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

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia…

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

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More from @TheDailyMao

26 Sep
Couple things to add here: this came right after Keith Krach visited Taiwan, where he discussed 'realigning supply chains' with both Tsai Ing-Wen and TSMC head Morris Chang. US policy is now to 1) protect TSMC vs Chinese competitors and 2) regulate who TSMC can sell to

1/n
The US will then use carrots (continued US subsidies, orders from US cos like QCOM AAPL NVDA) and the stick of 'protecting' against TSMC's Chinese competition to control TSMC by proxy.

The US wants China to set up substitutes to TSMC. That makes their stick more credible.

2/n
With TSMC firmly in the US orbit, the US believes it can then control the global diffusion of other technology such as 5G, AI, AR/VR, driverless cars, and robotics, as all of them benefit from leading-edge semicon fab capabilities

3/n
Read 12 tweets
24 Sep
1/4 With the latest sanctions, the US is changing its strategy in Xinjiang from ethnic destabilization to sanctions-based suppression of economic activity
2/4 Timing wise, the US knows the world fashion industry is slumping this year so they will be cutting suppliers left/right/center; so the US gave a powerful incentive to cut Xinjiang-based textile suppliers via the sanctions + withdrawal of ESG audit firms
3/4 The goal of US sanctions is still the same as with ethnic destabilization: prevent Xinjiang from developing and tying Central Asia/Russia with firms on China's east coast. This matters b/c the US doesn't want China to fill the post-NATO Afghan power vacuum
Read 4 tweets
16 Sep
Heard that Xi told Trump on Feb 5 that China was seeing early success in containing COVID, and wanted the US air travel ban lifted 'soon'

Trump interpreted Xi's words to mean that the virus was not that bad and it wouldn't spread to the US, and felt betrayed when it did spread
Of course, we now know that by Feb 5, the US likely had at least a few hundred active cases, if not more. Neither leader seemed aware of that at the time. Also, Xi emphasized test/trace/isolation but it's unclear if Trump thought that knowledge would matter to the US
Instead, Trump got advice from national security specialists like Matt Pottinger, who told him Xi must be lying and China's numbers must be much worse, and that travel bans would substantively contain the disease.
Read 12 tweets
8 Sep
(0/n): Serious Twitter thread time: I think the governing elites in both China and the US have a mental model of each other that is, in a few key political and economic respects, 10 to 20 (or maybe even 30) years out of date
(1/n): On a political level, until the 2017 <--> COVID timeframe, China generally saw the US as sometimes hypocritical and nearly 100% self-interested, but respected it as patient, confident, and competent, and critically, assumed it had a pro-business domestic consensus
(2/n): Specifically, China assumed that the US corporate class had political primacy, and was both able and willing to defend the Sino-US relationship from both natsec hawks, nativists, labor progressives, and human rights progressives.
Read 33 tweets
4 Sep
All, let's get some nicknames for the China Watcher community going - feel free to suggest new ones and/or vote for your favorites:

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian = Rapunzel
General R Spalding = General Basketball
Professor C Balding = Professor Rogaine

(1/n)
Gordon Chang = Nostradamus
Bill Bishop = Shabi
Adrian Zenz = Heil Turkestan

(2/n)
John Garnaut = The Princeling from Down Under
Mike Forsythe = Mike from Accounting

(3/n)
Read 6 tweets
3 Sep
@CarlZha Likely outcome: Jio tries cloning most of these Chinese apps with Google/FB/MSFT SDKs, maintained and coded by FAANG engineers, running on US cloud infrastructure, while India's native tech sector languishes and FB/Jio team up to pick India's next PM
@CarlZha Reliance has subverted and exploited India's developmental agenda for 50 years now

1970s hoarding of import licenses
1980s manipulation of the DMT market
1990s oil/gas with Itoh and Enron
2000s 2G scam
2010s Rafale tender and Jio peering agreements
2020 China app ban
@CarlZha Jio's own cloned apps are so bad they have to force them onto people's phones. ex JioMeet looks exactly like Zoom except without even Zoom's bare-bones encryption / security schema and with much worse compression, packet jitter, and lag
Read 9 tweets

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