U.S. translation project opens window on China's ambitions, fears, Nikkei Asia, Mar. 7, 2023.
KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei Asia diplomatic correspondent
CSIS think tank's archive aims to enhance understanding, avoid 'escalation spiral'
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, has quietly built up an archive of 200 translations of recent Chinese speeches, academic papers and government documents in hopes of offering a better understanding of Beijing's ambitions, fears and how it sees its own capabilities.
The "Interpret: China" project models itself after how the U.S. sought a laserlike understanding of the Soviet leadership during the Cold War. "All too often we're relying on what others are saying about China, but we want to stop and listen to the discussion, the dialogue, the discourse that's happening within the country," the project's co-director, Jude Blanchette, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, explains on the website.
The database is changing the way analysts discuss China. On Monday morning, CSIS hosted a panel of defense experts, including Elbridge Colby, Bonnie Glaser and Michael Mazarr, and asked the participants to read 87 pages of translated Chinese commentary. Blanchette had chosen three recent Chinese papers on U.S. strategy. He thanked the panelists for doing their "homework" before appearing on the webinar.
Colby, a former Pentagon official, told the panel he was struck by the sophistication and the nuances of the analyses. He noted that one of the papers correctly construed that a lot of the actions the U.S. is taking in building up deterrence are defensive in nature and have the goal of maintaining the status quo.
"It gave me a little bit more confidence that if we match our strategic logic in a way that is consistently status-quo oriented, strategically defensive, even if it might involve operational or tactical offensive actions, that we should be able to communicate the point," Colby said.
Sean Monaghan, a visiting fellow with the CSIS Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program, said he found the papers "mind blowing."
"Naively, I was expecting Sun Tzu and I got Thomas Schelling and Glenn Snyder," Monaghan said, referring to the American game theorist and political scientist, respectively.
"It's interesting and notable that we have a lot of the same reference points. It's reassuring that we're all singing off the same hymn sheet when it comes to understanding what we mean by deterrence, by compellence, coercion."
Glaser, a China expert and managing director of the German Marshall Fund's Indo-Pacific program, raised doubts that Chinese President Xi Jinping was reading such policy papers. "Nobody knows what Xi Jinping reads, but I can guarantee you that he doesn't read these articles," she joked. But they may be read by others throughout the system, she said. And by U.S. government officials and experts following what is being discussed, there can be a more accurate understanding of what points are shared in the Chinese leadership and what points are being made, Glaser said.
"If the United States thinks that there is a real misunderstanding of something that the U.S. is doing, reading these articles then gives us the opportunity to go back to the Chinese and say, 'This particular point is a misunderstanding of U.S. policy. That is useful for us to do.'"
She gave the example of the "October surprise," when on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Donald Trump, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, phoned Chinese counterpart Gen. Li Zuocheng to assure him that the U.S. was not preparing a strike in the South China Sea.
A review of intelligence suggested that the Chinese believed the U.S. was preparing such an attack.
"This is an example, from reading these kinds of articles, that we can get a sense as to where the Chinese might misread U.S. intentions and take actions to avoid an escalation spiral," Glaser said.
This comes amid a bipartisan hardening of positions in Washington over China. At the recent inaugural gathering of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, politicians on both sides of the aisle took turns to describe the threat China poses.
"We may call this a strategic competition, but it's not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake," said Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the select committee. The Chinese Communist Party "is laser-focused on its vision for the future, a world crowded with techno-totalitarian surveillance states where human rights are subordinate to the whims of the party," he said.
Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat, said, "Over the last three decades, both Democrats and Republicans underestimated the CCP and assumed that trade and investment would inevitably lead to democracy and greater security in the Indo-Pacific region, including in [China]. Instead, the opposite happened."
Journalist Fareed Zakaria said on his CNN program on Sunday that watching the Feb. 28 hearing of the House committee was like being transported back to the 1950s. "Members of both parties tried to outdo each other in their denunciations of China. It creates a dynamic that makes rational policy difficult," he said.
But a correct understanding of Beijing's intentions does not automatically lead to better policies.
The U.S. is trapped in a security dilemma, Mazarr, a senior political scientist at RAND Corp., said during Monday's webinar.
"China is building up its military capability, so we feel trapped in a situation where any action other than rapid military reinforcement and development of the military relationship with Taiwan is seen as weak," said the expert on deterrence. "And as long as that dynamic persists, it'll continue to undermine the basis for peace and moving away from it, from a political standpoint, would be extremely difficult."