This commentary was first published by Nikkei Asia.

The White House has styled the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment announced by U.S. President Joe Biden in June as a $40 billion pathway to work with allies, partners and the private sector to offer sustainable, green infrastructure alternatives.

This marks the latest American effort to offer an infrastructure alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative. But given the disappointing results seen with previous such programs, it is imperative that Washington look for lessons in the successes of other more creative efforts in recent years.

Experience shows that the U.S. and its allies can win important infrastructure victories by being strategic, proactive and persistent, and by building close partnerships between government and private business.

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Consider the deal under which U.S. private equity group Cerberus Capital acquired a bankrupt shipyard in the Philippines last April, keeping it out of Chinese hands.

The U.S. embassy in Manila had alerted Washington to the business' failure in 2019, noting that its Subic Bay location provided the closest deep-water port access and ship supply and repair facilities to the disputed South China Sea and that Philippine officials were concerned about the prospect of Chinese companies moving in. Some in Washington showed interest, but the bureaucracy initially struggled to translate this into action. Fortunately, key players in the government persisted.

Working closely with Cerberus executives to overcome delays and a decision by the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) not to participate in the project, these officials developed a creative solution: obtaining commitments from the U.S. Army and the Philippine Navy to lease parts of the project area, thereby guaranteeing Cerberus the steady revenue stream it required to proceed. The deal was a big win but happened only through the ad hoc efforts of a few people.

The Australian government took a more proactive approach toward the sale of the Pacific arm of Digicel Group, which controlled much of the communications and internet infrastructure in six island nations, including Papua New Guinea. Two Chinese state-owned companies had immediately expressed interest in the assets when Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien put them up for sale in 2020.

The U.S. took a different but equally strategic approach toward a third infrastructure development of strategic importance: China's building of a deep-water port at Kyaukphyu on the Bay of Bengal in Myanmar.

CITIC Group, the Chinese state-owned lead investor, had initially proposed a $7.3 billion port complex which would have made Kyaukphyu as big as Southern California's massive Long Beach freight hub.

Some U.S. and Myanmar officials were concerned that Naypyidaw could be saddled with sizable debt for a project of questionable commercial viability as the Chinese proposal included loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Myanmar to finance its 15% stake. CITIC was to take 85%.

In response to a request from the National League for Democracy-led government, Washington's embassy in Yangon used funds from an existing U.S. Agency for International Development program to hire independent experts to conduct due diligence on the project.

They succeeded in downsizing the project to $1.3 billion and doubling Myanmar's equity participation to 30%, thus avoiding the need for borrowing from China. Going ahead on a smaller scale then greatly reduced concerns about potential repercussions.

These three efforts demonstrate that the U.S. and its allies can, when they focus imaginatively, offer countries in the region viable infrastructure options that reduce their dependence on Chinese investments.

They also highlight, however, that this process remains ad hoc and needs substantial improvement. For the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment to be successful, the U.S. and its partners must adopt a more systematic strategic approach.

This approach should include three components. First, the U.S. should build on its recent appointment of a global infrastructure coordinator at the State Department by moving that position to the White House. It should give the coordinator authority to bring together personnel from different agencies and ample staff of his or her own and provide a clear mandate to identify and pursue priority infrastructure projects aggressively.

Second, the U.S. must make better use of existing tools by bolstering the DFC's flexibility, requiring each embassy to assign an officer to identify potential projects and ensuring senior officials match Beijing's aggressive lobbying efforts.

Third, the U.S. infrastructure team should forge partnerships with private companies on specific infrastructure projects and redouble efforts to overcome the obstacles that have hindered cooperation with allies, including Japan, which on its own has achieved success on the infrastructure front, to co-finance and coordinate so as to avoid needless competition.

These recommendations will take commitment, political will and resourcing. But if Washington wants PGII to succeed, it will require the White House's strong commitment and a willingness to be nimble and creative in responding to opportunities.

The U.S. has made many promises in a variety of programs on global infrastructure development and consistently under-delivered. PGII must prove it can get things done.

James Carouso leads the advisory board to the Australia chair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Scot Marciel is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center of Stanford University and a former U.S. ambassador to ASEAN, Indonesia and Myanmar. Both are senior advisers at strategic advisory firm BowerGroupAsia.

This commentary was first published by the Los Angeles Times.

The 104-minute speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the country’s 20th party congress reveals a leader who believes he is on a historic mission to save China’s self-described socialism in the 21st century.

Xi’s Oct. 16 speech launched the twice-a-decade meeting, which concludes this weekend, where the national Communist Party appoints its leadership and announces China’s policy direction for the coming years. The address reads very much like a sequel to his previous one five years ago. At that time, Xi cryptically said China had entered a “new era” of socialism. This time, he characterized his aim as “building a modern socialist country,” which the state media touted as the highlight of the speech. This statement clarifies his ambition to prove the superiority of socialism by 2049, with an implicit aim to surpass the U.S. by the centennial anniversary of the People’s Republic of China’s founding in 1949.

Xi is driven by the grand “Chinese dream,” the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” that he referenced in his 2017 and 2022 National Congress speeches. He appears to view himself as the sole individual who can achieve this dream in the 21st century, perhaps casting himself as a 21st-century Mao Zedong. His plans — including “common prosperity” and “socialist modernization” — are long term and unlikely to shift even following the recent turmoil caused by COVID-19, China’s harsh lockdowns in response and the resulting economic pains.

These ambitions are the same ones promoted by the Xi administration over the last decade. But by the end of this latest congress, Xi will have cemented an unprecedented third term as president, and he can now be more aggressive than before in their pursuit.

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It follows then that U.S.-China relations are unlikely to improve in Xi’s next term. He has shown, time and again, that he differs from his predecessors, except Mao, in that he does not shy away from conflict with the United States. Xi has felt comfortable declaring that “the East is rising while the West is declining” and positioning the U.S. as a challenge to overcome, rather than an obstacle to avoid, on the road to the Chinese dream.

On the other hand, China will probably strengthen ties with Russia, North Korea and other like-minded authoritarian nations, just as the U.S. is strengthening alliance networks in the region, including with Japan and South Korea. We are, as Henry Kissinger once said, in the “foothills of a Cold War.”

The Taiwan Strait remains central to how quickly and drastically conflict could escalate. Xi’s latest speech reiterated that China wanted to gain Taiwan peacefully but “will never promise to renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.” He frames unification not as a choice but as a historical responsibility, which has been placed on his shoulders. Xi’s direct mention of Taiwan unification at the party congress suggests that he will use that issue as a justification for his long-term reign.

One factor that will help determine the actual longevity of Xi’s rule is whether meaningful protests against him will emerge. Xi’s policies and crackdowns against dissent have yielded sporadic protests that made international headlines. In China, however, the threshold for revolution is quite high, creating major barriers to a regime change. A large dose of state-led nationalism and indoctrination convinces people that the U.S. in particular is determined to torpedo China’s quest for modernity, creating an enemy to rally the country around.

China’s economic challenges pose another hurdle for Xi’s long-term agenda. The country’s rigid zero-COVID policy has limited growth, and Xi has displayed a heavy-handed approach toward private businesses, dampening entrepreneurial spirit. If Chinese people come to think of Xi’s anti-market tendency as the underlying problem, it will erode his authority.

To stave off such threats, Xi is likely to continue his iron-fist rule. He has purged enough rivals and earned enough grievances over the years that relaxing his power grip at this juncture will likely invite criticism, if not revenge, toward him. He is eager to turn China into a global power that will awe the West. As Xi put it at the 2017 party congress, China is increasingly taking “center stage in the world.” With Xi still at the helm, we should expect a more aggressive China and increasing turbulence in the regional and global order.

Gi-Wook Shin is the director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Seong-Hyon Lee is a senior fellow at the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations.

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Feng is recognized by the Shorenstein Journalism Award for her stellar reporting on China under strenuous conditions. She was joined by two other China experts on a panel about the future of China reporting: Stanford’s Jennifer Pan, a professor of communication and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs (FSI), whose research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics, and Louisa Lim, an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC, and who also serves on the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award. FSI Senior Fellow Andrew Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford, chaired the discussion. 

The Appearance of Foreign Media Coverage 

As China has grown into a geopolitical superpower, understanding Beijing’s decision-making is more crucial than ever. Yet under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the number of foreign correspondents on the ground has atrophied, digital surveillance has intensified, and online censorship of sources has tightened. Being tailed constantly during reporting trips is now the norm, says Feng, and many sources are running dry, no longer willing to talk to reporters. “This kind of digital surveillance not only stymies public discourse and civil society in China but also inhibits our understanding of the country,” Feng notes.  

More worrisome still is the rise of harassment, in person and online, of foreign correspondents and the portrayal of their work as intelligence gathering for foreign governments. Feng described how Chinese state media outlets, local government officials, and security personnel have been gradually laying the ground to cast foreign reporters as agents of foreign influence — accusations that carry physical danger and legal costs for reporters. “That kind of language is particularly tough on ethnic Chinese reporters like me,” says Feng, who has personally confronted race-based harassment and xenophobic nationalism. A year ago, for example, she discovered she had been unknowingly subject to a national security investigation related to a story she had done half a year earlier.

In addition to whittling down the number of foreign correspondents on the ground and increasing the pressure on those who remain in the country, China’s COVID restrictions have been detrimental to press freedom. The foundations of journalistic work — talking to people, fact-checking, traveling to gather information — have become nearly impossible. 

These increasingly challenging conditions have forced Feng and other China reporters to sacrifice the kind of stories they tell about the country, often filing dry reports that diminish global interest in China. “The result,” says Feng, “is a growing opacity, and opacity about a country as big as China breeds suspicion and mistrust. But it seems to be what China wants: the appearance of foreign media coverage without truly getting to the heart of what is going on in the country and without access to the people making the stories happen.”

A Vehicle for the CCP

In her remarks, Professor Pan described China’s changing media landscape and the rise of digital repression. Fundamentally, she explains, media in all its forms in China is a vehicle for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to preserve its staying power. But while the Chinese government has always worked hard to control the domestic information environment, it is now increasingly limiting what the world can know about the country. “The Chinese government thinks it can tell the China story better.”

Altogether, Pan notes, these recent trends — the rise of digital censorship in all its forms, the government’s ability to influence the production and consumption of information, cyber harassment, and undermining of journalists and their work — indicate that the Chinese government has many levers at its disposal to constrain not only the activity of journalists but also limit their reach and influence.

It remains to be seen, however, whether all these efforts will produce the outcomes the Chinese regime wants. Clearly, by eliminating access to foreign correspondents, the world will know less about China, Pan says. “It’s less clear whether this will be advantageous in the long term for the CCP.”

Reshaping the World’s Media

What is filling China’s information vacuum? Since she left the country after reporting from China for a decade for the BBC and NPR, Lim has been interested in this question, or what she calls “the other side of the campaign to marginalize foreign journalists and to cut down on the coverage from China.” 

Jointly with the International Federation of Journalists, Lim has examined how China is trying to shape a singular story from its perspective by bypassing resident correspondents who speak Chinese, study China, and are savvy about Chinese history, culture, and politics. Her investigations reveal that the Chinese government targets journalists — particularly local journalists from countries in China’s periphery, like Pakistan or Bangladesh — offering them paid tours in China and other enticements in exchange for pro-China reports that it then features in state media. For example, in these pro-China reports, the political indoctrination camps in Xinjiang are portrayed as vocational training camps designed to combat extremism.

“You can see how foreign journalists are being used to legitimize and validate China’s tactics,” says Lim. “That’s why it’s so important that we have sources on the ground telling other stories, but also why that work has become harder. It speaks to the importance of the media and of what China calls ‘discourse power,’ how important it is to China to tell the China story in a particular way.”

Reconfiguring Our Knowledge of China

What is the future of China reporting? There has been a noticeable shift to remote reporting, Feng explains: not only in the sense of reporting on China outside of the country but also in relying on different sources of information. “Traditionally, in journalism, we travel and meet people, but I find more and more that reporting relies on data. The advantage is obvious: you might be blocked from accessing a detention center in Xinjiang, but it’s hard to block satellite images of these camps. This opens up a whole new area of China reporting that relies on data journalism.”

Another development, notes Feng, is the emerging beat of “China and the rest of the world.” Foreign correspondents now increasingly report from outside of China on the perceptions of China around the world and tell stories about how China influences all manners of countries and sectors. However, there are costs to this process of reconfiguring our knowledge of China without being in the country, Feng says. “The cultural context and the human reporting are lost, and it is that kind of in-country reporting that helped us make sense of the facts and figures that come out of this massive country.”

Feng, therefore, worries about the future of China reporting. “I don’t worry that China is about to take over the world or invade Taiwan, but I do worry that in the off-chance that this does happen, we won't have enough correspondents on the ground to make sense of that.”

She also cautions that there is no next generation of China correspondents building experience to replace those who are leaving the country and to take up reporting when she and others move on. “There are no new young academics or journalists who want to come to the country, and those who want to are unable to do so. In this vacuum of explanatory, investigative, or simply empathetic reporting on the country, I fear we begin to accelerate toward more misunderstanding, mistrust, and perhaps even conflict.”

“I look forward to returning to China and reporting again if I can, but I hope other people take up the mantle soon,” she concluded.

This commentary was first published in The Hindu.

India and China appear to be mending fences, gingerly. Relations have been icy since China launched multiple incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in mid-2020. After years of inconclusive military talks and halting “disengagement” from sites of confrontation, the rivals made inching progress last week. They completed disengagement in an area known as Patrolling Point 15 (PP15), pulling troops back to create a demilitarized buffer zone, and their leaders met in person at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand.

The tentative conciliatory steps between two nuclear-armed rivals are important; but they also carry risks, especially for India.

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Despite the latest round of disengagement, the LAC remains deeply unsettled. Observers have pointed out that the buffer zones produced by the crisis inhibit India’s ability to patrol its own territory. And India and China have tacitly agreed to postpone settlement at two other confrontation sites, including a particularly tactically valuable area known as Depsang. The buffer zones and Depsang’s status both suit China’s objectives because they limit India’s military activities near the LAC, which analysts judge had partly motivated China’s initial incursions in 2020.

Similarly, the military threat on the border is not only undiminished, but has actually grown over the course of the crisis. The reinforcements that each side deployed since 2020 have not returned to garrison. Even if future rounds of talks continue “disengagement and de-escalation,” and reduce those forces, returning to the status quo ante is now impossible. Both sides have raced to build permanent military infrastructure near the border, to help them surge forces to the border. Unsurprisingly, China seems to have outpaced India in building these roads, helipads, and communications nodes. 

China still claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own, and just as it has pressed its maritime claims once its growing capabilities permit, its military build-up may portend increasing pressure in coming years. Even without a deliberate attack, the increasing capabilities and mobility on both sides of the border means that a crisis can more quickly escalate to a large military stand-off anywhere on the LAC, and possibly even trigger a conflict.

Strategic implications
 

As vexatious as the tactical picture may be on the border, the strategic implications are more dire. For over two years, the land border has become the overwhelming priority in India’s military competition with China. India has reassigned one of three originally Pakistan-facing Strike Corps to the China front. It has deployed its newest artillery, fighter jets, and drones to the China border. 

At the same time, India has not significantly improved its capabilities or posture in the Indian Ocean region. Granted, a suite of impressive new capabilities — from cruise missile-equipped fighters and U.S.-origin naval helicopters to a brand-new indigenously-built aircraft carrier — are inching towards fruition. But these programmes were all initiated before the border crisis, when the Indian military was incrementally modernising its capabilities for the Indian Ocean.

Whether or not by design, this must delight Beijing. As India and China jostle for security and influence in Asia, the contest in the Indian Ocean will inevitably intensify. Their respective capabilities to project military force across the Ocean, to coerce or defend smaller regional States, and to establish an enduring strategic presence there, will determine the Asian balance of power. With the border crisis, China seems to have successfully fixed India’s gaze to the land border, at the expense of that more consequential competition over the Indian Ocean.

Disengagement at PP15, and especially continued “disengagement and de-escalation,” has the potential to ameliorate this strategic trap. A progressively less urgent threat will tempt New Delhi to de-emphasise military readiness on the border. This could be a golden opportunity for Indian planners to work towards long-term military modernisation and political influence across the Indian Ocean region. But a likelier and riskier outcome is that decision makers will prioritise other, more politically salient issues, like gaining quick wins in the campaign for Atmanirbharta in defence industry — which may come at the expense of modernisation.

Paradoxically, then, a cooling crisis on the border may teach India the wrong lesson: that the short-term expedient of greater readiness is enough to see off the Chinese threat. In fact, and especially for the strategic prize of the Indian Ocean region, the challenge posed by China cannot be met without long-term growth in Indian national capacity. That, in turn, requires coherent strategic assessments and the political will to balance readiness with modernisation.