Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Today, our guest is Alicia R. Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. She studies the political economy of China’s international aid and finance. Prior to doctoral studies, Chen was a research specialist with the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project at Princeton University. Alicia, welcome to the show. It’s a real treat to have you.

Alicia R. Chen: Thank you so much for having me on.

Eleanor M. Albert: To kick us off, I’m always curious about how we as researchers come to our topics. So I was wondering if you could walk us through how you came to study China’s international aid and finance.

Alicia R. Chen: I actually came into the Ph.D. much more focused on security studies than on international political economy. Obviously one of the defining geopolitical shifts of our time is the rise of China and the changing relationship between the U.S. and China. I think once you start thinking seriously about the consequences of China’s rise, it naturally pushed me towards studying China’s outward economic policies, in part because it’s one of the main ways that its power is experienced and projected around the world.

What drew me in specifically is that China’s rise is, in large ways, driven by its economic rise and its economic reach around the world—it’s really visible. It’s one of the clearest manifestations of its rise. And because of that, it’s generated a lot of concern. There’s a lot of policy interest in it. But at the same time—at least when I started the Ph.D.—it felt also like it was very opaque and poorly understood.

Early on, I felt like there were lots of intuitions I had about what China was doing that was either missing from the policy conversations and some of the academic discussions that I felt was a little bit more complicated perhaps than the conversations that people were having. What drew me to aid and development finance in particular is that, in some ways, it turned out to be a very useful window into studying this topic because there’s been a tremendous amount of work being done over the past two decades trying to build systematic data on it.

In part because things like the BRI attract a ton of attention and it’s very visible, but the data work I think has really made it possible to study these questions in a rigorous way. So, I think naturally it drew me to this topic.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s fascinating and so true. I think ironically, my own research interests did the opposite. I came in very much thinking I would be focused on the economic side and I actually turned back more towards the security side. I’ve always been interested in the nexus because, I think with China, it’s really hard to say that one is one and not the other. There’s this incredible kind of enmeshedness.

You authored an article recently about aid with “Chinese characteristics.” There’s been, as you mentioned, so much attention to the expansion of China’s global footprint, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. And of course with Belt and Road [Initiative, BRI]. But could you contextualize just how vast Chinese aid and development finance is in the world, how many countries receive this assistance? How does it stack up against what other countries are providing?

Alicia R. Chen: The answer to this question, it can be quite controversial because it ultimately depends on how we want to define aid. If we consider all forms of money that flow from one government to another—that’s why a lot of scholars use “development finance” because it’s more than just aid—then China’s a really big player. In the last two decades, since 2000 to about 2020, it’s extended about roughly $70 billion per year in overseas development finance.

That’s much more than what the U.S. has over the same period. These are the kind of figures you typically see in headline reports about China’s aid program, China’s development finance program, which creates this concern about China’s rise. It’s global in nature. The footprint is enormous. I think almost every country—maybe there’s like 15, 20 that haven’t received some form of financing from China.

It’s really a big program, but things look really differently if we are precise about what we mean by aid. Aid in the traditional sense, often we think of concessional grant-based funding. Think of the aid coming out of, say USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] from the U.S. That’s typically what we think of when we think of aid. In terms of that, China really doesn’t give a lot of aid.

Only about 10% of its overall portfolio fits into that more traditional definition of aid. The closest analog to something like USAID has a much smaller budget annually. The government agencies that participate in this true aid program has an annual budget of about $3 billion in the last couple of years. That’s a fraction of USAID’s budget, [which] is about $40 billion in 2023, for example.

But I think what makes China distinct is that it’s not just a massive donor in a traditional Western sense. It combines a lot of different things together. There’s very limited grant-based aid, but it has large volumes of other forms of financing that are from state-linked entities.

In that broad definition, a lot of countries receive it and we can see that. How big China’s aid and development finance program is relative to other donors really depends on how we want to slice it because ultimately it’s a question of what kinds of comparisons are we comfortable making and whether we are willing to make comparisons across actors that don’t really map on neatly onto one another when we think of the classic aid in the Western context.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right. The traditional ODA, official development assistance or aid, doesn’t exist within China. I wanted to ask a follow-up question in terms of the fact that China created an actual aid agency, right? It’s the China International Development Cooperation Agency. It was in 2018, I believe. Since then, you gave a picture of the numbers of what we would consider more traditional aid.

Since that institution has been created, has there been more aid or is it just a differentiation of the types of assistance? Does CIDCA do particular types of aid that have then been siphoned away from other things that MOFCOM used to be doing?

Alicia R. Chen: I don’t get the sense that that’s the case. I get the sense that there were some bureaucratic infighting between the different ministries in China. And CIDCA was this agency that they created to try to consolidate these different groups of people that were sitting in different ministries. I get the sense that it mostly took a bunch of people from different offices and put them in the same office. A lot of the same procedures still follow and they’re still using them. The critical thing is that it’s just a really tiny share of the rest of what China’s other agencies are doing.

Eleanor M. Albert: Throw the [COVID-19] pandemic in and then who knows what numbers look like these days. Me bringing up this agency makes me want to have you unpack a little bit more about how Beijing distributes its aid.

What are the vehicles through which it does this assistance and development finance? Who are the institutional actors? Have they changed over time?

Alicia R. Chen: Again, I think the actors that we consider as part of this program depends on the definition that we use. In part, this is important because different data sets capture different parts of China’s development finance program depending on how they themselves define it. So some are going to focus in the broadest sense of capturing any money that’s coming from state-affiliated entities, where some only focus on the more narrow definition of aid or aid only coming from certain actors.

The empirical choice as researchers is quite important in that sense. But if we take a broad view of what people typically think of when they look out in the world and see pictures of Chinese aid and finance, broadly, I would say that there’s three categories of actors. First there’s government agencies. That’s going to be things like this new CIDCA agency that was created that is the analog of USAID.

Then obviously, the classic government industries that used to be part of this, that used to be the leaders, which is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Finance who set the budget. So if we’re going to consider aid in the traditional sense, these are the only players because, at least in China, that’s the players that are authorized to distribute aid in their definition.

Second, there’s policy banks. In particular, there’s the China Development Bank and the Export Import Bank of China. These are two of China’s three policy banks that participate in overseas financing. These are the core of China’s development finance portfolio. They make up the core because they make up the bulk in terms of dollar amount of China’s portfolio.

Then third, I would say there’s state-owned, more commercial entities, and in particular state-owned commercial banks. But increasingly there’s been SOEs that have become, in and of themselves, trying to finance some activities and because they’re state-owned, they get merged in…

These entities, I think, are a little confusing. These are state-owned, but I would say most research finds that they operate in ways that look much more commercially driven than certainly policy banks and definitely ministries. They’re state-owned, but at least in China’s system, they have a very profit-driven mandate.

Eleanor M. Albert: China, in many ways, has completely adopted the market forces in terms of how they make their decision-making.

Alicia R. Chen: Yeah. In my view, there’s these three classes of actors, mostly because the policy banks are interesting because they have both a political and economic mandate. The commercial banks, even though they’re state-owned, have a more commercial mandate. Then obviously the ministries, to the extent that you can call it only political, they very much do follow political directives.

Actually the part that’s confusing and that creates a lot of concern is that, even despite the fact that maybe on paper, commercial banks have a commercial mandate, I think there’s always a fear that none of these actors can be really understood as independent from the state because of the way that the Chinese system works. That’s where the concern comes from, that maybe this is all aid, that all of these actors are going to pursue some kind of geopolitical motivation when they’re making allocation decisions.

Now, personally, I think some of my research shows that perhaps, some of these concerns may be a little overblown. At least most of the aid that’s coming from the banking side tends to not be as consistently geopolitically motivated. I find that government agency aid is really where the strongest geopolitically motivated allocation shows up more consistently. Whereas the banking side, especially the commercial side, but also policy bank lending can reflect different motivations that aren’t geopolitical in nature.

Eleanor M. Albert: I saw you had some other research that disaggregated the top-down way in which aid is conducted. I think the Chinese system is complicated because it is so institutionally dense. We were just talking about aid and we are already talking about three buckets of actors, and then within those buckets, you have multiple ministries that have power struggles over who really controls aid allocations, et cetera.

Now that’s still just talking at the top level. Aid can also be allocated from sub-national levels. How much is driven by the central interests through power players in Beijing and throughout the other commercial banks versus the provincial level? China has this long history of having sister provinces, sister cities that I can imagine create certain types of relationships that might lend themselves well to aid distribution or development distribution. So how do we understand this sub-level? How does it fit into the broader China development finance equation?

Alicia R. Chen: At the central level, if we think about how most governments conduct aid operations, oftentimes they’re geopolitically motivated. To the extent that we can really identify whether or not this money is representative of central motives, empirically what we can say is that, at least consistently, we see that aid from the government ministries are following what we would think China’s geopolitical motivations are, whereas we don’t find that for aid coming out of non-government ministries.

So then the natural question is, “Well, if it’s not about geopolitics, then what is it really about?” That is, as you mentioned, what I’m trying to tease out in some of my other research. My own view is that a lot of it is better understood precisely from this domestic political economy lens. And in part, I think there’s an institutional foundation for that.

The way that China runs its economy, the way that its economy is governed, is very much delegated to a lot of these sub-national actors. So in some ways you can understand it in a similar way where each province and each jurisdiction within the province operates things within that jurisdiction. The tricky thing is that a lot of these policy banks and China’s commercial banks also have branches in these different jurisdictions. And those, even though they are state-owned, maybe headquarters are in Beijing, may be subject to a lot more influence from local actors than we might expect in a system like China’s.

What I study is how do these local interests affect the allocation of Chinese aid, even though it’s money that is going overseas. In my own view, I think a lot of what’s happening with this pot of money can be understood by looking at how it serves China’s domestic objectives, whether that means supporting certain firms, supporting industrial capacity, advancing broader economic priorities at home of the provinces, that are central to party survival in China.

I think the entire system is very much shaped by a very strong domestic institutional arrangement that a lot of people that study China know about, but I don’t think that has really made its way as much to some of the conversations about China’s overseas activities. Once you adopt that view, I think some of the major trends also start to make sense.

Traditional aid coming from China started under Mao, but the broader development finance program really expanded dramatically after, first in 2000 and then in 2008. That coincides with a period where the party really tried to inject a lot of stimulus into the local economy and try to push this going-out strategy as domestic markets are shrinking. You can view this expansion in China’s overseas development finance program to not just be about external influence, but also in ways addressing some of the problems economically that they’re facing at home.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s great. That helps us pivot to talking about China actually having a strategy with its aid allocation. Obviously not all of it is deployed strategically for geopolitical purposes, but for the instances in which it is, what is, in fact, its strategy? Who does it target externally, and why does it do this?

Alicia R. Chen: So in my own research, I looked at whether or not China was using aid to try to gain some political influence over regional international organizations like ASEAN in Southeast Asia or the African Union in Africa.

What I find is that when countries chaired one of these institutions, the chair country received a lot more financing from Chinese government agencies that year compared to when they weren’t chair of that organization, which I interpreted as suggesting that at least China was trying to exert some influence over the chair to get them to exercise some of their agenda setting power in those institutions.

That suggests to me that this form of aid from government agencies is being deployed strategically to engage countries that occupy especially important diplomatic or geopolitical positions. So there’s definitely a strategy there.

Some other research, both before this paper came out and since, have also pretty consistently showed that this kind of traditional aid is motivated by the same kinds of geopolitical factors that traditional donors
have also been found to follow when allocating aid.

Whereas, oftentimes, when it comes to state-owned commercial banks or policy banks, you really don’t see the systematic pattern. In my research, when I look at the chair of ASEAN or the African Union, I don’t find that they’re receiving more money from the banking side of things. That matters a lot because it suggests that not all of China’s overseas finance is doing the same thing, but I think it also matters because the banking side is really where the majority of the money is coming from.

It forces us to think about, when we want to engage with China on this front, what are some of the areas where cooperation can still exist, and where are some of the areas that for a country like the U.S. that really wants to fight its geopolitical influence, where are the right places to look for that influence and to fight back?

Eleanor M. Albert: I think that’s really interesting. And I’m curious why a regional organization matters so much.

A lot of my research is about China within global governance institutions. It was initially inspired by this sizable number of institutions that China is a part of whether that’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whether that’s ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], ASEAN plus 3, FOCAC [Forum on China-Africa Cooperation], CELAC [Community of Latin American and Caribbean States]…

What is it about regional organizations that provides greater leverage for China as opposed to a place like the United Nations where there are a lot more other power players involved? What is it about the regional organizations, and what does China want to get out of those relationships?

Alicia R. Chen: You’re totally right. I think a lot of people who follow how China conducts its diplomacy notices this regional orientation to its foreign policy. In many ways this is consistent with that. There’s a couple of reasons that I think regional organizations are important for China.

Ultimately, China has a preference I think for engaging in this regional manner in some ways because I think it’s easier for them. That’s not really necessarily something I can say empirically in terms of the research that I’m doing, but if we think about the UN where there’s a lot more institutional legacies that represent other, non-Chinese interests, Western interests, in terms of both the institutional design of these organizations and also the influence that the U.S. and Europe sometimes have over these institutions, it makes sense for China to want to create either parallel or other venues for them to push things through.

I also think regional organizations in particular help China deflect criticism in a way that tends to be really valued for China. And in particular, I think China tends to be sensitive to criticism globally. There is something to be said about it identifying itself as the leader of developing countries who are oftentimes organized around these regional organizations.

I think the support that these regional actors provide China fits within the picture that they want to present themselves as. It also gives them a lot of legitimacy to project the image that they are a leader that represents developing countries. It also helps when they don’t criticize China on certain things. For example, in the South China Sea being a key example where depending on who is chairing ASEAN, the degree of criticism towards China and the South China Sea really varies.

I think China likes when there’s no outward mentions of what maybe not very appropriate things that it’s doing. And so I think, even if it is just rhetorical support, it seems to value that and we can debate about why that is, but China certainly seems to value that. A lot of what China cares about is economic. These regional organizations often play an important role in shaping regional development priorities. And if we think about, even its development finance program, the BRI, et cetera, these projects sometimes cross national boundaries, which require some kind of institution to help coordinate that. A lot of this decision-making happens through these regional organizations.

So, to the extent that regional organizations can shape the development trajectories, which influences what China can really do and get from these places, that also is another reason why regional organizations might be valuable to China in ways that global institutions like the UN might not be able to offer.

Eleanor M. Albert: The other fundamental thing is that when you have a regional summit, everyone is there, so it provides a physical ability to coordinate... Not that China is hands off in rolling out the red carpet diplomatically when it wants to. But that being said, that doesn’t mean that it wants to be expelling all that energy all the time when it can very much make use of a regional summit platform.

And I think, if nothing else, narrative framing is something that China values a lot. Most countries value it too, but when you have an ability to try and shape it, I think it becomes even more important to you—especially when there’s been narrative written about you that you might disagree with. And so it provides a venue to do that.

In terms of the criticism, I think, China interestingly is okay with criticism from the West and other major powers. But when it’s coming from regional actors that are part of what it might label the so-called Global South, criticism from the developing world, I think it is more sensitive to their positions and wanting to make sure that they present themselves as aligned with them, even if they might not always overlap.

That is a good concluding point, but I’m curious about how the shifts in both China’s narratives around the Global Development Initiative might impact some of this aid. I’m also curious in thinking about China’s own economic trajectory domestically is not going so well.

How we might see, or if there already have been, shifts in the types of allocations that it’s making, whether commercial banks and the development banks have shifted their strategies, the budget because of the slowing growth, which for China seems like perhaps contraction-based on what it’s experienced. But with the economic indicators where they are, should we expect shifts? Where might they be?

Alicia R. Chen: China definitely seems to be more cautious in extending overseas finance for a couple of reasons. One, there’s this learning process where I think they’re starting to realize that maybe some of these debts aren’t going to be repaid. But some of the major defaults have been a surprise and they may not have gone in fully recognizing some of the real risks associated with lending to developing countries. So, in part, it’s a learning process from that.

Then you really see debt starting to slow down, and I don’t think that’s unique to China. I think a lot of great powers have experienced this arc and coming to terms with that and then figuring out where to go from there. And you already started to see slowing down after 2016, after some defaults.

I also think that there was a reputational dimension to it where it attracted a lot more negative attention than it perhaps was expecting. So, I think, in part, it also stopped wanting to be as generous in giving that money, realizing that maybe they weren’t even going to get rhetorical or public goodwill from some of these activities.

There was a time when BRI as a term in China became really controversial to say, whereas that’s really different if you look at in 2013 when this all started where everyone really wanted to label everything BRI if they could. There’s that more political component.

And then obviously economically, there clearly seems to be a contraction in the budget allocated for overseas finance. A lot of the major actors that we’re discussing here have really ramped down in their financing abroad.

And whether that’s because they are learning of the risk and therefore no longer willing to make some of these investments, that’s one explanation. The other one is that maybe centrally there was some directive to be more cautious and to not have as much of the budget allocated to that.

I do think that it reflects where China is domestically. It’s going to reflect in some ways how it chooses to transform its economy in the next stage. And I’m not exactly sure exactly how that’s going to go. There’s some other researchers that have theorized about whether or not China’s going to follow the West in the way that it’s shifted from a debt-based program to a more aid-based one and really decrease the total amount of value that it gives, or whether it’s going to figure out some way to maneuver in this space and find its own way of doing things, I think remains to be seen.

But certainly in this moment, there’s a contraction in the amount of financing that is going abroad. Even if you talk to development practitioners in the Global South, they’ll say that money that usually was very easily negotiated is much harder to negotiate now than it was even five, seven years ago. They’re also experiencing the skepticism coming from China’s side of wanting to give this money out.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Today our guest is Jennifer Bouey. Jennifer is the Tang Chair for China Policy Studies at the RAND Corporation and associate professor and chair for the Department of Global Health at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on health, technology, and social issues.

Jennifer, welcome back to the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you.

Jennifer Bouey: Great to meet you, Eleanor, always be a great pleasure to be on your show.

Eleanor M. Albert: We’re having you on today because you have some new research recently released that’s about China’s global health activities in Africa, looking back historically and also focusing on some case studies. Can you give us a quick summary? How has China’s engagement in global health work in Africa evolved over time? How long has it been doing this kind of work?

Jennifer Bouey: This is a great question. And that was the focus of this report. We won’t have lots of time to go through the details, but this RAND report onChina’s global health activities in Africa includes both the historical perspectives, as well as two case studies I did in Africa. So if I miss anything, we have a report as a reference.

Talking about global health in Africa from China, this is over 60 years of journey. It started in 1963 in Algeria. That’s when the French colonial power was leaving Algeria. Then China, the first medical team went to Algeria when the French physicians left.

So why Africa? Some historical context here. When the People’s Republic of China set up in 1949, the whole world at the time pretty much all still kept a diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, which is the Republic of China. So for China, it’s very isolated.

Egypt was the first Arab and African country that set up a diplomatic relationship with [the] PRC. That was 1953. During the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, China immediately offered Egypt a $4.5 million grant and vocally supported its fight with the British and French intervention. I think that’s the deep root of China’s global health starting point. It’s really about the brothers in arms against Western imperialism under Mao’s revolutionary idea. That was the beginning.

Eleanor M. Albert: A lot of ideological solidarity.

Jennifer Bouey: Lots of ideology. What’s funny is actually the China-Egypt relationship went down a bit a few years later because of the Sino-Soviet split.

Fast-forward to 1963 when the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, did an epic 72 days tour of 10 African countries. Guess what is the first stop? That was Egypt. The second stop was Algeria. Also on that trip, premier Zhou Enlai set up the main target of China’s foreign policy, which is anti-imperialism, competing with Soviet Union, and also eight principles of foreign aid—including no strings attached, respect sovereignty, and focus on self-reliance. Those principles pretty much have survived all these 60 more years. Even nowadays, you hear a lot of the familiar terms there.

By 1972, more than 28 African countries have received Chinese medical teams. Many foreign policy analysts will accredit this global health aid in Africa [as] contributing to China’s formally entering the UN seat vote in 1971. Even Egypt voted for China in 1971.

Another interesting tradition started then was when China’s sending out medical teams, they usually asked a province, a Chinese province, to build that team. Then afterwards, once they sent a medical team, that province in that country—especially African country—will become friendship partners. And that built a long-term relationship between the global health or health aid versus the other country’s connection. That was, I think, quite unique in terms of the global health aid that China has done.

The next critical year is 1979 of course, when Deng Xiaoping came into power. By that time, Chairman Mao had passed away. And U.S.-China had resumed [a] diplomatic relationship. So Deng’s focus is very clear. It’s not about political revolution anymore, and it’s focused on economic development for China.

His idea, at first, is we are [a] developing country, we cannot put in even when we are in the famine, we’re still doing all these for soft power. So he said, “Well, let’s rethink this aid.” That caused a brief, I would say, downturn for the aid. Even Chinese medical team continued to send teams to many countries, they sometimes reduced the number of people on this team and sometimes they even ask for, “Okay, can you compensate for
our cost?”

That lasted about 10 years until nearly year 2000 when China got into the WTO [World Trade Organization]. At that time, they entered the next generation of China’s leaders, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao; they see that when they first got aid from Japan, then Chinese market get to know some of the products from Japan, the brand names. And then they said, “Okay, why don’t we use aid as a way to going global?”

They encouraged provincial governments when they build more manufacturing capacity, now they’re thinking of the market. So global health aid became part of the demonstration setting for Chinese products. And that has been continuing, I would say, almost 40 years.

The FOCAC—the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation—launched in year 2000; that’s every three years, many of the ministers from Africa will come to Beijing or the Chinese ministers will go to Africa. Those conference set the goals for global health aid in Africa.

I’ll talk a little bit more about Health Silk Road, which is actually a very different initiative from that. But in terms of aid from 1979 to almost 2021, that was the focus: Chinese product going abroad. And we’ll talk about 2003, that MOFCOM (the Ministry of Commerce) took over the main foreign aid initiative.

Then let’s talk about the current stage, which I think starts in 2021 when Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Global Development Initiative. That’s built on the rhetoric of not only focusing on economic development, but more on the soft power relationship, common good, South to South collaboration. We see real rhetorical changes there. Would it be a real change from the previous era? We’ll wait and see.

Eleanor M. Albert: It’s very interesting. In some ways, the rhetorical shift harkens back a little bit to the solidarity era, but with less vivid ideological principles. I wanted to talk a little bit about the scope and scale of the engagement on health in African countries. You mentioned the early days, it was about sending medical teams. Of course, we can’t talk about any of this without mentioning the massive development, physical infrastructure that China has contributed to Africa. I’m sure this has touched the health sector in terms of hospitals, roads to hospitals, et cetera. How can we wrangle the scope and the scale? How deep is the engagement?

Jennifer Bouey: There are two features I want to bring up in looking back into the 60 more years of activities of China’s global health. One feature is it’s diverse and cumulative. Because it started with Chinese medical teams and medical training. They actually trained many of the physicians, especially the physicians from these African countries. And then built on that. They never really abandoned those practices.

But then in the ‘90s and 2000s, we started to see hospitals and infrastructure, what they called a “bundle,” infrastructure project bundles. That can include when a Chinese construction company builds a hospital, then other companies are bringing in the medical devices and then there will be training of the people who are using this device. And this is all coordinated by MOFCOM, the commerce department. Then you see medicine donations, management training, all coming from these bundles.

So I would say in general, there are two big themes coming from the earliest time is medical team and medical training. And second batch is all these bundles.

Another feature I think should be highlighted is that their operations are very sensitive to criticism. When we see an increase of malaria medicine donation around 2009/2010, I think peaked in 2010, then there started to have incidents of the fake drugs and issues with quality. And then you see that medicine donation suddenly stops. They move to something different. However, their core values, core goals, whether it’s for solidarity or whether it’s for Chinese products going abroad, those core missions are usually not changing.

We used AidData, which is a wonderful dataset built by the AidData Center at the William & Mary University. We worked with their center and looked at global Chinese development funding. They have data starting from year 2000. From year 2000, they have over 2,000 health related projects, distributed in all 55 African countries. The number of these projects on the record increase from 2000 to 2019. But there’s really a jump during the COVID years. During COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 800 projects were delivered during that time. That accounts for about 55% of all the projects.

I would say the health project in number also represent about 15% to 20% of all the Chinese government-funded projects, including the roads, railroads, and so on. However, those are small budget projects. Medical teams, it’s hard to calculate, but it’s still small funding. So in terms of funding, the medical, the health assistance program really accounts for less than 1% of the total project funding. There are of course lots of caveats. Sometimes it’s hard to really find the cost. But in the report, we have a bit more details on that. The health project are really fitting into what President Xi has called “small and beautiful projects,” and those are continuing.

Compared to other countries, it’s also small budget. In 2024, we found that China very narrowly defined foreign aid, this includes all foreign aid, that it’s about $2.5 billion in total. But compared to USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] in 2024, which had a budget of $42 billion. That gives you a sense of that in the dollar amount of China’s foreign aid is still a very small proportion compared to the U.S. at that time.

I would say that the Health Silk Road Initiative started before COVID, 2018-ish. That’s also a very different initiative compared to traditional aid. That one focuses on China’s bordering countries, especially Southeast Asian countries, to build collaborations on biotech and bio and medicine, pharmaceutical industry collaborations. That’s led more by the public health rather than the MOFCOM initiative.

Eleanor M. Albert: Very interesting. We’ve alluded to the administrative and institutional bodies that oversee some of this. I want to unpack that a little it more. China in particular, it has been doing this type of work for a very long time, but the entities that have overseen it have not necessarily always been the same. Who manages China’s global health engagement?

Jennifer Bouey: Yes, it’s quite a complex and often not very transparent, not-easy-to-understand structure. There are almost 33 ministries in China that are involved with global health aid. However, the structure is quite top down, centralized as many of the initiatives in China that are initiated by the Chinese government.

But the principle hasn’t changed since Mao’s time, which is the decision-making by the Chinese Communist Party, CCP’s Central Committee. The grand strategy has always been set by the Central Committee.

And the government ministries are considered as implementation agencies. So we mentioned that 33 of them were involved in many of these activities, including the humanitarian aid. For Ebola, between 2014 and ‘16, was one of the largest overseas humanitarian aid initiative, and China has 33 ministries involved at that time.

But I will only highlight the three main agencies, ministries, that truly take the design and implementation of these aid project. These three are Ministry of Commerce, usually we call it MOFCOM, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and lastly, the Ministry of Finance.

For a long period from 2003, when all the foreign aid moved to MOFCOM, they become the head of this committee of 33 ministries, that they are the chair of this big committee. They do the basic design of the aid. They also have an advantage compared to other ministries: they have a representative in pretty much every embassy overseas. Sometimes this commerce representative has more funding than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That’s a very powerful delivery channel for this aid.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance are co-chairs with MOFCOM. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has the veto power for a long time, not to design the product, but they can say, “Well, the red line is touched, then we have to withdraw aid or we should increase aid.” And that red line often is about the diplomatic relationship between that aid recipient country, and Taiwan. So sometimes you see that if the country changed their diplomatic relationship, switched from Taiwan to PRC, then they will get aid. That’s where you see the Ministry of Foreign Affairs impact. And Ministry of Finance really focuses on the budget and the funding.

But in 2018, a new agency came up, it’s the CIDCA, the China International Development Cooperation Agency. So this agency has been tasked with policy leadership. They’re building laws and regulations on foreign aid. They’re building a database with contracting companies. Often these are SOEs, state-owned-enterprises. They are really posed to change some of the policy. I think that’s related to President Xi Jinping’s Global Development Initiative, which is moving foreign aid [to be] more organized and also more into the soft power and foreign diplomacy line of thinking.

However, so far, CIDCA’s budget is quite small compared to MOFCOM. In 2024, CIDCA has 170 million RMB budget compared to MOFCOM still have the 21 billion (this is in RMB). So you see that CIDCA is really a policy institute rather than implementation institute so far.

Then we have to talk about the public health expertise, which is concentrated in the National Health Commission, which is the Ministry of Health equivalent. Talking about training, we’re talking about [the] Ministry of Education. But as you can see, these are two of the 33 ministries. They are the peripheral ministries that work for MOFCOM on this aid. They’re not the main actors.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s so helpful. You alluded to some of these in terms of how global health aid has fit into China’s broader outreach and diplomatic endeavors and their grand strategy. I want to talk a little bit about narrative and framing and the pseudo-marketing of China’s global health engagement. Where does this fit within Beijing’s broader diplomatic initiatives?

In 2003, you said all of this came under MOFCOM, that coincides a little bit with China’s going out or going global policy. That’s zou chu qu. And then you have BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] that comes in, and now we have GDI. These are all an evolution that become nested within each other in my thinking about these things; perhaps you might see some
differences. But how can we understand them within China’s global health engagement in Africa and its activities? Are these continuity? Are they distinct? How do you see them existing together?

Jennifer Bouey: I like the word of evolution. We definitely see the rhetoric has changed since Mao’s time. As we discussed, Premier Zhou Enlai explicitly said foreign aid is to actually undermine the power of imperialism. This is back in the 1960s. That was very clear as a guide for China’s foreign policy.

Well, under Deng Xiaoping and his successor[s], Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, we see the statement change more to the economic reform era. The language shifted to more focusing on mutual benefits or practical results.

When the BRI launched, health aid are rebranded sometimes to Health Silk Road, so that certainly the language of BRI, and especially positioning health cooperation as China’s infrastructure building—that’s their globalization strategy.

During COVID-19, China used vaccine diplomacy, and over 70% of countries worldwide received a Chinese vaccine, particularly for those countries that joined the BRI.

And the Global Development Initiative, I think still is the most significant narrative shift because now it’s focused more on global public good, moral responsibility, common good, rather than bilateral economic returns. The language has also shifted more from this Sino-centric framing, so more on global governance. So even yi dai yi lu [Belt and Road Initiative] was still a Sino-centric road and belt.

But now it seems that China wants to be a global governance stabilization force. That’s the main changes. But also in recent years, I think this is U.S.-China’s competition in both technology and global influence; you see China is trying to evolve [from] being just an aid provider on global health to more of a knowledge producer. Tsinghua University’s BRIGHT program is really looking for early career researchers that understand global health. And then the new Global Health Innovation Institute in Shanghai launched in 2024, that was funding from many international foundations and focusing on affordable treatment for disease of poverty. That all fits into not just global governance, but also knowledge and technology development.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s a perfect transition. I think a lot of times when we think about China’s engagement with the world, it has for so long been characterized at a bilateral level. And not to say that this isn’t still very true and happening. But how does it also then coexist with international institutions that deal with global health?

This fits very much into the questions about China being a stabilizer of some of these global governance institutions, especially in the current environment with the U.S. retreating from some of these, particularly the World Health Organization (WHO) and other United Nations efforts. How do we understand China’s interaction in global public health vis-à-vis these international institutions?

Jennifer Bouey: In over 60 years of this history, I would say 90% of the time China is still thinking of health aid as a bilateral initiative. When MOFCOM builds their products for these countries, they’re delivering the Chinese product, either it’s a hospital construction or donation of medicine or training in the sense of bilateral relationship. They negotiate with the recipient country and they provide products and in return they get other things. So I would say predominantly bilateral operations.

However, we did see in the recent years, especially since 2018, that there are an increasing number of projects that China is starting to involve the United Nation agencies—UNICEF, UNFP, those are the agencies—that get most of the project-related funding from China.

During COVID[-19] pandemic, there was an initiative funded by the Chinese government, designed and operated by UNICEF, focusing on maternal and child health in eight countries in Africa. That is one of the projects I think is the most significant, signaling that instead of the bilateral relationship, this time that was the first time that China used the UN agency. Funding their local office to deliver the project that [was] designed by the UN agency.

We also see that in last year when the U.S. has retreated from collaborations and funding for many of the UN projects, that China has been putting in more funding in the format of their membership contribution, as well as extra contributions to WHO and UN.

The other thing that was interesting is that MOFCOM is working actively, trying to build Chinese products up to the UN procurement standard. This move, I think, is really to see UN procurement process as a platform, again, for Chinese products. Rather than doing the bilateral demonstration of their Chinese product, this is a UN platform.

On the research side of global health, there is not a lot, a few, maybe 10-ish universities in China has global health research. These are interestingly traditionally not funded by the Chinese government. In terms of evaluating China’s global health products overseas, their impact, or even anti-malaria strategies, Traditionally, these research projects are often funded by DFID (the UK’s Department for International Development from 1997 to 2020), by international organizations, not by Chinese government. So that’s, I think, an interesting phenomena that I’ve observed.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. I think we can’t talk about this without recognizing that aid is a demand and a supply situation. In your research, in the report that recently came out, you have two case studies. I want to bring in the idea that this is also a demand from African countries. How is China’s global health engagement perceived locally in Africa?

Jennifer Bouey: That’s a great question. As we described, the Chinese strategy for health aid is a mixture of both provincial government and the country, bilateral friendship relationship, as well as MOFCOM directed, delivering bundles of aid projects. It’s also very widespread. Pretty much all African countries have seen or received some aid from China. So their experience will be quite diverse.

For this report, I did two case studies, one in Sierra Leone and one in Kenya. I don’t think this can really represent all the local experience; it has its limitation. However, I chose the two because Sierra Leone has a very traditional health aid relationship with China. It started the medical teams in the early ‘70s and never stopped; 25 medical team went to the country over the years. Only gap was the civil war time. Whereas Kenya never had a Chinese medical team. Kenya’s health aid are dominated by U.S., UK, and UN agencies, not with China. However, there is more and more presence of Chinese products—hospitals and medical devices in Kenya. It’s mainly driven by MOFCOM initiatives.

When I went to these two countries, with very different models—one traditional, one more on the BRI model—so I see very different pictures there. Overall, I think these countries are both on the positive side. The stakeholders acknowledge that Chinese aid built real hardware for their health system, hospitals, advanced medical equipment. In Kenya, for example, mobile clinics; in Sierra Leone, the bio-safety level three, the only lab like that in Sierra Leone post-Ebola, and pandemic supplies.

The medical training programs are also often mentioned by these countries, especially Sierra Leone. China and Russia were the only countries helping with medical training in the ‘80s. And nowadays, it’s more diverse. Whereas in Kenya, we see more China’s medical devices, even in rural Kenya area where the roads are not reaching, but we see remote telemedicine health work there, and many of these products from China.

But other than these positive feelings, there are also lots of significant concerns that persist over these years. Number one is the language and cultural barriers between Chinese teams or deliveries from the local population. What we see is, say in Kenya, there’s no presence of medical team. And we see the products and people often say, “Well, we only see the product. We never really see the Chinese presence in person.” Even with that large eight country UN project on maternal and child health, the UN agency is doing the training, are delivering the devices. They say, “We see one person from the embassy that are showing up at beginning and end of the project, usually a ceremony.” They see Chinese merchants and business people, but they really don’t see much public health.

An interesting story in the Masai Mara. It’s very remote area, very distinguished cultural area. They say, “We see American politicians, so-and-so will come here and sit on the grass and talk to us about the needs for our health. But we never see that type of Chinese presence here.” Whereas in Sierra Leone, there is more presence because they have medical team, they have the team that’s supporting the bio-security labs. They even have teams from China’s military that are supporting the West Africa tropical diseases labs. So even there, they say, “Well, we see Chinese, but they’re silent.”

When there’s collaboration of all these different agencies, from Germany, from the U.S., they usually have a monthly coordination meeting. The Chinese are either absent or when they’re there, they will not say much. I think this is related to the political culture within China. That if you’re a government employee, it’s safest not to say anything. So that’s quite different from the aid agencies from other countries who have more agency maybe or free will to improve their program. That’s one of the things quite obvious, and what we heard in the countries.

The second critical concern is the sustainability. When China’s donating or giving these medical devices, they’re much more affordable than the devices from other countries. That’s the advantage. However, all these parts for these devices, or when these devices, we often see that a Chinese product looks very good, fancy, but then it’s not in use because it’s broken. Who’s going to fix them? Who’s bringing the parts? In a level three lab, everything was provided, shipped from China. There’s no local supply chain. So that’s another big issue. Even with the mobile clinic, how to maintain these rather than when there was just one time donation. So sustainability is a huge issue.

And then lack of transparency, the vulnerability of local corruption, those are also mentioned quite a lot.

Also, different than the infrastructure project, which seems to have a higher-level planning strategy, the railroads link from here to there, the highways link from this town to the other town. The Chinese hospitals and medical teams are often very isolated. There seems to be a lack of higher-level design with the countries or with UN agencies, with other international partners in terms of where to locate this aid and how to link this aid to the local health system. That’s another issue.

But I would say that I think that many of the agencies in China understand, know these limitations. I’ve seen recently there are trainings for Chinese public health professionals more on health diplomacy, more on communications and economic aspects of global health. That’s the key of what was missing in the past. Public health is really focused on domestic Chinese issues, whereas there’s no international health focusing on understanding other countries’ needs.

Eleanor M. Albert: It would make sense that if soft power is where this is going, then this connectivity between the diplomatic and political culture around the presence of some of these projects will have to catch up. And that takes a long time to build.

Jennifer Bouey: I think maybe an interesting fact is that so far the only two health diplomacy training programs that we know [of are] only in two places. One is Georgetown University. We have a program that crosses the School of Foreign Service and the School of Health on health diplomacy. And then in Beijing University School of Public Health, they have a Department of Global Health too, and they have the other health diplomacy program.

So I think, in the future, talking about soft power, common good and global governance, and technology competition, we will look at these two countries and see how their strategies can benefit the world.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Today our guest is Viola Rothschild. Viola is an assistant professor of comparative politics at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA and a non-resident fellow in the Institute for Global Affairs’ Independent America program. Her research centers on state-society relations and grassroots governance in authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on China. After completing her Ph.D., she served as a foreign policy analyst at the U.S. Department of State. She also previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a J. William Fulbright Scholar in China.

Viola, welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you with us today.

Viola Rothschild: Thanks, Eleanor. Happy to be here.

Eleanor M. Albert: Before we turn to discussing some of your recent work, I always like to ask people how they came to study China. And then for the purposes of our discussion today, how did policing practices become something that you gravitated towards?

Viola Rothschild: I have been studying China for a long time. My mom is from Beijing. I went to China for the first time in 1995 when I was three to meet half my family for the first time, and I’ve been going back every few years since.

But my more academic journey started in college. I studied abroad in Beijing in the fall of 2012 and that was a super politically charged time. The 18^th Party Congress was happening and shut down the entire city. Xi Jinping was coming to power. There were big protests happening outside the Japanese Embassy over the Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands.

And in my little world, the food street outside our campus where we would get lunch every day was being demolished and cleared. The people that were complaining, that were upset about their businesses and their livelihoods getting destroyed, were getting taken away by the authorities. I just got really interested in why some protests were allowed to happen and others weren’t; big picture how the Chinese state exercises control over its people.

My dissertation, and all of my doctoral research, tried to answer some of these questions on Chinese domestic politics, repression, grassroots governance and social management. I was looking at things like surveillance, dynamics between central and local governments, and community policing.

After I finished my doctorate, I shifted gears in a big way and went to work directly for the [U.S.] State Department, where for two years, I was an analyst focusing on China’s foreign relations, particularly their approach and their strategy for gaining economic, political, and diplomatic influence in the so-called Global South.

I left the State Department last spring and am back in academia now, where I’m trying to currently figure out how to marry these two very different strands of research. There’s clearly a lot there. There is definitely a connection between how China maintains stability at home and the product that it’s marketing abroad to leaders in many of these developing countries, and is proving very popular, whether it’s the hardware—the digital surveillance technologies—or this governance software—the law enforcement training, media control, and censorship model. So this is the domestic politics-foreign policy intersection where I’m finding myself now.

Eleanor M. Albert: It’s incredible. It becomes the security focus, but it’s not necessarily purely motivated on the external side from a security perspective.

I want to pivot back a little bit though, because studying policing in an authoritarian context seems challenging for obvious reasons. Let’s focus first on the domestic side. Can you walk me through how local policing works in China? Has it changed over time, especially given the hardware upgrades that have taken place?

Viola Rothschild: Definitely. That’s a great jumping-off point because when we think about China’s massive and fearsome domestic security apparatus, interestingly enough, these days the police are usually not what first comes to mind. We think about the dystopian, disembodied digital surveillance systems. We think about the great firewall and the censorship apparatus. These are of course super important components, but it really overlooks this human, physical element of policing and law enforcement which has also been changing and evolving.

For a lot of people in China and elsewhere, it is the police that represent the most public, recognizable, common face of coercive state power. People see police officers every day and they don’t just see them as repressive agents. Police, in theory, are also enforcing law, order, safety, some of the most important and basic public goods that states provide.

China’s approach to local policing has been changing. I’ll spare you some of the detail. But long story short, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was a big wave of police reform that popularized a community policing model that reallocated tens of thousands of county and city-level police officers down to neighborhood-level police stations. It’s important to note that even though China makes headlines for its massive domestic security budget, it has one of the smaller per capita police forces in the world. Officers at the grassroots often face funding shortages; they’re inadequately trained and this can lead to local police forces that often just can’t do their jobs very well.

So if you factor this in with a mass reallocation and increase in everyday contact, the incidents of conflict between the police and the people went up. In the 2010s, there was this litany of high-profile police violence incidents that were recorded and posted online and really drew the public’s attention to police accountability issues.

A couple examples: in 2016, Lei Yang, who was a 29-year-old well-educated Beijing man, died mysteriously in police custody. It was unclear why he was there in the first place and this became a huge deal. Thousands of regular people were posting online asking if they could be the next Lei Yang. There was a viral video of a police officer in Shanghai shoving down a woman that was carrying a baby over a parking ticket violation. A man was violently detained by police after he complained about the cost of hospital food.

What we’ve been seeing in recent years is the Ministry of Public Security, and beyond, engaging in this PR campaign that’s become increasingly refined and media-savvy to humanize these frontline officers to project a reliable, relatable image of the police force to the people. There have been a series of popular hero cop TV shows. The social media following of municipal police bureaus is in the tens of millions often.

I was in China this past summer and was followed around a park by a little robot on wheels that was being controlled by a mobile police unit at the other side of the park, which was very disconcerting. But the robot was super cute with big, blink-y eyes and a little girl voice, so how scary can that be? Now, police are really portrayed by the state as either being these hero crime fighters or these friendly, benign service providers.

The last thing I’ll say is that it’s not just a shift in PR; it’s substantive as well. The state is continuing to double-down on what official documents are calling a “downward shift in police work.” In 2023, the Ministry of Public Security released a three-year action plan to significantly increase the deployment of officers into residential communities. The plan outlines three priorities for police work and number one is strengthening grassroots
capabilities by continuing to increase the allocation of resources to the grassroots and really consolidating strength at the grassroots as a foundation for national security and social stability.

What we’re seeing is a focus on developing a proactive and preventative policing system where you have a lot of trained officers that are very, very deeply embedded in a community, and are able to detect and neutralize potential issues before they get out of hand.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to follow up with two questions. One is can you tell us a more about who oversees policing in China? In terms of the institutional bureaucracy and the actors. And then as a second part, you were talking about developing this more proactive policing approach, grassroots capabilities. What does this look like in practice? You mentioned being followed around by a robot. Is that part of this community policing? What is the police in China at this grassroots level intended to do? What are the types of threats that need to be neutralized?

Viola Rothschild: There are a lot of moving pieces. At the central level, most police work falls under the purview of the Ministry of Public Security. Community police stations, pai chu suo, are the most basic units of China’s police system at the grassroots, but these officers are working in tandem with community political institutions, which is really important. Frontline police officers will often either serve on or adjacent to township or residential committees, which are the lowest level of community governance in rural and urban areas respectively.

This gives police a lot of insight into percolating grievances in a community: who is socially or politically influential, any ongoing disputes or issues that need to be nipped in the bud. So on top of these regular officers, communities will also sometimes host unofficial neighborhood watch-esque enforcement associations, like the security protection committees, or voluntary police or auxiliary police that are usually contracted by local police stations are part of this grassroots security apparatus, and are stationed in neighborhoods keeping an eye on whose coming and going, like any suspicious foreigners that might be roaming around their parks, if anything sketchy is going on. Sometimes these are nosy retirees from the communities themselves. These are the grannies with the armbands that you see sitting on the streets outside of neighborhoods. Sometimes they’re younger, more professionalized people hired from outside the
community.

Increasingly, these neighborhoods are also being overlaid by a grid management system which further breaks down the administration and control of residential areas with a couple hundred households in each grid unit. These are staffed with professional community grid workers that are responsible for what’s going on in their block. There’s some overlap and redundancy within these different groups. So you have this patchwork of different actors and institutions whose job it is to assist in self-governance and solve issues in their micro-jurisdictions before they escalate. But, of course, they’re also playing a huge human surveillance and political compliance role within these neighborhoods as well.

Eleanor M. Albert: Really fascinating. Connected to that, I’m very curious about the role of the internet. You led with providing some context of incidents of conflict between police and Chinese citizens. A lot of this information spreading via posts. But, you also talked about having a large budget dedicated to trying to improve the PR and reputation of the police in the eyes of the community.

I would presume that the internet can cut both ways in this instance. At this moment in time, where do things stand? Has the internet been a problematic source for the government in trying to manage the way in which it polices? I can also see it being a large source of data that can then be mined and then applied at the grassroots level through some sort of surveillance. How do we reconcile the role that the internet plays in navigating the way in which policing is perceived?

Viola Rothschild: That’s a great question and taps directly into one of the main findings from a recent working paper that I have with Professor Hongshen Zhu, who is an assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. We find that when it comes to public opinion and perceptions of police, perceptions are shaped by people’s real-life experiences. So, depending on a citizen’s proximity to the police, they get a more unvarnished, real-life picture of what policing can look like, which still can be pretty rough around the edges. Despite these different campaigns to try to professionalize and better train officers, there’s still a lot of incompetence and malign behavior among these grassroots police forces.

But then, citizens that aren’t as proximate to the actual police, I think, are able to better maintain these images that are propagated by the media. They’re able to keep this untainted image of, again, the hero cops, the service provider. So it really has to do with a person’s lived experiences and what they’re perceiving on the ground, versus what is being put out there by the state.

The second part of your question about how the state is using the internet, of course, this is part and parcel of the digital surveillance apparatus. We have been seeing that be packaged as part of the tool of social control that has been used in a very widespread way, and has certainly had massive implications for behavior, and social and political compliance.

Eleanor M. Albert: This helps us transition to talking about how the reform of China’s own policing model at home comes in tandem with China’s taking on a more active role in global governance and security cooperation. Do we see China’s domestic vision of policing and public safety shaping the ways in which it engages in security cooperation abroad? Is there a link between the domestic and the international when China thinks about safety, or are these two separate pillars?

Viola Rothschild: I would say absolutely related. Very early in the Xi years, he introduced the idea of a comprehensive national security concept which really laid out this unifying theory that combines both internal and external security concerns. Whether it’s resource security, or tech security, cultural security, territorial security...

Eleanor M. Albert: Ideological security.

Viola Rothschild: Yes. Many of these areas have both domestic and foreign policy dimensions that Xi has identified as being critical to maintaining internal regime and party stability, which is the top priority always. This conceptual linkage of internal and external security has had concrete impacts on what China’s doing in the global security space.

For one, of course, through things like the Global Security Initiative that was introduced in 2022, we’ve seen China package and promote its domestically focused vision of security to the rest of the world. As it turns out, China’s expertise in maintaining domestic security and regime stability is a very attractive product, especially to governments in the developing world.

In September of last year, the Lianyungang Forum on global public security cooperation attracted over 2,000 people from 120 countries and international organizations. One of the key themes of the forum was law and order maintenance, and the forum showcased this very impressive array of both, again, these Chinese hardware—drone, surveillance equipment, facial recognition programs—but also software: police trainings with political security components, public security capacity building seminars, international police education cooperation, that sort of thing. You really do see this clear through line between what China is doing domestically and what they’re pushing in their foreign relations as well.

Eleanor M. Albert: Now, the big perennial question here when we talk about anything as it relates to China’s overseas engagement is, is it exporting a policing model with Chinese characteristics? So first off, is there a model like this that is exporting from a principled perspective? And then how can we tell? Is this widespread? Police trainings—this is probably a core component of this. What do they entail? Talk me through about the idea of a Chinese model of policing that gets exported around the world as a product to the broader so-called Global South.

Viola Rothschild: I’ll tackle the second part of that question about what this looks like in practice first, and then we can move on to the exportation of a model, if that is indeed happening.

In terms of logistics, Sheena Greitens and Isaac Kardon are the experts on this. They published a great new study on China’s global police training footprint at the end of last year where they compile a really impressive data set of around 900 law enforcement trainings provided to at least 138 countries over the last five years. Suffice to say, it is definitely widespread. Most of these trainings are taking place either on China’s periphery in Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and then also in Africa where China has had strong relationships with many of the countries there for decades. And as Greitens and Kardon’s data show, most of these trainings are being conducted on a bilateral basis, but some are also being done through multilateral organizations, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

On the Chinese side, there are a variety of domestic institutions that are involved at the central and local levels. Of course, the Ministry of Public Security. But under that, provincial and municipal public security bureaus and provincial level policing colleges around the country are involved in and actually carrying out the trainings.

In terms of what the trainings actually look like, the most common kind of police trainings takes on the form of a host institution in China, say the Zhejiang Police College, inviting a delegation of officers from a country to attend courses at their institution for a few weeks. These courses consist both of the more generic classes on China’s law enforcement system, and then more specific content on whatever has been identified as the topic for the course, whether it’s counterterrorism or law enforcement regime security, keeping public order,
drug trafficking…

In addition to the in-classroom training, there’s also a soft power element. Foreign officers will learn a little bit of Chinese, they’ll visit cultural sites, they’ll go out to Chinese restaurants, they’ll take Tai Chi classes. Though, I should also mention that there are a few instances of more intense law enforcement cooperation where Chinese advisory groups are dispatched to a country to spend time there training local forces and we’ve seen this in a few Pacific Island (PIC) and African countries.

The last thing I’ll say on this is that there are mixed reviews on the efficacy of these trainings. When I was at the State Department, I had the chance to visit several African countries and talk to experts and officials on the ground. The consensus was that the quality and usefulness of these trainings is mixed, but overall improving. Similar to many other aspects of their relationship with China, whether it’s economic, or educational, or military, that even if some of these countries might prefer to engage in law enforcement trainings with the U.S. or other countries, China is the one that’s offering, China is paying for it. Even if the participating country isn’t getting a ton out of it, there are fringe political and diplomatic benefits.

And like I said, there’s a consensus that the trainings are getting better. So even if the officers aren’t coming home from their all-expenses paid trips to China ready to rock with the most cutting-edge policing methods and technologies, they’re still coming back with something, whether it’s connections, or ideas, or experiences. This is how big picture, I think, that we’re seeing increasing Chinese influence in global standards, and in security and police work.

Eleanor M. Albert: To pivot us back: is this a model? There’s a real question about whether we should view an offering of training and how to use certain types of hardware or how to use certain types of policing tactics. Should we see that as a model? Is there something there in terms of their being a model? Does China want to be perceived as providing a model for policing?

Viola Rothschild: I think there are two things. There is China exporting a model question and then there’s a how exportable is this model, how transferable is this model.

In terms of the latter question, at least, the short answer is we don’t know yet. China is obviously very unique in many ways. The size, bureaucratic capacity, how central-local relationships and implementation work, and the extent to which these teachings and technologies are transferable to what are obviously very, very different contexts is something that we just don’t have the data on yet.

One case that I flagged that got a lot of attention at the end of last year was the Solomon Islands. There, for what I think is the first time, we saw China not only supply the technologies, and the police cars, and the uniforms, and carry out trainings both in China and on the islands, but what’s new is that they are explicitly trying to teach the Fengqiao model of social management, which is a Mao-era innovation now upgraded with digital tools that combines many of the factors I was talking about earlier in the domestic Chinese context. This more integrated and holistic approach to community management and policing where everybody has a role in maintaining neighborhood harmony. Subtext: everyone can be an informant; everyone is watching everybody else all the time. This has raised a lot of red flags. The case has been framed as a microcosm for the struggle between Chinese versus Australian influence in the Pacific and further evidence that China is exporting this techno-authoritarian model.

According to Chinese state media, which published a pushback to this narrative, they say there’s no-one-size-fits-all model. They’re just trying to support stability and development in the PICs, and this concern is a reflection of the West’s mounting geopolitical anxiety.

To get more towards the is China exporting a model question, it’s complicated. Yes, China, I think, is increasingly trying to shape norms around global security and has found many interested and willing partners. And no doubt that is concerning. But I’d also caution against the wholesale leaning into the China has it all figured out and they’re rolling out their master plan.

As I said earlier, the reviews from countries that are actually working with them on this stuff are mixed and their approach is landing differently in different places. From what we know about domestic policing, we’re finding that in the domestic community policing context, there are still a lot of issues in terms of people actually trusting the police and these community governance structures that they’re embedded in, and that there are potentially negative externalities for grassroots governance and social management broadly.

The model is not perfected at home and it’s certainly not perfected for export. But this is something that I’m really interested in exploring in future research, though it’s tough from a data gathering perspective. What does this mean for people in these countries that are adopting Chinese policing hardware and governance software? What are the implications for global rules and norms around security and policing? As China continues to exert more influence in the global security space, these questions will only become more important.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Today we are joined by Shanshan Mei and Dennis Wilder. Shanshan Mei is a political scientist at RAND specializing in Chinese defense policy and Indo‑Pacific security. She previously served as special assistant to the 22nd chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, was a member of the Secretary of the Air Force Advisory Group, and advised commanders of Pacific Air Forces on strategic competition with China. She has also taught at the Air War College.

Dennis Wilder is a senior fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, where he previously served as the managing director. Wilder holds a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and an M.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University.

Shanshan, Dennis, welcome to the show!

Dennis Wilder: Thank you. Great to be here.

Shanshan Mei: Thanks for having me.

Eleanor M. Albert: We’re here today to talk about the state of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] military. Before we get a little bit into the deeper conversation, we have to start with some news as it relates to this recent purge, particularly of Zhang Youxia, who was a vice chair of the Central Military Commission, and he was just placed under investigation. If you had to speculate some of the reasoning behind the move, were you surprised by it? Shanshan Mei: What do you make of it?

Shanshan Mei: This almost feels like the emperor-has-no-clothes moment because, as people who follow the PLA or follow China’s military modernization over the past two, three decades, one general observation is that the PLA is becoming stronger. The modernization has been going well despite some setbacks and different issues, but overall, the trendline is that the PLA is getting more modern. They’re becoming more combat-ready, and they have all these fancy missiles, fancy weapon systems and all sorts of positive news. But this incident definitely caught me by surprise. I assume many China observers and PLA observers were probably shocked by this breaking news.

The reason why I say it’s showing us some of the huge vulnerabilities is that no matter what is the reason—I don’t want to speculate because I really don’t know—but no matter what the reason, the fact that Chairman Xi Jinping has to make a move and make an announcement very publicly to announce that “my number-one uniformed military leader is now under investigation for some wrongdoing,” something is wrong. Something is wrong with the PLA leadership; something is wrong with the PLA’s overall image. That is my key takeaway: the military is far from being all good.

Eleanor M. Albert: This comes across as a major housekeeping issue that your number-one person has done something so egregious. I’m curious about Zhang Youxia’s background. He has been the face of the military for a long time under Xi Jinping. What is his background? How did he rise through the ranks?

Dennis Wilder: I wrote a top-secret report for the president of the United States in 1984 that highlighted the fact that he was one of the young officers that Deng Xiaoping tested on the Vietnamese border. This was a[n] unknown war to many people. This was after the ‘79 invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese continued in what was called the Battle of 1,000 Thorns at the time. I loved that and made it the title of my paper.

They decided that they needed to keep pressure on the Vietnamese. In battles that resembled Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War, the Vietnamese and the Chinese would fight over these hilltops in hand-to-hand combat, terribly expensive in terms of casualties, but what Deng Xiaoping was doing was finding the new generation of leaders for the PLA. Units were rotated in and then they would evaluate the officers. Zhang Youxia was one of those young officers. He was a deputy division commander in the 14th Group Army. He was publicized as a hero.

We at the CIA started following him all the way back in 1984. We knew that he was an up-and-comer. The other thing was, he is the son of a revolutionary leader who frankly was on par with Xi Jinping’s father. They were political commissar and commander in the same unit in the Northwest Field Army. So Zhang Youxia has had an illustrious PLA career. He has served in many different commands. He served in equipment procurement and other areas of the PLA. He was the top uniform general, a war hero, looked up to by many, many officers within the PLA. That is why this is bizarre.

If I can add one very big curiosity for me is it would’ve been so easy, with Zhang Youxia already being in his 70s, for Xi Jinping to simply retire him. He could have had a political illness, for example, which is not uncommon in communist countries. So the big question is, why do you have to publicly humiliate this man? What is the necessity that Xi Jinping sees in making sure that the whole PLA knows that this man was disloyal? The key line for me on this was that he had violated the chairman responsibility system in the PLA. That is a charge of disloyalty to Xi Jinping personally. What would lead that kind of charge? As was said earlier, we just don’t know. This is really a total black box.

Shanshan Mei: I do want to add two things related to Zhang Youxia. One is that, as Dennis mentioned, no doubt, Zhang Youxia served the role as a war hero and he literally was, leading his small unit and guarding one of the mountaintops. In many ways, we can assume that he actually witnessed or was actually willing to kill and risk himself being killed, in many ways is being tested by real combat. But I think also that gave him a perspective—as many American soldiers, airmen, sailors know—that in real combat, life and death, this is real. This is not just propaganda; this is not some movie. This is real. I think that is a very important perspective that Zhang Youxia has. I assume that he has been talking about it and trying to propagate or preach that spirit of combat, but also at the same time about the brutality of war.

That may have represented people like Zhang Youxia and his affiliates’, proteges’ perspective, including General Liu Zhenli. Liu is about, what, 13 years younger or junior than Zhang? They probably have not really served together, but publicly available information also tells us that Liu Zhenli also was involved in the Sino-Vietnamese border skirmishes during the 1980s.

That gave me a sense of these two men that are being investigated represent sort of an ideal military man, which is a very rare commodity in today’s PLA. You just don’t have people like that. This really not answers the question about the mystery of why Xi Jinping needs to publicly humiliate them in a way that he chose to do almost intentionally to send certain messages to his own troops, perhaps also to the entire Communist Party political establishments, but also to the world. This adds to the layers of mystery of the situation.

I do also want to address the issue of the CMC chairman responsibility system that Dennis raised. The wording we saw in the editorial published by the PLA Daily a day after they announced the investigation, including one line that says that Zhang and Liu Zhenli had trampled upon and undermined the CMC chairman responsibility system. I actually went back to the October editorial that the Chinese Communist Party officially published on PLA Daily, about the other nine PLA military members that were either expelled or probed. Similar wording was used in the previous editorial, except that this one for Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, they added one more Chinese character, trampled upon, versus just saying undermined.

These words are very carefully crafted. I don’t want to overread or over-interpret into these words, but in many ways, adding those “trampled upon” is obviously purposeful. I can see that, number one, because Zhang Youxia’s stature. He is the number-one uniformed leader, but when you use words like trampled upon, you are really showing someone is demonstrating some sort of a defiance over something. Again, interestingly, at the time of the editorial was published, there were only a handful of men left on the CMC. As of today, I think Xi Jinping is sitting on top, but also Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli, and Zhang Shengmin, they were still there because they were being investigated. They were not officially removed, but we know what’s most likely going to happen.

This is very personal. Again, as Dennis suggested, that almost Xi Jinping is trying to say, “You have trampled upon my authority.” Now, for what? We don’t know. We may never know, but something is definitely personal there.

On the CMC chairman responsibility system, I do want to add also, it’s a very important political item that we should take it quite seriously because as we read the PRC’s 1982 Constitution, that was when [the] CMC chairman responsibility system was first written into the Constitution, but curiously and interestingly, Xi Jinping was the one who added this into the Communist Party’s Constitution in 2016, I believe. There’s some Chinese explanations for that. They were saying, “Oh, this is Xi Jinping’s effort to align the party constitution with our PRC constitution,” but some also said “this is absolutely necessary because this is important for us to, again, align the party and the state.” As we can see, this fits in perfectly under Xi Jinping’s agenda that he’s really increasingly consolidate his own power, but also the Communist Party’s leading role.

Dennis Wilder: What I want to point out is what you have just heard is what we refer to as Pekingology. There are very few people today, and most of the commentators [that] have written on this subject do not have that skill. Shanshan grew up in the system. She has command of the Chinese language in a way that I will never have. She understands the fact that every word counts in Chinese party language. The fact that they change one character and that she can find meaning in that is exactly what analysts and our students at Georgetown need to be doing.

I wanted to highlight that because there is a great concern today that we are losing that, that far too few Americans really study Chinese, really study Chinese propaganda and use of media. People like Shanshan are real treasure. Unfortunately, we have far too few of them in our intelligence community and in our think tanks.

Eleanor M. Albert: I also think it’s super important because we’re in a time that, politically, I think a lot of students have concerns. They don’t want to be too close because it might affect their careers down the road. The reality is if we don’t have deep knowledge, how to understand China, then our country’s intelligence, and even just analytical capability in trying to navigate in the world, will be weakened because we won’t have that deep knowledge.

With this investigation, this leaves only one member of the 20th Military Commission intact. The person remaining is Zhang Shengmin. What do we know about him and the role that he now plays in the military?

Shanshan Mei: Zhang Shengmin, to us PLA analysts, he is we call a political commissar, a political type. When we say that, really we’re saying his entire career, he was in the political officer track, not a commanding officer track. These are some PLA jargons. We’re saying that as the Communist Party’s armed wing, very similar to the former Soviet Union’s Red Army in many ways, Zhang was trained and excelled in his career field as a political officer—not to dismiss their role, it’s very important actually in the PLA—but the political officer’s role generally involves personnel issues, promotions, morale issues, but most importantly, the indoctrination of the Communist Party’s ideology and quite a wide range of tasks.

Also, Zhang Shengmin, his entire career was spent in the PLA’s second artillery. Now we know it as the rocket force, but that matters a little less perhaps than the fact that his job was in the discipline inspection and political affairs, which makes it a little bit curious as of right now if you look at the CMC. I sometimes wonder what is a CMC meeting looks like today? Is it Xi Jinping sitting there giving Zhang Shengmin orders? Or perhaps those meetings are not happening now?

One last thing I want to add about Zhang Shengmin is perhaps also, what is his role in the investigation of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli and others? Again, I don’t know, but I would assume he likely played a role, perhaps, given that he still remains in the seat and he was having the portfolio of discipline inspections. But, I also have serious doubts about that, given how the PLA functions and Zhang Shengmin is one of their own. I don’t know if Xi had that kind of trust in him.

Eleanor M. Albert: Interesting. Dennis, any thoughts on Zhang Shengmin?

Dennis Wilder: Another of the big questions for me in this situation is, has Xi Jinping, before he took this action, worked out a list of new candidates? Has he identified officers that he thinks are loyal to him, or not?

One group I’m looking at closely are officers he has sent to Russia in the last few years to go for a year or two to Russian military academies. Obviously those generals would learn about modern warfare on the Ukraine border, so that may be a group that he picks from. It may also be that he turns to the air force and navy because the army has failed him. Again, it’s a question of, has he moved precipitously here or does he have a real plan?

The one thing that leads me to believe he may not be able to do this easily is the fact that he hasn’t been able to pick a foreign minister. That job has been vacant for quite some time. Wang Yi has had to do two jobs. The question becomes, is Xi Jinping, in his authoritarian overreach, now running out of people who he thinks he can trust? Again, we really don’t have the answer.

Shanshan Mei: On that point, if you just follow the PLA’s hierarchy, you go to the next echelon of potential commanders who had joint experience and the stature and the degree of proficiency in skills that they need to do this job. I look at the theater command levels, and then you look at the five theater commands and you look at their commanding officers and their political commissars. What interests me is the Southern Theater Command. When we think about the Southern Theater Command, we’re thinking about the vast South China Sea, we’re thinking about China’s southern border, and then you realize, that commanding officer is actually a PLA army officer…

To Dennis’ earlier point about maybe he now doesn’t trust enough of the army, given Zhang Youxia’s huge influence, and Liu Zhenli’s influence, of course, then will he really turn to air force and navy to find his loyal followers? I don’t know. On paper, when you really look closely of the personnel as of today in 2026 of senior leaders of the PLA, you realize the army remains a dominating force. That’s very natural just given how big the PLA is and also given the land borders and all issues related and also the historic army dominance of the PLA. Change happens very slowly.

Despite all the talk about [the] PLA getting better at joint operations, joint is difficult. Even for the U.S. military, this is very difficult. Despite we’ve practiced that, trained for it and exercised that for so many years, it is still difficult. For the PLA, without real combat testing, and we’ve seen some pretty impressive improvement, but I think the progress remains limited. So then you really need modern commanders to lead a modernizing military. I just don’t really think Xi Jinping has a lot of choice but to rely on some army officers, a mix of maybe air force and navy.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s really important and gets to my question in terms of thinking about the domestic implications of the status of the leadership of the PLA. You mentioned that the military has been modernizing under the reforms of Xi, at least on the surface level, as far as we can tell, but if you don’t have new generations of personnel who have combat experience… Where do you go from here in terms of what that next generation of leadership looks like?

I also think the bigger question ends up being what Xi cares about here more. Do we care about the readiness and effectiveness of the military, or does he care about the party having a stronghold over the military? What is the current relationship between the party and the military? I know that technically the PLA is the military branch of the party, but how does that live in practice, and then how has that maybe changed under Xi?

Dennis Wilder: My favorite theoretical framework is something that people have labeled conditional compliance within the military. I can’t remember who coined this phrase, but the notion that the army is subordinate to the party, obviously, but the PLA also brought the party to power. So the relationship is complicated between the two organizations. They are the two pillars of Chinese communism. Over the years, as I have studied the PLA, there are moments when the PLA demands of the party.

For example, when Zhu Rongji and others told the military, “You may no longer engage in private enterprise,” at that point in time, the PLA was running hotels; they were using their motor transport for private activities. In fact, at one point, I will tell you, I got a satellite photo from one of my analysts that showed 4,000 Hondas on an airfield. These were being smuggled into China and sold by the military. Zhu Rongji got very angry because the military was importing ore from Australia without the knowledge of the Chinese leadership.

So they cracked down on the military, but the military officers basically said, “If you’re going to do this, where’s the budget?” You can see a direct correlation between the divestment by the military of their private enterprises and dramatic increases in the military budget. That is a case where the military internally, without any public display, said to the Chinese government, “We demand some things.”

This is very complicated, and of course it goes on behind closed doors. In the United States, when the military wants to advocate, they leak things to the press. This is a tried-and-true tradition in the United States. That isn’t the way it happens in China. So when you ask, how does this change the army-party relationship? Eleanor, I have to admit that I’m not even sure I can describe today’s party-army relationship enough to say how it’s changed. This is a very subtle, complex thing between military leaders and civilian leaders in China. Remember that Zhang Youxia, by the way—we tend to forget this—was a Politburo member. He wasn’t just a military figure, he was also a member of the party central leadership, which gives him an additional voice within the system, or he had within the system.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. Shanshan, anything you want to add?

Shanshan Mei: I wanted to mention the more rebellious side of the PLA that I think is also interesting to know and also important for us to be cognizant of. For instance, in the, a PLA Air Force officer, General Liu Yazhou, he was, again, also purged. General Liu Yazhou was jailed, punished by the PLA for being outspoken and writing about or advocating about the nationalization of the PLA (or jundui guojiahua) in a way, meaning that they want the PLA become more like U.S. military, or any other Western military, to serve the interest of the country or the state rather than just the party.

To be honest, most of the time the Communist Party represents the PRC’s interest, of course, as the vanguard party of the state, but also there are times that people would challenge and say maintaining the Communist Party’s regime security is not exactly the same as promoting the national interest of the PRC and the Chinese people. Generals like Liu Yazhou was known as very outspoken and very patriotic. In fact, that’s a long lineage of tradition in Chinese intellectual history people would say a true loyalist to the nationalist ideal is the one who speak truth to power. But that has become a big no-no and taboo in China when you talk about nationalizing the military.

The reason why I bring this up is trying to complete the picture, as complete as possible, to add that there were different strands of thoughts within the PLA. But also different aspects of the party-military relationship. That the party is corrupted, as we know, and there are many works actually talking about how corrupt the PLA is, or really how corrupt the Communist Party’s system is, not just the military. The entire apparatus is built that way. When you have a top-down system, it is very difficult to truly eradicate corruption.

But there are good ones. I guess that’s what I meant. In fact, in my past career, I had some interactions with some senior-level PLA leadership, and my impression at a personal level, albeit very limited and oftentimes supposed to be very staged, yet I was exposed to some true leadership characters that we often see in American generals, admirals, and flag officers, but you see more similarities sometimes when you actually interact with them as human beings. They’re not always reading and just repeating the party’s indoctrination. I hope that completes our picture.

Eleanor M. Albert: We’ve talked about the news; we’ve talked about personnel and the relationship between the party and the military. I want to talk now about more concrete military posture and how there might be some international implications for this. How do you assess the strength of China’s military now in 2026, and what are those national security priorities that it prepares for?

Shanshan Mei: I don’t think they’re invading Taiwan tomorrow or maybe next week, but that being said, the unification agenda—that’s on everyone’s mind—has not changed. By all means, the existence for the People’s Liberation Army is to finish this unfinished civil war, and Taiwan is almost the fundamental reason why the PLA exists, if I exaggerate a little bit. That is to say, the end goal of achieving unification with Taiwan from China’s perspective has not changed.

Also, to be fair, in terms of hardware modernization upgrades and all the things that happened over the past 20 years, despite occasional scandals coming out of the processes, China’s hardware has improved and the arsenal has been expanded and the troops have been trained better. It’s hard to measure, but things have been ongoing for a while, and I don’t think that shakeup at the very top will really fundamentally change the direction of the military modernization process.

Eleanor M. Albert: I just wanted to ask a quick question. You framed the role of the PLA as having this reunification agenda as being its lifeblood. In some respects, one could argue that you would just want to prepare for it forever, but not actually achieve it, because once you achieve it, does that then mean that the PLA has to have a new, defining, motivating entity?

Shanshan Mei: It’s an important point because, in fact, all deadlines in Communist Party’s language can change. This also is, I think, one of the advantages of the Chinese language because the language itself is so vague. I sometimes say Chinese language is made for poetry, but English language is made for science. These are different things. Sometimes Westerners, when we interpret the Chinese speeches, writings, and texts, we tend to use or look at it through the Western lens. We like black and white. We like math because it is so accurate and tells us, “Okay, is that the date you’re going to go to invade?” Well, I don’t think any military in the world would tell you that is the date I’m going to go.

For Chinese, all the setup of 100 years, that centenary goals, objectives, and 50 years achieving certain status and things like that, the 2035, 2049, these things, in my view, are moving targets because they can always justify. It’s just like the five-year plans. Have we ever heard that the Communist Party come out and tell you, “I’m very sorry that we have not achieved the goals that we set out five years ago”? It’s always check, check, check. Reality on the ground is always more complex, and then you will see some very subtle ways of the communist propaganda to walk things back and keep working on it.

This is my way to address your observation about, are they going to just forever strive for a goal so that they could keep getting the resources that they needed, keep their mandate, and also the reason, motivation, all things; it’s very reasonable, actually. That observation is very reasonable.

I do want to also mention that it’s also very important to acknowledge that the PLA’s existence or the core missions, Taiwan obviously is one of it, but also at the same time, the fundamental role of the PLA, just like all military in the world, is homeland defense, is preserving China’s sovereignty and territory integrity, and that has not changed and will not change. Taiwan is important piece of that puzzle, but if you look at China’s neighborhood, China does not live in a very happy, comfortable, peaceful neighborhood. You’ve got the Korean Peninsula, you’ve got the South China Sea, you then look at the land border, you have the China-India border skirmish, and you also have China-Inner Mongolia, China-Russia, all sorts of things that would worry a PLA commander, I think, more so than sometimes when we look at them from outside.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. Dennis, your thoughts?

Dennis Wilder: I often remind my students that the United States lives in a particularly unbelievably advantageous position. We have two big oceans separating us from foreign powers. We have Canadian neighbors who, in my view, could not be nicer people and have no land army to speak of. We have Mexican neighbors who have to get their internal house in order. We live in a pretty good neighborhood, but as was just said, the Chinese, if you look geographically, they have huge land borders, and the PLA’s primary mission is to guard those borders. The responsibilities of the PLA are huge in this regard.

One issue I think you were trying to get to, Eleanor, that I want to address, and here we’ve been very hard on Xi Jinping, but maybe I’ll say something positive. It is possible that one of the reasons he wants to clean out the command structure of the PLA is that people like Zhang Youxia, I doubt that if you sat Zhang Youxia down at a computer, he would know what to do with it, to be very frank with you. I think there is this old blood in the PLA that is not conversant in modern warfare, is not conversant in joint
operations.

In some ways, cleaning out the old guard and finding younger, more tech-savvy commanders—remember that a lot of the old guard really didn’t have very good educations, whereas the younger officers have had better educations—it is possible that at the end of the day, we will have a better PLA out of all of this, one that has a command structure that is more modern, that understands twenty-first century warfare. I’m not one who wants to commit to the idea that the PLA will now fall into some sort of disarray. It could be quite the opposite.

Shanshan Mei: That’s a very important point. I t reminds me of some sort of theory that I was developing. When we look at and analyze the PLA’s modernization process and you read the PLA Daily every day and watch as much PLA TV as you can, you then realize every single episode and articles often generally talking about “we’re fielding new modern equipment,” “we have a new type of missile,” “we have a new jet that we need to train our people to fly, to maintain.” But then you realize, it is actually easier to pour money and buy stuff. Upgrading your hardware is a lot easier than actually training and preparing your people to use them, maintain them and do them, and fly them well.

That gets to my little theory, but Dennis already alluded to that point, is how does the PLA find a shortcut to upgrade their leadership? Because you can buy equipment, things like that could happen within one generation, perhaps just a decade or so, I guess that’s what I meant by one generation. But when you want to upgrade your leadership, if you follow the current PLA leadership transition and retirement and all sorts of personnel policies, they won’t be able to really upgrade and bring young blood in as fast as they would have wanted.

Important point to note is Zhang Youxia’s generation: he’s 75 years old and he’s I think two years older than Xi Jinping—roughly the same generation. If you look at the Politburo Standing Committee, folks are generally born in late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Now that is a very sad generation if you look at China’s history, and also very unique. Unique in the sense that this generation had been really deprived of formal education because of [the] Cultural Revolution, and also, as we know, the Chinese college entrance exam system was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and didn’t really get resumed until 1978. This is the sad generation in the sense that they really missed out, not really by their own choice, but they weren’t able to learn how to learn.

Now, this generation today is in their late 60s and early 70s. Even you push one more generation in, folks who are in their 50s and early 60s today, I would argue they also were negatively impacted by the turmoil and a lot of the tragic experiences of modern China. So you really want to bring in folks that are in their 40s, I would say, early 50s, perhaps to be your backbone of a modern PLA, as Dennis was suggesting. How do they do that? Really they can’t if they just gradually change and gradually retire and promote. So I wonder if this also creates opportunity for the PLA or for the Communist Party to actually select an accelerated way to put modern commanders in position.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. This leads to my last question, which points us to some recent crises that we’ve seen that are both farther away from China’s borders, but are no less learning opportunities where they witness certain types of military engagements and interventions taking place. We’ve had the resurfacing of the Israel-Palestinian crisis, the war in Ukraine, where you’ve had simultaneously what we might describe as traditional trench warfare, but also the rise in technology with use of drones. Again, these don’t have direct bearing on China’s national security, especially as we’ve talked about the homeland defense mandate of the PLA, but are there any lessons that may have been taken from how these conflicts and incidents have played out?

Shanshan Mei: My first reaction to that question is, actually, all of these military activities and operations that the U.S. military has put on in the recent two years-ish timeline, I think, has huge deterrence value in terms of signaling to the PLA to not mess with us. I think that’s a very important message, because let’s not talk about the actual implications and political side of things, but really purely focusing on the operational side of things, the [Operation] Midnight Hammer [airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites] and the recent capture of [Venezuela President Nicolás] Maduro. These are very well-executed military operations per se, and it demonstrates our military service members’ supreme qualities and dedication, but also the capability to execute under stress in real combat conditions.

I quote this “real combat” because this is a PLA propaganda term that they have been trying to highlight over the past decade in terms of trying to train under realistic conditions, but we actually are fighting real wars and these are things that are real-time deterrence in my view that the Chinese are clearly, almost no doubt, taking notes, of course, analyzing and learning how these things were executed. We will probably soon start seeing these things appearing on a lot of PLA textbooks about how the American military did this and did that. That’s really one key point I want to emphasize is the deterrence value.

Eleanor M. Albert: Dennis?

Dennis Wilder: I am going to add a final point that you didn’t ask about, and that is U.S.-China relations. It is very interesting that Xi Jinping called Donald Trump, and the readouts I understand are saying that Xi Jinping dominated that conversation, which, when you think about Donald Trump is fairly unusual. The analysis is, and I think this is accurate, that Xi Jinping called to reassure Trump that in all of this turbulence, he’s still in charge, he still wants the April visit of Trump to Beijing. He wants to move forward, particularly on the economic agenda.

I find it fascinating that Xi Jinping would want to do that at this moment. He also talked to Putin the same day. This may be an element that we need to watch in terms of Xi Jinping’s interaction with the United States. Does this make him more eager to improve the relationship with the United States because he needs to demonstrate competence capability that everything’s normal? I think this is one to watch.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor Albert: Today our guest is Lunting Wu, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo and an associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. He is also an associate of the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” in Berlin. He is the author of the book Belt and Road Initiative in South America: Explaining the varying responses (2024). His research interests revolve around foreign policy analysis, diplomacy, political economy, and security. Lunting, welcome to the show. I’m really happy to have you with us today.

Lunting Wu: Thank you very much for having me.

Eleanor Albert: Before we start talking about this concept of ghosting diplomacy, I wanted to ask how you came to studying rhetoric in diplomacy and then what drew you to focusing on China specifically?

Lunting Wu: I started out my academic career in political economy, global governance, and foreign policy. My Ph.D. looked at the Belt and Road Initiative in South America, mainly through the lens of domestic politics and international relations. At the beginning, my work wasn’t really about diplomatic rhetoric. It was much more focused on political interests and economic interests in foreign policy and its institutional dynamics. But the deeper I got into studying foreign policy and political economy, the more I became fascinated by the role of narrative and discourse in diplomacy. Narratives shape how governments understand their room for maneuver and how shared realities are constructed. Rhetoric gradually became a natural extension of my research interests.

As for why I focus particularly on China, perhaps I’d like to just clarify that my research does not only deal with China, but also a range of other international actors, like countries in the Southeast Asia, the European Union, in Latin America. China is just one part of my research geographically speaking.

This said, as Beijing intends to strengthen its discursive power in the world and to enhance its capability of shaping norms and ideas, as well as defending its core interests, which is evidenced by what some would call “Wolf Warrior diplomacy.” I think it is essential for researchers to be attentive to not only what China is doing, but also, what China is saying and by extension, what it wants the world to believe it is doing.

Eleanor Albert: Absolutely. I think that’s spot on. You’re the author of a new article that develops a concept: “ghosting diplomacy.” In the broadest of broadest sense, how would you define it, and how is it observed in the actual conduct of foreign policy?

Lunting Wu: Of course. I will first begin by illustrating what ghosting means in our daily life and interpersonal relationships. Overall, I think it happens to a lot of people when they text somebody at some point in their lives [and] they don’t get a response for an extended period of time. And when this continues, you may start to think “Why this is taking place?” or “Why the person that is supposed to enter into conversation simply evaporates?” and instead turns into a so-called ghost. Now, there are two explanations for this. That is, ghosting can be intentional or unintentional. Maybe [the] other side simply forgot to reply your messages because they’re too busy, or they’re doing it on purpose.

Now, upgrading it to the interstate level, the scenario in which you get no response from another country can be rarely attributed to the other side simply forgetting to respond. This then leads us to think whether it is ghosting, or to put it another way, this silent treatment has been strategically deployed to reach a certain foreign policy objective because after all, in order for it to count as a diplomatic instrument, or ghosting diplomacy, it needs to carry certain meanings, intentions, and objectives.

The way I see it is that ghosting diplomacy is a unilateral and purposeful act of severing communications with another country. Now, there are different levels and different types of this so-called interstate silent treatment. First of all, the magnitude of this silent treatment can vary. It can be that only the communication of leaders or heads of state that is disrupted. It can also be that the ministry-to-ministry communication is cut off, or it can be that several communication channels across different departments or sectors are affected as well.

Second, the duration could also vary. It can range from days to weeks to even months. But here’s the tricky part. When you want a response on an urgent matter, even a two-day silence can be worrying. If you want a response on a non-urgent matter, then the response does not need to be that time sensitive.

Third, interstate silent treatment can be explained or unexplained. That means that in some cases, the target simply knows why they’re being treated with silence. Whereas in other, rarer, cases, the reason may not be that clear or straightforward.

And last but not least, I would say ghosting diplomacy can be a standalone act without other sanctions or punitive measures, or it can be also accompanied by those sanctions or punitive measures.

To your question about how we can actually see whether silent treatment is happening between countries, or whether we can even know when it is going on, well, the thing is that states almost never have a total communication blackout. It is not like an interpersonal relationship where you can just stop talking altogether completely. Even during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union kept an emergency hotline open. Normally, you have Track I and Track II diplomacy between countries. If you watch the Netflix series The Diplomat, you will see that sometimes, even if major communication lines suffer a breakdown, however, the intelligence communication between allies will be still open.

But having said that, you can have a really important ministry or several ministries basically ghosting their counterparts for a long time. Sometimes, it’s the top leader doing the ghosting.

In short, we do not always know what’s happening through every single behind-the-scenes channel, but even this targeted silence can have big consequences. And because it does matter, it usually becomes visible in one way or another. Either the media reports it or you can see it in official statements. In a sense, we know countries are not talking when one or both sides come out and essentially say, “Yes, we’re not talking right now.”

Eleanor Albert: You can also, I presume, have some that might want to not have their silent treatment strategy be visible. They might deny it or they might say, “Oh, we’re not not talking to them on purpose.” This is such an interesting dynamic because it’s hard to figure out, well, what is the purpose of the ghosting? What is the outcome that they want to achieve through the ghosting? I think us talking about a country with some specifics might help ground this because I think this is such an interesting phenomenon. So, in talking about China, how does China ultimately use this strategy? How does it employ it? And what does China use it for?

Lunting Wu: It is interesting that China has deployed [the] silent treatment in some notable cases. One case that caught researchers’ attention is after the former British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to receive the Dalai Lama in 2012. China suspended high-level diplomatic communication with London for over a year. What was particularly interesting was that, during this period of time, the economic exchange—meaning trade or investment between China and the UK—remained largely unaffected. In other words, China only resorted to diplomatic sanctions rather than economic sanctions.

Another notable example of China using ghosting diplomacy is in the aftermath of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. After this event, China held a three-day live fire military exercise encircling the island, which was broadcasted by Chinese media as well as international media. But what is less known and less discussed is its subsequent severance [of] military-to-military communication with the U.S., as well as other dialogues concerning climate and counternarcotics.

Directly to your question of how China is doing this: according to a report from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), for about one year and a half, Beijing canceled or suspended planned engagements between the two militaries and either refused or ignored the DOD’s requests for engagements. This silence even continued in the wake of the reported surveillance balloon incident, which was months after Speaker Pelosi’s visit. This was, according to former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, one of the most dangerous moments for the U.S.-China bilateral relations during his ambassadorship.

A more recent case of silent treatments is Beijing’s decision to permanently cease communications and engagement with the Czech President Havel in the wake of his recent meeting with Dalai Lama earlier this year.

In these examples, China mainly targeted communication channels that are deemed important by the target. In the U.S. case, we’re talking about China-U.S. theater-level commander talks, defense policy coordination talks, as well as the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings. In addition to that, the crisis communications working group meeting between the two countries was rejected by the Chinese side. These platforms and dialogues are of crucial importance for both militaries to coordinate policy and to avoid misperception and misunderstanding.

But clearly, China has instrumentalized—if not weaponized—these communication channels to exert pressure on the United States in an attempt to regain control of the situation. In the Czech case, it was only the communication channel with the president himself that was severed, while other established communications remained largely unaffected. Also, economic exchanges seem to continue. This shows that the channels that Beijing chooses to cut off have been carefully selected.

Eleanor Albert: It’s interesting because you could imagine a scenario in which lower level, ministry level is seeking to come up with some policy win. They have an objective. They’re hitting some blockades. They’re not getting through. Are there any instances in which you could imagine a ministry level employing the silent treatment in a specific ministry in order to try and extract a win because they know the target side cares about this?

Lunting Wu: Of course, I think silent treatment, as I mentioned earlier, can target [a] ministry, can target leaders. Extracting this silent treatment from the case of China and upgrading it to broader cases, let’s say like the U.S. We have seen President Donald Trump has refused to take up phone calls from other leaders as well. I think this is also a way of leveraging communication to extract certain conditions or certain concessions from the interlocutors that you’re engaging with.

Eleanor Albert: Why does China use ghosting diplomacy at all? Has it been effective for them? Why is this a strategy that seems to be something that their diplomats want to engage in? It seems risky in certain scenarios, right? So why take such a risk?

Lunting Wu: If we look at those episodes of China using ghosting diplomacy or silent treatment, it usually happens when it perceives the other country to have violated or transgressed its national interests. In the U.S. case, it was about Taiwan. In the British and Czech cases, it was about Tibet. We see a pattern here in which this passive aggression was invoked when Beijing perceives that its core interests have been trampled despite constant warnings.

Secondly, silent treatment is not merely ignorance, but an intentional and strategic ignorance or refusal to engage. It serves as a means, and more importantly a passive-aggressive one, to punish the other without direct confrontation. In other words, it is a form of punishment, and it deprives something valuable from the target that is the access to the source of silence. It also compels the target to comply with its demands because the termination of ghosting and the resumption of dialogues would ultimately depend, to a large extent, on whether certain conditions are met, or not, by the target. If not, then silence continues.

Also, it might deter other countries from following suit to violate the core interests. In a way, I would say the punitive mechanisms might be similar to that of a sanction, but it differs here from economic sanctions in the sense that the imposition of silent treatment or ghosting would not need to mobilize a lot of labor to achieve that. It simply involves the cutoff of communication by not responding, and this might be solely at the discretion of the executive.

Third, I would say, [the] motivation behind silent treatment is that different from other types of overt aggression. Ghosting signals grievance and resentment without making the conflict drastically escalate in the short run. This is important—in the short run. Again, if nothing wrong precedes the act of ghosting, then it should not have occurred in the first place. Therefore, sometimes, silence speaks louder than words. Sometimes silence is the nonverbal way to say, “Hey, you did something wrong. I don’t like it.” But on the other hand, it forecloses the possibility of undue escalation because overt confrontation can escalate quickly, particularly when it is mismanaged.

Last but not least, drawing on social psychology studies, we can see that by imposing [the] silent treatment, the source of [the] silent treatment can regain a sense of control over events that it seems to lose control over previously. For example, Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, albeit Beijing’s constant warnings. The Czech president visited the Dalai Lama despite its dissuasion, and David Cameron’s government received the Dalai Lama in spite of China’s opposition. Therefore, China may see that it could no longer control the situation.

In order to regain the sense of control, [the] silent treatment could fortify some emotional needs that it has. In a way, it may also start to feel more respected when the target of [the] silent treatment begins to bombard China with calls and requests for meetings, because right now, it is essentially using silence to intentionally ostracize and even humiliate the target and treat it as somebody unworthy of being listened to, which elevates its own status in this communication as the superordinate interlocutor.

Eleanor Albert: Right. It’s a silent treatment that has multilevel impact, both on the target, but also, on the broader social community. It’s also interesting that in some ways, this silent treatment, as you said, it doesn’t necessarily escalate confrontation. It also provides a sense of plausible deniability because it’s understood in many cases that this is intentional, but it could say, “Oh, we lost that communication or that outreach,” or “We’ll get back to you because we’re busy doing X, Y, Z thing.”

I wanted to ask about these cases because you provide some very concrete examples, and almost all of them are between states that might have fundamentally different values, foreign policy principles with China. There are some severe disagreements. Are there instances in which even allies can be targets of this ghosting? Are there instances where countries are targets of ghosting that might traditionally be seen as more closely aligned with China?

Lunting Wu: It touches the question of whether ghosting can be observed in other cases. While I think all countries can engage with ghosting to some extent, it is definitely not an act that is limited to China. Just take a look at reports of President Trump not finding the time to pick up phone calls from the state leaders around the world when they want to negotiate tariffs with the U.S. president or take a look at how North Korea, [it] sometimes just cuts off communications with South Korea amid tensions.

So we can definitely discern instances of silent treatment elsewhere in the world, but then it remains an open question as to whether leaders or countries that demonstrate more authoritarian traits may instrumentalize or weaponize communication channels more frequently or not. And as to whether allies can ghost each other or can impose silent treatment on each other, I think it is a fascinating question to answer.

I cannot really name a concrete scenario in which allies are doing this, but again, looking at the reports of recent trade negotiations, we have seen instances in which the U.S. refused to pick up phone calls from Japan, for example. And this is, again, a fascinating question to provide answers to in the future and to research upon.

Eleanor Albert: So my last question, and you alluded to this already in talking about can all countries engage in ghosting. If all countries have the power to do so, that seems to be yes because all countries have channels of communication. But then the broader bigger question is, is the leverage that a state trying to employ ghosting or the silent treatment, does it matter that they have a certain amount of power? Is this something middle powers can use, or great powers? Or is it really about the interactive dynamic between who is doing the ghosting and who the target is?

Lunting Wu: Definitely. In social psychology terms, I would say that the saddest scenario would be a country not being paid attention to by anybody, for example, in a multilateral setting, simply because the country doesn’t matter to another country and it was automatically ostracized. This is something that also deals with the power relationship between two countries, but I think what matters more is whether the communication channel is really valued by the target or not.

If the target says that we don’t actually care about whether we have the access to another state, then the ghosting might not achieve a lot of impact. But on the other hand, if the target says that, yes, we really value access and communication with the interlocutor, then the severance of the communication with this target can be really impactful.

And for an extended period of time, the target might be left confused and frustrated and again, might bombard the source of silence with a lot of requests or with a lot of plans to engage, only to find out that the door has been shut. And this is something that also causes a lot of psychological or
emotional disruptions to the diplomats that are engaging with this sort of diplomacy.

Eleanor Albert: I think a lot about the role that Norway plays in broader relations with North Korea. That is likely a very important communication channel that could be leveraged for some powerful extraction if necessary. I’m curious: with this concept, do you have plans to expand it to have other cases, other instances?

Lunting Wu: Of course, this is just the beginning of a broader research agenda, and a lot of questions have been left unanswered. I think it is worth researching what is the impact of interstate silent treatment. We have already touched upon that in the short term, it is not going to escalate that drastically the tensions, if there is any.

However, what about in the long-term, with silence dragging on? Then the military-to-military communications in this case might be impactful because the silence can just lead to misperceptions, misunderstanding, and can amplify a very minor incident into a very big one if there is no communication at all.

It is worth studying what would be the consequences of the silent treatment and importantly, how this would end? So in which pathways or scenarios that silent treatment can end and the communications can be normalized and resumed.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Our guest today is Ayumi Teraoka, an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. She studies alliance politics and security issues in the Indo-Pacific. Her forthcoming book examines the history of U.S. alliance management in Asia from the 1960s to the present, illuminating the conditions under which the United States successfully negotiated geopolitically contested issues with allies, including air defense integration and the defense of Taiwan, in the face of China’s opposition. Ayumi, it’s great to have you back on the show. It’s a real treat.

Ayumi Teraoka: Thank you so much for having me back.

Eleanor M. Albert: We’re going to talk today about Japan’s foreign policy vis-à-vis China, but before we start, perhaps we could begin with a little intro on who Japan’s new prime minister is?

Ayumi Teraoka: Sanae Takaichi is the current prime minister of Japan, inaugurated in October. She leads the largest Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been ruling the party for decades, during Cold War and even today, but she now has a new ruling coalition partner, which is [the] Japan Innovation Party, and most excitingly, of course, she’s the first-ever female leader of Japan.

She was first elected to parliament in 1993 as a part of a different party, New Frontiers Party, which was sort of [a] reformist party at the time, but then she joined LDP in 1996. I think what also makes her special, it’s not that she’s a woman, but she comes from a non-dynastic family, which means that her family is not a traditional family of politicians. Her parents were working class and then she went to Matsushita seikei juku [Matsushita Institute of Government and Management], which is a prep school made for raising next-generation leaders founded by Panasonic founder Matsushita Konosuke. That prep school had [a] new-generation leaders who didn’t have any dynastic background.

She grew an LDP leadership career being affiliated with late Shinzo Abe. It was Abe who led the efforts behind her first candidacy in [the] LDP election leadership race in 2021. She lost that time against Kashida, but that officialized her position as Abe’s successor or Abe’s protege. She has close views with Abe on history. She has visited controversial Yasukuni Shrine that enshrines war criminals from [the] Tokyo trials. She rose up as a right-wing conservative leader within a group that is less willing to accept Japan’s culpability in the war [World War II].

Her views on foreign policy also are strongly impacted by Abe and Abe’s foreign policy visions of Free and Open Indo-Pacific, often known as FOIP. She appointed recently Keiichi Ichikawa from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be her national security advisor, and Ichikawa is known to be the architect of FOIP vision when Abe was in power. She must know, after working closely with Abe, that Abe’s foreign policy was not as successful if he didn’t [get] the China piece right.

When Abe came into office in 2012, China had very similar, coercive campaign against Abe, describing him as a historical revisionist. But ultimately, China came to admit that Abe was going to be in power for a while and China also had to have a working relationship with Japan. In [the] later years of Abe’s administration, Xi Jinping and Abe’s relationship was pretty positive. There was also talk about Xi Jinping visiting Japan for a state visit, which never came to fruition because of [the] COVID-19 pandemic. Takaichi must know that she also wants to stabilize a relationship with Beijing.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating way to start her administration if that is on her foreign policy agenda. Beijing and Tokyo are not in a good place. They’re at loggerheads, in a bit of a diplomatic crisis. I’m curious if you could walk us through how we got here. She’s inaugurated in October. She has all this influence in thinking about how Abe wants to see Japan’s role in the world and in the Indo-Pacific. What happens?

Ayumi Teraoka: One thing you should know about Takaichi is she’s a pretty straight talker, and that’s why she’s also popular among the public that she doesn’t really give BS on policy. She gives straight answers to questions. In parliament, when she came into office, there was a Diet debate between her and [an] opposition party member, former Foreign Minister Okada from Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, and Okada was really trying to ask Takaichi whether she held the previous positions that she had, which is that contingency around Taiwan, which includes [an] armed attack on Taiwan from Beijing or even [a] naval blockade around [the] Taiwan Strait would constitute what is called [a] Japan survival-threatening situation, which means because that the situation constitutes an existing threat to Japan, that would allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defense and allowing Japan to use force, even if Japan itself was not attacked.

Takaichi, after evading that question for a little bit, ultimately said, yes, of course it could constitute as survival-threatening situation for Japan. Again, what she said, in terms of context, everybody knew that because [of] the proximity, of course, any crisis or military situation around [the] Taiwan Strait would have devastating consequences for Japan, but nobody really said that in public, let alone the prime minister of Japan [on] the Diet floor. That’s why it really triggered Chinese responses.

Initially, the response came from [the Chinese] Consulate General of Osaka who had a really dramatic, threatening statement saying that Takaichi should be beheaded basically, but that social media post has been taken down [and the] Chinese government is now putting forward a campaign more on the official line and demand[ing] Takaichi to take down the statement, or correct her statement, which [the] Japanese government’s not willing to do.

Then, the coercive pressures include re-suspending import of seafood from Japan, canceling cultural exchanges like music concerts, movie releases from Japan, and also advising individuals, tourists from China not to go to Japan, basically saying that Japan doesn’t have a welcoming climate for Chinese tourists at this time. It’s a massive campaign of economic coercion against Japan, which Japan has experienced before and many other U.S. allies and partners have so far. It’s a very familiar tactic for Beijing.

Most recently, there was some military crisis around Japanese territory where Chinese fighter jets also, according to Japanese media reports and defense authorities, had locked radar on Japanese fighter jets who were preparing to scramble, if necessary, around [a] Chinese military exercise. It’s been a pretty intense relationship and moment between China and Japan.

Eleanor M. Albert: What I think is so interesting is that the intensity of this moment makes us have to look back at history because there’s a reason for this type of statement to be so inflammatory from Beijing’s perspective. It’s been a long source of tension. Where does Taiwan fit into this complicated history? You alluded to the war, but maybe we could provide a little bit of context of where Taiwan sits within the historical tension between Beijing and Tokyo.

Ayumi Teraoka: China’s position with Taiwan has always been integral part of China. Japan also has a One China policy. Japan doesn’t recognize Taiwan sovereignty or doesn’t have a position on it, but encourages peaceful resolution of differences between [the] Taiwan Strait. Taiwan, of course, has been occupied by Japan, colonized by Japan from 1895 to 1945 for 50 years as a part of a victory for Japan to win the first Sino-Japanese war and as a result of the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Qing dynasty. Since 1945, Japan has relinquished those territorial gains and hasn’t had any political willingness to really get into the politics of Taiwan sovereignty vis-à-vis China, especially after 1972 [with]Tanaka’s visit to China, rapprochement with PRC [People’s Republic of China].

Historically, because of the history of Japan’s occupation of Taiwan, Beijing has been extra sensitive about Japan’s potential involvement over Taiwan issues. Beijing has been skeptical about Japan-Taiwan ties, going back to the 50 years of occupation, colonial history, and this sense of alarm and suspicion of China toward what they see as [an] ulterior motive of Japan to encourage independent forces in Taiwan more than the reality. Japanese politicians have been very careful not to be involved in this sovereignty dispute between China and Taiwan.

But after [the] 1990s of Taiwan’s democratization and more recently, Beijing’s military coercion against Taiwan, I think Tokyo has come to [the] realization that Japan has to step up and make sure that China understands that any armed attack against Taiwan or naval blockade constitutes an armed attack or coercive measure against Taiwan [and] would have consequences for Japan as well. Therefore Japan has a point of view and really wants to discourage Beijing from taking such an actions. That’s that.

Also, Taiwanese and Japanese societies have always had a very close relationship and I think this sense of affinity between two peoples is pretty strong. Economically too, these two economies are closely interrelated. Because [of] Taiwan’s special position in [the] semiconductor industry, TSMC—major fabrication company of chips—have one factory in Kumamoto that’s already operating. There’s also talk about a second factory opening up. That planning is still in discussion about what kind of chips they want to produce, but there is this strategic element of discussion happening between Japan and Taiwan on this key sector.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to unpack a little bit about the repercussions of what Tokyo’s statement about a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan and how that would constitute a survival threat. It’s also been alluded to as an existential crisis for Tokyo. Will that have broader impact on security dynamics in Asia? Tokyo has constraints on the way in which it can use its military force built into its constitution. A statement like this sets it apart saying, “No, these are instances in which our military would be allowed to engage.” How will Japan staking this position impact the security strategies and thinking of other Asian powers in the Indo-Pacific?

Ayumi Teraoka: Takaichi’s statement was stating the obvious part out loud, so quiet part out loud for the first time. In that sense, that statement was reducing Japan’s strategic ambiguity on this question of whether Japan would be involved in contingency around Taiwan. At the same time, if you look at her statement closely, she only said it could constitute, right? She didn’t say that it will.

There is still a political judgment that will take place if such a situation arise[s]. In that sense, I think she was really stating the obvious, and that’s why, if you look at public polling on her statement, [the] majority of Japanese respondents to the poll say, “I think what she said was correct and justified.” Maybe she didn’t have to say that. That point draws a lot of criticism from her opponents. Because of that nature of her statement simply stating the obvious, I don’t think it really changes the geopolitical picture in Asia, but given this coercive campaign in response to Takaichi’s statement, countries like the Philippines, Australia are watching the consequences of such explicit statement.

These leaders of other countries will be a lot more cautious, learning a lesson from Takaichi’s case, not to say explicitly what they would do in [a] Taiwan contingency. At the same time, there is an argument to be made that such a statement actually reassures Taiwanese that they’re not alone in this context and in potential coercion from Beijing. It has reassured political leaders in Taipei who often feel that they’re isolated and they don’t have enough allies and partners because of their very unique position in international politics. In a way, I think the consequences of her statement, whether it proved to have a net positive or not, remains to be seen.

Eleanor M. Albert: With this coercive campaign, it seems counterintuitive to how we opened the conversation about Takaichi being very aware that she has to have some sort of working relationship with Beijing, right? They are large economies in Asia. They are influential in the region. If they want to work together, and she wants to follow in the footsteps of Abe in trying to forge some sort of coexisting relationship, what types of recommendations might you make to walk back some of these tensions? Are there risks of the current dynamics escalating, or do we think this is performative in some way from the Beijing side?

Ayumi Teraoka: This is a very tough situation where both sides really can’t walk back from what they’ve already done. Takaichi, or [the] Japanese government, finds it very difficult to retract that statement because that, in and of itself, will be escalatory by implying that Japan may not be involved in such a contingency. It also has an implication for [the] U.S.-Japan alliance because, ultimately, whether that situation would constitute as an existential crisis for Japan or not, and whether Japan can exercise the right of collective self-defense also means whether Japan will be behind U.S. military operations around Taiwan, so Japan can’t take it back.

Then Beijing, because of its nationalist campaign rhetoric around this issue, it’s also hard for them to not react, but also to walk back what they have already done. One suggestion I have is that Takaichi has to solidify her domestic political base. If Beijing finds that Takaichi will be around for years to come, then Beijing would have [an] incentive to find a space to work with her, which is exactly what happened with Abe. For that, I think she needs to focus on economic policies and various issues that the public cares about and then make substantial progress with improving her domestic political situation.

In terms of risk of escalations, what I’m worried about is nationalism within China. So far on the Japanese side, there is a dominant narrative that we shouldn’t overreact to these coercive campaigning or pressures coming from Beijing. But from Chinese side, the question of Taiwan and Japan’s potential involvement in Taiwan are so close to [the] domestic nationalism narrative that is so integral to [the] Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. It’s hard for the leadership to restrain or change that narrative.

I can see that lower-ranking officials within [the] bureaucracy of military [might] take actions to please their leadership or [to be] align line with [the] party line so that the leadership level cannot really punish them. Many people are taking actions only in the direction of escalation without any sort of consequences from the top. I worry that situation continuing into further escalation on the military arena; I have a sense that that might be partly why the military escalation happened at sea recently.

I wonder how a Chinese leader can walk back that narrative, especially in [an] era where Chinese people might be dissatisfied with the current state of [the] economy and have always been taught that China has to stand firm on the question of Taiwan, especially against Japan’s involvement.

Eleanor M. Albert: This makes me think of Jessica Chen Weiss’s work about Chinese responses to tensions with Japan in earlier iterations around some of this stuff. What is the threshold of too much nationalism within Beijing, among the people for them to say, “Oh, we need to reign this in and find a more stable ground to stand?”

We alluded to the U.S. component. Where does Washington stand right now? It has a major treaty alliance with Japan. It has some serious implications for the type of role it wants to play in the Indo-Pacific, at least as laid out from prior administrations. Should Washington be playing a role? Where do you see the U.S. in this diplomatic crisis?

Ayumi Teraoka: Well, Ambassador [George Edward] Glass in Japan has taken a clear stance issuing statements to support Japan and criticiz[ing] China’s coercion and escalatory dynamics, whereas other parts of [the] Trump administration have been rather quiet. There was [a] phone call taking place between Takaichi and President Trump, but what actually was conversed between the two has been sort of controversial, and we don’t know, but Trump hasn’t been taking a very clear stance on this crisis developing between China and Japan.

Many suspect that Washington, and the White House in particular, doesn’t really want to rock the boat with Beijing at this time, especially [as] they’re negotiating trade deals, and they’re looking to have positive momentum toward the president’s visit to Beijing planned in the spring. There’s mixed signals coming from Washington how affirmatively [the] U.S. is supporting Japan’s position on a statement that would support U.S. military operations around Taiwan.

Also, these statements are fine, but I also think that Japan would never be fully assured by statements, right? We also know that President Trump often issues conflicting messages depending on different audiences, so it’s really hard to gauge one statement or another will be actually a message that would stick or will be implemented. Statements have a weakened impact.

At the same time, more recently [the] U.S. and Japan had multiple military joint military exercises; more recently, U.S. strategic bombers joined the Japanese fighter jets. This is a more quiet message, but [a] very strong show of force. Those types of signals coming on the military side, I think will be a lot more assuring. I think Beijing is also watching how [the] U.S. will react, both on the military aspect, the behavioral aspect and also statements.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Maria Repnikova is an associate professor and the Inaugural William C. Pate Endowed Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State. Her research interest centers around media-state relations in China, including political persuasion and critical journalism; Chinese soft power and public diplomacy, especially in the African context; and China-Russia comparisons. Maria, welcome to the show. It’s a real treat to have you here today.

Maria Repnikova: Thank you so much, Eleanor. It’s wonderful to be here.

Eleanor M. Albert: Before we dive in, I wanted to first ask on the personal note, how you came to study China and China’s political communication.

Maria Repnikova: My journey into China’s political communication has been long and curvaceous or zigzags more than a linear path. I started out with studying Chinese journalism education when I was a master’s student at Oxford and that brought me into contact with a lot of journalists who were training these students at various top institutions in China, and many of them were investigative journalists, so they were quite fascinating characters.

The students talked a lot about their desire for more wholesome and dynamic vision of the media. They were training to potentially become media professionals, but they were given very conflicting signals from their education professionals. It’s Chinese media, it’s propaganda, but also supposedly professional, in some ways critical, in some ways not. So it’s a very amorphous picture, and I thought it was quite fascinating.

From there I went on to do a little bit of journalism in Beijing as an overseas press fellow. I worked for Reuters, which was super interesting time. Alongside with that, I got accepted to the Ph.D. program and I continued to study Chinese media politics. At this point, the focus was on critical journalists. I ended up zooming in more on their perspectives, their ambitions, their values, their limitations, and then looking at certain case studies to investigate how it works in practice. This came out as my first book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism.

From there, [I] shifted towards a more global domain, in part because I observed so much conversations in Beijing, amongst other places in China, about the importance of image. China really cares about its image, I think more than any country in the world. It’s quite phenomenal that it really does value soft power and how it’s perceived. Sometimes when I give talks at Western universities, they’re like, “Oh, who cares? Soft power, whatever.” But it’s like, “Well, actually they care.” So by virtue of the fact that they care, it makes it a very interesting topic and puzzle.” So I started with an external propaganda research looking at Xinhua News Agency, and then I shifted towards more expansive research, empirical research in China’s image building through various mechanisms, including trainings of journalists in Africa.

Eleanor M. Albert: Let’s jump right in. Could you unpack for us what role China’s international media entities play in China’s broader political messaging strategy? You talked a little bit about journalists being in this nexus of propaganda and journalism as professionals. How do these media enterprises fit into the broader political messaging strategies?

Maria Repnikova: These enterprises are quite important as this overall Chinese media expansion overseas. It was probably one of the earliest signs of the party state’s concern with image starting in 2009. There was already this going outward policy energy, effort, and huge investments poured into these state media outlets. Essentially, central level media outlets like CGTN—which was previously CCTV—China Radio International, Xinhua News Agency, of course, is its own entity, but also expanding widely across the world. Then it transitioned towards social media platforms and so many other channels. But the efforts to really boost the presence of Chinese state media has been really outstanding. I think it’s one of the earliest signs and policies that we witnessed when it comes to concern for image.

Also, the idea of discourse power, which Chinese policymakers talk a lot about, is strengthening China’s voice in the international system, is also very much dependent on communicating this voice and communicating it through state media actors. Xi Jinping, when he talks about soft power and image, he often invokes storytelling and telling China’s story well, but also the focus on communication. Communication is a huge aspect of this larger endeavor. I think it attracted the most financial resources and the most attention from researchers and observers.

Eleanor M. Albert: Looking at where China’s international media lives, who oversees these groups? Who manages them? Where does it fall within the broader party-state apparatus?

Maria Repnikova: The majority of the oversight still falls under the Central Propaganda Department. One of the trends we’re seeing since Xi Jinping’s ascent to power, which now seems like a very long time ago, is centralization of media managements across the board. It’s both domestic media and global media or China’s internationally oriented media.

In the past, there was a bit more decentralized, but since 2018 it’s become regrouped into the Voice of China. And that Voice of China entity is under [the] Central Propaganda Department. It’s directly under the very top entity that manages the media. Of course the propaganda department has been renamed as [the] Publicity Department, so it has a softer name, but in Chinese xuanchuan, it’s often interpreted as both. It could be both propaganda, publicity, so it’s a dual meaning. But it’s managed from the very highest level of the party-state.

Then, Xinhua News Agency is a state ministry, so it has its own delegation or its own status, and it’s very high status, so it’s higher than the other state media. Xinhua stories tend to be used and reused by a lot of these other outlets. Recently, we also see this interesting development of international communication centers that have been spread all across the country. They’re localized, so they’re under provincial governments and oftentimes under provincial propaganda departments, but still have the central CPD, central propaganda departments, still oversees the overarching effort. This is a very new development.

There are dozens, if not, some claim, even a hundred of these centers. I haven’t looked at them closely, so I wouldn’t want to overstate, but it’s becoming a big initiative to open up the centers at all kinds of local levels and then diffuse the story of China that’s more local-based to impress global audiences with a story about Tianjin or about Sichuan or about another region. It’s all supposed to be positive, but it has a local tint to it, which is a very interesting new development.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. I’m curious the zǒu chūqù, right, the Going Out Policy, and how that was in tandem with a lot of these media enterprises developing and going out globally. What kind of strategies did these media enterprises use to create partnerships with overseas media outlets? How do journalists, who then get sent to foreign positions, undertake their positions? Do they have distinct reporting styles? Is there variation based on the markets and where they’re placed?

Maria Repnikova: The groups vary a bit amongst themselves. Journalists going to work for CGTN are different than those working for Xinhua News Agency. They might have different experiences. I would say CGTN is still a bit more open. They have more flexibility when it comes to what they cover and how, whereas Xinhua is much more regimented and it’s almost like a diplomatic tool of the state.

They play varied official roles as well. They would send very different people for those posts. They don’t always overlap, but sometimes, not that they don’t like each other, they might see each other’s work as very different. But in terms of what strategies they undertook, I think there’s several interesting strategies.

One of them, the big strategy is localization. That’s been endorsed across Chinese soft power practices, but especially in the media. This means hiring a lot of local talent. We often think about Chinese media, Chinese state journalists or media practitioners from China, but actually a large proportion now is coming from elsewhere. We can see this in Europe. We can see it in Africa, in places like Kenya. Chinese state media have poached some very talented reporters from other outlets, in part because Western media has shrunk its presence and its financial resources on the ground, in part because local media pays less. It provides a more stable, not necessarily more interesting, but more stable job. But also there’s a persuasion line there, hiring these people that they get to tell their own stories about their country and the continent. So that can be quite exciting. That’s something that they’ve been doing for some time, I think, that’s going to stay.

But the other part of localization is local partnerships. Local partnerships means signing agreements with local media organizations, and then it can mean different things. It could be co-production, producing documentaries together, different films, content, et cetera. Or it can mean indirect co-production. For example, Xinhua signs an agreement with a local news agency like in Ethiopia where I’ve done the research. Ethiopian News Agency is a state-owned one, and then this agency has access to content from Xinhua for free. It ends up relying a lot more on Xinhua content for China stories for different reasons. Part of it, because they don’t have their own resources [to] report [on] China; it’s convenient; it’s free; easy to use. It’s like a shortcut.

Something I noticed on the ground doing research there, especially in 2023, is that when I would ask in focus groups, young people, about their recognition of Chinese state media, they haven’t heard of CGTN, they haven’t heard of China Radio International, China Daily, but they heard of Xinhua. I was very surprised. “How did you hear about that?” They said, “That’s because it’s mentioned in the local media.” They’ll say, “According to Xinhua or Xinhua source or...” It was popping up all the time in local reports, which to me signifies quite a bit of influence. So that’s the kind of local partnerships that are being formed in many, many parts of the world. And then the other part of localization is also bringing journalists from local media over to train or to experience China. It’s not quite the same as the zǒu chūqù policy, but it’s more persuasion propaganda to bring them over and witness China for themselves.

Eleanor M. Albert: From your research and from your vantage point, how have these strategies paid off? Are they having the impact that A, China hopes or B, certainly they’re having some impact? You just mentioned that you had these focus groups with young people saying that they recognize Xinhua. In some ways it makes it sound like it’s acting like another wire service that’s just not necessarily a Western one… Are there consequences for this that should be alarming? Are they filling a certain void? Of course, if it’s under the directives of the central party, there are priorities, but it’s certainly not necessarily a malign actor for all intents and purposes, especially with local journalists being the ones reporting their story.

Maria Repnikova: When it comes to red lines, certainly most of the reporting is quite positive when it comes to China. It really is a China promotional reporting style. They might cover some stories about Africa, for instance, in a more balanced or negative manner, or they would expose, not necessarily in an investigative way, but report on some crisis or disastrous issues, problems, et cetera. But when it comes to China, it’s very rare that you’ll see reports that are negative. If they are, it’s more about growth, solutions that goes back to what I studied domestically in China, the solutions-oriented, hopeful style of journalism, constructive reporting. You’re not supposed to critique for the sake of critiquing. You’re always providing some sort of resolution to your critique. That really resonates and echoes in international reporting as well.

Rarely do we see a big story that tackles China’s problems, and especially its problems when it comes to relating with other countries. Typically, those are very, very positive. In some ways, the Chinese media effects, they’re quite subtle. One of the effects I’ve observed is that it homogenizes narratives about China on the ground, especially in countries that are more authoritarian. For instance, Ethiopia is not really democracy—it’s still considered to be an autocratic regime and the regime has very tight control over the media. Local journalists have already pressures when it comes to reporting on China. They have a lot of internal and external pressures, but then they have this shortcut of using Xinhua, so it becomes a way out. It’s like, “Well, I can’t really report back to China anyway,” something I talk about my forthcoming book, I have a whole chapter on censorship as part of China’s soft power, because I think it does carry some sharper edges.

Like you said, it’s not being normative or treating it all as malign, but there’s a combination of different things. We have to recognize the full picture. One of it is controlling the narrative. As part of controlling this narrative, there’s all kinds of access, control. Who gets to report on China, at what time, what kind of questions get to be asked? Essentially, it’s very hard to do anything when it comes to asking sensitive questions of Chinese entities. Then, because it’s so hard and there’s so few resources, what do you do instead? You still have to cover it. Well, you might as well just use a Xinhua story, a little blurb—they’re typically very short—so you can repackage it and send it off. That’s becoming a big thing.

So I think that’s homogenization of narratives. It’s something that’s not quite direct control. It’s not really threatening. It’s often by choice. I talk a lot about complicity in the book as well, and it’s not really like somebody’s forcing this journalist to adopt Xinhua—in some ways it’s just easier. I think that’s where a lot of this influence is trickling down, not so much in direct threats. But it’s still, I think, significant, especially since people recognize Xinhua on the ground and know that this is Chinese media, and also that so much storytelling about China is overwhelmingly positive and has this pro-China tint that seems to come from Xinhua News Agency. That’s quite something.

As far as influence more broadly, I think that recognition of Chinese media is still not as high as they would like. Talking to young people, for instance in Ethiopia, Chinese state TV, China Daily, there’s not much awareness of these companies, not much awareness of this content. And journalists who actually talk more frankly about Chinese state media, they find it not very exciting. They think it’s kind of boring. That’s been confirmed in surveys that have been done by other scholars like Herman Wasserman in South Africa. They interviewed a lot of journalists, in South Africa, I think Kenya. There was comparative research that also revealed that there’s not a lot of admiration or excitement about it. It’s fairly positive, so not the most interesting storytelling. The desire for Chinese content through the state media thing is still not quite as high as maybe the government would like.

Eleanor M. Albert: I’m curious about the digital space in terms of perhaps there being a shift if these traditional state media enterprises aren’t necessarily having the larger direct narrative impact that perhaps Beijing hoped for. What are people consuming on social media digital platforms? Is it still more tightly controlled, top-down narrative construction? Who are the audiences that they’re hoping to target? It’s been a long time since China Daily was paying for paid inserts in Western media campaigns that clearly didn’t have the effect that China Daily had hoped that it might have. In some respects, it may have even backfired. So has there been a learning curve for these media enterprises?

Maria Repnikova: It’s a good question. It’s a bit hard to know the motivations because they require talking to these top people, and sometimes it’s really hard to decipher. Do they really have a vision for the expansion? Does it seem to prioritize some places over others? It’s pretty clear that, with the headquarters of some of this media, Africa is a huge priority because they see Africa as a stepping stone towards influencing [the] Global South, and its appearing as this benevolent, helpful power that replaces, or at least outweighs, some of the influence of the West.

The West sometimes, I think, has been deprioritized because of, like you said, little success on the ground. It’s been extremely difficult to get through this Western public opinion space. Overall, in recent years, a lot of talk of Global South in Chinese states narratives about its soft power beyond the media, the global priorities in Global South; it’s all about Global South. And BRI [Belt and Road Initiative}, of course, has been declining and shrinking. So Global South has become the term that’s often thrown around to talk about where they’re prioritizing their influence. It doesn’t mean they’re giving up on the West, but I think there’s a bit more cynicism towards the ability to influence it.

But I do think there’s a lot of expansion on social media that I haven’t studied empirically, but some scholars are looking at it and they’re finding the scale of Chinese state media presence on Western social platforms is huge. There’s a lot of content and there’s more engagement than maybe we would’ve assumed there would be. There’s a lot more, at least, clicking and likes. And of course, again, social media engagement can be very superficial as we all are aware of. But still, some engagement is still something, people are somehow responding, maybe not commenting as much, but maybe they’re clicking on it. So that’s something that’s considered to be some success when it comes to metrics.

I think it’s also worth noting that [the] metrics of success for Chinese state media and soft power at large are very ambiguous. And sometimes they’re very scale-based. How many events? How many clicks? How many bureaus? How many journalists are hired? It’s about visibility and highlighting that there’s something happening versus the quality of engagement. Are people actually liking China more as a result of engaging with this media? Do they respect or admire it more thoroughly, or do they critique it as a result? The more serious public opinion studies, I think is too sensitive to engage with because if the results are negative, it doesn’t look good for these entities. It is a very tricky business to understand how they see themselves, because success metrics are almost very surface.

Eleanor M. Albert: Their metrics are performative in some respects.

Maria Repnikova: Yeah, they’re very performative. So then, if it’s all about performance, then I guess they can count many things as very successful. A big summit is a success as we’ve seen, and recently in Shanghai and the big World War II parades, lots of leaders showed up, although mostly from other countries, but still it was very widely publicized and watched so I guess that’s a success.

It depends on what we think about as success. I think when we think about success from the perspective of maybe the West or the U.S. perspective, it’s about engagement and admiration, creating these kinds of warm sentiments, and it’s also very hard to measure. But when it comes to China, I think it’s a bit more performative, more amorphous, and more focused also on respect and recognition. As long as China is recognized, that’s already successful, it’s something. I don’t think that’s seen as a failure.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fantastic. I want to leave the floor open in case there’s anything we haven’t touched upon that you wanted to bring up as it comes to China’s international media. I think one area that’s really interesting, and probably still a little underappreciated, is the fact that China does engage in trainings for a lot of journalists. I’m curious if those come across as your run-of-the-mill trainings or whether they are “trainings with Chinese characteristics.” What does journalistic training from the Beijing perspective look like compared to what might just be professional training?

Maria Repnikova: The trainings that I’ve analyzed, they’re not quite so rigorous. They’re really more about showing off China than training and specific skills. Sometimes they’re even very comical. The journalists I spoke to complained a little bit that they were taught skills that they already knew, or even very good at like Photoshop, some very basic digital skills. They were a little bit surprised and not embarrassed, but it just felt like this was a bit of a undignified as almost like…

Eleanor M. Albert: Underwhelmed.

Maria Repnikova: Yeah, like, “Why are we being taught this? Why don’t they think we know this? Where do they think we’re coming from?” There was that sense, but a lot of it is showing off the trends in Chinese media, like how successful it is in digitalizing its content, how successful it is in commercially, in earning commercial revenue. All kinds of success stories that are being communicated in a very dense, overwhelming way. There’s tons of statistics and graphs and figures, and it’s pretty intense as an experience, but also doesn’t quite stick with people.

So they go and then they don’t remember a whole lot from the trainings. Oftentimes when I would ask, and I’ve done many, many interviews with participants that would say, “Yeah, I don’t really remember very much. But I remember that the Chinese state media has very advanced technology; the newsrooms are impressive. There’s a lot of wonderful technology that appears to be very new and modern and futuristic.” And then China itself is being regarded as again, futuristic and very developed, more developed than anticipated, and more welcoming than anticipated.

They have some softening of perceptions towards China as a whole, which that’s a success for China. But when it comes to media specifically, it’s a very ambiguous experience for them. They go, and some of the people I spoke to called it a picnic. It’s a fun thing to experience as a free trip, but not so much as a training experience. Many of them aspire to have trainings elsewhere. Their first choice is typically not China; it’s usually the West, the U.S., the U.K. I think those come up as the very top and some parts of Asia as well. Maybe Korea [Republic of Korea], but not really China.

Eleanor M. Albert: Interesting. It ends up not being necessarily a media professional development exercise, nor does it sound like it’s a really effective Chinese storytelling experience either.

Maria Repnikova: It’s mixed. And it’s also back to localization, on the Chinese side, domestically, there’s a lot of localization. Who gets to perform these functions? Who runs them? It’s so many different people. It just depends a lot on who runs the program on the experience you get. It’s not systematic at all. Some of the ones that I studied, they came from Hunan Province. Hunan specifically initiated a lot of contact with Ethiopia, for instance, because Hunan has a lot of economic interest in Ethiopia.

They decided that they were going to host all these journalists, and when they go there, they go to local regional media, local media, and they see the province. But they’re not really trained. Those people who are training them are not really trained to give those sorts of presentations. So a lot of it is just an amalgam of different facts. I call it “patchy soft power”—a bunch of different things pulled together and presented.

Many of these lectures, especially from universities and party state institutions, they have very limited time. They’re generally overworked. They’re not paid a lot to give those lectures. They’re called upon. It’s almost like a campaign style. Like, “Oh, hey, we have a delegation. You’ve got to give a lecture to them.” They don’t have hours to prep this. So they put together whatever they’ve got and try to be friendly and give a talk, and that’s it. They don’t have a lot of information about the visitors. They don’t have time for learning. Who are the Ethiopian journalists? Who are these Nigerian journalists? Who are these Argentinian journalists? They have no idea. So in some ways, it’s also the problem of the system because they’re trying to do so much at such a large scale. A lot of different groups volunteer for different reasons, but they’re not necessarily equipped to carry them out very well.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

Eleanor M. Albert: Bulelani Jili is an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is part of the African Studies Program and an affiliate of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program. His research interests include Africa-China relations, cybersecurity, ICT development, African political economy, internet policy, Chinese business law, law and development, and privacy law. Bulelani, welcome to the show. It’s a treat to have you, and welcome to Georgetown as you kick off the first academic year.

Bulelani Jili: Thank you so much for having me.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. Before we dig into the bulk of our conversation, I’m curious about how you came to your research and your topic of focus. How did you land on focusing on Chinese tech and then how also within the African context?

Bulelani Jili: I’d say there are probably two stories. The first one really begins at my time in Beijing. I was a graduate student at Beida, Peking University, principally doing graduate work surrounding ethnic minority experiences, both kind of related to surveillance but also more broadly related to experiences surrounding inclusion in the educational, in higher ed in particular. That work got me quite curious in general about the nature of state surveillance, but as you could imagine, that kind of research was considered politically sensitive, and so there was not actually a lot of academic material that I could leverage while there.

The African connection came about when I did a research trip to initially South Africa and then later Zimbabwe that was on a very different topic, but I found that China’s digital footprint and geopolitical footprint extended to the continent in a massive way. I became quite curious about the economic and political nodes that held those relationships between the corporations and Beijing together in Africa.

So I became quite curious about in particular the digital infrastructure that was being imported to African countries under the guise of development, but also around the general capabilities of trying to resolve traditional problems that sat at the intersection of security and development.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. Turning to the core of our conversation, let’s turn back the clock to early days of Chinese tech in Africa. How did Chinese tech start entering African markets? Were there experimental phases where there was a particular place or a certain type of technology that paved the way for a more robust relationship?

Bulelani Jili: If one is really thinking about Chinese tech in Africa, one probably has to go back to the mid-’90s, maybe late ‘80s. And majority of the information communication technology demands that were coming from Africa were simply really contingent on trying to close the connectivity gaps that many African countries experienced.

This is basically that digital inflection point in which there was a shift towards fiber optic-capable connectivity, moving away from satellites. African countries themselves obviously were realizing that the internet could play a critical role in their own economic activity, and so they wanted to improve those means.

And if you look on the China side, this was also a particularly prodigious moment in terms of the development of the technical capabilities of their own respective country companies. You can think about Huawei and ZTE and their general improvement in terms of switch technology, and then eventually, they leap into the international stage.

You could, for example, look into the cases of Kenya, and what you see is that a company like Huawei, for example, would’ve entered their market in about the mid-to-late ‘90s. The initial work really was about selling the switch technology as one would expect because a company like Huawei was already selling their switch technology in Hong Kong and was selling it also across Asia, and they enter African markets on a similar note.

Much of the big business around tech, both in the early ‘90s and then into the 2000s was around governmental contracts. Also, this is kind of a tangential note, but an important note is that at the time, you also are seeing a declining interest by traditional Western firms in African markets in part because of trepidations over risk, trepidations over political instability within the region.

Chinese companies saw this really as an opportunity to double down on those markets, also in part because they thought that they could compete with these American and European companies on a more equal footing if they’re operating within emerging markets.

So a company like Huawei began initially switches and then eventually started taking on tender contracts, which are basically state contracts for work. Their big break began when they started also selling fiber optic installation opportunities and became the digital backbone for countries like Kenya but also for other African markets.

Eleanor M. Albert: And when did fiber optics take over as the bulk of Chinese tech?

Bulelani Jili: This is around the mid-2000s—so 2005, 2008, 2012—became the major rollout. They were doing this business in Kenya, but they were also supporting other connectivity initiatives in South Africa and in Zimbabwe and so forth.

This work also then connected the initiatives with data centers and then eventually smart city initiatives, and I’d say the general analytical attention within the policy space but also within academic research has been around the smart city model. But the smart city model echoes an earlier history and their involvement on the African continent, and really, I would argue the broader Global South.

I, in general, don’t like the analytical aperture of the Global South because it holds much, but also tries to explain a lot, which at times might not explain anything. But what you can surmise is that principally, it’s countries that experienced a form of settler colonization, or countries that themselves were not traditionally thought of as upper-income countries.

Eleanor M. Albert: That helps transition us into the evolution of the tech relationship, and clearly a lot of it was about entering new markets for retail purposes. Some of that was overcapacity in China, new markets to sell some of this technology.

But how does that translate to the current footprint of Chinese technology? You were talking about this a little bit with these initiatives of smart cities. Are there tech standards that China has been developing that have become embedded and traveled with the technology? What’s the evolution been like?

Bulelani Jili: I will try and at least speak to first, say, what is a smart city and then speak a bit briefly into questions about what were the underlying features that supported the push for both smart cities but also more entrenched engagements with Chinese technology partners.

When we say smart cities, we are just saying computationally-driven urban planning. That means trying to leverage technologies—whether it be facial recognition, data centers—in order to support the general performance and efficiencies of an urban landscape. And so that might mean, for example, using a facial recognition for security purposes or using a surveillance infrastructure to improve, say, the overall traffic and efficiency of traffic within a respective city.

Obviously, the demand for these technical systems is very much in line with developmental goals across the continent and across the Global South in which the technologies are presented as a modality in order to resolve traditional problems that sit at the general intersection of security and development.

You could imagine a country like Kenya is both worried about growing challenges surrounding, say, terrorism, and this is particularly earmarked by the Westgate massacre in Kenya in 2013. And then also challenges surrounding the traditional questions of the digital divide, issues around connectivity, but also issues around broader efficiency within traditional post-colonial state capacity.

So basically, these technologies have been consistently presented as almost a panacea, a means to resolve a lot of these traditional issues that governments face. Simultaneously, improving state capacity by relying on, say, a tech company, whether it be Chinese or not, raises several questions, right?

So state capacity contingent on corporate entanglement in itself raises a variety of questions in part because while you’re presuming that you’re improving state capacity, you are also relying on a technology partner, i.e., the capacity of the state is outside of the state, and at times, the corporate interests of the company may not be neatly aligned with the interests of the respective government.

So development in many ways is entangled with neoliberal logics of the state, and those issues are some of the current issues that are playing out in terms of Africa-China relations in which state capacity is tied up with debt, state capacity is tied up with outsourcing state applications. And these kinds of issues then also raise questions about the general governance of these technologies. So beyond whether or not they function, how are we choosing to manage them?

Many partners in the context of Africa-China generally don’t necessarily offer an immediate governance blueprint in terms of managing, for example, a biometrical dataset, which is the basic ingredient that you’ll need in order to run a facial recognition system. In brief, you could think of a facial recognition system as a digital camera that is able to identify a face in front of the lens. The way in which you would do that is by cross-referencing the face in front of the camera with that of a biometrical database that the state has.

Obviously, how the state goes about collecting that data, how the state goes about managing that data, raises another plethora of questions. But in part, Chinese partners, while they’ve necessarily helped governments in improving their functional capabilities of rolling out these technologies, they’ve not necessarily always played a role in helping them build out a governance framework.

At times, and particularly in examples in South Africa, and you see also examples in Kenya and also in Uganda, you see moments in which, at times, officials receive training from their Chinese partners in terms of simply learning how to
utilize these systems, and you’ll see this also in examples in Kenya where you’ve procured the basic surveillance system, and now you’re trying to figure out where to support the training of some of these officials who will be managing the system, and the officials would at times be coming from the police, but also they’ll be coming from other parts of local and regional government.

They, at times, would receive training from similar organizations in Beijing, but the training would come from a diversity of partners. At times, they would’ve worked with countries in the Middle East to train the officials and officers, and at times, they would’ve even worked with some British security organizations. So the general influence on governance is quite broad. It’s not
just contingent on a Chinese factor.

Outside of the training, in terms of the actual writing of legislation, what you see is at times lobbying coming from companies like Huawei or ZTE and so forth who are trying to influence the government policies that would impact the technology. But you also see on the other end, a European factor, what people have been terming the “Brussels Effect,” i.e., the exploitation of European normative and political commitments around the management, both of, say, technologies like AI but also technologies more broadly.

You see that the legislative and legal class being trained under European frameworks that also have a general impact on how these systems are managed, but none of these general efforts get to what I’ve been arguing, which is the root cause of some of the challenges, which is simply a lack of state capacity-building efforts—systematically but also at scale—to improve issues surrounding the misuse of these technologies.

If you look into the governments across the continent, their means of managing data, you find that a lot of the data commissioners are understaffed. Some countries, it’s at times literally just one or two people within a respective office, and they’re responsible for an entire country’s data flows and management. But their police have received these new shiny technologies. And it is that incapacity that at times is resulting in the spillover of negative consequences outside of the fact of a Chinese influence over how a security apparatus might be thinking about those technologies.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right. I think a lot of times, there’s a simplification in the concerns of Chinese technology being exported, that there’s some malevolence by the Chinese in terms of what they might get from it. Not to say that there aren’t perhaps concerns, but it’s as much of a consequence of once it’s been created, how does it survive and operate and get managed, right? The corporate social responsibility that certain firms should have for the environment, right?

I imagine that there are likely similar types of demands or expectations from some civil society groups saying, “We need to have more corporate social responsibility for technology companies and surveillance companies in terms of how these tools are then used and managed when given to countries.”

I was curious if you could give some examples of how different African contexts might create different outcomes based on these different types of incapacities, right? So how might we compare or contrast the South African experience and the Kenyan experience or the Ugandan experience with some of these Chinese technologies?

Bulelani Jili: There are definitely similarities and differences, and the differences are echoed by distinctions at the level of state capacity, but also at the level of the robustness of the civil society. And then finally, about what kind of legislation do those respective countries have in their books? To offer some lucidity here, let me speak to, say, South Africa and Kenya.

When you look at those two countries, at one level, they both have clearly very robust civil society organizations that have been consistently calling for the curbing of the misuse of surveillance technologies, but obviously the motivations for the procurement of these systems are going to be distinct in relation to why those technologies are in demand.

In the South Africa context, the big push for surveillance technologies is marked by trepidations over crime, which in itself is a historical phenomena that extends itself from the long shadow of apartheid. Whereas in the context of Kenya, it is a regional issue surrounding terror. The motivations are quite distinct, and when the technologies land, they are being mobilized for at times overlapping issues, like both countries would be dealing with questions of crime, but both countries are not dealing with similar levels of questions around terror.

Then, how the civil societies have responded are quite similar in the sense that both have spoken to the challenges and misuses of the technologies, largely so in the context of Kenya where the police have had a history of misusing the technologies against traditional communities like Somali Kenyans, but also around protest. The most recent cases of protests in Kenya have illustrated to the people that, at times, the police might be using technologies in supporting the suppression of protest. The civil societies noted that as an issue and then have put pressure on demands on being more transparent, not only in terms of the history of the procurement of these systems—which in most countries across the continent, the transparency about when and how they were procured is not particularly clear—but the fact of also how they’ve been used has not been particularly clear. The only time people find out how they’re being used is precisely when they’re being abused. In both countries, that’s been a major push.

What’s clear is that both countries have, at least in place, a form of data protection-related legislation. Both legislations are not particularly old. In the Kenya context, the legislation is definitely not older than four or so years, and building capacity to ensure that the legislation is realized is a key issue, and that also mirrors the South African experience.

But when you take a step back and you look across the continent, you become aware that about almost half of the countries on the continent actually don’t have any form of data legislation put in place, and the distribution now is becoming ever more widely. So the likelihood of the abuse of the systems is becoming quite evident simply on the fact that people don’t have the requisite legislation in order to support the overall management of the system.

This is not necessarily even speaking to whether or not the political contingencies of that country are more, say, authoritarian or democratic, and it’s also not necessarily even speaking to exactly how Chinese partners would engage. What is clear about how we shouldn’t be interpreting China is that it is able to try and meet the political horizon in which it lands, i.e., that they are quite politically promiscuous in terms of how they choose to engage with their partners.

They are equally willing to work with democracies on the continent and with authoritarian governments, and how they choose to promote policies would be contingent on the interests of their firms and their partners there, rather so than any kind of broad normative commitments. In part, because the discourse of human rights has been almost marked with a supposition that it is uniquely Western, and to push back against human rights in many ways is also to push back against Western influence. Much of the challenge is to try and almost dislodge the connection of human rights with the West and to simply think of it in terms of a broad human interest.

Much of, I would argue, the work is to try and explicate and speak to a rights-based commitment to the application of these technologies if they’re here to stay, away from simply thinking that it is a U.S. interest or a Canadian interest or a German interest. It can be a local interest, and that pushing back against its misuse shouldn’t be construed with a normative influence from foreign partners. In fact, I’ve argued that partners, whether it be the U.S. or elsewhere, should be trying to engage with local stakeholders, particularly within the civil society in terms of where they are.

And backdoor access, it’s a long conversation. But one thing that I think is particularly important to think about when we’re thinking about backdoor threats, is not that it’s not there. It’s more so about where is the solution for it? I’ve consistently argued that in the African context, improving cybersecurity supply chains is a paramount for them, and that improving cyber stability domestically is a paramount regardless of who the supplier is.

Attention to that issue shouldn’t be interpreted simply as a critique of the quality of goods coming out of China, in part because it then is read almost as a way to say that importing commodities from Japan or elsewhere is illustrative of the quality against Chinese goods. The threat might be coming from China today, but tomorrow, the threat might be coming from Russia. So domestic stakeholders and their allies should really be thinking about how do they support improving cyber stability and security across supply chains? That’s where they can ensure that local stakeholders can resist these threats.

Eleanor M. Albert: That’s fascinating. I was actually curious about this process, which you already said is not necessarily super transparent. But in the ways in which these technologies migrate to their contexts, are we talking about a majority of capital stakeholders negotiating with Chinese firms? Are we talking about smaller provincial stakeholders negotiating with these firms? At what level is this technology being integrated into the African context?

This, of course, then has ripple-down effects in terms of how it’s applied, and these questions of state capacity might be missed, because if you have a country level negotiating with a firm for a contract, then you might not be aware of the ways in which in different provincial contexts or city level, prefecture level even, that’s going to be applied. That creates, of course, power imbalances when you have a large Chinese corporation who might have more influence.

Bulelani Jili: Much of the negotiation and engagement about the procurement of these technologies takes place at multiple levels. At the first level, it’s at the local level or the city level, where basically a city official, whether it be in Nairobi or in Johannesburg, is interested in procuring some level of surveillance capacity within specific designated areas within a city. Again, it’s not like they’re in every single corner. They’re generally strategically placed within what is considered either hot spots for crime or simply major transit nodes that is also believed to have greater risk.

A city official might then want to put out a tender contract or a contract to then invite competition—disproportionately so Chinese companies get these contracts in part because of the financial reachability of their products vis-à-vis traditional Western competitors. That is partly connected to both the R&D capacity of a company like Huawei, but is also deeply connected to access to state credit that they have, which supports the production at lower cost of these technologies.

Then, of course, a general consequence of development is that, the reality is that the cost of labor for a Chinese company is just simply lower than compared to the American counterparts, which is again connected to where China is in terms of its developmental experience. These general formative factors influence the price of these technologies when you’re comparing it to a Western partner, and that means that countries and cities that are financially strapped generally then procure from Chinese partners.

While the city is engaging in these conversations, the national government in a lot of African countries is also in negotiations with China, and you’ll generally see empirical evidence for these things, particularly at the level of FOCAC [Forum of China Africa Cooperation], which is the multilateral stakeholder platform for China and respective African countries.

And there, there are several meetings around ICT technology and in particular smart city technology and AI technologies. You’ll see levels of negotiation about what level of support can China offer the rollout of smart city technologies. You’ll then see support specifically for the use of surveillance technologies.

At times, you will find that the national government has then been able to get access to an EX-IM [export-import] bank loan, and that that loan will specifically only support the rollout of smart city technology that includes surveillance but can only be used for Chinese companies.

So the state machinery is then being leveraged precisely to support their own companies when they’re operating locally, and that local operation can then basically lockout Western competition when you are working on, say, a data center, but you also are working on installing a facial recognition system and other things in other assortments that then will privilege Chinese companies when they’re working in Global South contexts.

Eleanor M. Albert: With that imbalance that’s created from the loan and the financing, what might it mean for the ways in which the U.S. and Europe engage on the continent?

Bulelani Jili: I’ve definitely thought quite a bit about this in terms of these clear imbalances. How should U.S. stakeholders be thinking or potentially engaging? One of the things that I’ve consistently said is that what is particularly striking about, say the U.S. and its allies—in Africa but really across the Global South—is that many of them have multiple initiatives in operation.

You know, the GIZ, a German equivalent of USAID, has a plethora of programs that are supporting AI governance or supporting local civil servants and improving their ICT skills. Similarly, Britain has a program, and Canada’s got a program, and the U.S.’s got a program, and so there’s just a stupendous amount of overlap. In fact, I’ve conducted tons of interviews with African civil servants about their interactions with Western civil servants and agencies, and they’ve consistently told me that “I’ve received three different kinds of training programs from Western partners, and they were like, ‘Can’t they just simply offer us one that is comprehensive?’”

Similarly, they have a lot of financing initiatives for fiber optic installation or other programs that are development-orientated. Again, to me, that screams out for opportunities for collaboration in terms of financing some of these initiatives, in part because many of them see themselves financially constrained when they’re comparing how much China can offer. But collectively, they could offer something as equally competitive.

I’ve consistently argued that the U.S. should be leveraging its alliances across the Global North to offer equal and comparable initiatives that are co-funded between the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia, and Britain, and so forth, as an example. Similarly, that kind of initiative can deal with some of the more functional, material aspects of issues surrounding surveillance and AI, but it also can deal with the more soft or governance-related issues. Where again, this issue can be brought and financed better, but also can be inclusive of other countries and partners who are like-minded. This is an opportunity to invite Singapore to the table, invite South Africa to the table, and other Global South stakeholders that have articulated similar values in terms of trying to truncate the worst aspects of the misuse of these technologies.

Eleanor M. Albert: What’s so interesting is that you’ve talked about the overlap between certain types of offerings for trainings, especially for the civil society side and financing for that. There’s also budgetary restrictions and considerations that stakeholders take when they are going through the tendering process.

Beyond these strict business and financial dimensions, let’s talk a little bit about the questions surrounding this intersection of digital development and security, which I think we’re very much learning on the fly, right?

But there are some very real considerations here, especially given the regional context of Africa. It’s got diversity in terms of how it thinks about itself as this Global South entity, but it also has different experiences with colonization, and so it has other feelings about ideas and normative values that might come out of the Global North.

So, in this space where it’s trying to fill that digital gap in its developmental experience, but it’s also trying to figure out the right pathways it wants to choose, what are the intersections for development and security in the digital space that you think are underappreciated or are where we should be looking next?

Bulelani Jili: Well, I’ve consistently thought that development and security co-author each other in the sense that producing a secure and safe environment enables for more stable and secure development in the long term, and simultaneously meeting your developmental prerogatives, whether it be improving education, improving health, and improving your broader economic situation, also supports your security outcomes.

And so, in many ways, the general intersection is evident in terms of how they can support each other. Across the continent, experiences around that intersection of being quite distinct. Using South Africa as an example, much of the discussions about, say, the digital divide have been about how do we, for example, ameliorate challenges that were borne from the experiences with apartheid?

So much of the conversation there is about improving connectivity, specifically for the most rural communities, communities who are incredibly disenfranchised, and then at times seek out, say, crime, for example, in order to garner basic materials in order to get themselves from today ‘til tomorrow. For the South African experience, a lot of these conversations about the digital divide are simply about ameliorating historical issues.

Now, of course, how one goes about doing that is an incredibly complicated matter, and it’s further complicated when your strategy is simply contingent on leveraging technical artifacts, in part because technologies are always viewed as not having a specific kind of politics, but they can imprint a specific kind of politics. For example, if your strategy is contingent on improving connectivity, that’s where you can increase the amount of digital entrepreneurs you might have.

It’s well and good, for example, to try and promote digital entrepreneurs so they can create more jobs and resolve this traditional problem of unemployment, specifically youth unemployment in a country like Kenya and South Africa. Currently in Kenya, it’s standing at about 70% unemployment for young people. It’s a huge developmental goal, and similarly, in the context of South Africa where I think unemployment generally is now standing at about 30-so-odd percent.

Getting digital entrepreneurs and improving connectivity is a good goal, but you have to also raise a basic question like how accessible are our digital jobs? What is its general composition within your broader economy? You’re keenly aware that participating within the digital economy space requires a requisite level of technical skills and education, which in many country contexts is simply not easily or equally available, because it’ll be contingent on your already very unequal and inaccessible educational systems. So, as you’re targeting the tech sector as your principal modality of transformation, you are potentially also further calcifying and entrenching other kind of inequalities.

I’ve consistently advocated for both a push for digital development-orientated strategies, but then also trying to encompass and take the rest of the economy with it, specifically thinking about underutilized areas like manufacturing and agriculture, which are two important access nodes because you can try and generate jobs that are at the level of semi-skilled and at times unskilled labor, which would pull as many of those people along with you.

Also thinking—this is the last point of this—more creatively about the kinds of technologies that you are trying to support in the terms of development, right? What is particularly interesting about this digital inflection point with AI is that a lot of the kinds of technologies that are coming out of that space at times might just not be accessible or easily usable in the African context. You could easily imagine that a lot of the AI technologies don’t represent the linguistical diversity of the African continent, in part because a lot of it is just trained on languages that are not representative of the continent.

Another level, is a basic accessibility level. Many people simply don’t have sufficient connectivity in order to be able to even access that kind of technology, let alone whether or not you have an adequate electricity supply, which is another issue that a lot of the globe deals with. So pinning your hopes on leveraging this technology might obfuscate the broader challenges that you’re dealing with.

For example, producing technical commodities that are supportive of local stakeholders where they are, to me, is the most important thing. Developing an AI that doesn’t require connectivity but can also speak in your local language, but can also specifically try and support, say, agricultural workers in terms of questions about the quality of soil is probably where your technologies should be going, especially if you’re trying to resolve these issues that will then scale those economies and then actually bring up more unskilled labor.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right. Cutting-edge technologies need to be leveraged and applied in the context in which they exist, and not just the big, new shiny thing because it might not be useful.

Bulelani Jili: It just simply might not be useful for the majority of the planet, even if it can improve the margins of efficiency of an already privileged class of people who are participating in the service industry, which is representative of, say, at times, Global North economies, but actually not really, you know? And so it’s that that I’ve been consistently trying to speak to in my work.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro: The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.