Author: Staff Reporter

Kurt Campbell, White House coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, gave a briefing and participated in a conversation with the Asia Society Tuesday morning that provided the clearest picture yet of the Biden administration’s approach to Asia. In a wide-ranging discussion with Asia Society President and CEO and Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) President Kevin Rudd, ASPI Vice President Wendy Cutler, and ASPI Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy Daniel Russel, Campbell spoke at length about U.S. strategy toward the Indo-Pacific and toward China, which he said represented a departure from the approach favored by former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Campbell explained that a “new cold war” was a not a suitable way to frame the U.S.-China relationship, even though it has adversarial aspects. “There will be periods of uncertainty — perhaps even periods of occasional raised tensions,” he said. “Do I believe that China and the United States can coexist peacefully? Yes, I do. But I do think this challenge is going to be enormously difficult for this generation and the next.”

 One potential flashpoint in this challenge is Taiwan, which China views as an irrevocable part of its territory. Campbell stressed that the Biden Administration stands by the “One China Policy” and does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country — but he explained that the island should not be ignored by the international community or shut out of multilateral collaboration where it can make contributions. “We fully recognize and understand the sensitivities here,” he said.  The conversation also covered trade policy, where the U.S. is “quietly exploring” trade initiatives in Asia; China’s bullying approach to Australia, and fielded questions on how the imminent withdrawal of the U.S. military from Afghanistan will play out in the region.

The in-depth conversation underscored the Biden administration’s deep commitment to engagement with Asia. “For the first time in our history, the Indo-Pacific will be the center of our regional focus,” Campbell said. But, he added, the Biden administration’s top priority was domestic renewal here in the United States, a polarized country still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. “When people ask what the most important thing to do in Asia or in the world is, it sounds tired but is in fact the case: to recover at home,” he said.

A hundred years ago, sometime in July 1921, 13 young men gathered in the Chinese city of Shanghai to found a tiny political grouping: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today that party rules a quarter of humanity, presiding over the second biggest economy and second-best funded military in the world. What stands out in the history writing project in China is that the same party, over the course of a 100 years of its existence, has approached the history of China and that of its own differently at different moments in time.

According to Rana Mitter, an analyst and expert on China, “The combination of factors that the CCP has brought together in today’s China has no exact parallel in history.” He says, the first factor is authoritarian government. The CCP has never been keen on liberal democracy, but in the past decade it has been explicit that it regards its one-party state as a meritocratic alternative to liberal democracy, not a stepping stone toward it. In the past year, the party has drawn attention to its successful suppression of Covid-19 in China under its own political system, and contrasted it with what party-aligned voices have called the democratic West’s failure to respond.

The second is the creation of a consumerist lifestyle. Back in the Cold War, then-US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev clashed in the “kitchen debate” over which system, capitalism or communism, could create a better lifestyle for ordinary people. In that case, most people might say the US has been the clear winner. But today, China’s emerging middle class can point to a lifestyle that is far beyond anything their parents or grandparents might have imagined. They have some of the world’s most sophisticated mobile phones, they go on vacation to glamorous locations within China (the tropical paradises of Hainan or Dali), and they live in some of the fastest-growing cities on earth.

Of course, this is still just one part of the population. There is plenty of poverty all over China, and even for well-paid urbanites, there are many problems ranging from expensive mortgages to lack of pensions. But the creation of the party’s idea of the “Chinese dream” is a reality for many of the new middle class. The third element the CCP has brought to bear is its global ambition. Back in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who followed Mao Zedong, advised that China should lie low and bide its time, getting rich first and only seeking global glory later on.

Thirty years later, today’s party general secretary and national president, Xi Jinping, has made it clear that the CCP needs to make a splash in the world. The party’s global ambitions take many forms. They include the Belt and Road Initiative — the label given to the plan to provide loans for infrastructure development across Asia, Africa, and even Latin America. China also has sought more influence at the United Nations, including in key institutions such as the World Health Organization. Trade agreements are also part of the plan. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is a free-trade agreement that puts China at the heart of an economic network across the Asia-Pacific; the US is not a member.

Finally, but perhaps most significantly, the CCP is using technology to change society both at home and abroad. China spent 2.4% of its GDP on research and development in 2020, and the technology produced by this investment has both military and civilian uses: For instance, artificial intelligence can be used by the security services to pinpoint dissidents via specific technologies like facial recognition, but it can also turn up consumer insights from the vast e-payments system that is making cash more and more outdated in China.This serves the party’s purposes, giving people everyday convenience while generating huge amounts of data that, many predict, will allow for unprecedented political control.

In 2012, soon after he became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping gave a speech at a foreign press briefing on what he sees as the road ahead for China. Ironically, in an address dedicated to the future of China, it was history that stood out as the focal point. Xi pointed to China’s “five thousand years and more of evolution as a civilization” in which the nation had made “indelible contribution to the progress of human civilization”. He also spoke about the hardships and sufferings endured by China in modern history and how “since its founding, the Communist Party of China had made great sacrifices and forged ahead against all odds.”

The role of history has been paramount in a China led by the Communist Party. Journalist Ian Johnson in his essay, ‘The presence of the past- A coda’ (2016), takes stock of this when he writes, “Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably towards Communism, an argument that regime builders like Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rise to power.”

The CCP has succeeded in holding onto power because it is an unashamedly nationalist party. It believes that China was weakened in the 19th century because it did not have a clear idea of what kind of state it wanted to be. The CCP fiercely guards its territorial boundaries, and it regards criticism of its internal actions as “interference” with its sovereign rights. In the past year, there has been global alarm at the constraining of rights regarding free speech and democratic activism in Hong Kong under the National Security Law of 2020, as well as the detention of Uighur citizens in what the government terms “re-education” camps in the western province of Xinjiang. (The party also maintains the stated goal of reuniting Taiwan with mainland China and has laid controversial claims on disputed territories in the South China Sea.)

“What’s interesting with the CCP is that you see from a very early stage, a very conscious decision that artists and intelligentsia, or cultural production of which history writing is a part, had to serve the interests of the party,” says Arunabh Ghosh, historian of Modern China at Harvard University. He explains this relationship between the professional historian and the state historically, when he suggests that there exists a 1000-year-old history in China of employing bureaucrats through a meritocratic exam. “What that means is that intellectuals have been employed in the imperial project in a systematic way,” he says, adding that the legacy of this system has affected the relationship between the intellectual and the state right down to the present government under Xi.

What also stands out in the history writing project in China is that the same party, over the course of a 100 years of its existence, has approached the history of China and that of its own differently at different moments in time. As the party evolved, so did its relationship with the past. What was marginalized under Mao is now glorified by Xi, critical moments of CCP’s history suppressed or recovered to suit the party, while leaders, once crucial to the party, are now deemed as uncomfortable faces in its memory. While on one hand discussing episodes such as the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests is almost taboo, on the other hand important leaders of the CCP who later fell out with the party like Gao Gang and Liu Shaoqi are erased from history text books.

The significance of Mao in the history of modern China can never be overemphasized. Mao to China was what Stalin was to the Soviet Union. He was the founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and yet under him the country experienced some of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in its history. After coming to power, Mao consolidated his control over the country through campaigns against landlords and counter-revolutionaries. His anti-rightist campaign between 1957 and 59 is known to have led to the execution of hundreds and thousands of critics of the party. The Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign initiated by Mao in 1958 to reconstruct the Chinese agrarian economy according to a Communist model resulted in what is believed to be the greatest famine in the history of the country.

Then came the Cultural Revolution, a movement that lasted for 10 years and led to unprecedented class violence and destruction of cultural artefacts. A 1994 report in the Washington Post suggests that Mao was responsible for more than a 100 million deaths, caused by the dozen or so campaigns launched by him between 1949 and 1976 when he died. The year 1989 is yet another landmark moment in the history of modern China. A student protest that began on account of the sudden death of CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang, soon turned into a movement centered on broader issues such as corruption, democracy, freedom of the press and the like. Thousands of students marched down to Tiananmen Square and as the protests kept developing the administration responded with both placatory as well as hardline tactics. On June 4, the government declared Martial Law and an estimated 300,000 troops of the PLA were called in to suppress the protest. Estimates of the number who died range from 1000 to 3000 and several others were wounded. The suppression of the Tiananmen protests was widely condemned by the global community.

This period of domestic turmoil received a further shock when the Soviet Union disintegrated between 1988 and 1991. “The message that a lot of the CCP leaders took was that if this can happen to the Soviet Communist Party, then this can happen to us, and how do we then prevent it from happening,” says Ghosh. One of the things that the party did very consciously after the crackdown at Tiananmen is to change the content of education. Thereafter, one of the campaigns it mounted in the early 1990s is the Patriotic Education Campaign. The primary goal of the campaign was to construct a historical memory of China in which the CCP had played a major role in the country’s independence and the influence that foreign countries had on it.

Scholars agree that what began in the 90s, has reached new heights under the Xi Jinping years. One way of doing so for the party is to promote itself aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and traditions. Interestingly, till the 90s, most of these traditions were labeled as ‘feudal superstitions’. The glorification of China’s ancient past is best illustrated by Xi’s embrace of Confucius, the sixth century Chinese philosopher. Ironically, the party under Mao, had tried to uproot Confucian thought from Chinese society as they believed it to be a feudal leftover that hindered the growth of socialism. Xi, in contrast, visited the hometown of Confucius soon after taking over the role of president, and pledged to read Confucian texts. The following year, he became the first Communist Party leader to commemorate Confucius’ birth anniversary.

In recent years, China has emerged assertive in its territorial claims, for instance, over the East and South China Seas. At the same time it is also interested in shaping international organisations. For that effect the CCP uses the narrative of the war and its defeat of Japan to claim an elevated place in the postwar global order. As Mitter notes, Chinese thinkers argue, “China, like the United States, should be able to draw on its own record as one of the victorious allied powers to define its own vision of the region. Like other allies, China also seeks to legitimise its own behaviour and give itself prestige by virtue of its contributions to the wartime victory.”

EbrahimRaisi ,Iran’s president-elect staked out a hard-line position in his first remarks since his landslide election victory, rejecting the possibility of meeting with President Joe Biden or negotiating Tehran’s ballistic missile program and support of regional militias. The comments by EbrahimRaisi offered a blunt preview of how Iran might deal with the wider world in the next four years as it enters a new stage in negotiations to resurrect its now-tattered 2015 nuclear deal with global powers.

When asked about Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support of regional militias, EbrahimRaisi described the issues as “non-negotiable.” Judiciary chief EbrahimRaisi also described himself as a “defender of human rights” when asked about his involvement in the 1988 mass execution of some 5,000 people. It marked the first time he’s been put on the spot on live television over that dark moment in Iranian history at the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

Tehran’s fleet of attack aircraft date largely back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, forcing Iran to instead invest in missiles as a hedge against its regional Arab neighbours, who have purchased billions of dollars in American military hardware over the years. Iran also relies on militias like Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah to counterbalance against enemies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, respectively.

Raisi, a protégé of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass executions. His victory in the balloting last Friday came amid the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Millions of Iranians stayed home in defiance of a vote they saw as tipped in Raisi’s favor.Of those who did vote, 3.7 million people either accidentally or intentionally voided their ballots, far beyond the amount seen in previous elections and suggesting some wanted none of the four candidates. In official results, Raisi won 17.9 million votes overall, nearly 62% of the total 28.9 million cast.

Raisi’s election puts hard-liners firmly in control across the government as negotiations in Vienna continue to try to save a tattered deal meant to limit Iran’s nuclear program, at a time when Tehran is enriching uranium at 60% its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels. Representatives of the world powers party to the deal returned to their capitals for consultations following the latest round of negotiations on Sunday. Top diplomats from nations involved in the talks said that further progress had been made Sunday between Iran and global powers to try to restore a landmark 2015 agreement to contain Iranian nuclear development that was abandoned by the Trump administration. They said it was now up to the governments involved in the negotiations to make political decisions.

Raisi’s election victory has raised concerns that it could complicate a possible return to the nuclear agreement. The international efforts to bring Iran back in compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal that came apart after former US President Donald Trump abandoned continued in Vienna on Sunday even as the world powers brace for a more hardline administration in Tehran.

Senior diplomats from China, Germany, France, Russia and Britain met at a hotel in the Austrian capital for the final meeting of the sixth round of talks in Vienna. Iran’s deputy foreign minister for political affairs said that almost all documents pertaining to the nuclear deal have been negotiated and that the diplomats would return to their home countries for further consultations with their governments and take a final call. But apprehension remains over the incoming Iranian president of EbrahimRaisi, who won an election that offered only a veneer of choice to the public.

Raisi is the first Iranian president sanctioned by the U.S. government even before entering office, over his involvement in the 1988 mass executions, as well for being the chief of the Iranian judiciary, which has a penchant for capital punishment and disdain for due process. Israel’s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned Sunday that Raisi’s election was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with”. “These guys are murderers, mass murderers,” he added.

Biden administration officials are insisting that the election of a hard-liner as Iran’s president won’t affect prospects for reviving the faltering 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. But there are already signs that their goal of locking in a deal just got tougher. Optimism that a deal was imminent faded as the latest talks ended Sunday without tangible indications of significant progress. And on Monday, in his first public comments since the vote, incoming Iranian President EbrahimRaisi rejected a key Biden goal of expanding on the nuclear deal if negotiators are able to salvage the old one.

At the same time, Raisi is likely to raise Iran’s demands for sanctions relief in return for Iranian compliance with the deal, as he himself is already subject to U.S. human rights penalties. “I don’t envy the Biden team,” said Karim Sadjapour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has advised multiple U.S. administrations on Iran. “I think the administration now has a heightened sense of urgency to revise the deal before Raisi and a new hard-line team is inaugurated.”

The long and divisive reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the dominant Israeli Prime Minister who led the nation for a long dozen years, officially ended, as the country’s Parliament gave its vote of confidence to a precarious coalition government stitched together by widely disparate anti-Netanyahu forces. Benjamin Netanyahu’s record 12-year run as Israel’s prime minister ended on Sunday, June 13th with Israeli Parliament approving a new “government of change” led by nationalist Naftali Bennett, an improbable scenario few Israelis once could have imagined. Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, approved the new government by just a single vote — 60 to 59, with one abstention. Naftali Bennett took the oath of office as prime minister.

Under the coalition deal, Bennett, a 49-year-old Orthodox Jew and high-tech millionaire, will be replaced as prime minister in 2023 by centrist YairLapid, 57, a popular former television host. With his far-right Yamina party winning only six of parliament’s 120 seats in the last election, Bennett’s ascension to the premiership was a political jaw-dropper.They lead an eight-party alliance ranging from left to right, from secular to religious, that agrees on little but a desire to oust Mr. Netanyahu, the longest-serving leader in the country’s history, and to end Israel’s lengthy political gridlock.

Meanwhile, reports here suggest, Israel’s fragile new government has shown little interest in addressing the decades-old conflict with the Palestinians, but it may not have a choice.Jewish ultranationalists are already staging provocations aimed at splitting the coalition and bringing about a return to right-wing rule. In doing so, they risk escalating tensions with the Palestinians weeks after an 11-day Gaza war was halted by an informal cease-fire. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s best hope for maintaining his ruling coalition — which consists of eight parties from across the political spectrum — will be to manage the conflict, the same approach favored by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, for most of his 12-year rule. But that method failed to prevent three Gaza wars and countless smaller eruptions.

That’s because the status quo for Palestinians involves expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, looming evictions in Jerusalem, home demolitions, deadly shootings and an array of discriminatory measures that two well-known human rights groups say amount to apartheid. In Gaza, which has been under a crippling blockade since the Hamas militant group seized power in 2007, it’s even worse. “They talk about it being a government of change, but it’s just going to entrench the status quo,” said Waleed Assaf, a Palestinian official who coordinates protests against West Bank settlements. “Bennett is a copy of Netanyahu, and he might even be more radical.”

Bennett said little about the Palestinians in a speech before being sworn in on Sunday. “Violence will be met with a firm response,” he warned, adding that “security calm will lead to economic moves, which will lead to reducing friction and the conflict.” Environment Minister Tamar Zandberg, a member of the dovish Meretz party, told Israeli television’s Channel 12 that she believes the peace process is important, but that the new government has agreed, “at least at this stage, not to deal with it.”

The government faces an early challenge on JabalSabeeh, a hilltop in the northern West Bank where dozens of Jewish settlers rapidly established an outpost last month, paving roads and setting up living quarters that they say are now home to dozens of families. The settlement, named Eviatar after an Israeli who was killed in an attack in 2013, was built without the permission of Israeli authorities on land the Palestinians say is privately owned. Israeli troops have evacuated settlers from the site three times before, but they returned after an Israeli was killed in a shooting attack nearby early last month.

Clearing them out again would embarrass Bennett and other right-wing members of the coalition, who already face fierce criticism — and even death threats — for allying with centrist and left-wing factions to oust Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Palestinians from the adjacent village of Beita have held regular protests against the settlement outpost. Demonstrators have thrown stones, and Israeli troops have fired tear gas and live ammunition. Three protesters have been killed, including 17-year-old Mohammed Hamayel, who was shot dead Friday. Initial reports said he was 15.

“I always taught him you should stand up for your rights without infringing on the rights of others,” his father, Said, said at a mourning event attended by dozens of villagers. He described his son as a popular teenager who got good grades and was a natural leader. “Thank God, I’m very proud of my son,” he said. “Even in martyrdom he distinguished himself.” Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war, territories the Palestinians want for a future state. The settlements are seen by the Palestinians and much of the international community as a major obstacle to peace because they make it nearly impossible to create a contiguous, viable state of Palestine alongside Israel.

Every Israeli government since 1967 has expanded the settlements, and this one is unlikely to be an exception. Bennett briefly served as head of a major settler organization, and his party is one of three in the coalition that strongly support settlements.