Talks on China

Where do Xi Jinping and the CCP stand - domestically and abroad - at the end of 2021? 

This week, Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair of China Studies at CSIS, joined Tom Tugendhat for a rapid review of the key political and economic moves in 2021 in China. What did the politics of the Sixth Plenum tell us about Xi's power? Is China's new style of diplomacy here to stay? And what does common prosperity mean for Chinese tech firms - and the Western finance industry? 

Listen for an expert breakdown of the CCP's 2021, at a time when Jude warns we are in "a moment of acute epistemological crisis" for our understanding of China.

Further reading: After Xi: Future Scenarios for Leadership Succession in Post-Xi Jinping Era by Jude Blanchette and Richard McGregor for CSIS.

As part of its Indo-Pacific Tilt, the UK is deepening its engagement with South East Asia. But what does the strategic environment look like and what are South East Asian countries looking for from the UK?

Julia Pamilih is joined by Charles Dunst, an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Southeast Asia programme. They discuss the impact of China's vaccine efforts, the role of ASEAN and CPTPP and mixed support for further military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.

This podcast follows Charles' new paper for the China Research Group. He argues that South East Asian countries welcome more engagement from countries like the UK — but won’t stop engaging China. The UK should pursue deeper ties with them nonetheless.

Chair of the China Research Group, Tom Tugendhat MP was joined by Desmond Shum for a conversation on Desmond's recent book Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China, a rare look at the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party.

Desmond's journey as a successful businessman during China's boom period in the 2000s took him close to the nexus of power at the top of the Chinese Communist Party. After studying in the US and working in Hong Kong, he moved back to Beijing, where he married Whitney Duan. Whitney was close to Zhang Peili, the wife of Wen Jiabao (China's premier from 2003 to 2013). 

The relationship gave Desmond insight into power, wealth and corruption across China in a period where its GDP was growing by 10% a year. Together, Desmond and Whitney leveraged their business and political connections to cut major business deals, pulling off the development of the largest air cargo logistics facility in China, the Beijing Airport Cargo Terminal. 

In his book, Desmond argues that entrepreneurs felt the tightening of CCP control as early as 2008. But Desmond and Whitney experienced significant pressure in 2012 when the New York Times splashed on the ‘hidden riches’ of Wen family corruption, which implicated his wife Whitney. And after three years under Xi's rule, Shum decided to leave the country in 2015 and move to the UK.

Whitney disappeared in China in 2017. No one had heard from her for four years. But on the eve of Red Roulette's publication earlier this year, Desmond received a call from Whitney - who asked him not to publish the book.

The discussion includes Desmond's perspective on Xi's power base and the political slant of his anti-corruption campaign in 2012/13, how China's 'red aristocracy' controls the CCP and the situation in Hong Kong.

Further reading:

With COP26 set to kick off at the end of the week and President Xi's attendance looking unlikely, we were joined by three experts for a panel discussion on China’s efforts to combat climate change - and what a successful COP 26 would look like.

All three panellists have worked closely with China on climate change. Former Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd led the UK’s delegation at COP15 in Paris, Isabel Hilton founded the influential ChinaDialogue, and Alex Wang is a Professor at UCLA and Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, having previously worked for an American NGO in China.

The discussion touched on China’s long-term attitude to climate change, the effectiveness of Western pressure and the false dichotomy between cooperation and competition. The three panellists also discussed how China and the West’s standing with lower-income countries could shape the outcome of the Glasgow summit.

Read the full transcript here on our website.

Further reading: 

Two data experts from AidData, Bradley Parks (Executive Director) and Dr Ammar Malik (Senior Research Scientist), joined us to discuss their findings from their recent paper: Banking on the Belt and Road. The paper draws on a new dataset covering 13,427 Chinese development projects in 165 countries, worth over $843 billion. 

Since the BRI, was introduced, China has spent roughly $85 billion a year on overseas development projects. That means that China has eclipsed the US on overseas spending by a 2:1 and the UK on a 7:1 basis. But while Western countries provide financing through ODA and grants, China's financing is almost all through debt, not grants. This lending has also shifted from sovereign debt to special purpose vehicles, state-owned enterprises, and joint ventures, creating a new trend of "hidden debt" which is not tracked by the World Bank.

The authors also look at how the BRI emerged as an innovative response to China's domestic economic challenges, including capitalising on the commodity price crash after the global financial crisis. 

Read the full transcript here.

More reading:

As part of the Integrated Review published earlier this year, the UK formalised its tilt to the Indo-Pacific. Our panel discussion with Claire Coutinho, Michael Auslin and Sophia Gaston provided insight and analysis of one of the generational changes in British foreign policy.

How should the UK maintain its interests and deepen its engagement with the region? What can it realistically seek to achieve and which relationships should it be prioritising? And what has it achieved so far? 

With the WTO in desperate need of reform and Australia hit by trade sanctions by the PRC, do we need a new allied trade treaty? How should the UK, EU and US come together to rethink the economic challenge posed by China?

This event took place in tandem with the launch of a new policy paper written for the China Research Group by Robert D. Atkinson, which you can read here. The paper looks at whether democratic nations should form an allied trade treaty to combat Chinese trade aggression.

This event was chaired by Tom Tugendhat MP, with the following speakers.

Speakers:

The FT’s Global China Editor, James Kynge, joined us to discuss his perspective on how the next generation of technology is shaping geopolitics. Over half of global trade is digital, and trust issues have suddenly become front and centre to global trade and investment. That lack of trust is increasingly leading to technological bifurcation. The discussion also touched on China's pursuit for self-reliance, Beijing's policies towards big tech and how the digital currency could affect the internationalisation of the renminbi.

The China Research Group was joined by experts George Magnus and Elizabeth Economy for a discussion chaired by Jeremy Hunt MP. Given some predict China will overtake the US as the world's largest economy by 2028, how should we understand China's ambitions for the next decade of its economic rise? And what does China's economic rise mean for the rest of the world? 

Read the transcript here.

Our new China Research Group paper, written by Eyck Freymann, is now published: 'The UK's Strategic Options: Belt and Road'.

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Back in 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled his expansive vision of a modern Silk Road, promising to revolutionise China's global influence. Eight years later, and 130 countries have signed up to Xi’s signature foreign policy. But the ‘project of a century’ remains loosely defined and poorly understood.

Despite accusations of predatory debt diplomacy, Chinese infrastructure lending has been in decline since 2019. Instead, a new phase of the Belt and Road has been accelerated by the pandemic. China has pivoted away from physical infrastructure and accelerated its expansion of the Digital, Green and Health Silk Roads. But what does the future of this version of the Belt and Road Initiative look like? And should like-minded democracies respond?

We were joined by a panel of three experts for a discussion moderated by Tom Tugendhat MP, Chair of the China Research Group.

Jonathan Hillman - Senior Fellow at CSIS and Director of the Reconnecting Asia Project