Noah Smith is clueless about China, and that's a problem for you (Part 1)

Watching Noah Smith commenting on China is like watching myself talking about the French parliamentary system: it’s simply painful to watch.

I am genuinely shocked I managed to hit my poll target less than 2 hours after launching it. I asked for at least 30 votes. Instead, I got at least 155 votes, with a 31% turnout and a whopping 94% of voters wanting me to write this piece, the sort of near-unanimous poll results that you can only find in China’s National People’s Congress ^_^. Some of you even write to me in emails or text messages urging me to do so.

I didn’t expect to hit such a nerve. You, my dear subscribers, have practically destroyed my weekend with your bare hands. I spent the last 2 days slaving over my laptop. With a piece of contemporary Chinese sarcasm: “I thank you for it! 我谢谢你哦!”

So now, by popular demand, here is my full critique of this tweet from Noah Smith and the dangerous and erroneous ideas it represents. 

Watching Noah Smith commenting on China feels to me like watching myself talking about the French parliamentary system: it’s simply painful to watch. I have no expertise or credentials to publicly talk about this subject.

And neither does Noah about China. How can someone who doesn’t speak Chinese, who seems to know very little about Chinese history, have the balls to opine on China? But he never puts out enough disclaimers for his lack of knowledge, and he is popular enough to be able to shape, and amplify, public opinions.

Of many of his errors about China, today I will only zero in on the single tweet above, which captures so well a fundamental misconception about China. I want to explain to you what is wrong, why it is wrong, and whether there could be a better theory.

Assumptions and beliefs

Any serious argument should begin with a review of basic assumptions. Most of the time when two people argue, they are only arguing in parallel universes. That parallel universe is the basic belief system that one adheres to. It’s also why people are usually never able to persuade other people. Because it’s almost impossible to change one’s core beliefs about oneself and the world. You can’t persuade someone in the 1200s that the Earth is round as a ball and not the center of the universe. You can’t convert a Muslim into a Christian.

So it’s only necessary for me to start at this level.

Behind this short tweet lies Noah Smith’s core belief about China. I will call this belief the Insecure-Expansionist China Myth. According to this belief/myth, China is an expansionist but insecure empire in the making, ready to unleash its ambitions of conquest onto the world. 

Please note my words here: expansionist, and insecure.

These are two contradictory, but logically intertwined traits. A country becomes expansionist only because it feels insecure. It feels insecure so it needs to pursue expansionist policies.

There are some famous Insecure-Expansionist Empires in history, such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, and, cough cough, certain big country located to the north of China (though I wouldn’t call that country an “empire” right now.) Invariably, certain “us vs them” kind of insecurity gripped those empires, leading to ultimately self-destructive over-expansion.

Here is the thing, which is something I have long observed and I want to make it super explicit: Noah, and many people in the West, have this belief that China belongs to the camp of those Insecure-Expansionist empires, that China is but another version of Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and Imperial Japan.

And by contrast, here are my core beliefs in this area, where I draw the line:

1. China is not Nazi Germany. China is not the Soviet Union. China is not the Empire of Japan. You can’t assume any nation rising to a similar level of economic power as the Anglo-American world to automatically become a conquest-driven, Insecure-Expansionist Empire.¹

2. When generations of Chinese leaders including Deng, Jiang, Hu, and Xi talked about the “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development” of China and the need to avoid the Thucydides Trap, they meant it. We genuinely believe this is both necessary and possible. Achieving an advanced economic status for a quarter of the world’s population without resorting to war is a noble cause that we believe in and will feel accomplished about.

If you think these beliefs are rubbish, and that I am brainwashed, please terminate reading now. We will have no meaningful dialogue here.

But if you think there might be something to this idea, please read on. I will go deeper into why China is not an Insecure-Expansionist power.

China does not feel insecure, life-and-death-wise

Let me clarify what I mean here.

I am not talking about how ordinary Chinese people feel about themselves. Of course, there are a lot of insecure feelings, about jobs, income, education, and healthcare. All of these insecurities make modern-day Chinese life a quite stressful experience.

I am also not talking about “insecurity” in the sense of “national security”. Any government in the world has the obligation to ensure the security of the country and its citizens. Institutions like the military, foreign service, and intelligence service exist to protect a country’s national security and to advance a country’s interests in that regard. China has all of these, just like anyone else.

What I am talking about is a sense of insecurity at a much deeper psychological level - a type of security of existential proportions, that of a Darwinian survival instinct to prevail over all others, that of an epic struggle between good and evil, between life and death.

Of those, China has almost none.

China is too old a country. Wars, famines, revolutions, warlordism, deaths - we have seen it all. In the "Story Behind" article of Baiguan, we emphasized the importance of understanding history to understand China’s choices. Many Chinese are history buffs. I bet it may be mind-blowing for you to imagine that, for many of us, the main contours of our 3,000-year written history are more or less etched in our minds.

The result of this millennia-long “un-forgetfullness” is that we weigh things on a massive scale, with many, many historical precedents in our heads. One funny thing I remember was that last year, when Prigozhin launched that 1-day rebellion, instantly Chinese people began to compare this with at least 10+ similar episodes in Chinese history. And, for a 3000-year-old soul, it is easy to see through the meaninglessness of war and destruction. We know there are better ways to manage ourselves.

And when it comes to foreign relations, we also need to understand the idea of “Tianxia天下” or “Under the heaven”. The Tianxia worldview imagines a world where the central civilization (the Middle Kingdom) achieves a high level of economic might and cultural authority, while the peripheral nations come as tributary parties to pledge loyalty.

The idea of a tributary system is quite interesting. At the height of Chinese power, many nations around China came and paid those tributes. But they were not forced to do that. They did it voluntarily because they would get gifts that were way more valuable from China as repayment. It’s a “You come and pay respect, we pay in cash” kind of scheme. It’s simply too profitable to resist paying tributes to China.

To me, this is a bit stupid, and not something economically sustainable. But that’s something we do. When Mao Zedong sent engineers to help Tanzania and Zambia build railways, while the Chinese people themselves were only living at a subsistence level, that was but a modern version of the old tributary system. And who can deny the whole Belt and Road idea is not a more financially viable version of that system?

8th Century mural, showing court officials (the 3 people on the left) receiving tributary envoys from the West as well as Korea (the 3 on the right)

But that’s not to say we have no problems in foreign relations. We have a lot, but many of our problems stem not from insecurity. In fact, our biggest problem is that sometimes we feel too secure, the idea of “Tianxia天下” is still quite dominant, to the point we can look patronizing to other people, especially the smaller countries, so much so that we may sound obnoxious, even resentful. Personally, I think that is a huge problem that we need to fix. It leads to a very bad international image and runs against the modern idea of equality. This also explains to a large extent why many ordinary people in smaller neighboring countries such as South Korea and Vietnam resent China to this date.

China is like this entitled brat in the school, born as a fifth-generation scion of an old-money family, taking many things for granted, who is also socially awkward and likes to show off his book genius. He wants everyone to like him but doesn’t yet know how. He fumbles through his way. At times he can even look like a joke. Many people look down on him because of it, which can irritate him, and he can act foolishly angry. Sometimes, people call this irritated response “wolf-warrior diplomacy”.

But again, this is not the insecurity problem the Noah Smiths fantasize about. It’s the opposite: an over-security, or over-confidence problem. You would not expect that little brat to start a school gang and beat you up, no matter how obnoxious you find him to be.

China wants to be liked, not to be feared, and there is a key difference here. Only insecure people want to be feared. The Chinese just feel too good about themselves to want that. We are yet to understand how to win respect while feeling equal with others.

That desire to be liked, rather than to be feared - a desire to be respected through economic and cultural might, rather than through the use of force - by the way, is the very essence of all these talks about achieving the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

China is not an expansionist power

Because of this lack of existential anxiety, China is just not interested in becoming a warring hegemon the way you imagine.²

As I say, an expansionist power is also an insecure one. Existential insecurity is the secret fire that leads ultranationalists or religious zealots to go on an expansionary path, a path once taken can only breed more insecurity, leading to yet more expansion. This is the vicious loop that brought down the Nazis and the imperial Japanese in the end.

China is simply not like that.

Think about this: We all know that China has at least 3 millennia of continuous written history. Of all those 3000 years, if China were an expansionist country, surely its tentacles would have been able to reach the western end of Eurasia? It took Mongols only a few decades to reach as far as Kiev, and Gaza. It only took the Greeks 10 years to reach India under Alexander the Great. Have you ever wondered why hasn’t China done the same, despite a full 3000 years of waiting time? Why has China only cornered itself in this particular pocket of East and North Asia, for a full three thousand years?

Geography is the key here. China’s plain areas, including North China Plain, Yangtze Plain, Sichuan Basin, and Wei River Plain, together make up Eurasia’s largest and most fertile agricultural land. On the other hand, those fertile lands are boxed in by the Tibetan Plateau to the southwest, the Pamirs to the west, the Altai to the northwest, the Mongolian Plateau to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the east and south, making expansion beyond the central plains very, very costly. For most of the time, it only makes sense to be content with governing over the central plains and extracting the most out of it, rather than embarking on foreign adventures by over-taxing the central plains.

The Pamir Mountains. These are the mountains Chinese armies and supply lines would have to climb to conquer Central Asia

Were there expansionist episodes in Chinese history? Yes. But those episodes were very brief and served only as the exceptions that proved the rule. For instance, Emperor Wu of Han (156 – 87 BC)’s very expensive conquest of nomadic Xiongnu tribes almost destroyed the Han dynasty, to the point he wrote the famous “Edict of Self-Confession罪己诏” to ask for forgiveness. The Sui Dynasty (581 to 618 AD) was less lucky. Imperial overreach led to civil war that eventually brought down that short-lived empire. (By the way, China only reached the maximum extent of territory during the Yuan Dynasty, which was essentially a Mongol dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty which was ruled by the Manchus, a semi-nomadic ethnic minority group.)

The dynamic is the same: as soon as China looks outward aggressively, mass mobilization and over-taxation will create so many internal imbalances, ultimately leading the system to self-implode.

These are all cautionary tales for future scholar-officials to deploy in order to dissuade rulers from foreign adventurism. Chinese rulers historically are evaluated with the yardstick of “cultural and military feats文治武功”. Note that culture always comes before the military. And here, even the military feat is only about fending off attacks from nomads and pirates, ensuring security for the central plains, not about bringing back how much loot from foreign lands. It is, ironically, also the same dynamic that ultimately led China to close up and lag behind the Western world in the 1800s.

But the cultural distaste for war and foreign adventures lingers on. For example, I always have this thought experiment, that if China were the US in 2003, would we go to war with Iraq?

Hell no! It would sound inexplicable to Chinese parents to send off their kids to fight a foreign battle, in a foreign land, for some foreign cause that has nothing to do with daily lives at home. What for? Are you nuts??? This is simply not thinkable.

Put it simply: For most of us, military conquest is not cool.

Home is the sweetest. Many parents whose children were studying abroad would want their children to come back home in the end. When I studied abroad, my grandma was always worried I would get mistreated and even beaten up by foreigners. It would be an impossibly hard sell to persuade these people to go on an expansionist path. There is zero political capital there.

Now I hear you, I hear you: “If China is so “peace-loving” as you have said, why are all those border disputes? Why is the question of Taiwan? Why, from what I read from my media, does China seem so aggressive?” I do not want this piece to be too lengthy, so I wrote a separate explainer on this question for those of you who are interested.

Back to the tweet

So ends the assumption-laying stage, which is, I believe, the most important stage. Once this stage is over, the rest will be quite brief. But again, if you do not agree with the above assumptions, this article will mean nothing to you.

Now we turn our attention to Noah’s 4-theory tweet. The tweet was about a mass removal of PLA generals, an event that has been rumored for months but only recently got confirmed. Solid analysis byBill Bishop on this topic by the way.

(Note that I refrain from using the word "purge" here, something I explained in the inaugural post of this newsletter. The word "purge" sounds too Stalinist to be accurate.)

Noah looked baffled as to why, in peacetime, Xi would "purge" so many generals, despite the damages it could have done for China’s supposed expansionist ambitions. For his logic, it doesn’t seem to make sense. He did some hunting in the forest and brought home 4 nice theories for us. To be honest though, if someone uses 4 possible theories to explain something, it can only mean that person has no clue about a topic. But let’s dive into them and debunk them one by one.

“1. He wants to fight the U.S. and is purging ppl who don't want to”

"2. He doesn't want to fight the U.S. and is purging a rogue hawkish faction"

Theory 1 and 2 are two sides to the same coin. They are easily debunked if you do not buy into the Insecure-Expansionist China Myth.

“Fight the U.S.”? In what way? Is this a Pearl Harbor kind of fight, or a streetfight in San Francisco? What war plans are you referring to here, specifically? Are you referring to the “China is invading Taiwan by 2027” myth? It’s a myth that I have debunked before on purely logical grounds.

Rather than "fight the U.S.”, China is simply more interested in the growth and prosperity of its people, and the attainment of advanced physical and cultural wealth. Again, as I explained above, China wants to be liked, not feared.

"3. He got wind of a coup attempt"

Ridiculous. Do you seriously think a coup in the way you imagine will be feasible in modern China? Here, I would like to remind you that in the entire history of the PRC, there has never, ever been a coup in which the No. 1 guy was successfully dethroned, nor has there ever been a confirmed attempt to dethrone the No.1 guy. Even the coup of 1976 that smashed the Gang of Four was done with the blessing of the then No.1 guy, Hua Guofeng. This system has been so well-tooled that every member of it is just a cog in the machine and dispensable. There is simply zero chance for a bunch of generals, who are not even very high-ranking, to do something like a coup.

There are indeed many people unhappy with Xi. But to turn that unhappiness into a coup will take several leaps of faith, in a highly extraordinary situation. Again, we are not the Third Reich of 1944, when the German race was on the brink of extinction as a result of Hitler’s recklessness, and even lower-ranking generals and colonels could muster enough courage to conspire for a coup. The wrong historical analogies gave you the wrong prediction.

"4. He's just gone insane like Stalin"

Oh, the Stalin analogy. Didn’t I tell you people like Noah just imagine China to be a Soviet Union type of power?

Stalin really is the archetype of a “dictator”. Manipulative, power-hungry, ruthless, cold-blooded, one man above all. The Great Purge of Stalin was an especially notable episode, which I assume Noah is referring to here.

When you make an analogy between two people, you cannot turn away from looking at the historical contexts of the two. Those contexts - the time and the circumstances - shape decisions.

I happen to be an avid reader of WWII and pre-WWII history. It may surprise you that my learning in that regard started when I was barely 12 years old, starting with a 50th-anniversary documentary of WWII (yeah, heavy stuff for a kid). To some extent, studying that period opened the gate to my long-held interest in learning about history in general. So I do have something to say about Stalin.

Originally, my understanding of Stalin was the same as Noah's: an insane person. How can someone be so bloodthirsty to kill so many of his own generals and colleagues? He had to be insane and evil.

But the more I read about the historical context, the more I understand, that very likely Stalin is not insane. (No, I don’t mean I agree more with Stalin’s choices, as a human being. I just say he may not be insane.) Nowadays when people talk about the Great Purge, few people comment on the historical context. Historians like to trace the Great Purge to 1934, when Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party boss and Stalin’s beloved comrade was assassinated. The Purge reached its climax during the 1937-1938 period when top generals and key party members were show-trialed and executed en masse.

What was the situation like in 1937-1938? Let’s take a look: Nazi Party had already been in absolute power in Germany for full 5 years, and Germany was well into re-armament. It was already 1 year after Germany re-militarized the Rheinland in breach of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was openly calling for an expansion of Lebensraum to the east. In 1938, Germany forcefully merged with Austria. Only 1 year later, German troops marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland. At the same time, on the east side of Eurasia, Imperial Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. People may forget now but at the time Japan’s arch-enemy was actually the Russians. Japanese strategists long set their eyes on the Russian Far East, and a major war was brewing. It was not until the decisive Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 that Japan completely stopped expansion in that direction.

Sitting in the chair of Stalin, you would feel one thing: insecurity. Not just the typical Russian-style insecurity, but insecurity to the extremest level, that of an apocalypse when the country is going to be gobbled up by land-hungry powers on both sides. The Soviet Union of that period was an archetype of the “Insecure-Expansionist” complex I talked about: because you are insecure, you try to expand to protect yourself. So it was not surprising he conspired with arch-enemy Germany to carve up Poland, and then in 1939, only 19 months before Germany launched a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets chose to invade Finland. Stalin also heavily interfered with Chinese politics to set China as a pawn against the Japanese threat, something Mao felt very bad about.

And the whole Great Purge happened under that context. I am pretty sure most of those killed were innocent, a lot of the convictions were fabricated, and Stalin was ruthless, terrible, and not some leader you would willingly work for. But he was not insane. He was right about one thing: an existential crisis was coming for Russia. Less than 3 years after the Great Purge, Barbarossa happened. In that most horrific war in the history of mankind, 27 million lives in the Soviet Union died. In hindsight, we may argue about the way it was carried out, but he was simply not taking chances on the loyalty of his own Red Army generals, many of whom hailed from Imperial Russian background, to prepare for such a terrible struggle.

Now, why did I digress so much on the topic of Stalin? Because I want to highlight to you the clear contrasts in historical contexts here.

Are we in a similar period of history as Russia in 1938? No!

Is China facing an existential threat? No!

Is a great battle costing the lives of millions on the horizon? Absolutely not!

So what’s there to be insane about? What help for global peace it does to paint China’s leader as “insane”?

I am not sure about the U.S., but the government in China is not stoking war. Nobody here feels we are going to fight for anything. From what I see, despite all the tensions, everything in the China-US relations is still operating well within a normal course of business.

So please stop these unhealthy fantasies.

So what happened with the PLA?

A full critique of Noah’s theories would not end well without offering my own theory.

To start, this is not the most serious mass removal of military brass in history, not even the most serious one in a decade. Remember, in the 2014-2017 period, generals who were much higher-ranking were arrested for corruption. That long list includes both of the two vice-chairs of the Central Military Commission (Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou), who were the highest-ranking uniformed people in the PLA structure (and there are only 2 vice-chairs at any given time), as well as heads of Joint Chiefs (Fang Fenghui) and Political Work Headquarters (Zhang Yang). The generals we see today were just small potatoes compared with those years.

The relationship between PLA and corruption is also deep. In fact, PLA was allowed to engage in doing business and making profits until just 25 years ago, when former President Jiang Zemin banned it in 1998 (Jiang later thought this was one of his 3 biggest achievements, video link). Effectively, this means what we may characterize as corruption today was not corruption as late as 1998.

Within this context, I would not be surprised if the PLA is not the cleanest military organization in the world.

At the same time, when so many generals have been affected, it is likely to also have something to do with counter-espionage. Maybe not all of those generals were selling secrets, but some of them may well be. It could well be an intertwined case between corruption and/or espionage, with one case leading to another, snowballing into something massive.

And like any normal country in the world, what Xi did was well within the realm of reason. Nobody would allow serious corruption, let alone espionage, in your defense mechanism.³

Again, I am not privy to exactly what happens (Otherwise, I will not be here to comment on this matter.) I am just trying my best to come up with a theory that makes sense to me, and I am not afraid to put up this disclaimer to show my lack of knowledge.

Why does this discussion even matter

Under my previous poll post, Kevin McSpadden of A6 - Where the world happens commented that:

I can't vote cuz the app keeps crashing, but my comment is I don't really care so I would say "no, there are more interesting topics".

This is indeed why I held back myself and started the poll first. I do think many of the ideas I have expressed here are so rudimentary that I feel it’s a waste of time to argue.

But then again, as I said in the About section, the core mission of this newsletter is to try to avoid a situation where we go to war for a nothing burger. And Noah Smith to me is one of those people who are fanning this nothing burger to war. And he is very, very influential, not just for regular folks but for key stakeholders and decision-makers as well. And I know one thing, no matter how peace-loving we are, sustained talks of war can change us as well. It takes two to tango.

The perceived threat of war will lead to war.

In this sense, I have to take on Noah sooner or later.

I envision several installments for this “Noah Smith’s China cluelessness” series. In the indefinite future, I may also write Part 2, Part 3, and more. I want this series to come in handy for you, so next time you find Noah doing it again, you can help me pass on to him a link, to urge him to stop.

1. I am not alone in stating clearly China is not Insecure-Expansionist. Another writer, Ningnanshan宁南山, wrote this piece (in Chinese) last year explaining why China is not Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan using the idea of “geographical depths”. If you would want me to translate this piece, let me know.

2. There are only a few exceptions of existential crisis, such as during WWII, when the nation ran the risk of extinction during the Japanese invasion. But that episode is only about self-defense, not aggression.

3. Yesterday, Bloomberg had this fanciful story that corrupt PLA people were filling missiles with water, not fuel. This story made no sense. China of today is not the China of the Qing Dynasty. The feedback loop and tracing mechanism for accountability is very quick. And China is firing hundreds of missiles every year for training. So it’s very easy to get caught doing this level of stupidity. This, practically speaking, would not make anyone dare to do such kind of thing. I also don’t buy into the story that, as Jordan Schneider’s retweet, “corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case.” Because, as you have already known from my writing, I don’t believe there is such “major military action” to speak of, apart from only one contingency situation when Taiwan declares independence, in which case China will have to take military action, water in missiles or not.