No limits, p.1
No Limits, page 1
No Limits
First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by
C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.
Copyright © Andrew Small, 2022
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: November 2022
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781685890193
Ebook ISBN 9781685890155
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943339
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
a_prh_6.0_141658919_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. When Doves Cry—How the United States and Europe Woke Up to China
2. Nobody Does it Better—British Spies and the 5G Question
3. Tainted Love—Trump, Merkel and Germany’s China Problem
4. Burning Down the House—China’s Shock to the System and the Crises That Mattered More
5. Fever—The Politics of the Pandemic
6. Can’t Buy Me Love—China’s Troubled Coalition-Building Campaign
7. No Limit—China, Russia and the War With the West
Epilogue
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book could not have been written without the help of a great number of colleagues, friends, supporters, and sources. While the primary phase of research, and all of the writing, was conducted from 2019 on, the book draws on meetings and interviews that go back to 2003, as well as my wider experiences in China since 1998. As such, thanks are owed to a particularly expansive array of people. Given the critical nature of much of the text, however, I will refrain from listing the friends and colleagues in (particularly) Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou who have been so foundational to my understanding of China, and provided me with opportunities as a teacher, fellow, intellectual partner, and regular visitor to the country. I appreciate your continued ideas and advice, and hope for better times.
The German Marshall Fund of the United States has been my professional home for most of this period. The range of locations covered in the book is indicative of the space and support GMF has afforded me to rove across so many areas of Chinese policy, and the US and European responses to China’s rise. This includes the people responsible for bringing me on board in the first place, and setting in motion GMF’s efforts on China and the transatlantic relationship—Craig Kennedy, Bob Kagan, and the late Ron Asmus. Dan Twining was my closest and most important collaborator for many years, and translated the whole agenda of transatlantic cooperation on China and in Asia into reality during a period when few others saw its importance.
I am very grateful to Jamie Fly, who did so much to steer that agenda through a particularly challenging period for the transatlantic relationship, and trusted to include me in so many of the most interesting parts of that process. I’m also grateful to Bonnie Glaser, Kristi Govella and my other colleagues on the program for giving me the chance to push this book to completion well after it was ostensibly finished, and setting the Asia program on its successful course. Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and the Berlin office provided a fantastic welcome as I relocated there over the course of the project. The Stockholm China Forum, supported by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, was at the center of GMF’s work on China—both the transatlantic exchanges and continued efforts to engage with Chinese counterparts—and the source of so many of the most useful insights from its participants down the years. I’m grateful for the longstanding cooperation with Borje Ljunggren, in particular, over the lifetime of the forum.
I was hosted as a fellow by the European Council on Foreign Relations for a core period of the book research. I’m grateful to Mark Leonard for bringing me on board, and for all the support and collaboration during my time in Beijing back in the days of the Foreign Policy Centre. I would like to thank the teams from ECFR’s offices—particularly in Madrid and Rome—who helped put my visits programs together, as well as the support from the Asia program, especially Manisha Reuter and Rosa Melissa Gehrung. I also benefited from both the expertise of other members of the institution, and opportunities to join their activities, especially Jeremy Shapiro and Jonathan Hackenbroich.
The book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation. Well before the topic achieved such prominence, Allan Song encouraged me to sharpen a wider research proposal to focus on the shifting approach towards China among US allies in Europe, which is at the heart of the book. SRF’s flexibility as the project evolved—not least through the complexities of getting the research conducted through the course of the pandemic—was also greatly appreciated. With the subject exploding politically, even in the early months of the research, I published preliminary versions of the analysis in the book in a variety of outlets, and am grateful to the editorial teams at Foreign Affairs, GMF and ECFR for bringing these essays and reports to life.
I would also like to thank my agent, Jonathan Conway, who translated my early drafts into lucid and sparkling proposals, gave extensive notes on the texts, and made sure the book found the right home(s). I am very glad that one of them is Hurst. I’m delighted to work with them again for my second book, and am grateful to Michael Dwyer for his support, Tim Page for his great edits, and everyone else at Hurst. I am also excited to be working with Melville House, and am very grateful to Carl Bromley for his extensive comments, as well as the rest of his team, and George Lucas at InkWell Management.
A long list of officials, ministers, journalists, members of parliament, and businesspeople, talked freely and candidly to me over the years, and provided the most important material for the book. The bulk of them are in the cities where I have lived—Beijing, London, Brussels, Washington, DC and Berlin—but I am also greatly indebted to many of those in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Stockholm, Warsaw, the Hague, Vilnius, Geneva, Tokyo, New Delhi, Taipei, Islamabad, Male, and Kabul, to mention only those that feature directly in the book. I am particularly grateful to those who not only went on the record but took the time to look at sections of the text and correct my mistakes and infelicities, especially Keith Krach and his team, and Martin Selmayr. With a small number of exceptions, I chose not to cite most on this list by name—in part because most of them are still serving in various capacities, but also because the bulk of the interviews were contemporaneous, and the terms under which the conversations were conducted precluded their being directly attributed.
I can however, thank at least some of those in their personal capacity—rather than as the officials that some of them were or are—where I have benefited from interviews, comments, invitations to helpful events, assistance, or just reading their work, including: Matt Turpin, Tom Wright, Ely Ratner, Michael Schiffer, Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Dave Shullman, Tanvi Madan, Ryan Hass, Dan Rosen, Evan Medeiros, Jeremie Waterman, Jonathan Hillman, Jeff Smith, Laura Rosenberger, Dhruva Jaishankar, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Evan Feigenbaum, Abe Denmark, Liz Economy, Dan Markey, Jennifer Hillman, Rush Doshi, Andrew Shearer, Barney Rubin, Siddharth Mohandas, Lisa Curtis, Michael Pillsbury, Randy Schriver, Jennifer Staats, Thomas Kellogg, Kaush Arha, James Schwemlein, Gary Schmitt, Dan Blumenthal, Phil Saunders, Garima Mohan, Dario Cristiani, Dhruva Jaishankar, Chris Buckley, David Rennie, Jörg Wuttke, Kerry Brown, Patrick Chovanec, Aaron Friedberg, Nadège Rolland, Raff Pantucci, Minxin Pei, Frédéric Grare, Sarah Raine, Volker Stanzel, Reinhard Bütikofer, Thorsten Benner, Nils Schmid, Metin Hakverdi, Sabine Stricker-Kellerer, Mathieu Duchatel, Abigaël Vasselier, Agatha Kratz, Giulio Pugliese, Giulia Pompili, Giulio Terzi, Mario Esteban, Todd Hall, Jane Perlez, Alexander Gabuev, Jakub Jakubowski, Vijay Gokhale, SL Narasimhan, Indrani Bagchi, Suhasini Haidar, Shivshankar Menon, Pramit Pal Chaudhari, Saeed Shah, Fazal Rehman, Hamayoun Khan, Mosharraf Zaidi, Mirwais Nab, Thoriq Hamid, and Mohammed Nasheed.
The two clusters of research expertise in Europe that deserve extra mention are MERICS and the world of François Godement, in his various different guises. The former I was able to credit in the text, focused on Sebastian Heilmann’s tenure as director, though it has also gone from strength to strength under Mikko Huotari. He and other former researchers, including Lucrezia Poggetti, also generously sat for more formal interviews. François Godement has occupied a crucial role in the China debate in Europe for decades now, magnified by the fact that so many people who worked for him are now leading intellectuals and officials in their own right. The emerging policy consensus looks like the one he sketched out many years ago.
Stuart Lau, Finbarr Bermingham, and—first as journalist, now as colleague—Noah Barkin have changed a dry, insider topic into a juicy set of news, policy stories and analysis, and much of the book has benefited from their work.
I am grateful to Paul Roberts for introducing me to the Maldives, well before any China related questions there were in anyone’s minds, and everything that we were able to do together there and in the neighborhood since then, from Hambantota to Hulhumale. I also benefited from a fellowship at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore for a key part of the Maldives developments; I’m grateful to Nitin Pai, and colleagues—especially Pranay Kotasthan
Amy Studdart was a part of so many of these stories and had to put up with me for swathes of the writing and research process. Her input and support has been invaluable in more ways than I can possibly list, in Washington, DC, in Brussels, in China, in the worlds of technology and democracy support, intellectually, and personally. Po made an important contribution too, albeit with less direct ramifications for the text.
I received many kind offers to read the drafts, but among my friends, I am particularly grateful to Peter Sparding for going closely through the full text. Desmond Shum has helped me sharpen my thinking on all the subjects here, since my early days in Beijing, and I was thrilled that his own book allowed so many others to benefit from his insights and way of thinking.
One person couldn’t be accorded the credit she deserved in the text itself. Janka Oertel was a protagonist in many of the dramas outlined in the book in recent years, and much of the 5G story, in particular, is really hers (though she would tell it better). There is little in the book that she didn’t provide, help, or improve, from the most practical support to the most challenging critiques. She did more to make this book possible than anyone else, and has been an incredible partner.
My family’s love and indulgence during all these travels and relocations has helped make this possible too, and this time also featured my mother’s help with Italian material…
All the errors, omissions, eccentric selection of material, and failures to grasp key points about the workings of the Radio Access Network and lawful interception, are mine alone.
INTRODUCTION
THE MESSAGE THAT POPPED up on my phone was a little shocking. It was late January 2020, and COVID-19 was hitting China hard. The note from my Chinese friend initially appeared to be analyzing the impact of the worsening crisis on the country’s GDP numbers. But there was more. He was trying to understand the rationale behind some of the Chinese government’s decisions and was troubled by what he saw. This was a system he knew from the inside out. Serving members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Chinese Communist Party’s top decision-making body, had once been his dining companions. He understood the way they thought. And his conclusion was a dark one. It seemed to him that the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.
Although I was skeptical, some of the moves Beijing was making were at least consistent with this analysis. Even as it locked down domestically, the government was demanding that countries around the world remain open to Chinese visitors and denouncing anyone that tried to stop them. China’s foreign minister turned up at a security conference in Munich to announce that “China has effectively curbed the spread of the outbreak beyond our borders” while hundreds of thousands of Chinese travelers fanned out across the world.[1] Yet as an attribution of malign intent, this seemed a step too far. It felt like conspiracy-theorizing, though I knew my friend wasn’t prone to that. I reflected on the note occasionally in the months that followed, as the world was convulsed by the pandemic, wondering whether I had been sober-minded and judicious or simply failed to make the mental leap that understanding Beijing’s behavior increasingly required.
Then later that year I opened Bob Woodward’s new book and saw that the US deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger, the architect of much of the Trump administration’s China policy, had taken the warnings more seriously. “Several Chinese elites well connected to the Communist Party” signaled that they thought the government had a “sinister” goal, the opening pages explained. “China’s not going to be the only one to suffer from this.”[2] I was sure that the same analysis had found its way to Pottinger, one of the few serving US officials to emerge from the Trump years with his reputation enhanced, not least for his critical interrogation of Beijing’s COVID-19 concealment efforts. It was among the reasons the United States shut down inbound traffic from China in February, virtually the sole element of Trump’s handling of the crisis that he could legitimately tout as a success. I shot my friend a note: “You’re in the first chapter of the Woodward book!” He replied with what I took to be the emoji equivalent of wry, dark laughter.
* * *
—
When we had first met in Beijing in the early 2000s, it was Zhongnanhai, the Party’s leadership compound, that brought us together. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, was due to visit London, and we had embarked on plans to launch a new program of think-tank activities during his visit. China’s relations with Europe were heading into a new era, and we hoped to help sketch out some ideas for their future course. I was in China to negotiate the modalities of the event with my Chinese counterparts, including the sensitive matter of gaining Wen’s personal imprimatur. But the man who was handling the most delicate contacts with Wen’s staff, who had got the whole initiative started, was not one of the academics who were my ostensible opposite numbers. It was an intriguing figure from the Chinese business community.
Desmond Shum and his wife, Whitney Duan—to take the anglicized names that they frequently used—were a rarity in the Chinese corporate world. Most of their peers were monomaniacally focused on racking up as much money and influence as possible, with philanthropy only another instrument to facilitate these goals. They, by contrast, were seemingly also on a mission to improve the caliber of Chinese policymaking and intellectual life. This certainly did not preclude the money and influence. Most controversially, their proximity to the Wen family would blow up in a New York Times story that detailed Duan’s role as the white glove handling billions of dollars that flowed from their stake in China’s largest insurance firm, Ping An.[3] But they had other priorities too. They were funding chunks of the economic policy work at China’s elite universities and think-tanks, such as Tsinghua and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. With China’s journalism scene flourishing, Desmond explored plans to put together a Chinese equivalent of the New Yorker. He was not satisfied with a hands-off benefactor role either. He was personally engaged in circumventing the layers of what he saw as ossified Chinese bureaucracy to channel ideas and advice directly to the leadership. This was where our work on the Sino-European relationship kicked in.
The early 2000s were a period of near-unabashed mutual enthusiasm among Chinese and European policymakers, and the Beijing of that time seemed physically to incarnate the sense of opportunity. Shanghai had already gone through the most dramatic phase of its transformation in the 1990s, driven by the natives of the city that were then running China. Now it was Beijing’s turn. In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, the skyline of this far lower-slung city was increasingly punctuated by architectural mega-projects, and the old atmosphere of wood-burning stoves and gritty street life was making way for shopping malls, luxury car dealerships and five-star hotels. For visiting European politicians, it was beguiling. The Chinese government had always done a masterful job at making its political visitors feel like they were far-sighted historic figures deliberating on the fate of the world. Now they could do it in high style too.
The sense of reform and opening was tangible. China had recently acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO), having accepted and seemingly delivered on the most stringent requirements any new member had ever faced, slashing tariff levels and opening up major industries to foreign competition. If European companies could gain even greater access to the Chinese market during the next phase of economic restructuring that everyone expected to follow, the future of entire sectors of the European economy would look different. Visiting CEOs were confident. The Chinese economy was still comparable to the likes of the UK and France in scale, and its companies complemented European industrial and technological strengths. Those malls and dealerships were selling European cars and luxury goods and were built with the invisible support of innumerable specialist engineering firms from across the continent.
Another group of foreigners was excited too. Few of the budding China hands I knew in Beijing at the time had come to the country because they wanted to prepare themselves for a role in a future great power contest. Instead, most were enthusiasts for the literature, the language, the food, the history, a different civilization, a different way of living and thinking and understanding humanity. As China was stepping out onto the global stage, it seemed that the rest of the world would also come to benefit from a richer immersion in all the things that had first entranced them.
