US and Chinese Delegates Clash at the Xiangshan Forum
An everything, everywhere, all at once moment for nationalist chauvinism.
Most years, I let the Xiangshan Forum pass without commenting on it.
If you haven’t heard of the Xiangshan Forum, it’s a Track 1.5 (quasi-official) meeting that China convenes to talk about defense and security issues. Representatives from 100 countries were in attendance this year, making it the largest multilateral defense forum in the world.
My co-host Matt Duss attended it last year, and I’ve been to countless meetings like it.1
East Asia’s shifting political order consists of many such confabs, but the ones that are US-centric (APEC, EAS) have a vague feeling of decay, even uselessness. The newer ones—which are China-centric—are increasingly part of the everyday life of East Asian elites but, like all things China, are viewed as vaguely menacing in the West. If APEC is a Hummer, then the Xiangshan Forum is a BYD.
This year’s Xiangshan Forum, held from September 17-19, was different from other elite talk shops in two respects. One is that some media reported much-heightened friction between the US and Chinese delegations. The other is that China was using the Xiangshan Forum to advance its “Global Governance Initiative” concept, which had just been launched at another Sino-centric forum, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
What’s Inside:
The meaning of China’s “Global Governance Initiative”
Lost technocrats and America’s insecure nationalism
Signs of Chinese chauvinism
The Treaty of San Francisco
Contesting the World War II story as a terrain for international order today
You don’t really need to know much about the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) other than that:
Descriptions of it sound duplicative with the UN but China boasts it as a retooling of international order in favor of the global South (a good thing if true!);
Asian governments are mostly warm toward it;
Western governments are mostly cool toward it; and
China seems to be using it as a way to articulate a positive alternative vision to the no-longer-existing US hegemonic order.2
Many think tankers don’t appreciate the importance that East Asian governments place on not just stability but a peaceable international order—something widely seen as under assault the past several years, even predating Trump 2.0. That’s why ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, who spoke at the Xiangshan Forum, positioned the GGI in his remarks as a potential antidote to:
Intensifying geopolitical tensions, deepening economic fragmentation, and the return of economic nationalism and protectionism.
That’s probably too lofty, but it conveys the aspiration of many East Asian elites to avoid subjugation to the whims of a sick, spasmodically violent, rule-breaking former hegemon.
America’s technocratic class of Asia hands—the people who show up to the Xiangshan Forum—is mostly embarrassed by the Trump administration. I sympathize with that much. But their cope is simply to lie and deflect—busying themselves portraying the US inaccurately and promoting criticisms of China. They have no other way of orienting themselves in the world; the movement of history is rendering them into lost children that nobody mourns.
The clash between the US and China this year—reported in more than one media outlet—arises from not just Chinese nationalism but also an increasingly insecure American nationalism. Both are chauvinists.
US think-tanker Elsa Kania—whom I would not consider a China hawk—commented at the Forum that China’s recent military parade in commemoration of China’s victory in World War II “could be perceived as aggressive.” That prompted a Chinese journalist to plead for her to not “belittle the suffering of her people during World War II.”
Derek Grossman, a former Rand Corporation analyst, accused the Chinese side of “inflam[ing] tensions in an already very dark international environment.” That statement responded to China’s assertion that the Communist Party defeated imperial Japan (in reality everyone but the right-wing collaborators defeated Japan, including the nationalist Kuomintang).
One piece about the Xiangshan Forum reported breathlessly that:
audible gasps were heard from some American participants when Lieutenant-Colonel Hu Fengsheng, a researcher at the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, denounced the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty as “illegal and invalid.”
The Treaty of San Francisco established the basis for America’s system of bilateral alliances in East Asia, but it also forced imperial Japan to concede its control of Taiwan without resolving who would ultimately control it, leaving Taiwan in a kind of legal limbo. To denounce the Treaty, therefore, is to at once denounce the East Asian political order that formed around American primacy and the US interpretation of the Treaty as not conceding to the Chinese claim that Taiwan is an “internal matter.”3
These are all reciprocal signs of nationalist strain.
The Americans no longer have anything to say in spaces like the Xiangshan Forum, other than to deflect from their own poisonous imperialism by drawing attention to any Chinese behavior that might be laced with traces of expansionism, revisionism, or aspirations to hegemonism. Western governments reportedly downgraded the level of their participation in the Forum, from an assistant secretary level to a defense attache level (purely symbolic but meant to convey disrespect).
China, meanwhile, is doing something I can appreciate but that also makes me wary. Nobody save a few self-serving elites believe in American hegemony or a “rules-based international order” anymore. And everyone wants to fill that void with something. China’s GGI is filling it with something constructive; something that at least gestures at prioritizing the needs of the global South, which is the world’s majority. That’s admirable.
But the Chinese state is disturbingly self-regarding, and anyone who has rightly lamented the body count on American primacy over the years should be concerned about the potential for China to follow the same path or worse. As Ta-Nehisi Coates complained: “the privilege of a great power is incuriosity about those who lack it.”
I’ve seen how the Chinese interact with US delegations, and I’ve seen separately how they interact with small-nation delegations (I live in New Zealand, after all)…it’s different, haughty. The smaller powers don’t even realize it most of the time, but it reminds me of how we dealt with smaller powers as Americans in the unipolar moment. And that gives me pause.
China’s Xiangshan Forum was also scheduled to commemorate the infamous Mukden Incident—imperial Japan’s false-flag operation used to justify its invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The Forum event comes on the heels of China’s recent military parade, which correctly depicted the Pacific War as an antifascist war…but military parades are for fascists. China could have celebrated being on the correct side of World War II without displaying its most advanced weaponry, triggering far too much chatter from Washington hand-wringers. But a China that venerates a large, technologically advanced military can’t pass up an opportunity to give the PLA a little shine, even if it makes others fearful.
China, in short, used the Xiangshan Forum—and the recent SCO meeting and its recent military parade—to promote a self-lionizing narrative of World War II meant to legitimate its new Global Governance Initiative (GGI).
Americans could choose to be constructive here. The Mukden Incident was bullshit and China’s not wrong to be pissed about it. Japan has never adequately atoned for its imperial era. China was on the right side of history in World War II. And the GGI’s rhetoric envisions the kind of world that I wish US policymakers would embrace.
Western policy wonks get all foamy about each of these things, and that’s wrong. We shouldn’t be naive about what China’s trying to do, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it either.
The highlights of a life in foreign policy consist mostly of circulating in posh hotel lobbies with watery coffee, stuffed into ballrooms with an earpiece that lets you listen to simultaneous translation of different governments propagandizing each other for hours on end.
It’s possible to preemptively critique GGI—it’s self-aggrandizing, it evinces a gap between Chinese words and deeds, it’s a thinly veiled bid for hegemony, etc—but they would all apply to the previous “rules-based international order” too.
In 1955, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said “Japan has merely renounced sovereignty over Taiwan which has not been disposed of by the peace treaty and not ceded to anyone. Consequently the United States also could assert a legal claim until Taiwan is disposed of by some means. We cannot, therefore, admit that the disposition of Taiwan is merely an internal problem.”
Has there always been a US delegation to the XF? I remember mentioning it when drafting my regional architecture book thinking it was an SLD wannabe and won't last long, but here we are a decade later still writing about it!
On GGI, initial responses to it remind me of how most Asian and Western governments responded to the the AIIB. In the end, AIIB ended up not being such a bad thing. It also doesn't carry the same weight as existing multilateral development banks like WB, IMF, ADB (but curious if that's the impression in the developing world too). I assume reception to GGI will be similar to the AIIB. That said, global governance seems much more fractured than it did in the early 2010s so perhaps my own DC-centric biases will be proven wrong.
Great piece, Van. Very well balanced on the merits and self-serving (even destabilizing) aspects of China's GGI and the Xiangshan Forum.