Michael Auslin has called for a ‘new realism’ in US foreign policy toward China, one that ‘begins with an official acceptance that we are locked in a competition with China that is of Beijing’s choosing’. Moreover he suggests that Sino-US dialogue must be ‘reset’ and ‘conducted not as an unearned gift to Beijing, but only when there are concrete goals to be achieved’.

While some, such US National Security Advisor Susan Rice, may dispute the first claim as ‘lazy rhetoric’, the second admonition to structure the relationship through a focus on the concrete goals and interests of each party isn’t as easily dismissed.

The problem in the current climate of Sino–US relations, however, is to identify areas in which those interests overlap to ‘mutual benefit’ more than they diverge. China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) strategy is an area that holds potential.

According to John Hudson, where US officials see China’s resurgence and ambition in the Asia–Pacific as the core driver of regional insecurity, in Eurasia they see a ‘surprising convergence of US and Chinese interests’ that ‘boils down to one mutual goal: security’.

From this perspective, Beijing shares Washington’s desires to see a stable and secure Afghanistan and Pakistan due primarily to Beijing’s own concerns with Uyghur terrorism in Xinjiang.

The strength of this view is based on two major factors.

First, the OBOR itself, while growing out of a decades-long agenda to firmly integrate Xinjiang and overcome Uyghur separatism and terrorism through the delivery of economic development, looks set to engage China more directly in the problems of the region. With its focus on the development of trans-regional infrastructure links and investment, such as the ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’, the OBOR would give China a greater stake in the future security and prosperity of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama administration officials have approvingly noted that China’s plan mirrors the intent of its own aborted ‘New Silk Road Initiative’ of 2011. Indeed, the logic of that effort suggests some complementarity between US and Chinese interests.

Second, the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, which China has attributed to militants based in the Af-Pak tribal areas, has arguably revealed to Beijing that it can no longer rely on the partial ‘outsourcing’ of its security to the US military presence in Afghanistan nor the Pakistani military along the Af-Pak frontier. Instead, Beijing must revise its to-date largely ‘hands off’ approach to the security situation in Afghanistan as it pursues the OBOR strategy.

Yet deeper consideration of both of these factors suggests that the potential overlap between US and Chinese interests shouldn’t be overstated.

Afghanistan, in particular, is deeply problematic for China in terms of the security of Xinjiang, its geopolitical interests and its reputation. China’s aloof approach to the country since the US and NATO intervention began, as Andrew Small has noted, has been dictated by a conflicted mindset:

‘China sat out the conflict in Afghanistan. It wanted neither a Western victory that might entrench a US military presence in its backyard, nor a Taliban victory that would pose risks to Xinjiang and the wider region. As a result, its financial and political contributions to Afghanistan were at best tokenistic, the minimum necessary to avoid alienating anyone.’

Greater Chinese security engagement in Afghanistan promises not only to make it a more overt target for radical Islamists, impacting negatively in the security of Xinjiang, but also to damage Beijing geopolitically by bringing it into conflict with its ‘all weather’ friend, Pakistan. Beijing has emerged as an active proponent of a negotiated political settlement between the Taliban and Kabul—even brokering secret negotiations between the two—in the interests of ‘stability’, while Pakistan ‘has been keener to see a level of consistent instability in Afghanistan’ rather than a secure and independent Kabul. The scope for this divide between the ‘all weather’ friends to widen was underlined by the multiple bomb attacks in the Afghan capital on 10 and 12 August. The Ghani government explicitly blamed the attacks on Pakistan and Beijing offered to extend greater security assistance to Kabul in response.

Speculation that China would actively consider a more overt security presence or engagement in Afghanistan, however, ignores the reputational costs this would impose on Beijing. Much of Beijing’s diplomatic success throughout Eurasia over the past decade has been built not only on its undoubted economic weight but also its ability to counter-pose its doctrine of ‘non-intervention’ to that of the West’s recent record of direct intervention into the affairs of others. The continued strength of this particular peculiarity of Chinese diplomacy has been most recently exhibited in Beijing’s response to the NATO-led intervention in Libya and its approach to the ongoing Syrian crisis.

Despite recent developments on the ground in Afghanistan—including the possible fracturing of the Taliban in the face of the emergence of Islamic State, in the country—it appears that China’s approach to the country remains cautious. Indeed it is difficult to discern a fundamental shift in approach to that described by Beijing’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi, when he noted in 2014 that ‘preserving Afghanistan’s stability is not a matter of adding troops but of helping Afghanistan to quickly rebuild’.

In the first instalment of this two-part series I reflected on the CCP’s anti-corruption drive as part of an effort to underwrite the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the Xi leadership. But if enduring legitimacy is the motivation, it’s often asked why the focus is on anti-corruption and not also on other aspects of national policy, like the economy and the environment? But that question overlooks the fact that anti-corruption is in fact not the sole focus of the Xi leadership.

In order to fully appreciate the role of anti-corruption in Xi’s new strategy of national governance, one must understand the so-called ‘four comprehensives’ theory proposed by the leadership early this year. The ‘four comprehensives’ are: comprehensively building a well-off (xiaokang) society, comprehensively deepening reform, comprehensively ruling by law, and comprehensively disciplining the party. The theory is now presented by the leadership as a new strategy for governing the country under the current circumstances. It’s almost a kind of grand strategy for CCP rule in China.

The ‘four comprehensives’ have logical connections with one another. Building a well-off society is the overarching goal, and deepening reform and ruling by law are two major means for achieving this goal. The CCP is the designer as well as executor of this strategy. But in order to enhance its legitimacy in this role, it must achieve self-restraint, self-innovation and self-development by comprehensively disciplining itself. Anti-corruption is a key strategic means of disciplining party members, and part of a broader—comprehensive—strategy for maintaining and enhancing CCP rule in China.

Viewed from the perspective of the ‘four comprehensives’, one can also detect an intriguing relationship between ruling by law and disciplining the party. In CCP politics, it’s often asked whether national laws or party rules take priority in practice. This is an extremely important question for understanding the nature of Chinese politics. But with respect to anti-corruption, the question is somewhat misleading. The CCP’s anti-corruption strategy is never about the rule of law: it’s fundamentally a political question about whether the party can successfully restrain its members and about the extent to which the leadership is willing to go to clean up the party.

Huge political risks and costs lie in wait, as is apparent from the arrests of top political and military leaders such as Zhou Yongkang and Xu Caihou. But the party is compelled to undertake the project, and even to elevate a specific strategy of anti-corruption to a comprehensive approach of ‘disciplining the party’. For, as Mr. Wang Qishan recognised, the legitimacy of the CCP as the sole ruling party of China requires it to discipline itself in order to gain and enhance the trust of the people. For this reason, party rules and regulations, and associated moral education programs, necessarily come before national laws, although laws can play a useful complementary function of punishing and containing the spread of corruption. To CCP members, however, party rules lay down higher and stricter moral and behavioral standards than required by national laws. The CCP must maintain its purity and keep itself in the vanguard.

Wang Qishan and the top CCP leadership should be applauded for deploying a political vocabulary that is conducive to international and cross-cultural exchange. Breaking the taboo of examining the legitimacy of CCP rule demonstrates the self-confidence and candidness of the leadership, as well as its sincerity to conduct a meaningful dialogue with the outside world. To make the narrative of a CCP accountable to the people more persuasive, however, the party must take the idea of the ‘endorsement of the people’ much more seriously.

How to deal with and respond to the ‘endorsement of the people’ is a huge challenge to the CCP. In essence, the CCP must create a mechanism or a set of institutions for measuring the degree of satisfaction of the Chinese people with a good degree of independence and fairness, and then to respond to public needs in a timely, creative and effectively manner. Only by doing so can the CCP build the long-term support of the people and maintain the legitimacy of its rule. Such moves will also help to foster a far more positive image of the CCP to the outside world than it is capable of projecting now.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) anti-corruption drive is of staggering scale, reach and audacity. From the powerful ‘tigers’ to the low-ranking ‘flies’, the anti-corruption policy of Xi Jinping’s leadership has targeted and frightened multiple segments of the party, government, military, and state-owned enterprises.

Many have since wondered about the motivation and nature of the wide-ranging and ambitious anti-corruption policy unleashed by President Xi and carried out by Wang Qishan, who is Secretary of the powerful CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and one of the seven members in the Politburo Standing Committee.

On 9 September, I attended a now-annual conference co-hosted by the International Department of the CCP Central Committee and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CCP Central Committee. This year’s theme was To Discipline the Party: Responsibility of the Party. It was appropriate that Wang—who’s in charge of the party’s anti-corruption drive and the broader strategy of ‘comprehensively disciplining the party’—agreed to offer his views to a select group of scholars and officials from China and abroad.

As I listened to Wang’s remarks at the Great Hall of the People, I realized that he was making a revolutionary statement in the history of the CCP. Wang raised an extremely provocative and hitherto taboo idea in CCP political discourse: he spoke of the legitimacy of CCP rule. Never before has the CCP leadership openly raised and even questioned the legitimacy of its own rule. Moreover, Wang actually set out to explain the legitimacy of CCP’s long one-party rule in China, which he pointed out to be the key distinguishing characteristic of Chinese politics. The legitimacy of CCP rule, Wang explained, is based on the ‘endorsement of the people’ and the ‘choice made by the people.’ He elaborated that the CCP depends on the people being satisfied and happy.

Through his comments, Wang was trying to imply that the anti-corruption effort was much more than a short-term expedient for the new leadership to win favor from the public or to establish political authority through factional or interest-groups-related struggles—just some of the hypotheses offered by outside observers for the push. He pointed out that anti-corruption isn’t a political campaign or movement—Mao’s Cultural Revolution taught the CCP that campaigns and movements eventually cease to exist. Anti-corruption, this time, will ‘always be on the road’, and ‘there is only a beginning, never an end’.

Those remarks, together with the invocation of the all-important concept of CCP legitimacy, suggest that Wang is seeing anti-corruption as a long-term strategy to maintain and enhance the legitimacy of CCP rule in China; it’s not just a temporary device for consolidating the rule of the new Xi leadership. Such an explanation would refute many existing hypotheses about anti-corruption. According to this view, what’s at stake in anti-corruption is nothing less than the legitimacy and survival of the CCP as the sole ruling party in China—something much more significant than the survival of the current Xi leadership, which, after all, has an implicit two-term limit of 10 years.

But is that explanation credible? Wang struck many of us in attendance at the meeting as a deeply impressive political leader and as an intellectual. His remarks on the many issues of dissatisfaction the Chinese people have with CCP rule left the impression that the current generation of CCP leaders face significant governance challenges in China. He spoke of the difficulties and complexities of CCP rule in today’s ‘extraordinary difficulty’ period, and he even said that the new leadership hasn’t taken rest for a single day since it took office.

His legitimacy-based explanation of the anti-corruption strategy would be readily comprehensible to a Western audience. The term ‘legitimacy’—Wang used the Chinese translation of hefaxing—is, after all, of Western origin. The difference between Wang’s narrative and many existing explanations for the anti-corruption effort comes down to the timeline: one takes a short-term tactical perspective, the other a long-term strategic view. While many Western analyses focus on the short-term interest maximization and political survival of the new Xi leadership, Wang takes a strategic view geared toward the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the expediencies of the current leadership.

A second, and final, instalment will look at CCP rule and legitimacy in the context of the party’s new ‘four comprehensives’ governing strategy advanced early this year.

Australia’s Defence Minster Kevin Andrews was in India this week, where he met with his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar as well as Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj. Andrews contributed an op-ed to The Hindu and delivered a speech to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (excerpted here). It was in the Q&A session of his address to IDSA that the Defence Minister raised the possibility of the Quad 2.0, which made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald this morning (and is likely to have been well-received in India—at least in Modi’s office).

Yesterday saw China celebrate its role in the WWII defeat of Japan 70 years ago. As expected, Beijing put on a massive display of military muscle, with 12,000 troops goosestepping through Tiananmen Square alongside a veritable heft of tanks, choppers, drones and missiles. Head over to The Atlantic to check out photos of the parade. Chinese President Xi Jinping took the occasion to announce that military personnel would be cut by 300,000. Over at CSIS Anthony Cordesman and Steven Colley have released for feedback a draft of their 600+ page study on Chinese strategy and military modernisation, which you can access here.

IHS has this week estimated that China’s defence budget would swell to approximately US$260 billion in 2020, which is around double the amount spent by Beijing in 2010. The analysis comes as Japan’s Ministry of Defense requests its biggest defence budget yet, which if approved in December would mark the fourth increase in as many years. Both can be taken as signs that the temperature continues to rise in the Asia–Pacific.

The UK Ministry of Defence is currently soliciting options for their surface fleet of the future. The push is being led by Starpoint, a tech-focused procurement group in the MoD, under the title ‘Dreadnought 2050’—a nod to the UK’s 1906 battleship that completely disrupted naval warfare by outclassing all vessels then in the field.

US President Barack Obama this week secured enough votes to prevent a veto of his nuclear deal with Iran, effectively ensuring that it will pass Congress. While a DefenseOne survey found that only 26% of serving US military and civilian government employees think the deal is good for America, Michael Krepon of Arms Control Wonk thinks the deal is about as good as the US is going to get right now. CSIS’s Jon B. Alterman is thinking beyond the deal.

Bookmark this one for the weekend: A few days back, Brookings published William McCants’ longform piece charting the life and transformation of the man who now goes by the name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s self-proclaimed Caliph. The essay is accompanied by a range of photos, videos, maps and recordings. Beyond that commendable effort, two pieces on the Islamic State caught our eye this week. A piece in The New Yorker looks at life after ISIS, drawing particularly on the experience of some former foreign fighters in Europe; and War on the Rocks asks which devil we need to dance with in order to deal effectively with ISIL.

And what is it about ISIL and Twitter? Beyond the erudite think tank contributions to our understanding of ISIL’s social media strategy, there’s a different, lighter side to the various online efforts to counter the group: first, the conversation between a BuzzFeed journo and an Australian official running the @Fight_DAESH Twitter account; second, a run-down on ISIS-chan, the kawaii anime character waging a meme-and-melon war on ISIL; and finally, @ISIS_karoke, which attaches well-known song lyrics to photos of jihadists. Of course, any effort to counter the potent #catsofjihad hashtag should be commended.

Podcast

With China’s weakening economy bringing more bad news for financial markets across the world this, Colm Quinn and Matt Goodman discuss China’s role in the global economy and its relationship with the US.

Videos

Brandon Valeriano, author of the new book Cyber War versus Cyber Realities, recently skyped-in to Robert Farley’s Foreign Entanglements program over at BloggingHeads.tv. The pair discussed deterrence, resiliency, restraint and the psychology of overhyped cyber fears.

Last weekend marked the 10th anniversary since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Vox speaks to some survivors about their experience, and the ABC has a striking set of now-and-then photographs.

20 years ago tomorrow, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton gave her famously forceful ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ speech in China, against the advice of some in the White House and many in Beijing. Watch it here.

Finally, Donald Trump on ‘China’ (h/t Daniel).

Events

Canberra: What’s there to learn from Australia’s efforts to support peace through the Pacific Islands? Head to the ANU’s College of Asia and The Pacific to find out, as Associate Professor Bob Breen examines our interventions between 1980 and 2006.                       

Melbourne: This Tuesday, the University of Melbourne will host Sir David King, the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change, to discuss a recent report out of Cambridge which recommended climate risks be assessed in the same way as risks to national security, public health or financial stability. See here to access the report, and here to register for the event.

Sydney: The NSW branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs will soon host Carlyle A. Thayer for a discussion on the implications of China’s land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea. Mark your calendars for 15 September.

The rise of ISIS allied with the seemingly inevitable mass migration caused by climate change is confronting Australia’s military and intelligence leaders with a devilish conundrum. No one yet has a plan to meet the approaching tumult but one thing is certain: in solving the dilemma the role of our Special Forces will be increasingly central to our future defence and security.

These conclusions were borne upon me during the two years of research and writing that produced my Warrior Elite, the history of our Special Forces incorporating our intelligence agencies just published by Hachette. It involved scores of interviews with the planners behind the political scenes who develop our defence policy.

In the last two decades the military and the intelligence agencies have coalesced into a Special Forces cohort unlike anything that preceded it. And it incorporates an ever increasing proportion of our defence preparedness. The planners know that the technological genie is out of the bottle. Today, an SAS squadron, for example, has at its command a firepower exceeding a WWII battalion. An extraordinary research effort in 47 military and civilian facilities in the US and others in Europe, Japan and China is producing an astonishing array of protective battle suits, advanced weaponry, communications, telemetry and real time HQ support and direction. These are either in use now or on the verge of deployment to the Special Forces of most advanced countries, Australia included. They are the instruments of a radical transformation of military strategy and tactics.

As our Commando regiment increases its battlefield capacity, the SAS in close cooperation with ASIS is expanding its capabilities in potential trouble spots in the region, the Middle East and even the African continent. But here the planners run up against a strategic quandary. Both units are closely affiliated with the US. And while this brings substantial technical advantages, in the bigger picture these are offset by strategic liabilities which defence leaders realise they must overcome.

America’s imperial superpower assertions have created serious complications in Australia’s relations with China and arguably affected the development of open-hearted, neighbourly relations with the largely Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. Both Indonesia and China are themselves deeply vulnerable to ISIS—Indonesia through its 95% Muslim population and corrupt governance; China because of its 160 million Muslims and their alienation from an unyielding single-party government. Both countries are facing much bigger problems than Australia in controlling their internal threat.

Indeed, were it not for Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the Five-Eyes alliance which has traditionally been directed against China and Indonesia, among others, it would be perfectly possible to envisage a regional arrangement encompassing Australia and its two most populous neighbours in a cooperative Special Operations counterforce to the jihadists.

Then comes the second strand of the conundrum: climate change. Heavy Weather, an ASPI Special Report published in March 2013, warned that global warming:

 ‘has generated little interest in either the ADF or the Defence Department, [yet] climate change is transforming the conventional roles of security forces. As a threat multiplier, it has the potential to generate and exacerbate destabilising conditions that could reshape the regional security environment.’

That now seems inevitable. And the planners are aware that our response must involve international alliances with the great forces who would underwrite—with force if necessary—the right of nations like Australia to decide (in John Howard’s immortal phrase) ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

When climate change produces uncontrolled mass migration—the forerunner of which we now see in the Mediterranean—the support and cooperation of regional governments, particularly Indonesia and China, will be essential to any Australian effort to retain its territorial integrity. Yet once again our ‘Five-Eyes’ alliance with the Anglosphere which targets Indonesia and China as potential threats stands as an impediment to the development of the cooperation  and support required.

While the American alliance will no doubt remain in place, it may well be that Australia needs to loosen the ties to its Anglophile past before a genuine regional integration can be secured. An innovative 2014 ASPI/ADF study might well point the way to the future. It proposes the posting of Special Forces liaison officers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines ‘of which Indonesia is the most important’. It recommends increased Special Forces engagement with Southeast Asian nations leading to the establishment of a Special Forces Regional Training Centre in Australia. And in a ground-breaking proposal, it advocates an ‘intensification’ of cooperation with Chinese Special Forces. ‘This would be a confidence-building exercise,’ it says, and would develop through joint humanitarian and military exercises.

In this rearrangement of forces, as our Special Forces add a diplomatic cutting edge to their arsenal, we might well find that our future security—in Paul Keating’s words—is ‘in Asia’ and not ‘from Asia.’