On 28 July, Quillette published a piece by David Marshall titled “Getting China Wrong.” The essay is an expansion on the classic Sun Tzu quotation: “Know your opponent and your own strength, and win 100 percent of your battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, and win half. Know neither yourself nor your enemy, and lose every engagement.” Marshall argues that American conservatives and the Trump administration do not understand China, its people, or its regime, and that the consequences of underestimating them could be dire. Blinded by “one-sided pessimism” and an outdated “Potemkin Village narrative,” Washington risks “the pitfalls of cocky and ignorant militancy.”

Getting China Wrong

American conservatives show no interest in understanding their country’s greatest geopolitical foe. The consequences of this incuriosity could be disastrous.

QuilletteD. Marshall

In today’s febrile brink-of-war climate, sober assessments of China’s relative strengths and weaknesses are exactly what we need. Marshall is right that the United States needs to realistically evaluate China’s vast productive capacity in ships, cars, drones, aircraft, iron, and rare-earth minerals if it is to know its enemy. He is also correct when he says that the US should shore up alliances and make the necessary resources available. And while we can see some progress—the Pentagon now calls China the “sole pacing threat” and prevention of the seizure of Taiwan the “sole pacing scenario”—it’s true that there is still plenty to worry about. Trump is a wild card, just as likely to lend his ear to the isolationists as the hawks, and he is hardly interested in courting international allies (to put it mildly). Much stronger and more consistent messaging is needed.

Unfortunately, Marshall’s appraisal of Chinese power gets mixed up with a defence of the country that is hard not to read as an implicit endorsement of the regime. He marvels at the rural highways, the timely trains, the lack of (visible) drug addicts in the cities, “glistening new airports,” and “the world’s vastest web of high-speed rail.” He concludes that China is actually “a pretty pleasant place to live.” And then, in no time at all, we find that Marshall is defending the Communist Party’s brutal COVID-19 policies, and arguing that conflict with China is unnecessary. This is not the clear-eyed analysis we were promised.

While nobody should overlook the danger that the CCP poses to the world, there are good reasons for the ubiquity of the Potemkin Village narrative. On one hand, Beijing can rely on a two million-strong standing army, the world’s largest navy, and a ballistic- and cruise-missile program more advanced than that of the United States. On the other, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has chronic problems with corruption and incompetence—last year, US intelligence reported that some Chinese nuclear missiles were filled with water rather than fuel, and that the lids didn’t function properly, hampering their ability to launch.

There is also a lack of modern combat experience, a problem Xi Jinping refers to as “the peace disease.” The PLA compounds that problem by tossing away a huge amount of time on political indoctrination. “This is a military that does not prioritise the mastery of operations and doctrine,” says Timothy Heath, senior international defence researcher for think tank RAND. “[The PLA’s] number one priority is politics and ideology.” All that time and energy wasted in the fantasy land of pseudo-Marxism-Leninism—it doesn’t bode well for the PLA’s real-world efficiency.

This is not cause for comfort. The Communist Party shows every sign that it plans to invade Taiwan, and PLA incompetence will not spare us the consequent economic and humanitarian catastrophe. But if we are to truly know our enemy, as Sun Tzu and Marshall have urged, then we must recognise that frailty and uncertainty have stayed Beijing’s hand for many years now. Rather than retreating to “avoid unnecessary conflict,” which will only make conflict more likely, Washington and the West should be adopting the toughest stance possible to reinforce deterrence. (More on Taiwan in a moment.)

Marshall believes that the extent of Chinese poverty is exaggerated: a crucial feature of the Potemkin Village narrative. He recounts his meeting with a highly-educated Chinese woman on a minibus, who was mulling various attractive job options and planning a shopping trip to Japan. Clearly, Marshall sees her as representative of her nation.

It will always be possible to find such individuals, and it is indeed wonderful that she exists—Marshall would certainly not have found her in Mao Zedong’s hellscape, half a century ago. But she shows just one side of the complex phenomenon that is modern Chinese society. There are many other individual Chinese to be found, living less enviable lives. Marshall might equally have travelled to Beijing and spoken to Hu Dexi, who is 67 and can’t afford to retire. Hu wakes at 4am every day, and then he and his wife—who is even older than he is—commute for an hour in order to work thirteen-hour shifts as cleaners. “No one can look after us,” he told Reuters. “Our country isn’t giving us a penny.” This is by no means an isolated case. There are currently 94 million Chinese who are over sixty and still working—over the next decade, another 300 million will enter their sixties and add to this number. China’s much-discussed demographic time-bomb is now beginning its slow-motion explosion.

Marshall dismisses the idea that China is “possibly about to collapse altogether (as Gordon Chang forecast decades ago).” Of course, it’s easy to mock Chang and others like him. Those analysts made the fatal error of assigning a date to the prophesied collapse. The years rolled by, the apocalypse never came, and the Gordon Changs of the world inflicted permanent damage on their own reputations. But the terminal tensions they identified within Chinese society are real. No one can assign a year ahead of time to the end of a dynasty; but it does not follow that no one can see that end approaching. Recall that Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as early as 1950 (a wiser man than Gordon Chang, he declared no grand date of dissolution). For four long decades, Brzezinski was wrong, and then suddenly he was right.

Some observers have found evidence for the concealed-weakness hypothesis by studying satellite data of nighttime light—a plausible proxy for economic growth. The results downgrade Beijing’s official GDP pronouncements, showing us an economy that is as much as sixty percent smaller. Marshall mentions this theory, and remarks that it leads to “misplaced scorn” in the West. But then he moves quickly on, offering no analysis of the striking discrepancy in nighttime light, and leaving us with a suspicion that maybe the scorn is not misplaced after all.

And then we come to Marshall’s strange escalation: China not just as economic heavyweight, but as moral exemplar. “Modern China is one of the most moralistic societies on Earth,” he informs us. “Where would you rather lose your wallet? In modern Brooklyn? Or in Beijing, which has far fewer drug addicts, where strangers on the subway warn you when your backpack is left unzipped, and where young women dance alone by canals in the dark?”

Sounds wonderful. But then a gallery of gruesome images springs to mind. The knifeman hunting schoolchildren in Beijing’s Haidian district. The stabbing of an Israeli Embassy employee on the streets of the capital. The repeated murders and attempted murders (there was another one just a few days ago) of Japanese families living in Chinese cities, targeted purely because of their ethnicity. If this is one of the most moralistic societies on Earth, then perhaps moralising is not what we need.

Beijing may have far fewer (visible) drug addicts than New York, but date-rape drugs are on the rise, and now account for twenty percent of all narcotics cases in the capital^. This trend hardly bodes well for all the carefree women Marshall sees dancing by the canals after dark. As for his subway example, well, if you are fortunate, strangers may indeed warn you about your backpack being unzipped. That’s a good day. On a bad day, they might simply masturbate and ejaculate on you, which is what happened on the Shanghai Metro this spring when an individual decided that he liked the look of a young woman in leggings. This is not a defence of modern Brooklyn—I just think we need to be honest about the nature of modern China. State propaganda would have us believe that the nation’s cities are oases of security and orderliness, and Marshall concurs. The reality, unfortunately, is a lot messier.

And for sizeable chunks of the Chinese populace who happen to be the wrong ethnicity—Uyghurs, Tibetans—the confident assertion that China is “a pretty pleasant place to live” is downright insulting. Eight hundred thousand Tibetan children have been forcibly removed from their families and enrolled in the Communist Party’s boarding schools, where they are brainwashed and abused. China is not “a pretty pleasant place to live” for the tiny Tibetan child caught on camera being savagely beaten at one of these schools by his Chinese teacher—whipped with a cane, battered with a chair, and repeatedly lifted and bodyslammed into desks.

How can a person who has lived in China for such a long time get China so wrong? Perhaps the answer lies in Marshall’s odd tendency to look past the crucial details. “In 2022,” he tells us, “Omicron broke out,” and “people in Shanghai began banging pans.” During the lockdown to which he refers, citizens were left to fend for themselves without food or vital medicines. The trauma sent shockwaves reverberating through the nation. It led to the Sitong bridge protest, the White Paper Revolution, the end of Zero-COVID, and the formation and expansion of a variety of Chinese anti-CCP movements outside the country. Multiple Chinese acquaintances have explained to me that Shanghai 2022 was the great turning point for them; the moment at which their faith in the CCP died. I believe it will come to be seen as a hinge-moment in history—an inflection point of immense significance. But all Marshall noticed was a few people banging pots and pans.

Shanghai on the Edge of Madness

Starvation will push and pull human psychology in unusual directions—it is one of the few things that can overcome fear of the authorities. When famine came to China 400 years ago, it made Chinese peasants receptive to the preachers of class war. When the government failed to provide crucial

QuilletteAaron Sarin

Marshall displays the same myopia with regard to Taiwan: “Before we go to war … Americans need to determine how serious the island’s inhabitants are about taking point, with their own cities as battlegrounds. It would be absurd to engage a well-armed foe for the freedom of a country too full of bubble tea to take on a neighbouring superpower.” Once again, he has missed the point. The reason a potential invasion of Taiwan features so heavily in the current discourse is not because Washington wants to defend the freedoms of a nation that can’t be bothered to defend itself. Realpolitik is the order of the day—now, as always.

Taiwan is Douglas MacArthur’s proverbial “unsinkable aircraft carrier”: a giant airbase in a geographically strategic position. Control of the island would enable Beijing to snap the First Island Chain, project military power across the Pacific, and blockade its adversaries in the region: Japan and the Philippines. The CCP would be able to establish the geopolitical sphere of influence it craves, significantly delaying the approaching Chinese decline. The creation of this sphere of influence would be a large-scale and long-term humanitarian disaster (as Xi Jinping’s tenure thus far should have made abundantly clear), but Washington’s chief concern is the potential hastening of its own decline. As historian Niall Ferguson has put it: “He who rules Taiwan rules the world.”

The island nation is also home to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world-beating chipmaker, behind which all competitors lag by some distance. Rob Toews, partner at capital firm Radical Ventures, explains the company’s invaluable status:

TSMC makes all of the world’s most advanced AI chips. This includes Nvidia’s GPUs, Google’s TPUs, AMD’s GPUs, the AI chips for Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Cerberus, SambaNova, and every other credible competitor. Modern artificial intelligence simply would not be possible without these highly specialised chips. … The entire field of artificial intelligence faces an astonishingly precarious single point of failure in Taiwan.

TSMC is expanding beyond Taiwan’s shores, but the chip fabs it is building and planning to build still only add up to about fifteen percent of its global capacity, and the most advanced production remains concentrated in Taiwan.

In theory, Chinese control of TSMC would enable Beijing to hold any nation it chose to ransom, withholding crucial semiconductors and demanding that its various dictates be met. In practice, however, TSMC may not survive long once the shooting starts. Vital components are needed in order to build those spectacular chips, and the components are shipped in from states that would likely join any international sanctions program. Without lithography equipment from Veldhoven’s ASML, for instance, TSMC could not operate. TSMC and ASML have also developed a kill switch: a system to remotely disable TSMC’s EUV scanners and render the chip fabs inoperable.

US military academics propose going further and employing a “broken nest” strategy whereby Taiwan actually destroys the TSMC facilities. Taiwan’s national security chief is sanguine: “Even if China got a hold of the golden hen, it won’t be able to lay golden eggs.” Perhaps not, but the world still needs golden eggs. In the event of a blockade, Bloomberg Economics estimates a sixty percent reduction in advanced electronics (such as smartphones using cutting-edge logic chips), and a five percent GDP hit for the world. An invasion would be a disaster for everyone, and that’s why the signs an invasion may indeed be coming should startle us out of complacency.

Marshall overlooks all of this, and asks, “Is conflict really necessary?” His prerequisite for defending Taiwan is the nation’s “serious[ness] about self-defence.” If the Taiwanese can’t get their act together, he seems to be suggesting, then Western powers should leave them to their fate. He simply hasn’t understood what’s at stake.

Finally, there is the question of Chinese nationalism and brainwashing—a topic of particular interest to me. Marshall recalls a scene from his days teaching in central China: “All the boys in the small high-school class I taught in Changsha spontaneously spoke up one day and announced (off topic) that, if China went to war, they would quit school and enlist.” For sure, robotic nationalism is still widespread, but ever since the failures of Zero-COVID, it has been on the wane. For two and a half years, I’ve been watching the remarkable rise of Chinese opposition to the CCP—opposition that begins with rejection of Xi Jinping, moves on to rejection of the Party as a whole, and finally arrives, in its most developed form, at a wholesale rejection of the Chinese nationalism that the Party teaches. I encounter it regularly in my conversations with people from a variety of different Chinese backgrounds.

Of course, there are no numbers and no way to quantify this shift. But my experience demonstrates to me that the real China is more complex than Marshall’s picture, and also more complex than the picture generally offered by those American conservatives he holds in such contempt. Most assuredly, it is more complex than any picture painted by the Chinese Communist Party.