 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon. I'm John Jackson. It's my pleasure to be the host for today's event. This is the 15th issues in national security lecture for this academic year. To kick off the session, I'd like to call on Admiral Chatfield to offer her welcoming remarks. Admiral? Hello, good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everybody warmly to this session. I think you'll really enjoy the topic. I want to give a call out to our Naval War College Foundation members who are on today, a friend and colleague, Brigadier General Chevalier from the Rhode Island National Guard, and then a wonderful mix of our faculty, staff, and students who are also logging on as well as members of our broader community. I want to thank you for joining us and for using this forum to further your understanding of issues that are relevant in national security, and I really look forward to a great lecture and to hearing your questions at the end. Thank you very much, Admiral. We appreciate that. Now, as I've said many times before about why this series was established, we want each recording to be of each lecture to be standalone, so please excuse the redundancy. The series was originally established as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family, to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the nation. We will be offering three additional lectures between now and May of 2021. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. As we mentioned before the previous lecture, the College is pleased to offer certificates of participation to all viewers who have attended at least 60% of the offered lectures, or 11 out of the 18. We will use the honor system and will upon request award certificates to everyone who completes 11 lectures by 18 May 2021. If you've already reached that milestone or expect to, please send an email to Commander Gary Ross providing the name you want to have inscribed on the document and the snail mail mailing address. We hope to distribute the certificates in late June. Looking ahead, we will not have a lecture in two weeks in order to support the College's spring break, but we'll be back on Tuesday the 27th of April when we will hear from Professor Andrea Cameron who will speak about climate change and national security. Today, a family discussion group meeting will follow the formal lecture, provide information to our community members. Our guests will be Delaney Daley from the Newport Historical Society. Okay, on with the main event. During the presentation that follows, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we will get to the questions at the conclusion of the presentation. You cannot understand China's future without understanding China's past. This afternoon, Professor Wilson will explore the two narratives that dominate historical consciousness in China about how PRC behaves and how the Chinese people view the outside world. Andrew R. Wilson is the John A. Van Buren Chair of Asia Pacific Studies. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has lectured at military colleges and civilian universities across the United States and around the world. The author of a number of books and articles on Chinese military history, Chinese seapower and Sun Tzu's The Art of War. He is presently at work on quote the acme of skill strategic theory from antiquity to the information age. To be clear he is not the actor Andrew Wilson nor is he the musician Dex Wilson. He is the scholar Dex Wilson and we're happy to have him aboard. I'm pleased to pass the digital baton on to Dr. Dex Wilson. Thank you John. Greetings Admiral. Greetings General Chevalier. Andy, nice to see you virtually. So I'm going to get started talking about how history informs thinking in China and when we think about any nation we sometimes look at what are called meta narratives and that's just a fancy social science term for the stories that nations tell about themselves. The types of national image, the way the national image that's generally shared, the way the nation's history is taught in the schools and dealt with in public circles, be it in society or in policy. So we can understand how it is that history informs the way the Chinese think about the world and the way they approach the immediate world around them. Unfortunately the, hold on, I'm having a moment with my slides. Give me just one second please. There we go. There we go. That should be back. Sure. Okay, excellent. Now I'm back. So unfortunately China's modern history in particular has been quite traumatic and for most Chinese this memory of the recent past, what's called the century of humiliation has a profound influence on contemporary Chinese attitudes and actions. When you look at say Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or its approach to Xinjiang province or even its approach to COVID, you can see strains of this recent history of national humiliation. But before that era of national humiliation, China was a great power. Some might even call a superpower, dominating the region of East Asia, radiating power outward from Beijing, the great forbidden city, the palace of the emperors that building actually that structure has been in existence for 600 years. So a very long period in which China was, if not the one of the dominant powers in East Asia and perhaps the world. So there's this competing, there's this competing national historical identity in China, weighing between an era of humiliation with an earlier era, which is, we might call an image of China as a hegemon. Now, these in fact have powerful influences on the contemporary Chinese psyche and on Chinese behavior, not just on the international stage, but also domestically. So we might ask if the goal for, you know, China is to become great again. We have to ask, why again, and what's the metric of greatness in the past. Now I want to introduce you to two phrases and if it's the only thing you take away from today's talk, I'd be happy with that. The first is, never forget national humiliation. And the other is revitalize the great Chinese nation. Here we have school children standing around an immense banner that says those two things. And so you get an idea of just how early in a person's education, they're exposed not just to the greatness of the Chinese past, but also it's more recent national humiliation. And in fact, these are two of Xi Jinping's go-to stock phrases. And you see them plastered on the walls of schools, museums all across mainland China, along with other propaganda. But for my purposes here, these are really pretty dominant when it comes to understanding the contemporary Chinese psyche, in particular, how victimization is inscribed on the Chinese psyche. So this idea of national humiliation is a collective trauma and that for China to become great again, it cannot afford to forget the century of humiliation. Now these are central to Xi Jinping's agenda, what's called the Chinese dream. So China's fall from greatness generally referred to as the century of humiliation begins in the middle of the 19th century, particularly with the first opium war of 1839 to 1842. It's a period defined by military weakness and a defeat in a series of wars. What followed these wars often were what the Chinese called unequal treaties, wherein ports in China were open to foreign trade, to foreign residents, where China was forced to pay indemnities as the defeated power. And there's a whole series of wars that run from the first opium war right up into the 1930s and 1940s. And throughout this period, the Chinese see their sovereignty being etched away by these aggressive foreign powers. Now anybody who's ever been too shy has been to what's called a treaty port. One of the key provisions in these unequal treaties was the opening of more and more Chinese cities to foreign residents. Moreover, the foreigners who lived in those cities enjoyed extra territoriality. They were not governed by Chinese law. They were exempt immune from Chinese law. Moreover, you see Europeans and Japanese inscribing their architecture on China's urban landscape. So when you go to Shanghai and you walk along the beautiful waterfront, the Bund, you see all these foreign banks, the customs houses, the amazing peace hotel, this art deco masterpiece built in the 1930s. You get an idea of how this victimization is actually physically inscribed on China's urban landscape. So say you're in the city of Harbin up in Manchuria and you turn a corner and there in the middle of the next plaza is a Russian Orthodox cathedral. That might strike you as well. That's odd. What a beautiful church. I didn't realize there were so many Russian Orthodox followers here in China. But to a Chinese citizen turning that corner, they might appreciate the beauty of that same cathedral. But their mind will also go back to the period of time when Manchuria was within the Russian sphere of influence. It was essentially semi-colonized first by the Russians and then later by the Japanese. So you see this inscribed on China's urban landscape. So it's front and center. Moreover, while these foreign wars were going on, what Chen Kaixuek used to refer to as diseases of the skin, the Chinese body politic was wracked by a series of absolutely catastrophic rebellions. Just on this slide are the major rebellions. The Muslim rebellion up in the Northwest, the Boxer rebellion you might know from a Charlton Heston movie, 55 Days in Peking. A range of minority uprisings. The deadliest of these internal rebellions was the Taiping. The Taiping rebellion is without a doubt the bloodiest civil war in history. It utterly ravaged southeast China. By the end of it somewhere between 20 and 30 million people had lost their lives. That makes it more lethal than the First World War. So while China is confronting this external weakness, its internal cohesion is being worn away by socio-economic upheaval. So you could understand the trauma of the modern period. I mentioned formally that Russian sphere of influence up there in Manchuria. By the end of the 19th century, foreign powers are curving up the once mighty Qing Empire into individual spheres of influence. I'm going to talk quite a bit today about this last empire, the Qing. Now you see here an image of it. This is the English lion and the Russian bear about to carve up the sick man of Asia, as many folks called China at the time, to carve out these spheres of influence. And you can see from this map the extent of Chinese territory, of Qing territory, that was essentially semi-colonized by these foreign powers. So this is an era called the scramble for concessions, as if this wasn't bad enough. The century of humiliation continues into the 1930s and 1940s. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, a brief experiment with representative democracy collapses, and China falls into an extended period of warlordism, wherein those who controlled the guns cut out, carved out personal fiefdoms. To give my students some sense of China in this period, imagine 25 Afghanistan's, including the narco state aspect of it. So you get a sense of just how massive the failure of the Chinese state was in the 20th century, accelerated by the actions of these foreign powers. The depths of the century of humiliation fall during the period of Japanese occupation, first when Japan invades and essentially annexes Manchuria in 1931, and then they invade China proper, setting up puppet regimes in East China, trying to shatter the will of the Chinese people through such acts of barbarity as the rape of Nanjing, wherein the Japanese army raped and murdered tens of thousands of people, attempting to break the will of the Chinese. But the Chinese fought on, and the scale of China's contributions to the Second World War cannot go without notice. Chinese casualties matched those of Russia, again, like the Taiping, in the order of 20 to 30 million. So we in the United States have a hard time imagining this degree of trauma, and how it influences Chinese thinking. So, ostensibly, the century of humiliation ends in 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party takes power, and Mao Zedong actually literally says the Chinese people have stood up, have shaken off the shackles of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism. Now, you might ask yourself, well, hasn't China fully recovered from the century of humiliation in the past 70 years, right? It's the factory to the world. It's trying to steal a march in all sorts of, not just, you know, production of consumer electronics, but all the big sciences of the 21st century. It's got an absolutely massive economy, almost as large as the United States, and depends on how you add things up. Some say it's larger than the economy of the United States. It's got a growing global influence, in part for one simple fact that China's on the permanent five of the UN Security Council. But also, we have the Belt and Road Initiative, whereas China's trying to export its comparative advantages in infrastructure construction, and the fact that it has a surplus of ready cash based on this great trading economy it's developed to send, you know, tendrils of power out. So developing the kinds of hard and soft power, one would see a great power exercise. China's also trying to influence other nations, sometimes through these Confucius Institutes co-located on US college campuses and college campuses around the world. There's cases of influence operations where in the United Front Work Department is trying to, you know, make friends and influence people around the world. China's a great lender to the developing world. It wants to not just be a lender to the developing world, it wants to show itself as the leader of the developing world, the protector of the global south and the agent of global economic development. It's got the world's second largest military, it's got the world's largest navy, and it's second only to the United States in military spending. So isn't it already a great power again? Well, one way to understand what that China does not yet feel sated, satisfied, or even secure. I point to this national day parade on October 1st, 2019, which is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, that day that Mao Zedong stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared that the Chinese people have stood up. And those of you who remember the Cold War and remember all those great parades in Red Square, this had all the trappings of one of those great parades, but also all the techniques and glitz of Las Vegas tied in with a tremendous amount of tech savvy as well. You see Xi Jinping making a classic speech from a Chinese limousine. We see all the accoutrements of great power, in particular military power, the so-called carrier killer missiles on the left, the Chinese armed forces up in the upper right hand corner. We have blue berets. These are Chinese UN peacekeepers. China, among the P5, contributes the largest number of personnel. So all the trappings are here of great power status and perhaps even superpower status. But on this very special day, while there was 30,000 some odd people participating in the parade and another 10,000 or so watching it, the rest of the population of Beijing was on lockdown. Center of Beijing, people were essentially told not to go outside and on the outskirts were impressed firmly not to go outside. So while recently we've had this experience where our own national capital is in a state of lockdown during the inauguration, we know deep down inside that that's an aberration. In China, this insecurity is still sharply on display. When the Chinese talk about national security, first and foremost, they're talking about internal security. So that gives you an idea of the depths of insecurity that still haunt the Chinese based on this central humiliation. So turn now to the other narrative, the hegemony narrative, and this is relatively new. The humiliation narrative has been front and center in the Chinese psyche for decades. This is a relatively new narrative. And what this narrative does is it goes back to that China's history as an imperial power, as a great civilization and culture, wielding all the hard power and soft power one might see in a superpower, for example. In particular, there's a focus on China's last dynasty, the Great Qing. And while it was the Great Qing that lost those wars beginning in the 1800s, the Great Qing also brought China to the peak of its territorial extent. So to get some idea of the scale of this multinational, multicultural mega-state that was the Qing dynasty, if you look at this map, the red line indicates the current borders of the People's Republic of China. China is a vast country today. But imagine it even larger than it currently is. So this is the standard, not merely an imperial greatness, but in territorial extent that Chinese think of when they think of the greatness of China in the past. Now, I'm going to introduce you to one of the most important people you've never heard of, and this is the emperor Chen Long, who dominates the history of the Qing dynasty in the 1700s. He's emperor for 60 years. If you go to Beijing, most of the great buildings you will see were either built or rebuilt by this emperor. He also added 30% again to the size of the Qing empire. China hadn't been since that big and since the Mongols ruled it, but when the Mongols ruled it, China was just one piece of a much vaster empire. This is a unified polity dominating the East Asian mainland. So looking at this past, pundits within China, Xi Jinping himself, and also pundits outside of China, folks like Howard French and Henry Kissinger, talk about a Chinese world order, wherein the Chinese were accustomed to think of themselves as the middle kingdom, that there's this attitude that all under heaven and the emperor's title is literally the son of heaven. The idea that all under heaven, all the other nations are racked and stacked into this hierarchy wherein China sits at the peak. But we have to ask, is this, as a historian I have to ask, you don't have to ask necessarily, and a lot of these authors don't ask, is this actually accurate? Was there a Chinese world order? I have to say, not really. But what's fact and what is believed, I think in contemporary China, what is believed is more important than what was. But anyway, Chinese influence has historically been more gravitational than kinetic. China did have a great military. You can see this in the affectations of the Manchu emperor. He wasn't even Chinese. The Manchu emperor dominated the 18th century. Chinese empires had used kinetic power, had used hard power, but its global influence was far more gravitational. Part of this has to do with the fact that China had the largest economy in the world in this period. It didn't have to go out and find trade. It wasn't like Spain or Portugal or Great Britain that had to go out and build overseas empire to control trade routes and have access to markets. China was one of the hubs of the global economy. As such, world trade came to it. There's another idea here that China was so awesome in its cultural achievements and its military power and its economic wealth. That its status as a hegemon was viewed not just in China, but around the region as something natural. And that China was a benevolent hegemon. So we have to ask ourselves, was it a benevolent and natural hegemon? When talking about this particular dynasty and Emperor Qianlong himself, the answer is yes and no. As I've also mentioned, China had a tremendous amount of economic pull drawing global trade to it. It also had tremendous soft power. Many of the nations of East Asia adopted the Chinese written language, adopted forms of Chinese political organization, the great civil service exams, many worshipped religions that had been passed through or been translated by Chinese culture. Confucianism, for example, is such a dominant thought system throughout East Asia and that comes from China. So China has this soft power per se. But this emperor who made that Qing great was not opposed to using military force to build an ever greater empire. So those areas that China now talks about as core issues all became part of the last dynasty through force. They were conquered. They were annexed. And the Qing hold over those territories was maintained with a mix of coercion and attraction. So the Qing Empire and many Chinese dynasties before that operated quite like other empires, the Ottomans, the Kievan Rus, European powers of the 18th and 19th centuries. But that sort of flies in the face of this image of this natural and benevolent hegemon that our Chinese friends would have us believe. And that many of them do sincerely believe in this. However, like many metanarratives, both humiliation and hegemony are cynically deployed by the regime to justify a wide range of things. Primarily their continued hold on power to achieve China's dream which can only be done if China sets right the wrongs of the past, essentially of humiliation and achieves that former greatness. Now as a historian, I find this very interesting that Xi Jinping himself is personally involved in a massive history project that's collecting all the primary and secondary sources on empires in the past, in particular on the Qing Empire, this last dynasty that ruled China into the 20th century. Xi Jinping is glossing that empire, not as an empire of conquest, which it was, but as a cultural and economic behemoth that awed and charmed the populations of those core areas, Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia and Taiwan, Xinjiang in particular, into happy submission. This is from a foreign policy piece written by a historian of the Qing dynasty. She's one of these people who dares to say that the Qing and other Chinese empires in the past was not afraid to use force, was not a natural or always benevolent hegemon. Xi's persona non grata in China, Xi Jinping knows her name and regularly unveils against this sort of notion that China in the past acted as we would understand in imperial power acts and he's attempting to rewrite Qing's history and spread this particular interpretation to make this one of the two dominant meta narratives of contemporary China. So when you want to see hegemony and humiliation in action, you can go to the South China Sea. You have there that sense of China's historical greatness in the past that the South China Sea was a place where Chinese fishermen and Chinese merchants and the great fleets of the Ming dynasty traversed, right? That this is historically been part of China, part of the Chinese economy. These are very sketchy historical claims but they're built on this idea of, since China was a natural hegemon, it obviously must have dominated its literal waters, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, what have you. So this is where China is building these islands, right? Building these way stations, these military bases to potentially project its power farther along its axes of trade through the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca and out into the Indian Ocean. So this is a restoration of the past greatness. But it's also underwritten by this sense of insecurity derived from the century of humiliation. The former chief of the Chinese navy, Wuxiangli, wrote that the largest, most violent, most destructive invasions China has suffered, many of them came from the sea and they came because China suffered humiliation because they did not adequately understand, A, its maritime rights, what came with great power status, nor did it understand what was required to defend its maritime frontiers. Hence, when the British gun emissaries destroys the Chinese war junks at the Battle of Shanghai in 1842, the Japanese navy utterly crushes the Chinese navy in 1895, leading to a humiliating, both of these leading to humiliating, unequal treaties. So this haunts the Chinese psyche. So you see this playing off in the South China Sea. If you go up to Tibet, well, remember, sorry, up to Xinjiang, up in China's Northwestern frontier. This is a very rich frontier. It borders, how many? Almost 10 countries. It's one of the axes. It's a locus for several axes of the Belt and Road, the new Silk Road concepts, reaching back to the ways China had interacted with the global economy over the Silk Road. And our old friend Xinlong had actually brought this piece of territory into the empire through an act of conquest and genocide. But that greatness, that past, that claim, you know, that reaches back to that era of hegemony sits atop this idea of exploiting this rich frontier. And yet the insecurities that come with knowing that China was a victim of outside meddling in its internal affairs, that some of the great rebellions of the 19th century were ethically driven and that foreign powers had actually exploited ethnic divisions in China. So many things right now that in China, that, you know, Muslim separatism in the Northwest is just part of a scheme by outside powers, and potentially even non-state actors like Al Qaeda and its associated movements to undermine Chinese territorial integrity and try to carve this piece of territory away from the Chinese body politic. So this in part explains the extremes that China, that Beijing is going to in this majority Muslim region by shipping in millions of ethnic Chinese to try to overwhelm the indigenous population, engaging in mass incarceration, something like 20% of the adult male population are essentially in concentration camps, employing an artificially intelligence driven surveillance of the Muslim population, essentially criminalizing being a Muslim. So when you see both of these snapshots of Chinese behavior, you see this tension between hegemony and humiliation. But as I said, these are narratives that are cynically deployed and the actions China takes, the party takes, are clearly cynically conceived as a way, most importantly to demonstrate that the party is indispensable, that the depths of the century of humiliation after the fall of that last dynasty came at a period of time with experiments and democratic politics. And that just left China even more open to foreign invasion and exploitation. So you need the one party system that party needs to control the barrel of the gun, the People's Liberation Army. These nagging security insecurities as it were also justify Xi Jinping's massive military reforms, his efforts to exert even more party control over the PLA. All it's about primarily about keeping the party in power. So when you look at Chinese behavior on its frontiers, you look at Chinese behavior in the South China Sea. This is primarily about domestic security. This is primarily about regime legitimacy, keeping the party in power. So when we look at COVID, for example, we see how it is that the response to COVID shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese state and its control apparatus, the fact that in responding to COVID, the Chinese government brought many of the techniques of surveillance and population control that had been using in Xinjiang back into the Chinese core. The way intelligence is gathered, how individuals and particularly individuals with their smartphones are both a subject of surveillance, but a source for intelligence. This is part and parcel of Xi Jinping's efforts to create a harmonious society, one wherein you have a social credit score, much like we have a credit score to get a mortgage. In China, you have a credit score whether or not you're a good Chinese citizen, whether or not you, J-Walk, for example, whether or not you pay your taxes and say nice things about the government. That actually improves the chances that your kids can get into good schools or you actually might get a mortgage. And the COVID pandemic actually exploits both of these meta narratives. We have this blame game, but we also have this idea that foreign powers are interfering in China's internal affairs. You see this in Hong Kong too, where the Chinese state simply cannot imagine that those are spontaneous demonstrations by local Hong Kongers hungry for democracy. They think it's primarily foreign powers that are putting these enemies up to claim some sort of greater democratic freedoms. Fortunately, you see Li Wenliang. Li Wenliang is the doctor who blew the whistle on COVID and ultimately paid with his life. The admonition he had to read for disrupting social unity. So when we think about Xi Jinping's core agendas, one is the Belt and Road Initiative, another is extending the control of the party over the military, vast military reforms to try to make it more responsive to bring it into the 21st century to be able to compete as a great power as a first class military power. So both of these narratives are absolutely central to Xi Jinping's China dream, but ultimately it really is all about keeping the party in power. And to understand the audacious nature of the Chinese dream, I won't go through these in detail, but it involves essentially a total transformation of China from primarily a rural society to primarily an urban society, fixing the environment, creating social cohesiveness, homogeneity, erasing ethnic distinction so that if you're a Muslim, you'll be a Chinese Muslim, capital C, lowercase M. So this is this bold agenda that Xi Jinping has, and if the party doesn't have control, it cannot achieve these things. Moreover, because of the growing popularity of this hegemony narrative, the measure of China's future greatness is based on a flawed understanding of the past. So you have here a dangerous combination of grievance born of the century of humiliation and entitlement born of this idea that China was and should be again, not just the dominant power in East Asia, but potentially one of perhaps the greatest power on earth. But at the same time Xi Jinping has this incredibly audacious idea of creating this new great China. China's face is all sorts of insecurity, not just the regime insecurity, water, food, fuel, manpower, the aging population, the demographic cliff that China is coming to. Moreover, you have to think about all the sand that throws in the gears of the Chinese dream. And then imagine if you lived in China's neighborhood. It's not a particularly good neighborhood to have neighbors like North Korea. And China, of course, is afraid that Muslim extremism will exploit the opening of Western China through the Belt and Road Initiative to feed back into places of large Muslim populations. So what Xi Jinping is trying to do is, is they talk about it in terms of a vaccine, right? They are preemptively trying to vaccinate Western China from Islamic extremism. So these are the some ideas of the deep insecurities of the state writ large, but also the Chinese Communist Party and of Xi Jinping, who's not the most secure guy we know. So with that in mind, I'm happy to take any questions that you have. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much, Dex. It was a wonderful presentation and generated about three hours worth of questions. So we're not going to be able to get into all of them, but we will go through a few. One of the first questions is how can we get a copy of this presentation? And I want to let everybody know that we will post this on YouTube as we have with all of the other issues in national security lectures. So you'll be able to go there and review it once again and potentially think through some of these issues. First question. Do you see China's internal instability growing to overshadow their global prestige? It's a great question. China has managed to dodge the bullet on a lot of internal issues in the last 20 or 30 years, I mean, the ways in which the regime was able to insulate China from the Asian financial crisis back in the 90s or from the global financial crisis in the 2000s. So those crises did not exaggerate some of the issues, the insecurities and instabilities in the Chinese economy or in Chinese society writ large. I would say actually in many ways China is, by its very actions of trying to deal with these insecurities are creating even more insecurities in terms of destabilizing the Northwest, essentially engaging in a military occupation of their own territory. These creeping anxieties and securities about foreign meddling in Chinese internal affairs read Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet, for example. So China tends to overreact in these places magnifying its sense of insecurity. And I think also it's insecurity writ large because you have populations on Taiwan and Hong Kong, they're much less fans of Beijing than perhaps they should be, not for the sake of the regime or anything, but the ideas of cultural and ethnic affinity that might more naturally draw these polities together. The way the Chinese government behaves is driving them apart. In terms of a range of those other things, it remains to be seen. Xi Jinping is trying to urbanize the Chinese population, trying to get ahead of the curve on the demographic crisis where in China, the freer is that China will grow old before it grows rich, that the middle income trap will be even greater in China than it was in say Japan, for example, just if only for the scale of it. But even when the population is in decline, the demographic pressure is immense in China. Imagine a billion people living between the Mississippi River and the East Coast. That gives you some sense of the idea of the pressure put on infrastructure, on the environment. And it's an environment that was wrecked even before the industrial age began, had been so intensely farmed for so many centuries that the environment was already wrecked. So this is a whole range of those challenges that are throwing, as I said, throwing sand in the gears of the Chinese street. Next question, please. Yes, is Mao's great leap forward simply overlooked in current Chinese thinking? For some who don't know, the great leap forward was an effort to essentially skip an entire phase of economic development, jumping straight from a land to the tiller program to mass collectivization of agriculture. And this happens actually in the mid 1950s in part within the context of the Korean War and its immediate aftermath. The result of the forced collectivization and botched economic and agricultural policies was another 20 to 30 million people dying. This cannot be ignored in China. When you look at the current demographic issue, two generations prior, it begins two generations prior with the drop in the birth rate that happened during the great leap forward. So reminders of the great leap forward are all around. And our Chinese friends are of two minds about Mao Zedong. They see him as a great revolutionary fighting the United States to a standstill in Korea, all these monumental achievements, but also the excesses that led to this yet another national tragedy, which was entirely self-inflicted. Next question, please. Well, one of our listeners asked you to reflect on the fact that the master plans in China are measured in decades as opposed to U.S. planning, which is measured in maybe four year increments you decide. How does that affect the future? I hear that a lot. That might not even be decades. It might be centuries that the Chinese had these long range plans. I'm very skeptical of that, having watched Chinese political behavior for my entire adult life and studying Chinese political behavior in centuries past. For example, if you look at the great leap forward, what part of anyone's master plan was that? Here, yes, the Chinese Communist Party can plan ahead because it assumes that it's going to be holding the reins of power. Therefore, it can make five-year plans and try to implement a radical collectivization of agriculture and then stick to that terrible decision. This ability to plan forward isn't necessarily always a good thing. Moreover, the fits and starts that the Chinese state has suffered or has inflicted on itself in the past 70 years would lead one to think twice about the grand strategic wisdom of this long-term picture. I think in fact American politics, while rhetorically volatile, American foreign policy is remarkably consistent throughout administrations, in part because of that natural check and balance. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't have that, so therefore it can come up with a long-term plan. But if that long-term plan is stocked full of terrible ideas, it's going to run its course and the consequences could be absolutely dreadful. Next question, please. A question about what effect do you think the crackdown in Hong Kong will have in the future? Is that a real flash point? It is a real flash point because it's adding to the regime's sense of insecurity and it didn't have to be this way. The way that Xi Jinping and the party have approached Hong Kong has been massively counterproductive, especially over the last decade. Simply ham-handed moves to alienate the population of Hong Kong. For example, Cantonese. Cantonese is its own language. It's in the Chinese family group. But Hong Kongers are proud of the fact that they speak Cantonese and their claim is that Cantonese was the language of the great Tang dynasty in the past, one of the great golden ages of Chinese history. That Mandarin is some sort of agglomeration of a simplified form of Chinese with Manchu and Mongol and Central Asians are thrown on top of it. And yet Xi Jinping insists on making Mandarin the primary language of instruction in Hong Kong schools. That's totally unnecessary and alienating the population. So I can't only imagine how reaping this particular whirlwind is not going to lead China to be more accommodationist when it comes to calls for democracy, especially in these places that it feels so deeply insecure about. Taiwan is probably the hottest of those flash points. Where in its policies have been utterly counterproductive. You move right into Taiwan. We have a question about that very issue. Do you think there's any possibility, probability China would invade Taiwan? If so, what would the United States do in such a situation? Some have argued that Xi Jinping is eager to, is in a hurry, rather than thinking long term. He wants to achieve the reunification of Taiwan and the mainland in his lifetime under his general secretarieship. That he will achieve things on par, if not greater than Xi Jinping achieved. So that historical chip on his shoulder driving him to precipitous action. I think more of the case of the Chinese are prepared for war over Taiwan, but are not eager for war over Taiwan. And deeply uneasy about the implications of American intervention. And if you think about that center of humiliation, fast forward to 1996. And in 1996, there was the first Democratic presidential election on Taiwan was taking place. The Chinese did a series of military exercises off the coast of Taiwan, trying to influence the election. Didn't work, in fact, it backfired. And the United States sent two carrier battle groups to the region with speed and ease. And ever since then, for the last 25 years, a big chunk of China's military modernization and institutional reforms in the PLA have been an effort to complicate that speed and ease of American intervention in what they view as an internal affair. So they understand that the implications of this will be massive. And the economic disruptions will be tremendous. So I don't think they are in a rush to take Taiwan by force. And I think the United States recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan would be cautionary as well. Because you're talking about occupying and transforming a society of 25 million people, which is about the population of Iraq. So while many in China think they're going to be greeted as liberators, they might find that they self have a long-term protracted drain on their rise or their return to greatness. Not only the immediate cost of it, but all the opportunity costs that come with it. And will probably stall China's efforts to achieve the Chinese dream. Dax, how does China balance communism with capitalism when more and more access through the internet and other means the Chinese population sees how the rest of the world lives? Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people have this sort of psychic whiplash, especially when they go to China the first time. And it is a communist country, Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedemann thought is the official orthodoxy. It is a creed that the party believes. And yet if you look around a Chinese society, it doesn't look communist, it looks capitalist. And the Chinese have gone through a lot of sort of rhetorical and theoretical gymnastics trying to explain this, essentially that the excesses of the early period, like the Great Leap Forward, called the Great Leap Forward because it tried to rush historical processes. And that the achievement of socialism and communism actually requires capitalism to come into its full form. So the Chinese really to sort of set the clock back to allow for the development of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. But of course, for exactly all the reasons you say, they want to manage that and further extend the reach of the state into the management of these things. One consequence of that has been massive corruption not just within the Chinese economy and Chinese society at large, but in particular with the government in part because the government is so invasive and so vulnerable to corruption. The Chinese military is also corruption plagued in ways that fat Leonard would be a blip on the radar compared to what goes on in China in terms of corruption. So yes, the Chinese are trying to manage this stage of capitalism that will eventually lead to socialism and then communism and are trying to now leverage artificial intelligence, big data, surveillance, all those things as yet another set of eyes on the Chinese people. I would say however that many in China, like many in the United States, live in info bubbles and there are many ardently nationalistic Chinese that tend to you know, hue spontaneously to Beijing's line about a lot of things. I will say however that particularly the 20-somethings in China have felt the significant rollback of their operating space as a war. I'm not going to say individual freedoms, but the width between the guardrails, the operating space wherein which you could go online and be environmental activists, all those things. The Chinese have seen that operating space shrink and now when you have the increasing application of the social credit system, that's yet another way to try to funnel the energies of the Chinese people and China has always been, has always had a big capitalist part of its economy to funnel those energies towards the purposes of the state and that's a really tough balancing act. Probably the last question we'll have time for today, Dex, is could you update us on the status of the long-standing territorial disputes between Japan and China? Very little movement there. I mean, there's a whole range of territorial issues, but the hottest is the Senkaku Diu Islands, which are islets and a couple of features just to the east of Taiwan, which Japan has controlled since the 1890s as in part as a result of the Sino-Japanese war in which the Chinese were humiliated by this upstart Japanese. Interestingly enough, and you see this recently also in the Philippines, one of Xi Jinping's formative experiences as General Secretary was when he came into the position of General Secretary back in 2012. At that time, the biggest story in China was a political corruption scandal, wherein this high flyer who was going to become one of the top 10 most powerful men in China utterly imploded because his wife got caught having their personal money laundered and murdered. So it wasn't that they had a personal money laundered or that they murdered him, it's that they got caught. So this sort of implosion of Boshi Lai, this guy's career. So this was the scandal du jour throughout 2012. And then in October, the Japanese announced the nationalization of these rocks in the Senkaku Islands. And this was an utter boon because immediately focus turned away from Boshi Lai to something the party could do. It could stand up, it could fight for sovereignty and exploit that both to cover domestic scandal but also play to domestic audiences. So when you see Chinese behavior in the South China Sea, East China Sea in particular, these are as much about pushing the Japanese or the Filipinos around as much as they are about satisfying domestic audiences. And in some ways, China has not much in the way of incentive to solve the smaller ones, which don't present national security concerns but are rhetorically very useful for the party in terms of its justification of its hold on power. Well, excellent presentation, Dex. We had almost 200 people at one point in the discussion. So you have the record, I believe, for this series. I'd like to pass it to Admiral Chatfield to see if she has any comments before we wrap up. Admiral. I was just trying to find my clap button. So I want to thank you very much for an extraordinary presentation. We really enjoyed it and learned a lot. And I know that everybody who participated online did, too. Thank you for the respectful attention to the questions that were asked. And for your deep scholarship in this area, you've really given us a gift in demonstrating exactly how deep your knowledge goes and how important understanding these concepts are to our national security. Thank you. Thank you much, Admiral. Appreciate that. Okay, Dex, once again, thank you for being with us. And we will now take a five-minute break.