China: The Party State’s Threat To Human Security

>> H.R. McMaster: America and other free and open societies face crucial challenges and opportunities abroad that affect security and prosperity at home. This is a series of conversations with guests who bring deep understanding of today's battlegrounds and creative ideas about how to compete, overcome challenges, capitalize on opportunities, and secure a better future.

I am H.R. McMaster, this is battlegrounds.

>> Jenn Henry: On today's episode of Battlegrounds, our focus is on the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China. Our guest, Tong Yi, is a Chinese human rights advocate who worked as an interpreter for Wei Jing Xiang, the prominent Chinese democracy advocate and dissident.

After translating in Wei Jing Xiang's meetings with then Senator John Kerry and assistant secretary John Shattuck, Yi was sent to a labor camp for two and a half years, she endured prolonged beatings for protesting the camp's conditions. After Yi and a fellow inmate smuggled a letter detailing the abuses, her story garnered international attention, and she was released.

She then immigrated to the United States. The Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, was founded in 1921 following a decade of profound change and turbulence in China. In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution ended nearly four millennia of dynastic rule and catalyzed anti-imperialist sentiment. Sun Yat-sen served as provisional president of the Republic of China from January to March of 1912 and was known for his three principles of the people.

In 1914, Japan seized Germany's concession in China's Shandong province. When the 1919 Treaty of Versailles did not return the concession to China, thousands of Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest. These protests grew into the nationwide May 4th movement, which called to return China to international prominence through adopting western science and democracy and abandoning Confucian ideals.

Meanwhile, Russia's 1917 revolution spread Leninist ideas eastward. Marxism, anarchism, Bolshevik ideology, and Leninist theory gained traction among Chinese intellectuals, and soviet communists helped found the CCP. The CCP grew quickly, in 1924, it aligned with the Guomindang Nationalist Party to create the first united front and eliminate the warlords they believed impeded a stable central government's formation.

On April 12, 1927, Shanghai sheik led nationalist forces to purge the country of communists in what became known as the Shanghai massacre. Civil war erupted and lasted until the CCP's 1949 victory establishing the People's Republic of China. The nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan. CCP founder Mao Zedong led China by constructing a cult of personality.

He suppressed perceived enemies, engaged in arbitrary arrests, and killed an estimated 700,000 perceived political opponents of the CCP. In his first three years, Mao initiated the great Leap Forward, a campaign spanning 1958 to 1962 to reconstruct China as a communist economy and society. The results were catastrophic, over 30 million people died in the largest famine in recorded history.

Mao then launched the decade long Cultural Revolution to purge any remnants of capitalist, nationalist, or traditionalist elements from Chinese society. An estimated 1.6 million people were killed and tens of millions persecuted. The US and China began secret negotiations in the early 1970s as President Richard Nixon sought to counterbalance soviet influence in Asia and resolve the Vietnam War.

National security adviser Henry Kissinger visited Beijing secretly in July 1971, and Nixon visited China in February 1972 in the first high level contact between the two countries. Mao died in 1976 and on January 1, 1979, the de facto CCP chair Deng Xiaoping and President Jimmy Carter established formal diplomatic relations.

In the 1980s, Deng attempted to liberalize China's economy from central planning to market orientation and opened China to foreign investments and ideas. Yet political reforms lagged, students led demonstrations in response calling for individual rights and freedoms. The CCP heavily suppressed the demonstrations and party elders forced the de jure general secretary, Hu Yaobang to resign in 1987, Zhou Ziying succeeded him.

Two years later, Hu died and became a martyr for liberalization and democratization. Following a tradition of using sanctioned public mourning as an opportunity to express dissent. Students came to Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu and call for reforms. They remained for weeks, on June 4, Deng ordered martial law and demanded the Chinese military regain control of the area.

The People's Liberation army entered central Beijing with tanks, crushed numerous protesters, and opened fire. Hundreds of individuals were killed, similar protests outside of Beijing were also brutally crushed. Zhao was removed and succeeded by Zheng Zemin who largely continued Deng's policies. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States pursued engagement with the CCP based on the hope that increased economic and diplomatic interaction with China would liberalize the country.

In 2001, the US cemented China's status as a most favored nation, further integrating the country into the global economy in the hopes of promoting democracy and economic reform. President Bill Clinton advocated for economic and strategic partnership between the US and China and effectively endorsed China's accession to the World Trade Organization.

In 2002, Hu Jintao succeeded Zhang and prioritized economic growth and poverty reduction through his harmonious society policy. Xi Jinping succeeded Hu in 2012 and consolidated power eliminated his political rivals and accumulated several top positions in CCP leadership. Xi, like Mao, has promoted a cult of personality. He has cracked down on dissent, human rights advocacy, and freedom of expression while perfecting a technologically enabled police state and extending repression to Hong Kong.

He launched the Belt and Road Initiative which seeks to expand China's global influence through infrastructure projects. China under Xi has built and weaponized islands in an effort to control the South China Sea, and his soldiers bludgeoned Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier. The CCP maintains control through manipulation of history, brutal repression, a sustained campaign of propaganda, continuous surveillance, and the weaponization of social networks.

We welcome Tong Yi to discuss the history of the CCP, the competition with China, and the prospects for human freedom.

>> H.R. McMaster: Tong Yi, welcome to battlegrounds, it's an honor to host you today, and it was a real pleasure to meet you when we testified together before the select.

Committee on the competition with the Chinese Communist Party. Your testimony was really brilliant and heartfelt and important, and it's wonderful to be able to follow up with a discussion with you on battlegrounds. Welcome.

>> Tong Yi: Thank you so much, General McMaster. It's such a pleasure to see you again this month online.

It's a great honor to be invited by you to be on this program. Thank you.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, hey, the honor's mine. And, the last time we talked, we talked about really how we got here today, and we discussed really the assumption that dominated America's approach toward the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, since the end of the cold War.

And that fundamental assumption was that China, having been welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules, and then as China prospered, it would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance. And I'd like to just ask you, what's your view of how we got to where we are today?

What was wrong with that assumption? Why did leaders in the United States, I think we could argue, hold onto that assumption for too long, even after it was clear that assumption was false?

>> Tong Yi: Yeah. The problem with the assumption was that fundamentally misperceived the nature of the Communist Party of China.

From its roots in the 1930s until the present day, the goal of this group has not been national welfare for China, but extension of the wealth and the power of its old people, and specifically the families that ruled the group. In the 1940s, as armies of the KMT nationalists and the a bombs of the US defeated the Japanese, the CCP took ruthless advantage of an opportunity to grasp power in all of China.

After which, in the 1950s and the 1960s, it launched a series of cruel campaigns, including the very quixotic great leap forward that pursued power for the CCP elite. As in the mafia, which it resembled Struggle with external enemies soon give way to rivalry and betrayal among the red families themselves.

The big mistake of foreigners was not to see the CCP for what it was. They took it to be a more or less normal national government and were deluded by its language that claimed itself to be the People's Republic of China with the People's Liberation Army, and so on.

When in fact the government, the army, the land, the economy, and almost everything else was the private property of the families that ran the party. After Mao died and the CCP announced a new phase of reform opening around 1980, many westerners, partly from naivete and partly self congratulation, assumed that, uh-huh, now they're turning to be more like us.

They now appear to be pursuing modernization, which would mean probably everything that came along with the modern world. But that was not the CCP's aim. The aim was still as from the 1930s on, the wealth and power of the red family elite and the means, as always before, were be as ruthless as necessary.

The question of why US leaders held onto their wrong assumption for so long is not something I can answer from direct experience, but from reading and from indirect experience. I do have some opinions. Nixon's and Kissinger's obsession with the Soviet Union distorted their perception of China. Seeing China only as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union, they did not look into what the CCP actually was.

They thought they were dealing with the nation, not with the top downs in the mafia of red families. The Tiananmen massacre in 1989, followed by the collapse of eastern european communism and then the Soviet Union itself, should have allowed us leaders to change their policy. The moral bankruptcy of the CCP had been put on display and the need for a counterbalance to the Soviet Union had disappeared.

This was a golden opportunity for the US to make a difference, and people like me could not understand why President Bush and Clinton did some of the things that they did. A few weeks after Tiananmen massacre, Bush sent emissaries to Beijing in secret to assure Deng Xiaoping of continuing us dedication to good relationships with him.

Clinton defeated Bush in an election while promising to deal differently with the butchers of Beijing. But then in 1994, abruptly decided to delink trade policy from human rights, ending in one fell swoop. The US practice, which had been very effective of conditioning most favored nation trading status on the CCP's behavior in human rights.

It took some time for people like me viewing these things from a far in China to realize that principle had been sacrificed for greed. The allure of China, both as a potential market and as a huge pool of high quality and low wage labor for manufacturing, was overwhelming for people with dollar signs in their eyes.

Some must have noticed that the low wage labor was kept in line by an authoritarian government that had no use for things like OSHA rules, independent courts, free unions or a free press, and must have felt guilty. And perhaps the guilt was assuaged by the thought that in the long run, economic growth would eventually lead to political change, a rising middle class would lead to democracy.

But that did not happen. And if the US had understood the CCP, probably it might have seen in advance of that wouldn't happen. The newly wealthy families in China are precisely the CCP families, and if they are not, the CCP buys them off. And if that does not work.

The CCP harasses them and imprisons them no differently from the way it represses political dissidents. Perhaps the biggest mistake of us policymakers to allow the CCP, under the label of China, into WTO in 2001. Anyone who had understood the history of the CCP would not even have expected to follow rules.

Rules like armies or political factions, are things that you work around in order to win, the CCP's economy took off after 2001 and came to rival that of the US. Except for a few clear eyed thinkers such as Robert Lighthizer, few in the US predicted that China would so quickly become a peer competitor of the US.

Lighthizer has estimated that the US has transferred at least $300 billion annually to China through theft of intellectual property. The harm to the US has been well documented, US manufacturing capacity has been hollowed out, millions have lost their jobs.

>> H.R. McMaster: You've given us so much there, that's brilliant, by the way.

And I'm just thinking of the contrast between your description of the party and the history and the way that Xi Jinping portrays it to the Chinese people and the world, right? You've really countered the narrative of the century of humiliation in which all of the ills that visited China were due to colonialism rather than colonialism, certainly.

But how about the destructive nature of the party? I mean, I think its important for our viewers to understand that the Chinese communist party has killed more people than Stalin and Hitler combined in the form of starvation and murder during the great leap forward in the cultural Revolution.

And you're bringing to mind for me some really great books that set the record straight, I think pretty well. I really like John Pomfret's book the beautiful country in the Middle Kingdom, I think is a great work. Our colleague Elizabeth Economy has two great books on the third Revolution and then China today and looking to the future, Frank Dikotter's work on his volume history of the Chinese Communist Party.

I'm thinking of Rush Doshi's book the Long Game, where he lays out this narrative. These are all primary source books, books that go to primary sources. I think there is so much misunderstanding out there, and what you really pointed out is, hey, the Chinese Communist Party is not just communist in name only, right?

It's not as if it's not like doctor evil would say that they're not the Diet Coke of communism, they're the real thing. And so I would like to ask you maybe to talk a little bit more about what motivates the party. Because when you look at the party and you say that doesn't make sense, because we do still tend to mirror image, I think this is one of the reasons why we didn't get it in terms of challenging this assumption we've talked about.

But we tend to think that it doesn't make sense that they did zero COVID, right? It doesn't make sense that they crack down on the tech sector. It doesn't make sense that they act in ways to restrict investment in China when they wanted to crack down on Bain and the other western companies that are there to provide some degree of transparency into Chinese companies and for investors in China.

But why does it make sense to the Chinese Communist Party to take these actions? What drives them, and why do they make, they being Xi Jinping, right, and those around him, why do they make the decisions that they make?

>> Tong Yi: Glad that you mentioned so many wonderful books, James Mann's, about Facebook that's published around 1998 that laid out all the US policies from Kissinger, Nixon until Clinton.

That was a really brilliant book, after reading it, I got a lot of it, too. And another one is Princeton professor Aaron.

>> H.R. McMaster: Friedberg.

>> Tong Yi: Friedberg.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> Tong Yi: Getting China wrong, really, really a great book, also, the CCP's approach to the world is simple, grab, monopolize, and maintain power.

Special care is given to controlling any group that is based on cultural or religious values. The values of Han nationalism and money making are largely given free reign. But if you belong to an organized religion or a minority culture, you will be watched and might suffer harsh and cruel repression as the Falun gong and weavers in Xinjiang have been.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: And the Tibetans, I would say, too, right?, absolutely right.

>> Tong Yi: Right, every person in the CCP ruling structure serves at pleasure of his or her superior in this structure. So the decision he or she makes are aimed overwhelmingly at pleasing the superior. The top leader lacking a superior, so must look around him, at his peers at the top, who are also his potential rivals.

Mao was obsessed by fear of rivals around him, Xi Jinping cannot but have similar fears. CCP decisions are sometimes made not because of changed perception of the outside world, but because of the mechanisms of decision-making by the party of one, which is Xi Jinping.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I mean, these are, I think these are really important points because what the party fears, I think, in part, is being seen to have been wrong, right?

The party has to be right about everything, and that's the nature of a Marxist Leninist system. I'm thinking about, I think it was two years ago, I can't remember exactly when it was the anniversary of Marx's death, and Xi Jinping gave this big speech in front of a huge portrait of Karl Marx.

And, of course, he's created this whole body of Xi Jinping thought on communism with Chinese characteristics. And I think when we look at it, we think, communism is passe, right? Didn't we get over that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they think that this Chinese communist party is communist in name only.

But could you explain a little bit more about the ideology of the Chinese communist party. Is Xi Jinping really a Marxist Leninist, and what is your assessment in terms of the nature of the regime and the ideology that drives and constrains Chinese communist party leaders?

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, I recently finished a new book by William Inboden about Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Great book.

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, great book, where I learned that Reagan labeled China's government, quote, so called communism, unquote. He saw it as different from Soviet and Eastern European communism. Reagan had a point, I don't think any of the CCP's top leaders have been great students of Marxism.

In fact, dissidents within the CCP often become dissidents precisely because what they learned from Marx was different from what the top leader was feeding them. Still, we cannot say Leninism is a thing of the past in China, in the 1950s, the CCP borrowed its basic governing model from the Soviet Union, and elements of the model survive today.

Mao also borrowed control techniques from Stalin, such as the idea that writers are engineers of the soul and that executions are a good way to handle opponents. Civilian's technology has, in a sense, helped the CCP to push Leninism beyond what the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe were able to achieve.

It would be absurd to call Xi a Marxist in anything but the most superficial sense. His formal education lasted only to junior high school. So on the Internet today, the term elementary school graduate has become a sensitive phrase, subject to monitoring and deletion. There are a lot of popular jokes about Xi's deficient education.

Xi's move to model himself after Mao Zedong seems an obvious search for grievous or charisma that he does not naturally possess. He published books of his speeches, thoughts and directives and mobilizes not only party members but even schoolchildren to study Xi Jinping thought. Poster boards of quotations from Xi Jinping on roadways oblige a person to record the cultural revolution.

In fact, study sessions that students, teachers and civil servants must attend every week have in many cases be counterproductive. They offend people who see them as a waste of time. Many Chinese think that Xi is afraid of a rich middle class in China because they will not be easy to control.

They think Xi's plan may be to keep the populace relatively poor, thinking about their stomachs all the time, and spend the state's money on military buildup and bribing foreign countries for their support and resources. But communism is still the ideology in China in the sense that CCP controls all of society.

The west has to recognize this fact and deal with China accordingly.

>> H.R. McMaster: There's so much to talk about here. Remember when the students had an uprising, not uprising, but protests, because they thought the government wasn't Marxist enough, and the party was just as brutal cracking down on the left wing demonstrations as they have against others.

And I'm thinking about gosh, this point that you made, I've not heard other people make this, that maybe he doesn't want a strong middle class. I mean, I think that there is conventional wisdom that Xi Jinping is very anxious about growing out of the middle income trap, and generating enough domestic demand such that China's insulated from any kind of economic or financial consequences of its aggression abroad.

But I'm thinking now, youth unemployment is about 25% in the country between, I think, the ages of 18 and 25 years old. And Xi Jinping recently said, what did he say? What's the phrase in Chinese that he's told young people? He said?

>> H.R. McMaster: What does that mean?

>> Tong Yi: That means, live a very poor, hard life, just endure that hardship as a true communist youth should go through.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Right, like suck it up, I guess he's telling them.

>> Tong Yi: Yes, that's the phrase.

>> H.R. McMaster: And I don't know if that plays well, with the younger generation. And he is, of course, he was himself subjected to the cultural revolution, and his family was abused terribly as I think his sister committed suicide over it.

And he was estranged from his mother, who had to denounce him and his father during one of the struggle sessions. It's really odd, it's almost like a strange version of Stockholm syndrome that he has here with the party. But of course, we're talking about the party and its roots and Maoism and the cultural revolution and the great leap forward.

But also when I visited Beijing with President Trump and they gave us a tour of the forbidden city, and I was struck by how much even the architecture there evokes kind of a sense of hierarchy, right? It sort of is meant to promote harmony, but that harmony comes from deference to a central authority.

And so could you talk maybe about how the Chinese communist party's authoritarianism comes from obviously, the party's past, but even might even go beyond that or further back in time to the imperial culture of China?

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, certain features in Chinese tradition have helped the CCP to rule China.

Respectful authority is certainly one, as you mentioned, sacrificing individual interests to the group, meaning to the authority figure that rules the group, is another. Chinese tradition also allows nepotism to trump meritocracy, hypocrisy and two face personality also thrive in the Chinese cultural environment. All of these result in attractive elements in Chinese culture helped the CCP.

Xi Jinping recently hosted the leaders of five former soviet countries from the ancient Silk Road for a banquet in Xi'an. You saw the fanfare there?

>> H.R. McMaster: I did, and I thought I kind of liked it because it was also a bit of an offense to Vladimir Putin in terms of displacing Russian influences, Central Asia.

 

>> Tong Yi: Right.

>> H.R. McMaster: So what was your assessment of it? Because he did evoke sort of images and imagery from-

>> Tong Yi: From Tang dynasty.

>> H.R. McMaster: The Tang dynasty.

>> Tong Yi: Like clothing and flags and images. He was stressing Confucianism, even though blithely overlooking the Confucianism was criticized throughout China's 20th century and mightily attacked by Mao Zedong.

Henry Kissinger recently commented in the economist that China is more Confucian than communist, but China is far less Confucian than our Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. It was just, I think, image play to play up China's claim that it has 5,000 years of history. Therefore, we are superpower, we have the credit or history to claim that.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Right, and so much of the party's behavior, conduct, philosophy cuts against Confucianism. But I'd love to hear what you would say to Americans, right? So we're talking about the Chinese Communist Party, we're talking about the flawed assumptions that have underpinned our approach to the party. We neglected kind of the nature of the party, its ideology, what drives and constrains the party.

Why do you think this is important to Americans? I mean, I think when you look just in recent years, there's been a big shift I think now Americans have come to the conclusion, except maybe for a few, a few on wall street who still haven't gotten the memo yet, that the Chinese Communist Party is hostile to US interests in the world.

If you just look back at COVID foisting COVID on the world, going after anyone who was trying to ring the alarm bells about COVID persecuting Chinese journalists and doctors who were trying to do so, subverting the World Health Organization, and then adding insult to injury with this wolf warrior diplomacy.

But then it wasn't just informational aggression, it was cyber aggression huge cyber attacks in the midst of the pandemic, and then physical aggression. Bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier, laying claim to the ocean in the South China Sea, and ramming and sinking Vietnamese vessels. The various threats to Taiwan and also to Japan and South Korea, with these overflights and threatening military maneuvers and so forth, you have now these campaigns of economic coercion that they've conducted also against Australia, Estonia.

The list goes on and on and I think Americans have come to the conclusion that the CCP is hostile, I think, to the international order that has benefited it and the world. But what do you say to Americans who might think, well, why do we care? Why do we care what China does?

We have our own problems what should Americans care about the nature of the CCP and its actions?

>> Tong Yi: To your credit, General McMaster, I think when you were the national security advisor, you issued a report about, in a sort of a national security assessment report and.

>> H.R. McMaster: National Security Strategy from December 2017.

And just It makes great beach reading, doesn't it? I recommend it to all of our viewers.

>> Tong Yi: Right, it was really the foundational document to claim that CCPs expansion into the world is inimical to us interests. The CCP has a clear record of breaking rules and promises. Xi promised Obama not to install military equipment or facilities on artificial islands in the South China Sea, but then did exactly that.

The CCP joint WTO promised all sorts of market opening, but then it didn't do it. It promised autonomy for Hong Kong until 2047 and drastically broke the promise in 2020. As the CCP grows richer and stronger, it bullies other countries. When a Chinese fishing boat entered Japanese waters and the Japanese dared to object, the CCP blocked the export of rare earth minerals to Japan.

While Australia dared to inquire about the origins of COVID-19 the CCP banned imports of Australian coal and wine. Taiwan has been bullied by China for decades. Xi had broadcast his willingness to retake Taiwan by force during his reign, already we have witnessed PLA planes and navy vessels flying close to Taiwan's airspace or waters almost on a daily basis.

Now they're challenging US airplanes and naval vessels in the international waters around South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Even in the US, in the media, in political circles and in universities, the CCP has been using what it calls united front efforts to encourage politicians, professors, students and honorary people to be favorable to the CCP and to accept its ways of thinking.

If China wins the competition with the US, the world will not be the same as the one we have been living in everybody's freedom will be checked by the CCP. That kind of dystopia world is something we must resist at all costs.

>> H.R. McMaster: You know, Tony, I'm also reminded of some of the egregious behavior by the United Front Work department and setting up these police stations internationally, where they.

Where they focus on policing the Chinese diaspora, but also, in our case, Chinese American citizens, intimidating them, trying to get them to fall in line. And I think I'd like to just make this point at this time I think what's one of the greatest strengths of our country is that we do attract some of the best and brightest people from around the world.

And one of the great strengths of our nation are our Chinese Americans and also Chinese residents who are here from China. And I think what's really important is to distinguish between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party. And I think it's actually unfair to Chinese Americans and actually kind of bigoted to assume that they would in any way support the actions of the Chinese Communist Party.

Obviously, it cuts against their values as Americans and why they came to this country to begin with so I just wanted to make that point so that there's no confusion about the nature of our conversation. I think that also on universities, there has been this effort by the party to kind of police the thoughts of Chinese students studying in America.

And I think every university president and provost and deans of schools, you have to really work hard to ensure that Chinese students who are here enjoy the full experience of freedom of speech and expression and freedom of thought. But really, what I am dying to talk to you about is all of this but what I know the least about, and I think probably most of our viewers know the least about, is what the heck is going on inside of China.

It's hard for anyone to understand what's going on because of the this technologically enabled police state, the fear that people have of saying the wrong thing, and the party's ability to use technology to police even the thoughts almost, of the people. We did see the white revolution a little bit in the protests associated with the zero COVID policies.

But how would you describe the dynamics inside of China? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the party? Are the Chinese people happy or unhappy with the party, what are their perceptions of the CCP these days?

>> Tong Yi: It's very hard to penetrate China these days because the Xi Jinping's China is super sensitive to national security.

The recent Anti-Spy Law makes a reporting of almost anything inside China to people outside China potentially dangerous. The reason for this anti spy law and the recent crackdown on due diligence firms such as means, you know, obeying the consulting firm, in my view, is that Xi wants to ban access to economic and social statistics, Statistics that would reflect poorly on his zero COVID policies.

Over the last three years, China's economy has not recovered from the zero COVID era as well as some expected. Instead of expanding at six to 8% a year, as was common in the past, China might be heading toward growth 2 or 3% or even negative growth. In particular, the real estate market now is in virtual free-fall.

The manufacturing segment has slipped, and the export industry is under great strain due to the reorientation in supply chains by western countries. Enormous debt is crippling households and local governments. Cities across country have cut benefits for civil servants and delayed salary payments, in some cases for teachers. Families are hoarding cash instead of consuming things because the social safety net is so unreliable.

2023 is also the first year in which China's population has declined. Very worrisome for the Chinese leadership is that the official unemployment rate for those who are 16 to 24 years old is around 40. Some say it's to 40%, close to 40% in reality, she has said, the young should learn to, quote, eater bitterness.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: What we're discussing, yeah, absolutely.

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, evoking a phrase that was used during the cultural revolution when young people were sent to the countryside. Such a policy today would make young people really angry. Raised in relative comfort, they would not easily accept cultural revolution treatment. In March and April this year, we also saw white hair protests against cutbacks in medical care in some cities.

The elderly protesters said their years of labor had earned the services. They were not asking for anything that wasn't rightly theirs. It's hard to say that many people in China are happy these days. Some are trying in every way they can to get out of the country. That's why we witnessed in recent months in the southern border.

There are so many Chinese are crossing the border now.

>> H.R. McMaster: Tongi, that's just a great analysis. I think that what you've described to us is the difficulties the party has encountered, in large measure because of their race to surpass the United States, right. They've got mountains and mountains of local debt that were built up because of investment they've made to keep the economic growth really artificially high.

The government is not really good at resource allocation, and so they've wasted a lot of these resources. You see that playing out of the real estate sector and really the inability to grow out of that middle income trap, where as wages rise, manufacturing in China becomes less competitive.

And so either you have to increase your productivity, which you cant do when you crack down on the tech sector. Or you have to create internal demand, domestic demand, which isn't happening because people are holding on to cash because they have this uncertainty about their future. So I do think it's a perilous time, and it's a perilous time because of the party.

And we see this happening in the big cities of China. And I've heard that it's even worse in the third tier cities, where they've overbuilt. And there are these empty buildings and spare capacity. And so I just think that what you've described to us is important, because these authoritarian, statist mercantilist models look strong from the outside, but they're actually quite brittle, I think.

And our democracies look kinda ugly. Our free market system looks ugly, but actually, we're pretty resilient, right. Because we have mechanisms for self correction and reform short of revolution. So I just wanted to also talk to you about. We have to talk about, this is how the party victimizes its own people, right.

So I think that by being against the Chinese Communist Party, I think that makes you for the Chinese people and not just kind of this, the Han majority. Which is what the party uses, is try to get everyone to conform to this sort of this Han nationalist sort of preoccupation or ideology in the big cities, but in the rural areas.

And could you tell us about the plight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and what's happened in Tibet? What's happening to freedom in Hong Kong?

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, okay. To answer your question, let me bring down into categories of the different group of people. The first, the rural people. These are mostly poor people who live without a safety net.

Previous premier Li Keqiang revealed last year that there were more than 600 million Chinese who earned less than 1,000 Yuan, around $140 monthly.

>> H.R. McMaster: If I could just interject for 1 second. This is around the same time. Remember that Xi Jinping had said, hey, poverty is over, right?

We won, right?

>> Tong Yi: Exactly, it's just barely above the international poverty line, which is $2 per day. Their condition will worsen as China's economy turns down. Xi Jinping fearing a loss of grain supply if international conflict should arise. These states has made a plan to use more farm fields for grain and has dispatched armies of agriculture police to mandate to farmers what grain should be grown on what land.

This is a new phenomenon. It's a major reversal policy that have held since the 1980s. I predict there will be a lot of misery for the rural population, for Xinjiang weavers, and, to some degree, Tibetans. The CCP has installed digital surveillance extensively inside Xinjiang, forced everyone to install civilians apps on their phones and put millions of weavers into concentration camps.

While they are forced to relinquish their own religion and languages and to learn CCP ideology and pledge loyalty to Xi. We in the west have heard numerous reports on these conditions but people in China where the news is strictly blocked know virtually nothing of it. This is really, really bad for China.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: I think this gets to the point I wish we would do more to poke holes in the firewall, the information firewall.

>> Tong Yi: Yes.

>> H.R. McMaster: In China and it is genocide. You could call it slow genocide, whatever you wanna call it. But also these reports of forced sterilization for example and of course the forced labor, the slave labor.

It's terrible and I think sometimes we lose sight of it efforts in the news cycle for a while we forget about it kind of we've. We've forgotten about Hong Kong, I mean, could you talk a little bit about Hong Kong? What's happened there? I mean, I think of some of the real leaders of the advocates for citizens rights there who are now unfairly imprisoned.

I think it's almost like we've forgotten about Hong Kong, too.

>> Tong Yi: Right, Hong Kong, China has imposed a national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, basically ending the one country, two system that promised to Britain in the 1980s. And there are now more than 1,400 political prisoners there.

The most famous, of course, is Jimmy Lai, who is a dear friend to me, a billionaire who escaped China with Wang Yuan as a young teen and then educated himself and rose to be a visionary midia tycoon. After he saw what happened in Tiananmen, he was determined to oppose the CCP.

He sold his clothing brand and founded the largest Hong Kong newspaper, Apple Daily. He stayed in jail for more than 860 days now and is still waiting for his trial for so-called national security offenses. The world has witnessed the demise of free Hong Kong and has seen clearly how the CCP broke its promise that it reached with Britain in the 1980s.

That betrayal, of course, is a clear warning to Taiwan, the free Chinese-speaking democracy that lies across the Taiwan street, where all the international concern right now is focused on the Taiwan issue.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, Jimmy Lai had just visited Hoover right before he was imprisoned again for this long stretch of time.

And I'm thinking just, it was recently the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square. And I saw that the Hong Kong police were stopping and detaining anybody who were black, for example, or anybody who appeared in some way to be commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre. And this is just an indication in Hong Kong, but it's really expanding across the whole country how they employ this Orwellian surveillance system, technologically-enabled, really worse than Orwell ever imagined.

 

>> Tong Yi: Right.

>> H.R. McMaster: The ability to stifle human freedom, to almost police people's thoughts, to make sure that there can't be any kind of an organization against the party. So could you explain the party's mechanisms for control? We talked about a little bit when you said it's really hard to figure out what the Chinese people are thinking, but how does the party maintain its grip on power?

 

>> Tong Yi: Whether CCP fears most is its all people, not the United States. And this means that maintaining control inside China is its ultimate mandate. Mao imported the Soviet police state from Stalin in the 1950s, and the CCP security apparatus has been strong since then. Now with the technology imported from companies such as Cisco, surveillance cameras are prevalent in every corner of Chinese cities.

Monitoring apps during the pandemic were installed in everybody's cell phone, further enhancing CCP control. The CCP also invented a social credit scoring system. People who offend the government get low Social Security scores that can impede their abilities to buy an apartment or a train ticket. A digital dictatorship even beyond what George Orville imagined in his novel 1984 is being realized in China.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: I think it really is unwise to just invest in China broadly at this point, but especially in these companies that have been part of establishing the police state. I'm thinking of anybody who invested in Hikvision or Sensetime. I mean, I'm sure didn't know it at the time, but they have actually enabled this sort of extinguishment of human rights, the campaign of genocide against the Uighurs.

So I think investment in China should be an ESG issue in American boardrooms. And I think we just have to have more of these conversations and stop, sort of, in many ways, underwriting our own demise and underwriting the demise of the Chinese people. I think your comments also tell us, hey, pay attention to supply chains and ensure that you're safeguarding your own privacy, but also data and technology that's critical to your business or to anything.

So what can we anticipate about the future? What is the party's trajectory? I'm gonna ask you to do the impossible, right? I mean, to predict the future, but what do you anticipate the party doing both internally, we just talked about how they establish and maintain control, but externally as well.

And also, as you're thinking about your answer there, you maybe think of another book, this is Suleiman Wasif Khan's book, Haunted By Chaos. And it's really a whole book about the party really being motivated principally by this fear of losing control. But okay, again, unfair question, but how do you see the future?

 

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, lemme just give my a little bit opinion here. Things do not look rosy for Xi Jinping now. The urban public is still angry about his COVID policies. The economy has been losing steam, and he has been, importantly, responsible. His policy debacles caused him to feel insecure about his hold on power.

He mobilized the country to study Xi Jinping thought. He arranges that his books be bestsellers in China. Some of his yes men are pushing for a mild style cult of personality. Silly practices from the Cultural Revolution, such as weekly study sessions for civil servants, are resurfing. Speaking as an American citizen, I am actually happy, in a sense, to see Xi wasting the time and energy of his population on useless things like Xi Jinping thought, this will make our competition with the CCP easier to win.

The stupidity will weaken the Chinese economy, frustrate its population, and stimulate unrest around the country.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yes, sometimes I also think just humor is a good thing. I remember when Xi Jinping got really upset when he was portrayed like Winnie the pooh, and we know the Chinese Communist Party has no sense of humor, no sense.

So I guess a related question, okay, what do we do about it? So what we being not just government leaders or people in academia or, we hear it, whoever thinking big thoughts. But what do you think the American people's responsibility are people from like-minded nations to private sector leaders, who make big decisions on investments or whether or not to engage in partnerships or to accept Chinese investment.

What advice do you have about what to do about the problem set that we've talked about? Right, a regime that's hostile to our interests internationally and is extinguishing human freedom within China.

>> Tong Yi: The US should stop playing with the CCP on a non-level playing field. A principle of reciprocity should be enforced.

For example, the CCP does not allow Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube inside China, and we should definitely not allow TikTok or WeChat inside the US.

>> H.R. McMaster: This is our friend Bob Lighthizer. This is his favorite word, reciprocity. Absolutely.

>> Tong Yi: Exactly.

>> Tong Yi: Views on TikTok and WeChat that CCP disliked are deleted from those platforms, which therefore makes them into a one-way propaganda megaphone for the CCP.

If they were two-way, they would be channels through which views that differ from the CCPs could penetrate China. But they're not. This is not unfair. Not only unfair to the US, but in principle, a fundamental violation of free speech. In 2021, the de minimis exception for trade with China led at least $188 billion of goods into the US without any paperwork or tariffs.

That made it possible for Chinese apps such as Pinduoduo, Tamu, and Shine, which offered extremely low prices for everyday goods to become so popular in the US.

>> H.R. McMaster: And even advertised during the Super Bowl, right?

>> Jenn Henry: Right, this is a stupid rule. I thought that Lighthizer said it was put up in 2015.

That allowed the CCP to exploit a trade advantage as well as to collect the private information of many American consumers. American universities need to be aware of whom they're training in STEM fields. How many PhD students bring their US founded learning back to China for the use of American adversary?

Immigration law should be revised to reflect on how we attract and deploy talented Chinese students. I believe we should allure more Chinese students to learn history, political science, journalism, and law. These are the really important frontier to nurture Chinese people's views on democracy and how democracy in a real world really work, like in the United States.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: And I hope they get that at our universities. Sometimes I worry about the curriculum in US universities, but hey, I agree with you. And I do think that maybe companies and FBI can do due diligence. But more Chinese students is better and I think keep more of them here.

If we have Chinese engineers who are trained here, you'll get H-1B visas as long as they're not PLA scientists or MSS agents.

>> Tong Yi: I want to add more, the CCP threat to the US interests has reached a degree where the whole of society approach should be used. Each US citizen needs to be aware of the threat, and should be ready to do what he or she can.

And also cannot be overstated how important it would be for the Chinese public to have better access to the truth. It is vitally important, one way or another, to dismantle the great firewall, as you mentioned previously. The more the Chinese people know the truth, the easier many things will become.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Absolutely. Tong Yi, I can't thank you enough. We've covered a lot of ground and you have explained so clearly I think, the nature of the challenge in one place, in one interview, I think with a higher degree of clarity and comprehensiveness than I've heard really anywhere else.

But I'd like to just ask you one last question. What did we not cover? What should I have asked you that you'd like to share with our viewers?

>> Tong Yi: Yeah, I would like to highlight WeChat's pernicious effect on Chinese diaspora around the world. WeChat's presence in the West hurt our interests.

Most of Americans don't use WeChat, like you probably not using WeChat.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I'm kinda rusty on my Chinese.

>> Tong Yi: Right.

>> Tong Yi: Right, so they don't understand why WeChat is harmful for the US.

>> H.R. McMaster: Right.

>> Tong Yi: But almost every Chinese-American uses Wechat to connect with families and friends inside China.

Inside China WeChat is a must-have super app. Outside China, it collects the data of overseas Chinese, including their social networks both inside and outside China, their professions, and their personal issues including. The CCP, can then leverage this information for their purposes. Overseas Chinese-Americans are targets of the CCP's influence or coercion.

For example, many Chinese students in STEM fields in the 1980s and early 1990s who received permanent resident status after Tiananmen massacre, went on to successful careers in universities or companies here. Later, many were lured by CCP's Thousand Talents Program to bring their knowledge home for CCP use. Bloomberg News recently revealed, for example, that Xiaorong You, who worked as a top scientist for Coca Cola, tried to sell $120 million in Coca Cola's trade secrets to a China run company, which must be controlled by the CCP.

Xiaorong You is not an outlier alas. Many others from the 1980s and 1990s got educations in American graduate science programs founded by the US Federal and local money. They received green cards because the Tiananmen students movement or through work visas, and were able to launch successful careers here in the US.

Then when China's economy boomed, especially after joining the WTO, these people found themselves with incentives to sell their company's trade secrets or academic research to the CCP companies and offices. They set aside the fact that they are legally American citizens, and have obligations to protect US interests. As we face heightened tension with the CCP, all of us, including Chinese-Americans, must ask where our loyalty lies.

This is a touchy topic with all the Asian hate noises mixed in. But at the end of the day, when conflict between China and the US breaks out, Chinese-Americans have to take a stand. Are we for freedom or for dictatorship? I am one Chinese-American for whom the answer is obvious.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, Ton Yi, I mean, you've helped us so much, and you're such a courageous person and a great leader at a critical time to help us understand the nature of this threat. And I do just want to highlight that I think now the situation has changed from those early days after Tiananmen, and it's clear that the Chinese Communist Party is not gonna liberalize, it's not gonna play by the rules, it's not going to change its form of governance.

And so we have to recognize the nature of the competition, and you've really helped us do that. I wanna thank you on behalf of the Hoover Institution for helping us learn about a battleground important to building a future of peace and prosperity for generations to come. It was wonderful to have you on Battlegrounds, and on behalf of all of our viewers, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me General.

>> Jenn Henry: Battlegrounds is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.