplomacy and conflict resolution. And then second, President Zelenskyy has very effectively leveraged appeals to democracy and a sort of pan european democratic identity, which works really well in Europe, where the majority of countries are consolidated democracies.

And that regional, direct regional military support for Ukraine has been critical to Ukraine's survival in this conflict so far, in addition to the United States role. And Asia is much more heterogeneous in terms of regime type and the level of regional commitment to democracy. And so I think we have to be very careful in assuming that that sort of appeal to democracy as the thing that's at stake would be as effective in a Taiwan scenario.

So I think Taiwan is harder, and that's important for us to pay attention to and to plan for and talk about. The final point that I wanna close on. As we think about watching China's response and figuring out what it is that China has learned from the conflict is that we need to assume that whatever it is we're learning is not necessarily the same as what the PLA or CCP is learning from this conflict.

That's a mirroring error. It's very easy to do, to say, well, you know, we've concluded this, therefore, that the PLA must be drawing similar conclusions. And I think we actually need to be pretty careful to try to take China's learning process on its own terms. The Chinese military has a process by which it has learned from conflicts like the Gulf War or the conflict in Iraq.

That process takes time, and I don't think we have enough data to understand exactly how the conflict in Ukraine and its consequences, partly because the conflict in Ukraine itself is not over. We don't really know exactly how the lessons from that conflict will shape China's political decision making or the Chinese military's planning and decision making in the event of a Taiwan contingency.

So I just think we need to be very careful to take their learning process on its own terms and not assume that they're learning the same things that we are, because those could, in fact, be quite, quite different sets of lessons. And we need to be aware of that because it will shape how we predict and anticipate PRC behavior in the event of a crisis.

I think I've gone on for just about long enough. I will stop there. And welcome, Glenn, your comments, reactions, questions, and then any dialogue with the audience. So thank you all for listening.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Sure, thank you very much, Sheena, for that great presentation. And again, I want to encourage the audience to file their questions in the Q&A by pressing the Q&A button at the bottom of your screens.

To begin with, Sheena, I'd like to sort of turn the clock back almost a decade now. Towards the end of 2013, Xi Jinping and Viktor Yanukovych signed a treaty of cooperation and mutual security guarantees between Ukraine and China in which China pledged to uphold and support Ukraine's sovereignty.

And in fact, though, this is debated also sort of extended a kind of nebulous nuclear umbrella over Ukraine in the event of threats of nuclear conflict. Now, analysts have not made as much of this, I think, as they could. Obviously, Washington and Kiev, I think, are anxious not to further antagonize Beijing and to ensure that they don't push it closer to Moscow.

But I'm just curious, in the larger discussion and framing of China's position, why this has not risen to the fore of the discussions about what China's guarantees are worth internationally and also in the larger sort of contest for the public opinion in the global south. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that question.

 

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, I do. I think it's a really important and great question, in part because I think as Ukraine has found out, you use the word nebulous, and I think when push comes to shove, nebulous doesn't hold a lot of water. And so that's the sort of just first factual observation.

I think that's an accurate characterization that countries should be careful about these nebulous commitments because they don't tend to hold up in a crisis. I think there are a couple of interesting things going on with Ukraine's approach to China. One is that we've seen, I think, Kievan treading very carefully and, as you said, trying not to antagonize the PRC.

That's quite striking because we've seen Zelenskyy and other senior officials in Ukraine several times now suggest that they would welcome China playing a mediator role. Which is actually, I think, a sort of telling offer from them, given the nature of the high level strategic partnership between China and the country Russia, that is invading Ukraine, right?

So to ask China to serve as a mediator suggests that there's some hope in Kiev that Beijing might play a role to moderate or pull back Russian behavior. I have to say I don't see much likelihood that China will play a mediator role or really that it sees much in China's self interest in getting further involved in the negotiations that could take place between Russia and Ukraine.

First, China has said consistently, this is a European problem and this should be resolved. Actually, it's not even just a European problem, right? They sort of often drop Ukraine out and say this is really a problem that should be settled between Russia and NATO, including the United States, right?

And actually the people who sometimes get left out. In one of the readouts of a call between Xi Jinping and President Biden, it was actually striking that the actor that was omitted from that discussion was Ukraine. So the expectation in Beijing almost seemed to be this very great power centric approach whereby, okay, it's NATO's fault, so NATO and Russia should settle this and over the heads of the Ukrainian government and people.

Which is very odd for a country that, again, pays such strong rhetorical service to this sort of discourse about sovereignty and all countries being sort of equal. And so that big power, great power focus on China's part that really omits ukrainian agency and Ukraine's role in determining the course of the conflict is still a little bit surprising because I think by now the Ukrainians have pretty clearly established that they intend to have the decisive say in what happens to their own country, as they should.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: That's a fair point, yeah.

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: But I think, so then the question is, what is inducing this moderation? And I think there are a couple of things. I do think there was this hope, maybe based on the memorandum that you mentioned, maybe based on China's sort of stated ambitions to play a peaceful role in the international order, that maybe Beijing actually would consider mediating.

And there was kind of some, okay, maybe we'll think about it discourse every once in a while. That never goes anywhere. So again, I think from Beijing's perspective, there's no real upside to trying to mediate. It's not historically played that role anywhere except maybe North Korea, and that hasn't been altogether successful.

So there's really not a lot of upside. It's not an identity or a role that China has commonly played in the international community. And there's a lot of downside risk if it goes wrong. And I just don't think that Beijing sees anything in it for China to assume that kind of mediating responsibility.

That said, sort of my best guess, and this is speculation at this point, to be very clear, I don't have much empirical data to go on here, is that Zelenskyy thinks it's worth trying. It's worth asking. It's worth that asking in a non-confrontational way sort of appeals to China without being confrontational.

And I do think that there's possibly some acknowledgement That China could play an important role in rebuilding Ukraine's economy and restoring some of the incredible damage that has been wrought on Ukraine as a result of the invasion. And that maybe China could be prompted or nudged later to provide increased assistance for reconstruction and rebuilding.

And that it's economic weight, the economic weight that China carries in the global environment, might make it an important actor not to antagonize. Now, that's kind of my best guess as to what's shaping Ukrainian calculations. Again, without any direct visibility into how those conversations inside the ukrainian government have unfolded.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: I want to return to that point about reconstruction in just a minute but let me flip the question that I just posed to you about sort of nebulous commitments. Let's turn that on the friendship with no limits that was declared by Putin and Xi Jinping just over a year ago.

To what extent is this alignment you've made, I think, a convincing case for China acting in its self interest. And so, to what extent is this alignment between Moscow and Beijing really just a pretty thin marriage of convenience? In some sense, you could argue this is the second time that russian adventurism has pushed Taiwan further out of China's reach.

And surely they can't be happy about that, the first time being the Korean War. And there are a lot of reasons why Russia should be, I think, anxious about China's growing strength in the relationship as well. So there's a strong argument among some analysts who say we shouldn't push them any closer together because the friction between them is enough to probably pull them apart.

But for this very peculiar set of circumstances, do you attach much credence to that? You've made the argument you don't expect China's policy to change, but the space is shrinking, at which point the platitudes that it's uttered for the last year are increasingly less convincing, I think, to everyone curious what your thoughts are on that question about how tight this marriage could be.

 

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, I view this more as a sort of, I'm using maybe overly charged language here, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I don't think this has to be a particularly comfortable relationship for it to be reasonably stable. There was a period where sino russian relations had a fair amount of friction before the rupture in 1960.

That was not an easy partnership for most of the 1950s. I think we tend to look at this, and we do see right now there is this shared personal connection apparent that seems to be functioning between the two leaders. They have alignment in terms of the way that their domestic political systems run.

But also, I think whatever some of the friction, there is a sort of shared perception of what the threat they face is and that that will hold them together for a while, even if there's a lot of internal friction about tactical things. And I do think Russia has been disappointed.

If you read some of the things that russian analysts have said, the support has been lower than what I think the russian officials hoped for. So again, the no limits partnership appears to have had some limits that were realized very quickly, perhaps more quickly than either side intended, because it's easy to say no limits.

Everything's great until a war starts, and then there are much tougher decisions to be made. So, I think Russia likely is disappointed or Russian officials likely are disappointed with the sort of limits on Chinese support. My guess is that they are going and repeatedly asking for more, and that has given China a more powerful role in the bilateral relationship.

That's not to Russia's advantage. It's yet another cost to Russia of Putin's decision to launch this disastrous invasion. So, I think all of those things are correct. I just see that this sort of overarching strategic alignment is likely to hold them together for a while, even if there's internal friction.

That's fairly significant. To your point about sort of the platitudes evaporating, I think that's also, that's one of the biggest, I think, things to watch going forward as the sanctions regime tightens. I think it may be harder for Chinese companies to, and we get more and more trade data, right, that we can analyze and look at.

I think it may be harder and harder for Chinese companies to skirt the line that a number of them have been skirting, where they'll provide parts and supplies to the Russian defense industry in ways that fall just short of a sanctions threshold. But the sanctions threshold is not static.

It's moving as well. And so I think you do see some constraining of that space where chinese companies in particular will have to make harder choices about economic access to the west. And whether that's Europe or the United States or both, those choices probably are going to get tougher.

But one of the things that I continue to be concerned about is that China has been actively sort of planning for and trying to reduce its vulnerability to western sanctions with the anti-foreign sanctions law that it passed in the last couple of years that the NPC debated in passed.

And so, this is a problem that the Chinese government has already moved to start solving and try to insulate itself. Now, it can't right now right. And Chinese actors and companies, I think, still are going to be affected and have to respond to the tightening sanctions regime. But in the long term, the effect could be to prompt the party state to try to decouple in ways on its side, in ways that reduce its ultimate vulnerability to having those sanctions applied directly in the future.

And again, that's a very tricky set of short term versus long term projections that are going to lead to, I think, just some really tricky choices for policymakers as the next year or so unfolds. It's a great question really worth watching. And I do think it's going to increasingly constrain the decision space.

So we'll see what the choices look like once people actually have to make them.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Time will tell, you make the point convincingly also that poor information flow within authoritarian regimes. Here is a critical, critical thing that we need to be aware and conscious of. I'm curious to the extent to which you would attribute ideology to also be a significant factor in China's miscalculation or misappreciation of the impact that this war in Ukraine would have on China's position with the United States and also with Europe.

China has long argued, for example, that us foreign policy is not really about values. That's just a very thin veneer on top of blatant self interest and economic hegemony on the world. And yet the values argument has played very strongly counter to economic interest in Europe, and one could even argue in the United States.

So, to what extent, really does that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding within China's foreign policy community and regime and the information its leaders are reaching about what drives the European western publics and western governments? And then if that's the case, what does it tell us about potential future conflicts in East Asia?

There are sort of frightening scenarios. Does that play out if China really doesn't understand what makes us tick?

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, I think there are great questions here, both about the thinking and the mindset of the chinese leadership and about the policy process. And just as an aside, I think the balloon incident that we've been watching also raises some of these same questions about what the sort of level of risk acceptance is on the part of the chinese leadership and how well certain things are coordinated and information is passed around and upwards within the party state itself.

So I take the information problems pretty seriously, particularly in domestic governance inside China. I think as it relates to the war in Ukraine. You can't reduce this to saying, well, Xi Jinping just doesn't understand the cost. I think the costs are pretty apparent at this point in terms, and that's why we've seen some of the calibration we have in the economic realm of, ok, I'm going to be supportive, but not in the areas that would trigger european sanctions.

I think China may have been surprised in, I think it was April at the summit with the EU, where China's lack of condemnation of Russia was really a friction point and its opposition to sanctions was really a friction point with european leaders. So I do think there was some misestimation of maybe the United States, but especially European public's and leaders' responses to the outbreak of conflict and to the invasion.

So yes, sort of the short answer is yes. I think that is concerning. It is concerning that the United States, I'm sorry that China could misread the United States level of commitment and likely mobilizational response, as well as whatever mobilizational response might take place across the Indo Pacific and the broader international community.

The one caveat I would have is that a lot of China's messaging has been aimed not at those actors, right, not at the folks that are already in the american alliance and Partnership network, but at the global south. So it's intended not to convince the people who are already sort of on the sort of insecurity alignment with the United States.

It's intended to convince all these folks who are kind of out there in an unaligned space. And the reality is that at least I haven't seen good data on how China's narratives are landing in the global south, how persuasive they are. We have anecdotal data where sometimes in South Africa and maybe in Brazil and under certain countries, certain leaders seem more sympathetic to chinese talking points.

But whether or not that is consistently true across the space that China is disseminating these narratives and this messaging to. I don't think we know, at least based on publicly available opinion data, there's very little good public opinion polling across the global south to measure what the effect of ukrainian messaging or us european messaging is versus some of the chinese narratives.

And so I actually think that's a very difficult question. But one which, you know, if I was going to pick one or two things here where I would like to get the answer to shape how policymakers approach the next year of american foreign policy. I think understanding how China's narratives are being received in the global south and across this whole swath of countries that where that messaging has been targeted is a really important question for which right now we have no good answers.

And I think that's a problem. it's problem for China, right? Because they don't know that China understands how its rhetoric is being received and how its image is being shaped. Certainly where we have seen have public opinion data, we've seen a real decline in perceptions of China. They become much more unfavorable.

But there are lots of places where that data is missing, where China has launched a really concerted information campaign. And I would love to get more data on how those messages have been taken up or rejected to guide and shape american foreign policy and the international community's response.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: I couldn't agree more. And I think you're right. There are a lot of confounding variables here. I mean, Covid also, I think impacted China's perceptions of China around the world as well. And so we need to have really good time series data to be able to disentangle those factors.

But clearly there's a contest in the global south of visions of world order at stake here that we need to get a better handle on. For the final question, before we go over to the audience. Q and A, I'd like to return to the question of reconstruction. One day this war will end, and Ukraine has paid a terrible price, a terrible human price, but also a terrible price in infrastructure.

And it seems to me that the west should be preparing much more than it is for the day when Ukraine needs to rebuild either a free and independent and whole Ukraine or Ukraine in which at least part of it is under russian domination. China, as we've seen over the last decade with the Belt and Road, is better prepared than virtually any other middle or developed income nation to swoop in very quickly with a full package of development financing and state owned enterprises that can build you a highway, a bridge or a mine overnight.

And so I think planning its incumbent upon Ukraine's western partners to begin very seriously rethinking their approach to development, finance and reconstruction to avoid a scenario in which China shows up at the table with a complete package of financing and capabilities and then begins rebuilding Ukraine to Chinese standards with the influence that the PRC has had in other countries, which would potentially exacerbate Ukraine's preexisting problems with corruption and government accountability.

And so it's about much more than the reconstruction. It's also about the kind of open, accountable, democratic governance values that we're also trying to reinforce in Ukraine. So I'm curious what you're thinking about how best to prepare for that day might be and whether you think China, a lot has changed in the last five, six years with regard to Belt and Road, if China is in the same place and would actually try to take advantage of that opportunity when the fighting stops.

 

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, the answer to that last question is yes. I think there's a high likelihood that China will position itself as a humanitarian assistance provider, but also design that assistance in ways that are maximally politically and economically beneficial to China, which is just what I would expect from the PRC and from Chinese actors or entities that might be involved in reconstruction contracts or activities.

And I think we've seen early on in China's positioning on the war already that it has chosen to emphasize that it has provided humanitarian assistance, not altogether a hugely significant amount. But its emphasis has been on, look, China's role is in providing humanitarian assistance. This is the way that we are interfacing with this conflict.

So I think you see the early seeds of that being laid out already with the assistance that China has chosen to provide. And the truth is, right, that this is, there is a sort of development and a foreign policy apparatus. It's a mix of Chinese companies and the Chinese party state that has been deployed and has had a lot of practice at offering infrastructure and construction and development projects in a lot of different parts of the world at this point.

So I think just from a sort of through line consistency standpoint, I would expect to see that same template applied to Ukraine. Yeah, I think that does raise all sorts of concerns. Now, to the extent that China's offers or engagement in humanitarian assistance or reconstruction can be made compatible with existing development banks practices and standards, and that a comparable level of oversight could be applied, then I think Chinese assistance should be welcomed.

The United States and Europe have spent a lot already on simply defending Ukraine itself that China has not spent. And so there's to some extent expecting China to step up and participate in reconstruction on certain terms, right, that are not destructive to Ukraine itself and Ukraine's political system, should probably be welcomed and encouraged.

That's a form of accountability and responsible engagement, that I think if it's possible to channel China's sort of engagement in that way, that would be good. And my sense, as I mentioned earlier, is that that may be part of what is informing Zelensky's current policies and approach to China.

That said, obviously the sort of oversight process on Chinese development assistance is inconsistent at best, and there have been a lot of reasonable concerns raised about how China does development, how Belt and Road has affected recipient countries. And I think there needs to be a pretty careful discussion and accounting and sort of tracking of that when the time comes, and that the United States and Europe, even given how much they've expended already, can't simply sort of absent themselves and sort of hand it off to the PRC.

That I think would not be a helpful way of leveraging Chinese engagement, is to just sort of outsource it. And frankly, the idea that the PRC might let an adversary take the brunt of combat costs and casualties goes all the way back to the founding of the CCP, right.

The CCP got to its position in terms of founding and running the PRC by sort of sitting back and letting the Kuomintang take the bulk of the costs of combat against Japan, against the Japanese invasion. Now, the KMT was also the government that makes some historical sense, but it's also very clear from strategic thinking at the time that, that was a deliberate choice on the part of the CCP.

And so the idea, okay, let's sit back, let other people absorb who have to absorb the costs of conflict and try to use that to our long term benefit in the aftermath is sort of, I think, it's in the earliest strands of the CCP's political and sort of foreign policy DNA.

And so I think, again, to expect anything else at this point would be sort of a misreading of the CCP's own history and approach to some of these issues, as well as just what self interest looks like as it applies to the reconstruction of Ukraine. So there's a long way of saying, yes, I think that is a concern.

There are ways in which I think China should be expected to come in and play a role that is sort of helpful to Ukraine that it has chosen not to play to date. But whether and how you would get Chinese reconstruction engagement to be channeled in those ways and with those mechanisms of oversight is really tricky and I don't know how possible it'll be.

We're going to have to find out.

>> Glenn Tiffert: I'd like to turn to the audience Q and a now. Thank you, Sheena. Let's start with a very basic question. Why is there such a focus on regime security among these regimes? Are there internal threats that are driving the focus?

 

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, so this is a fascinating question, and I do think some of it comes back to Xi Jinping, but some of it also comes back to CCP history. Under Xi Jinping, national security has become sort of the centerpiece, or a centerpiece of Xi Jinping's governance, and we can talk a lot about why that is.

I think to some extent, that has to do with his analysis and the CCP as a party's analysis of what doomed communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Lack of ideological fidelity, problems with corruption, loss of control over the coercive apparatus, right? You can take all of these postmortem diagnoses of problems with soviet communism and draw a pretty direct line to most of Xi Jinping's policy priorities today.

But this concept, this comprehensive national security concept that he premiered in 2014 really puts regime security at the heart of what China does. And if you look at how it talks about political security as the heart of national security, then you go look up what political security is, and it says, well, it's the security of China's socialist system, the authority of the CCP Central committee and Xi Jinping at the core, which means fundamentally, that's regime security.

It's not national security in the way that the United States Defense Department talks about it. And that was actually codified in a national security strategy, that China never had a national security strategy. The Politburo approved one for the first time in 2015. Again, note, it was the CCP politburo, not the PRC National People's Congress, that approved the national security strategy.

So this idea of regime security is pretty fundamental. One of the things that's fascinating about that is that it really sees internal and external security as interconnected. So a lot of external developments are refracted through the prism of how they could be destabilizing for the CCP's hold on power at home and its ability to maintain the socialist system that the CCP runs.

And so I think, again, this goes back a little bit to Xi Jinping's personality, a little bit to his, but also the broader parties diagnoses of what will keep them in power. And the sense that, yes, that's threatened, it's threatened both in a physical security sense, but very strongly in this regime security concept is also the idea of ideological contamination.

So to get back to your point about the importance of ideology, I think that China views this confrontation as a matter of ideological security and the United States as a threat to the ideological security of the Chinese Communist Party. And that, that does really exacerbate tensions and makes it hard, frankly, for the United States or any external power to reassure, right.

Sometimes we hear a discussion about reassuring the PRC about the x or y bad thing is not going to happen. But if the reference point is really, well, security to us means we stay power forever, that's not something the United States or a western democracy probably can or should promise Beijing, right?

And so that really, I think, puts some limits on the extent to which we could reassure that the CCP about its aims and objectives, either domestically or Internationally. So ultimately, the why question is a little bit mysterious, right, because it takes on. When Xi Jinping translates this sort of regime security priority into policy, it looks to outside observers often like such an overreaction.

Take Xinjiang, for example, right, the sort of grossly disproportionate level of repression that's been leveled at Uighurs. But I think it's hard for us to understand the extent of the insecurity that comes with this focus on regime security. And if you look at, again, the sort of the Marxist framework that Xi Jinping and Chinese leaders use to explain this, getting more powerful doesn't actually solve your security problems, it makes them worse.

Because there's this dialectical process by which, as opportunities grow, so do risks and threats. And so, ironically, the more powerful the CCP gets, the more endangered and insecure it may end up feeling from a regime security standpoint. And I can tell you that there's a consistent, logical architecture that sort of is the intellectual blueprint for this regime security concept.

But ultimately, I think parts of it are pretty hard for outside observers to understand. And that's part of what informs the closing comment I made about sometimes we have to take this stuff on our own terms. Whether we find it convincing or not, we have to look at it and say, is this a good guide to what China has done so far?

And how good is it at predicting what they might do in the future? Because that's ultimately what we need to be concerned about.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Great, let's actually pivot to the question of internal security. What are the key messages that China's been giving to its own people on the war in Ukraine?

And do we have any good data on the extent to which information is flowing from other sources to create cognitive dissonance or different points of view within China about whether that messaging is connecting and persuasive?

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, it's a great question. There is limited data, in part because China's domestic information environment is so controlled.

So we know that there was at least one internal directive that sort of directed media outlets and censorship organs at different platforms to not be critical of Russia and to align with the CCP's sort of official messaging. So we do know that there was at least one internal directive, presumably, there are probably even more that we haven't seen, that laid that out as the sort of the party line on the information space.

And so domestically, what we've seen in the information space inside China is a lot of consistency with the outward rhetoric. So we've seen a lot of discussion about blaming NATO, about how NATO and the United States are destabilizing and responsible for this conflict. And that China has tried to play this humanitarian role, but that this is really a European issue that needs to be resolved kind of over there.

And we don't have much data on how receptive chinese netizens or citizens have been to this messaging. But I do know that the Carter center did at least one study, one survey that suggested that these messages had been sort of were overall resonating with the people they surveyed.

Now, lots of questions about who they could survey and what people were comfortable saying to a survey enumerator who might have been asking them about this. Particularly at the time they asked, which I think was last summer or early fall. So I think we have to be very careful not to over interpret survey data on this because we know that people are very careful what they say when there is an official line that's been given.

Yeah, I think we've all seen cases or individual articles where people point out the costs, suggest privately that maybe this is more costly and that some calibration recalibration maybe is worth considering. But when we look at the public opinion data, what we see is that the survey respondents were broadly supportive both of the sort of pro Russia approach and of China's positioning on the conflict.

The only other thing I'll say is that Maria Repnikova has done some fantastic work looking at how chinese media has portrayed this conflict. One of the things she notes also is that there's a consistent absence of Ukrainian voices. There's been a little bit of that incorporated over time, but the overwhelming sort of trend is to minimize Ukrainian voices.

And that, again, kind of reinforces this narrative that the Ukrainians don't have much agency, which, again, to an outside observer, looking at how decisive the ukrainian impact on the course of this war has been is a little bit surprising. But that's the data we have right now.

>> Glenn Tiffert: We have a couple of questions related to Taiwan.

One asks you to opine or explain what China's motives are. Is it nationalistic pride? Is it looking for material gain in their designs on Taiwan? And maybe if you could compare or contrast that with the way Putin talks about Ukraine and Russia's destiny, the kind of new greater Russia idea that he's been talking about recently.

 

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a case where there's much more at stake than simple material interest. I think this really does have to do with both leaders and the leadership's sense of what their country is both sort of domestically and how they fit in the broader world.

And so for Putin, I think you're right. I think it's become increasingly clear over the course of the conflict that he's not very deterred by really high material costs. Because this is about this sort of quasi-imperial identity of Russia on its periphery and in the world, and the reassertion of Russia's sort of rightful territorial claims.

Again, in the minds of Putin and some of the russian leaders. To the extent that I think that's paralleled in China, Taiwan remains the sort of unfinished business of the Chinese revolution. And to an extent of the century of humiliation that the CCP has really used to formulate and deploy this patriotic education campaign that is now so thoroughly embedded in patriotic history, education, and patriotic red tourism sites around China.

And so remember that one of the first things Xi Jinping did publicly after he got his third term as General Secretary of the CCP was to go to Yena, right? And to take the new standing committee of the Politburo and go visit the birthplace of the CCP and of Chinese communism.

And some of these, not just one historic site, but a couple different ones. And so, you know, I think this does go back to, you know, there's this sense that, you know, Mao Zedong founded the PRC. Deng Xiaoping gave the country reform and opening. And Xi Jinping will sort of do national rejuvenation, which is a sort of very, again, nebulous sort of vision of China's role in the world.

But the specific deliverable that Xi Jinping has tied national rejuvenation to several times is Taiwan. And so I do think Taiwan is the remaining piece, right, if you look at the CCP's sort of narratives, right? Hong Kong was one of these. And the return of Hong Kong and now under Xi Jinping, really the tightening of.

Political control and incorporation of Hong Kong to the point where one country, two systems has been pretty fundamentally compromised, right? If you look at that as, again, part of this sort of restorationist project that Xi Jinping has laid out under national rejuvenation, Taiwan is the kind of remaining link in this broader historical narrative of restoration.

And so I do think that there's a historical arc and a historical nationalist arc that is both probably sincerely believed by China's leaders. And that they've also done a ton of work to push downward throughout Chinese society to the point where we've now had generations of patriotic education, which was a project that really kicked off after Tiananmen.

And so I think that also to a certain extent, it makes this issue a little more impervious to outside influence because there's not a material trade that you could necessarily offer that would solve this problem. Now, there are clear economic and security implications of who controls Taiwan, right?

I'm not putting that to the side, but as you look at CCP thinking and motivations, I do think there's more to their objectives and their aims than just those sort of material power calculations.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Right, and it changes the deterrence calculus as well then. You've made a point about how China is using this as a data point for its larger arguments tied to the global security initiative of the way that peace and security is governed globally, and in particular an argument against the us alliance system in Europe and in Asia.

Now, I've been to Europe several times in the last several months, and what's been most striking to me is how much the war in Ukraine has really changed the way that european government officials and people in the policymaking community think about China. Up until recently, China was very far away, and the primary connection with China was economic for many european countries.

But suddenly, there is a whole new dimension of what the risks of engagement with China might mean for them, and it felt much more palpable for them, too. And likewise, we've seen a lot of movement in East Asia, too, in tightening alliance structures between the various spokes in the US hub of treaty commitments there.

And so to a large extent, the war in Ukraine has kind of caused tremendous blowback and backfired for China by, I think, tightening the world in a, the western world and the liberal democracies in a stronger bond with the United States and in particular making connections that they otherwise might not have made in the past.

Jens Stoltenberg, for example, was just out in Korea and Japan arguing that Korea should supply weapons to Ukraine, too. And so there are now linkages, with the US being the connective tissue between our alliance systems in both parts of the world that did not exist before. And so this has, I think, probably ironically been very sort of unfortunate for China's interests.

So we have a question sort of related to that setup that I just described about the extent to which kind of the new agreement that Secretary of Defense, Austin, and his visit to the Philippines to expand the US presence there in the Philippines. And in particular with regard to pre-positioning of material in Taiwan, how is that being perceived by China in this larger sort of geopolitical game?

And how are the other partners and allies of the United States kind of interpreting this as well and coordinating?

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, lots of moving parts to that question.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Sure.

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Let me try to break it apart and not talk for the rest of the afternoon about that.

I'll try to keep it short. So, yes, I think broadly speaking, for the first time, we saw a NATO defense concept that included a discussion of China. And I think that was primed well before the conflict in Ukraine by some of China's other actions, whether it's Xinjiang or its treatment of Hong Kong or its behavior in the South China Sea, its punishment of South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, with economic coercion and coercive practices after some political decision was made that China viewed as unfavorable to its interests.

So all of these data points were sort of there in the background. But you're right, I do think that Ukraine really catalyzed a different sense of acuteness and urgency, maybe, in the minds of European leaders. I'm going more by what I read. I haven't been to Europe. I'm envious of your recent travel to Europe, I would like to get there soon.

But I think these broader currents really are visible and that that has crossed over into Asia, right? Where you see European navies doing joint patrols in the Indo Pacific in a way that was maybe not expected five years ago, ten years ago. And, yeah, I don't think that's a favorable security development for China, I don't think China views it as a favorable security development.

Again, this is a case where it's unclear to me how much open debate there can be, even behind closed doors in China, about the costs of the choices China is making and therefore, what kind of recalibration should be considered. It's just not clear to me that there's much capacity for introspection and recalibration.

Maybe a little bit on the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, but, gosh, that's, again, rhetorical and seems pretty marginal compared to some of the actual policy choices in question. So as it relates to the Philippines, yeah, that's a really interesting development. It reminds me, so I did some of my dissertation research on the Marcos period in the Philippines and when the United States had more bases there.

And so to have Marcos as president in the United States discussing access to various bases in the Philippines is a little bit like deja vu to my dissertation fieldwork about ten years ago. And I mentioned that because the United States has really tried for years now to reengage and to rebuild its security partnership with the Philippines.

Which really was damaged after the fall of Marcos, and the negotiations collapsed, and the Philippine constitution forbade the presence of foreign bases. So to this day, all of the American forces that come are on what we call a rotational presence. I think that's why Secretary Austin was acknowledging that the forces in the Philippines are there at the invitation of the Philippine government.

Because this is a longstanding point of sensitivity in the Philippines that has, at the time, jeopardized or significantly curtailed, terminated US access to the Philippines. And so I think acknowledging that trying to be respectful of that sensitivity and that history is a smart move by the United States, I think it's really important, because the other factor here is that the Philippines has a very powerful presidency, and so every six years, you can get big changes in the Philippines foreign policy orientation.

We saw that from Aquino to Duterte, maybe now Duterte to Marcos. I think we're still figuring out exactly what the orientation will be, but I think the United States, So the United States probably would be wise to try to build a foundation for cooperation with the Philippine, the government at various levels, not just at the very top.

And also with the Philippine people, right? Where there are longstanding economic and cultural ties. The Philippines was a US colony. And it has July 4th as its Independence Day, which is not a coincidence, right? That's part of our shared history. And so I think it's really important for the United States as it thinks about a durable security presence and partnership with the Philippines to make clear that it's at the invitation and to the benefit of the Philippine people.

Now, in terms of how China interprets that, it's not favorable, right? China went out of its way to try to reach out to Marcos and try to court Marcos, I think. In terms of inviting him to visit, and early phone calls, and things like that. But I do think the Philippines is a piece of this, the overall recognition in a number of countries in the Indo-Pacific.

That they might not be ready for a conflict that might happen sooner, or at a time that they aren't anticipating or didn't predict, right? That's one of the possible lessons you could draw from Ukraine. Is that a lot of people, including reportedly some of the folks in the Ukrainian government, were really skeptical that Putin was actually going to invade.

And yet he did in late February 2022. And so I think there's maybe a sense of like, okay, we didn't think that was actually gonna happen, and it did. Are we really understanding China's own threshold and the point at which China would engage in military action? And therefore, what implications does that have for preparation and readiness?

And realizing that preparation and readiness are a multi-year process, I think that is part of why you're seeing this movement in Japan and in Australia and in the Philippines. South Korea is a little bit different because they've got the North Korea issue that makes their role in Indo-Pacific security a little bit more complicated.

But I do think that overall recognition of, okay, we, from where we sit in various capitals in the Indo-Pacific might not be perfect at predicting China's decision making calculus. So maybe we should prepare for things a little more than we have so far. That's kind of broadly speaking, how I read that and the Philippine piece in particular.

I'll stop there, sorry. The Philippines is a fascinating place. I really enjoyed the time that I spent there doing dissertation work. So I will try not to go off on a tangent about US Philippine security ties. But it's a really important and often under attended to partnership in the US government.

And I think it's good that the United States has given more attention to it. I do think we need to be aware. Sometimes we're not very good at remembering our own history with some of our partners, and they're better at remembering it than we are. And so I think it's important to tread carefully there and acknowledge that history.

Because it shapes the stability and the durability of the US partnership with the Philippines.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you, Sheena. We've covered a lot of ground. We should have done this years ago. I hope we'll do it again. Thank you for the excellent, excellent discussion. And I'd also like to thank the staff at the Hoover Institution who organize and produced these events so flawlessly.

I wanna pivot now to the next talk in our series on February 21st at noon Pacific. Which will feature Professor Suisheng Zhao from the University of Denver, who will be discussing Xi Jinping's concentration of power and the implication for China's foreign policy. In some sense very related to the topic today.

We hope to see you then. Thank you for joining us. And Sheena, fabulous again. Very much appreciate you spending time with us.

>> Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thanks so much for having me.