This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is the host of the Great Power podcast and author of “Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.”
Federal Newswire
What is the American Foreign Policy Council and what started the project that led to your book?
Michael Sobolik
When I was doing my exit with all my colleagues on Capitol Hill in 2019, I sat down with a number of folks and I made a point of asking each of them the same question: What is the biggest issue in US-China relations that you see but you lack the bandwidth to really sink your teeth into?
The consistent answer I got was the Belt and Road Initiative. I had this idea of writing a big white paper on how to go on the offensive against the Chinese Communist Party's biggest foreign policy project. I pitched the white paper internally and our senior vice president said, ‘this is too big. You need to write a book about this.’ My eyes got really big. I got really nervous, because that was not what I planned, intended, or at the time even wanted to do, but he convinced me, and it made sense.
Federal Newswire
What conclusion did you come to?
Michael Sobolik
When I started working on the project, the Belt and Road Initiative was beginning to be questioned over funding. In 2015 or 2016 the amount of money that Beijing was pumping into this project was massive.
When we say Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, what is it? The BRI is Xi Jinping's pet foreign policy project. It essentially is his gambit to shift the economic and strategic orientation of the whole world away from Washington and the West, toward Beijing in the East.
People primarily will conceive of the Belt and Road in terms of infrastructure, because they'll look at either big bridges, soccer stadiums, or trade routes that are being constructed, and they'll look at the construction projects and the trade that follows the construction, and they'll view the success or failure of the BRI primarily on those two metrics.
During the pandemic, BRI funding plummeted. Even after we came out of the pandemic, China's approach to foreign aid hasn't really resuscitated to those 2015-2016 levels. That's a whole other conversation about the state of China's economy.
The big question I had was, are China analysts in DC misjudging the fundamental goal of the CCP's foreign policy?
What surprised me is that BRI is entering a second phase that I think is really underappreciated. Not just the BRI as a project, but the CCP’s foreign policy is entering a second phase, which is the political deals that have been cemented and built upon over the past decade. They're now militarizing the Belt and Road.
You see this in the Pacific islands. You see this especially with what's happening with Cambodia and Southeast Asia. You see this in Africa, the Middle East, and in our own hemisphere, too. It is Xi Jinping's attempt to grease the skids for the expansion of China's political and military influence globally, and it's entering that second phase now.
The first phase was economics. The second phase is militarization, and I think that component is dangerous and also devalued by a lot of folks in DC, and I think it's really important.
Federal Newswire
As your book title suggests, the great game with China is on. How can we counter it?
Michael Sobolik
The book's starting point is the Cold War, which is contrary to the Biden Administration. We in fact cannot cooperate, compete, and manage competition effectively with this adversary. I understand that the desire is there, and certainly they're not the only presidential administration that wants to try to live in this kind of positive world. But if you listen to Xi Jinping and the strategic direction of the Chinese Communist Party and even Xi Jinping's predecessors, it is abundantly clear, not only to me but to folks who have been serving at the highest levels of government.
Recently, Matt Pottenger, the former deputy national security adviser who wrote the foreword to my book, made the case maybe better than anyone in America recently that Xi Jinping sees China in a cold war with America. It only takes one country to decide there's a cold war for a cold war to happen. That's proposition number one.
Proposition number two is that we're currently losing. Look at all of the really tough China policies that have come out of Washington–TikTok is a great example recently. You could look at what we've done with Confucius Institutes, intellectual property theft, or trade for instance. All of these issues are in response to problems that the Chinese Communist Party has created for the United States.
I remember that during the tail end of my time on Capitol Hill I took stock of all the legislation that was going through the Senate about China. All of it was playing defense. It was almost as if we were trying to hit “Control Z” to edit and undo our way out of three and a half decades of engaging Beijing.
Where the void that my book seeks to fill is good defense might win athletic championships, but good defense is the bare minimum of great power competition. You need to go on the offense and force your adversary to compete on unfavorable terrain if you want to win a cold war. That is the blueprint that I seek to give policymakers in my book.
Federal Newswire
How do you define this adversary?
Michael Sobolik
This is one of the most important questions in our China policy right now, and certainly we have no qualms with the people of China at all. If anything, they suffer the most from the Chinese Communist Party every single day. I'm in strong agreement with what I think is an emerging bipartisan consensus in Washington, that our focus is on the Chinese Communist Party.
It's not just an ideological or economic threat. I see the People's Republic of China as the latest inheritor of an imperialist foreign policy heritage. If you look at China's dynasties, all the way from the first dynasty in 21 BC to the final dynasty–the Qing, which collapsed in 1912 AD–China grew by a factor of four in that span of time. That part of China's history I think has been this gaping hole in our understanding ever since Nixon and Kissinger went to China in 1972.
Chapter two of my book portrays the CCP today as an imperial power. If you look at the BRI in imperial terms you see it very starkly, because the tribute system in dynastic China was never about economic terms or turning a profit. It was about securing China's place in the world and securing the Dynasty's stability domestically. That's a huge part of what the Belt and Road is today for the CCP.
If you understand that, you see different vulnerabilities in China's foreign policy that I think you would miss otherwise if you didn't see them as an imperial power.
Federal Newswire
What are the areas of effort we should be focusing on and how do we define them?
Michael Sobolik
Chapters five and six of the book are competitive strategies that I think if implemented or at least if tested, we could begin to gain the competitive advantage against Beijing.
Chapter five asks a really simple question: where is the Belt and Road Initiative weak globally and how can we exploit and test those weaknesses? Chapter six asks the question: how do those vulnerabilities trace back to the CCP's vulnerabilities at home within China itself? I think that's where some of the really competitive subversive options are for policymakers.
If we learned anything from the Chinese Communist Party, it was more worried about stopping information about the virus than they were about stopping the spread of the virus itself. Americans died because of that. How the Party relates to information is not just this human rights issue, it's a national security and homeland security issue for Americans.
The US government is not afraid of what someone is going to tweet tomorrow. The Chinese Communist Party is, so let's exploit that and compete there.
The biggest thing that I say in chapter six about this is we need to start making it more difficult and more expensive for the CCP to operate the Great Firewall. I talked with someone on my podcast about this a couple years ago…I asked, “were we doing anything when you were in government to do that?” He said, “no, nothing at all.”
Federal Newswire
Do you think it would be possible for the US to pursue a policy of reciprocity in our relations with China?
Michael Sobolik
I think reciprocity is one of the best litmus tests to expose who the CCP is, because if the United States were to sit down tomorrow and say, ‘okay listen, we're fine to let TikTok operate in America if you allow Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all these other apps to operate inside of China.’
If we sat down and said, ‘we can play ball with you guys. You just got to play ball with us.’ There is no way that the CCP would say yes to that deal, which is an illustrative moment.
I think with reciprocity, number one, we have to tell the truth to ourselves, that the goal of pushing that line isn't actually to get what we want, because they're just not going to give it to us. It is to their own strategic detriment if they were to take a deal like that. Because they're afraid of speech they cannot control. They're afraid of expression they can't control. I think the value of talking about the relationship in those terms is that it's so intuitive for Americans to understand it well.
Our economy and our political system are an open book, from Washington, DC all the way down to the local level, and it has always been an open book. Yet the CCP comes to infiltrate our universities and steal our IP to the detriment of not only US companies but jobs everywhere.
They flood our country with fentanyl, and when we try to enter their market they have this super long list of all these requirements we have to fulfill; foremost among them is creating these joint ventures where we have to give up our IP.
None of this is fair or free. Fair and free are concepts that Americans just at a guttural level understand quite well, and I think this is one reason why public opinion about China is in the tank across the board in America right now, because they're starting to understand with even more vibrancy, this is who we're dealing with. I think that sober realization is a good thing, even though it feels uncomfortable.
Federal Newswire
Where can people get your book, and where should they go to follow you?
Michael Sobolik
For the book, “Countering China's Great Game,” I would recommend picking it up on Amazon. My twitter handle is @MichaelSobolik. If you want to dig into some of my analysis, just hop on www.afpc.org.
The China Desk podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, a former president of Radio Free Asia and White House national security advisor.
