lmao this assertion is wrong on 3 levels

First, China hasn't done a "hardline switch", because that implies political liberalization was the status quo when it definitely wasn't. China has been, is, and will be a Leninist state, and any recent shift is simply mean reversion

1/n

In fact, the China of 09 was an aberration: it had top-level leadership (Hu/Wen) who wanted more liberalization when most of the Party didn't, and it pumped so much stimulus it helped reflate the entire global economy (when China has historically been quite parsimonious)

2/n

I was in China then. I saw 1st-hand how Chinese banks and SOEs saved GE/JPN toolmakers, Korean electronics companies, US banks, and Western govts and corporates in general - and while letting Western NGOs flourish and engage with Chinese civil society.

3/n

In fact, it can be argued that 2009 China did America the single largest foreign policy favor of any country in the post-Cold War era - by keeping the American system of global trade from imploding while still paying lip service to US-centric civil society actors

4/n

...and then what happened?

2009, the US trashed the Cophenhagen agreement rather than cooperate with China on climate change
2010, the US kicked off the SCS mess by forcibly inserting maritime claims into the agenda at a China-ASEAN-US summit

5/n

2010-12, the US slapped down Chinese engagement with JPN by engineering a palace coup against Yukio Hatoyama and then quietly backing Shintaro Ishihara's idea to nationalize the Senkaku Islands

And, in the biggest "f*** you" to China...

6/n

Engaged in a massive military buildup and diplomatic offensive on China's doorstep from 2009-15 (the "Pivot to Asia") even as China was helping the US fix the world economy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_foreign_policy_of_the_Barack_Obama_administration#The_pivot

7/n

So, to recap,

a) not only was China being unusually liberal & economically generous from 09 to 15, but

b) the US was constantly increasing its diplomatic and military presence in the region to contain China even as it begged for Chinese help to fix the world economy

8/n

You know what's an easy tell for this? IMF quota aka voting power.

It's supposed to be based on GDP, openness, macro stability, and FX reserves. China has 6% of the quota - a fair allocation is over 2x that (!), at 13-14%. Who has been blocking this shift since 2011? Guess.

9/n

At the same time, corruption in China had become a massive sociopolitical issue. What did the US do? Wink and nod at Chinese officials fleeing overseas with ill-gotten assets while using corruption as a HUMINT opportunity and tut-tutting about political reform as a panacea

10/n

China sincerely *tried* to solve each of these problems in cooperation with the US from 2011-13. But the US just paid lip service to Chinese concerns while continuing to do what it was doing. I saw this firsthand.

11/n

So then China tried solving these issues on its own but as non-confrontationally as possible.

- The anti-corruption campaign
- BRI/AIIB, which bypassed IMF/WB governance issues
- MIC 2025, which focused on domestic tech development to rebalance away from export-led growth

12/n

Also remember that at this time the SCS had not been substantially militarized yet - besides policy papers China hadn't been doing much of anything on the ground.

13/n

How did the US respond to China's (quite non-aggressive) fixes? It treated them as existential threats to its global power and went for full on diplo, econ, and mil containment.

This was under Obama, *not* Trump.

14/n

In 2014 Chuck Hagel told a room of us that he was getting fired as SecDef. He said it was about ISIS but we all knew the real reason:

Chuck was guilty of trying to keep PACOM uberhawk Harry Harris and his pet "analyst" James Fanell from starting Cold War 2.

@BadChinaTake

15/n

Others wanted that Cold War as well: Kurt Campbell, Ely Ratner, James Clapper, the Seiwa Political Analysis Council, and most of all Hilary Clinton.

Hilary was supposed to win in 2016 and lead a Cold War lite vs China.

16/n

Fun fact about Harry Harris: Shinzo Abe once flattered Harris by telling him that Harris reminded Abe-san of his grandfather. Yes, *that* grandfather. The literal colonial governor, war criminal, mass rapist, and equivalent of Albert Scheer in Imperial Japan.

17/n

@CarlZha

In addition, while Japan's PM was busy using the starvation-level exploitation of China's Northeast to flatter America's top Pacific military commander, the TPP was getting negotiated to economically contain China, and the US was trying to cause capital flight from China.

18/n

The TPP is well understood, but capital flight isn't. Here's how it worked:

There were 5 Chinese financial conglomerates with political links that spent (or borrowed) USD against China's national balance sheet to buy up assets abroad. Wanda, Anbang, Fosun, HNA, and CEFC.

19/n

The US encouraged these companies to siphon Chinese capital abroad. The US wanted to engineer a 1997-style financial collapse... while recycling Chinese financial flows into TPP economies that would then contain China. It almost worked (see 2015 below)

20/n

At the same time, the US was stepping up ideological warfare against China. The 2011 Jasmine protests (where the US ambo marched with demonstrators in a gross violation of diplomatic protocol); the 2014 Occupy Central and Sunflower protests; all had US support.

21/n

The Sunflower protests - against the Trade-in-services agreement between China and Taiwan - allowed the US to stall China-Taiwan finserv integration and force China to a US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty which would make the dollar drain from US-China permanent.

22/n

Lastly, on the mil front, the US began stepping up freedom of navigation patrols in the SCS and had the Philippines pursue a UNCLOS case against China that could give the US justification (via the PH-US treaty) to sink Chinese ships or sanction Chinese companies...

23/n

...while pursuing THAAD with Korea to track Chinese ballistic missiles and signing wink-wink nuclear deals with India so that they could expand the quantity/quality of their nuclear arsenal - and dramatically stepping up cyberattacks on Chinese companies (ie XCodeGhost)

24/n

So, to recap:

After China tried solving its problems in as peaceful a way as possible (BRI, anti-corruption, MIC 2025), the US began a Cold War lite in all but name:

Mil: FONOPs, UNCLOS, THAAD
Econ: Capital flight, TPP, TTIP
Diplo/Ideological: 茉莉花革命, 太阳花学运, 占中

25/n

All this happened BEFORE Trump. Much of it happened even before China's 2016 land reclamation spree in the SCS, which was when China made its proverbial "line in the sand" concrete.

The US has been structurally hostile from the very beginning, while acting innocent.

26/n

Now, 2016-17, what did China do?

Mil: SCS reclamation
Econ: crackdown on capital flight, expansion of anti-corruption campaign overseas, RCEP/AIIB
Diplo: more BRI, increased outreach in international organizations

Are these disproportionate or aggressive? Heck no

27/n

At every moment, China has been trying to dial things down. SCS island reclamation is *defensive*, not offensive, and enhances stability. Same with international outreach or building up new institutions like AIIB...

28/n

...even China's 5G push is fundamentally peaceful and *anti-offensive-SIGINT* if you look at Huawei's proposed architecture vs, say, what Samsung, Rakuten, Jio, Microsoft, or VMWare want to do in that field

29/n

To conclude, the US has been hostile to China since at least 2009, but in spite of all that, China has been acting like the responsible stakeholder the US asked of China - responding to every US move - even Trump's insanity - with stability-enhancing countermoves.

30/n

@beijingpalmer, China is not "hardline". No, for the last 10 years, China has been the grown-up, and America has been the ungrateful, perfidious, myopic, structurally hostile, and petulant child, and I hope anyone who believes otherwise is not in the next administration.

END