Has a controversial idea

About how to deal with China

Should the US take his advice? 

Welcome to China Uncensored. I'm Chris Chappell.

Today I'm going to talk about a bad  idea. It's the kind of bad idea that  

sounds like a good idea...at least to some people.

Like the time that my roommate Carl decided  to go skinny dipping...in the neighbor's pool.

At least this bad idea comes with less jail time.

What's the bad idea? Last  week, the Atlantic Council,  

a prestigious think tank, published an  anonymous report called The Longer Telegram.

It was “written by a former senior  government official with deep expertise  

and experience dealing with China.”

Oh, so you know this is going to be good. 

Why is it called the Longer Telegram?  The anonymous author wants to compare  

his report to the “Long Telegram,” an  actual telegram sent by George Kennan,  

an American diplomat in Moscow  to the State Department in 1946.

Kennan's telegram presented a  clear-eyed view of the Soviet Union  

and correctly predicted what the communist  government would do during the Cold War. 

Kennan called the Soviet Union “highly  sensitive to logic of force.” And said  

that it would withdraw “when strong  resistance is encountered at any point.”  

And he said that the Western world  needed to provide that resistance.

Kennan's telegram dramatically  changed how the US government  

dealt with the Soviet Union,  by essentially proposing what  

became known as the containment strategy  that the US used during the Cold War.

So now in the Longer Telegram, this anonymous  

former senior government official is proposing  his own strategy for the US to deal with China.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing.  When this guy said it was a longer telegram,  

he wasn't kidding. The original  Long Telegram is 8,000 words long.  

The Longer Telegram is almost 30,000 words long.

And you don't watch China Uncensored  to see a 3-hour dissection  

of a think tank policy paper.  This isn't Reports Unread.

Welcome to Reports Unread, I'm Chris  Chappell. Today I'll be talking about...Wait,  

how long is this thing? I'm not reading this!

The real show I need to make  is Content Undemonetized.

Anyway, back to the longest telegram ever. 

Don't get me wrong, the anonymous  author gets some stuff right.  

Like when he says that “The single most  important challenge facing the United States  

in the twenty-first century is the rise  of an increasingly authoritarian China.”

And when he says that the US urgently needs  to “develop an integrated, operational, and  

bipartisan national strategy to guide the content  and implementation of US policy toward Xi's China”

But the biggest problem with this  report is his central strategic  

idea of how to deal with the Chinese Communist  Party. The anonymous author spells that out in  

this opinion piece he wrote for Politico. The  US should focus on Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

That's the idea: The US needs  to get rid of Xi Jinping. 

I know what you're thinking: The US is  bad at regime change. But don't worry!  

This is not regime change. Because  we're going to get rid of Xi Jinping,  

but we're going to keep the  Chinese Communist Party.

Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

Why are we keeping the Communist Party? 

According to the Longer Telegram, treating  the Chinese Communist Party the way we  

treated the Soviet Union, what he calls  “containment with Chinese characteristics,”  

is too blunt of an instrument. And  CCP collapse is just a dream.  

“By contrast, a strategy that focuses more  narrowly on Xi, rather than the CCP as a whole,  

presents a more achievable objective.”

That's right, it's not regime change. It's  leadership change. Totally different. 

This is a bad idea. This isn't just  skinny dipping in your neighbor's pool.  

It's diving off Niagara Falls naked. In a canoe.

And I'll explain why after the break.

Welcome back. The strategy  to get rid of Xi Jinping,  

while keeping the Chinese Communist  Party is a really bad idea.

And I say that even though  I'm no fan of Xi Jinping.  

He's never responded even once  to any of my interview requests.

So it's not a bad idea because Xi Jinping is  somehow a good guy who should stay in power.  

It's a bad idea because it's a fundamental  misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party.  

One that is dangerous for the  US and the rest of the world.

The anonymous author believes that  “if leadership change were to occur,  

it would be more likely to  move in the direction of a more  

moderate collective leadership, given that  the burden of the internal critique of Xi  

so far has been that he has been too  leftist at home and too assertive abroad.”

And how would leadership change occur?  Well, did you know that there's this  

thing called factional infighting going  on within the Chinese Communist Party?

It's always nice when more people find out about  my favorite factional infighting soap opera,  

General Hostility.

But the Longer Telegram says that since  there is infighting, “The central focus  

of an effective US and allied China strategy  must be directed at the internal fault lines  

of domestic Chinese politics in general and  concerning Xi's leadership in particular.”

On China Uncensored, we differentiate between  the Chinese Communist Party and China as a whole.  

But the Longer Telegram argues that just like  attacking “China” in general is an error,  

it's just as significant of an error to crudely  attack the Chinese Communist Party itself. 

It's simply an unsophisticated strategy  when fault lines exist between Xi Jinping  

and other senior Party officials.

So what's the sophisticated strategy?  “The mission for US China strategy  

should be to see China return to its pre-2013  path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo.”

And how would we know that the strategy has been  successful? According to the Longer Telegram,  

one of the indicators would be that “Xi has been  replaced by a more moderate party leadership.”

I know that's a lot to take in, so  

let me summarize in a way that  the internet can understand.

Broke: Nuke China. Woke: Take down the CCP. 

Bespoke: Leverage factional infighting  within the CCP to take down Xi Jinping  

and ensure that a “moderate”  CCP leader replaces him. 

Sounds great! Except this is exactly how we  got into this situation in the first place. 

I'll explain after the break.

Welcome back. A lot of people in the west  are completely clueless about the Chinese  

Communist Party. They think the CCP is just  a bunch of benign moderate technocrats.

Oh, Chairman Xi Jinping is a  bad guy, so let's get rid of him  

so the good guys can take over? Yeah, right.

The problem is, there are no good guys at  the top levels of the Chinese Communist  

Party leadership. They've all had to  do terrible things to get to where  

they are today. It's a classic deal with  the devil, and the Party gets your soul. 

Look at what happened to former  Chinese leader Hu Jintao.

He used to be an actual human being  who experienced actual emotions:

And by the end of his term he looked like  this. Although it can't be easy having to  

sit next to the guy who's stabbing you  in the back and twisting the knife. 

Speaking of former Chinese leader and  toadfish Jiang Zemin, this guy and his minions  

are on the other side of the factional  struggle against Xi Jinping. 

If Xi Jinping goes down, he's just  going to be replaced by another bad guy,  

probably someone from Jiang Zemin's faction.

The Longer Telegram imagines that there's some  moderate leader in the Chinese Communist Party  

that can take over and make it  better, the way it used to be. 

And it uses former leaders like Deng  Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao as  

examples of the former, status quo moderate  leaders—you know, from the good old days.

Except, the good old days weren't that good.

Like how in 1989, Deng Xiaoping  ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre.

And then in the 90s, Jiang Zemin rose to power  by supporting that massacre. He also started the  

campaign to crush Falun Gong, which included  things like killing people for their organs. 

Hu Jintao used to be Party chief of  Tibet. He was indicted in a Spanish court  

for genocide because of his policies in Tibet.

These top Party leaders were all killing people  

way before Xi Jinping was in power. There were  no good old days of the Chinese Communist Party.

But the Longer Telegram treats these former  Party leaders as more moderate because they  

seemed to have a less aggressive stance towards  the US and changing the international order.

But that's wrong. The Communist Party always  had an aggressive stance towards the US.  

It was already going down the same road it  is currently under Xi Jinping. The Party  

just wasn't as rich or powerful back then as it  is now, so a lot of people just didn't see it. 

Here's the problem: The Longer Telegram  isn't about getting a better CCP leader.  

It's about getting a CCP leader that  makes the West feel better about the CCP.

Once we get rid of Xi Jinping and go back to those  benign moderate technocrats, we can work together.  

And by work together, I mean, we  can keep making money together.

This is wrong. The Chinese Communist Party is  engaged in an ideological struggle with the West. 

To its credit, the Longer Telegram realizes  this, and says the West must fight back.

But it makes the mistake of thinking that  the Communist Party leaders can pull back on  

the ideological struggle if we appeal to their  self interests by helping them get rid of Xi.  

That's not how it works. The Chinese Communist  Party needs the ideological struggle against the  

West in order to survive. They've always had  it, and they're never going to give that up.

Fundamentally, blaming all of  CCP's actions on just Xi Jinping  

is...unsophisticated. It's the CCP not the XiXiP.

Everything that the Longer Telegram blames Xi for  

can be traced back to policies that were in place  before Xi. Did Xi make things more aggressive and  

worse? Sure. But that's no guarantee that  the next CCP leader won't do the same.

And here's another problem:  

The US government does not understand the  factional struggle within the Communist Party.  

Remember in 2013, when everyone thought that Xi  Jinping was going to be some liberal reformer?

The Longer Telegram suggests  that the US can somehow pressure  

Party leaders to choose a moderate leader  *this* time. This is a joke. And it's not funny.

The danger in getting involved the  way that the Longer Telegram suggests  

is that the US government accidentally ends  up doing the dirty work in the factional  

struggle. And strengthening  the Chinese Communist Party. 

No matter how moderate the next leader may  appear to be, they're not going to change  

the fundamental nature of the Communist Party.  Unless they get rid of the Party completely.

No matter who is in charge, the Party  will continue the genocide in Xinjiang,  

crushing Hong Kong, militarizing the South  China Sea, getting ready to invade Taiwan.  

They're not going to stop. 

So in the end, the Longer  Telegram's main idea doesn't work.

The US would basically be saying that we  don't care if the CCP oppresses people,  

as long as they do it quietly. And hey, can  we buy some more of those Chinese bonds?

I guess we'll just have to see  what happens on General Hostility.

Next time on General Hostility...Xi Jinping  appears to be winning the factional struggle  

for the Chinese people's  hearts. But he's lost the love  

of the West. Could the West betray  Xi by sleeping with his mortal enemy,  

Jiang Zemin? Does the West really believe Jiang  will treat her better than Xi? Or is the West  

just doing it for the money? Find out  next time...on General Hostility.  

And now it's time for me to answer a question  from a China Uncensored fan who supports the show  

on the crowd-funding website Patreon. We could  always use more support at patreon.com/China  

Uncensored. It makes a huge  difference for our team.  

Charlie Badge says, Chris my question is, if  places like Sansha city on the paracel islands  

are just normal parts of  China, can anyone visit them?

Well Charlie, as far as I know foreigners  aren't really visiting Sansha city yet.  

Although Chinese officials definitely  want to develop tourism in the area  

as a way of further staking their  claim on the South China Sea. 

Since 2016, there have been “patriotic cruises”  

running to Sansha from Hainan island in  southern China. What is a patriotic cruise?

“Aside from sightseeing, tourists will sign  a long paper scroll to show their support for  

China's territory sovereignty and sing China's  national anthem on the disputed islands.”

Sounds fun! But obviously that's geared at Chinese  tourists. The artificial islands themselves don't  

have a lot of tourism infrastructure yet. But  that's definitely a possibility for the future. 

Back in 2018, the Hainan government started  offering visa waivers to foreign travelers.  

But I haven't seen reports of  foreigners going to Sansha yet.

I for one recommend going to the South China Sea  the old-fashioned way. On a Filipino fishing boat.

Thanks for your question, Charlie. 

And thanks for watching. I'm Chris Chappell.  Thanks for watching China Uncensored.