Brian Burack is a senior policy advisor for China and the Indo-Pacific at the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center. He previously worked as an advisor to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Federal Newswire
What were your expectations as you began to study China and how did they match with reality?
Bryan Burack
Pretty much everyone I've worked with who has familiarity with China really enjoys the country itself–the physical majesty of it, the people, the elements of Chinese culture that have nothing to do with the Communist Party's totalitarian government–are generally wonderful. But it became pretty apparent over the course of my education and my professional life that the reality of the bilateral relationship was increasingly hostile and structurally problematic for us.
One thing that really matters as we evaluate the Administration's approach to the PRC today, is the fact that the United States for a long time has ascribed very little agency to the CCP.
Commentators talk about the relationship as the United States takes an action and the PRC responds. Obviously, the CCP has its own proclivities, intentions, and the capability of seeing them through. It's not a United States-driven relationship.
There are certain realities regarding how one should take the CCP at its word, [such as] the Xi Jinping Rose Garden episode. He promised not to militarize the South China Sea and not to conduct cyber attacks against the United States.
It is very apparent that we're dealing with an entity that is more than willing to stand up in front of the United States in the most public way and essentially lie to us.
I later went to the PRC as a staff member. It was shortly [after] this when the United States was becoming aware of the genocide of Xinjiang. But the CCP had not yet adopted the rhetorical line that the internment camps existed.
It's really remarkable to sit at a conference table with a number of CCP international liaison division staff and have every single one reject and literally laugh at the notion that there was mass human internment going on, then just a few months later for the line to completely turn on its head and say, “Well actually these reeducation camps do exist, they're a good thing, and they're responsive to legitimate concerns we have.”
Federal Newswire
What does the new Heritage Foundation China Strategy document say?
Bryan Burack
A lot of orthodoxies and dogmatic principles that had been part of the conservative platform for a long time had become increasingly untethered from the reality of the strategic competition in the US-China relationship.
As this is happening, certain elements of China policy were becoming and continue to be subject to significant disagreement among Republicans in Congress and conservatives.
Generally speaking, the Heritage Foundation also had a lot of changes happen, and… we've attempted to forage a third way: foreign policy that can attempt to discern, “what does the new conservative position need to be” on a lot of these issues.
The “Winning the New Cold War” report is the most authoritative place to look for Heritage's position on China issues in that new context.
There are a number of things that would be worth flagging that are a little different than where Heritage was on these issues in the past. A few of those things are very related to ongoing debates in Congress. It really speaks to the fact that this is not a settled area, but we're modernizing our approach and trying to come into alignment with the reality of the threat today.
Primarily, I would flag investment restrictions. This is something that… is an absolutely critical piece of the US-China security dynamic. It's just unacceptable–as we point out in our paper, and as [congressional] members like Mike Gallagher have pointed out–that we continue to fund our adversary to develop capabilities that will be used against us.
Potentially, the use of tariffs,,, and the use of whatever capabilities to promote onshoring, reshoring, or friend-shoring. The Winning the New Cold War paper reflects the need [for these] to be a part of our national security toolkit.
The report talks about banning certain apps, particularly Tiktok, but not necessarily limited to that, because there are other Chinese apps that would present similar threats. [The paper] also talks about export controls…, and finally, new approaches to foreign aid that are directly in response to PRC aggression.
The most prominent of those would be the use of security assistance authorities for Taiwan.
We're not saying that we are in a one-for-one analog to a previous historical context, because there is no context. But what we are in is a full spectrum competition that's currently short of armed conflict, and that basis really informs a lot of these policy departures.
We've never really had a situation before where we are incredibly reliant on our adversary for basic functions of daily economic life and even things like our military affairs.
I think it was this summer the CEO of Raytheon said that he had dozens of suppliers in the PRC and that decoupling was impossible. It's pretty alarming when one of the largest United States defense contractors publicly admits reliance on our primary adversary.
Similarly, I don't know that there is a historic analog for a situation in which the United States capital markets are funneling potentially multiple trillions of dollars into our adversary, knowing that that adversary government is shaping the investment climate to its strategic ends.
This sort of heavy economic interdependence is obviously something that's new for us. But the overall great power competition implication was useful to get at the scale of changes that will need to be made.
Federal Newswire
What can be done to de-escalate the tensions between the US and China?
Bryan Burack
There are old Foreign Affairs articles from the Trump years, wherein some of the top Biden Asia hands criticized the policy that they're currently conducting. One even uses the phrase, “Don't be an overeager suitor.”
It is ludicrous to think that the CCP doesn't know that establishing regularized bureaucratic dialogues are an excellent way of preventing the United States government from taking any real concerted action.
We've seen this time and time again, from historical analogs like the bundling of Taiwan arms sales, which contributed to the situation we're in today. We’re potentially as much as a decade or more behind on Taiwan arms deliveries.
We saw this throughout the course of the spring, where critical national security actions were delayed, diluted, watered down, or just trash canned, because we had these high level cabinet exchanges happening that were ultimately fruitless.
It should be cause for concern that further critical actions are not going to happen, because we're building towards a leader-level exchange between President Biden and Xi Jinping this fall.
The aperture for productive steps is relatively narrow. Congress is having a difficult battle over spending right now. If that does ultimately get resolved in a way where we can [get] something like regular order and a national defense authorization act, [that] could be a vehicle for China policies.
Even in a divided government, it's not totally unrealistic to pin some of our hopes on Congress on issues like reforming loopholes in our law that prevent executive agencies from taking action on dangerous apps - TikTok, for example - or putting forward ideas on export control reforms that continue to allow entities like Huawei to essentially beat US sanctions.
There are a couple of those things that are either likely to happen this fall, or at least are possible over the course of October and November.
There needs to be some kind of resolution on outbound investment restrictions.
We now have conflicting House and Senate language that's going to, at some point, need to be worked out, as well as the Biden administration's watered down Executive Order on the review and restriction of outbound investment.
There are other novel ideas, like expansion of CFIUS authorities to deal with foreign adversary land purchases in the United States. There's a basket of things that are productive and doable.
It's just a matter of, “Can we prevail over Congressional gridlock and dysfunction and interconference disagreement on some of the policy specifics? It's always a tough lift in Congress, but it's possible.
Federal Newswire
The Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on China have been working hand in hand on the majority of the issues. Is that helpful in getting progress on the issues in the other committees?
Bryan Burack
It's a little too early to say. The committee has a lifespan that's established in its enabling legislation. They're not even halfway through that lifespan yet, so they have some runway left.
I think they deserve a ton of credit for phrasing their actions in a way that has…preserved a level of bipartisanship within the committee and legitimized what they're doing. They started from an ideological and values base and are now building that out into specific contributions on things like the outbound investments, and that's great.
I have high hopes. They have the right people on staff. They have the right leadership. It's just a matter of, can they be in a position to [win over] folks that are recalcitrant, and will they have cover from leadership to prevail in those arguments?
Federal Newswire
What steps does Heritage recommend to mitigate the threat of conflict?
Bryan Burack
One of the problems is that our foreign policy bureaucracy is allergic to prioritizing.
We have successive administrations that diagnosed our biggest foreign policy challenge, that being the PRC. But we've been unable to shift resources into alignment with that strategic consensus across administrations and parties.
We're seeing an anemic allocation of our non-defense capabilities into the Indo-Pacific region.
There is [also]... the atrophy of our defense industrial base…[and] shipbuilding capabilities. There are a number of related issues, like consistently unfunded priorities from Indo-Pacific Command that we need to start being attentive to.
Obviously there are increasing limitations regarding United States’ munition stockpiles and production. Heritage has come to the conclusion that there are tradeoffs that we need to acknowledge, recognize, and address if we're going to deter conflict in the Taiwan strait.
What can we do to harden Taiwan's defense in the very short term? That's where we come to things that haven't been a characteristic of the United States-Taiwan relationship previously, such as foreign military financing and Presidential drawdown authority, which could be used to rush munitions to Taiwan.
Congress enacted the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, but we're seeing anemic and imperfect implementation of those authorities so far.
There's a tremendous amount of work we need to do and improvements that we can make, but essentially the tools are there now. The administration just has to use them.
Federal Newswire
Where can people go to track Heritage analysis and reports?
Bryan Burack
I circulate anything that I publish on Twitter @BryanBurack. The China paper is at www.heritage.org/china-plan.
The China Desk podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, former president of Radio Free Asia and former White House national security advisor.
