CHINAwatch

Understanding China's Innovative Development

PowerPoint presentation on 10 June to the Innovation Network, United Kingdom. 

Download Understanding China's Innovative Development - Innovation Network

American senators land in Taipei, trip likely to irritate China - but what is the end-game?

Live interview with PressTV on 6 June, 2021

Can Asia guide Biden's China Policy?

Professor Kishore Mahbubani gave a succinct and insightful expose on 18 May, 2021 on whether Asia can guide President Biden's China Policy.

The Zoom presentation is at the invitation of "Our Hong Kong Foundation" founded by the Hon. C.H. Tung, first Chief Executive (1 July, 1997 - 12 March, 2005) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. 

Professor Mahbubani is Distinguished Fellow at the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He has more than 30 years in diplomacy and 15 years in academia, including 10 years as Singapore's Ambassador to the United Nations. He has authored multiple insightful books including "Has the West Lost It?" and "Has China Won?". 

Rather than just a policy, President Biden boasts a "China Strategy". Prof. Mahbubani questions whether the United States, under Biden or Trump, has ever had a real "China Strategy" with deliverable goals, or just a bipartisan anti-China posture. What appears is a beleaguered United States struggling to respond to a rapidly-rising China with paranoia, denialism, and wishful thinking.

What seems lacking is a strategy for realistic long-term co-existence with an ideologically-different China as the world's largest economy, largest trader and manufacturer, and growing global clout, while America remains dominant in global military reach, ground-breaking inventions, dollar supremacy, and soft-power attractiveness.  

Sri Lanka handing control over Hambantota Port to China

Live TV panel discussion on 28 May, 2021 with CNN News18 of India 

President Biden's State of the Union address - warning to Russia and China

Live interview with PressTV on 29 April, 2021

Would a US-led Carbon Tax, instead of partnership, spur China's progress under the Paris Agreement?

A think-piece by Andrew S. Erickson and Gabriel Collins in Foreign Affairs of May/June 2021 argues that only pressure, not partnership, will spur China's progress on Climate Change.

The argument is that despite advances in renewable energy capacity, China's coal reliance in recent years has markedly increased, due to concerns with energy security, local vested interests, employment imperatives, and projects along the Belt and Road. The authors suggest that only coercion by way of a US-led carbon tax, along with Western allies, would do the trick, on grounds that China has under-performed with its Paris Agreement targets and is unlikely to be able to fulfill more promises. 

Not unexpected is the now-fashionable China bashing and demonization. What seems lacking is appreciation that as "factory to the world", China's economy is fundamentally different from that of the United States. It is much more dependent on energy input, of which coal is likely to remain a comparatively large contributor, due to insufficient endowment of more readily available natural gas.

Also lacking is appreciation that China has already become the world's leading country in electricity production from renewable energy sources, with over double the generation of the second-ranking country, the United States. By the end of 2019, China had a total capacity of 790GW of renewable power, mainly from hydroelectric, solar and wind power.

Furthermore, the authors seem to doubt China's genuine desire for renewable energies. Apart from pollution and quality of life considerations, renewables will lessen China's exposure to choke points like the US-controlled Malacca Strait and the Strait of Hormuz near Iran subject to uncertain geopolitical risks. 

Melanie Hart, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson's earlier analysis of 15 May, 2017 for the Center on American Progress puts things in more balanced, quantitative perspectives. Entitled Everything You Think You Know About Coal in China Is Wrong, it highlights the following considerations -

"China’s Paris commitment includes a promise to install 800 gigawatts to 1,000 gigawatts of new renewable capacity by 2030, an amount equivalent to the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity system. While China and the United States have roughly the same land mass, however, China has 1.3 billion people to the United States’ 325 million. It needs an electricity system that is much larger, so adding the renewable equivalent of one entire U.S. electricity system is not enough to replace coal in the near to medium term."

" three things American observers need to understand about coal in China:

1. China’s new coal-fired power plants are cleaner than anything operating in the United States.
2. China’s emissions standards for conventional air pollutants from coal-fired power plants are stricter than the comparable U.S. standards.
3. Demand for coal-fired power is falling so quickly in China that the nation cannot support its existing fleet. Many of the coal-fired power plants that skeptics point to as evidence against a Chinese energy transformation are actually white elephants that Chinese leaders are already targeting in a wave of forced plant closures."

"The U.S. coal fleet is much older than China’s: The average age of operating U.S. coal plants is 39 years, with 88 percent built between 1950 and 1990.  Among the top 100 most efficient plants in the United States, the initial operating years range from 1967 to 2012. In China, the oldest plant on the top 100 list was commissioned in 2006, and the youngest was commissioned in 2015."

"The United States only has one ultra-supercritical power plant. Everything else is subcritical or, at best, supercritical. In contrast, China is retiring its older plants and replacing them with ultra-supercritical facilities that produce more energy with less coal and generate less emissions as well. Out of China’s top 100 units, 90 are ultra-supercritical plants". 

"In the United States, the total nameplate capacity of our top 100 most efficient coal-fired power units is 80.1 gigawatts, and their cumulative annual carbon emissions amount to 361,924,475 metric tons. Meanwhile, the total nameplate capacity of China’s top 100 units is 82.6 gigawatts, and their cumulative annual carbon emissions are an estimated 342,586,908 metric tons."

"Since China’s fleet uses more advanced technology, it also consumes less coal: an average of 286.42 grams of coal equivalent, or gce, consumed per kilowatt-hour of power produced in China versus 374.96 gce consumed per kilowatt-hour produced at lower heating value in the United States."

What is more, it is doubtful if a US-led carbon tax would be a silver bullet. If anything, it could massively backfire. First, considering most of the world's consumer products are now made in China, such a tax, like US trade sanctions, is likely to hurt consumers worldwide, not least in the United States.

Second, the developing world is unlikely to be supportive. To survive, the poor are heavily dependent on whatever energy sources are available to them locally. Such a tax is likely to be viewed as a ruse of the world's richer to tax the less fortunate. 

A better outlook would be for the United States to coordinate with China their respective national policies, targets, and actions under the Paris Agreement. They could do well to cooperate on joint efforts to accelerate attainments of Climate Change targets across the globe.

For a start, they could showcase each other's best technologies and practices to their own peoples. This would vastly enhance their mutual understanding and learning of each other's capacities and progress. What is more, as the world's great powers and largest polluters, they could set a dynamic example for the rest of the world to reach for the stars under the Paris Agreement. 

Separately, this would have the added, yet powerful, benefit of building mutual trust and understanding between the two great powers, now locking horns for mortal combat that is bound to engulf the whole world. 

U.S. reaffirms partnership with Chinese Taipei during high-level visit

Live TV interview on 15 April 2021 with Press TV.

The New Concert of Powers: How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a Multipolar World

With the waning if not passing of Pax Americana, the world is increasingly torn between fears and denialism in trying to avoid the unavoidable. A more powerful, assertive and self-confident China sees its time has come to return to the future where a large part of the world had been dominated by China and India, the two oldest Eastern civilizations, for millennia before the 17th century.

Amidst a transitional era of uncertainty, Richard N. Haass and Charles A. Kupchan's ground-breaking insight for a "New Concert of Powers" in their 23 March 2021 think-piece in Foreign Policy has much to commend itself. Haass is President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Both are éminences grises in global affairs and international relations. 

The concept borrows from the Concert of Europe, a loose consensus among the Great Powers of 19th Century Europe to maintain balance of powers through a mutual commitment to upholding the territorial settlement at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. The consensus allowed for cooperation, disputes, as well as  jockeying for position and influence. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert managed to sustain relative peace and stability in Europe for a hundred years until the 1914 First World War.  

Far from ivory tower theorizing, there are many practical considerations in the Foreign Affairs thick-piece:

"A global concert would have six members: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States." 

"A global concert would be a consultative, not a decision-making, body. It would address emerging crises yet ensure that urgent issues would not crowd out important ones, and it would deliberate on reforms to existing norms and institutions. This steering group would help fashion new rules of the road and build support for collective initiatives but leave operational matters, such as deploying peacekeeping missions, delivering pandemic relief, and concluding new climate deals, to the UN and other existing bodies."

"Members would send permanent representatives of the highest diplomatic rank to the global concert’s standing headquarters. Although they would not be formal members of the concert, four regional organizations—the African Union, Arab League, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Organization of American States (OAS)—would maintain permanent delegations at the concert’s headquarters."

"A global concert would shun codified rules, instead relying on dialogue to build consensus. Like the Concert of Europe, it would privilege the territorial status quo and a view of sovereignty that precludes, except in the case of international consensus, using military force or other coercive tools to alter existing borders or topple regimes."

"At the same time, the concert would provide an ideal venue for discussing globalization’s impact on sovereignty and the potential need to deny sovereign immunity to nations that engage in certain egregious activities. Those activities might include committing genocide, harboring or sponsoring terrorists, or severely exacerbating climate change by destroying rainforests."  (Japan's recent plan to dump radioactive water in the ocean may fit this category.) 

"Members would reserve the right to take unilateral action, alone or through coalitions, when they deem their vital interests to be at stake. Direct strategic dialogue would, though, make surprise moves less common and, ideally, unilateral action less frequent."

"Although members would, in principle, endorse a norm-governed international order, they would also embrace realistic expectations about the limits of cooperation and compartmentalize their differences. "

"A global concert would give its members wide leeway when it comes to domestic governance. They would effectively agree to disagree on questions of democracy and political rights, ensuring that such differences do not hinder international cooperation..... But the concert would also work toward a shared understanding of what constitutes unacceptable interference in other countries’ domestic affairs and, as a result, are to be avoided."

"The international system, for one, will exhibit characteristics of both bipolarity and multipolarity. There will be two peer competitors—the United States and China. Unlike during the Cold War, however, ideological and geopolitical competition between them will not encompass the world. On the contrary, the EU, Russia, and India, as well as other large states such as Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, and South Africa, will likely play the two superpowers off each other and seek to preserve a significant measure of autonomy."

".... the twenty-first century will be politically and ideologically diverse. Depending on the trajectory of the populist revolts afflicting the West, liberal democracies may well be able to hold their own. But so too will illiberal regimes. Moscow and Beijing are tightening their grip at home, not opening up. Stable democracy is hard to find in the Middle East and Africa. Indeed, democracy is receding, not advancing, worldwide—a trend that could well continue. The international order that comes next must make room for ideological diversity."

"Pax Americana is now running on fumes. ..The absence of U.S. leadership during the COVID-19 crisis was striking; each country was on its own. President Biden is guiding the United States back to being a team player, but the nation’s pressing domestic priorities and the onset of multipolarity will deny Washington the outsize influence it once enjoyed."

"Allowing the world to slide toward regional blocs or a two-bloc structure similar to that of the Cold War is a nonstarter. The United States, China, and the rest of the globe cannot fully uncouple when national economies, financial markets, and supply chains are irreversibly tethered together. A great-power steering group is the best option for managing an integrated world no longer overseen by a hegemon. A global concert fits the bill."

Terry Su, president of a Hong Kong-based online publishing house and geopolitics think tank, opined in the South China Morning Post in support of the Concert idea, provided that Japan and India are removed from the suggested list of Members. I tend to agree.

After all, the idea is a proposed mechanism for Great Powers, defined in terms of substantial global, rather than regional, gravitas, and not in terms of size of economy (otherwise Russia would hardly qualify). But more importantly, India and Japan are seen by China and Russia as US "allies", whose formal inclusion may upset the intended balance. In any case, depending on issues, they will often have to be involved as important Members of the United Nations and other international organizations and platforms including the G7 or G20. 

Having said all this, the world is still in transition. Everything remains in a flux. The Concert idea may need time to incubate and nurture, even absent a torrent of destabilizing undercurrents amidst an intensifying Great Power rivalry. 

China’s navy says ongoing drills near Taiwan to become regular

Live TV interview on 6 April 2021 with Press TV. 

Biden-Presidency's first stormy US-China high-level talks in Alaska - what do they imply?

Live TV panel discussion on 23 March, 2021 with Indus News. 

A South China Morning Post (SCMP) podcast dated 20 March 2021 adds to the analysis. Tom Plate's later Op-ed in the SCMP of 23 March points to the need for both sides to rethink their diplomacy. 

My reference to rising nationalism in China is supported by the emerging reality that Young People in China Are Losing Faith in the West , according to Eyck Freymann and Brian Y.S.Wong in Foreign Policy on 22  March, 2021