Hundred year marathon

The Long Game by Rush Doshi

Hundred-Year Marathon 2.0?

JONATHON P SINE JUL 06, 2021 7

1 “I looked forward to the end of the Cold War, but now I feel disappointed. It seems that one Cold War has come to an end but that two others have already begun: one is being waged against all the countries of the South and the Third World, and the other against socialism. The Western countries are staging a third world war without gunsmoke. By that I mean they want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism.”

— Deng Xiaoping, 1989

A book was published arguing that the People’s Republic of China has an ambitious and long-established plan to displace America as the world’s sole superpower. This book, The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury, was roundly criticized for its lack of rigor. Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers a critique that can be viewed as representative: “Books that challenge the prevailing view on China are greatly needed… [o]ne can hope that such a book will come along in the near future, as it’s clear that The Hundred-Year Marathon is too replete with errors to inform.”

Six years later, it seems Blanchette’s hopes may have been answered. A new book, The Long Game by Rush Doshi, seeks to provide a more academically rigorous investigation into China’s grand strategy. Doshi, in the introduction, describes Pillsbury’s book as ‘overstated’, relying excessively upon ‘personal authority and anecdote’, and that while it may ‘get much right’, fails to be convincing due to being ‘more intuitive’ rather than ‘rigorously empirical.’ Doshi himself thus seems to be consciously intending his book as an update to Pillsbury’s 2015 effort (pg 8).

Pillsbury and his book Hundred-Year Marathon enjoyed substantial influence on the Trump administration’s views on the PRC—Trump described him as “probably the leading authority on China” and then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis brought the book with him on an official trip to China—though he never held an official position.  Meanwhile, as a star protégé of Kurt Campbell who runs Biden’s important Indo-Pacific team on the National Security Council, Doshi has earned an official position in the Administration as a co-‘China Director’ (along with Julian Gerwitz). The informal and formal ways in which Pillsbury and Doshi respectively advise the Trump and Biden administrations mirrors the nature of their books. Where one is informal and intuitive the other is formal and rigorous. The similarity that remains, however, is their general outlook on the PRC. Their subtitles, ‘China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower’ (Pillsbury) and ‘China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order’ (Doshi) evince the shared nature of endeavor.

Beyond providing an improved version of Hundred-Year Marathon, Doshi’s work to map out the Party’s ultimate ambitions also serves to fill an emerging lacuna that is legitimately dangerous. With an academy increasingly characterized by narrow siloes of expertise, Alice Miller noted in 2018 that the China-watching community suffers “from a contemporary variety of what Chairman Mao might have described as “mountaintopism” (山头主义): analysts have command over their parochial base area of interest but lose track of the overall picture.” More pointedly, Dan Tobin argues in testimony to the US China Economic Security Review Commission, that otherwise excellent work “on Chinese politics explore the challenges of day-to-day governance and of crisis response, the mechanisms of domestic control, and the Party’s political succession processes, but have not provided students and U.S government officials with a sense of the strategic agency of the Party’s leaders.” An unsettling gap in analysis has thus emerged with respect to “an ‘ends-based’ research program on China that studies how Beijing conceives of great power competition.” As with Blanchette, so too with Tobin: Rush Doshi is answering.

Doshi doesn’t mince words when it comes to describing the Leninist nature and character of the Chinese Communist Party. Several times in the book he describes the CPC as a ‘centralized structure’ driven by a ‘vanguard’ elite shot through with ‘ruthless amorality’ (pg 10 & 44). Such declarations by Doshi, though, are not flippant assertions. Citing Franz Schurmann’s classic ‘Ideology and Organization’ he argues the CPC has consistently relied on a highly realpolitik Leninism to guide its practice, i.e. ‘the principles of organization related to gaining and wielding power that have endured even as Marxism has withered.’ (pg 32). A quote from Zhao Ziyang drives this home: ‘Deng regarded a system without restrictions or checks and balances, and with absolute concentration of power, as our overall advantage… he adored the high concentration of power and dictatorship’ (pg 25).

Leninism, for Doshi, remains the key to understanding the ‘how’ of the PRC’s ambitions to displace American Order. However, in Doshi’s view, Marxism does not now–if it ever did–appear to truly inform the Party’s ultimate aims and ambitions. Rather, drawing from Orville Schelle and John Delury’s book Wealth and Power, Doshi argues the Party is and mostly has been an explicitly nationalist party aimed at restoring—‘rejuvenating’, per Party parlance—the grandeur of the Chinese nation. He buttresses his case that great power nationalism is the Party’s ultimate ambition by quoting all Party leaders’, from Deng onward, consistent repetition of the desire for ‘rejuvenation’, which is itself a goal inherited from the Qing-era / early Republic reformers who raged against their states’ impotence in the face of colonial depredations.

In making his case that the PRC does in fact have a grand strategy to displace American order, Doshi relies on two pillars: social science and Pekingology. His first pillar, an explicitly social scientific framework, relies on two rigorously defined core theoretical concepts, international order and strategy, as well as a main interpretative framework. Doshi’s theoretical concepts argue that state’s exist in a hierarchical, not anarchical, international system wherein a leading state enacts and enforces norms and values. Competition over leadership of the international order is thus a zero-sum conflict, as it is over a positional good. Following on from that, Doshi argues that great power states use systematic approaches to achieve security and autonomy related ambitions, i.e. a grand strategy, which for great powers entails striving to gain leadership of the international order.

Doshi’s interpretative framework, meanwhile, is a matrix categorizing the CPC’s grand strategic intent across time based on two things: its perceptions of relative power differential between itself and the US, and the CPC’s threat perception of the US. On the back of this matrix, Doshi argues that ‘shocking’ events have catalyzed three drastic changes in CPC power and threat perceptions, and thus in the Party’s grand strategy, in as many decades.

The first major turning point Doshi identifies comes in the late 80s/early 90s, following Tiananmen, the collapse of the CPSU, and the first Gulf war. While the CPC’s perceptions of a vast power differential between itself and the US remained stable, its perception of threat from  the US altered radically, leading to its first grand strategic shift away from an ‘accommodationist’ disposition to US-led order and toward a ‘blunting’ strategy which sought to quickly limit US capacity to infringe on China’s autonomy. Second, in 2008, while the heightened threat perception remained, the US-centered Great Financial Crisis led the to a decisive change in the CPC’s perception of power differentials, which induced a shift from its ‘blunting’ strategy and toward a regional ‘building’ strategy that saw Beijing begin development of the institutional basis for its own order. The third and final shift, according to Doshi, begins a mere eight years later with Brexit and Trump’s election—intensifying due to the West’s coronavirus mishaps in 2020—which again altered Beijing’s perception of relative power and triggered a shift from ‘building’ to global ‘expansion’.

To back out these key turning points in CPC perceptions of US power and threat, Doshi relies on his second pillar: Pekingology, which Alice Miller describes as ‘Kremlinology with Chinese characteristics’ and Simon Leys memorably characterized as “the art of interpreting nonexistent inscriptions written in invisible Ink on a blank Page.” In normal language, it is the systematic excavation of authoritative Party documents and speeches for insights into the otherwise black-box of Communist Party elite thinking. It requires familiarity with the arcane yet loaded language the Party communicates with internally. Doshi ‘makes use of an original database of  Chinese Communist Party documents’ (pg 3) to undertake a careful reading of authoritative Chinese sources from periods both immediately preceding and following the major world events noted above, conducting what amounts to a ‘Pekingological’ regression discontinuity design.

This clearly articulated methodology is an important contribution Doshi introduces into the debate on China’s grand strategy. In particular, his efforts to move beyond generic ‘hide and bide’ and ‘striving for achievements’—and the overwrought and likely misleading focus on Xi Jinping’s personality—and into specific articulations of when, where, how, and why CPC elites changed their grand strategic orientation, allows for falsifiability and productively furthers our understanding.

More than giving an academic treatment to the subject of China’s grand strategy, though, Doshi truly hopes to persuade. He juxtaposes his own viewpoint against ‘skeptics’ who reject the idea that the PRC has a grand strategy aimed at displacing the US. In particular, he singles out Michael Swaine, who wrote in Foreign Policy in 2018 that “[one] hugely distorted notion is the now all-too-common assumption that China seeks to eject the United States from Asia and subjugate the region. In fact, no conclusive evidence exists of such Chinese goals.” One core purpose of Doshi’s book, then, is to convince the likes of Swaine of the ‘true’ nature and character of China’s grand strategy.

Critiques

Yet, for a book slavishly devoted to dissecting the pronouncements and thinking of Chinese Communist elites, it is somewhat surprising to find missing from The Long Game any substantive discussion of the complex heritage and contemporary influence of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx. Throughout the book, Doshi purposefully glosses over the Mao era and similarly  discounts entirely the relevance of Marxism to the Party’ s ultimate aims. Yet, Xi Jinping’s speeches as well as the Party’s constitution routinely stress the continuing relevance of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. Though plausible that Mao and Marx effectively exert little influence on Party leaders thinking despite Xi Jinping’s frequent assertions to the contrary, it is noteworthy that Doshi fails to explain this away. How can we really be sure that such routine topics in Party discourse don’t influence Beijing’s ambitions and strategy? Does not this omission indicate potential blind spots in Doshi’s analysis? Consider, for example, Julia Lovell’s take:

“few of Xi’s headline approaches are particularly new: the CCP has been openly promoting nationalism since the 1990s…'Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has, again, been in the mainstream of political discussion since the 1990s…Yet Xi does have one stand-out innovation. Emulating Bo Xilai’s invocation of Maoist themes, Xi has, for the first time since the Chairman’s death in 1976, reinserted into the mainstream of Chinese national life some of the symbols and practices of Maoist politics. After some forty years of post-Mao reforms china remains socially, economically, and culturally hybrid, but Xi’s repertoire for political control is resurgently Maoist” (pg 444).

Such notable omissions by Doshi may call into question the more general endeavor of Pekingology itself: the subjectivity of it perhaps necessarily involves weaving a partial and incomplete story.

The most predictable critique of Doshi’s book, though, will likely come from those whom Dan Tobin critiques in his USCC testimony. Many academics continue to advocate, in what is now a rear guard battle, for seeing Beijing as fundamentally more reactive than proactive. This strand of thinking is succinctly captured in well-worn, and oft cited, phrases like ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ and within scholarly work on center-local relations—in books with descriptive titles such as Jae Chang’s ‘centrifugal empire’—which see a centralized Party apparatus beset by problems and routinely incapable of coherently devising or implementing strategic plans. While Doshi goes through pains in the book to argue that foreign affairs is an area wherein the center can lead in a uniquely unitary and strategic manner, his decision to elide discussion on complications wrought by the PRC’s plurality of actors—SOEs, provincial governments, private companies, etc.—and the various domestic drivers of behavior will justifiably come in for scrutiny.

This leads to perhaps the most fundamental critique one might leverage at Doshi’s book. In largely neglecting domestic drivers of behavior, Doshi may misattribute to grand-strategic calculations fueled by relative power and threat perception what are better ascribed to domestic political exigencies. Of particular import is the growing need to keep the Party organization itself unified, disciplined, and fundamentally in control.

As many scholars have noted, Xi Jinping came into power with a mandate to consolidate the increasingly ‘fragmented authoritarian’ system that had evolved over several decades of reform and opening. To do so, however, would require struggle, mobilization, and a re-consolidation of discipline within the Party, things that have indeed proven to be Xi’s primary focus areas. One angle that Doshi might have approached this from is re-centering what has long been a prime directive of the Communist Party of China since Mao. Building on Lenin’s ‘Who, Whom?’ distinction, Mao famously wrote that the prime directive of the revolution must be to always ask and evaluate: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” Indeed, it is this deeply tribalizing type of politics—the invocation to a constant fear of an enemy without and within—that has historically provided the animating force necessary to hold together a centralized, Leninist, single Party. It is not surprising, then, to learn that today’s leaders of China’s Leninist Party—a Party deeply concerned with history, particularly the history of the fall of the Soviet Union—may be reviving that unifying sort of paranoid passion that comes from stoking an ‘us vs them’ dyadic political struggle.

Mao, just after bombing the Jinmen and Mazu islands to create tension and mobilize the Party for the Great Leap Forward, wondered:

“Is it true that tension always harms us? Not exactly, in my opinion. How can tension benefit us instead of harming us? Because tension … may serve to mobilize forces and awaken inactive strata and intermediate sections. The fear of atomic war demands a second thought. Just look at the shelling of Jinmen and Mazu islands … Such a few shots and there was such a drastic storm and the towering smoke of gunpowder. It is because people fear war, they are afraid of disasters the United States might randomly cause … Lenin touched on this when referring to war, saying that war rallies people and intensifies man’s mind. There is no war now, of course, but the tension of military confrontation can also mobilize positive elements, as well as set inactive strata to thinking.”

Viewing developments under Xi as a response to the fragmentation of the Party and its weakening grip on Chinese society helps explain an unaddressed inconsistency in The  Long Game. At the beginning, Doshi suggests that ‘grand strategy is rare’ and ‘changes in grand strategy are rarer.’ He then argues, however, that the PRC’s grand strategy has radically changed three times in as many decades. The contradiction here is never fleshed out. And while the first two shifts in grand strategy, from ‘accommodation’ to ‘blunting’ and from ‘blunting’ to ‘building’, are spaced out, the third shift from ‘building’ to ‘expansion’ is perplexing in its speed, occurring after a mere eight years. Doshi’s intense focus on how Brexit, Trump’s election, and the coronavirus pandemic shifted Beijing’s external perceptions may not provide an entirely convincing account of this rapid shift. A more convincing analysis might also take into account domestic exigencies, such as the CPC’s fear of a fragmenting Leninist Party. In heightening external tensions by shifting into a global ‘expansion’ phase, Xi Jinping and the CPC may be pulling a page from Mao to purposefully heighten tensions and bring about a tribally-induced Leninist unity.

Such a critique is not ultimately incompatible with Doshi’s fundamental argument over Beijing’s intent to displace American order. Indeed, Xi and the Politburo probably view a tension-heightening rush toward the center of global governance as a Party-consolidating expedient that is simultaneously simpatico with his and his Party’s ultimate ambition to once more sit, rejuvenated, atop a China-centered order. But interpreting this seeming rush to the center as a response to domestic exigencies does complicate Doshi’s narrative on Beijing’s grand strategy. It also suggests that even if we fully accept Doshi’s argument regarding Beijing’s grand strategy, we should be skeptical in its ability to carry it out. As analysts such as Ryan Hass have written, the PRC is not ten feet tall. It is truly beset by problems, perhaps the most fundamental, or at  least what Beijing sees as most fundamental, is the need for Party unity. Without a congealed Leninist system, as Doshi himself writes, Beijing’s grand strategy cannot be operationalized.

Conclusion

As Blanchette foreshadowed six years ago, this is the kind of book that many China policymakers have been eagerly awaiting. The Long Game is a rigorous and authoritative treatise on what the PRC wants and how it intends to get it. It is in key ways precisely what The Hundred-Year Marathon was not. China doyens have lined up to review the book favorably, including Susan Shirk, who called it an ‘instant classic’ that persuaded her to re-examine her own view that ‘China’s aims are open and malleable.’ It will be the talk of the town this summer in DC’s foreign policy circles. More consequentially, given Doshi’s position as China director on the Biden Administration’s NSC, it may offer substantive insights into how the US has been and will be handling its affairs with the PRC. Whether you agree or disagree with Doshi’s premise, the book is well-worth reading. And even if you don’t read it, you can be sure the PRC’s America watchers will.