How Washington Overestimates Chinese Weakness

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

American politics and foreign policy has become consumed with the challenge from China, and the face of that challenge is Xi Jinping. But too many depictions of Xi are stark black and white. He’s either an all-powerful mastermind carrying out a long-term plot for domination, or he’s guilty of a self-defeating overreach that has sent China into decline. For Chris Johnson, who worked for two decades as a China analyst at the CIA, the truth is in the messy middle—and the first step to a better China policy, Johnson argues, is a better understanding of Xi and his power.

Chris, thanks so much for being here, and for your excellent recent piece, “Xi the Survivor.” 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to start on what may seem like a somewhat philosophical note, but I think gets at what in your analysis of China and U.S.-China policy and the U.S.-China relationship often kind of goes to the heart of what we get wrong. And that's this, you know, very simple but quite challenging epistemological question of how we understand, how we analyze Chinese policy and power. Why we think we know what we know, how we understand Chinese Communist Party politics and the internal dynamics, what's Xi Jinping’s mind, right, his intentions, their capabilities. You faced this challenge for a long time as a CIA analyst until you left government a decade or so ago; you now face it in your attempts to understand China and Chinese power from the outside. What have you learned about the way we try to understand China? What are the pathologies and pitfalls of the U.S. discussion? And what ,in your mind, is the right way to approach this? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

I think one of my chief observations of the last three years has been that a combination of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power, right, which then means that the circle—and centralization of power—which then means that the circle of knowledge or trust within the system is very small, has definitely been a challenging factor. And then you layer upon that three years of zero-COVID isolation for the country, right. So therefore, solid information, for lack of a better term, has been really hard to come by and is not leaking out of the system in some of the ways that normally would. And to be somewhat critical of the regime, their interest in booting a lot of foreign journalists out of China over the last few years has been something of a double-edged sword for them. On the one hand, it seems to have achieved certain objectives in terms of regime security—and you know, the other reasons they presumably did that for. But on the other hand, these journalists are then left to create narratives in a vacuum. 

And I think that's really been the problem; in other words, the combination—or a big problem—the combination of Xi's consolidation of power and this zero COVID isolation has meant that not much value is leaking out of the country. And yet, journalists, commentators, people like me—you’ve got to write, right, and so the vacuum has been filled, in my mind, then, by a lot of dubious narratives about what's actually happening. That's one point. 

I think the other sort of more macro point is that it seems to me that in a number of ways, various folks who cover and comment on Chinese politics seem to still refuse to acknowledge that Xi Jinping has made some pretty big changes to the way in which that system works and how people are promoted and advanced. So I think it's a combination of a failure to recognize these changes, plus a very difficult operational and informational environment that we've been in. And I think, to the issue of what may be the intelligence challenge, if you will—not just for those of us on the outside, but probably for the CIA and other intelligence services—when you have a more collective leadership structure, like they had in the past, where there were seven or sometimes nine members of that top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, that's seven or nine places where you could, to use the analogy, attach the alligator clip, right, to try to get some sense of what was going on. And also in an information environment where those seven to nine silos, if you will, all have basically the same information picture going on at the same time. So if you were really lucky, you might strike in silo one, in silo two, and in silo six, and be able to cross-compare what you were getting from those two streams and say, oh, this really is something that's approaching, quote unquote, truth. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It strikes me that for people in the U.S. government, for policymakers, the sources of information coming to them are much, much less rich than they were even 10 years ago, 15 years ago. I mean, some of that's the lack of diplomatic contact you normally would have had, but there's a lot of reporting on U.S. intelligence networks being rolled up in China, just the challenges of understanding this very, you know, personalist system, fewer opportunities for kind of signals intelligence and other ways of getting at it. Are there adaptations happening? Is it your sense that we’re kind of adjusting to this? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Yeah, I mean, one would hope; I guess that's the first question. The second is, you know, of all the targets, if you will, when, from an intelligence perspective on China, or any other hard country, that critical issue of leadership plans and intentions, right, is often the most difficult one to get at. And this has extreme relevance in my mind for the “will-they-won't-they invade Taiwan next week” debate and other things along those lines. So that's one point. 

The second is, indeed, the operational environment in China is arguably one of the most difficult there can be, right? The surveillance system that they've built over the years; their ability to put a lot of bodies on a particular problem at any one time; and again, zero COVID, right, if you're an operational intelligence officer for any service, and you're trying to get out on the street and it’s zero COVID—going to look pretty obvious, right? Difficult. So these things all kind of come together. And then I think as well, there may be a situation where over time, their counterintelligence efforts, especially by the Ministry of State Security, have become more sophisticated. The reality is they were, I won't say a joke, but they were definitely not considered a top-tier intelligence service for many years. And in the last few years, they've demonstrated some things that suggest maybe that needs to be reevaluated.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN  

If we'd been having this conversation a few weeks ago, all we'd be able to talk about is the balloon. 

CHRIS JOHNSON 

Exactly. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We're thankfully somewhat past that. But it is worth lingering on that incident a bit, not so much to second guess whether we should have shot it down sooner or not, or anything else. But it's kind of this amazing test case of the way you can interpret intentions on the part of Beijing differently, kind of a test case of how the American political system and policy apparatus interacts. What is your understanding—your theory—of the balloon’s timing? What Xi Jinping knew and didn't know, what it tells us about the state of decision-making in Beijing? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

My view is that this is not 2010 or 11, where there were some real concerns, I think, at times, about whether Hu Jintao, the then-Chinese president, had awareness of some of these things the military was doing, and there seem to be some real questions around that. My sense is that Xi Jinping, interestingly serving as Hu Jintao’s understudy at the time, sort of was watching this all happen and thought, I'm going to get a handle on this when I get in charge, you know. And he also had some certain advantages that Hu Jintao did not have; he had worked in that system at one point, very briefly; you know, he touts the fact that he's the only civilian leader in some time who actually did hold the military rank at some point. And more importantly, I think he's got a lot of these what I like to call—sort of jokingly—princeling bros, you know, scattered all over within the People's Liberation Army.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Princelings meaning the children of revolutionary figures.

CHRIS JOHNSON

Yes, exactly, so, the founding fathers, their version of the founding fathers. And that's helped him, I think, improve his own situational awareness. Then he's done structural things to how he interacts personally with the PLA and how they report to him that I think increases his ability to have an understanding—and, more importantly, diminishes the decision-making role of his senior generals. Now it's much more emanating from him, which can be good or bad. 

So I find it impossible, therefore, to believe that he would have been unaware of the balloon program—I mean, especially given the size of it, that has been disclosed now by the U.S. side, and the scope, that there have been 40 of these, something like that, all over the world. So that's impossible. In terms of this specific episode, however, I don't find it that surprising that perhaps—that certainly he probably didn't sign off on it individually, and he may not even have been aware of it. I mean, I think I'm an Occam’s razor guy for most things. And since we were just discussing the intelligence enterprise, you know, having served in it for a decent chunk of my career, the reality is when you have a program like that, and it is delivering anything that could be described as benefit—and sometimes the bar can be pretty low, because these are difficult challenges—and you're getting away with it, you're not getting caught… well, you just keep at it, right. And it sort of then becomes, quote, unquote, routine operations, in a way. So that's my sense of probably what happened here. 

You know, we've all had to, unfortunately, kind of become balloon experts as part of this process. You know, my initial instinct when I was thinking about this was, well, balloons move kind of slowly, so they could have been launched a month before, or whatever. But apparently we discovered, when it was loitering over the U.S., that in fact it can move pretty quickly when there's motivation to do so. So in my mind, that suggests that maybe there was a little more sort of insight. 

The other thing, I think, to keep in mind here, which really hasn't been out there in the public discourse that I've seen, is that China has political incentives for doing something like the balloon program, not just purely intelligence collection. In other words, the United States does thousands of surveillance reconnaissance operations opposite China's coast every year. We don't fly over their territory; we respect the 12 nautical mile limit and all of our operations are within the context of international law as currently written. But we do a lot of them, and it irritates and provokes the Chinese. And they don't really have an ability to respond to that, they don't have air bases in the Western hemisphere from which to run SRO operations along the U.S. coast. So in a way, this is sort of a message from the CCP leadership to the CCP system, the Politburo, and also to the broader Chinese public: we're not taking this surveillance stuff lying down. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you think from a national perspective there was reason to be especially concerned about the balloon? Was that an overreaction by the U.S. system? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

It feels a little bit that way, in the sense that this was literally the Chinese menace flying over, you know, the U.S. head. I think perhaps the administration, in some of its messaging, it was a bit complicated—and that on the one hand, they were saying, you know, this is serious, and it's a violation of our sovereignty or territorial airspace and sovereignty; and on the other hand, they were sort of saying, well, they couldn't really get anything from this that they couldn't get from their low Earth orbit satellite constellation. So you're kind of talking out of both sides of your face a little bit there.

I suppose the other piece of it is that at the end of the day, it's a balloon. And, you know, what I think is fair is that when we subsequently went balloon-mad and opened the aperture, right, of the national radar system, and so on, we've spent a minimum of three to five million dollars neutralizing the balloon enthusiast threat in the United States—maybe that suggest something of an overreaction. But all kidding aside, I see the balloon as a symptom of the underlying disease, right, not the other way around. In other words, that despite what seems to be a pretty evident desire from both leaderships to, however you want to say it, put a floor under, stabilize the relationship—something as simple as this, it all goes down the tubes. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, I want to come back to the U.S.-China relationship a bit later. But I first want to just linger on Xi Jinping and how we understand him, and what we tend to get wrong about him. You write in the recent piece a line that I think captures this nicely, so I’m quoting you: “A misguided desire to view China’s challenges and choices through the same lens as other foreign systems lies at the crux of these misperceptions.” So just stepping back a bit, if you can kind of tutor policymakers on the right way to understand that system: what is it that we're missing that is so essential to understand? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

I find increasingly that no matter what the issue is, vis-a-vis the U.S., China or developments within China, China and Taiwan, the narratives tend to be very polar. It's either all this or all that, right. And they tend to be, frankly, grossly oversimplified, almost just sort of like a sock puppets type level. And so one of those is that Xi Jinping is either a Stalinist madman. or he came in initially and he was turning left to turn right, you know, these kind of ideas—when in fact the reality is it's only somewhere in the messy middle. China is a big and messy place. 

There are certain standard operating procedures, I guess we could say, that Xi Jinping has demonstrated to us over time, which sometimes I think are not taken into account enough. So, for example, his penchant for creating and manufacturing almost a sense of urgency, certainly, and maybe even crisis, both domestically and in the international sphere, to justify his power grab—this has been an important aspect of his tenure, and we see it again and again. And yet sometimes, I think, then analysts take a speech that he's given or something where it seems a bit dark and says, you know, this guy's right out of central casting in terms of communist orthodoxy, you know, and so on. The second thing is that he has demonstrated this penchant, as I mention in the piece, for what we call these big bets, right? And we can argue the validity of them and whether he's making the right choices with those big bets, but he has a strong tendency of doing it. And I think where that comes from is a couple of things. You know, we were just talking about princeling—there is this sense of a born-to-rule feeling, right, that these guys are the inheritors of the regime, especially these sort of first generation reds, as they’re called.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Xi Jinping’s father was an important lieutenant to Mao.

CHRIS JOHNSON

He was. The regime has amplified his importance since Xi Jinping showed up. I mean, to be fair, the princeling world is sort of like the British peerage, right, there are dukes and marquesses, and all this sort of thing. And the real princelings would argue his father was not, you know, a top shelf founding father, but he's in charge. But yes, there's that aspect. 

And then also this sort of sense of, I wouldn't say he has a messianic personality, but I do think he considers himself to be a man of history, right, and that he's willing to do the hard work that the system needs to do to bring about what he calls the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation, right. And this was all over the history resolution that was put out at the 100th anniversary of the party, where there was this critical line that was repeated and has been repeated many times: decisions that should have been taken were not, problems that should have been solved were not, and the dot, dot dot there is I'm the guy who's going to solve them. And also, he has a tendency to be decisive. We're used to a Chinese system that's exceptionally deliberative, and sometimes he just strikes out in a direction, and the end of zero COVID is a perfect example of that. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I mean, one of the things you focus on in much of your analysis is the ways that systems change, and the ways in which we outside observers are slow to understand the changes to that system. We're watching further changes in the structure of the government, the party right now—some of these will be rolled out, I believe, later in March. What do you expect in this next round of changes, and how will that affect decision-making and the state of Xi Jinping’s power? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

What they're signaling to us so far is it's going to be, again, another round of fairly extensive tweaking to the system, and maybe even some dish breaking. So basically, just for our listeners, the way this tends to work—every year, they have one of these sessions of the legislature where the premier gives his work report, and they set targets for the economy, and so on, and so forth. But at these five-yearly ones, they do a reshuffle of the key posts on the government side, so premiers, vice premiers, key ministers, and of course, that gets a lot of people's attention. 

But they also do these changes to the structure of the system. And they have done it with great regularity really since the post-Cultural Revolution period. And each time, more or less—he seems to be on a more track right now, the last one was quite extensive, with the abolishment of a series of ministries, the establishment of all kinds of new party conditions. The themes once again with him are common, which is what we might call, first of all, the party eating the state, right. So in the good old days of the 1980s, when Zhao Ziyang was the party secretary—and before him, Hu Yaobang—and there were terms like political structural reform, thinking about how to open the system maybe a little bit, or at least tweak it, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. One of the key debates was around this idea of separation of party and government functions. And even Deng Xiaoping supported this idea, not as much as his underlings, as 1989 showed, but he was positive about it. 

Xi Jinping has reversed that entirely and said, no, the party controls the state; that's how it should be. So we see, increasingly, duties that once would have been in the purview of the State Council, China's cabinet and government ministry organization, floating over to the party side. So a great example that apparently is under consideration in this round is perhaps de-linking the security services, both the police, the Ministry of Public Security but maybe also the intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, from their function as sort of state council ministries, and therefore at least notionally subordinate to the State Council system, over to some new party commission that fuses those those sorts of responsibilities together. And this is very in keeping with Xi Jinping’s heavy emphasis on national security, comprehensive security—the list of things that are described as security by him increases pretty much in every speech. 

And then the other one, which I think is really interesting, is some discussion around bringing back a party group that existed in the late 1980s, into the early 2000s, called the Central Financial Work Commission, and this I think, is very interesting and is being grossly sort of underrated in the coverage so far. And part of it is we just don't know much about it yet. But my sense from talking to folks about it is that, number one, if it is brought back, at least initially its importance will be as much in the symbolism or the message as in the mechanics, in that when it existed previously, it was created at a time of crisis around the Asian financial crisis. It was designed to do certain things; manage the heavy pressure on the Chinese currency when the Chinese made the decision not to devalue, even though all their fellow Asian currencies did. It was looking at malfeasance in the financial sector, which of course is a clear priority again—still now, interestingly—and certain structural aspects as well. So in other words, it was created at a time of crisis. And so by bringing it back, they're suggesting to some degree, they've got a lot of work to do.

Is this them finally saying there are certain bugs in our economic system that are becoming really deleterious? The problem with local government finances; we've just seen a massive crackdown on the real estate sector. Now there's a huge problem with how to handle debt restructuring within the real estate sector because of that. There's issues over taxation, there's issues over demographics, right, shrinking population, and so on. Something of this nature could make a move on some of those things and surprise, frankly, a lot of now very skeptical investors who think that Xi Jinping has, quote, unquote, pivoted to the state, and is just on a sort of teleological trajectory toward, you know, Stalinist greatness, 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Meaning that this both indicates a degree of concern about the economic challenges that is not reflected in the relatively confident rhetoric you hear from Chinese officials, but also that Xi Jinping will focus on growth and getting the economy moving. 

CHRIS JOHNSON

So they have this strange dilemma, right. On the one hand, it's growth, growth, growth, that's the message. And that's how you get the three legged stool, you could say, of the Chinese economy going again, which is consumer confidence, domestic onshore private sector investment, and foreign investment. So the idea is, we're back, we're growing, everything's great, please come, right. And at the same time, it’s, we’re dealing with these very deep, embedded structural issues that are challenges for us, which oh, by the way, are growth-suppressing at least in the near term, because people see taxation changes and things like that, and they freak out, right. And yet, this goes back to the vision thing with Xi Jinping; he feels, if I'm going to do that great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and I'm going to break through the middle income trap by 2035, somebody's got to start addressing these fundamental issues before the system really does blow up.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just to linger on this binary of Xi Jinping that seems to characterize much of the debate about him here—we saw also in the analysis of the zero COVID policy, the exit from zero COVID, there were times when Xi Jinping was all-powerful and all-knowing and orchestrating this perfectly, and then he was kind of haplessly responding to protests with a degree of desperation. Zero COVID did seem to be a bit of a disaster in the exit, though they seem to have weathered that in the months since. How does Xi emerge from this? Does it affect him at all? Did it change the system at all? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Well, that remains to be seen. We'll see. I mean, I think the starting point is, like it or no, to some degree they got away with it, right. It was poorly handled, there's no question about it. A lot of people died unnecessarily—that's definitely the case. And I think it's fair to make a case that the system wasted the huge amount of time they gave themselves while watching how other systems had handled and failed in various ways. Why didn't they get on it with vaccination? Why didn't they get on it with antivirals, you know, things like this, logical steps that they could have taken. And there are reasons in my mind for all of that when viewed through the lens of how they see things. 

But they certainly could have done better. And I think, you have a situation then that would suggest—and the policy was so closely personally associated with Xi Jinping, after all, he was the commander-in-chief, right, of the fight against COVID, certainly the zero COVID policy was his no question. And so you would think perhaps, this could do some damage. But I think the first point, and this is something I've been writing about a lot over the last year and a half or so, is there has to be someone to take advantage of that moment of weakness. In other words, somebody's got to say, I'm criticizing you, right. And we just don't really see that inside the system. You know, the reality is that he has, certainly in terms of sort of coup-proofing his regime, he's done a very good job. The hard power ministries, the key levers of power, military, security services, propaganda—he's got that all locked up. 

[AD BREAK]

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As long as we're on COVID, we should talk a bit about the lab leak debate that has occupied much of the debate here, there was just this week an additional part of the intelligence community, the Department of Energy's intelligence unit said that they had decided it was likely a lab leak was the origin of the pandemic. This is an incredibly hard debate to assess for anyone outside of either the kind of medical community or the intelligence community. How do you assess this debate? Are we ever likely to have anything more definitive given the refusal of China to really participate in an investigation in a serious way? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Unfortunately, I think the issue has become obviously deeply politicized not just by the U.S., but by the Chinese as well, right. And in other words, daily, now the foreign ministry spokesperson is out there hinting about Fort Detrick and the U.S. military having brought it to China, they've been on that theme for a while. And frankly, in this country, I think it is almost a religion, right—in other words, the zealotry around lab leak versus natural or some other cause. You can't be persuaded, basically, by evidence; you think it's either one or the other, or I'd say a good chunk of folks cannot. So that's a challenge. I do think it's terrific that the Biden administration, very bravely, has continued to try to work on the topic, and the president made very clear to the intelligence community, you know, we're not sweeping this one under the rug, we want to continue to gather insight. Obviously, the more time and distance that goes on from the initial point of impact, the harder it is to gather any quote, unquote, evidence. You know, on the science side, the thing that's often the gaping hole is you can't find the animals, right, there's no samples, and so on. 

And so let me talk a little bit about the intelligence community part of the exercise because I think it's important. You know, one thing is learning and understanding intelligence community speak, right. And so when the intelligence community assesses something with low confidence, that basically means we have no idea or something approximating that. I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of it. There's a certain sense, I think, that is fair, at which at some point, you sort of say, okay, but at the end of the day, there's all these millions of people dead, in large part because of the various ways countries mishandled their response to the pandemic, so maybe we should move on.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You talked about Xi Jinping’s messianic impulses, this sense that he's the one who's going to solve problems that haven't been solved—national rejuvenation, 2049 is often kind of set as this important date for the party, 100th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC. I think when people in Washington hear that kind of talk today, their mind goes immediately to Taiwan timelines. And you've said before that Washington is gripped by a quote, Taiwan invasion hysteria. What is the evidence about Xi Jinping—his intentions with regard to Taiwan? What's the right way to understand the state of this from the Chinese perspective? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Yeah. Well, for one, this is probably the most difficult issue we face, the biggest flashpoint in the bilateral relationship, of course—and the most dangerous for the world. I mean, we’re talking head-on competition between two nuclear powers, that's not happened, right, and so that's something that should terrify all of us. 

My starting point on this is that I see no evidence that would suggest to me that the Chinese have a particular timeline in mind, other than, as you say, sort of very vaguely 2049, because of the 100th anniversary of establishment of the PRC. But also, Xi Jinping has said, this can't go on forever in terms of reunification, and so on. So there's that aspect. But I have seen nothing credible to suggest to me that 2027, or 2025, or next week, or the various things that have been put out by various flag officers and even senior administration cabinet officials are relevant in terms of timeline and actual timeline capabilities—yes. And so this is an important distinction, since we kicked off our discussion around some of the gaps in the intelligence framing of the issue and understanding China.

It's a classic dilemma between what in the community we would call capabilities analysis—in other words, I have the ability, perhaps, to invade Taiwan, because I have X number of planes, bombs and guns, and troops. And then I have made a decision to do so, plans and intentions, right. And there are two separate things. And I am worried that—and this is why I characterize it as invasion hysteria—I'm worried that they're being conflated. So for example, that 2027 timeline, let's talk about that for a minute. And even Director Burns came out last week or the week before and basically said Xi Jinping has told his military, you know, get on it by 2027. And I think he's being very careful there. 

You know, it's been interesting to watch the various members of the administration and how they characterize this. I would say that Director Burns—the CIA director—and DNI Avril Haines have been very consistent in their approach when questioned about this, which is to talk about those capabilities and make very clear there's no sense of a particular timeline, and so on, so forth. So what Xi, what has Xi Jinping done—and he's done it very publicly—he has issued instructions to the PLA, you are to meet certain operational benchmarks by the time of your 100th anniversary as an institution, which is in 2027 for the PLA. So again, capabilities, right, not plans and intentions. The PLA may or may not meet those objectives. So I think it's important to understand that distinction, because when you start to conflate it, you create a certain sense of this hysteria.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When it comes to that intentions question, are there things that you watch as the indicators of changing intentions?  What would we see that would suggest that there is more urgency on the Chinese side?

CHRIS JOHNSON

The things I would be looking for, in terms of certainly any seriousness to consider a proper invasion—you know, that's, that's a long, cold start. You have to mobilize the economy, you have to begin a propaganda mission within the system to sensitize the Chinese public to the fact that our social contract has always been, we deliver the goods in terms of economic growth and reasonable governance, and you give us the political power and don't ask for more participation—that is changing, because this is about national sovereignty now, and you’ve got to get ready for that. We would see them massively increasing the output from their shipbuilding facilities of the amphibious lift that would be required; they're just not there on that and a number of these other sort of signs that take time. And that the U.S. forget about the intelligence apparatus—I think just the overt interest in China would pick up these developments. And then rhetorically, I think we would see sort of things like suggestions that they feel that when they sort of developed some some years ago, the idea of the reunification law, right, one of the reasons was there could be legal triggers, this sort of thing. So some suggestion that Taiwan has somehow crossed a line legally, those are the things we would be concerned about. And most importantly, I think it really is: whatever you say, United States, my impression is you have broken with the One China policy, at least in deed if not in word. And I think they're getting there, in a few instances.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Perhaps just as fraught as the Taiwan question in the U.S.-China relationship right now is the Russia question, right. Of course, before the invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin famously met and talked about the no-limits partnership; there have been various supports in the last year of Chinese economic support to Russia; there have been reports that they are considering sending lethal assistance to to Russia, which would have a really significant effect on the battlefield in Ukraine, right. People have had a hard time understanding exactly what that relationship is, there are arguments on all sides. What is the right way to understand the China-Russia relationship and China's posture towards the war in Ukraine right now?

CHRIS JOHNSON

I think one thing that's been interesting is to look at the change in the relationship over the years. You know, it's kind of interesting, I would say I started observing this a few years ago—when we talk about how to think about the China-Russia relationship, I noticed a certain tendency that's somewhat demographic or age-based in the U.S. watching community. In other words, for analysts who were around and even involved in the thaw between the U.S. and China in the 70s and the move toward the Soviet Union as a common enemy—those analysts, I think, tend to emphasize the trouble in the Russia-China relationship. They distrust each other, they really don't like each other, this is all tactical, so therefore, we shouldn't get too exercised, right. 

And then I think there's a younger group who sort of say, this is a new China-Russia, new axis, and we're asleep at the wheel while they're mounting this challenge to the rules-based international order. And that, you know, there's a deep bromance between Xi Jinping and Putin over, you know, their mutual love of communism, and, you know, missing the Soviet Union days and so on. And again, I mean, I think sort of the truth is sort of in the middle. We should not underestimate, I don't think, the personal relationship between the two of them, and I think it's largely because when they look at each other, they largely see themselves, right. So when Xi Jinping sees Putin, he sees a guy who is powerful, like he is within his system; who is decisive; and who probably is very willing to go to the mattresses to defend the system that he has created, right. And those are important bonding factors. And, you know, it's clear Xi Jinping has a personal relationship with him and speaks about that publicly in a way he does with no other world leader. That's fair. 

On the other hand, we know that communists reject psychology, so I don't want to put too much emphasis on the dime store psychological analysis. I think there's a very hard and real, cold pragmatic calculation by the Chinese in this, which is that it may be Putin personally, but it's really I think more what he represents, the system he represents, and the fact that they know that he has their back. In the West, I think there's an assumption—I mean, I'm not a Russia guy, but I think there's generally an assumption that if Putin dies, is killed, is ousted, then, what do they call them, siloviki number three, right ,just comes in behind him and runs the place, Patrushev or someone like that. 

The Chinese probably assess that as well. But they don't have the luxury to assume it. They have to consider at least the possibility that you would get maybe a 1991 scenario where you've got a government of Moscow which may not be necessarily overtly hostile to China, but is looking more toward Europe. And they haven't had to think about that problem for a very long time. You know, people forget, I was reminded recently, the Soviets had nearly 20 divisions in Mongolia when the Soviet Union collapsed. China has not had to worry defensively about that border for a very long time, and that has allowed them to focus their energies on what I call the front door—Taiwan, and the South China Sea, and so on, so forth. So I think that's really what it's about, to a large degree. 

Does Xi Jinping have remorse for the new no-limits thing? We can't possibly know. I think what is likely is that he probably did assume that Putin would invade, but that he would stay in the east. That I guess, would be my, my sort of assessment. In terms of their current and very painful and not very effective dance, there’s—this gets grossly overused, but they are indeed straddling the fence, very painfully. Now, they've got everything but a couple of toes on one side of the fence, I think it's fair to say that—but when we look at the peace plan, which, perhaps wrongly, the administration and others dismissed immediately as pointless and so on—not for its content, do I say, perhaps wrongly, but in terms of just humiliating the Chinese very quickly, and therefore not incentivizing them to want to play a role. It also, in my mind, showed how fenced-in they've made themselves, right—that they're continuing to have to do this very awkward dance where, in effect, they understand full well what needs to happen for the war to end, and they can't abide that. So they're in a terrible position, 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Does it seem plausible to you that they would provide some kind of lethal assistance? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Well, I think it's a great question, you know, it's something I've been kind of mentally playing with. I think in any such enterprise with such huge consequences, it's incumbent upon us as analysts to not just think about the easy stuff, right, which is the constraints, a deep and abiding fear of secondary sanctions that they saw placed upon the Russians. And a really big concern—I think, to be fair, if you if you ask Xi Jinping, in his heart of darkness, he's sort of decided that the U.S. is a lost cause, you know, in terms of they are out to get them, they are an implacable enemy out to sort of subvert China's rise. But Europe is still quote, unquote, in play geopolitically. So I think they have deep concerns about losing them. So those are the constraints. 

But I think then you have to sort of say, what might be the enabling factors or the desires, and I think a huge one of them—and my understanding from talking to folks inside their system is that increasingly, their intelligence folks, military, civilian and so on, are telling the Politburo, you know, if you're wondering where the Russian offensive is, for spring, this is it, you're watching it. You know, you can't see it because it's performing so poorly. And therefore, we have concern that they cannot repel the presumed Ukrainian counteroffensive that will happen at some point. That gets them worried, right. And in other words, the humiliation for Putin personally, the risk that the nuclear threshold could somehow be on the table despite the fact that the Chinese have made their position very clear on that, I think, to the Russians—and so you could see how they could be incentivized.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, does this suggest that China sees advantage in the war continuing because it ties down the U.S., or it's just a matter of avoiding a scenario where you get either nuclear use by Putin, or Putin falls, or some other catastrophic outcome? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Yeah, I think, here, again, we get into this territory of polar narratives, right. You know, I don't think I'm fully convinced the Chinese want the war to end. And, this is not sort of their interest, it has been horribly painful for them. They've had to deal with all the economic consequences of supply chain ramifications, energy ramifications on so forth, this horribly awkward dance with partners they’re at least in theory trying to improve relations with, and so on. 

So they want it to end—but they're not willing to see Putin and the Russian system as it currently exists go down in order to facilitate that. Obviously, they benefit from the fact of U.S. distraction, just like they did 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is another part of the sort of Taiwan hysteria freakout, right. All of a sudden, our policymakers and military commanders are looking around and saying, oh, these guys have gotten pretty good while we were otherwise detained. So that, I'm sure, redounds to their benefit, but I don't think it's a primary consideration. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think there's been one thread of argument in the policy conversation here that we're past these kinds of hopes of the 90s, you know, the engagement period needs to be caricatured.

CHRIS JOHNSON

Engagement was a failure, basically.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That's right, right. But there was a sense, I think, 25 or 30 years ago, that China was likely to become more like us, right, that there'd be liberalization, economically, politically, foreign policy would moderate—that has not happened for lots of reasons, we don't have to get back into that. But I think that kind of where policy is landed is that there's going to be competition, that we should create guardrails around this. Now National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, who runs Asia policy, wrote a version of this in Foreign Affairs in 2019, before they were government; Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister, and I believe now Australia's ambassador to the United States, wrote about managed strategic competition in Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago. You make the point in your piece that we keep talking about putting guardrails on the relationship, creating constraints that would allow competition to go forward, but without resulting in catastrophe—that China doesn't really set that framework. And so the basic approach that has been, I think, one of the underpinnings of U.S. policy just isn't connecting when it comes to the diplomatic relationship itself. Is that a fair characterization? 

CHRIS JOHNSON

I think that is a fair characterization. I want to be very specific—guardrails, as they are construed by the current administration, but I think also, fairly, the Trump administration, and maybe even preceding administrations, in this sense—we want to talk about nuclear, we want to talk about accidents, and see, we want to talk about air incidents, you know, things like this. And the Chinese understand that, and I think they're concerned about it as well, I think that's fair to say.

But their view on those specific matters is, you're the big kid, I'm still the rising power, and therefore, as such, why is it in my interest to help you define how far you can push to my stretch point before we have actual conflict—In my assessment, knowing full well that once that is established, you'll go right up to it every day and twice on Sunday? I mean, I think this is—it doesn't make sense from their point of view, that's one thing. Two, I think we grossly underestimate their concern about being characterized as the Soviet Union or another Soviet Union. They do not want to be defined as another Cold War. And every time a senior U.S. government person says publicly, well, we have these agreements with the Soviets, that just reinforces that narrative in their mind, even though those were legitimately safety features, confidence building measures that could be needed. I mean, we see this every day—we were talking earlier about the balloon. This was a balloon, for goodness sake. What if a decision on kinetic response which may have had to be made in minutes? We would have had a real problem.

You know, I've been saying recently, to your point, the administration talks about strategic competition—I think we left strategic competition in the dust. You know, we're clearly in what I would call strategic rivalry, right. And I'm worried we're rapidly heading toward what I would call strategic enmity. And this is not me being a pedant, I think these each have separate meanings about where we are. And if we're in enmity, it is a proper Soviet-style Cold War, where—I know this hurts me, but it hurts you two percent more, so I'm going to do it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, that may be something we have to pick up in your next piece or in our next conversation. But thank you for the wonderful piece you did, “Xi the Survivor,” a few weeks ago. Thanks so much for covering so much ground today. 

CHRIS JOHNSON

Wonderful. Thank you.