US Intel Community Report Highlights Complex, Worsening US-China Relations

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington, D.C.) The US Directorate of National Intelligence published a sobering assessment of the complex mixture of interwoven variables central to the fast-growing China threat. The report, posted in March by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, analyzes the implications of how Chinese global ambitions, military modernization and China’s growth is arguably both helped and hindered by the CCPs continued emphasis upon “statist,” centrally mandated social and economic policies.

The impact of this juxtaposition, as explained in the DNI report is two-fold in that it may help streamline military modernization through ongoing military-civil fusion and “reduce dependence on foreign technologies.” yet this intended advantage is offset or at very least complicated by what the DNI report describes as China’s “domestic and international challenges that will probably hinder CCP leaders; ambitions.”

In one respect, China’s repressive or state-mandated economic policies may contribute to what the DNI essay describes as “an aging population, high levels of corporate debt, economic inequality and growing resistance to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) heavy handed tactics in Taiwan and other countries.”

The DNI report seems to capture the continued nuance and complexity of what could be called China’s somewhat paradoxical approach to government in recent decades. In one respect, the Chinese government has in recent years sought to lean forward into more private enterprise or state-supervised and monitored economic growth and investment. Deng Xiaoping’s well known emphasis years ago was focused on what he described as a deliberate and focused effort to enable Chinese people to “make and have money.” These economic initiatives, while still ultimately driven by state control, sought to expedite economic expansion through various kinds of semi-free enterprise, international commerce and efforts to attract global investors and business.

These initiatives, which have evolved into more fully statist policies in recent decades, showed some impact and seemed to reflect China’s paradoxical effort to both move closer to economic free enterprise to some extent while simultaneously maintaining and even intensifying socially and politically repressive centralized authoritarian controls. One would think that these trajectories would inevitably collide in a measurable and potentially catastrophic way, however China has somehow managed to sustain and arguably even thrive in many respects despite these seemingly contradictory approaches. Perhaps Deng Xiaoping believed people would not mind giving up freedom of political expression and religious practices to a large extent if they simply had money and were living well. China has arguably achieved some surprising measure of success with these efforts to strike a delicate, yet precarious balance between seemingly opposing efforts to foster and encourage free-market kinds of economic growth and concurrent repression and widespread denial of human rights. Years ago, some argued that technological advance and moves toward free enterprise would generate a freer flow of information which would ultimately function as a democratizing force, however China has managed to pursue the opposite and increase state controls over information flow, free expression and social openness.

Can China massively break through with capitalist-minded kinds of economic reforms alongside intense centralized decision-making and CCP dominance and societal repression? A repressive social and political regime might seem antithetical to generating economic growth in many ways, yet China’s paradoxical or contradictory approach has by no means been a failure, as the DNI report explains, but continued to produce mixed results