Appendix II: The Longer Telegram: Toward a New American China Strategy (Part I)

Author: Anonymous
Originally published in: Politico (United States), January 28, 2021

[The author of this essay is a former senior government official with deep professional expertise and extensive experience dealing with China. In 1946, U.S. diplomat George Kennan sent Washington a cable that came to be known as the “Long Telegram,” which laid the foundation for American policy toward the Soviet Union for decades to come. Kennan later published an anonymous article expanding on those ideas.

In the same spirit, a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China submitted a bold and ambitious new U.S. strategy to the Atlantic Council to confront the next great global competitor. This submission was likewise anonymous.]

The single most consequential challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of China under the increasingly authoritarian rule of Xi Jinping, who simultaneously serves as both state president and party general secretary. With Joe Biden assuming the presidency, it may be tempting to believe that China can be dealt with easily, as if it were merely the obsession of Donald Trump. In fact, the opposite is true: the way the United States approaches China now requires greater focus and sustained attention than under any previous administration.

At first glance, this claim may seem exaggerated, especially given the many challenges the United States confronts globally. It is not. China’s economic and military scale, the speed of its technological advancement, and its fundamentally different worldview mean that China’s rise today profoundly affects every major U.S. national interest. In many respects, this is a structural challenge that has gradually emerged over the past two decades. Under Xi Jinping, however, that challenge has both intensified and accelerated dramatically.

Domestically, Xi has pulled China back toward classical Marxism–Leninism while cultivating a Mao-style cult of personality and systematically eliminating political rivals. Market-oriented economic reforms have stalled, and the private sector is now increasingly subject to direct party control. Xi has also mobilized nationalism to unite the country against any internal or external challenge to his authority. His treatment of recalcitrant ethnic minorities within China borders on genocide. Under Xi, China increasingly resembles a new form of authoritarian police state. In a fundamental departure from his risk-averse post-Mao predecessors, Xi has made clear his intention to advance China’s authoritarian system well beyond its borders, coercively projecting diplomatic and military power abroad.

China under Xi Jinping is no longer a status quo power, as it was under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. It has become what the international system terms a revisionist power—a state determined to reshape the world around it. For the United States, its allies, and the U.S.-led liberal international order, this represents a fundamental shift. Xi is no longer merely a challenge to American primacy; he now constitutes a direct challenge to the entire democratic world.

For the United States, the most fundamental strategic question is how to respond. What is urgently needed is a comprehensive, bipartisan China strategy that can guide U.S. policy over the next thirty years. Some may argue that such a strategy already exists, pointing to the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which declared “strategic competition” to be the central challenge to U.S. foreign and national security policy. Yet while the Trump administration was effective in sounding the alarm on China, its execution was often chaotic and at times contradictory. At its core, “strategic competition” amounted to a doctrinal posture rather than a fully articulated and operationalized strategy.

The uncomfortable reality is that China has long possessed a comprehensive internal strategy for dealing with the United States—one that has largely worked. By contrast, the United States, which once articulated and implemented a coherent response to the Soviet challenge through George Kennan’s containment strategy, still lacks a comparable strategy toward China. This constitutes a dereliction of national responsibility.

Washington’s difficulty in formulating an effective China strategy stems in large part from the absence of a clear strategic objective. Current statements by officials span a wide range of aims—from using limited trade measures to induce economic reform, to pursuing outright regime change focused on overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party. What, then, should the objective be, and on what understanding of China should it rest?

America’s strategy toward the Soviet Union was grounded in Kennan’s famous 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow, which analyzed the internal structural weaknesses of the Soviet system and concluded that it would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The entire theory of containment—and its eventual success—rested on this central assumption. The Chinese Communist Party, however, has proven far more adaptable than the Soviet Union, in part because China spent more than a decade carefully studying the “lessons” of Soviet collapse. Consequently, it would be extremely dangerous for American strategists to base a future U.S.–China strategy solely on the assumption that China’s system is destined to collapse internally—let alone to make the overthrow of the CCP an explicit objective. Addressing today’s challenge requires a more precise policy, fundamentally different from the blunt, China-specific variants of containment and the wishful thinking surrounding CCP collapse.

Indeed, indulging calls for overthrowing a political party with 91 million members is strategically self-defeating. Such an approach would only strengthen Xi Jinping’s political position by allowing him to cloak himself in elite solidarity and nationalist fervor, thereby reinforcing his claim to defend party and state.

By contrast, a strategy that focuses more narrowly on Xi Jinping himself—rather than the CCP as a whole—represents a more realistic objective and points toward a set of policies that would inevitably weaken, rather than reinforce, his personal dictatorship.

The enduring value of Kennan’s analysis lay in his deep understanding of how the Soviet system actually functioned internally, and in his ability to craft strategy grounded in that complex reality. The same is required for China. The political reality is that the CCP has become visibly divided in the face of Xi’s leadership and ambitions. Senior party elites have been deeply troubled by Xi’s policy direction and angered by his relentless demands for absolute loyalty. Many fear for their own safety and the future livelihoods of their families. Numerous examples point to profound and enduring doubts about Xi’s leadership, including international media revelations regarding the vast accumulation of wealth by Xi’s family and members of his political inner circle—even as Xi has prosecuted an aggressive anti-corruption campaign. When such internal fault lines are evident to analysts and prudent policymakers alike, treating the party as a monolithic actor becomes an overly simplistic and immature strategy.

Any strategy that targets the party as a whole, rather than Xi personally, also ignores a critical fact: all five post-Mao leaders preceding Xi were able to work with the United States. Under their leadership, China sought to integrate into the existing international order rather than remake it in its own image. At a minimum, the mission of U.S. China strategy should therefore be to see China return to its pre-2013 trajectory—a “pre-Xi” strategic posture. While U.S. interests certainly faced challenges during Hu Jintao’s second term, those challenges were manageable and did not constitute a fundamental violation of the liberal international order.

Among the many elements missing from current discussions of China strategy, the most critical is a more precise focus on the fault lines within China’s leadership itself. While American leaders frequently distinguish between the CCP government and the Chinese people, Washington must develop the sophistication to go further—to distinguish between the government and party elites, and between party elites and Xi Jinping himself. As more moderate potential successors emerge, this distinction becomes increasingly important.