Page 2 of 2 Humble pie for Xi on Sunnylands menu
By Peter Lee
And immediately prior to President Xi's arrival in the United States:
A US businessman who was unable to leave China for nearly five years has returned to his home in the US. Hu Zhicheng was detained in China in 2008 when a former business partner accused him of commercial theft. ...
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters that Mr Hu had been restricted from leaving China because of an ongoing lawsuit.
"Now these restrictions have been cancelled according to legal proceedings. The relevant judicial cases are being handled," he said. [7]
All these initiatives add up to a message of conciliation from the
PRC to the United States.
Are these simply the cynical machinations of a hostile regime determined to disguise its motives and shield its actions? A low-cost diplomatic strategy to grease the wheels for an otherwise meaningless friendly photo-op with President Obama to boost Xi Jinping's domestic stature?
Or is Xi prepared to execute as well as offer some genuine concessions in order to obtain, if not the unlikely "US China partnership", more of a tilt toward China and away from the pivot coalition in Pacific affairs? Probably a key indicator will be how the "cyber-outrage" narrative plays out.
The United States has been methodically hyping the Chinese cyber-threat since November 2011, systematically escalating the attributions, the accusations, and the anxiety from initial suspicions of non-state hacking maybe originating in China to current declarations that the Chinese government and military execute a massive state-directed hacking program against US commercial, governmental, and military assets.
A climax of sort will be reached in Sunnylands when President Obama officially gets into Xi Jinping's grill and provides a dossier of alleged Chinese cyber-outrages and the costs they have inflicted on US businesses.
The US cyber-position is rife with contradictions, starting with the fact that the United States - with its technological assets, its central position in the world communications infrastructure, the National Security Agency's pressing need to build server farms the size of the Astrodome to store the petabytes of data it has accidentally stumbled across (which, by US law, is supposed to exclude communications inside the United States), and the fact that the United States followed up its proud record of nuclear first use at Hiroshima to become the first use state for cyber-weapons with Stuxnet, the attack on Iranian centrifuge facilities - is the king of covert cyber-activity.
As Kenneth Lieberthal of Brookings put it:
President Obama needs to be sensitive to the reality that, from a Chinese perspective, the United States nearly owns the cyber arena. America has the most advanced tools and capabilities, and the Chinese political and financial systems largely run on American software. China assumes the US uses that huge capability to its advantage. That is a perception that will be part of the equation in any serious cyber discussion. [8]
One has to wonder if America's "China cyber-threat" posture has something to do with the realization that the Chinese government had allowed the yuan to appreciate to its natural value and a replacement threat narrative was urgently needed to keep the onus on the PRC as a rogue state.
Today, the traditional narrative that "Chinese companies beat out US companies because of an unfair exchange rate advantage" has been superseded by the borderline racist "Chinese companies can't innovate and can only succeed by stealing US secrets" reboot.
Per NPR:
[I]f Chinese businesses can steal US technology, they can blunt the one big advantage US companies have in the global economy, which is their capacity to innovate. It is that spirit that explains the emergence of US companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google. Such companies, business experts say, have been far less likely to originate in China, because the business culture in China does not favor creativity. But they can always steal the products of US creativity. [9]
Then there are the accusations of military espionage, which lend themselves to even more dire narratives:
Lou Dobbs, CNBC: Remember, a little over a year ago, the Joint Chiefs made a similar statement, that in certain instances, intrusions in cyberspace will be considered an act of war against the United States and will be treated as such. What more ... what in God's name would it take to create an act of war? You couldn't do this in anything but the virtual world and have there be any doubt about it. It's an act of war. [10]
The Obama administration's high-profile jihad against Chinese hacking would appear to be an exercise in futility from a legal/diplomatic perspective.
Given the opaque nature of the Internet, it is unlikely that the United States will ever be able to document Chinese cyber-intrusion to a degree sufficient for an international commercial tribunal, let alone achieve the level of proof needed to launch a cyber-attack or cruise missile under international law. But that's not a bug, it's a feature.
What President Obama is presumably threatening is unilateral, discretionary, and unattributable off-the-books cyber-retaliation by executive order for cyber-infractions unless Xi acts on his dossier.
Things get better, in other words, or things get messed up.
Not exactly the Platonic ideal of justice, but extremely useful to the United States: it can unilaterally define the crime, attribute it, demand punishment, and, inevitably, declare that the punishment was insufficiently thorough and sincere, in a fashion that will be immediately familiar to anyone who recalls the US campaign against Iraq's WMDs and Iran's nuclear program.
I expect that, for the sake of improving relations with the United States, President Xi will consider accepting the dossier and ordering up a few cyber-sacrifices in the digital arena. Accepting the dossier and "doing something" will be a relatively momentous step for Xi, if he undertakes it. If the PRC acknowledges the validity of US cyber-complaints the issue will never, ever go away (unless a new, even more effective instrument of China bashing materializes).
I expect Xi will consider assuming his cyber-enforcement duties with the understanding that nothing he can do will ever be considered sufficient by the United States, any benefits China gains in return are conditional, transitory, and subject to immediate revocation, and his domestic stature will not be enhanced by cooperating with the US on this issue.
This impression will be reinforced by the reshuffling of President Obama's national security team. Tom Donilon, President Obama's National Security Advisor, is stepping down in July and will be replaced by UN Ambassador and erstwhile candidate for secretary of state Susan Rice.
Donilon was the architect of the "rebalancing" to Asia, or perhaps the architect of appropriating Kurt Campbell's conception of the pivot, renaming it, and, in the first months of President Obama's second term, repurposing it to achieve a measure of meaningful engagement with the PRC.
Donilon was known for his focus on managing the national security process and its diverse constituencies to secure a range of foreign policy options for the White House. Reportedly, he was very keen to schedule the Sunnylands summit (the first president-to-president meeting was originally scheduled for the G-20 get together in September), quite possibly viewing it as his swan song and a chance to bring to fruition his project for rebalance-driven engagement.
Donilon is probably right to feel a sense of urgency, since his successor is likely to take a jaundiced view at the possibility of a constructive and productive relationship between China and the US.
Judging by preliminary reports and her performance at the United Nations, including her full-throated advocacy of the Libya intervention and disregard for the consequences for the overseas victims of her flawed moral certainty, Ambassador Rice is more likely to be an advocate for a moral interventionist agenda within the bureaucracy and to the president than an objective facilitator of the national security process. [11]
Rice will be replaced at the UN by Samantha Power, who is, perhaps, even more of a moral interventionist (fun fact: Power, an important adviser to President Obama on foreign policy, had been blocked from a high position in the Obama administration because she had called Hillary Clinton a "monster" while acting as an Obama campaign surrogate in 2008. It would be interesting if the trigger for all this musical-chair activity was the retirement of Hillary Clinton and the possibility to finally slot Ms Power into the high foreign policy position it was felt she deserved. With Rice and Power in the top spots President Obama originally intended for them, it will be interesting to see how much influence John Kerry can exert as secretary of state.)
Given staffing trends, President Obama's own inclinations, and its crude political utility, I expect cyber-indignation to remain at the center of US China policy.
And I expect that President Xi, cognizant of the fact that he needs some goodwill from the US, no matter how transitory, will think seriously about the risky and highly consequential step of validating the US cyber-threat bugbear.
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