O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

Meu Twitter: https://twitter.com/PauloAlmeida53

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paulobooks

Mostrando postagens com marcador John Pomfret. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador John Pomfret. Mostrar todas as postagens

quarta-feira, 29 de março de 2023

Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War - John Pomfret and Matt Pottinger (Foreign Affairs)

 A coisa está ficando séria, pela primeira vez em meio século...

Chinese President Xi Jinping during the closing session of the National People’s Congress, Beijing, March 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping during the closing session of the National People’s Congress, Beijing, March 2023
Noel Celis / Pool / Reuters

Chinese leader Xi Jinping says he is preparing for war. At the annual meeting of China’s parliament and its top political advisory body in March, Xi wove the theme of war readiness through four separate speeches, in one instance telling his generals to “dare to fight.” His government also announced a 7.2 percent increase in China’s defense budget, which has doubled over the last decade, as well as plans to make the country less dependent on foreign grain imports. And in recent months, Beijing has unveiled new military readiness laws, new air-raid shelters in cities across the strait from Taiwan, and new “National Defense Mobilization” offices countrywide. 

It is too early to say for certain what these developments mean. Conflict is not certain or imminent. But something has changed in Beijing that policymakers and business leaders worldwide cannot afford to ignore. If Xi says he is readying for war, it would be foolish not to take him at his word.

WEEPING GHOSTS, QUAKING ENEMIES 

The first sign that this year’s meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—known as the “two-sessions” because both bodies meet simultaneously—might not be business as usual came on March 1, when the top theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published an essay titled “Under the Guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Army, We Will Advance Victoriously.” The essay appeared under the name “Jun Zheng”—a homonym for “military government” that possibly refers to China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission—and argued that “the modernization of national defense and the military must be accelerated.” It also called for an intensification of Military-Civil Fusion, Xi’s policy requiring private companies and civilian institutions to serve China’s military modernization effort. And riffing off a speech that Xi made to Chinse military leaders in October 2022, it made lightly veiled jabs at the United States: 

In the face of wars that may be imposed on us, we must speak to enemies in a language they understand and use victory to win peace and respect. In the new era, the People’s Army insists on using force to stop fighting. . . . Our army is famous for being good at fighting and having a strong fighting spirit. With millet and rifles, it defeated the Kuomintang army equipped with American equipment. It defeated the world’s number one enemy armed to the teeth on the Korean battlefield, and performed mighty and majestic battle dramas that shocked the world and caused ghosts and gods to weep.

Even before the essay’s publication, there were indications that Chinese leaders could be planning for a possible conflict. In December, Beijing promulgated a new law that would enable the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to more easily activate its reserve forces and institutionalize a system for replenishing combat troops in the event of war. Such measures, as the analysts Lyle Goldstein and Nathan Waechter have noted, suggest that Xi may have drawn lessons about military mobilization from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failures in Ukraine.

The law governing military reservists is not the only legal change that hints at Beijing’s preparations. In February, the top deliberative body of the National People’s Congress adopted the Decision on Adjusting the Application of Certain Provisions of the [Chinese] Criminal Procedure Law to the Military During Wartime, which, according to the state-run People’s Daily, gives the Central Military Commission the power to adjust legal provisions, including “jurisdiction, defense and representation, compulsory measures, case filings, investigation, prosecution, trial, and the implementation of sentences.” Although it is impossible to predict how the decision will be used, it could become a weapon to target individuals who oppose a takeover of Taiwan. The PLA might also use it to claim legal jurisdiction over a potentially occupied territory, such as Taiwan. Or Beijing could use it to compel Chinese citizens to support its decisions during wartime. 

Since December, the Chinese government has also opened a slew of National Defense Mobilization offices—or recruitment centers—across the country, including in Beijing, Fujian, Hubei, Hunan, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanghai, Sichuan, Tibet, and Wuhan. At the same time, cities in Fujian Province, across the strait from Taiwan, have begun building or upgrading air-raid shelters and at least one “wartime emergency hospital,” according to Chinese state media. In March, Fujian and several cities in the province began preventing overseas IP addresses from accessing government websites, possibly to impede tracking of China’s preparations for war.

XI’S INNER VLAD

If these developments hint at a shift in Beijing’s thinking, the two-sessions meetings in early March all but confirmed one. Among the proposals discussed by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—the advisory body—was a plan to create a blacklist of pro-independence activists and political leaders in Taiwan. Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the “positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. 

Also at the two-sessions meetings, outgoing Premier Li Keqiang announced a military budget of 1.55 trillion yuan (roughly $224.8 billion) for 2023, a 7.2 percent increase from last year. Li, too, called for heightened “preparations for war.” Western experts have long believed that China underreports its defense expenditures. In 2021, for instance, Beijing claimed it spent $209 billion on defense, but the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute put the true figure at $293.4 billion. Even the official Chinese figure exceeds the military spending of all the Pacific treaty allies of the United States combined (Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand), and it is a safe bet China is spending substantially more than it says. 

But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”

In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized. 

Xi may have drawn lessons about military mobilization from Russia’s failures in Ukraine.

Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era. 

On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.

In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.

In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity. 

TAKING XI SERIOUSLY

One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.

Xi is now intensifying a decadelong campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.


sexta-feira, 21 de agosto de 2020

Política EUA-China: Biden vai continuar Trump? - John Pomfret (WP)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/global-opinions/


Biden could execute a strong and effective China policy ... thanks to Trump

Chinese President Xi Jinping shaking hands with then-Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2013.
Chinese President Xi Jinping shaking hands with then-Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2013. (Pool New/Reuters)

quinta-feira, 19 de dezembro de 2019

Um falcão da Guerra Fria quer que os EUA conduzam uma Guerra Fria contra a China: John Pomfret (WP)

A acusação é a de que a própria China já iniciou uma Guerra Fria contra os EUA.
Acho que os chineses não têm essa intenção: eles apenas intentam levar uma guerra fria econômica, que aliás eles já ganharam.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

It’s not all on Trump: China favors confrontation with the U.S.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Dec. 13. (Noel Celis/Afp Via Getty Images)
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Dec. 13. (Noel Celis/Afp Via Getty Images)
As the United States and China limp to a truce in the trade war, two very different story lines have played out on opposite sides of the Pacific. In the United States, a series of high-profile American figures — a columnist, a former treasury secretary, a former World Bank president and an expert on foreign relations — have weighed in with laments about the course of America’s ties to China and have criticized the Trump administration for its handling of Beijing.
If current American policies continue, these men warn, China and the United States will descend into a new Cold War that could be more dangerous and far more costly than the old one. All of these writers call for a return to the policies of engagement with China, which have been pursued since 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon first journeyed to Beijing.
In China, however, no such parallel concern has been expressed publicly. There has been no criticism of Xi Jinping for running his country’s relations with the United States into a ditch. Instead, since Nov. 20, there has been a striking upsurge in condemnation of the United States on a level not seen since 1999, when a U.S. missile mistakenly destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese reporters.
For the past several weeks, the main state-run nightly news program, watched by hundreds of millions, has been devoted to disparaging Americans and their government. The United States has been blamed for fomenting the six-month-long demonstrations in Hong Kong and for meddling in China’s internal affairs over criticism of the treatment of the Uighurs.
Carl Minzner, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Fordham University, has watched the newscast every day since Nov. 20 and notes that each night the United States has been attacked not once or twice but in multiple news segments — 13 on Dec. 4 alone, followed by eight the next night. Then on Dec. 13, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, blasted the United States for “almost paranoid” behavior that has seriously damaged “the hard-won foundation of mutual trust between China and the United States.”
Given these jeremiads, reading the pronouncements by the American figures —columnist Thomas Friedman, former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former World Bank president Robert Zoellick and foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria — it’s difficult to grasp what exactly they would have the United States do. It takes two to fight a Cold War; it also takes two to stop one.
So far, China doesn’t seem ready to put down its gloves.
To be sure, some of the criticisms of the Trump administration by these four writers are spot on. To properly deal with China, the Trump administration can’t continue to alienate America’s allies, including South Korea, Japan and Europe. Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership also denied America an important lever to push back against China’s trade practices. But embracing these smarter policies won’t actually improve relations with China or head off a new Cold War, unless China is also ready to compromise. And so far, there’s no evidence of that.
For me, the critical issue is that none of these writers seems to have truly grasped how much China has changed for the worse under Xi, despite the easy availability of insightful books on the subject, such as Elizabeth Economy’s The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State." China began to veer from its market-oriented economic reforms and understated foreign policy in 2008, when the global financial crisis made the United States appear weak. Xi’s rise to Communist Party boss in 2012 added a dose of accelerant.
These experts also soft-pedal another issue that is key to understanding the negative trajectory in U.S.-China relations: decoupling. “Decoupling” is a buzzword used to describe the process by which the United States and China have begun to separate their intensively intertwined economies. All of the authors decry decoupling as a strategic error, but they also assume that if the Trump administration decides to forego decoupling, then China will follow suit.
This ignores China’s role in the issue.
China effectively announced its intention to decouple from its dependence on U.S. technology in 2015 — well before Trump’s election. That was the year when Beijing rolled out its Made in China 2025 program, which aims to replace foreign-made high technology with Chinese products.
China has also “decoupled” from international agreements. It has ignored a major treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, by claiming all of the South China Sea as its territory and ignored the verdict of an international tribunal that ruled against China’s claim. It has also declared invalid the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international understanding made over the future of Hong Kong. And since 2014, when a newspaper in Liaoning province published an article urging students to expose liberal professors, it has intellectually decoupled from the West in a campaign that has led to book burning.
This is a far different country than the China that entered the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In a way, many experts have become unconscious victims of the Chinese Communist system of thought control — where the victim is always at fault. Under this logic, responsibility for the current state of affairs has to be lain at the feet of the United States because the Communist Party never makes a mistake. Our four American commentators seem to have internalized that message. So, they declare, the United States needs to do more. China? Not so much.