Beijing on the front foot as US superpower stumbles
The commonality between the Taliban and the New Era Chinese Communist Party bodes ill for Taiwan.
The waves pushed out around the world by the unravelling of Pax Americana in Kabul did not take long to reach the shores of the South China Sea.
Taiwan’s resilient President Tsai Ing-wen responded that her proudly democratic and open society’s “only option is to make ourselves stronger, more united and more resolute in our determination to protect ourselves”.
She added: “It’s not an option for us to do nothing and just to rely on other people’s protection.”
The historic stumbling of superpowers in their attempts to control Afghanistan during the past two centuries, the flaws in the reasoning for the American invasion 20 years ago, the strategic incoherence about governing the country, and the more recent blunders of Donald Trump and Joe Biden as they abandoned it are being examined minutely in the Western world.
But trawling through these entrails is completely beside the point for the world’s great new power, as Taiwan’s Tsai knows especially well.
Almost no one in the places where China’s influence matters most takes much interest in the intricacies of these discussions or in the excuses for policy failure. The Americans might have been wrong to get so involved in the first place and have been well justified in leaving – but that’s all beside the point now.
The Chinese party-state’s core target audiences for its messages are first and foremost its own population, next the 14 countries that border it and others in east Asia, and finally the scores of Belt and Road Initiative partners elsewhere in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America and in Europe.
In this case the Chinese party-state doesn’t need to add much of a gloss to what people in these places are seeing on their TVs and other screens: the real-time manifestation of one of the favourite phrases of its leader Xi Jinping: “The East is rising, the West is falling”, with China now providing “a new model for human advancement”. That’s the message that counts.
The gloss that the US is going to be able to redeploy more of its hard power to east Asia and that the decks can be cleared for more focused contestation with China may carry some truth, but that’s unable to resonate, to gain much traction, outside strategic studies nerds until clear evidence proves otherwise.
The visit by US Vice-President Kamala Harris to Singapore and Vietnam this month, “blooding” her in international affairs, does little or nothing to limit the damage from the wrecking ball of the Afghan abandonment.
Including Indonesia and The Philippines in Harris’s trip, while challenging, would have provided an opportunity for more genuine progress in terms of convincing the region of Washington’s interest and capacities, beyond rhetoric that has been heard before, for instance about a “pivot” that never was.
Most folk around the world are focused on their own neighbourhoods and, at a pinch, their countries. When international affairs make an impact, it’s images that matter most.
I became a friend, during Hong Kong days, of Hugh van Es, a Dutch photographer whose career had been defined by a single shot. On April 29, 1975, he photographed 20 to 30 people desperately trying to board an Air America helicopter on a CIA building in downtown Saigon as North Vietnamese troops closed in. The image came to encapsulate that whole war.
Today, it’s hard to rid our minds of the awful sight of Afghans rushing planes to escape and, worst, of those falling from them to their deaths.
Other, less dramatic, images also communicate stories that fit Beijing’s own narrative tellingly: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi standing alongside Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar after talks in Tianjin, China, a few weeks before the Taliban takeover; and Wang talking with Myanmar’s military dictator Min Aung Hlaing in January, a fortnight or so before the latter’s seizure of power there.
Alongside such images, an absence also speaks eloquently and disconcertingly: the lack of useful intelligence.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “The speed with which (Afghan) cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated.” After 20 years with immense numbers of “boots on the ground” and ears and eyes in the air, the richly funded American intelligence establishment failed to work out what was going on.
This will be the cause of particular concern in Taipei, as in the capitals of US allies around east Asia. For while the intent of the Chinese party-state has never been clearer, thanks to incessant speeches, papers and books by Xi and his circle, the actual process of top-level decision-making has not been as opaque since distant imperial days.
Xi has restructured and centralised policy formation, drawing it away from the established routine meetings of the politburo and of its seven-man standing committee that he also heads, towards topic-focused “leading small groups” and commissions, of which he chairs a dozen, including those on national and domestic security, economic reform and Taiwan. Their agendas, memberships, staffing and decisions are largely unknown.
In Xi’s New Era, the shutters have come down sharply. Not only foreigners, including diplomats, but top Chinese academics, journalists and business leaders, are held away, removed from anyone near the levers of power. Analysts are left to read the runes from arcane documents, to parse formal photos – who is standing next to whom, who is absent – and essentially just to speculate on what’s happening in that “black box”.
The sudden imposition 14 months ago of the National Security Law on Hong Kong, and its blitzkrieg-speed implementation, appears to have come as much of a shock to the US as to Hong Kong’s own democrats, journalists and civil society.
In this context the failure of intelligence even in Afghanistan naturally leads to anxiety about the likelihood that Washington can gain a useful advance on any well-educated China-watcher as to Xi’s next major initiative, including towards Taiwan.
Another side effect of the Taliban takeover, as Foreign Policy magazine deputy editor James Palmer points out, is likely to be “Chinese intelligence deepening its already considerable ties with its Pakistani counterparts, which created and supported the Taliban”, as Beijing’s arc of influence reaches through Afghanistan and friendly Iran to the Turkish border. Inevitably, the Communist Party-owned Chinese media is exulting. Global Times says “Afghanistan is not the first place where the US abandoned its allies, nor will it be the last” and that this is “some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate”. Of course, Taiwan is far removed from Afghanistan in almost every conceivable way – except that a strong force also covets seizing it.
Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu agreed, in a wry way, with Global Times that “China dreams of emulating the Taliban”, wishing to impose communism and commit crimes against humanity. But “we’ve got the will and means to defend ourselves.”
There is a further point of commonality between the Taliban and the New Era Chinese Communist Party: they are driven not by pragmatism but by sincere belief in the righteousness of their sacred cause. Xi’s China, too, is a form of theocracy.
We may not know the intricacies of how decisions are made there any more, but we do know that they are made not by distanced observers but by true believers. All party members are expected by Xi to be devout, to have faith in the victory of socialism, to be ready to sacrifice everything in the great struggle – a word for which, douzheng, Xi used 60 times in a single speech.
Beijing’s assessment of whether Americans still have a stomach for an international role will now come crucially from its new ambassador in Washington, Qin Gang, who as Foreign Ministry spokesman was a civil and intelligent interlocutor. But more recently he has worked closely for Xi as his protocol chief, and he knows better than most the kind of message the “People’s Leader” wants to hear. As Kevin Rudd says: “Most of Xi’s senior officials are terrified of him. They are highly unlikely therefore to be providing frank and fearless advice.”
And the Kabul chaos will have underlined with emphasis the narrative already implanted firmly in Xi’s mind, about the rapidly unfurling destiny of his party and its People’s Republic.
In the meantime, Australia – only one of many countries suffering from Beijing’s attempted political coercion via economic weaponisation – rightly seeks to maintain its surviving commercial, cultural and personal links with China and to enhance ties elsewhere.
Taiwan, already our seventh biggest export market, is keen on increased trade and investment with Australia, and it makes pragmatic and moral sense to reciprocate, with its globally prominent tech sector leading national growth that is expected to reach 5.9 per cent this year.
The Australia-Taiwan Business Council hosted a highly successful webinar last week with about 60 significant participants from both, including energetic Trade, Tourism and Investment Minister Dan Tehan.
Even if Australia isn’t ready to follow New Zealand and Singapore in negotiating a free trade deal with Taiwan, it could do more to smooth Taiwan’s admission to the 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, rather than await the outcome of the somewhat bizarre plan for Britain to join next.
In the wake of Afghanistan, the free world needs to get back on the front foot rapidly. Fortunately, it has in White House Indo-Pacific co-ordinator Kurt Campbell, a sane analyst who understands just how much work the US now has to do – especially economically – before Xi’s narrative can be challenged convincingly.
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.