 Well, thank you folks for coming. It's a little bit like church here. Everybody sits in the back and you kind of have to draw them up front, right? So I guess instead I'll just move forward a little bit. So thank you very much for coming. And I want to point out that this lecture that I'll do today is the third in a series. Dr. Chao, Brian Chao gave the second lecture earlier this year and Dr. Mulrandy Stone, did the first lecture this year. So typically we do them all together at the same time. We just couldn't coordinate schedules to be able to do it. So now the third and last of these sort of organizing lectures to help sort of provide a framework for how to think about China. Dr. Mulrandy Stone's lecture focused on sort of China's culture. And Dr. Chao focused I think mostly internally China's economy and the politics of China's economy and I'll be looking outward. You'll see some overlap in our presentations but I'll be looking at sort of how the Chinese think about security and economics outside of China and how that affects China's foreign policies in many different dimensions. So the idea is that Xi Jinping has to balance various factors, right? So security, external security, wealth, the generation of national economy and hopefully increasing the GDP for capital over time. And then the third is stability, right? So internal political stability. So those are the things we'll focus on but I should tell you who I am, I suppose. My name is Peter Dutton. I am now a professor in the Stockton Center of International Law. My background, I have both a law degree and a PhD. So I focus on the intersection between international law, China and maritime strategy. So a lot of the work I've done has been on things like the South China Sea, the legal issues there and the relationship between the strategic and legal issues in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. I started more recently a project on Taiwan. And so I'm looking at the legal and strategic and political aspects of that dynamic. Prior to my current position, I was for a year and a half the interim dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Before that, I was director of the Tana Maritime Studies Institute here at the college. That's the short bio. I've actually been at the college for 22 years and held a bunch of different positions in that time. But that really gives you a sense of who I am and what I do. I like very much to teach. I'm not teaching this year, but next year, I'll be sure to get back into the classroom. And I'll join my Stockton colleagues whenever I can in teaching their courses. All right, so security, wealth and stability. I think of the three big things that Xi Jinping and the leaders of China have to focus on. And so one of the things about security is we think about external security sort of in the context of modern times, in the context of where China is today. And we forget that China actually thinks about security very differently. So it's not just that China has a sort of a longer history than places like the United States, but it has brought China's history of the last 200 years into the political conversation. So there's very much an ideological component of the way China thinks about security, external security. And you have to think about the fact that from about the late 1700s until just about the turn of this century, right about 1989 really, I suppose. So for about 200 years, China was in some kind of internal upheaval or external conflict, almost continually for 200 years. So it began under, China had reached the apex of its power in the late 1700s. It was unquestionably the most powerful country on the planet at that point in time. It was a very continental state at that time as well and an expanding continental state in the late 1700s. But with that expansion came in some internal weakness. Keeping up with stability, internal stability as it was expanding in a continental direction became a very difficult thing to do in terms of resources. So internal instability began to creep in or cracks of internal instability and internal rebellions that began for various reasons in the late 1700s. And that sort of accelerated for various reasons into the 1800s when China began to fight a series of wars primarily with maritime powers. It was also quite, let's be clear, it was also fighting a number of conflicts on its periphery with continental powers but it was utterly unprepared to address maritime conflict. And so China lost all of the wars that were maritime focused from 1840 until the end of World War II. And so I suppose you could say that China was on the winning side in World War II but that was because it was in a coalition against Japan. So China has, and then what you have after World War II is revolution, right? So you have internal instability, just utter upheaval. And that really didn't end until after the Tiananmenin in 1989, right? So you have essentially 200 years of internal and external instability and the two are very related in the way China thinks about security instability. So in order to become more secure and internally stable the Chinese turned to wealth generation, right? So you think about a communist party that is very on communist in its approach to wealth generation. And so by the 1980s, actually Mao Dada in 1976 and as Deng Xiaoping ascended to power he began to look at ways to generate wealth for China in order to generate both external security and internal stability. And that's the purpose of wealth generation, fundamentally the purpose of wealth generation. It's less about, I mean, it has the effect of making everybody's lives better but it's less about that. That's not the fundamental purpose for it. So it's about becoming more secure and more stable as a country. So the turning point as I mentioned already was that period of 1989 to 1992 after Tiananmen Square, the whole essential concepts of communism and the ideological viewpoint of communism and revolution had run their course. There was no longer a lot of appetite for revolution and communism after the series of things like the Great Leap Forward where millions of Chinese died in order to pursue frankly some pretty bad policies in the late 50s, early 60s. And then there was the Peltual Revolution in the 60s and early 70s when again, millions of people died and there was a suppression of any sort of individual rights or freedom or individuality even. And then in 1989, you had another sort of incident, the Tiananmen Square incident where the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA actually ended up killing many of the dissidents and the students in Tiananmen Square. And we're all familiar with that. So you got to the point where the people in the party were really disconnected by that point in time. And so the party did an incredible job of internal reassessment and developed a policy where Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy was based on three factors. It was based on generating wealth. So it was not, now here, there is an element of the bargain between the people in the party where generation of wealth was about, your life will get better. So the overarching purpose of generating wealth was to become more secure and stable, but also that stability component, internal political stability component had to do with creating a relationship again between the party and the people that was beneficial to the people, right? And that the benefits were going to be economic and everybody's life would improve because their economic situation would improve. The second element of that relationship was based on something called patriotic education campaign. Essentially it was the party built economic wealth for the people or would build it. And then at the same time it built nationalism, sort of consciously created nationalism. And here's where that concept of the century of humiliation comes in to play, right? Where consciously reminding the people from preschool up through PhD programs, everybody participates in this patriotic education campaign. And now as you may have even read, even in companies, even Western companies in China have these education programs that they have to learn. And so you have a situation in which the Communist Party has consciously created a nationalist ideology for the people of China that is based in part on humiliation, right? The past humiliations of that period of time in the 1800s and 1900s when China was weak and unstable and insecure. And demonstrating that the Chinese Communist Party can make China a whole again and strong again, right? So it's that relationship between the people and the party that was consciously generating part through wealth and in part through this development of nationalism. And the third aspect of it was called something called the three represents. And this is where the party expanded instead of an internal, what's called othering, right? You have the ins and the outs, right? The good people and the bad people that had been the revolutionary approach to how to solidify the control of the party. There's good people, they're the peasants, they're the workers, they're the Communist Party. And there's the bad people, the intellectuals, the artists, the capitalists, the landowners, right? That the exploiting class, right? So the good people and the bad people. Well, the party in that period of time between 1899 when you realized that they were going to need all of these people in order to generate the wealth necessary to become more secure and more stable. And so they brought the three representatives, they brought everybody into the party. The problem then became what? If there's something that's negative, if everybody is good in terms of the party's perspective, then there's no one to blame for the bad things, right? In the past, the blame would fall on the bad elements of society, right? Oh, it's the capitalists that are causing this problem and we need to rectify it by punishing the capitalists. Now China had to look for another way to place blame and it looked externally, right? So here you have a party that is all encompassing the Chinese people and that's good, right? It brings everybody into the party and it stabilizes the internal political situation. But in order to have someone to blame, let's put it that way, in order to have someone to blame, you have to have an external bad guy, right? And so what you saw at that point in time was a beginning of the degradation of the relationship with Japan, right? Because Japan's the bad guy, Japan's the one that invaded us twice, right? And we gotta watch out for the Japanese and they're trying to take our islands, the St. Papua Jago Islands, et cetera. And so that became one and the other became the United States, actually. It's just sort of varies depending on what the message is at the time. So China-Foreign relations became different after that point in time because of the internal situation. So what you see is a relationship between internal politics and externalization of the political approach to security and stability. So let's see. Xi Jinping, he's of course the top leader and in order to bring together these elements, right? He has developed the basic concepts that he's laying out, right? So we remain true to our original aspiration of socialism with Chinese characteristics, right? So socialism with Chinese characteristics is a new approach to economic relationships that combines socialism and elements of capitalism to create a moderately prosperous society in all respects, right? So everybody's going to be included in this larger effort and then to achieve the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation, right? So we're looking back before the center of humiliation attempting to recreate a powerful China with global impact and the capacity to manage affairs in East Asia without outside interference, right? That's the essence of where Xi Jinping is trying to head. But he's got a dilemma, right? Because there's only so many resources and only so much that he can put into these objectives. And so let me explain this a little bit. So this is called the S-Curve and it is a model for how states become high GDP per capita states, essentially. And in the bottom left, you have a low GDP per capita states you see down there at the bottom, Malawi, Malawi, Burundi states with a very low GDP per capita. In the upper right-hand corner, you have the United States, Switzerland, UAE, Qatar, so states with a very high GDP per capita. And what you have is something in the middle. So you have this initial increase when a state's economy begins to grow. A lot of that initial growth is based on external investment. That was part of what the Communist Party did to bring in external investment after 1990 and begin to grow the economy with external investment. And you get easy, that sort of easy growth, right? Just based on a literate population, the capacity, the resources, the capacity to become more productive individually. So you're building productivity, increasing productivity in society based on external capitalization. And so you can get that easy growth and that tends to be with manufacturing, right? So low-end manufacturing. Sometimes there's other approaches to it like resource inscription, but generally speaking, it's low-end manufacturing. And you begin to rise in the S and then you get to the point in the middle where you level off. And that's because essentially the easy growth, the manufacturing growth has been exhausted. And so it depends on the size of your economy and the size of your population, how long that growth period will last and because China's huge and has a lot of resources, including a strong population, it can, it'll last a long time. We saw it begin to level out around 2010, that period of time. We saw it leveling off of the growth model into that what's called the middle income trap. That middle box there in the S curve is the middle income trap. And states often get caught there because they're caught between the rising growth and then the headwinds that are caused by that rising growth. So some of that, some of those headwinds are demographic. How many workers per non-worker do you have? So the elderly and the young, the non-workers, when you end up with a much older population, you have more costs to bear with fewer workers. So China has that problem. You also have rising expectations of a middle class for a better life, better education system, better health system, cleaner environment, all these become headwinds to rising up to the top level. But the biggest headwind has to do with the capacity to grow beyond manufacturing through things like innovation or finance and investment. These are the ways that you end up in the upper right hand corner. The sort of shorthand, the bumper sticker of it is the society has to get rich before it gets old. So the idea basically is you have to, you have to have fewer headwinds, right? Then the things that propel you into well. So this is what Xi Jinping is trying to do, and he references the middle income trap. Some economists think this is nonsense. I actually think it's a good model, but more important than that, Xi Jinping thinks it's a good model. He references the middle income trap all the time. And so he's thinking about how does China get out, get up into that upper quadrant, where you have a very large, more than a billion population? How do you raise the GDP per capita of that population? And it's through innovation, it's through finance, it's making money from money, right? So investment, looking, and that in part explains why China is looking outward in its investment approach. We'll come back to talk about that in a minute. But this is why China is in the middle income trap now, and it's why you've seen the GDP per capita and the growth level out over the last 10 years. A lot of what you've seen in growth over the last 10 or 15 years has been either debt driven or external investment driven, right? So a lot of that growth, you can grow an economy if you keep borrowing, right? From the economy. But in the end, that's not a sustainable approach. So China is at that point now, where they're in that middle income trap, they're out of options for growing rapidly, and they've got to figure out a way to get to the upper right-handed corner. Or expansion, right? So internal growth and ways to work externally, to build relationships where you can invest effectively abroad has to be balanced against the expansion. Now why? This should sound familiar to two of the legs of the post-1989 bargain with the people, right? The first is economic, raising everyone's economic level as raised the national wealth that you can do more with. But at the same time, nationalism, right? The other one is nationalism, and that is the Chinese Communist Party's drive to demonstrate efficacy, effectiveness in creating a stronger China capable of achieving the China dream. And so there's a pulling tug between investment in these two areas, economics and security, external security as the Chinese define it. So you see Taiwan, you see the investment, it's an example of the investment in the military, in the PLA, but you've got to figure out ways to invest in providing nationalist benefits at the same time that you're providing economic benefits. So what kind of security does China want? How does China think about its external security given these two competing interests? The first thing to say is that China looks at the external world as a land power. This is very important to understand. And there's two fundamental approaches to global security. One is an interior security strategy. The globe here shows, I think a good example of that. Essentially it's where you think of a bullseye and there's decreasing rings of control around the bullseye, right? Decreasing rings of control and military capabilities that extend further out to expand the perimeter around that which you're trying to defend. That's an interior security strategy. Well, China has taken that approach to its overall security where land dominates the sea, right? So yes, China is building a stronger and more capable navy, but it is fundamentally up to this point using that navy as a land power uses navies, which is to say to help expand the perimeter of control around the territory rather than to play the away game essentially. I'll come back to that in just a minute. So they're developing an expanding interior strategy, right? So I use the missile rings here as a way of demonstrating the concept, but China's incrementally expanding its capability outward. Initially it was to protect the coast, then it was to protect the near seas, then it was to move beyond the first island chain and to begin to affect the influence events in beyond the first island chain. And the best way to think about it is in terms of control, influence and reach. The Chinese don't use those terms exactly, those are my terms, they use similar terms though that control is how the Chinese think about their maritime periphery. And it's not a set area. You might hear control within the first island chain and that's a rough approach to it, but it's control as far out as the technology allows you to exercise sea supremacy, right? So control and influence, the next is to influence the outcome of events. So you might think about that as achieving the culminating point of enemy advance, right? In that second area, right? That might be the Philippine Sea or even a little bit farther from China's shores. And then the third is reach. Now this is the idea that China uses its fleet to go around the world, but at the sufferance of other stronger powers, right? China does not have bases, it doesn't have the capacity to project power and sustain power in conflict. If for instance, China wanted to send aircraft carriers into the Eastern Mediterranean, it would only be able to do so if it was allowed by other stronger powers to do so. It could be prevented from doing that. That's what I mean by reach. China has the capacity to reach around the world with its navy, but not to control events around the world with its navy. So control is local, it's near seas. Influence is that next sort of second tier where they're trying to prevent an attack from reaching the zone of control. And then finally reach to achieve other events around the world or to achieve other interests around the world, but not the capacity to control other areas of the maritime convey. Why? Because they use the land to control the sea. They have a land power, missile power, air power approach to act with sea power. So sea power operates under the umbrella of land power in order to achieve the interior objectives. Now the other approach to security strategy is an exterior security strategy. It's essentially the way you wake it. It would be to surround the bullseye, so to speak, right? So the United States pursues an exterior security strategy through our relationships in Europe with NATO, our alliances in East Asia. We're able to be resident in the areas of potential threat and to control the commons in between our territory and that area. That's called an exterior security strategy. You're essentially trying to surround the potential area of hostility. So you can see in that a fundamental clash of basic security strategies between an expanding interior where China is attempting to achieve more and more control over space in East Asia and the United States, which has historically been resident in East Asia to prevent another country from achieving control over that space. The design of the United States was never to be the hegemon, the sole power in East Asia, although there were times when we were. That's not the design. The design is to prevent someone else from becoming the sole dominant power in that region. So you can see where some of the clash between the American interests and the Chinese interests overlap. We have vital national interests in the same geographic space is how I like to put it, because China is an expanding interior power and the United States is a resident exterior power. So when China looks out at the world, this is basically what China sees. So China sees the American position in Japan. China sees the American position in the Philippines. China sees the American support for Taiwan. So China looks out at the world and sees the American position there, but by now what we see is China weakening the American position and the American lines as the red lines there are the ways in which China is demonstrating the capacity to undermine the security of the United States position in the region as the exterior power allied with regional maritime interests. If you think about it, I don't think I have the map. I should have done that. If you think about the map of China, you can think about in the upper right-hand corner, northeast corner is Manchuria, then there's Mongolia. Mongolia as a state today was actually part of historically part of China during the Qing dynasty, but they're even part of Mongolia, outer Mongolia, it's called, inner Mongolia, sorry, is part of China today. Then Xinjiang, the Turkmenistan, Turkestan, I can't remember East Turkestan, that's what it was called. The Turkic area was brought into the Chinese dynasty during the Qing dynasty, and the same thing with Tibet. So you have this arc of control that was completed around China during the Qing dynasty, right? That period of time in the late 1700s when China was at its most powerful is when China brought into the imperial system these external territories. It's part of the internal weakness that they have to deal with today. China remains an imperial system. There's historical conquering of these lands, but they were brought into the imperial system in order to provide a buffer zone, right? To provide stability on historical China's borders, the Han Chinese border. But the Qing failed to provide that same stability in the maritime periphery, and you can see what the Chinese are trying to do today. It's to complete that arc of security around central China by including the maritime domain in that larger security system. So are they looking to expand further in order to generate more security for their economic system as it's developed? Yes, they are. They're probing for opportunities for overseas bases to date the only place Cambodia and Djibouti. Those are the only two places. Djibouti, for sure, had one already. I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. And there seem to be developing one in Cambodia. It's pretty clear that that's what's going on there. The one in neither one, frankly, provides a great benefit to the Chinese. Cambodia, the base in Cambodia, I think it's just an opportunity. It does push a bit to the Southwest China's ability to station maritime forces, but recall that they've got the three large bases and five small bases among the Spratly Islands. So this probably doesn't tremendously shift the strategic posture for the Chinese. And remember too that this is within the South China Sea. So again, it doesn't tremendously shift the posture. What does it do? It fundamentally surrounds Vietnam. It changes the dynamic of the South China Sea. It creates, China is on Vietnam's northern border. China and Vietnam contest the islands in the South China Sea. And now China has a position in Cambodia. And so it changes the security dynamic for Vietnam in ways that may, I think, China hopes favor its interests. It also provides the opportunity for more naval power to be in the vicinity of the Indonesian straits, Strait of Malacca and the other straits through the Indonesian archipelago. So, but I don't think it changes things dramatically. I also think the same thing about Djibouti. It has not turned into the kind of forward operating base that I think the Chinese hoped it might do. But at the same time, in times of conflict, remember, China does not have the capacity to defend its interests abroad, right? Times of conflict. What does this base become? It's a disconnected, it's untethered from China's security system and easily severed by other maritime powers in the region, India, Australia, perhaps the United States, et cetera. France actually has interests in the region as well. So you have other powers that might have the capacity to rather easily sever China's connection to Djibouti should they desire to do it. So they're probing for opportunity, but they really haven't turned that corner yet. And I do wonder whether China will in fact turn the corner into something of a more expeditionary naval force with the capacity to control regional events because they have bases in the region that support the naval power and each other in that region. So I'm not convinced based on the evidence to date that China has that capacity despite what you read from some people about China's Navy is going global. Yes, it's true, but China's Navy is only going global at the, at the sufferance of other states. Okay, so in the Indian Ocean, China has interests, right? Supply chain interests that both resources and energy and markets that run across this. And you would expect that China would look for an opportunity to connect those with its South Tennessee bases, including apparently Cambodia, but they would need a node in the middle. So you would be looking at, say, perhaps Sri Lanka, perhaps the Maldives, perhaps Seychelles. Who knows, that if China is going to attempt to make this leap to be able to dominate their East West supply chains and sea lines of communication, you would expect to see some more development in that area. You might also expect to see it in, say, Pakistan, what are there, or in Myanmar. To date, there's been talk for more than 20 years now about the possibility of a string of pearls bases or bases in the Indian Ocean region. And for various reasons, and I think one of them is the cost, both political and economic cost of bases, China has chosen not to pursue it as avidly as they might. So what kind of Navy does China want then? I think there's, first, remember, I think the key to remember is Taiwan first, right? So keeping pressure on Taiwan, a force structure developed to put pressure on Taiwan and to focus on that as a source of, remember that nationalism and that desire to make China, quote, whole, right? By bringing these territories back under Beijing's dominance, that's the first priority. It remains the first priority for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. And what would we be looking for to see if there's going to be change? Well, I've developed this five, the ladder of five different types of bases, beginning at the bottom and going up to the top. And what you would expect to see would be China looking for overseas naval bases that work their way up this ladder. At the bottom is really just a friendly port, right? Where ships, if you're from the Navy or naval, you know that ships pull into ports all the time. They are looking for ways to rest, they replenish and conduct naval diplomacy, right? So you're out and about and conducting national and naval diplomacy. These are just friendly ports, right? Just permission to come into a foreign port. And China has plenty of these on a worldwide basis and that's typical of all Navy's. Moving up one, you have bases where there's logistic support. There might be ongoing commercial ties. You use perhaps the same port over and over again and so you develop commercial ties and have contractual logistics relationships. China had one of these. It was in the port of Aden prior to the central collapse of Yemen into civil war. So China used the port of Aden on a regular basis in this way. They had ongoing logistic support contracts and they had developed a sort of a routine relationship with commercial support in that port. Next up you would see on the third one of the ladder, you would see a logistics hub where you have a permanent contractual relationship where rather than sort of ad hoc contractual relationships, you have a permanent contractual relationship. That's not just economic but political as well. The example that I use for this would be someplace like Jebel Ali for instance in Dubai. You have, it's not a base per se but it is a permanent contractual relationship between the UAE and the United States to use Jebel Ali and the peers there for support. And there's a carrier pier where we come and go on a routine basis. And there's existing contractual relationships that have a political component behind them. So that's an example of that third level up. Fourth level up, I just referred to it as a place. We talk a lot about navies having places, not just bases. And the idea is we have a permanent presence with political commitment. That's the key. You might think of this as perhaps Singapore, right? The US has a permanent logistics support system and permanent agreement with the government of Singapore to use Changi and to the peers at Changi and to, and so there's, what you see as you're going up the ladder is a shift from a sort of commercial ad hoc relationship to a more politically permanent relationship, right? And so as you go higher up, there's an international diplomacy aspect to the relationship that increases in intensity. And so at the place level, you have a permanent relationship with the other country. It may not be a defense agreement, it may be just a status of forces agreement where you're allowed to use permanently a facility and even to have like in Singapore, a permanent logistics hub, but it's based on that political level of commitment. And finally, you have a base, a full-on base, something like the American Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan where it's based on a deep political commitment between the two countries. There's a permanent presence. There's the capacity to work well together on security issues, often as allies. And there's full, all of the support that, I mean, the very extensive support that Navy's need to support each other. And it's that level of base that clearly China does not have anywhere in the world. So we might be seeing something like it beginning to develop with Cambodia, it's unclear exactly how high on the ladder that will go, but even in Djibouti, you have something maybe approaching that level of place, somewhere between a logistics hub and place, but definitely not at that top level of political commitment where Djibouti and China are now allies supporting each other, right? So that's as you would look for a change in China's approach to its security interests, where it intends to move beyond original power into a more expansionary naval power that will intend probably as a next stage, the logical next stage would be to develop naval power in the Indian Ocean. But there's a lot of pushback from others, United States, Australia, India and others to doing that. So there's costs for China to doing it. And they don't seem to be willing to pay those costs, at least not yet. So the key there is the political relationships. China is also reluctant to develop political relationships in the same way that the United States and others have, where China is committed to supporting the security interests of other states, right? China does not feel the confidence, it doesn't feel like it has the resources to do that while it hasn't got its own interests at this time. Okay, along with this, so remember, I talked about the expanding interior power and the forward-based exterior power, that affects how the US and China view international law of the sea, right? So you can see, first of all, in China's view, maritime order is based entirely on national interests, without necessarily reference to global interests and how national interests and global interests are related. In fact, it's quite the opposite. In my engagement with the Chinese, they're very focused only on what China wants in its regional neighborhood. And when you press them and say, well, are you willing to live in a world where others start following your rules and start attempting to take over large areas of water space and make it their own, there's not any response to that, right? So at this point, China's policies are purely national in focus without reference to any aspect of how China's policies will affect the global maritime rules-based system. Remember, as we all, I'm sure, remind the Chinese when we see them, that China's a growing power and others will follow China's lead. Because of China's power, others will follow its lead eventually. And so challenging the Chinese on whether they want to live in a world where their rules now apply more broadly has been an ongoing conversation that I've had with the Chinese. On the left, you see what the South China Sea would look like if the rules of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea were followed. So what you have on the left here are the exclusive economic zones in the blue dashed lines of the coastal states. The red dashed line is China's nine dashed line claim, the broader claim, without reference. It is without reference to existing international law. On the right, what you have is what I call the inside out, outside in. China's approach to making its claim. The inside out approach is saying, hey, we have historic rights based on this nine dashed line. We inherited the nine dashed line from the Republic of China. We have rights based on it. And those are historic rights to the water space and to the land within it. They haven't fully clarified what those historic rights are but what they've also done. So that's the outside in, right? You're claiming the water space based on the outside line, the nine dashed line and everything inside it based on the line and historic rights. Remember that there is no reference in international law to that approach at all. The inside out approach is to say, okay, well, all of the islands in the South China Sea belong to China. We claim them, we possess them and the rest of the countries that occupy them do so because we're in that one, right? So we're not willing to use force to extricate them. So, but they're trying to say, we own them, there are. And we are going to draw baselines around the island groups meaning collectively, collect the island groups, draw lines around them and draw our resource zones from that collected point. Well, again, that's not what international law allows, period. You can't draw baselines around widely dispersed tiny little islands, essentially enclosing 98% water and 2% land and claiming it as your sovereign zone. That's just not what international law allows. But you see an example of that on the right there. Now this is notional, the Chinese haven't told us exactly what their baselines would look like, but this is a foul rent. I've participated in enough discussions with the Chinese to know that this is roughly what the Chinese are talking about. And so what you can see is that they collectivize the islands and then draw the exclusive economics out from that. And that takes you essentially throughout the entire South China Sea. And when you talk to the Chinese about what that now the nine dashed line means in this case, they say, well, that's the medium line between our claim and the coastline of other states. And that's our basic negotiating position about the nine dashed line. So whether you get there from the outside in, in other words, the line is ours, everything in its art based on historic rights or the inside out that's using the language of the law but not the law, right? Baselines and territorial seas and exclusive economic zones uses the language of the law but it's not applying the law in how that's actually achieved to dominate space. So these are the ways in which China's undermining the maritime rules based order. And without reference to how that might affect the global rules based order in the maritime domain. And so it's very interesting that China hasn't made that shift from looking at itself as a global leader based on the power that it has achieved through the wealth it's been able to generate. It hasn't made that shift from narrow national interests to sort of enlightened national interests in the context of global power. It just hasn't made that shift yet. So it still remains a continental state focused on Taiwan and controlling its regional space. So that's the kind of maritime order that China wants. It does want to avoid provoking conflict, right? So it desires expansion in the maritime domain, the maritime direction without escalation, without reaching military conflict. So its policy remains to seek a reunion with Taiwan through peaceful means, even as it's building military power and demonstrating the capacity to use military power. There's a coercive element to it but its policy remains first to achieve it through peaceful means on only use of force and last resort. But in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, China has been much more proactive in using non-military power. So non-militarized coercion, this is how I use for this, non-militarized coercion to achieve control over this expanded maritime periphery that is claiming for itself. It's also doing a little bit of violence to the concept of use of force in international law and in the international system because it's essentially defining anything that is a law enforcement platform is by China to you, by definition not a use of force. So a Coast Guard vessel or a maritime militia vessel might plow right through a Philippine vessel and sink it as it has done as they have done, but that's not a use of force because it was done with a Coast Guard vessel or a militia vessel. So these are considered below the threshold of Article 24 of the UN Charter and not invoking Article 57, so that the right of self-defense. So Article 52, sorry, Article 52, right of self-defense. Yeah, thank you, I'm getting all my 50s next up. Article 51, right of self-defense, thank you. So getting those, sort of blurring the paradigm there and blurring the approach to use of force. They are attempting to expand without provoking escalation. This is part of what the gray zone needs, essentially part of it. All right, so what kind of economic order does China want, right? So we've heard quite a bit about the expansion recently of the Belt and Road Initiative, bringing new members, I think Iran and Saudi Arabia, both recently were brought within a number of different Chinese breaks, but also the Belt and Road Initiative. So China is looking at ways to connect its economic power to the global market for the purpose, for in part, for the purpose of expanding its economic relationships and its economic activities. But for a very important component to expand its political power through the economic relationships. And China's been fairly effective in being able to use economic power to achieve political outcomes to date. So what is the Belt and Road Initiative? In short, it's offshoring manufacturing. Remember, China's got the, it's essentially used up low-end manufacturing capability and now frankly wages in China have begun to make low-end manufacturing in China less competitive. So China itself has begun offshoring some of that to other places. Ethiopia was a key place that China offshored this to and before it developed into civil war. China's been unlucky in that regard. Developing markets for its products, a lot of what China's doing in Africa has to do with developing markets and setting the rules of a structure and the relationships to use these markets for the long-term. Access and resources also in Africa, but elsewhere as well, but a lot of the focus is on Africa. Building infrastructure throughout the world, frankly. Establishing rules in relationship to this. And this isn't just international law. These are things like business standards or manufacturing standards. There's all kinds of things that make Chinese products more globally essential to the supply chain through things like standards and not just the rules of economic relationship, although they are attempting to establish rules of economic relationship that favor Chinese interests as well. And then creating long-term relationships, so that China is looking for ways to expand its global power, not so much through military power as we've seen, but through its use of economic relationships for political power. Longstanding relationships in Africa. China has had a long history of engaging with, from the 1950s through 60s and 70s, China was actively involved in welcoming and assisting states that were emerging. So whether that was out of colonialism or emerging as new states during that period of time, China exercised a lot of leadership and still considers itself the leading state of developing states in the world. I think we've hit enough there. The economic prize for China is the European market. It's even bigger than the American market. It is a challenging market because there's both a combination of state-based national standards and then EU standards. But China is really looking to leverage its economic power in Europe for the same reason because it wants not just to have that market drawn to the Chinese economy, but also to have political leverage there, to weaken American political leverage in Europe that has been developed over the last couple of centuries. We've already mentioned the headwinds that China faces in developing its wealth and what it's doing to try to advance its interests there. So maintaining power is the internal stabilization that the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to do through its policies of internal security, wealth generation and external security. So stability, security and wealth together, maintaining Chinese Communist power but also sustaining China's overall rise within the international system. So what thoughts or questions do you have? Yeah. So relating to the S-curve. Yeah. I noticed that the dates on there were quite old. Yep. Where were it placed at China currently? It's right in the same position. Yeah, it's a GDP per capita thing. China's GDP per capita hasn't changed much. Got it. Yeah. It's just the only one that I could find. It was from the economists actually some time ago. Yep. Yep. So there are a lot of internal conflicts which are at presently going on in the China like the UPS and the other state. How is that affecting his expansionist policy or the sustaining policy for the rise? So China has a pretty good internal control system, I think. Occasionally you see commentators predicting China's collapse in various ways because of these internal challenges that China faces, debt being one of them but also internal dissent being another. But China has very effectively developed since 1989, has developed an internal control system that is largely economic, I'm sorry, largely cyber-based and economic-based. So the capacity to use cyber capabilities to control the population and communication among people and then to even control access to resources through various cyber control mechanisms. There's almost no cash used in China anymore. All trends, nearly all transactions are through apps on the phone that are actually very carefully controlled and monitored by the Chinese government. And then of course they have the external security system. People are monitored incredibly in China. So I think what the Chinese Communist Party has done to maintain internal stability and the security of party has been to recognize that there is, that they would have to give up a certain amount of control, internal control, but that they replaced that control with the monitoring and monitoring system so that they could zero in on potential threats, cut them out before they became too serious. That's my view at least. Did that answer your question or, okay. Yeah. Think about Stalin, how starkly he was to dangers to Soviet communism of external power. And you said China needs that external opponent. But it doesn't seem as if China uses the United States in the same way that Stalin did. Sometimes they presented more like the United States, it's annoying. Yeah. So can you characterize the difference in the need for this external opponent? Yeah, I'm not sure I can do a good comparative contrast with the Soviet and Stalin, but I can say that the Chinese relationship with the United States is complex, right? Because the Chinese need the American economy, every bit as much as they are seeking the same level of interest in the European economy. So you have to be careful not to overdo the political condemnation. But there's a pretty steady drony internal to the Chinese conversation about negative aspects of the relationship with the United States and the American provocation of China in various ways. Things that frankly, they just don't even have to have to highlight at all. For instance, American intelligence gathering from the airspace outside of China is an example that the Chinese use all the time to sort of highlight the American pressure on China. They could just ignore it entirely. People might know or might not know or care, but the Chinese focus on it as a way of generating sort of a sense of anger at the United States for interfering in China's overall regional security. And it's somewhat manufactured, you can see it. But you're right, it is a complex relationship. They can't take it too far, right? Because they need the American investment and relationship with the American markets as well. Soviet Union was pretty different. It was economically isolated. They didn't need us, right? So not in the same way. So I think that might help explain some of the difference, but I don't know if there's a Soviet expert in the room who can clarify some of that, but all right. Nina. I'm wondering how much in your research you're coming into contact with China's working emerging tax. So I know in a lot of this sort of expansion of its military power, a big component of that is developing new capabilities and especially around AI, which of course I focus on, but I'm thinking also in terms of quantum technologies is what I think they're quite advanced. How much is this coming into contact with some of the maritime strategy stuff that you're... So I would say a lot. Actually, it's not an area of focus for my research up to date, especially for structure and technology issues, but anyone who studies China bumps up against these issues all the time. And the degree to which China is really rapidly seeking to advance its capabilities in these emerging technologies, part of this has to do with security, but part of it also has to do with getting in that upper right hand quadrant of the S-curve, it's how you innovate to take advantage of the next revolution, right? So one of the years ago it was Apple and the iPhone, and I don't know what the next innovation might be, but China is seeking to position itself within these technology advances to be at the forefront of it. And they are also bringing some of these technologies into the military field. I think the leading edge of it is pretty classified, just exactly what the Chinese are doing. But every year when the annual China Power Report comes out from DOD you learn new things about what the Chinese are doing at an unclassified level that just is stunning, right? So space technology I think is a real area of expansion and the capacity to communicate with space. I've only gabbled in learning about this quantum computing and what's that? There's a couple of different phrases related to that that are not coming to my mind at the moment, but the capacity to, is it quantum communications? Yeah, the quantum communications as well is something that I've seen that the Chinese are seeking to position themselves at the forefront of. I'll be honest, I don't understand the technology well, but it does to me real pause and concern to see how vast China is developing as kids learning. Do you have anything else to add? I mean, what are you seeing in your work? Yeah, so I think what I'm seeing, because my work is on emerging tech, so I'm really coming at it from that angle, but a lot of what I'm seeing, especially around quantum stuff, is China's had a few impressive breakthroughs with computing, but also with cryptography I believe was one of the ones I saw recently. And the discussions happening in the tech space around this is whether China's kind of trying to redefine what military influence looks like. So maybe it doesn't have to resemble the way the US has spread its military influence around the globe, it's going to be something new, right? And something technology based. So I just didn't know if this was, but the maritime angle is one that I'm not familiar with at all. So I was wondering if that would come up. You know, it brings to mind the last defense white paper that the Chinese developed. I don't recall the year, 2013 maybe? Maybe someone knows, but it's been a while. The last defense white paper, when it came out, I took the white paper and I took two markers, literally. And I went through line by line and all of the maritime stuff, I highlighted it and I blew or something, right? But then there was what I noticed, and this was what everyone was focused on, because there was a real sense that China's maritime policy said turn to corner. Again, and especially with the Navy, there was this sort of like, whoa, what does this really mean for us, right? Moment when China's white paper came out because there was so much naval stuff in it. But I took another marker to yellow and went through it and marked up all of the, the references to new technologies and new domains, right? And what you ended up with was a document that was equally blue and yellow, right? And so what I think what we were seeing was an investment in two different approaches to expanding global power. And my sense is that they have limited what they've invested in the Navy power, right? The Navy has an expansionary tool, right? And that they have focused on technology, emerging technologies and emerging domains as the expansionary tool. I also came across a couple of really interesting Chinese papers about the way in which technology could be employed. And one of them, in particular, by a very influential Chinese writer from a very influential think tank at the National Defense University, wrote about leapfrogging over naval power. Like that naval power was so 19th century, right? So the idea that naval power is no longer the primary mechanism or the most effective mechanism of power projection for states, that power projection through, actually the paper was about space technology, power projection through space technology as a mechanism for global maneuver and the capacity to mass power and globally maneuver through space as opposed to in the maritime domain could be achieved more effectively and efficient, right? That's, so those two things really struck me. And I just haven't had the capacity to pull on the threads of the different programs but it did strike me to see that the Chinese probably have seen more breakthroughs in the emerging domains, the cyber, the space. They actually have more domains than we do in military domains. So Lansi air, space and cyber are sort of the American domains. They include the electromagnetic domain and the cognitive domain. They have two different additional domains that they see as sort of warfare domains. And so it's the emerging domains, like the space, the cyber, the electromagnetic and the cognitive domain that they have been focusing on how to project power and achieve strategic effects that way. That's what I observed. I don't know, it's really interesting. Maybe someday we'll be studying China's naval power as a competitive strategy. China's competitive strategy, develop a navy to keep the Americans worried about the navy and then develop these other domains as the primary effort, I don't know. You shall see. Yeah, what else, anything? Julia, is there anybody on Zoom that has a question? All right, I don't know if Julie's sitting there. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. And I hope you got something out of it. I enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you.