"Churchillian warnings": Niall Ferguson's China policy reading list for 2021 -- China Boss update 7.02.21
update
Niall Ferguson, historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, penned an incredible review of the top 2021 China-related books in TLS this week. As he put it: “Churchillian warnings that China has a grand strategy for world domination are now a favourite with publishers.” Among these titles are a number of influential policy writings that I’ve mentioned in previous editions of China Boss, The Week’s Best China Reads, and several are on my “must read” list, also. You can read Ferguson’s stellar review here.
And here I’ve listed the ten books he references with links to their Amazon sales pages and excerpts from book blurbs. Some great stuff!
The China Nightmare: The grand ambitions of a decaying state (Dan Blumenthal, American Enterprise Institute)
Read if you’re interested in what a future “Chinese world order” might look like.
Blurb:
This is a book about China's grand strategy and its future as an ambitious, declining, and dangerous rival power. Once the darling of U.S. statesmen, corporate elites, and academics, the People's Republic of China has evolved into America's most challenging strategic competitor. Its future appears increasingly dystopian. This book tells the story of how China got to this place and analyzes where it will go next and what that will mean for the future of U.S. strategy. The China Nightmare makes an extraordinarily compelling case that China's future could be dark and the free world must prepare accordingly.
The Long Game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order (Rush Doshi, Oxford University Press)
Read if you’re interested in the question of whether China truly seeks to “displace” the U.S. in the world order. I think some Chinese leaders, historically, did and others paid lip-service to the idea but were more interested in enriching themselves. With Xi, I’d point to a relentless quest for total leverage as a possible indicator of his hegemonic ambitions.
Blurb:
In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on"hiding capabilities and biding time."
After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actually accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to a more even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's
ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
Invisible China: How the urban-rural divide threatens China’s rise (Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell , University of Chicago Press)
Read if you’re interested in China’s “middle income trap” and how the state is failing, according to Rozelle and Hell, as many as one-half to three-quarters of its people. Little in China has turned to gold for the masses, and most of what officials and foreign expats say about “rich China” is, either, a reference to the government’s coffers OR bona fide propaganda and bullshit.
With a problem that large, one might understand Chinese nationalism and warmongering as a panic-stricken party-state reaction. I agree with Rozelle and Hell that China is “an urgent humanitarian concern” and “a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe.” You might not be feeling all that charitable, especially after the coronavirus pandemic, but lack of focus on what’s actually happening in China - and letting the CCP go about it’s dysfunctional, mafia-style business, I’d argue, is also partly responsible for the loss of so many lives and livelihoods. When China coughs . . .
Blurb:
Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere.
In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike.
Emphasis added.
Every Breath You Take: China’s new tyranny (Ian Williams, Birlinn)
Read if you’re interested in China’s export of digital authoritarianism.
This is not a book about a dystopian future, but something that is happening now, and which is a challenge and warning to us all. Beijing is aggressively exporting digital totalitarianism. It has become a model for aspiring autocrats everywhere.
. . . Western criticism (even of mass detentions in Xinjiang) is muted, but there are the first signs of push-back. A technological arms race between China and the West is gathering pace. China not only poses a direct threat to the West, but demonstrates what happens when ‘dual-use’ technologies are unleashed without restraint or oversight. Our own safeguards are worryingly fragile as potentially repressive technologies develop at break-neck speed.
How China Loses: The pushback against Chinese global ambitions (Luke Patey, Oxford University Press)
Read if you’re interested in learning about the world-wide pushback against China from a diverse group of states and individuals, including “forms of resistance that China is encountering as its influence expands.”
Blurb:
How China Loses tells the story of China's struggles to overcome new risks and endure the global backlash against its assertive reach. Combining on-the-ground reportage with incisive analysis, Luke Patey argues that China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs. In travels to Africa, Latin America, East Asia and Europe, his encounters with activists, business managers, diplomats, and thinkers reveal the challenges threatening to ground China's rising power.
At a time when views are fixated on the strategic competition between China and the United States, Patey's work shows how the rest of the world will shape the twenty-first century in pushing back against China's overreach and domineering behavior. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries
began to confront their political differences and economic and security challenges with China and realize the diversity and possibility for cooperation in the world today.
One Belt One Road: Chinese power meets the world (Eyck Freymann, Harvard University Press)
Read if you’re interested in moving past propaganda to the realities of China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. Spoiler alert: Freyman thinks the BRI model of geopolitical investment and infrastructure ties, despite all its flaws, could still work to secure China’s foothold in global power.
Blurb:
Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi’s project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China’s motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.
China Coup: The great leap to freedom (Roger Garside, University of California Press)
Read if you’re fascinated by the political opposition to Xi and the potential for his demise. :)
Blurb:
This short book predicts—contrary to the prevailing consensus—that China’s leader Xi Jinping will very soon be removed from office in a coup d’état mounted by rivals in the top leadership. The leaders of the coup will then end China’s one-party dictatorship and launch a transition to democracy and the rule of law. Long-time diplomat and development banker Roger Garside draws on his deep knowledge of Chinese politics and economics first to develop a detailed scenario of how these events may unfold, and then—in the main body of the book—to explain why. His gripping, persuasive account of how Chinese leaders plot and plan away from the public eye is unique in published literature.
The Great Decoupling: China, America and the struggle for technological supremacy (Nigel Inkster, Hurst)
Read if you’re interested in the China-US technological decoupling that’s currently in motion.
Blurb:
Since the 1980s, reforms have transformed China into the world's second largest economy and a major global power. Cyber space and other advanced technologies have become a battleground for international dominance; but today's world relies on global supply chains and interstate collaboration--at
least, for now. Growing tension between the USA and China could result in the two superpowers decoupling their technology--with significant consequences for humanity's future.
The Great Decoupling shows that this technology contest, and how it plays out, will shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.
The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the struggle for global leadership (Clyde Prestowitz, Yale University Press)
Read if you’re interested in possible strategies for competing with China, though, as Ferguson notes, they may not actually “deter China from, say, invading Taiwan.”
Blurb:
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures to liberalize China and make it “a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order.” But the experts made the wrong bet. China today is liberalizing neither economically nor politically but, if anything, becoming more authoritarian and mercantilist.
In this book, notably free of partisan posturing and inflammatory rhetoric, renowned globalization and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them. He argues that these must be more sophisticated and more comprehensive than a narrowly targeted trade war. Rather, he urges strategies that the United States and its allies can use unilaterally without contravening international or domestic law.
2034: A Novel of the next World War (Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis’s novel, Penguin)
Read if you’re into geopolitical thrillers. This one’s a must for me. :)
On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.
. . . Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.
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Expect CCP anniversary celebrations to drag on a bit with more displays of belligerent devotion to the Motherland. If you’re new, it’s normal . . . for China. I’ll try to spare you the mind-numbing details in the newsfeed. ;) Enjoy your weekend.
I really appreciate this list and especially the comments you provide. There is no way that I can get through all these books and it's a time saver.