Shane Leary joins Miles Yu to discuss the legacy of Henry Kissinger, China's attempts to dominate narratives through "discourse dominance," and the upcoming 2024 presidential election in Taiwan.
Shane Leary joins Miles Yu to discuss the legacy of Henry Kissinger, China's attempts to dominate narratives through "discourse dominance," and the upcoming 2024 presidential election in Taiwan.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from Hudson Institute's China Center.
Shane Leary:
It's Tuesday, December 5th, and we have three topics this week. The first is Miles’ reflections on the death of Henry Kissinger and the immense legacy he left behind. Second is the CCP’s attempt to drive the global narrative through discourse power, and Miles' expansion of his recent testimony to the [House] Select Committee on the CCP. And third, we discussed the upcoming Taiwanese election and its implications for cross strait relations. Miles, how are you?
Miles Yu:
Very good, Shane. Glad to be with you again.
Shane Leary:
Glad to be with you as well. So for our first topic, this past Wednesday, November 29th, Washington lost a giant with the death of Henry Kissinger at a hundred years old. Kissinger who was an accomplished scholar outside of his political and diplomatic achievements, was integral to US foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations and his legacy continued to loom large for the decades to come. We'd like to pay our respects to Mr. Kissinger and reflect on his legacy. Miles, we've spoken a bit about him before on this podcast. He's obviously a man of some controversy on segments of the left and right for his contributions to American foreign policy. How do you think about the legacy he left behind?
Miles Yu:
Well, it's very hard to use a very brief statement to summarize such a very complex man. So as you indicated in your question, there are many ways you can approach this. First of all, I think the nation should be very grateful to Mr. Henry Kissinger because he was the first person who really introduced a huge amount of intellectualism in American foreign policy discourse long before he became a politician in the White House and the State Department. He was first and foremost a scholar at Harvard, and his contribution to our understanding of the geopolitical theories and in the nuclear age is really immeasurable. So for that, we should be very grateful to Dr. Henry Kissinger. Secondly, and I think the second part of his career - so having said that, he's a brilliant strategist, number one - and then he entered the White House after 1968 election, he became the National Security Advisor to Mr. Richard Nixon in 1969.
And that's where controversy comes because in that role, he really, really sort of highlighted the profound conflict and dilemma of being an intellect and a policy person. So that's why you always have this kind of a conflict. That's when essentially his job in the White House, he became a presidential fixer to fix problems of the time. And at the time, obviously the Vietnam War was a big thing. So that's why he had the shuttle of diplomacy in the Middle East, obviously as another crisis too, and the Vietnam and then, but he's most famously known for his role in the opening of China in 1971 and 1972. And so when we say Henry Kissinger is the most relevant in the China field, both, we talk about that trip to China in 1971 and then that paved the way for Mr. Nixon to visit to China in February, 1972.
That is very important. But the reason why he went to China and Nixon sent him to China was not because of some kind of really grand geostrategic vision. Of course there was some element to that, but mostly to solve some kind of very specific question, the most important ones, most important one was the Americans quagmire in Vietnam. So they want China to help them. And it was the Chinese who basically constantly tried to elevate the level of the discourse with the United States at the much more strategic level. Most importantly, China wants to forge alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union. Remember, after that point, China had steadfastly refused. Americans appeals to get engaged because China really didn't believe that the United States harbor any good intention. Only after the 1969 Soviet Chinese brinksmanship that almost led to the nuclear mutual annihilation that China realized Soviet Union was such a big threat.
They want to play the US card, played the US card, they did and did it very well. So you have to look at from that point of view, the third part of Mr. Henry Kissinger's legacy has something to do with his great success in being a businessman and a commentator. You combine the business enterprise with his great influence in the commentary world that has really give this man an enormous power and influence. So he built a business of empire and also his opinion on the world politics has staying power, but also have to point out one of the reasons that Mr. Henry Kissinger was so powerful, so influential was almost in spite of him because he was chosen by the Chinese Communist Party as the ultimate friend of China. So the reason why he's so powerful, because Chinese government gave Mr. Kissinger exclusive access to the inner core of the Chinese Communist party's thinking. And with that kind of exclusive power and almost near monopoly to the Chinese senior leadership, and Mr. Henry Kissinger become a very powerful figure because everybody who wants to understand China, and they go to him because Mr. Henry Kissinger was known as the ultimate China whisperer. So that's why you see how this kind of business and public opinion really mixed this extraordinarily influential man, extraordinarily smart guy, and extraordinarily controversial person.
Shane Leary:
I think that's well said. For our next topic, Miles, you recently testified before the Select Committee on the CCP on the topic of discourse power, the CCP strategy to shape the global information space discourse power you write “is for the global community, what the term propaganda is for China domestically.” And you mentioned four primary means in which the CCP shapes perception that is disinformation, elite capture, self-censorship and brainwashing. Could you expand on this and give us a brief overview? What is discourse power and why should we be concerned with it?
Miles Yu:
Well, the best way to expand that is to watch the whole hearing. I joined two other panelists. We had a great time and I am very grateful to the Committee for giving the opportunity. Propaganda is no problem for the Chinese Communist Party domestically. That's because the Chinese Communist Party control all the tools of information generation and information dissemination. So they have total control of access to information. That's why they can do that internationally. They couldn't do it. That's why their international propaganda has to be very subtle. So they sugarcoated and masqueraded as a pursuit of what they call the “huayuqian” which literally translated to the right to speak. But as I explained in my hearing, that was not really the original intent. The original intent for the CCP when it comes to the right to speak is not just to present its story narrative. Well, rather it is to dominate the dialogue to make the Chinese Communist Party narrative the only one available in the world.
So that's why discourse power has a lot of element of coercion in it, but it's also never do it very delicately and deliberately. That's why I delineated four major categories. This information is greatly edited by the advent of the information revolution. There's a lot of mass distribution and dissemination tools, social media in particular. So China banned all of them from outside Twitter, Google, Facebook, you name it. So none of this available, but the Chinese government parties, officials, those people who are in charge of this discourse dominance project, they have a full access to those tools of free expression. And so ultimately, the tools of free expressions in the West, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have become the Chinese Communist Party tool to destroy freedom of expression. So that's very, very important and telling. And secondly, of course, China tried to change the global conceptualization about China and they try to insert communist ideology, their nomenclature into international body, particularly like United Nations World Bank and WTO and WHO, for example, Xi Jinping's thoughts and his view about socialism with Chinese characteristics in new era was inserted in the UN documents.
And his champion for this very bizarre concept of community, of common destiny for all mankind has been written into UN documents. So those efforts has been very, very robust and rigorous. Of course, they try everything to control Chinese diaspora all over the world, and there was tens of millions of Chinese immigrants living overseas. And they control this through not only their direct counselor facilities all over the world, but also through high technology. I mentioned in my hearing about the Chinese use of Amazon. Amazon.com is the largest e-commerce platform in the world. There are about 1.5 sellers on Amazon, over two thirds of them - 1.1 million of them - are based in China. Think about that. So this gives Chinese government an enormous opportunity to exploit this kind of a high-tech commerce mechanism. And so they use this amazon.com as a platform to dominate some of the very critical areas of personal and national security.
For example, I mentioned in my hearing that Amazon.com, the Chinese sellers literally have a monopoly of all the home security devices - routers, wifi extenders, and so you name it, mini computers. And so it's very, very dangerous for us Americans to be hooked into that kind of things. They also have the device to change the entire TV viewing environment in America as if you are sitting here in the United States watching Chinese TVs unhinged. So that's the problem. And of course, the next thing I talked about in my hearing was the Chinese very, I adroit cultivation of praxis. In other words, I use the phrase elite capture. Unlike the Soviet Union, Chinese government rarely sends, it's a propagandist overseas to pitch Chinese propaganda directly. Rather, they spend a lot of efforts, their best and brightest to the American’s elite circles, wall Street, the K Street, and particularly think tank roles to cultivate proxies.
And so those guys who speak to Americans, to the world on behalf of the Chinese government. So you often, because this appeal to ego and the vein glory of a lot of people, I mean, how often do you actually get the access and authentic messages from the Chinese government per se? And you, a regular researcher can speak for the entire nation and you try to explain to the Americans, you know what, this is what Chinese thinking. If China killed 2000 people somewhere in a square and then all those proxies will jump out and say, “hey, listen, let me explain the context with which Chinese government had to do this,” to try to justify the brutality of Chinese government. It happens all the time. This is exactly what's been going on in the current crisis in the Israel Haas war because there are so many Hamas pro-terrorist intellectuals in the west try to sort of contextualized justify Hamas's October 7th atrocities.
I went on to talk about self-censorship among all of us because China control a large body of international communication in social media in particular TikTok at all. And so therefore, everybody who wants to have to do anything, wants to have any career in the China field or do any business with China, you have to watch what you say, what you tweet, watch your email. And that's basically is fundamentally un-American and anti-free. So brainwashing obviously is very simple because Confucius Institute and a lot of Chinese direct propaganda and the conferences and they send people here to inject a lot of Chinese communist concepts into the American society. Words like progressives, words like a consciousness raising, they all have the etymology of the CCP dating all the way back to 1940s.
Shane Leary:
I actually found that to be one of the more striking elements of your testimony. The suggestion that CCP ideological influence is not a far off or even an immediate concern as we often think about it, but rather something that has been permeating our society for some time. So I just wonder if you could expand a little bit more on that. You mentioned these concepts like raising the level of consciousness. So to what degree does it already permeate American society today and how does that maybe cause us to be vulnerable against them in the coming tension?
Miles Yu:
I mean just about this particular phrase, right? “Consciousness raising” in Chinese that phrase came directly straight from the 1941, 1942 communist parties Yanan thought reform, thought rectification. It's also a purge. So basically it is a draconian thought reform, thought minding, thought rebranding campaign. It's basically indoctrination with extreme cruelty. That phrase was conveyed to the American mainstream through the wartime correspondent of Time magazine in China. His name is Teddy White, Theodore White, Theodore White got that phrase and written into his books, his correspondence and American sort of the liberal side of this social movement, picked it up. This consciousness reason is literally the model of, for example, the American Feminist Movement. And most of them probably didn't know the origin of this phrase. It came directly from the indoctrination camp of the Chinese Communist Party of 1941, 1942 in Yanan.
Shane Leary:
So some of these things, it seems like there are solutions that while they may not be easy, they're clear. For example, we can ban TikTok, we know we can disband CCP influenced and operated academic organizations like Confucius Institutes, but some things seem harder to me like elite capture. Are there specific measures we could be taking to mitigate this particular avenue of influence, especially if, as you say, it's something motivated a lot of times by ego on our side and sort of just the enticing nature of access and things like that.
Miles Yu:
First of all, we have to understand the nature of such Chinese effort is not really normal academic and scholarly exchange. For example, we are here working for one of the thinktanks in Washington DC, but there are a lot of think tanks that accept a lot of Chinese exchange researchers whose job here is to influence to cultivate the proxies. And Hudson Institute obviously is not really welcomed by the Chinese government because we are very different. But I think there are a lot of Chinese scholars and they work in various kind of government functions with the cover of scholar come over here and I have some fresh evidence that, but I don't want to talk about in open air. What it also is that they want us to treat China as a normal country, as a country with the normal woes and up and downs as if China number one is a market economy, as if China is just a developing country, as if China is seeking mutual benefit.
So they spread the gospels of Chinese Communist parties win-win [rhetoric]. And they also spread the gospel of CCPs idea about peaceful reunification with Taiwan. So Taiwan, those coded words carry implicit messages that were completely false in the first place. So win-win, how could you win when you basically restrict the American's access to your market and to your economic data? And you cannot compete with somebody who doesn't follow the same sets of rules. So that's why win-win just garbage. And many people fall into that kind of conceptual and intellectual trap and couldn't really escape. So we have to understand the nature of the regime, what they're doing, what's the purpose of that. And the secondly, of course, you can always instill a very strict set of transparency rules, disclosure rules. So that's something that we should have done. We didn't do enough. And during the Trump administration, we actually sent the message to various think tanks to urge them to open up their disclosure and make a statement that they can guarantee assure the American public and the government that they have not taken foreign money. And if they did, they have to disclose it so that there will be no suspicion of conflict of interest.
Shane Leary:
For our last topic, I would like to check in on the upcoming Taiwan presidential election, which is fast approaching in little over a month on January 13th. This election obviously has immense significance for Taiwan and the world as it could determine how willing Taiwan is to defend its independence or whether it is willing to capitulate to Chinese aggression. Miles, can you give us a brief overview? Who are the candidates and in your view, what is at stake in this election?
Miles Yu:
First of all, I'm not going to take side with any of them, but basically we have this sort of a three-way horse race. Leading the poll as of now is the incumbent vice president William Lai, and his running mate, who was the Taiwan's top diplomat in Washington DC until about two weeks ago, Representative Bi-Khim Hsiao. The second pair is the candidates for the nationalist party, the KMT. So it's led by this gentleman by the name of Hou Yu-ih, and the third candidate is a former mayor of Taipei. His name is Ko Wen-je. The issue obviously you mentioned about this is a decisive - this is a very meaningful consequential and in a true democracy, every presidential election is consequential. So Taiwan started this full democratic process in 1996, even though the incumbent won, but the process was open and fair. In 2000 there was a presidential election for the first time where the opposition leader actually won.
So that presented an enormous opportunity to show case Taiwan's democratic maturity. Taiwanese people did a great job. They transformed - they basically have a power of transition of power very smoothly, including the intelligence and the defense establishments. Now it's not a hundred percent smooth, but overall it's just remarkable. And then ever since we have several presidential elections, every one of them is crucial. It's crucial because facing Taiwan is the enormous issue of how to deal with China. So the Chinese communist government threatened to use force to take over Taiwan for decades. They have never relented that promise. And the excuse the pretext they're using is that there is a Taiwanese pro-independence movement, which in my view is total red herring. It didn't exist because the - Taiwan is the leaders past to present have always said there is no need to seek brand new Taiwanese independence because Taiwan is already a sovereign and independent country, and its name is Republic of China in Taiwan.
So that's basically is not about declaration of new independence, it's about recognition of a de facto real independence that's already in existence. So for China to insist otherwise, it's just very disingenuous. Unfortunately, we have some people in American think tanks and academia who basically did not really care about this kind of reality. And for example, there is a Foreign Affairs article that published last week, which basically blamed the victim of CCP’s belligerence and calling the DPP Party to get rid of its Taiwan independence clause, which was incorporated in the 1991 DPP platform. And that was just silly because these people didn't do research very well because in 1999, that clause was already being frozen by the DPP’s new resolution, it's called resolution on Taiwan's future. So in other words, the DPP itself no longer really was calling for Taiwan's independence because they know reality is independence. Two years later in 2001, the DPP adopted a new resolution getting rid of the Taiwan independence clause altogether.
So no one accepted CCP has been spreading falsehoods about this issue except the authors of this recent Foreign Affairs article. So it's not very helpful and created such a, so I will say the issue right now that first Taiwanese voters are not only about governance issue, but also it's about the overall strategic outlook of Taiwan's future. That is to what extent we should recognize the status quo. The status quo is basically the status quo independence, to what extent that we should really stick to the global dialogue on Taiwan. In other words, it would not be the issue of where Taiwan should belong to China or not. Rather, it should be really a dialogue framework of freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus autocracy. So I think that's what Taiwanese people were thinking. Hopefully Taiwanese people will make the right choice. I think historically since 1996, they have always made a good choice.
Shane Leary:
One thing I might want to add as a question, I've seen some recent reporting that something the US audience is missing is the importance of sort of everyday domestic, especially economic issues driving Taiwanese voters. From our perspective, it's certainly the most pressing thing is their relationship with China. And I have to imagine that's at the top of people's minds. But to what degree do maybe we have a warped perception and are there other issues at the forefront that could drive this one way or the other?
Miles Yu:
Listen, Taiwanese people have been threatened by China for over seven decades. In the very important regime changing election of 2000. I was in Taiwan as an election observer. Chinese government officials behave belligerently. I remember very vividly when the Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji went on TV and using very harsh word threatening Taiwanese voters with the use of force, and the people basically rebel against that. So every time the Chinese government play hardball, it will always backfire. I mean, they never learned a lesson. So I would say right now they're trying to sort of interfere with Taiwanese election. If I were in Chinese Communist Party leadership, I would just learn the lesson, just shut up and Taiwanese democracy let it run its own course. So of course, communists will never do that. That's the problem with the autocracy. I still very confident that the Taiwanese people were smart, and even if the KMT were to be elected, they still have to solve this fundamental question about the party itself. Yes, it is a sort of a transitional party from mainland to Taiwan, but after seven decades, KMT should really have a clear cut statement about whether the KMT party that existed only in Taiwan is the Chinese political party or a Taiwanese political party. And that's why they have to really, really make that distinction. And for all practical purposes, KMT is and will be just a Taiwanese political party. And I don't think there is politicians within the KMT courageous enough to make that statement. Now, we'll see.
Shane Leary:
Yes, we will. Well, Miles, I think that's all the time we have this week. Thanks so much for taking the time. I'll talk to you again next week.
Miles Yu:
See you next week.
Shane Leary:
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of China Insider. For Chinese language listeners, be sure to check out our monthly Chinese language episodes. And for those who prefer written analysis, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, China Digest, the best place to stay up to date on miles analysis and the latest news on China. As always, you can stay up to date on the China Center's activities @hudson.org.