Welcome to the 186th edition of Trade War.
Is Beijing making nice with the U.S. or using “Sharp Power”? At Stanford meeting, Five Eyes intelligence chiefs warn of “unprecedented” Chinese corporate espionage threat. And tune into an upcoming virtual talk on China’s global influence activities.
Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing and Xi Jinping gives Vladimir Putin red-carpet welcome. Chinese GDP grows a strong 4.9 percent but property sector malaise hangs over economy.
China scrutinizes the foreign connections and overseas travel of Chinese civil servants and state enterprise managers. And Kissinger Institute head says Xi represents a “nationalist, isolationist, paranoid, totalitarian strand” within China but that “liberal internationalist” strands also exist.
Making nice with the US?
Has Beijing decided to make nice with the US? That’s a question I have been considering following a rash of recent positive news, including Xi Jinping’s decision to meet with a congressional delegation to China led by Chuck Schumer, as I write in the latest edition of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Newsletter.
“China maintains that the common interests of the two countries far outweigh their differences,” Xi said to the bipartisan group of senators visiting Beijing.
And as Beijing has loosened up on issuing visas, friends in business have recently made their first post-pandemic trips back to China. Meanwhile, senior delegations from China and the Chinese Embassy in Washington, have been trekking to the place I work, the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana, despite its distance from the coasts.
How to understand all the amity?
China’s Sharp Power
A recent interview I conducted with the Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond, a scholar of China’s Sharp Power—which he defines as “between soft power and hard power” and used to “penetrate open societies and compromise them, through corruption and coercion”—reminded me there is another lens to view this.
“Friendships are useful and important, but primarily they’re seeking strategic advantage. For a state like Montana, they would be trying to assess, get access to, become more aware of, the strategic assets,” said Diamond, who, with China expert Orville Schell, coedited the 2019 book, China’s Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance. “They will say– okay what are the resources here? Do you mine anything that might be useful, for example, strategic minerals? Do you have ICBM silos?” (Montana has both.)
With companies? “They are trying to use American business to lobby the government of the United States, to adopt policies that will be favorable to China, and increasingly in recent years, to not adopt policies that will penalize China, such as export controls or outbound or inbound investment controls,” Diamond said.
To read the entire October edition of the Global China Newsletter click on this link.
Chinese corporate espionage an ‘unprecedented threat’
The intelligence chiefs of Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and the U.S., the so-called Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, met Tuesday at Stanford University, to highlight what FBI director Christopher Wray called an “unprecedented” threat from Chinese corporate espionage directed at cutting edge technology.
I talk to San Francisco Experience Podcast host Jim Herlihy about what kinds of espionage measures China is reportedly using and which global cutting edge technologies are most at risk.
Global influence activities
This is one not to miss: Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Joshua Kurlantzick will speak Thursday with Radio Free Asia president Bay Fang on the topic “China's Global Influence Activities: Growing Threat or Failure?”
Kurlantzick is the author of the new book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.
Sign up for the virtual talk happening on October 26 at 7:00 pm MT (9:00 pm ET).
Massive Belt and Road forum in Beijing
China held a huge forum in Beijing from October 17-18 for its signature $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), inviting top officials from more than 140 countries, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the Taliban government.
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