Also, it's not clear it is in the US' interests to take those steps.

On tension in the US approach as Pompeo is outlining it is we both want regime change in China *and* for China to accept non-peer geopolitical status.

These may be in tension! https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1286722279150411778

Point blank, my personal belief is that a stronger CCP probably means a weaker PRC. Imposing stiff sanctions against China has two effects: 1. Weakening China generally 2. Rally-round-the-flag

i.e. sanctions often STRENGTHEN the sanctioned regimes internally

State owned enterprises weather sanctions better in many cases as, obviously, the state helps them make it through!

If your goal is regime change, as many libertarians, neoliberals, neoconservatives, and liberals desire, then sanctions aren't very useful. You want to see reformers win out in internal debate to produce a more open and liberal China!

Or, if you're a neocon, you want to see latent anti-CCP elements be stronger and rise up against the CCP.

Sanctions do not achieve this.

But if you're none of those basically-idealist frameworks (idealists come in many shapes and sizes), but instead a realist, sanctions may be very useful.

EVen if sanctions strengthen the CCP's grip on Chinese society, they may weaken China generally, and reduce the threat it poses. Furthermore, a democratic realist would argue that as the CCP gets stronger, its system weakens CHina.

i.e. that as the CCP gets stronger and undoes reform, that its policy initiatives will prove self-defeating rather than self-strengthening.

As it happens, I'm something of a democratic realist. I think liberal democracy is the most efficient system.

I think the rise of liberal democracy is not about idealism but that the liberals and democrats successfully murdered the royalists and fascists and communists in numerous wars and revolutions.

We were able to do this because liberal democracy is, I think, actually a superior system for organizing the resources of complex, modern societies. You can try other systems but in time you'll gravitate back towards liberal democracy, or be conquered, or become a backwater.

Now, this theory has a very long game. It is emphatically NOT the theory that "economic liberalization will lead to political liberalization." It's that "if liberal democracies engage in robust self- and system-wide defense, other forms of government will prove uncompetitive."

Thus, I favor aggressive action. Sanctions. Freedom of navigation. Huge increases in commitments to Taiwan. Support of less-awful regimes around China. NOT because I think this will create a regime change in my lifetime!

But rather because I think the way liberal democracy spreads is by defending itself and its international system and simply being better. China might never have regime change: and its population might fall incredibly low!

Large portions of the world are just as habitable as much of China with far fewer people!

If China wants to cling to their regime in the face of implacable liberal democratic opposition, fine.

They can do it without access to our capital markets. Without access to our technology. Without access to our universities, unless they want to publicly renounce the CCP and move here permanently.

In time, either the Chinese people will dislike this and change, or....

... they will simply drift into a 2nd-rate backwater country, mired in a middle-income trap, not a terribly great threat to the world...

... or some new Genghis Khan will arise in the world, and they will be conquered.

And Pompeo's thinking here seems muddled. He talks a regime change game. But his actual policy moves are very much oriented towards the realist approach.

But that's normal in American foreign policy, which can never fully escape idealism.

And of course a realist might choose to highlight the conflicts of ideology and values between liberal democracy and the CCP for the purpose of reminding liberal democratic publics of "why we fight," and perhaps provoking some in China to consider their position.

But all that to say....

"Regime change" is an unpopular word. And I don't think we should have an objective of regime change in China. It's unrealistic to think we have the ability to create and steer such changes. Also, it's not for us to decide.

Our objective should be to so alter the geopolitical playing field that *it doesn't matter* that the CCP rules China, because China isn't strong enough to do anything really terrible to the rest of the world.

So where to the Uyghurs fit in?

Well, we should be honest: nobody is about to march an army into Urumqi. Not happening (even though many moral systems would argue such a thing is justifiable!).

So if we operate from the assumption that *nobody is going to liberate the Uyghurs*, it clarifies what role commentary about them plays: it is a signal of how bad it would be to allow the CCP to have its way elsewhere. Proof that containment is important.

It is also a concrete place where democratic societies should be able to find agreement: even those that disagree about the need to contain China's power *in general* should agree that sanctions and other actions aimed at the Xinjiang question *specifically* may be justified.

The reason democratic societies should be able to find agreement is because our values and beliefs move us to genuine and sincere compassion for the people the CCP is persecuting: it's not just pretextually exploiting the Uyghur cause!

It's a realistic assessment that nobody is going to, arguably nobody has the ability to, go on an Uyghur Rescue Mission. All we can do is try to reduce the odds that what's being done to Xinjiang isn't done to Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the many other territories China has its eye on.

But we should not be designing our policies in a narrowly-targeted way *only* at this one issue. It is emblematic of the larger system of government operated by the CCP.

I agree this is the best thing we can do but absolutely not the only thing we can do. But yes, maintaining a society which is democratic, liberal, pluralist, materially wealthy, orderly and peaceful, transparent and accountable, is very important. https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/1286729609011175432

One of my regular schticks is that the best thing the US could do domestically and for advancing our strategic interests globally would be to increase funding of tax audits, anti-corruption investigations, and related efforts by an order of magnitude or two.

This is a nice article critiquing people like me who aren't technically China experts but do a lot of talking-about-China. Except it naively skips over the real reason WHY there's a new crop of people talking about China. https://medium.com/@anotherchinaopinion/chinese-communism-is-a-magic-mirror-52fec4a71bd6

And why is that?

Because the entire crop of "empathetic" and "experienced" commentators.... have turned out to be marks who got absolutely taken for all they were worth.

China has not been successfully integrated into the global order. Regardless of your beliefs about China's intentions, this statement is true. Hopes that accommodation would reduce tensions were absolutely wrong.

Decades of attempts to accommodate China's rise through dialogue and engagement have not prevented Hong Kong's 50 year handover being shorted by more than 2 decades.

Decades of experienced China-hands telling policymakers what their contacts in the CCP were thinking somehow led to Western governments being caught blindisded by the genocide of the Uyghurs until there were already a million in the camps.

It took non-governmental open-source intelligence and think-tank types to turn up these stories.

After decades of economic integration China's internal system is still essentially closed to competition from most foreign companies on anything like an equal footing, rule of law is still basically nonexistent, and they still routinely flout their treaty commitments.

(which is why China has one of the worst win-loss ratios of any big country in the WTO: because they sign the agreements then violate them at will)

All the hopes that China's rise could be "managed" that there wouldn't need to be direct confrontation that openness would lead to a partnership for mutual security in the Pacific were basically the vanity of experts who were duped by the CCP.

This is all basically just fact statements. Engagement and dialogue *failed*. The rise of new China watchers wasn't because of some mysterious rise in demand or arbitrary increase in jingoism.

The rise in new China watchers is because the old China watchers completely failed to do their job and so the wider political millieu is looking for experts who might be less completely wrong about everything.