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China Coop Bad DA: Kentucky1NC DAPressure now to deter China Hong Kong intervention Daily Beast 2019 (Erin Banco 8-27-19 “Republicans Look to Punish Chinese Leaders Over Hong Kong Crackdown” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****But behind the scenes, senior officials in the Trump administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are quietly brainstorming ways to officially punish China for the clampdown in Hong Kong and to deter Beijing from deploying military forces to directly and violently confront protesters in the streets, according to three government sources with knowledge of those efforts. The wide-ranging discussions—which include the possibility of imposing travel bans and asset freezes on certain Chinese leaders—come just two weeks after Beijing’s troops began to amass outside Hong Kong. “Since Day One of this administration, China has been a national security concern. The protests in Hong Kong are just another example of why we should be focusing our attention on finding ways to push back against Beijing,” said one senior administration official. “We’ve been taking other routes to confront China, especially economically. This would be another step in the game plan. The draft legislation is in a lot of ways going to look like some of the sanctions we implemented with Russia.” Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives are in the midst of drafting legislation, after consulting with senior officials in the ranks of the departments of State and Treasury, to introduce legislation that would hit Chinese entities with sanctions that support the suppression of protests in Hong Kong. The legislation would be the first of its kind to address the crackdown head-on by going after some of China’s most influential and well-connected entities. Members of Congress have for weeks sought out ways to respond to the Beijing leadership’s role in the clampdown in Hong Kong, fielding expert opinions from experts in the international sanctions and foreign policy fields. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), along with both his Republican and Democrat colleagues in the Senate, re-introduced the Hong Kong and Human Rights Act in June. The bill would make it harder for Hong Kong to keep its trade status with the U.S. if it did not maintain autonomy from China. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) introduced the bill in the House of Representatives. But other lawmakers on the Hill are considering a more direct approach to confronting China. Three individuals familiar with the effort said lawmakers view the legislation as a way of establishing a “red line” that would deter China from cracking down on protesters in the future by threatening increasingly steep political and financial punishments. Two sources said lawmakers are considering a system whereby Congress could review the list of Chinese companies every several years, adding some and losing others depending on the circumstance. “The administration has been looking at options for some time now,” one senior Trump official said. “But now things are starting to move forward and the legislation on the Hill will crystalize once Congress comes back. We’ve been looking at smart ways to address the crackdown and this is definitely a start.” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has looked over draft legislation for new Chinese sanctions and is considering sponsoring some form of it within the next few months, according to two sources familiar. In July he delivered an 11-minute speech in which he called out the Chinese government for their involvement. “If the Chinese officials in Beijing, the communists Chinese who rule mainland China, if they have their way, they will extinguish these rights for the people of Hong Kong,” he said. Discussions on Capitol Hill are taking place as the U.S. and China continue to engage in a tit-for-tat trade war. President Trump said earlier this month that if China used violence in Hong Kong it would “hurt” trade talks. “For the most part the administration, and the White House in particular, has been trying to keep the trade talks front and center when it comes to China policy,” one senior administration official said. “But really the trade talks and our response to the protests in Hong Kong are tied. The threat of sanctions is really starting to scare China and so we might begin to see trade talks go a little smoother.”Cooperation with China over space signals passivity to Chinese authoritarian powerFisher 2019 (Rick, senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, “Relearning the Dangers of Space Cooperation With China” 1-30-2019, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In his China Daily interview, Bolden appeared to suggest that the United States could cooperate with China on its space station. But sending U.S. astronauts to a Chinese space station on U.S. spacecraft, or allowing Chinese spacecraft to dock with the ISS, would constitute an open door for Chinese espionage against U.S. space technology. The PLA would be the ultimate beneficiary of insights into U.S. space designs, materials, and procedures. Such cooperation would also constitute a cruel irony considering that, in 2008, China very likely practiced a military interception of the ISS. On Sept. 27, 2008, in a possible simulated attack interception exercise, China’s Shenzhou-7 spacecraft passed within the 28-mile box around the ISS, just after it had launched a small microsatellite. But what is galling is that, following this incident, neither officials from the George W. Bush nor the Barack Obama administrations offered any public reaction, much less any explanation for China’s actions, which could have threatened the one American and two Russians who were aboard the ISS. Preventing Dominance As the PLA has consistently sought civil-military “dual-use” benefits from its control of China’s manned and unmanned space programs, it can be expected that the PLA will also derive dual-use benefits from China’s activities on the moon. By controlling the “Earth-Moon System,” it’s likely that CCP leaders harbor ambitions to deny access to any emerging “space economy,” or a new era of economic growth on Earth stimulated by economic activity on the moon and Mars. This would be consistent with China’s strengthening domestic dictatorship and its ambitions to dominate economic, political, and military power on Earth. By denying the “legitimacy” for China’s space program that would be conferred by full U.S. cooperation, the Wolf Amendment constitutes an enduring U.S. moral “sanction” against China, signaling that free people still oppose the CCP’s pursuit of dictatorship and hegemony on Earth and in space. The intent of the Wolf Amendment should be sustained until China reveals and verifiably dismantles its military-space program elements that threaten democracies. Doing so will continue Rep. Wolf’s legacy by seeking to ensure that space cooperation with China doesn’t increase the ability of the PLA’s Space Force to threaten America’s security and future prosperity.Appeasement emboldens China’s aggressive foreign policy, risks conflict in several hotspots and turns the aff’s cooperationWright 2019(Thomas, Senior Fellow at Brookings, 8-15-2019, “Trump’s Foreign-Policy Crisis Arrives Competition between the U.S. and China may be inevitable, but if Trump and Xi mishandle the Hong Kong crisis, they could lose the ability to calibrate.” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****For two and a half years, the world has wondered how President Donald Trump would cope with a real international crisis. That crisis may have finally arrived in Hong Kong, as Beijing appears poised to execute a massive, violent crackdown against protesters. And how it’s resolved will matter not just for Trump’s political fortunes—it will determine whether the United States and China can find a basis for managing competition with each other, or whether they will be locked in a new and volatile Cold War. Unrest in Hong Kong would pose a particularly difficult challenge for any American president, who would have to balance support for democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest against the need to avoid interfering in China’s domestic affairs. The shadow of Budapest in 1956 looms large. Hungarians believed, with good reason, that the United States would support them if they rose up against the Soviet Union. When they did so, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, believing it could lead to a general war. This tragic episode was a warning to future presidents not to overpromise. That lesson was learned again when President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to abandon them. During Hong Kong’s 2014 umbrella protests, which were not as far-reaching as those taking place now, President Barack Obama struck a cautious note, expressing America’s inherent sympathy for freedom of speech and association and saying his government’s primary message was the avoidance of violence. Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio, criticized Obama for not being more supportive of the protesters. The White House worried that any support would lend credibility to Beijing’s claim that the protests were orchestrated by the United States—and was careful not to overpromise. Presidents are constrained in what they can say. We should cut Donald Trump some slack. But even taking those constraints into account, Trump’s response could hardly have been worse. Not only was Trump silent on America’s core values. He also increased the risk of a major miscalculation by China with seismic geopolitical consequences. It may prove to be the greatest mistake of his presidency. Trump’s folly began with a phone call to China’s president, Xi Jinping, on June 18. According to the Financial Times and Politico, Trump told the Chinese leader that he would not condemn a crackdown in Hong Kong. The commitment was made on the fly, without prior consultation with his national-security team. On August 1, Trump made good on that secret promise when he told the press: “Something is probably happening with Hong Kong, because when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time. And I don’t know what China’s attitude is. Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that. But that’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.” On August 13, Trump called it “a very tough situation,” but added that he hoped “it works out for everybody, including China.” Later he tweeted, “Many are blaming me, and the United States, for the problems going on in Hong Kong. I can’t imagine why?” His secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, told CNBC, “What would we do, invade Hong Kong? … It’s a question of what role is there for the U.S. in that manner? This is an internal matter.” Politico reports have quoted administration officials as saying that Trump is singularly focused on a trade deal and does not want human rights to get in the way. After a torrent of criticism, and a deluge of statements from congressional leaders, he tweeted last night, vaguely asking Xi to deal with Hong Kong “humanely” and hinting at a meeting. He could have said no violence, but he chose not to. This morning, he again praised Xi and suggested he meet with protesters. It was marginally better than the unconditional green light he had offered previously, but it is still far short of what is required. Trump’s remarks will be read in the historical context of his previous comments on repression in China. In a now-infamous interview with Playboy in 1990, Trump reflected on a recent visit to the Soviet Union. “Russia,” he said, “is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.” The interviewer followed up by asking, “You mean firm hand as in China?” Trump responded: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.” Much will be made of the immorality of Trump’s position, how he has abdicated the role of leader of the free world, and why his stance makes violence more likely. That is all true—but Trump’s stance is even worse than it appears. The Hong Kong crisis comes at a particularly sensitive moment in U.S.-China relations. Competition between the two global powers may be inevitable, but its scope and intensity depends on the decisions both countries make. In Hong Kong, Xi faces a crucial choice—a 21st-century version of the Tiananmen Square crackdown would make a new Cold War all but inevitable. A violent crackdown would make it much more difficult to calibrate competition with China. China will have revealed itself to be a totalitarian dictatorship guilty of the excesses associated with such regimes. Cooperation will become difficult, if not impossible, even on matters of mutual interest. Having crossed the Rubicon and incurred the costs, Xi may be even more willing to flex China’s muscles in the South China Sea and East China Sea, increasing tensions with its neighbors and the United States. If China handles Hong Kong in a heavy-handed way, that would also have repercussions for Taiwan, which would see its suspicions of the mainland confirmed. Read: Hong Kong and Taiwan are bonding over China A violent crackdown would also accelerate economic decoupling, with Western investors fleeing Hong Kong as it becomes just another Chinese city. More than 1,300 U.S. firms have a presence in Taiwan, including nearly every major U.S. financial firm. There are 85,000 U.S. citizens in Hong Kong. They would likely leave. A violent crackdown would almost surely lead to the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. Congress, if necessary with a supermajority to overcome a presidential veto. The decoupling would not be confined to Hong Kong. The tariffs and restrictions imposed to generate leverage in trade negotiations would become permanent. I asked Michael Green, who served in senior positions on Asia in the George W. Bush administration, what Trump should say now. The president, he said, should point out to Xi that the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act allows the administration to change its approach should Hong Kong become less autonomous. He should also say that China’s actions here will be seen as an indicator of its direction more generally, and make it abundantly clear there is no place for the use of force or violence as the people of Hong Kong express their aspirations as allowed under the rule of law. The administration should then work to ensure that Japan, Australia, and the European Union issue similar statements. In a normal administration, the president might also ask a trusted Cabinet member to privately convey to Xi the geopolitical stakes and America’s likely response. That interlocutor would emphasize that the U.S. response would not be as it was in Tiananmen or Budapest—to just move on. The geopolitical context is different now. The United States did not respond to the Budapest uprising in 1956, when the Cold War was already well under way, but if it had occurred in 1946, it may now be seen as a proximate cause of a decades-long struggle between Moscow and the West. The kindling is dry, and a spark will light it up. Trump may say he doesn’t care, but the country will.Nuclear warKlare 17 – Michael Klare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, “Escalation Watch: Four Global Hotspots for Trump”, Asia Times, 1-20, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Within months of taking office, President Donald Trump is likely to face one or more major international crises, possibly entailing a risk of nuclear escalation. Not since the end of the Cold War has a new chief executive been confronted with as many potential flashpoints involving such a potential for explosive conflict. This proliferation of crises has been brewing for some time, but the situation appears especially ominous now given Trump’s pledge to bring American military force swiftly to bear on any threats of foreign transgression. With so much at risk, it’s none too soon to go on a permanent escalation watch, monitoring the major global hotspots for any sign of imminent flare-ups, hoping that early warnings (and the outcry that goes with them) might help avert catastrophe. Looking at the world today, four areas appear to pose an especially high risk of sudden crisis and conflict: North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region, and the Middle East. Each of them has been the past site of recurring clashes, and all are primed to explode early in the Trump presidency. Why are we seeing so many potential crises now? Is this period really different from earlier presidential transitions? It’s true that the changeover from one presidential administration to another can be a time of global uncertainty, given America’s pivotal importance in world affairs and the natural inclination of rival powers to test the mettle of the country’s new leader. There are, however, other factors that make this moment particularly worrisome, including the changing nature of the world order, the personalities of its key leaders, and an ominous shift in military doctrine. Trump may lift gold as new leaders carry risk Just as the United States is going through a major political transition, so is the planet at large. The sole-superpower system of the post-Cold War era is finally giving way to a multipolar, if not increasingly fragmented, world in which the United States must share the limelight with other major actors, including China, Russia, India, and Iran. Political scientists remind us that transitional periods can often prove disruptive, as “status quo” powers (in this case, the United States) resist challenges to their dominance from “revisionist” states seeking to alter the global power equation. Typically, this can entail proxy wars and other kinds of sparring over contested areas, as has recently been the case in Syria, the Baltic, and the South China Sea. This is where the personalities of key leaders enter the equation. Though President Obama oversaw constant warfare, he was temperamentally disinclined to respond with force to every overseas crisis and provocation, fearing involvement in yet more foreign wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. His critics, including Donald Trump, complained bitterly that this stance only encouraged foreign adversaries to up their game, convinced that the US had lost its will to resist provocation. In a Trump administration, as The Donald indicated on the campaign trail last year, America’s adversaries should expect far tougher responses. Asked in September, for instance, about an incident in the Persian Gulf in which Iranian gunboats approached American warships in a threatening manner, he typically told reporters, “When they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and make gestures that … they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.” Although with Russia, unlike Iran, Trump has promised to improve relations, there’s no escaping the fact that Vladimir Putin’s urge to restore some of his country’s long-lost superpower glory could lead to confrontations with Nato powers that would put the new American president in a distinctly awkward position. Regarding Asia, Trump has often spoken of his intent to punish China for what he considers its predatory trade practices, a stance guaranteed to clash with President Xi Jinping’s goal of restoring his country’s greatness. This should, in turn, generate additional possibilities for confrontation, especially in the contested South China Sea. Both Putin and Xi, moreover, are facing economic difficulties at home and view foreign adventurism as a way of distracting public attention from disappointing domestic performances.BlockU: US-China Coop Down--US-China military cooperation nonexistent – tensions high nowCouronne ‘19– (Ivan, “In Space, the US Sees China as a Rival,” Phys Org, 1/6/19, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****"It's unfortunately hard to envision any major armed conflict on Earth not extending into space," he added. "The Chinese have been preparing for whatever eventuality may be in the future, and... they have been experimenting with systems to interfere with our communications, our transmissions from satellites to drones." Harrison concurs: "The United States has not been keeping pace with the threats against our space systems," and that has left the US vulnerable. Meanwhile, US dialogue with Beijing is virtually nil, in contrast with Washington's exchanges with Moscow during the Cold War. "If there's a crisis in space involving China, it's not clear our military knows who to call," said Harrison. Relations strained – US and China view each other as security threats even in civilian space issuesHoyama ‘18–?(Taisei, 11/24/18, Nikkei Asian Review, “US To Ease Restrictions on Space Tech Tie-Ups – Except with China,” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****With the U.S. and China competing in areas ranging from trade to security, the White House intends to fully maintain existing restrictions on exports of space technology to its increasingly powerful rival, and the country's astronauts will not be asked to participate in new lunar missions. "I don't see any liberalization or relaxation of space export controls with respect to China," said Scott Pace, the man leading development of the new U.S. space policy. "I can imagine some relaxation with respect to close friends and allies," he added. The executive secretary of the National Space Council, which is chaired by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, described the strategy in an interview with Nikkei. Pace is currently overseeing a review of the regulations relating to space technology exports before submitting a proposal to Trump. "Even if we do not change anything on the list, dealing with export controls is a difficult and burdensome process, especially for small companies," he said. "So we want to make the process of compliance easier and smoother with electronic tools." If implemented, a relaxation of the rules would make it easier for Japanese and European companies to work with U.S. players on satellite development and other projects. Currently, the Department of State and the Department of Commerce designate products such as satellite parts for export control from the viewpoint of their potential use for military purposes. Companies need to obtain permission to ship such products according to country-specific regulations. The system works to discourage foreign makers of such products from seeking U.S. partners. The Trump administration is also rethinking its stance toward international cooperation on manned space missions. NASA is working on a program to take humans into orbit and into deep space, including the surface of the moon via a space station in lunar orbit. Unlike the Apollo program, which put the first man on the moon, the new program will involve working with other countries. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe confirmed Japan's cooperation on the project in a meeting with Pence on Nov. 13. The White House is also considering partnerships with Europe, Canada and Russia. "If Japan is a major strategic partner with us as they have been with the Space Station," Pace said, "then I expect that there will be opportunities for Japanese astronauts to be on the Moon with us." However, he was candid when asked about the possibility of China playing a part. "Probably not," he said. "The reason is that human space flight requires a very, very high degree of trust," he explained. "China has good capabilities but the political situation is difficult. As a result, trying to build trust in civil space cooperation is very, very challenging." The U.S. also plans to enhance ties in the area of space security. The Trump administration has started working to create a new "Space Force," a branch of the military devoted to operating satellites, missile defense systems, and other equipment by 2020. Pace confirmed Washington's intention to bolster cooperation with Japan on space defense, and urged the Abe government to increase the country's own capabilities. "In order to cooperate more effectively with the U.S., I think the Japanese Ministry of Defense will need to have a significant increase in the number of space specialists and experts in the ministry and the Self-Defense Forces." The Defense Ministry will propose the creation of a "space unit" in the new National Defense Program Guidelines it is scheduled to unveil. Trump revived the National Space Council after a 24-year hiatus in 2017. The move is part of an overarching strategy to respond to China's rise as a major space power, and is focused on expanding and upgrading cooperation with U.S. allies in areas ranging from security and commerce to science. But Trump's Space Force proposal, for its huge spending, faces opposition within the U.S. Congress, which has the power to block the initiative. Securing backing for the agenda will require convincing lawmakers that the strategy is not limited in scope to simply countering China.Space race more likely than space co-op--Zhen & Feldscher ‘19– (Liu, Jacqueline, “Are China and US Racing Towards Inevitable Military Confrontation in Outer Space?” 6/17/19, South China Morning Post, Politico, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****A top Chinese general has a warning for any US leaders planning an arms race in space: be prepared to lose. Outspending a rival power into economic exhaustion might have helped the US win the cold war, said Qiao Liang, a major general in the Chinese air force who co-wrote the book Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America. But he said it would not work against a wealthy manufacturing powerhouse like China. “China is not the Soviet Union,” Qiao said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, a news partner of POLITICO. “If the United States thinks it can also drag China into an arms race and take down China as it did with the Soviets … in the end, probably it would not be China who is down on the ground.”Qiao’s words come as both Washington and Beijing are pouring money and resources into an increasingly militarised space race that some security specialists and former US officials fear is heightening the risk of war. The aggressive manoeuvres include US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a stand-alone Space Force – which Qiao dismissed as “an unwise move” – and efforts by both countries to develop laser and cyber weapons that could take out each other’s satellites. The rivalry is plainly on the minds of leaders at the Pentagon, which cites “space” 86 times in a new threat assessment of China’s military. It also warns that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is working on “enabling long-range precision strikes” and developing directed-energy weapons for use in orbit. Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence and a slew of US military leaders have cited China’s military space programmes as a key rationale for proposing the Space Force, which would gather nearly all the defence department’s space-related programmes into a new military branch – similar to the one China created four years ago. Congress is considering the administration’s plan, although some defense hawks are skeptical. Pence has also expressed alarm at China’s success in landing uncrewed probes on the moon, a place US astronauts last visited in 1972. “Last December, China became the first nation to land on the far side of the moon and revealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world’s pre-eminent spacefaring nation,” Pence said at a meeting of the National Space Council in March. Even more worrying, neither country seems interested in placing the issue on the diplomatic agenda to lower the tensions, some security advocates say. That is in contrast to the decades of space cooperation that have existed between the US and Russia. “One of my biggest concerns is that for all the talk about how horrible an armed conflict with China would be for everyone, all the current US policies and actions seem to be preparing for armed conflict instead of avoiding it,” said Brian Weeden, director of programme planning at the Secure World Foundation, which advocates for using space in a peaceful and sustainable way. “There is not a lot of dialogue between the US and China,” he said.U: Pressure NowCongress seeking to pressure and deter China nowThe Washington Post (9-9-2019, “U.S. help sought in Hong Kong protest” Nexis) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****HONG KONG - Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched to the U.S. Consulate here on Sunday to urge American lawmakers to pass legislation in support of the territory's democratic aspirations. The police-sanctioned rally and march through the city center had the trappings of a Fourth of July parade. Protesters waved American flags, sang the "Star-Spangled Banner," carried red-white-and-blue signs calling on President Trump to "Liberate Hong Kong" and chanted "Free Hong Kong, pass the act!" As in previous demonstrations, violence broke out at the end of the day. By early evening, protesters had vandalized a subway station in central Hong Kong that police had closed and set a fire around one of its entrances. Demonstrators wearing face masks and helmets smashed station windows, leaving glass piled on the sidewalk. They tossed street signs, emptied trash cans down the subway stairwells and began building barricades. Later Sunday, police fired tear gas to disperse protesters in the popular shopping district of Causeway Bay. It was the second consecutive night of clashes, despite the decision of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to withdraw the widely unpopular extradition bill that sparked the months-long political crisis - a clear sign that her concession has been rejected by pro-democracy protesters. As dissent in Hong Kong and the accompanying police crackdown continue, Lam and her government face the possibility of growing international criticism, particularly from the United States, where lawmakers have returned from their summer recess. Authorities have targeted prominent activists who have not been at the forefront of the recent protests. Former student leader Joshua Wong, who is due to visit the United States soon to testify at a congressional hearing, was arrested at the city's airport while returning from Taiwan, he said through a legal representative Sunday evening. Wong was detained for "breaching bail conditions" following his arrest last month but said this was due to mistakes on his bail certificate. He called his detention "utterly unreasonable" and said he expected to be released Monday. Organizers handed a petition to a consulate official calling for swift congressional passage of the bipartisan Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The protest was expected to draw the ire of Beijing, which has accused the United States of meddling in the months-long political crisis and warned that Hong Kong is an internal Chinese matter. Members of the Congressional Executive Commission on China reintroduced the bill in June, days after a million people marched to call for the extradition legislation to be scrapped. In a statement late Sunday, the Hong Kong government said it has "regret" about the reintroduction of the act and "reiterates that foreign legislatures should not interfere in any form in the internal affairs" of Hong Kong. The congressional bill would require an annual review of the special treatment afforded by Washington to Hong Kong under the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, including the trade and business privileges Hong Kong enjoys separate from China. It would also direct the administration to freeze the assets and deny U.S. entry to people found to be "suppressing basic freedoms" in Hong Kong. "The Chinese government is breaking their promises to give freedom and human rights to Hong Kong," said a 24-year-old protester in a red "Make America Great Again" hat. "We want to use the U.S. to push China to do what they promised over 20 years ago," said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The U.S. government can make China think: Do they really want to lose Hong Kong?" Lam, Hong Kong's chief executive, suspended the extradition bill in mid-June but didn't fully withdraw it until Wednesday. In the weeks between those actions, the protests expanded in intensity and scope to encompass Beijing's erosion of the "one country, two systems" framework, under which Hong Kong has operated since Britain handed it back to China in 1997. In an indication of the growing anti-China flavor of protests, demonstrators on Sunday carried posters and stickers depicting the Chinese flag with its yellow stars rearranged into swastikas. Swastikas with the term "Chinazi" were spray-painted in the Central district. Lam's concessions, which also included beefing up an independent police oversight committee, drew hostility among protesters, who want her to meet the four other demands they have laid out. Her move to withdraw the bill "was a public relations exercise vis-a-vis Beijing and Washington," said Andreas Fulda, a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham's Asia Research Institute and author of a book on efforts at democratization in China. He said Lam "has every reason to be worried about a strong U.S. response" when Congress sits again. The growing distrust and public animosity toward police was evident again on Sunday. Dozens of officers stopped and searched protesters on a glitzy stretch of luxury shops in the Central district. Bystanders jeered, yelling "shame," and cheered when a group of tactical officers left the area. On Saturday, demonstrators planned a second "stress test" to disrupt transportation to Hong Kong International Airport, but it was thwarted by police. Last weekend, protesters caused massive traffic jams and rail delays to the airport. Police stymied Saturday's effort by stationing officers in riot gear at subway stops and ferry terminals and boarding buses to check for demonstrators. Demonstrators pushing for a stronger U.S. government response say Washington has several options, including tweaking language in the Hong Kong Policy Act to limit government-to-government interaction and alter the U.S. economic relationship with Hong Kong. "We are in a very urgent situation," said Cody, a 30-year-old IT worker. "We need all the support we can get." Members of Congress have been watching Hong Kong and discussing legislation through the summer recess. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week that lawmakers should move quickly to advance the bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would support legislation to "enhance" the Hong Kong Policy Act he helped to pass in 1992. The push to pass the law has frustrated pro-Beijing lawmakers in Hong Kong. Felix Chung, one such lawmaker, traveled with colleagues to Montana last month to meet with congressmen and senators. "Traditionally, these bills targeting specific countries, they are developing countries, with dictators in those countries," he said. "But Hong Kong has been so close to the U.S., economically and socially, it has never been a target of the U.S. government, so why should they use such a particular bill to punish Hong Kong?" While leaders from both parties have been vocal in their support of Hong Kong's protesters, Trump has taken a largely hands-off approach. He said last month that Chinese President Xi Jinping could "quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem." Previously, he described the protests as "riots," a term used by Hong Kong authorities and a characterization protesters are fighting to have withdrawn as one of their demands. Kurt Tong, who served as U.S. consul general in Hong Kong until this summer, said the administration has treated Hong Kong as a "second-tier" issue. In a speech in Washington, he said the administration has put more focus on Iran, North Korea and the trade war with China.Trump’s china pressure checks appeasementKazianis 8-24-2019 – MA @ Harvard in International Relations, recognized expert on national security issues involving North & South Korea, China, the Asia-Pacific, general U.S. foreign policy and national security challenges. Kazianis is also Fellow for National Security Affairs at the Potomac Foundation and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the University of Nottingham (Harry, “Trump is right to confront China, reversing Obama’s policy of weakness and appeasement,” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The escalation in the U.S.-China trade war Friday – with each country slapping new tariffs on the other – is part of a larger fight that will decide which nation will shape the economic and geopolitical future of the 21st century. President Trump is right to refuse to raise the white flag of surrender. Thankfully, few expect a shooting war to erupt between China and the U.S. Instead, our two countries are waging economic warfare, with trade policy being central to the battle. And like escalation in a shooting war, hostile actions taken by one side in our trade war with China will typically prompt the other to retaliate. That’s why when China announced Friday that it would increase tariffs on $75 billion in imports from the U.S., President Trump was right to respond the same day. "Starting on October 1st, the 250 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, currently being taxed at 25 percent, will be taxed at 30 percent," Trump tweeted after China hit the U.S. with higher tariffs. "Additionally, the remaining 300 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, that was being taxed from September 1st at 10 percent, will now be taxed at 15 percent." Some Trump critics are saying America should back off this fight. They argue that Trump shouldn’t take on a rising China, because bilateral trade benefits both nations and because tariffs will hit U.S. consumers and businesses with higher prices and destroy American jobs. Some even warn the trade war could lead to a dangerous and deadly military confrontation. I say the Trump critics are wrong. In fact, now is the time for the U.S. to push back against China for years of trade violations, intellectual property theft and unreasonable demands that past American presidents have complained about but failed to do anything about. It’s about time we finally have someone in the White House who is bold enough to take on the China challenge and has the right foreign policy ideas to do it. President Trump is fond of calling his brand of foreign policy “America First.” This policy is really a matter of simple common sense. America – like every other nation – should place its own interests and those of its citizens ahead of other nations or secondary concerns. That means that China must be confronted and stood up to, like the international bully it is has become. Faced with a policy of weakness and appeasement when President Obama was in office, China’s power, economic might and military muscle grew exponentially in the eight years before President Trump took office. If Trump simply continued the Obama policies, China would grow stronger still at U.S. expense. For Trump, there is simply no other choice. There will be costs in the form of higher prices for products American buy and we will suffer because of reduced exports to China due to the tariff increases. But in the long run, these costs are worth short-term pain to achieve long-term gain. If only President Obama had stood up to a rising China starting in 2009, President Trump would not be in the position that he is in today of asking the American people to make some tough sacrifices. Clearly, Obama had ample opportunities to put Beijing on notice. For example: Obama did nothing to match or deter China from building an awesome military machine. China developed weapons that can sink U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, along with missiles that can destroy most U.S. bases throughout Asia and negate the military capabilities or our allies. Instead of spending more on defense, Obama cut military spending to the bone – something Trump has had to correct at great cost. Obama failed to stop China from making territorial claims all throughout Asia. Whether it was in the South or East China Sea, over Taiwan or over small islands and reefs, China’s goal was to turn the broader Asia-Pacific into its very own giant sphere of influence. In response, Obama proclaimed a so-called “pivot to Asia.” The pivot sounded great, but never happened. It was under-resourced, devoid of any strategy and accomplished nothing. China pushed even harder in the face of Obama’s weakness, building islands to cement its claims in the South China Sea and constructing military bases. Obama did nothing after China hacked the U.S. government’s Office of Management and Budget. China stole an astounding 23 million personnel records of federal workers – including many who work in the national security and intelligence establishment. Obama failed to respond when China broke World Trade Organization rules. China gave hundreds of billions of dollars of illegal subsidies to domestic industries to try and dominate the global economy. Named Made in China 2025, this initiative was designed to ensure that China’s electric cars, solar panels, 5G equipment and artificial intelligence technologies not only dominate the Chinese domestic market, but the global economy. At the same time, China – along with its state-owned enterprises – used all sorts of methods to steal U.S. intellectual property worth hundreds of billions of dollars through cyberespionage or making access to the Chinese market contingent on getting access to such information. While the above list is far from complete, the point is clear: the Chinese government is a bad actor that has gained from aggressive behavior that enhances its power at the expense of others – especially the United States. The Trump administration has now set on a course to ensure that whenever Beijing acts like a rogue regime there will be costs. The American people should know, as the president has tried to explain, that this test of wills could cost them economically. The good news is that the American people know their history and understand the need for shared sacrifice for the greater good. An earlier generation of American leaders stood up to the Axis powers in World War II when they tried to dominate the world. Then American presidents stood up the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And most recently, our leaders began the fight against international terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Now President Trump is standing up to China’s efforts to dominate the 21st century through economic, military and diplomatic thuggery. He deserves the support of every American, regardless of political party, in this vital endeavor.U: Pressure WorksUS pressure will prevent Chinese miscalculation and intervention into Hong KongLee et al. 2019 (Paul Lee is a program assistant for China and North Korea programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Paul Lee; Jacob Stokes; Rachel Vandenbrink, 8-21-2019, “Despite Beijing’s Threats, Hong Kong Protesters Remain Unbowed” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Beijing and Washington have heightened their rhetoric over Hong Kong, with bipartisan U.S. congressional support for the protesters contrasted with Beijing’s sharp criticism. Beijing has ramped up an international disinformation campaign encouraging confusion over the nature of the protests, and has pressured corporations, such as the major airline Cathay Pacific, to prevent their employees’ participation in the protests. What similarities are there to the pro-democracy protests happening in Moscow now? The two situations differ in numerous ways—for example, Moscow is Russia's capital while Hong Kong is a nominally self-governed Special Administrative Region—but some similarities do exist. Protesters in both countries are standing up to powerful authoritarian governments who have demonstrated a willingness to use force against them. In both Hong Kong and Moscow, massive crowd sizes underscore the depth and breadth of citizens’ grievances. The two movements appear to have expanded well beyond activist circles to bring citizens into the streets who might not normally rally. In addition, both movements have sustained protests over the course of many weeks, a signal to both governments of their commitment. The protests in Hong Kong and Moscow both have proximate causes—for Hong Kong a proposed extradition bill, and for Moscow the government barring opposition candidates from running for city council—but have broadened into wider indictments of the regimes. Also, both sets of protesters have found ways to organize digitally in online environments that are closely monitored and heavily censored. They are also taking steps to circumvent advanced surveillance tools such as facial recognition. The Chinese and Russian governments seek to blame foreign actors—primarily the United States—for allegedly stirring up protests. The goal of those accusations is to undermine the protesters’ legitimacy. Chinese and Russian leaders also plan to coordinate and exchange information on how to thwart that supposed outside interference. How has Beijing responded so far? What do you expect from China moving forward? In the early weeks of the protests Beijing initially blocked news of them in the mainland, but after last week’s protests at the Hong Kong airport in which a reporter from the mainland was attacked, Beijing has changed tactics to condemn the protests in mainland media. A spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office told reporters in Beijing last week that protesters’ actions “constitute serious violent crimes and have started to show signs of terrorism.” Concerns are mounting that Beijing may violently crackdown on protesters. Just across the border, hundreds of People’s Armed Police personnel, responsible for internal security and riot control, conducted large-scale exercises at a sports stadium in Shenzhen, with the Chinese state media broadcasting ominous clips of paramilitary vehicles gathering in the area in a clear warning to the people of Hong Kong. Under the Garrison Law of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government can request assistance from the central government in Beijing to send troops for assistance in the “maintenance of public order.” But Hong Kong police told reporters in a briefing last week that despite struggling in their response over the past weeks, they have now reorganized operations and are prepared to handle the situation on their own, without intervention from the mainland. Beijing is unlikely to send troops into Hong Kong as long as local authorities keep the situation under control. While keeping forces ready across the border, Beijing can be expected to also focus on shaping the narrative in mainland and international media about the protest movement, criticizing any violent acts by the protesters as terrorism and evidence of influence of hostile foreign forces. Even if Beijing hopes to avoid military intervention in Hong Kong now, painting a picture of the protest movement as violent and destructive could help serve as justification for mainland intervention at a later date, even decades down the line. What consequences would Beijing face if it were to take violent action on protesters? Beijing’s words and actions have raised serious concerns about whether it will forcefully intervene in the protests as it did during the Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989, which resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian deaths and drew swift condemnation from countries around the world. At the time, the United States suspended military exchanges, foreign aid, arms sales and the sale of policing equipment to China. Many of these sanctions were lifted and relations restored based on the belief that China’s further integration into the global system, not isolation, would speed along progressive reforms. If China were to take violent action in Hong Kong, it would again face condemnation and sanctions around the world, but with much less sympathy this time given growing disillusionment in many capitals (and at home) with its increasingly authoritarian turn under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It would completely lose the trust of citizens in Hong Kong who were promised the right to “one country, two systems” and further convince the people of Taiwan that peaceful reunification or coexistence is truly out of reach. Such action would also increase threat perceptions of China around the world and destroy the image of China as a champion of peace and development that its leaders have tried so hard to promote. In short, Beijing would have the most to lose if it were to take such a route. What can the U.S. do? While U.S. influence on Hong Kong's situation is limited, it can emphasize to Beijing that a violent crackdown would have a major negative impact on bilateral relations and would catalyze a global reassessment about the nature of China’s rise. Understanding the cost of forceful repression ahead of time should make Beijing think twice about going further down that route. Next, the United States should coordinate with its allies and partners and encourage them to convey similar messages to China, reflecting a global democratic consensus. Washington can also coordinate with allies to ensure solidarity protests in other countries can go forward without fear of harassment by Beijing’s supporters abroad. Several Australian cities have already seen scuffles and intimidation during local protests related to Hong Kong. U.S. leaders could also warn Beijing that the use of force against protesters could be met with repeal of the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, which gives Hong Kong special trade status and has propelled the city’s role as a trade and finance hub. The basic message to Xi Jinping would be, if you negate the “one country, two systems” framework in practice, the United States will withdraw that status in law. Finally, to support those protesting for greater democratic reforms in Hong Kong and elsewhere, the United States must objectively and consistently champion political freedom, democratic values and human rights at home and abroad. U.S. leaders should take care never to link or give the appearance of linking "concessions" on such issues to other unrelated bilateral matters, such as trade. Because doing so would only shore up the groundless but oft-repeated accusation by autocratic regimes that the United States and "foreign forces" are manipulating protesters to advance their own interests, and detract attention from the protesters' courageous cause.Narratives matter, the plan’s “win” gives China the bandwidth to pursue autocratic violence in Hong Kong and TaiwanMazza 2019 (Michael, Visiting Fellow, US defense policy in Asia-Pacific 8-14-2019, “US-China great power competition: The role of values, Hong Kong, and Taiwan” ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Hong Kong has been in political turmoil for much of the summer. The contours of the city’s upheaval are relatively straightforward at this point. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, attempted to rush through the Legislative Council a bill that would have allowed extradition from Hong Kong to China. Hong Kong residents, reasonably concerned that the bill would permit the long arm of Chinese law enforcement to reach into the city with potentially disastrous results for its freedoms, protested. Lam’s refusal or inability to find a political solution to a political problem combined with heavy-handed police tactics have led protesters to escalate their demands from simply withdrawing the bill to genuine universal suffrage and direct elections of the chief executive. Chinese authorities, meanwhile, are making veiled and not-so-veiled threats to deploy the People’s Liberation Army into Hong Kong’s streets. After weeks of demonstrations, tensions run high and a peaceful resolution seems ever more distant. Demonstrators have taken to the streets in response to local developments. It is a homegrown movement—a movement that is not, contrary to Chinese propaganda, directed or incited by foreign agitators, American or otherwise. But nor is that movement isolated from the outside world. Rather, many marchers are inspired by, and identify with, western cultural touchstones and liberal political traditions. One of the movement’s unofficial anthems has been “Do You Hear the People Sing?” From the musical Les Misérables, originally written in French and adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name, the song is a cry for freedom from tyranny. Union Jacks are ubiquitous, their bearers perhaps not only asserting that British colonial rule of the past would be preferable to what Beijing has in store for the future, but also staking a claim as spiritual descendants of John Stuart Mill and his liberal fellow travelers. The occasional marcher has even been seen waving the American flag, undoubtedly seeking attention from the United States, but also waving the flag of the world’s oldest democracy and its foremost advocate of universal values. President Trump may have done Xi Jinping a favor by referring to the protests as “riots,” but many others in the United States are acting more constructively. Legislators across the political spectrum, from Marco Rubio to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have made statements supportive of the movement. On August 2, the co-chairs of Congress’s Human Rights Commission sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross urging them to “suspend future sales of munitions and crowd and riot control equipment to the Hong Kong Police Force and publicly announce that the US will not contribute to the internal repression of peaceful protest in Hong Kong.” A bipartisan piece of legislation introduced in June would, if it becomes law, require the secretary of state to annually recertify that Hong Kong exercises sufficient autonomy from China for it to receive special trade and economic privileges granted by the US-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992. In an August 6 statement, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi offered her concurrence with the letter and announced that, after the August recess, “Congress will begin our work to advance the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, and fight to preserve democratic freedoms and the rule of law in Hong Kong.” These lawmakers understand what the Trump Administration has thus far failed to sufficiently recognize: the competition between the United States and China is not just a contest between different economic systems, a race for global influence, or even a competition over the fate of global order. It is—perhaps fundamentally—a competition between freedom and the forces arrayed against it, the latter embodied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Hong Kong is where these forces are most visibly clashing at the moment, but that clash should not be limited to this unique semi-autonomous city. Within the mainland of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the forces of tyranny largely go unchallenged, as is clear from the consequence-free (for Beijing) cultural genocide in Xinjiang, the appalling treatment of activists of all stripes, and the emerging panopticon state. Beijing wages this battle outside China’s borders, too—notably when it seeks to shut down speech that it does not like in other countries—though the offensive is not often recognized for what it is: an extraterritorial assault on the liberties that citizens in free countries hold dear. That the United States has yet to wholeheartedly engage in this contest is unfortunate, because its advantage over China is clear. To the extent that narrative-building matters in the realm of international politics, it is fairly easy to make the case that China is not on the side of the angels. Tactically speaking, if Chinese diplomats are tied up defending Beijing’s indefensible human rights record, they have less bandwidth for countering American diplomatic initiatives or isolating Taiwan on the world stage. Strategically, effectively engaging in this contest of values can create marginally more space within the People’s Republic for a healthy civil society and civil activism, making it more likely that the Chinese people themselves can, over time, bring about the changes they so richly deserve—just as Hong Kongers are attempting to do today.L: 2NC WallIncreased cooperation with China signals appeasement Juul, 2019 – (Peter, senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, “Trump’s Space Force Gets the Final Frontier All Wrong”, Foreign Policy, March 28, p. )****NCC’19 Novice Packet****But funding isn’t everything, and in the new geopolitical context, democracy must be seen to work effectively. When it comes to space exploration, that means ratcheting back U.S. space cooperation with Russia as well as forgoing any equally intimate cooperation with China and its secretive space agency. The fact that the head of Russia’s space agency remains under U.S. sanctions for his role in Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine illustrates the hazards involved in working with autocracies in space. Deep cooperation with autocratic powers in space gives autocracies a major point of diplomatic leverage over the United States, and more generally allows them to poach unearned international prestige by working on goals set and largely carried out by the United States. In today’s world, there’s no reason for the United States to give Russia or China this sort of standing by association. Cooperation between the United States and Russia won’t grind to an immediate halt, though. With the International Space Station in orbit until at least 2024—if not longer—it will take time to disentangle the web of functional ties that have bound NASA and its Russian counterpart over the last quarter century. Significant cooperation with China should be avoided altogether, especially given its notoriously opaque and military-run space program. The space programs and agencies of other nations—NASA, the European Space Agency and its member-nation agencies, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and even Russia’s Roscosmos—remain led and run by civilians.No strings attached Space cooperation gives away the farm – must use pressure to keep China in check. Hines 2019 (Lincoln, PhD candidate in the Government Department at Cornell University, Secure World Foundation forum March 29, “US-China Engagement in Space” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****[04:09] From the outside, China has changed space policies, sometimes viewed as part of a large grand strategic plan. It's important to recognize the role of domestic politics in nationalism in China. While lamenting our own domestic politics, we often have the tendency to view other states as unitary, intentional, and strategic. [04:30] Like all countries, Chinese domestic politics are complicated. While it's often easy to dismiss the importance of public opinion in closed states, the Chinese Communist Party cares deeply about maintaining its hold on power. It maintains extensive apparatus for collecting and censoring public opinion. [04:48] Chinese new social credit system and even the innovation of an app for users to study Xi Jinping's thought are just a few examples illustrating CCP's concerns over legitimacy. Chinese Communist Party, in part, legitimizes its rule by claiming to regain respect for China, lost in what nationalist narratives describes China's century of humiliation. [05:09] This is what Xi Jinping refers to when discussing the so-called Great National Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation. China advertises extensively to domestic audiences that it has the dressings of a great power. China has hosted the Olympic Games, built its own infrastructure bank, launched the One Belt One Road initiative, and now has an aircraft carrier, despite the limited strategic rationale of possessing one. [05:35] Likewise, in space, China's most expensive projects are designed to attain the dressings of a great power. Placing humans in space, building its own space station, and landing on the moon. Chinese leaders, like in other states, recognize the political utility of outer space for promoting national indemnity. [05:52] As such, Chinese leaders have a keen interest in attaining recognition from the international community that China is an equal and a space power. These facts are important to keep in mind when attempting to comprehend Chinese policy making, and in understanding potential opportunities for cooperative engagement in space. [06:06] Chinese interest in attaining recognition of its status as a great power, providing a means by which the United States can engage China and shape its behavior. To Chinese leaders, the attainment of status of prestige is invaluable political resource. Recognition of China's status as an equal in world politics is an important priority for Chinese foreign policy. [06:26] We can see this rhetorically with Chinese efforts to get the United States on board with its framework of the so-called new model of major country relations, or to adopt the language of "win-win" cooperation. One avenue by which to attain Chinese support for US priorities in outer space is to entice it with the political carrot of recognition. [06:46] Engaging China bilaterally or multilaterally as an equal member of the international community, similar to the responsible stakeholder framework, provides an important source of external and informal recognition of Chinese status ambitions.Pressure checks violent crackdown – failure to maintain pressure causes international symbolism spilloverGreenwald 2019 (Michael, Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “The Financial Implications of Deploying Sanctions in Hong Kong” 8-20-2019, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Hong Kong has been gripped by a brave protest movement sparked by Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s proposed Extradition Bill, which, though suspended, has yet to be withdrawn. Though protestors have moderate and measured requests, they have been met with the flagrantly irresponsible use of riot control devices such as tear gas in the Kwai Fong metro station. Police have turned a virtual blind eye to attacks on the press and protestors alike in Yuen Long. The protestors’ persistence has called into question whether Beijing might employ force to end the protests, envisioning another Tiananmen Square crackdown, and how Washington should potentially. Constitutionally, Beijing could activate the People’s Liberation Army Garrison in Hong Kong if requested by the Hong Kong government. Still, doing so could trigger a multilateral response, ranging from financial sanctions at a time of financial instability on the Mainland to the deployment of additional hard power resources to the region. Considering the effort that Beijing devotes to censoring speech about Tiananmen at home, a similar crushing of dissent in Hong Kong would require draconian lengths, likely overstepping the One Country, Two Systems model. Even more dangerously, Beijing could use the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary police force within the PLA’s command structure. The group has often been used to crush mainland dissent, like the 2008 protests in Tibet. It is now more critical than ever that Washington and the international community keep focused on Hong Kong. Although it is difficult to envision the Mainland stepping down in any scenario, it is not as if the demands put forth by the protestors drastically alter the power dynamic between Hong Kong and China. The protestors do not seek a fundamental reorganization of the relationship between the Mainland and Hong Kong; their demands support the basic foundation of the One Country, Two Systems model that the Extradition Bill threatened. These are not political extremists seeking to carve off a piece of China’s territory, but rather ordinary citizens demanding the basic respects afforded by the Hong Kong Constitution. In response to Beijing’s exaggerated deployment of harsh police activity, some have raised the question of whether Global Magnitsky sanctions would be appropriate. Contrasted with more powerful sanctions, such as dollar clearing and financing restrictions used against Iran and Russia in the past, Global Magnitsky sanctions target individuals and, depending on whom is chosen, could have strong political and reputational impact. If a symbolic denouncement is indeed the goal, as it was for Saudi Arabia after the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Global Magnitsky sanctions are likely the right tool, as they would send a powerful message of solidarity with protestors to both the Hong Kong and Mainland authorities. Such reputational effects should not be discounted in evaluating the policy effectiveness of the Global Magnitsky designation. Given Hong Kong’s privileged status in the international financial system, the symbolic power of Global Magnitsky should not be underestimated. These designations are no longer being made in the periphery of the global financial system, affecting insiders and cronies, but rather one of Asia’s largest economic hubs, universally respected for its rule of law and investor protections. The symbolism of not only solidarity with the protestors, but also holding authorities accountable within the realistic political context of the City should not be underestimated or set aside as moral posturing. There is considerable value in the designation, yet much of Hong Kong’s allure stems from its ties to the Mainland, not necessarily from the City itself.Plan is a huge concession - Xi deploys space cooperation to recuperate legitimacy. Fabian ’19 (Christopher David; B.S. from the US Air Force Academy, M.S. from the University of North Dakota; January 2019; “A Neoclassical Realist’s Analysis Of Sino-U.S. Space Policy”; ; UND Theses, Dissertations, and Senior Projects; accessed 9/2/19; TV) /)****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Fundamentally, cooperation between the U.S. and China is based on maintaining the status quo of free access to space in accordance with existing international treaties and customary law. The primary laws governing the peaceful use of outer space, for which China and the U.S. are both signatories, include the Outer Space Treaty (OST), Rescue Agreement, Liability Convention, and Registration Convention.107 Article IV of the OST prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit and forbids the placement of any weapons on a celestial body. Although the OST requires the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, it does not prohibit conventional weapons in space or provide a definition for what could be considered a space weapon. The vagueness of the OST, particularly article IV, amounts to a crisis in space law and will be covered at length in later sections.108 Despite the previously mentioned ambiguity, this analysis will assume that cooperation entails both the adherence to existing legal regimes and the limitation of the capability to wage war in and from the space domain.109 This includes limiting space control and on-orbit force application capabilities. Alternatively, defection between the U.S. and China involves preventing free access to space through the manipulation of international law, the building and maintaining of space control capabilities, or the building and maintaining of on-orbit force application capabilities. These broad definitions are essential for two reasons: first, they acknowledge that the Sino-U.S. space policy game is nested inside a larger game of Sino-U.S. geostrategic relations, given that space power is a fundamental element of national power. Second, it accounts for the practical limitations in foundational, codified space law. China is highly incentivized by the prospects of mutual cooperation in space. Maintaining free access to space is analogous to free sea lines of communication, which are primarily guaranteed by U.S. military power. 110 This guarantee has allowed China to become the world’s largest importer and exporter, accumulating $4.3T of total trade in 2014 and catalyzing a massive economic resurgence. 111 Similarly, there is evidence that China aims to take advantage of free access to space to continue its national rejuvenation into post-industrial future. In 2013, General Secretary Xi Jinping announced the “China Dream” to rejuvenate China by building national pride, engineering an economic revolution, and rebuilding China’s military.112 Xi has linked a “space dream” as a means of fulfilling the “China Dream”.113 After the launch of the manned Shenzhou-10 mission in 2013 he stated, “The space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger. With the development of space programs, the Chinese people will take bigger strides to explore further into space,” and went on to compare the Chinese manned space program to the Long March.114 Similarly, Lt. Gen. Zhang Yulin stated, “The earth-moon space will be strategically important for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”115 The connection between China’s space program and national rejuvenation touted by CCP leaders is particularly strong in relation to the manned space program, which has ambitious development milestones planned until 2045.1Space power and manned space accomplishments serve to benefit China in five ways. First, success in space forms a nationalist narrative and creates a positive focal point for national pride, counter to the negative images of the Tianamen Square massacre and China’s consistently poor human rights record. 117 Maintaining an independent and self-reliant space program helps the CCP craft a narrative based on technological development, social progress, and sustainable development. This lends legitimacy to CCP leadership of China and stokes nationalism. 118 Additionally, the dissemination and control of satellite communication gives the CCP a medium by which to propagate its own political interpretation of world events.119Second, the economic benefit gained from China’s space program is essential to upholding the informal social contract between the Chinese people and the CCP, one that is based on continued economic growth and an increase in quality of life. China seeks to make its space program a driver of economic and technological advancement in a variety of ways. Primarily, they believe that spin-off technologies from the space program could have up to a 1:10 cost to benefit ratio.120 This creates a cycle where the Chinese space program generates technology, technology spurs economic development, and economic development supports the space program.121 The export of commercial space services will be a driver of economic development as a producer of both jobs and hard currency. 122 Additionally, the space industry spurs the development of a high technology industry by creating a market for high-skill labor and products. 123 The industrial and academic base required for the development of a strong space program is projected to have multi-order effects across other key industries and inspire young Chinese to pursue a career in the sciences.124 Next, the use of satellite application technologies is critical to China’s economic development.125 The use of geological, weather, and positional data is essential to developing China’s limited resources and guarding her fragile environment.126 A multitrillion-dollar infrastructure project called the Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) was announced by Xi in 2013. The purpose of this project is to harness latent Chinese industrial capacity to enhance strategic connection between China and the rest of the Eurasian landmass.127 China’s space development has been specifically linked to BRI by the China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) director of international cooperation, Jiang Hui. In a brief to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Hui highlighted a long term plan focused on building the Chinese space industry and leveraging space capabilities (particularly geospatial, communication, and navigation systems) to build a spatial information corridor.128Third, China is using spacepower as a way to develop prestige and reap soft power gains. The success of the Chinese space program infers significant leadership connotation in the region and is intended to establish Beijing at the forefront of Asia’s technology and economic development. 129 Orbital accomplishments and space technology development is seen as a herald for advancement in agriculture, resource management, communications, and disaster management as well as a symbol of national scientific and economic infrastructures. Therefore, they play a deeply symbolic role in Asia, with significant prestige to be gained by accomplishing space “firsts” within the region. 130 Beijing has made an effort to translate the success of its space program for the purposes of seizing regional leadership, boosting soft power, and incorporating space into BRI. 131 It created the Asia Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO) in 2008, which consists of China, Iran, Mongolia, Peru, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand.132 China has donated ground systems, personnel training, and remote sensing data to member countries.133 Two other major Asian space cooperation organizations exist: the Japanese created and led Asian-Pacific Space Agency Forum (APRSAF) and the Indian created and led Center for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific (CSSTEAP).134 The purpose of these organizations is to reduce the costs of expensive space programs through resource pooling and increasing diplomatic ties between partner nations. Unfortunately, member nation overlap is mostly limited to smaller countries, and the presence of three competing organizations in the same region, each with similar missions led by separate space powers, may result in factionalism rather than cooperation.135In addition to strengthening China economically, the export of commercial space services and the use of satellite application technologies may also have far reaching diplomatic benefits. China has served as an eager provider of space services and technologies to international markets, particularly for developing countries.136 Providing low-cost, partially subsidized space services to developing nations is a powerful diplomatic initiative relating to resource extraction and basing rights. 137 China provided Brazil a low-cost alternative to the LANDSAT remote sensing data via a cooperative venture called Chinese-Brazilian Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS). The cost was split 70/30 by China and Brazil.138 China manufactured, launched, and operated communications and imaging satellites for oil rich Venezuela.139 Similarly, China generously subsidized Nigeria’s first communications satellite for $550M as part of the BRI, with Nigerian oil rights serving as collateral.140 Bolivia enjoyed a similar arrangement, as 85% of its first communications satellite was subsidized by loans from China and built by the Great Wall Industry Corporation.141 Likewise, China designed, launched, and heavily subsidized a Pakistani geosynchronous communication satellite under BRI in exchange for Beidou ground stations in Karachi and Lahore. 142 This was followed by the development and launch of a remote sensing satellite in 2018.143 These acts of space diplomacy are consistent with China’s larger foreign policy efforts to open international markets. 144A2: TrumpWhole of government action, with congress leading the way is keyNossel 2017 (Suzanne, CEO of the Pen American Center and was formerly deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the U.S. State Department. 6-19-2017“It’s OK That Trump Doesn’t Care About Human Rights” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In light of this, it is time for human rights advocates to pivot from voicing outrage at the president’s failure to press for rights in his global pronouncements and appearances and instead double down on making sure the rest of the world understands he does not speak for all Americans. The idea that the current White House will press Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to release his country’s jailed journalists and academics, urge China’s Xi Jinping to loosen restrictions on anti-government speech, or persuade Arab leaders to usher in democratic reforms is fantasy. Moreover, coming from this president, speeches and statements on human rights would ring hollow, compounding the global propensity to read hypocrisy and cynicism into American articulations of values. Rights advocates would be better off working to temper the worst in Trump’s domestic policies and finding other vehicles and voices to uphold, and ultimately restore, the credibility of the United States as a global human rights standard-bearer. Advocates may find there is a silver lining of sorts in Trump’s silence on rights: It creates an opportunity for more credible actors — from members of Congress to intellectuals and activists — to remind the world that despite Trump’s election, liberal values and support for dissidents remain strong across the United States.Engagement risks appeasementLayton 2018 (Dr. Peter Layton is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University. A retired RAAF Group Captain, Peter has extensive experience in force structure development and taught national security strategy at the US National Defense University. He has a PhD in grand strategy and is the author of the book Grand Strategy., “To Engage China, Or Balance It? Lessons From A Failed Grand Strategic Exercise” 7-20-2018, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The British grand strategy of the 1930s has become popularly known as “appeasement” and has been much studied. This analysis can be divided into three distinct waves. The first wave, the orthodox interpretation, began when emotions were running high in 1940 with Guilty Men, written under the pseudonym Cato. As the book’s title suggests, this wave focused on the personal failings of individual policymakers. The second wave, the revisionist approach, arose in the mid-1960s with the release of official classified U.K. Cabinet documents and focused on the decision-making process and the underlying strategic logic. In the 1990s, the counter-revisionist wave began arguing that the appeasement concept was sound but poorly implemented. This article draws mainly on the second and third waves to offer three lessons from Britain’s grand strategy in the 1930s that, arguably, adherents to each school of thought would agree with. First, combining engagement and balancing risks incoherence; second, engagement, if undertaken, needs careful consideration to avoid an “own goal;” and third, alliances are significant and should not be overlooked in crafting nuanced grand strategies to counter adversaries. Today, many studying how to handle the rise of China propose some version of a grand strategy that similarly blends engagement and balancing. Indeed, the China debate now seems to be moving on to arguing about how much weight to attach to each strand. In this discussion, however, we should remember that Britain has been here before us. Britain’s Grand Strategy The pre-1965 orthodox interpretation of appeasement held that senior British politicians and policymakers were “vain, naif and ignorant” and thus underestimated Nazism, refused to educate the public to Hitler’s expansionist ambitions, and failed to increase defense spending as soon as they should have. The “treasonous” appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938, then, simply reflected that the British government was led by knaves whose “ineptness and incapacity, [displayed] almost criminal negligence in their appointed tasks of protecting the national security. There was no strategy, merely “old fools.” With the release of the Cabinet papers and greater distance from the trauma of World War II, however, new historical research revealed that the British government did actually have a grand strategy and that it was quite sophisticated — even if a dismal failure. Moreover, it revealed that many diverse and complex factors influenced the government’s choice of this grand strategy and how it was implemented. This revisionism shifted an ultimately sterile debate about the perceived personal failings of the “guilty men” toward trying to understand why the grand strategy had failed. With the blame game abandoned, it became possible to formulate insights that could inform future grand strategies. Let us now do just that. In Britain’s twin-track grand strategy, the engagement strand assumed Germany’s leadership was not monolithic, rather comprising four distinct power centers: the officer class of the armed forces led by Field Marshal Werner von Bloomberg; the economic policy bureaucrats, bankers, and business heads (especially those from the heavy industries in the Rhineland and Ruhr); the Nazi party; and the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler. The British government believed that within these power centers there was a struggle underway between moderates and extremists that could be usefully exploited. Both sides were vying to influence Adolf Hitler, who was thought to be a moderate, at least compared to perceived extremists like Joseph Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Himmler. Accordingly, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted Britain to “do all in its power to encourage the moderates.” Britain’s intention was to strengthen the moderates’ position by working with them to address their concerns about the Treaty of Versailles and offering tempting political and economic policy incentives. The hope was that in due course, the more bellicose extremists would be expelled from the government. The political incentives included helping correct perceived failings in the peace treaty: Britain acquiesced to Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland and its annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. The economic incentives built on the strong connections between the major financial and business institutions in Britain and Germany. British government departments actively supported the growth of commercial interactions and business relationships to help tip the domestic balance of German political power in favor of moderate groups. As part of this, the government granted an increasing volume of export credits to firms involved in commerce with Germany right up to late August 1939, immediately before the war started. Aiding this effort was the unusually close working relationship between each nation’s banking representatives. The governor of the Bank of England held that there were sensible financial figures behind the new Nazi regime who could steer Hitler towards less militaristic policies. One of the key assumed moderates targeted was Hjalmar Schacht, who served during various points in the 1930s as president of the Reichsbank and minister of economics. Schacht told the British that economic concessions bolstered him and the other moderates within the power struggle. In mid-1937, the British also began cultivating Herman Goring, an important Nazi Party figure. Equally surprising in retrospect was that the British also approached Field Marshal von Blomberg, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and minister of war from 1935 to 1938, who was, in reality, strongly committed to German expansionism. In the grand strategy’s second strand, Britain sought to balance against Germany, mainly by re-equipping and expanding the British armed forces to more effectively deter any German adventurism. The Navy would contribute with a strengthened capability to interdict merchant shipping, foreshadowing a repeat of the World War I blockade of Germany. The Royal Air Force would develop the capability to destroy military-industrial targets, while the Army was to concentrate on home defense while keeping up imperial policing across the Middle East and the Afghan border. The two-pronged strategy led to some premature satisfaction about Britain’s apparent cleverness. At the Nov. 20, 1938, cabinet meeting, Chamberlain remarked: “In our foreign policy we were doing our best to drive two horses abreast, conciliation and rearmament. It was a very nice art to keep these two steeds in step.” Lessons for China Grand Strategy History records, though, that this grand strategy was a failure, leading to precisely what it was meant to avoid: loss of empire and Britain’s relegation to a second-class power. Worse, the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee in 1935 had correctly identified 1939 as the year of maximum danger. From Britain’s accurately predicted misfortune, we may draw some cautions for modern-day grand strategic challenges. First, a grand strategy that combines engagement and balancing is inherently incoherent. Engagement stresses cooperating with another nation for the common good whereas balancing involves threatening another nation with war to make it cease unwanted actions. Germany used its good economic and financial relationship with Britain to help finance its rapid military buildup. The 1931 Standstill Agreement begun during the Great Depression was renewed annually, aiding German bank solvency and providing crucial lines of credit. Moreover, merchandise trade with Britain furnished the international currency necessary to pay for essential food and raw material imports. As was recognized at the time, this all facilitated German rearmament. In 1936, Reginald McKenna, chairman of Midland Bank and a member of Parliament, campaigned against economic concessions to Germany on these grounds. The Foreign Office countered that this economic and financial interaction “strengthened the peace party,” helping “reasonable people in Germany to exert their influence.” As Aaron Friedberg has shown, Western engagement with China has permitted rapid economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty but also allowing the Chinese Communist Party to build a large, well-equipped military. To take one example, Chinese economic growth fueled by foreign investment and merchandise trade provided the financial basis for large-scale state investment in national dredging capabilities beginning in the tenth Five Year Plan (2001 to 2005). By 2010 China had the world’s largest dredging capacity and was able to undertake the massive land reclamation involved in building the six new islands in the South China Sea. Ironically, the new South China Sea island military bases are partially a result of Western engagement. It’s clear that balancing against China militarily conflicts, to some extent, with efforts to engage with it economically. Second, Britain’s engagement strand rested on a badly flawed understanding both of individual German leaders and of how the leadership group functioned. Rather than persuading German leadership to make choices that furthered British interests, U.K. leaders were instead manipulated by their targets to advance German rearmament. In retrospect, supporting the Nazi Party’s grip on German society was a major error. Rather than trying to gain favor with German leaders by helping them advance their domestic agendas, it might have been more advantageous to make Nazi rule more difficult. Considering current circumstances, Friedberg suggests that given the Chinese Communist Party’s use of political warfare against other states, reciprocating is in order. He argues that the party has many internal shortcomings, observing that “the United States and its allies should seek to highlight [these] rather than ignoring them out of a misplaced sense of decorum or in a futile attempt at reassurance.” Friedberg’s critique has merit in that there is one big issue about which Beijing obsesses. Joseph Fewsmith notes that: “China is the only great power that worries about its legitimacy on a daily basis.” As Kerry Brown points out, Chinese leaders work “in a very restricted space, where their margin for error is low. No one pretends that Chinese people have deep loyalty to the Communist Party.”A2: No SpilloverXi can use the plan as political cover to crackdown on dissidents, space cooperation ensures a massive legitimacy boostGoswami 2019 (Namrata, senior analyst and author. Her work on “Outer Space and Great Powers” was supported by the MINERVA Initiative Grant for Social Science Research, 8-5-2019 The Space Review “China’s grand strategy in outer space: to establish compelling standards of behavior” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China’s strategy to shape the path for its renaissance and emergence as lead actor in outer space by 2045 can be understood through a Sun Tzu-inspired lens. For one, it was made clear by President Xi Jinping, in his 2012 speech, while he was touring an exhibition on “The Road to Renewal” hosted by the National Museum of China, that the time for renaissance and rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is now. This is Xi’s dream, outlined further when he became president in 2013, that China crystallize itself into the world leading power overall, to include space, that benefits its citizens. In order to ensure stability to that dream, Xi took the unprecedented step of making himself president for life, despite his claims to the contrary of intra-Communist Party of China (CPC) democratic reforms. With that step, he categorically put an end to the once-per-decade high-level CPC leadership transition. The building of alliances and legitimacy After Xi took over the reins of China, he has undertaken significant steps to build China’s space capability. Under him, China tested several key technologies for the first time in space: in 2013, a Chinese satellite, Shiyan 7 (SY-7, Experiment 7), with a prototype robotic arm demonstrated that it could capture another satellite in orbit, explained as a space maintenance mission by China, but with dual implications of grabbing adversary satellites.SY-7 also rendezvoused with two other Chinese satellites, the Chuangxin 3 (CX-3) and the Shijian 7 (SJ-7, Practice 7). The strategic significance of these maneuvers at that time was that SY-7 surprised everyone by its sudden maneuvers with a completely different satellite, the SJ-7 (launched in 2005) instead of what experts thought it would rendezvous with, the CX-3 launched along with SY-7 in 2013. In 2017, China demonstrated the launch and docking of its indigenous cargo spacecraft, the Tianzhou 1, with its space lab, the Tiangong 2. In May 2018, China launched its relay satellite, the Queqiao, to L2 halo orbit to enable communications between its upcoming Chang’e-4 lunar mission to the far side of the Moon. In January 2019, Chang’e-4 successfully landed on the farside. In July, for the very first time, Chinese private space company, ispace, launched successfully into orbit. Earlier such attempts by Onespace had failed. This is part of President Xi’s push for encouraging private space startups, and investment flows as a result. Under President Xi’s civil-military integration strategy, the PLA opened up its Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center for private launches. Ji Duo, the center's party chief, stated that “carrying out launches of privately made rockets is what a world-class space center is supposed to do, and Jiuquan is willing to put privately funded missions on its launch agenda.” Critically, under that strategy, Chinese investment firms are also looking to aggressively invest in US private space companies. For instance, China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd has invested in Moon Express, one of the companies chosen by NASA for its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Tencent also invested in Planetary Resources (now acquired by ConsenSys, Inc.) and Satelogic, an Argentinian company specializing in satellite imagery. NanoRacks, another US private space company, established a commercial partnership with Kuang-Chi Science LTD in 2018. China established its first overseas satellite ground station in Kiruna, Sweden, that year as well. Consequently, as is advised by Sun Tzu, to build a comprehensive context for the moral legitimacy of your power, President Xi and the CPC has worked to build alliance structures, signed memoranda of understanding (MoUs), and offered to collaborate on lunar missions with other countries. This is part of Xi’s vision of creating a world order where China not only has capacity but also legitimacy as the country that champions a peaceful and harmonious world order. China even invited India, a peer competitor in Asia in space, to become part of its lunar exploration program and research base plans by 2036. One such initiative is the Spatial Information Corridor, where China is offering its Beidou Navigation System to the world, especially to the 70 member countries of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Categorically pitched within the United Nations agenda for making the world a better place, China has offered its space capacity as a force multiplier for a world free of poverty, backed by peace, justice, freedoms, and strong institutions. This perspective has been vindicated by none other than the United Nations Office on Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) Director, Simonetta Di Pippo. China and UNOOSA signed an MoU that called for applications from UN member states to be part of China’s permanent space station. China’s BRI initiative has been hailed by the African Union and dubbed the Marshall Plan, without a war. Recently, China, in its quest for outer space resources, signed an MoU with Luxembourg and established its deep space exploration unit in the Grand Duchy, primarily to take advantage of Luxembourg’s legislation on space resources. Consequently, China hailed Luxembourg’s entry into its BRI initiative in March, following which the Bank of China chose Luxembourg to list its $500 million BRI bond. China even invited India, a peer competitor in Asia in space, to become part of its lunar exploration program and research base plans by 2036. This came right after India successfully launched the Chandrayaan-2 mission to the South Pole of the Moon. Earlier in June, China, along with UNOOSA, selected a joint Indian Institute of Technology-University de Bruxelles experiment project, among six others, to conduct experiments on the Chinese Space Station (CSS). India has however announced that it will build its own space station by 2030 and conducted an ASAT test, Mission Shakti, this year vis-à-vis China’s growing counter-space capacities. Achievements What China has achieved under Xi are clear demonstrations of international legitimacy and the construction of a narrative that its space activities will lead to global freedom and economic development. This is a rather remarkable achievement, coming from a CPC regime that is brutal to internal dissidents and tolerates no dissent. President Xi, in a speech to the PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF), categorically stated that loyalty to the CPC comes above everything else. This loyalty was reiterated by other Chinese state officials as well as Chinese media. And there are dire consequences for those who fail in demonstrating that loyalty. The example of Hong Kong and the recent proposed extradition changes, under which Hong Kong residents could be tried in mainland China for certain crimes, should give one pause. The extradition principles goes against the legal and ratified commitments China made as per the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, based on which the UK handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997. The 1984 Declaration specifies “the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be vested with executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication”. Wide ranging protests by Hong Kong residents have since ensued against it, with China now hinting about the use of its military against the protestors, if requested, by the Hong Kong government who proposed the extradition provisions in the first place. Yet, at the global arena, China is selling a narrative of liberty and freedom, backed by significant resources (billions of dollars in investments), that is succeeding to an extent that countries are buying into that Chinese dream; that China’s success in space will benefit all humankind and promote freedom. The aim is to win the game for influence and power projection, especially in a domain like outer space without bloodshed so that a Chinese order is established and legitimized. Sun Tzu’s advice to build into the five elements of power, imbibed with stratagem, is clearly a guiding principle for Xi. As the author of the book China Dream, Liu Mingfu, a retired PLA colonel, maintains, as per Sun Tzu’s guidance, the breakout of war is the breakdown of strategy and demonstrates civilizational demise. To win a war by stratagem, without bloodshed, is the way of a superior grand strategy and civilization. With a combination of economic resources, moral legitimacy, and by constituting standards of behavior, China is playing at a game for power, one with consequences for the global order. For with power comes influence, especially “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.” Given that, we need to reflect on what the world would be like when we have self-appointed leaders for life, inspired by an authoritarian ideology that limits access to political representation within China, leading that global order; especially leaders who believe in the great destiny of their country to emerge as world leader and set standards of behavior for others. That is a scenario that requires deep philosophical and strategic engagements, answers to which, I am afraid, will not be found by studying European history, warfare, and strategy, which currently dominates professional education courses in the West. For to avoid being caught by surprise, the need of the hour is to broaden your education and go beyond ethno-centric academic, intelligence, and policy discourses dominated by a Western-inspired international history and concepts. For instance, if one analyses how intelligence is gathered by the US ($59.9 billion intelligence budget in 2019), and its closest allies (the Five Eyes: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the concepts are informed by defunct Anglo-Saxon presumptions, and the method is technocratic, utilizing data-mining approaches to understand polities that are informed by a completely different strategic culture. I argue that the US strategic culture has yet to account for the fact that the world has changed, unable or simply unwilling to adapt to a new security environment. And as Klaus Knorr indicated in his chapter on “Threat Perception”, these results in several problems, least of which is the ambiguity of information gathered. More seriously, Knorr specified that ethno-centric predispositions resulted in problems of information gathering, intrinsic intellectual difficulties, and predetermined expectations and beliefs. For he said and I quote “Man, it seems, not only tends to be a prisoner of his perceptions, his perceptions also are slaves to his predispositions”. For to truly understand complex strategic doctrines like The Art of War, one must move beyond clichés like “deception is the Chinese way of war” or conveniently locate it within realism, to actually grasping that Sun Tzu wrote a comprehensive text in which he asserted, “all warfare is based on deception”, and not just the Chinese way. Moreover, to him, deception was simply a tactic and not the end goal, in the larger “grand strategy for success,” which prioritizes a peacetime offensive. The aim is to win the game for influence and power projection, especially in a domain like outer space without bloodshed so that a Chinese order is established and legitimized. And that after all is President Xi Jinping’s space P legitimacy is directly linked to space program successMuthert 2018(Luuk L.W.F., Master thesis, Utrecht University, “Does the Middle Kingdom rise up alone? The US exclusionist policy toward China's space program” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****5. PRESTIGEA key rationale for states in pursuing a space program is prestige, both domestic and international. While it is often mentioned in various ways in the description of other rationales, the accruement of prestige is a rationale in and of itself. R.P. Dore in his 1975 consideration of the influence of prestige in international affairs identifies a ‘normatively ranked hierarchy of nations’.58 Prestige is that which determines the rank a state occupies within this hierarchy, i.e. its status. As it is normative, the hierarchy does not just encompass power. Equality, justice, social, artistic and intellectual development are part of this normative scheme that add up to possible claims of ‘moral leadership’. A minimalist definition of prestige that has been offered is ‘recognition of importance’.59 Prestige can be gained from two basic sources; material and social. A flourishing economy, extensive knowledge of advanced technology and a strong military are examples of the former. Powerful alliances and membership in international institutions (especially those promoting peace) are examples of the latter. Crucially, an additional distinction is made between dominance and higher prestige. While dominance is supported by force, prestige is ‘freely conferred deference’.60 The important consequence of this distinction is that those seeking higher prestige, do not necessarily seek dominance.61 For contemporary China, a rightfully prestigious position in the world has been missing during the ‘century of humiliation’ it suffered, since being defeated by Great Britain in the First Opium War of 1839-1842. A time of unequal treaties, domestic turmoil and foreign dominance followed, throwing China into chaos. For over two millennia before the colonial powers brought imperial China to its knees, the Middle Kingdom had been the centre of its world. The Chinese, from the unification of China in 221 BCE, were used to receiving tribute from neighbouring tribes and states through the tributary system. Note that this was without the threat or use of force, and instead considered something self-evident. China saw its culture, philosophy and language as constituting the pinnacle of civilised society, to which others logically ‘freely conferred deference’. This tributary system was only ended forcefully when in the nineteenth century the Qing dynasty encountered the militarily vastly superior European states. The restoration of the rightfully prestigious position in the world has been a main objective for all Chinese governments after the political unification of the mainland. Pursuit or restoration of the prestige by China thus has an important international component. Referring to the ‘century of humiliation’, Mao in 1958 said: ‘‘In the past others have looked down on us. […] Now let us do something for them to see’’.62 In line with this statement and the continuous, if not always equal, political support for the space program Xi remarked at 2013 launch of Shenzhou-10: ‘‘Developing the space program and turning the country into a space power is the space dream that we have continuously pursued.’’.63 He is also explicitly quoted by Chinese state media connecting space achievements to international status: ‘‘Space is an important field of scientific and technological progress and innovation, Xi said, adding that achievements in this regard are also important symbols of a country's scientific and technological strength.’’ 64 Advancements in space are interwoven with the ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘renewal of the Chinese nation’, a narrative referring back to the prestigious status China used to hold in the world before the ‘century of humiliation’. In the State Council’s Information Office 2016 white paper on China’s space activities, the stated vision has a clear international connotation: ‘‘to provide strong support for the realization of the Chinese Dream of the renewal of the Chinese nation, and make positive contributions to human civilization and progress’’.65 One major problem with the advancement of prestigious activities from a backward position is what R.P. Dore calls the ‘dilemma of pride and pupillage’.66 If one wants to overcome backwardness in the pursuit of a more prestigious status, tutoring or assistance is needed. These however, imply deference to another who is then recognised as more prestigious. In order to accept tutoring, pride must be swallowed by the learning party by admitting it lacks knowledge and capability. One way out of this ‘dilemma’ is to focus on self-reliance. The 2016 white paper on China’s space activities declares that China’s historical experiences have ‘‘opened up a path of self-reliance and independent innovation, and has created the spirit of China’s space industry.’’.67 This does entail long development times and slower progress, although this course had not been entirely voluntary during the space program’s history. In a June 1960, towards the height of the Sino-Soviet split, PLA Marshal Nie Rongzhen reports to Mao on technical assistance from the USSR: ‘‘We need to adopt a new way of doing things in our future scientific and technological dealings with the Soviet Union. When the time comes to do so, we should inquire about and still request all assistance that is set out in agreement. But if the other side won’t give [us the assistance], we certainly won’t press [the issue]; we’ll just keep account. In the last few months, staff members of our office in the Soviet Union have repeatedly pressed their inquiries, encountering many rebuffs, leaving the impression that we are in a desperate situation without Soviet assistance and, in this way, making the other side even more cocky and more controlling. We have already told these comrades that they should only ask lightly and just forget it if assistance is not forthcoming.’’ 68 While there was the clear influence of the escalating ideological conflict between the USSR and China, it wasn’t supposed to look as if China really needed the Soviet’s help. It seems that a combination between being a lack of assistance and a choice of pride over pupillage characterised the end of Sino-Soviet space cooperation. The progress of China’s human spaceflight program throughout the 1990s and 2000s is especially telling evidence for the importance Chinese leadership attaches to prestige and status. A first attempt at putting a taikonaut in space had been made with the 1971 project 714. Although even selection of potential astronauts was made, the alleged coup and death of Lin Biao at the end of the year combined with PLA leadership of the program sealed it fate. The current Chinese human spaceflight program is part of project 921 initiated in 1992, also known as the Shenzhou program. While manned space programs tend to receive staggering amounts of political support, as is the case in China, their usefulness is often doubted. Costs are usually ten times higher than for a similar mission executed by robots.69 National economic benefit of space stations is also difficult to disentangle from the standard effect of large government spending programs. If economy is the rationale, the state would certainly be better served by investing the same amount of funds in infrastructure or practical research. Military rationales are also dismissed, as both the US and USSR found no added military value in keeping astronauts/cosmonauts in space.70 Science does stand to gain from a human space program, yet the caveat of the economic rationale also applies here. If advancement of science is the goal, investing the same amount of funds in universities and research groups instead of rockets is far more efficient. The human spaceflight program is, however, very effective at increasing prestige. Internationally, China has become part of a group of major powers that only included the US and USSR/Russia. Membership of this exclusive group confers a status that unrivalled by any other achievement. China was able to marshal enormous economic resources, build rockets capable of exiting the Earth’s atmosphere, raise its national scientific capability to world class, and provide political support for over a decade. The space program and especially the human spaceflight aspect has certainly raised China’s prestige within the world community, while it is still being classified as a developing state by e.g. the World Bank.71 Prestige enhancing activities also has a domestic side, creating a sense of pride in the country’s achievements and its political leadership. The CCP is aware of both the international and domestic prestige benefits emerging from its space program. For example, commenting on the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter launch in 2007, Premier Wen Jiabao remarked that it had ‘‘deep historical significance for raising our international standing and strengthening the force of our ethnic solidarity.’’.72 The vast and often mountainous periphery of the Chinese territory has been difficult to properly connect to the prosperous east. This has caused the minorities living in the peripheral Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Guangxi, Ningxia and Tibet autonomous regions to be is less contact with the central government in Beijing. As an alternative to expensive and expansive hard-wired communications, the space program facilitated satellite links to these areas. The CCP leadership has taken every opportunity to tie its image to that of the space program, especially the human spaceflight program. Presence at launch sites, statements and speeches linking the program to the party ideology, creation of a national ‘space day’ and using taikonauts in public relations has cemented this link.73 What must be noted, is that this outcome of enhancing the party’s prestige, if not legitimacy, is a side-effect. Enhancing CCP prestige can be conceivably be done in many ways, and human spaceflight is the most expensive and least secure option.74 So on the one hand, party prestige benefitting from the space program could not have been an important prestige rationale to induce China to start project 921. On the other hand, it could provide a prestige rationale for the continuation of the space program, even under future economic duress. The CCP has tied itself and the historic ‘renewal of the Chinese nation’ narrative to the space program, especially the human spaceflight component. Any and all failings in this program will therefore also been cast back onto the CCP, leading to potential ‘loss of face’ or reduction in party prestige. In fact, the human spaceflight program can be said to be a very public part of the CCP’s performance legitimacy. This idea that China’s ruling party is dependent on socio-economic performance as a justification for its rule was for a long time dominant and even connected to its earlier historical experiences.75 However, it is currently being debated as ideology and social justice are increasingly seen as main legitimisation forces by Chinese elites.76 An interesting example of the role prestige play within the Chinese space program can be found in the earlier discussed Chang’e-4 mission to the far side of the moon. As it is the first lander on the far side, it is an both a civil/scientific and prestigious achievement. No other state has yet landed on the far side of the moon, making almost all observations scientific treasure-troves. At the same time, it shows that China is able to conquer uncharted territory when it comes to high technology and space technology in particular. This uniqueness increases the international prestige of the Chinese space program, and with it that of the Chinese state and communist party. As previously stated, the priority of rationales for a space program differ among states. A glimpse of the Chinese priorities can be extracted from the proposed landing site of the Chang’e-4 lander. The site is located within the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, a location of scientific interest for the formation of the moon and its geological development. While a suitable location, it has bene criticised by lunar scientist Dr. Paul D. Spudis for being a suboptimal landing zone for these scientific objectives.77 He suggests that a site only 250 km east of the intended landing site would be easier for landing and more scientifically interesting. It is of course possible that CNSA and its international partners had not considered Dr. Spudis’ arguments or disagree with them on scientific grounds. However, it is striking that the proposed precise landing zone within the SPA basin will be the Von Kármán crater. This crater is named after Hungarian-American aerospace engineer Theodore Von Kármán, who worked at Caltech from 1930 and founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1944. The JPL was to become a crucial hub for space technology in the US. Von Kármán’s group was joined by Qian Xuesen in 1935. During the Second Red Scare in the 50’s, Qian was accused of being a communist and detained for several years. Only one year after he returned to China in 1955, Qian became the first director of the Fifth Academy of the Chinese National Defence Ministry.78 The establishment of this Fifth Academy in 1956 heralded the start of the Chinese missile and space program.79 Qian was crucial in the early development of the Chinese spaceflight and nuclear weapons programs, earning him the nickname ‘Father of Chinese Rocketry’.80 Out of all the geological features on the far side of the moon, the Chinese rover will most likely land in the crater named after the man whose protégé was the ‘Father of Chinese Rocketry’. As only a handful of geological features on the moon have names connected to China, and landing in one of them would emphasise the unique national achievement of this Chinese-led mission. Therefore, unless there are scientific arguments countering those of Dr. Spudis, CNSA has deliberately increased the mission risk in order to increase the symbolism of the achievement. Especially regarding the current scientifically suboptimal location with higher risk, the determination of the Chang’e-4 landing site should be seen as a fundamentally scientific, but ultimately prestige driven choice. The major role prestige plays as a rationale for the Chinese space program is also doubted. Kulacki and Lewis consider the rationale explained as prestige differently: ‘‘not so much ‘prestige’ as ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ In particular, the cases of Sputnik and Reagan’s SDI speech demonstrate that fear of falling behind was a much more powerful motivation than a sense that the party might improve its standing by launching satellites and astronauts into space.’’ 81 It is certainly true that the fear of lagging behind fuelled space program rationales, especially during the Cold War space race. However, this is also a prestige rationale. After all, falling behind compared to a competitor leads to ‘loss of face’ and the perceived superiority of the competitor. Party standing might not directly improve due to a satellite launch, but that would be a domestic prestige rationale. Relative international status however, will clearly benefit if a loss of prestige due to falling behind is avoided. In order to prevent loss of face, China used to refrain from live broadcasting of its rocket launches. A tight control over the publicity surrounding the space program was, and still to some extend is, used to shape the narrative. Another sign of China’s sensitivity to loss of prestige is the pace of the space program. China has far less budget allocated to CNSA than the US has to NASA, its space program goals are always on a longer timescale than those of other agencies, and not too ambitious.82 When it comes to international prestige from its space program, China wants to rather be safe than sorry. International prestige is a crucial rationale for the Chinese space program. Civil weather and communication satellites have a unique benefit for China. All other goals pursued through the space program can arguably be better obtained by traditional investment methods; whether regarding science, stimulation of the economy or domestic prestige for the CCP. However, overcoming its ‘century of humiliation’, reasserting itself as a regional and world power and showing the advanced capabilities of China to the international community, are feats requiring international prestige that is uniquely well conferred by the space program. Space key to legitimacyBowe 2019(Alexander, Policy Analyst, Security and Foreign Affairs , “China’s Pursuit of Space Power Status and Implications for the United States” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Beijing consistently invests high levels of funding and political will to its space program, which has driven its steady progress in achieving important milestones.? 13 This support, along with a focus on improving and standardizing the quality of manufactured components, has helped create a mature space program whose development was previously constrained by poor infrastructure and less advanced technology.14 Compared to the U.S. space program, China’s program is also more connected to the “levers of power,” meaning its goals more often draw support from top leaders and are interconnected with the overall priorities of China’s industrial and foreign policies.15 China’s deliberate and comprehensive approach to its space program gives it opportunities to derive important economic, political, and diplomatic benefits, including domestic legitimacy, international prestige, and access to tasking information and observational data derived by international clients using its space platforms.16 For example, China’s Beidou GNSS is a vital component in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as part of the Digital Silk Road.17 According to one high-ranking government official overseeing information technology policy, the Digital Silk Road will help establish “a community of common destiny in cyberspace,” invoking a slogan Beijing uses to describe a revised global order more accommodating to its political and economic system .18A2: No Risk of CrackdownYes violence is highly likely absent international pressureShoebridge 2019(Michael, director of the defence, strategy and national security program at Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 8-26-2019 “Beijing is manufacturing the circumstances to justify brutal intervention in Hong Kong” )****NCC’19 Novice Packet****So, we’ve got to a point where the playbook needs to turn a page. As I see it, Chairman Xi Jinping and his politburo colleagues have three options. The best—and most unlikely—path for Beijing to take is to do what a representative government would: engage with the people of Hong Kong to listen to their views and act on them. That sounds incredibly naive and idealistic I know, but the option is open to Beijing. It would demonstrate a maturity that might shift the increasingly bleak assessments people across the world are making of China and maybe give Xi a chance to salvage some credibility for his offer to take his China Dream to the world. It’s now well beyond the time when Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, could engage with the people of Hong Kong on some of the core grievances they’re expressing and have any hope of being listened to, so it’s up to Beijing. Xi could do this by being the adult in the room. He could politely disown Lam’s disastrous handling of the protests while also expressing concern about the protesters’ methods, then use that space to do some of what the protesters want, in a way he controls. That would mean appointing a respected Hong Kong figure to hold a public inquiry into police violence during the protests, as well as inquiring into violence by protesters. Providing some kind of amnesty for individuals involved would be wiser than laying charges against officials and protesters. Xi could also unilaterally withdraw the extradition bill and commit to no further action on it under the ‘one country, two systems’ commitment. While he could be reassuring about keeping Hong Kong’s political and legal structures in place over coming years, the bottom line would remain the 2047 timeline for Hong Kong to assimilate into mainland China. The second path open to Xi is to continue to give no ground to the people of Hong Kong on any of their grievances and to simply wait the protesters out. That option would require him to keep control of the security forces so that they don’t escalate further in violence even in the face of attacks by protesters. And it would require an assessment that the protests will lose momentum over time—which hasn’t happened to date. It might be attractive as an approach between now and the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October. The most likely course from the politburo, though, is a simple, repressive and violent one. Hong Kong matters most to the old guard in Beijing as a symbol of control—theirs or the people’s. Sure, Beijing has tried the normal playbook to manage things, and it has failed. But the reason Xi hasn’t taken steps to de-escalate the confrontation between the Hong Kong people and the police through politics (listening and negotiating) is that doing so would cede a level of control from the party to the people, and send a message that this might be possible in other parts of China. As we saw with references to ‘colour revolutions’ by senior party members in the past few weeks, their fear of a mass people’s movement that ousts the CCP is real. The Hong Kong protesters’ use of Eastern European precedents like the human chain stokes those fears. So, what Xi and his party colleagues see as at stake in Hong Kong is their personal futures, along with the future of CCP rule in China itself. That is the logic that brought Deng Xiaoping to order the People’s Liberation Army to massacre its own people in the streets of the capital 30 years ago, when Eastern Europe was convulsed with its own people’s movements. And it’s this same voice of self-preservation and continued control that is likely to be loudest within the CCP as the protests continue. Beijing is driving the course of events in Hong Kong to this conclusion by refusing to engage with the Hong Kong people’s grievances—and Xi surely knows that. This refusal is creating a more pressurised, intense and desperate environment between the protesters and the authorities, which is leading inexorably to a violent conclusion. That may be just what Beijing wants. And the party leaders’ excuse would be that events on the ground got so chaotic that they were left with no option but a lethal intervention. They should be held to account for creating the environment in which such bloody logic can be paraded as a justification. It’s now time for the international community to step up to prevent a foreseeable massacre that will further cleave China—and other authoritarian regimes—from the rest of the world.Troop buildup means the threat of intervention is real between now and October 1stBall 2019(Sam BALL, 8-14-2019, “Troops at the border: A Chinese military intervention in Hong Kong?” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Video and satellite images released this week show Chinese military troops massing near the border with Hong Kong. Is it just an exercise in intimidation or is there a real threat of a Chinese military intervention? Armoured personnel carriers are seen, one after the other, rolling along a Chinese highway. Their apparent destination is a sports stadium in the city of Shenzhen, just across the bay from Hong Kong. The video of what appears to be the deployment of Chinese military personnel to within miles of the Hong Kong border were published by Chinese state media earlier this week. That was followed by satellite images, taken on Monday but released on Wednesday by US-based Maxar Technologies, showing what looked to be Chinese military vehicles parked inside the Shenzhen Bay Sports Centre, a 20,000-seat arena that once hosted a concert by English pop singer Jessie J, but may now be the staging post for a military operation by the People’s Liberation Army. The People’s Armed Police have been assembling in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, in advance of apparent large-scale exercises, videos obtained by the Global Times have shown. It is the latest sign that Beijing is prepared to take a more direct role in curtailing the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, or at least wants the main actors in those protests to believe it is willing to do so. ‘Psychological warfare’ State media claimed the troop movements were part of previously scheduled military drills, unrelated to events in Hong Kong. Professor Steve Tsang, Director of the SOAS China Institute in London, says there is no doubt the release of the video was designed to deliver a message. “It is clearly meant to intimidate people in Hong Kong and send a message that if the Hong Kong government can’t get things under control, they will intervene,” he told FRANCE 24. Beijing has mostly watched from the sidelines as the protests in Hong Kong, triggered by a controversial extradition treaty with China amid a perceived general erosion of freedoms since the territory was handed back to China in 1997, have grown increasingly violent. Our Intelligence has informed us that the Chinese Government is moving troops to the Border with Hong Kong. Everyone should be calm and safe! However, as the Hong Kong government led by Chief Executive Carrie Lam seems increasingly unable to quell the unrest, China has stepped up its rhetoric and issued what to some are veiled threats of more direct action. On Wednesday, following violent clashes at Hong Kong's international airport, China's Hong Kong Liaison office compared the protesters to "terrorists”. Earlier this month, another slickly produced video was released by the PLA garrison in Hong Kong, showing armed troops undergoing “anti-riot” drills. “Beijing probably thinks the images constitute the resolute backings Carrie Lam badly needs to restore order,” Dr Kenneth Chan, associate professor in political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, told FRANCE 24. A satellite image appears to show a close up of Chinese military vehicles at Shenzhen Bay Sports Centre in China, close to the Hong Kong border. A satellite image appears to show a close up of Chinese military vehicles at Shenzhen Bay Sports Centre in China, close to the Hong Kong border. Maxar Technologies / Handout via Reuters “Talks and images about the deployment of troops also serve as a typical communist-style psychological warfare to isolate and marginalise the more radical elements of the ongoing protest in Hong Kong,” added Chan, who is also a former Civic Party lawmaker in the Hong Kong legislature. ‘Not an empty threat’ Though Beijing’s goal may be primarily to intimidate, that does not mean it will not resort to military intervention if pushed to it, said Tsang. “The Chinese would much prefer the protesters to simply go home. But if they think the authority of the Communist party is being challenged they will intervene,” he said. “It is not an empty threat, it is a real threat.” Escalating that threat is a potential flashpoint looming on the horizon. October 1 will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a day set to be celebrated with much pomp and ceremony on the mainland. If demonstrators in Hong Kong mark the occasion by taking to the streets in full force, it could prove a provocation too far for Beijing. If China does intervene, that could mean troops pouring across the border, and also the deployment of the PLA garrison in Hong Kong, estimated at between 8,000 to 10,000 troops, which until now has remained firmly in its barracks. Under the “one country, two systems” principle in which Hong Kong is granted a certain amount of political autonomy by the mainland, the PLA garrison can only intervene if requested to do so by the Hong Kong government. However, such is the influence now exerted by Beijing, this legal hurdle is a mere technicality, according to Tsang. “If the Chinese government wants the Hong Kong executive to request an intervention, then they will request it,” he said. “If China does intervene they (the troops stationed in China and the Hong Kong garrison) will be deployed together.” Resistance For China, however, such a move is fraught with risk, and viewed by most experts as a last resort option for Beijing. A military intervention would almost certainly be a death knell for the one country, two systems policy, marking a seismic shift in the geopolitical status quo in the region. The international fallout, along with the risk to Hong Kong’s status as a business and finance hub, of such a move means Beijing is likely to explore other options first. “The total subjugation of the city by brute force will be fatal to both the city’s global financial status and China’s international standing,” believes Chan. There is also the question of the resistance Chinese troops could face among a Hong Kong populace that has continued to take to the streets despite an often bloody security crackdown. “It is all speculation but if they send in troops it could all be over in 24 hours, but it may not, there may be pockets of resistance that keep going,” said Tsang. “A lot will depend on how much violence Chinese troops use in Hong Kong and that we don’t know.”ImpactsImpact: FastImpact is fast, we have less than three weeks to deter an explosive crackdownThe Guardian 2019 (8-13-2019“China flaunts military muscle as it seeks to quell Hong Kong's ‘colour revolution’” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Looming over the protests is a deadline of sorts, though. The 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China falls on 1 October. It will be celebrated with a military parade and other activities around the country, and China’s autocratic president, Xi Jinping, is unlikely to want it overshadowed by events in Hong Kong. Perhaps the biggest question for the future of Hong Kong and its protesters is what he might consider more of a spoiler – crowds still clogging the streets of Hong Kong in a dramatic, democratic denunciation of Xi’s “China dream”, or celebrations held in the bleak wake of a bloody crackdown.I: Appeasement badWars are a result of appeasement, not accident – AND if miscalc DOES happen, it’s BECAUSE of US capitulation Victor Davis Hanson 10/3/17 -- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, “Are Wars Caused by Accidents?,” The National Review, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As tensions mount with North Korea, fears arise that President Trump’s tit-for-tat bellicose rhetoric with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might lead to miscalculations — and thus an accidental war that could have been prevented. Is there evidence in history that wars break out largely because of an accident or over a misplaced word? Seldom. ENEMIES FIGHT, BUT NEUTRALS, RIVALS, AND FRIENDS RARELY DO The precise timing of particular outbreaks of war, of course, can depend on unique factors. A sudden perception of a loss of deterrence can cause an army to mobilize. So can almost anything, from the introduction of a new weapon to a change in government. Yet the larger events that originally drove two sides to fight are rarely, if ever, accidental in the manner of car wrecks. Enemies go to war; rivals, neutrals, and friends rarely do. There is little chance that an accidental foreign incursion across the Canadian or even the Mexican border will result in war. The apparently accidental, but quite lethal, 1967 Israeli air attack on the USS Liberty did not result in a U.S. retaliatory strike on Tel Aviv, much less escalate to a general war. Yet a similar Soviet strike might have. In general, the best deterrent policy in dealing with multiple aggressors is Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum to speak softly and carry a big stick — because loud speech is sometimes misinterpreted as a compensatory effort to disguise military incapability, and thus paradoxically it can lead to a fatal loss of deterrence. Next best perhaps is speaking loudly while carrying a big stick. Intemperate words are not fatal if ultimately reinforced by overwhelming force. Most dangerous is speaking loudly (and especially sanctimoniously) while carrying a twig — basically what we have seen in the past eight years with Russia, Iran, and Syria. WAS WORLD WAR I REALLY AN ACCIDENT? It is often said that accidents and extraneous forces — nearly automatic and mindless mobilization, fumbled diplomacy, greedy arms merchants, archaic alliances on autopilot, confused messaging, or bellicose strutting and rhetoric in August 1914 — triggered World War I, which otherwise might have been prevented. But a continental war had come close to breaking out earlier in 1911 over Morocco and again in 1912–13 in the Balkans. A war would likely have broken out later, if not in 1914. Berlin by 1914 held views that were incompatible with peaceful resolution: 1) Germany felt cheated that its economic dynamism, population, and military power somehow had not resulted in what Germany thought it deserved: commensurate colonial expansion overseas and dominant influence on the Continent; 2) the German army since 1871 had felt that its size, and organizational and technological excellence, increasingly replicated in a rising and powerful navy, made it nearly unstoppable vis-à-vis other European rivals; 3) any sudden German strike in either the East or West could not be immediately deterred or stopped by the existing forces of Britain, France, or Russia. The net result of these unchallenged assumptions was a likely German war of aggression sometime in the second or third decade of the 20th century. Preventing World War I would have required far closer coordination and greater deterrent capability among Germany’s intended targets. Or the Germans would’ve needed to be far less aggressive, perhaps with a Kaiser more like Wilhelm II’s grandfather, Wilhelm I, who under the influence of Otto von Bismarck had realized that long-term German aspirations were achievable without a sudden and destructive European war. Or a more interventionist United States would have had to intervene on the side of the democracies before, rather than after, the war — somewhat akin to America’s proactive Cold War leadership after 1945. Just days after the war broke out, German professor and diplomatic analyst Kurt Riezler issued his Septemberprogramm draft of annexing much of Western Europe — a plan of aggression that only summarized long-held German agendas. Indeed, since 1871, Germans had believed that their empire was destined to do as it wished in Europe, and, more immediately, that another border war would, as in 1870–71, be rather short and earn great dividends that were richly deserved at tolerable costs. APPEASEMENT, NOT ACCIDENTS, START WARS If rising tensions are not to lead to war, the key factor in confronting aggressors is avoiding accidental impressions that cause a loss of deterrent power. What will start a war with North Korea is not a bellicose tweet from Trump. Instead, a war will follow if North Korea does a cost-benefit analysis that leads it to conclude that an attack will produce more positive results than setbacks, or if it has the impression that its forces can inflict lots of damage without the regime’s destruction. Again, mellifluous appeasement is far more dangerous even than sloppy, bellicose rhetoric. Of course, the latter should be avoided if not backed by force, but “fire and fury” words, ipsis factis, will not provoke to action an otherwise stationary aggressor. Rather the danger is that rhetoric alone can project a sense of weakness that invites aggression, on the theory that fiery but empty words are intended to mask military inability. The last century of so-called accidental wars did not start over an unwise taunt or an accidental bombing. To the degree that there was a miscalculation during rising tensions, the culprit was most often a loss of deterrence, whether real or imagined: ‐Much of Europe and Britain weakly appeased Hitler’s serial aggressions in the 1930s rather than stopping them, persuading Hitler that his rather meager forces could nonetheless win a continental war against America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. ‐Japan wrongly surmised that U.S. isolationism in the 1930s and inaction from 1939 to 1941 would not lead to a muscular response after Pearl Harbor — and so Japan tried its luck. ‐Dean Acheson in 1950 suggested that South Korea was outside the U.S. protective shield; the miscue probably encouraged a North Korean invasion. ‐A series of unwise British actions in the early 1980s (from a parliamentarian’s occasional na?ve reference to the Falklands as the “Malvinas” to the more serious tactic of withdrawing a small Royal Navy ship from the Falklands) suggested to the Argentine dictatorship that London did not see retaining the Falklands as worth a war. ‐April Glaspie sloppily remarked in 1990 that Arab border disputes were not of paramount interests to the U.S., which may have encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. ‐ THE TERRIBLE LABORATORY War is a horrific laboratory experiment that confirms or rejects vague and inexact prewar guesses about relative strength or weakness. The way, then, to prevent conflict from breaking out is to assure potential aggressors during peacetime that they are weaker than their targets and would lose catastrophically if they were foolish enough to test the obvious. Only in this way does war appear as a costly redundancy that is avoidable.HK: General IEngagement during crackdown risks democracy, alliances, and economic growthYoo 2019(John, Manuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, 9-3-2019, “Trump is making a big mistake on Hong Kong – Here’s what he should do to support protesters” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****What should the U.S. government do to respond to three months of mass protests by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Hong Kong desperately struggling to preserve their freedom under pressure from China? Sit back and watch as event play themselves out? Or take an active role in helping the freedom-loving people in the former British colony? Adams said in 1821: “America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. …She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition.” But America in 2019 is a far more powerful and globally interconnected nation than it was in 1821. “America First” should not mean turning our back on involvement around the world. There is much more that the United States can and should be doing to aid the 7.4 million people of Hong Kong – especially as our rivalry with China escalates through the trade war now underway and with other actions. The first thing the Trump administration must do is identify our goal. That goal should be to maintain the unique status of Hong Kong within China. President Trump can use immigration law to his advantage and declare that we will welcome Hong Kong businesses and citizens to relocate to the United States. Before Britain ended its colonial rule and returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, China agreed to make the city a special administrative region with a high degree of autonomy so it could maintain its own economic and governmental system under a policy known as “one country, two systems.” Today Hong Kong stands as a shining contrast to the authoritarianism and repression of the Xi Jinping regime that rules China with an iron fist, much like West Berlin was a bastion of freedom in the middle of Communist East Germany during the Cold War. But now China is seeking to exert more control over Hong Kong, in what seems to be an effort to gradually end the city’s special status – understandably alarming Hong Kong’s citizens. There’s no doubt that the U.S. government would like to avoid any violence by the Hong Kong protesters, which could trigger Chinese military intervention on a scale like Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Estimates are that several thousand demonstrators were killed by Chinese troops to end protests in the square that began in April that year. But if the violence in Hong Kong escalates, with a move by police or the military to crush the freedom demonstrations, the U.S. should respond as part of our longer-term struggle with Beijing. An American response is needed not just because we have an interest in preserving an enclave of capitalism and individual liberty in East Asia. If China is the rising threat against us, we have an interest in drawing contrasts between the prosperity and freedom in Hong Kong and the authoritarian repression of Xi Jinping’s China. Our options are limited. We cannot intervene militarily, just as we could not stop Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. We are limited in what additional economic sanctions we could impose on China, because the Trump administration is already inflicting heavy pressure on China for its unfair trade practices. Washington does not have the leverage in China that it had in Asia in the 1980s, when it could use its close economic, political, and military ties to help nations such as South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia evolve from military dictatorships into democracies. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has a valuable opportunity to expose the Chinese government for what it is: a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. The United States can and must do more than issue statements calling for restraint by China from President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Our government can and must do more than encourage extensive media coverage of the protests. These things should be done, but they are just a start. What more can we do? President Trump can use immigration law to his advantage and declare that we will welcome Hong Kong businesses and citizens to relocate to the United States. By some estimates, Hong Kong’s per capita income would rank it around the 15th richest nation in the world. It places first in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Hong Kong is valuable to China because it grants the mainland access to the capitalism and dynamism of the West. The United States can try to remove that advantage by encouraging the banks and companies located in Hong Kong to move. The U.S. can welcome Hong Kong’s economic and intellectual leaders to our shores, where their liberty and freedom will be protected. In addition, the American government should take advantage of China’s brutality to tighten our alliances in Asia – not just with countries like South Korea and Japan, but also India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hong Kong is a preview of what could happen to those nations if they become vassals of the Chinese. They will see the contrast with American leadership, which has provided the peace and stability necessary for Asia’s incredible postwar economic growth. Trump could even resuscitate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is designed to exclude China from the growing Asian trading system. Asian countries will see that they cannot trust China’s word, as Beijing’s efforts to impose authoritarian rule in Hong Kong violate the agreement with Britain transferring the territory to China. These policies could send a message to the mainland Chinese that they are not be fated to live under repression. They can see in Hong Kong, and other places like Taiwan and Singapore, that they can flourish if they live under the right government. The Trump administration can also send an important message to other Asian nations that they should choose to ally with the United States instead of China. If the Xi regime treats its own citizens this way, simply because they want the respect for the freedoms that they were promised, how will it treat its neighbors? HK !: Global DemocracyHong Kong would boost global democratic transitionsPetrou 2019 Michael, Historian, journalist and fellow-in-residence, Carleton University, “The high stakes in Hong Kong’s battle for democracy” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****There are two possible outcomes of the current Hong Kong protests: success for pro-democracy demonstrators or an authoritarian triumph for China. As Michael Petrou writes, either result will have dire consequences for democracy everywhere. The large and long-running protests in Hong Kong, which appear to be headed to a confrontation — maybe a violent one — with Chinese authorities, are not just about a proposed extradition bill or the territory’s relationship with China’s central government. They’re not just about Hong Kong at all. Demonstrators there are instead on the front lines of a much larger global conflict between democracy and authoritarianism in which Canada is deeply invested but, sadly, largely absent. Canadians are perhaps na?ve about democracy’s fragility. Anyone born in Canada has known only stable, liberal democracy in their home country. And in living memory, those who looked abroad witnessed the so-called “third wave” of democracy that swept through Latin America, parts of the Asia-Pacific, and Eastern Europe between the 1970s and ’90s, more than doubling the number of democracies in the world. But more recent years have witnessed backsliding in places like Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela, the rising power of authoritarian Russia and China, and, most worryingly, the election of an American president whose commitment to the democratic norms necessary for democracy’s resilience is selective and weak. Hong Kong, where protesters are demanding genuine universal suffrage, is far more important to this struggle than its small size might otherwise suggest. One of the lessons of the third wave of democratization, as has been highlighted by scholars such as Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, is that countries do not democratize in isolation. They tend to emulate the levels of democracy, or its lack, in their neighbours. Success for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators will embolden and strengthen those who share their values elsewhere in the region. An authoritarian triumph for China will have the opposite effect. The implications for governance elsewhere are not limited to Asia. Writing about the transition from Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, British political scientist Archie Brown has examined the influence and impact of Western countries, including Canada. Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1983 visit to Canada while he was Soviet agricultural minister shifted his political thinking in a way that would bear fruit when Gorbachev became president and ushered in perestroika. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe during this time, Brown writes, what happened in distant countries shaped people’s beliefs about what was desirable, but what happened in neighbouring countries told them what was politically possible. In today’s more globalized world, this distinction matters less. Serbian democratic activists have collaborated with Iranian ones. Polish veterans of the pro-democracy struggle in that country, including founder of the Solidarity trade union Lech Walesa, visited Tunisia and Egypt to offer advice following the Arab Spring uprisings there. A successful defence against increased Chinese dictatorship in Hong Kong has the potential to be an example and inspiration anywhere in the world. Liberal democracy solves existential impacts Kasparov 17 ---- Garry, chairman for the Human Rights Foundation, “Democracy and Human Rights: The Case for U.S. Leadership,” Testimony before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues, 2/16, **Modified for ableist language) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The Soviet Union was an existential threat, and this focused the attention of the world, and the American people. There existential threat today is not found on a map, but it is very real. The forces of the past are making steady progress against the modern world order. Terrorist movements in the Middle East, extremist parties across Europe, a paranoid tyrant in North Korea threatening nuclear blackmail, and, at the center of the web, an aggressive KGB dictator in Russia. They all want to turn the world back to a dark past because their survival is threatened by the values of the free world, epitomized by the United States. And they are thriving as the U.S. has retreated. The global freedom index has declined for ten consecutive years. No one like to talk about the United States as a global policeman, but this is what happens when there is no cop on the beat.American leadership begins at home, right here. America cannot lead the world on democracy and human rights if there is no unity on the meaning and importance of these things. Leadership is required to make that case clearly and powerfully. Right now, Americans are engaged in politics at a level not seen in decades. It is an opportunity for them to rediscover that making America great begins with believing America can be great.The Cold War was won on American values that were shared by both parties and nearly every American. Institutions that were created by a Democrat, Truman, were triumphant forty years later thanks to the courage of a Republican, Reagan. This bipartisan consistency created the decades of strategic stability that is the great strength of democracies. Strong institutions that outlast politicians allow for long-range planning. In contrast, dictators can operate only tactically, not strategically, because they are not constrained by the balance of powers, but cannot afford to think beyond their own survival. This is why a dictator like Putin has an advantage in chaos, the ability to move quickly. This can only be met by strategy, by long-term goals that are based on shared values, not on polls and cable news.The fear of making things worse has paralyzed [prevented] the United States from trying to make things better. There will always be setbacks, but the United States cannot quit. The spread of democracy is the only proven remedy for nearly every crisis that plagues the world today. War, famine, poverty, terrorism–all are generated and exacerbated by authoritarian regimes. A policy of America First inevitably puts American security last.American leadership is required because there is no one else, and because it is good for America. There is no weapon or wall that is more powerful for security than America being envied, imitated, and admired around the world. Admired not for being perfect, but for having the exceptionalHK: Key DemocracyChina appeasement around Hong Kong spills over to all Human Rights leadershipNew York Times 2019(Michael Crowley and Edward Wong, 8-15-2019“Trump’s Hong Kong Caution Isolates Him From Congress, Allies and Advisers” ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The crisis in Hong Kong has cast a particularly bright spotlight on the role of western democratic values at a moment when authoritarian politics are on the rise across the globe. Mr. Trump’s critics call this a vital moment to reassert American leadership. “If America does not speak out for human rights in China because of commercial interests, we lose all moral authority to speak out elsewhere,” Ms. Pelosi said in her statement. “Our democratic allies are looking to us for leadership,” said Daniel Kliman, a former Pentagon official and director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.Democracy I: War Backsliding causes war and undermines US influence which de-escalates conflicts. Kendall-Taylor ‘16 –(Andrea, deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, “How Democracy’s Decline Would Undermine the International Order” 7/15 ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****It is rare that policymakers, analysts, and academics agree. But there is an emerging consensus in the world of foreign policy: threats to the stability of the current international order are rising. The norms, values, laws, and institutions that have undergirded the international system and governed relationships between nations are being gradually dismantled. The most discussed sources of this pressure are the ascent of China and other non-Western countries, Russia’s assertive foreign policy, and the diffusion of power from traditional nation-states to nonstate actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and technology-empowered individuals. Largely missing from these discussions, however, is the specter of widespread democratic decline. Rising challenges to democratic governance across the globe are a major strain on the international system, but they receive far less attention in discussions of the shifting world order. In the 70 years since the end of World War II, the United States has fostered a global order dominated by states that are liberal, capitalist, and democratic. The United States has promoted the spread of democracy to strengthen global norms and rules that constitute the foundation of our current international system. However, despite the steady rise of democracy since the end of the Cold War, over the last 10 years we have seen dramatic reversals in respect for democratic principles across the globe. A 2015 Freedom House report stated that the “acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government—and of an international system built on democratic ideals—is under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years.” Although the number of democracies in the world is at an all-time high, there are a number of key trends that are working to undermine democracy. The rollback of democracy in a few influential states or even in a number of less consequential ones would almost certainly accelerate meaningful changes in today’s global order. Democratic decline would weaken U.S. partnerships and erode an important foundation for U.S. cooperation abroad. Research demonstrates that domestic politics are a key determinant of the international behavior of states. In particular, democracies are more likely to form alliances and cooperate more fully with other democracies than with autocracies. Similarly, authoritarian countries have established mechanisms for cooperation and sharing of “worst practices.” An increase in authoritarian countries, then, would provide a broader platform for coordination that could enable these countries to overcome their divergent histories, values, and interests—factors that are frequently cited as obstacles to the formation of a cohesive challenge to the U.S.-led international system. Recent examples support the empirical data. Democratic backsliding in Hungary and the hardening of Egypt’s autocracy under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have led to enhanced relations between these countries and Russia. Likewise, democratic decline in Bangladesh has led Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her ruling Awami League to seek closer relations with China and Russia, in part to mitigate Western pressure and bolster the regime’s domestic standing. Although none of these burgeoning relationships has developed into a highly unified partnership, democratic backsliding in these countries has provided a basis for cooperation where it did not previously exist. And while the United States certainly finds common cause with authoritarian partners on specific issues, the depth and reliability of such cooperation is limited. Consequently, further democratic decline could seriously compromise the United States’ ability to form the kinds of deep partnerships that will be required to confront today’s increasingly complex challenges. Global issues such as climate change, migration, and violent extremism demand the coordination and cooperation that democratic backsliding would put in peril. Put simply, the United States is a less effective and influential actor if it loses its ability to rely on its partnerships with other democratic nations. A slide toward authoritarianism could also challenge the current global order by diluting U.S. influence in critical international institutions, including the United Nations , the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Democratic decline would weaken Western efforts within these institutions to advance issues such as Internet freedom and the responsibility to protect. In the case of Internet governance, for example, Western democracies support an open, largely private, global Internet. Autocracies, in contrast, promote state control over the Internet, including laws and other mechanisms that facilitate their ability to censor and persecute dissidents. Already many autocracies, including Belarus, China, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have coalesced in the “Likeminded Group of Developing Countries” within the United Nations to advocate their interests. Within the IMF and World Bank, autocracies—along with other developing nations—seek to water down conditionality or the reforms that lenders require in exchange for financial support. If successful, diminished conditionality would enfeeble an important incentive for governance reforms. In a more extreme scenario, the rising influence of autocracies could enable these countries to bypass the IMF and World Bank all together. For example, the Chinese-created Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the BRICS Bank—which includes Russia, China, and an increasingly authoritarian South Africa—provide countries with the potential to bypass existing global financial institutions when it suits their interests. Authoritarian-led alternatives pose the risk that global economic governance will become fragmented and less effective. Violence and instability would also likely increase if more democracies give way to autocracy. International relations literature tells us that democracies are less likely to fight wars against other democracies, suggesting that interstate wars would rise as the number of democracies declines. Moreover, within countries that are already autocratic, additional movement away from democracy, or an “authoritarian hardening,” would increase global instability. Highly repressive autocracies are the most likely to experience state failure, as was the case in the Central African Republic, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In this way, democratic decline would significantly strain the international order because rising levels of instability would exceed the West’s ability to respond to the tremendous costs of peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and refugee flows. Finally, widespread democratic decline would contribute to rising anti-U.S. sentiment that could fuel a global order that is increasingly antagonistic to the United States and its values. Most autocracies are highly suspicious of U.S. intentions and view the creation of an external enemy as an effective means for boosting their own public support. Russian president Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and Bolivian president Evo Morales regularly accuse the United States of fomenting instability and supporting regime change. This vilification of the United States is a convenient way of distracting their publics from regime shortcomings and fostering public support for strongman tactics. Since 9/11, and particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, Western enthusiasm for democracy support has waned. Rising levels of instability, including in Ukraine and the Middle East, fragile governance in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sustained threats from terrorist groups such as ISIL have increased Western focus on security and stability. U.S. preoccupation with intelligence sharing, basing and overflight rights, along with the perception that autocracy equates with stability, are trumping democracy and human rights considerations. While rising levels of global instability explain part of Washington’s shift from an historical commitment to democracy, the nature of the policy process itself is a less appreciated factor. Policy discussions tend to occur on a country-by-country basis—leading to choices that weigh the costs and benefits of democracy support within the confines of a single country. From this perspective, the benefits of counterterrorism cooperation or access to natural resources are regularly judged to outweigh the perceived costs of supporting human rights. A serious problem arises, however, when this process is replicated across countries. The bilateral focus rarely incorporates the risks to the U.S.-led global order that arise from widespread democratic decline across multiple countries. Many of the threats to the current global order, such as China’s rise or the diffusion of power, are driven by factors that the United States and West more generally have little leverage to influence or control. Democracy, however, is an area where Western actions can affect outcomes. Factoring in the risks that arise from a global democratic decline into policy discussions is a vital step to building a comprehensive approach to democracy support. Bringing this perspective to the table may not lead to dramatic shifts in foreign policy, but it would ensure that we are having the right conversation.Backsliding guarantees great power war Gat 11– (Azar, the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, 2011, “The Changing Character of War,” in The Changing Character of War, ed. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, p. 30-32) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Since 1945, the decline of major great power war has deepened further. Nuclear weapons have concentrated the minds of all concerned wonderfully, but no less important have been the institutionalization of free trade and the closely related process of rapid and sustained economic growth throughout the capitalist world. The communist bloc did not participate in the system of free trade, but at least initially it too experienced substantial growth, and, unlike Germany and Japan, it was always suf?ciently large and rich in natural resources to maintain an autarky of sorts. With the Soviet collapse and with the integration of the former communist powers into the global capitalist economy, the prospect of a major war within the developed world seems to have become very remote indeed. This is one of the main sources for the feeling that war has been transformed: its geopolitical centre of gravity has shifted radically. The modernized, economically developed parts of the world constitute a ‘zone of peace’. War now seems to be con?ned to the less-developed parts of the globe, the world’s ‘zone of war’, where countries that have so far failed to embrace modernization and its pacifying spin-off effects continue to be engaged in wars among themselves, as well as with developed countries.? While the trend is very real, one wonders if the near disappearance of armed con?ict within the developed world is likely to remain as stark as it has been since the collapse of communism. The post-Cold War moment may turn out to be a ?eeting one. The probability of major wars within the developed world remains low—because of the factors already mentioned: increasing wealth, economic openness and interdependence, and nuclear deterrence. But the deep sense of change prevailing since 1989 has been based on the far more radical notion that the triumph of capitalism also spelled the irresistible ultimate victory of democracy; and that in an af?uent and democratic world, major con?ict no longer needs to be feared or seriously prepared for. This notion, however, is fast eroding with the return of capitalist non-democratic great powers that have been absent from the international system since 1945. Above all, there is the formerly communist and fast industrializing authoritarian-capitalist China, whose massive growth represents the greatest change in the global balance of power. Russia, too, is retreating from its postcommunist liberalism and assuming an increasingly authoritarian character.? Authoritarian capitalism may be more viable than people tend to assume. 8 The communist great powers failed even though they were potentially larger than the democracies, because their economic systems failed them. By contrast, the capitalist authoritarian/totalitarian powers during the ?rst half of the twentieth century, Germany and Japan, particularly the former, were as ef?cient economically as, and if anything more successful militarily than, their democratic counterparts. They were defeated in war mainly because they were too small and ultimately succumbed to the exceptional continental size of the United States (in alliance with the communist Soviet Union during the Second World War). However, the new non-democratic powers are both large and capitalist. China in particular is the largest player in the international system in terms of population and is showing spectacular economic growth that within a generation or two is likely to make it a true non-democratic superpower.? Although the return of capitalist non-democratic great powers does not necessarily imply open con?ict or war, it might indicate that the democratic hegemony since the Soviet Union’s collapse could be short-lived and that a universal ‘democratic peace’ may still be far off. The new capitalist authoritarian powers are deeply integrated into the world economy. They partake of the development-open-trade-capitalist cause of peace, but not of the liberal democratic cause. Thus, it is crucially important that any protectionist turn in the system is avoided so as to prevent a grab for markets and raw materials such as that which followed the disastrous slide into imperial protectionism and con?ict during the ?rst part of the twentieth century. Of course, the openness of the world economy does not depend exclusively on the democracies. In time, China itself might become more protectionist, as it grows wealthier, its labour costs rise, and its current competitive edge diminishes.? With the possible exception of the sore Taiwan problem, China is likely to be less restless and revisionist than the territorially con?ned Germany and Japan were. Russia, which is still reeling from having lost an empire, may be more problematic. However, as China grows in power, it is likely to become more assertive, ?ex its muscles, and behave like a superpower, even if it does not become particularly aggressive. The democratic and non-democratic powers may coexist more or less peacefully, albeit warily, side by side, armed because of mutual fear and suspicion, as a result of the so-called ‘security dilemma’, and against worst-case scenarios. But there is also the prospect of more antagonistic relations, accentuated ideological rivalry, potential and actual con?ict, intensi?ed arms races, and even new cold wars, with spheres of in?uence and opposing coalitions. Although great power relations will probably vary from those that prevailed during any of the great twentieth-century con?icts, as conditions are never quite the same, they may vary less than seemed likely only a short while ago.Democracy I: DiseaseDemocracy is key to prevent and contain disease spread Ruger, 5–(Jennifer, leading scholar of global and domestic health policy and public health PhD, Prof of Medical Ethics and Health Policy @ U Penn, “Democracy and health,” , ava) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****One theory that relates political institutions to human development focuses primarily on democratic principles, such as regular elections, universal suffrage, representation, one person–one vote, multiparty competition, and civil liberties.16 In this realm of thinking, representative democracy is generally understood to produce competition for popular support among elites who are trying to maintain or win elected office,17 although some argue that politicians’ responsiveness to citizens’ needs and concerns has waned in some settings.12 Democratic institutions might therefore relate to health through, for example, alleviation of social disparities and income inequalities that results from greater political voice and participation.18–20 Improving the health of the worst-off can in turn improve a country's aggregate performance in health. Political institutions might also affect health through their general impact on universal health policy issues, such as universal access to high-quality services. In such cases, political institutions might help create universal health insurance and access programs such as the British National Health Service or the Canadian Health Insurance System.21–23 By contrast, the absence of representative democracy provides few incentives for political elites to compete for votes,24 resulting in less political responsiveness and fewer incentives to spread benefits universally or to the poor. Authoritarian regimes suppress political competition and tend to have an interest in preventing human development, because improved health, education, and economic security mobilizes citizens to advocate for greater participation and more resources. While much can be said about the link between politics and health, this paper examines one aspect of this relationship—the impact of key democratic principles on health. After presenting a philosophical framework that links democracy and health, it analyses three major public health events in China: the 1958–1961 famine, the SARS epidemic, and the emerging threat of HIV/AIDS. These three case studies explore the idea that a lack of democratic institutions, especially a free press and multiparty elections, can have deleterious effects on health. The link between democracy and health can be viewed through a philosophical framework, which sees societal development as expanding individual freedoms, and focuses on two basic aspects of freedom: opportunity and process.5 The opportunity aspect judges public policy by its impact on individuals’ substantive freedoms or capabilities: for example, its impact on individuals’ capability to avoid premature mortality, preventable morbidity, or involuntary starvation.5,7,25–27 The process aspect stipulates that public participation in political decisions and social choice is a constitutive part of public policy. This philosophical framework focuses on enhancing individuals’ agency or ability to understand and ‘shape their own destiny and help each other.’5 In this paradigm, citizens make their own decisions as active agents of change, and state actions must be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in expanding individual freedom. As Amartya Sen has demonstrated,5 such freedom can be realized, in part, through a multiparty democracy, with elections and free media, open public debate and discussion, and guaranteed individual civil and political rights. In such a framework, health is an intrinsically valued end of development and public policy and is also a means to other valuable ends.6–8,25 The same can be said of political freedoms. Applying this framework to developing countries reveals widely different political, economic, and social contexts. Analysing public health episodes in China in historical perspective within this framework reveals a political and cultural history of authoritarianism, and a lack of civil liberties, political rights, and freedom of the press that have dramatically impacted the population's health. Between 1958 and 1961, one of the largest famines in recorded history killed nearly 30 million people in China.28–31 This tragedy followed the famous Great Leap Forward, which was initiated, in part, to improve the health of the Chinese people. Many have sought to explain this paradox and the resulting health disaster. The country's authoritarian and undemocratic political system is considered a leading reason why the government failed to respond quickly and effectively to public need.28,,29 The Chinese government received little pressure to report the famine, because the absence of an opposition group and the lack of open journalism created an uninformed public.29 Furthermore, the government did not admit the failure of the Great Leap Forward for several years. This motivated government leaders to exaggerate crop yields, to give the impression that agricultural and rural economic policies were successful. During the height of the famine, Chinese authorities noted they had 100 million more metric tons of grain than they actually had.29 This misconception kept Chinese imports of food grains down while food grain exports peaked. In 1959, China imported about 2000 tons of food grains, compared with 223?000 tons in 1958.29 During the same period, exports of food grains peaked in 1959 at 4.2 million tons, up from 1.9 million tons in 1957 and 2.7 million tons in 1958.29 China's famine was also associated with a decline in food production. The average national grain output per capita in 1956–1957 was 308?kg, which fell by 17% in 1959 and reached its lowest level—a decline of approximately 30%—in 1960.29 However, the rural population suffered much more than the urban population, because the government moved food from rural to urban areas. In one province, grain availability was 288?kg per head in an urban area but only 122?kg per head in rural areas.29 Additionally, food procurement from rural areas rose from 17% in 1957 to 21% in 1958 and 28% in 1959.29 Thus, people in rural areas had to part with a larger proportion of their output. The culprit in this case was the political system, as the famine was not made public for three years, and there were no official policies for responding. The primary feature of the Chinese government, an ‘absence of adversarial politics and open journalism,‘29 contributed to the largest famine in history. Sen has argued that political freedoms can help prevent major social disasters such as widespread famine because the existence of free, uncensored media draws attention to social needs and allows government policies to be evaluated openly. Similarly, democratic elections (with a choice of parties) forces the party in power to justify its policies or reform them in accordance with people's needs. Sen argues that China's inability to prevent the famine of 1958–1961 resulted in part from its lack of a free, uncensored press and the absence of opposition parties that would have poked holes in the government's propaganda, false reports, and failed reform policies. Instead, the government continued to pursue a set of harmful policies. A key aspect of this argument is that the lack of a free press actually ‘misled the government itself‘5 because state policy was dictated by the government's own dogma and by inaccurate reports from local Communist Party officials who were competing for ‘credit in Beijing.‘5 Sen notes that this campaign of distortion and misinformation led the government to vastly overestimate the country's food supply.5,28,29,,31 More recently, China's lack of democratic freedoms made it unable to respond promptly to a new health crisis: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The government's immediate response to SARS was reminiscent of its reactions to the famine 40 years before. Its first inclination was to cover up, rather than reveal, both the scope and severity of the disease, thwarting control efforts. For example, the government's censorship of news about the spread of SARS in Guangdong Province in 2003, which accelerated the spread of the disease,32,,33 was possible because the Communist Party directly controlled the media. Had citizens been made aware of SARS earlier through accurate reporting of its prevalence and geographic spread and evidence-based prevention and treatment recommendations, they would have known how to take precautions and obtain needed care. The government was exceptionally vigilant at first however, about hiding evidence of SARS through heavy-handed propaganda and control of information. It also threatened citizens with execution and lengthy imprisonment should they become infected with or knowingly spread SARS.34 And there was forceful suppression of opposition or anti-government sentiment as well as infringements of civil liberties. The Chinese government's pledges of honest reporting of infections and firing of public officials (e.g. firing both the mayor of Beijing and China's health minister) at first brought hope for real political reform,35 but subsequent efforts fell short of that goal. Far from acting as an independent and free agent, the Communist Party's newspaper, People's Daily, instead served as a Party instrument by publicly praising government leadership and strategies and misreporting public opinion. For example, it noted that ‘the people have become more trusting and supportive of the party and government.‘34 An ironic twist to the SARS story is that China made a successful transition to a more open, internationally connected, market-oriented economy but failed to capitalize on the simultaneous global movement for democratization. This change exacted a high price from China and the global community because, unlike the 1958–1961 famine, China's SARS epidemic fatally impacted the rest of the world. Consequently, China's failure to contain and effectively address SARS exposed it to international criticism and provided a strong rationale for sovereign nations and global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) to become more actively involved in its political economy. Indeed, the ripple effect of the SARS crisis penetrated the international development community itself, forcing WHO to consider reforms that would allow it to ‘fight future international threats’ more powerfully.36 Thus, while China's handling of SARS has many similarities to the famine of the mid-twentieth century, those similarities remain primarily domestic. In today's more integrated global economy, China's mismanagement of the outbreak impacted the rest of the world as its catastrophic neglect of economic freedom 40 years ago affected its own people. This time around, however, the international community pressured China to respond, demonstrating that the effects of global integration can be two-directional. China's handling of the 1958–1961 famine and the SARS epidemic points to a few key lessons that may help China, and the global community, address future public health threats, particularly the emergence of HIV/AIDS in China. In 2003, an estimated 840?000 individuals in China were living with HIV/AIDS, 80?000 of whom had AIDS.37 First, while the SARS epidemic exemplified the most authoritarian aspects of the Chinese political system (initial cover-up of the epidemic and massive firing and jailing of health officials), the experience has led to higher standards of public accountability. For example, the Chinese Ministry of Health has drafted regulations to hold accountable government officials who cover-up HIV/AIDS.38 To the extent that China can codify (in law), enforce, and apply these regulations to those who have or will cover up the AIDS epidemic, it will have learned its lessons from SARS and the past famine. Second, China's handling of SARS emphasized that its public-health practices and policies affect the entire world and therefore provide the rest of the world with a vested interest in cooperating internationally to ensure global health.39 A recent report on HIV/AIDS, for example, argued that the US should significantly increase its bilateral and multilateral ‘engagement’ with China to pre-empt a generalized epidemic that would have catastrophic global consequences.40 Indeed, the SARS episode in particular demonstrated weaknesses in ‘China's system for monitoring and responding to infectious disease.‘41 This has raised global concerns about the ability of the Chinese public health system to monitor emerging diseases.40,,41 Applying this lesson to the case of HIV/AIDS means that China's public health practices are more vulnerable to public criticism. In order to obtain funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, for example, the Chinese government was forced to publicize the spread of HIV through unsafe blood collection centres in a number of provinces.42 This public exposure could ultimately lead to impartial investigation of local and state authorities’ involvement in the collection and transmission of HIV-contaminated blood by, for example, the United Nations (UNAIDS or WHO). The Global Fund application also shed light on how the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS in China has significantly hampered the country's social and political response to the epidemic.42 This could lead to more rapid progress in protecting the rights of, and eliminating prejudice and discrimination practices against,43 people affected by HIV/AIDS. Third, the SARS and famine case studies demonstrate the importance of sharing and accessing information, which can be essential for preventing and treating disease. Both tragedies tested the Chinese governments’ lack of toleration of public discussion and debate on public health subjects, and the mistake of hiding public health failures. In light of these events, the government has learned to treat HIV/AIDS as a major and genuine public health concern that requires a serious, coordinated response. A recent report on HIV/AIDS in China recommended media and educational campaigns, especially aimed at youth and China's migrant population,40 and a focus on informed, comprehensive approaches to prevention and treatment.40 A fourth lesson lies in the deleterious social impact of violations in individual rights to freedom of assembly, association, and expression. The ability to exercise these rights enables citizens to organize interest groups to advocate for rights, respect, and resources. These rights, coupled with the ability to have free and full access to (and to share) information creates conditions under which effective advocacy can take place. Experience with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US demonstrates, for example, the power of advocacy groups (people living with HIV/AIDS in particular) in obtaining rights, resources, and greater dignity. Grassroots organizing by members of civil society (grassroots NGOs, for example) can have a positive effect on individuals’ health by improving access to, and the quality of, health care and residential services for people living with HIV/AIDS. Such assistance is critically needed in the fight against HIV/AIDS in China, especially in the delivery of public health services to poor, rural populations involving both Chinese and foreign NGOs.40 A final key lesson from SARS and the 1958–1961 famine rests in the absolutely essential role of free, uncensored information, including the ability to voice complaints and opposition to government practices and policies and to shed light on corruption. The SARS-famine case studies highlight the Chinese government's history of censorship and restrictions on freedom of the press. To combat HIV/AIDS and prevent it from becoming a full-scale epidemic, the Chinese government must permit both domestic and foreign journalists to report on the disease without any restrictions. Early indications suggest that the government is taking steps to address these restrictions better. Democratic institutions and practices can affect human development in multiple ways, including population health and well-being. The absence of democracy, in particular, can have deleterious affects on health, as the 1958–1961 Chinese famine and the 2003 SARS outbreak demonstrate. These case studies highlight factors that are essential for preventing a full-scale HIV/AIDS epidemic in China: new and better standards of public accountability; an international imperative to cooperate globally to ensure health; freely available information, especially about disease prevention, control, and treatment; protection of individual rights and freedom of assembly, association and expression; and the ability to voice complaints and opposition. By instituting these rights in a timely fashion, China may be able to contain the HIV/AIDS epidemic before it loses millions of its citizens to yet another public health tragedy.Democracy I: EnviroDemocracy is key to environmental protection and combating climate change Policardo, ‘14–(Laura, Department of Economics, University of Siena, “Is Democracy Good for the Environment? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Regime Transitions,” , ava) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Despite the different views about the effect of democracy on the environmental management, in this paper I show that democracy and environmental quality are positively correlated. To show that, I use the powerful approach of ITS design in cointegration analysis to show that democratic countries and autocratic ones have two different targets of environmental quality, with those for democracy higher than those for autocracies. Previous works on democracy and environmental quality were indeed unable to assert that democracy is really good for the environment because they did not show that non-democracies are not. Segmented regression analysis of ITS allows not only to see the effect of democracy through time, but also if this effect differs from the effect of autocracy. The weakness of the previous works in this field was therefore that not comparing the results with those for dictatorships, the positive effect of democracy on the environment might not be due to democracy per se, but from other effects, like maturation, or technological progress, common to both regimes. In this panel of 47 transition countries, this approach shows that democratisation is consistently associated to a reduction of CO2 emissions and PM10 concentrations, but this process may be quite slow because—at least in the ECM relative to CO2 emissions—it is detectable only in the long run. Due to the fact that democratic institutions tend to be slower than autocratic ones in taking decisions and acting, in the short run we do not observe a negative effect of democracy on the level of emissions, while the positive effect of dictatorship is quite consistent. Inequality has two different effects depending on the incumbent regime: in any case it counterbalances the global effect of the regime. In democracy, increased inequality means that the decisive citizen is poorer and so less willing to pay for environmental protection. This however assuming perfect democracy only and full participation to the poll. From another point of view, it is reasonable to think that democratic institutions work worse when inequality is high, due to the scarce participation of the poor to the electoral processes, and therefore democracies with high income inequality resemble more to a dictatorship than a democracy itself, because decisions are taken by a small (and usually strongly interested) group of people. Inequality during periods of autocracy, under the assumption that this inequality favors the dictator at the expense of the rest of the citizens, it may retain the negative effect of the regime since it increases the dictator’s income and so it increases his demand for environmental quality, which may be driven by a limited (although high) opportunity to substitute environment with private consumption. The overall effect, however, is that dictatorships tend to be associated to a worse environment than democracies.Best studies go NEG Chen, 13–(Vincent, Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, “Democracy and the Environment,” 2013, Stanford Press, , ava) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The relationship between human institutions and the environment it inhabits has long interested social scientists. This paper asks the question of whether democratic governments bring about better environmental performance compared to their autocratic counterparts, and if so, what causal mechanisms might explain this relationship. Using a large-N empirical analysis, I observe a positive relationship between democracy and environmental performance when isolating the effects of other socio-economic measurements such as developmental level, population density, and industry structure. Further more, governance features associated with democracies are important conditional factors in realizing the environmental benefits brought about by democracy. In particular, democracy is most effective in addressing environmental issues with substantial human health implications because the environmental preferences of the public is more easily expressed in the political arena of a democratic society.The aff wrecks it–?democracy has direct positive correlation to climate action in the flawed regimes that need norms setting the mostLooney ‘16– (Robert, “Democracy Is the Answer to Climate Change,” Foreign Policy, 6/1/2016, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Two data sets can help us identify the impact of democracy on climate change: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index 2015 and the World Energy Council’s Energy Trilemma Index. The Democracy Index divides 167 countries into four main groups: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. The countries are ranked best (Norway) to worst (North Korea). The Energy Trilemma Index ranks 130 countries in terms of their progress in three key energy performance measures: energy security (the availability of reliable supplies of energy), energy equity (the domestic price of energy) and environmental sustainability (the effect of the country’s energy sources on greenhouse gas emissions). Based on these measures, countries are ranked from best (Switzerland) to worst (South Africa). In 2015, the twenty countries grouped by the EIU as democracies had an average ranking of 34.2 on the energy sustainability index, while the 27 authoritarian regimes for which climate data existed scored much worse, with an average ranking of 85.6. In the two intermediate regime types, environmental sustainability fell off with democracy, with flawed democracies having an average ranking of 62.9 compared to hybrid countries at 67.5. The bad reputation of democracies in combatting climate change likely reflects the extremely low environmental sustainability scores of several of the more prominent members of this group, namely Canada (71), the United States (95), and Australia (110). As the name “Energy Trilemma” suggests, countries are forced to make trade-offs between energy security, energy equity, and environmental sustainability when determining their energy policies. For instance, a country that prioritizes energy equity might opt to import cheap fossil fuels at the expense of energy security and environmental sustainability until it can develop low-cost green domestic energy sources. Thus, the Energy Trilemma Index can provide insights not just into a country’s performance, but also into its priorities. As it turns out, countries that prioritized environmental sustainability ranked considerably higher on democracy than those that didn’t (75.4 vs. 103.5). These countries also had somewhat lower average per capita income ($25,015 vs. $37,095), demonstrating that taking action against climate change is far from a luxury that only the richest nations can afford. As these patterns clearly show, democracies are much more likely than authoritarian regimes to give environmental sustainability priority over either energy security or affordable energy supplies. This fact appears counter-intuitive, given that an often-cited flaw of democracy is that politicians are forced to make short-run decisions based on the election cycle. However, the effects of climate change, in the form of more severe storms, damaging droughts, falling agricultural yields, and increased flooding of coastal areas, are already being felt. And voters whose lives and livelihoods are increasingly impacted by climate change are beginning to demand immediate action, effectively forcing politicians to take a longer-run view. As a result, democratic governments become more likely to comply with global agreements that set specific targets for carbon reduction. Nevertheless, as noted above, several of the more prominent democracies — in particular, Canada, the United States, and Australia — have failed to adopt a national strategy for combatting climate change. The governments of these countries have not only come under pressure from their domestic fossil fuel industries, but from other constituencies that oppose changing the status quo, due in particular to the perception that environmentalism comes at the expense of jobs and low energy prices. In the U.S., a long-term campaign of disinformation funded by the fossil fuel sector has given rise to a large group of climate-change naysayers, although their numbers may be shrinking. Even in these countries, however, democracy is at work subtly prodding the government toward greater environmental responsibility. For now, this work is taking place at the provincial, state, and municipal levels. British Columbia has imposed a carbon tax, California has initiated a cap-and-trade carbon plan, and Melbourne has set a goal of zero net emissions by 2020. In most cases where local action has taken place, the effects of climate change have already begun to affect people’s lives. Once the consequences of climate change begin to be felt in other parts of these countries, it is reasonable to expect movements of this sort to gain momentum. Public concerns about the effects of climate change are unlikely to have the same force in authoritarian regimes as in democracies for two basic reasons. Authoritarian regimes almost invariably prioritize energy security and equity over environmental sustainability, since rising fuel prices risk social unrest. This overarching concern with keeping energy prices low encourages increased usage of fossil fuels and a bias against green technologies. At the same time, authoritarian governments control information through state dominance of the media and access to official data. For example, China recently reported a sizable drop in coal consumption to placate citizens’ concerns about the country’s choking air pollution. According to the New York Times, however, Chinese coal consumption during the period of supposed reduction actually rose by 600 million tons, an increase equal to 70 percent of annual coal usage in the United States. Even as Chinese greenhouse gas emissions from coal grew, a Pew Research report noted the number of Chinese who expressed serious concern about global warming fell from 41 percent in 2010 to just 18 percent in 2015. The only explanation for the drop the report’s author could suggest was a relative lack of public discussion of climate change.AFFU: Engagement NowDA is nonuniqueHallie Detrick, Fortune, 1-21-2019, "U.S. And China Embark on New Era of Space Collaboration. First up, the Moon," Fortune, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Tensions between Beijing and Washington may be running high over trade and technology, but when it comes to space exploration, the U.S. and China are collaborating more than ever.Earlier this month, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and NASA shared information for the first time since 2011 in hopes of better monitoring the landing of China’s Chang’e 4 lunar probe. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was unable to capture the landing as it happened but has been capturing data ever since, and NASA plans to share that information with China and later with the international community.NASA’s renewed collaboration with China is all a part of its plan to get back to the Moon, possibly as soon as 2020. China won’t be its only collaborator either: The agency is open to collaborating with international partners as well as commercial ones in its mission, as directed by President Trump, to return to the Moon with the intention of building a base that could support further travel in space — specifically, to MarsSpace cooperation with CNSA thumps.Andrew Jones 16. (Andrew Jones graduated from University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School. Expert on Biotechnology and credited writer for the Global Times. Oct 25, 2016. )The second meeting of the US-China Space Dialogue took place in Washington DC last week, as part of efforts to work around a US Congressional block to cooperation between the two countries’ space agencies. The meeting was hosted by the US Department of State, involving representatives from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Geological Survey, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Defense meeting with officials from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on October 20. The two sides exchanged updates on space policies and programs, discussed Earth and space science, space and terrestrial weather, tackling space debris and the long-term sustainability of outer space activities, according to a State Department media note. Established in 2015, the dialogue, “enhances cooperation between the two countries, promotes responsible behavior in space, and encourages greater transparency and openness on a variety of space-related issues”, but few details of the meetings have been released. Notably NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was in attendance, despite Congressional barriers to engaging Chinese state entities, with the Dialogue offering a way of working around such roadblocks.Coop with China nowFoust ’19 - Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyJeff Foust, “New Opportunities Emerging for U.S.-China Space Cooperation,” , April 8, 2019, has been recent, if limited, cooperation between NASA and China on China’s lunar exploration program. Patrick Besha, senior policy adviser for strategic engagement and assessment at NASA, said at the Secure World Foundation panel there was coordination with the Chinese government regarding plans by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to take high-resolution images of the landing site of the Chang’e-4 spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year.“It wasn’t a formal agreement,” he said, but that coordination was done within the guidelines laid out by the Wolf Amendment. That cooperation was “reasonably successful,” he said, noting that it was limited to just the Chang’e-4 mission.“But it’s a start,” added Gold. Still cooperatingJones ’17 - covers the growing Chinese space programme, including exploration, space science, politics, launches, human spaceflight“China, US Quietly Hold Third Civil Space Dialogue, Discuss Exploration Plans,” GBTIMES, December 11, 2017, quietly hosted the third China-US Civil Space Dialogue on November 30, with the two sides exchanging plans for human and robotic space exploration, and discussing engagement through multilateral mechanisms.The meeting was co-chaired by Tian Yulong, secretary-general of China National Space Administration (CNSA), and Jonathan Margolis, assistant secretary of state of the US Department of State.In an email, a State Department official informed that “the delegations discussed ways to improve bilateral cooperation on spaceflight safety issues and shared their respective plans for human and robotic space exploration, and support for commercial space activities. In earth and space science, existing cooperation was emphasized, including the strong work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and China's Meteorological Administration, where free and open data sharing has yielded improved weather forecasting capabilities.“Both nations also discussed constructively engaging in space-related multilateral mechanisms, including participation in the Charter on Space and Natural Disasters, and the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.”In a CNSA press note published on its website, it was also stated that discussions on multilateral engagement explicitly named the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) as a forum in which strengthened cooperation on lunar exploration and Mars exploration exchanges could take place. Space debris was another issue highlighted.The dialogue was devised during the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in 2015 in order to establish “regular bilateral government consultations on civil space cooperation”.The first dialogue was held in Beijing in 2015 and the second in Washington in 2016NASA ban on engaging ChinaThe dialogue between the State Department and CNSA is an initiative designed to facilitate exchanges between China and the United States on a range of space-related issues, working around and filling a void created by an effective US Congressional ban on NASA dealing with Chinese entities.Containment BadChina is not revisionist, and containment causes global war. Swaine ’19. Michael D. Swaine, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies, PhD, AM, Harvard University BA, George Washington University, 1-16-2019, "A Relationship Under Extreme Duress: U.S.-China Relations at a Crossroads," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, . ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Even more worrisome, in the United States and other Western countries, worsening domestic economic and social problems--exacerbated by the unprecedented surge of both legal and illegal non-white immigrants into Europe and the United States that began in the 2010s---have led to the emergence of chauvinistic forms of nationalism hostile to China and other countries. According to the line of thinking currently so prominent in American politics, the globalization of economic and social systems, most acutely manifested by Beijing’s conspicuous economic impact on Americans’ daily lives, lies at the root of growing domestic economic inequality, job losses, social injustice, weakened national sovereignty and threatened cultural identity.In the United States, such hyper-nationalism is reflected most distinctively in the extremist views of President Trump. He has criticized U.S. politicians and global corporations for selling out U.S. workers, and the national interest in general, by their support for unfair multilateral trade agreements and by moving manufacturing facilities to foreign countries. Most notably for U.S.-China relations, Trump and his supporters have singled out China for special denunciation when they blast a range of other countries as economic predators or cheaters that aim to enrich themselves at America’s expense.A third major factor contributing to the overwhelming negative dynamics emerging in U.S.-China relations is China’s very rapid growth, which has passed certain key thresholds. Over the last eighteen years, China has become the largest trading power in the world, surpassed the Japanese economy to become the second largest economic power overall, become a major source of innovation in key high-tech sectors, accumulated massive foreign exchange reserves, and transformed its military from a defense-oriented force focused mainly on the homeland and Taiwan to a more expansive, sophisticated force capable of operating at significant distances from China.While contributing to global growth and the rise of living standards in many countries, the systemic changes arising from these developments have enhanced Chinese confidence abroad while greatly stoking American fears. By some measures, China is now poised to equal America’s military footprint in the Western Pacific, which would effectively end seventy years of U.S. maritime dominance in that critical region. In addition, Beijing is using its economic resources to create what it hopes will become a vast network of interlinked economic structures and relationships extending from China to Europe and Africa via both land and maritime routes, the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is also supporting or leading a variety of other multilateral and bilateral economic and security initiatives---such as new investment banks, Asian economic associations, and strategic partnerships with U.S. friends and adversaries alike---that could significantly shape the contours of the international system in new directions. Further, as mentioned above, China is more assertively advancing, by economic, political, and military means, its claims to disputed areas along its maritime periphery from Northeast to Southeast Asia, thus alarming many nearby states.Chinese confidence and assertiveness has increased, but certain more pessimistic Chinese sentiments have surfaced as well, providing more fuel for the fears of American hyper-nationalists. In recent years, slowing growth and rising wages have intensified worries among Chinese economic policy specialists about the so-called “middle income trap.” This has produced a policy consensus regarding the urgency of transforming China’s economy from a labor-intensive to a more competitive, innovation-driven economic model. That, in turn, seems to underlie China’s present very conspicuous efforts to propel China into the top ranks of high-tech nations at the fastest possible pace, by fair means or foul.For instance, while spending billions of dollars on legitimate research and development, some Chinese entities now also engage in unprecedented levels of cyber espionage, physical theft, coercive contract arrangements, and other underhanded efforts to obtain cutting- edge technologies. While certainly not justifying the blanket label of “economic predator” applied by the Trumpists (see below), these activities, along with perceived “unfair” protections of Chinese domestic industries, have significantly aggravated relations with more developed, rule-of-law-based nations such as the United States. Of particular note, they have contributed greatly to the general souring of attitudes toward the China market evident among many U.S. businesses, thus weakening a major historical pillar of strong U.S.-China relations.A RELATIONSHIP ADRIFT AND TAKING ON WATERAs a result of all the negative changes outlined above, the common (and in some areas growing) strategic logic, economic incentives, and societal ties that long anchored the U.S.-China relationship in the past are today rapidly disintegrating under a tidal wave of growing mutual suspicion, faulty interpretations, worst-case assumptions about motives, and zero-sum policy calculations. Although this is happening in both Washington and Beijing, it is at this time particularly evident in the United States.American policy under Trump has turned its back on the shared Chinese and American interest in combating common transnational threats such as climate change, and has withdrawn from or undermined potential mechanisms (such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a revised World Trade Organization agreement) for more effectively managing bilateral and multilateral economic problems. Instead, the Trump administration has adopted crude, sledgehammer-like economic policies (centered on the imposition of legally questionable tariffs) to force Beijing to submit to fully open its markets and eliminate state involvement in the Chinese economy.Even more ominously, Trump Administration strategy statements like the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy, the 2018 Summary of the National Defense Strategy, and the so-called U.S. “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy” explicitly label China as a fundamental, existential threat to Western interests. These statements allege that Beijing is plotting to build a revisionist, Sino-centric world order fundamentally incompatible with the U.S.-led liberal international system.Link D: Black BoxReject their predictions – its impossible to know whats going on in china Holodony 15 – Elena, BA. Economics Columbia University, works at business insider, covering economics, geopolitics, and markets. Previously she reported for CNBC, NBC News, and WNYC, and worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She also co-authored a scientific article on CT perfusion and brain metastases. Internally cites, Mr. Tak Lung Tsim is on the Board of Directors at Asia Cement (China) Holdings Corp., Playmates Holdings Ltd. and Aberdeen Greater China Fund, Inc. Mr. Tsim was previously employed as a Member by Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong. (“China is a Black Box”, Business Insider, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****They all mentioned that it's nearly impossible to tell what's happening in Beijing's inner political circle. And, since politics and economics in the world's second largest economy are so intertwined, that makes it that much more difficult to tell what is happening, and what will happen, in the country.“There’s a general perception that in China both the economy and politics are a black box. I can say, with a degree of certainty, that the economy doesn’t seem so much of a black box to me. ... But what I do feel is a black box is the politics," said Diana Choyleva, Lombard Street Research's chief economist and head of research.With "the 'black box' of the politics, we just don't know how [China] will react if faced with these very challenging things," she added, referring to the financial obstacles that have already transpired or that could come to be.The analysts reiterated that everyone's pretty much aware of the vague outline of China's political order. Namely, that Xi Jinping is the big guy in town, and he has installed his own guys in state-owned enterprises.But beyond that, not so much."The opaque, nontransparent palace politics ... I don't think anybody understands really what is going on. You have all sorts of rumors. But, no, we don't understand it," political analyst and China specialist Tak-Lung Tsim explained.Going a step forward, that makes analysts more uncertain about what might happen should China's economy start to shake."The difficulty in China is that politics and economics are so intertwined that ... A crisis in the economy [would be connected to] politics ... and then you get to Xi Jinping — does he get thrown out? There's, you know, tremendous volatility there," added Fraser Howie, who was most recently an MD at CLSA, and coauthor several books on China."It's China. So therefore ... whatever it says on the bottle, is not what the contents are," he added, referring to China's bond market.In sum, it's hard to tell what's going on behind the scenes in China's political circle. And that adds a degree of risk.D: DemocracyNo impact – democratic peace theory is empirically deniedFemke E. Bakker, 5-15-2018, PhD candidate Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. ”Hawks and Doves Democratic Peace Theory Revisited” Leiden University. Accessed 2-27-2019. []/mnw ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The core assumption of democratic peace theory that liberal norms are only present among individuals in liberal democracies does not find empirical support. The largeN study investigated the levels of liberal norms among representative samples of the US, Russia, and China. The study showed liberal norms are not absent within nondemocratic political systems. The US sample scored on average, as expected by democratic peace theory, significantly higher than the Russian and Chinese samples. However, also the Russian and Chinese samples scored, on average, well above the midpoint of the liberal norms scale. In other words: on average, liberal norms prevailed in all three regime-types. Furthermore, all three representative samples showed to have similar patterns of variation, which in all three countries approached more or less normally distributed varying levels of liberal norms. The results indicate that the assumptions about liberal norms, as used by democratic peace theory, should not be used as has been done so far. Moreover, the results show that levels of liberal norms are individually based, rather than socialized by the super-structure of a political regime. Democratic peace theory also assumes that liberal norms and democratic institutions affect liberal democratic decision-makers in such a way that they will be less willing to attack another liberal democracy over an autocracy. It is, moreover, assumed that this difference in willingness would show when liberal democratic decision-makers are compared with decision-makers of other regime-types. The latter decision-makers would be in any case be more willing to attack any state, no matter the regime, or so the assumption goes. These assumptions also do not find empirical support in this study. The experimental results show that the regime-type of the opponent does not influence the willingness to attack in any significant way. Neither the US decision-makers nor the Chinese and Russian decision-makers were affected by the regime-type of the opponent. A test whether the levels of liberal norms of liberal democratic decision-makers influences their willingness to attack another liberal democracy showed that there is no empirical evidence to support such a claim. The experimental results, when tested for other policy options, showed to be robust. The influence of these factors on the willingness to negotiate was also measured. The willingness to negotiate is an outcome often considered as the diametrical opposite of the willingness to attack and thus a good robustness check. Regarding the influence of regime-type of the opponent and the regime-type decision-makers were socialized in, that held true: these factors were of no influence on the willingness to negotiate. Also, an interaction between liberal norms and regime-type was of no influence. Liberal norms did affect the willingness to negotiate on an individual-based level, but this was unrelated to the regime-type of any of the states. The case-study illustrated that regime-type did not play an important role during Thatcher’s decision-making process regarding the Falklands War. Regime type did play a role differently though. Thatcher mentioned the regime-type of opponent Argentina extensively while aiming to justify the war to the general public, a finding that is discussed more in depth below. The results of this dissertation show that the hypotheses, generated from democratic peace theory, did not find support empirically. It indicates that the assumptions of democratic peace theory, which are used by other scholars as if these were empirical facts, should not be used instrumentally as such.D: Diversionary WarChinese diversionary war will never happen. Levi & Economy ‘16et al; Michael A. Levi and Elizabeth Economy are both Senior Fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. Michael Levi is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), director of CFR’s Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, and director of the CFR program on energy security and climate change. He is an expert on energy, climate change, nuclear security, and the interplay of global economics and international politics. Before joining CFR, Dr. Levi was a nonresident science fellow and a science and technology fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Prior to that, he was director of the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security Project. Elizabeth Economy is the C.V. Starr senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Economy has published widely on both Chinese domestic and foreign policy. Dr. Economy is a frequent guest on nationally broadcast television and radio programs, has testified before Congress on numerous occasions, and regularly consults for U.S. government agencies and companies. Levi & Economy hosted a workshop along with the Council on Foreign Relations' Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and Asia Studies program. This report is includes the thoughts of the CFR participants at the workshop – “Economic and Geopolitical Fallout From China's Slowing Growth” - February 25,2016 – pdf available via: ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****But Beijing Is Unlikely to Wage War if the Economy Crashes By the same token, analysts should probably discard the notion that a crash of the domestic economy would provoke a Chinese military adventure abroad in order to distract Chinese people from upheaval at home. This "wag the dog” scenario may gain currency with screenplay writers and conspiracy buffs, but it is not borne out by history. Although it is true that strife-torn countries often get embroiled in external wars, it is rarely because their leaders set out to generate a diversionary activity for their restive populace. Indeed, most workshop participants argued that if China were beset by an acute internal crisis, the Communist Party would almost certainly refocus its energy and resources inward. The leadership and its security apparatus, including components of the military, would have their hands full protecting against social instability, tamping down the activities of Uighur and Tibetan separatists, and maintaining the cohesiveness of the party itself. To launch a foreign war in an atmosphere of domestic public grievance would be particularly dangerous for Beijing. If China sustained a defeat at the hands of the Japanese or U.S. navy, the leadership would compound its reputation for economic mismanagement with one for military ineptitude—a potentially lethal cocktail for the ruling party.D: Taiwan WarNo Taiwan war---both sides will be flexible and maintain relationsJ. Michael Cole 16, former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, senior non-resident fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, and an Associate researcher at the French Center for Research on Contemporary China in Taipei, “The Great Cross-Strait Doublethink Act,” 3/4/16, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****With the May 20 inauguration approaching, it’s increasingly safe to say that the analysts who were predicting a rapid souring of cross-strait relations or punitive action by Beijing following Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) landslide victory in the Jan. 16 elections were too alarmist. Both sides have demonstrated an ability to act pragmatically, and even though the fundamentals remain unresolved, a new modus vivendi is in the making that will conceivably ensure stability and continuity in the Taiwan Strait for years to come. The sticking point, of course, is “one China” and the so-called “1992 consensus” that Beijing has repeatedly insisted on as a prerequisite for continued dialogue. During the election campaign, a struggling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) repeatedly sought to exploit the consensus—which it has adhered to wholeheartedly—by warning that the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) refusal to recognize it would seriously harm relations with Beijing. With the elections behind her, president-elect Tsai dispelled most of those fears by stating during an interview with the Liberty Times that she recognized as a historical fact that discussions between the two sides had indeed taken place in 1992. Ostensibly aware of the significance of Tsai’s strong mandate, that same week some Chinese academics were already arguing that Beijing should soften its stance. “Maintaining the current relationship is what really matters,” one academic told the Washington Post, “not the 1992 consensus.” Also speaking to the Post, Zhang Nianchi (章念馳) of the Shanghai Institute for East Asia Studies, said that China “shouldn’t be unsatisfied with her not accepting the 1992 consensus. Tsai was chosen by Taiwanese people, and that is a reality we have to face, too.” This was the same Zhang that, back in 2004, had expressed support for passing a “unification law” and defining the conditions under which war against Taiwan would be “permitted.” There were further signs of an emerging modus vivendi on Feb. 25 when Chinese Foreign Minster Wang Yi (王毅), discussing how Beijing intended to work with the DPP at a conference in Washington, D.C., referred to the (Republic of China) constitution and indicated that substance, rather than personality or symbolism, were what really matters. Interestingly, Wang did not mention the “1992 consensus” in his address. Although we should not read too much into the foreign minister’s comments—for example it is unlikely that Beijing will recognize the legitimacy of the ROC government, as some have argued—it nevertheless hints at the possibility of a more flexible, and perhaps more pragmatic, approach to Taiwan. Wang, of course, balanced that statement with his usual insistence on “one China,” while Zhang Zhijun (張志軍), head of the Taiwan Affairs Office, cautioned that we should not “misread” Wang’s remarks and that Beijing’s policy on Taiwan had not changed. And on Thursday, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference issued a report reaffirming the “one China” principle and the “1992 consensus.” But that’s the kind of thing that Beijing officials have to say. Wang’s remarks we no landmark, as some academics were quick to point out, and there is no doubt that Beijing’s long-term objectives vis-à-vis Taiwan remain unchanged, as pro-independence activists rightly pointed out. But the hint was in the details, in the language. What wasn’t said mattered just as much as what was said. The crucial point is that if relations in the Taiwan Strait are to remain stable, Beijing and Taipei must develop the ability to live with contradictions, to engage in what Orwell called doublethink. Only under this necessary modus vivendi can Beijing both insist on (Zhang) and downplay (Wang) the importance of the “1992 consensus,” or refer to constitutions and “constitutional frameworks” (Tsai) in vague enough a manner to allow for different interpretations that meet the needs of both sides. Also important is who says (or doesn’t say) what, in what setting, and to whom they are speaking. We must therefore weigh remarks by a foreign minister speaking in Washington against those of a lower-ranking official under the State Council. My bet is that Wang was speaking primarily to the U.S. and to Taiwan, while Zhang was addressing a domestic audience. All things in balance. Doublethink. As long as Taipei and Beijing engage in this doublethink, the sky won’t fall. And for the time being, Beijing seems to be proving that it is willing to dance with President Tsai.D: US-China WarNo China war. Yan Xuetong 19. Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University. “The Age of Uneasy Peace.” ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****What kind of world order will this bring? Contrary to what more alarmist voices have suggested, a bipolar U.S.-Chinese world will not be a world on the brink of apocalyptic war. This is in large part because China’s ambitions for the coming years are much narrower than many in the Western foreign policy establishment tend to assume. Rather than unseating the United States as the world’s premier superpower, Chinese foreign policy in the coming decade will largely focus on maintaining the conditions necessary for the country’s continued economic growth—a focus that will likely push leaders in Beijing to steer clear of open confrontation with the United States or its primary allies. Instead, the coming bipolarity will be an era of uneasy peace between the two superpowers. Both sides will build up their militaries but remain careful to manage tensions before they boil over into outright conflict. And rather than vie for global supremacy through opposing alliances, Beijing and Washington will largely carry out their competition in the economic and technological realms. At the same time, U.S.-Chinese bipolarity will likely spell the end of sustained multilateralism outside strictly economic realms, as the combination of nationalist populism in the West and China’s commitment to national sovereignty will leave little space for the kind of political integration and norm setting that was once the hallmark of liberal internationalism. WHAT CHINA WANTS China’s growing influence on the world stage has as much to do with the United States’ abdication of its global leadership under President Donald Trump as with China’s own economic rise. In material terms, the gap between the two countries has not narrowed by much in recent years: since 2015, China’s GDP growth has slowed to less than seven percent a year, and recent estimates put U.S. growth above the three percent mark. In the same period, the value of the renminbi has decreased by about ten percent against the U.S. dollar, undercutting China’s import capacity and its currency’s global strength. What has changed a great deal, however, is the expectation that the United States will continue to promote—through diplomacy and, if necessary, military power—an international order built for the most part around liberal internationalist principles. Under Trump, the country has broken with this tradition, questioning the value of free trade and embracing a virulent, no-holds-barred nationalism. The Trump administration is modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, attempting to strong-arm friends and foes alike, and withdrawing from several international accords and institutions. In 2018 alone, it ditched the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the nuclear deal with Iran, and the UN Human Rights Council. It is still unclear if this retrenchment is just a momentary lapse—a short-lived aberration from the norm—or a new U.S. foreign policy paradigm that could out-live Trump’s tenure. But the global fallout of Trumpism has already pushed some countries toward China in ways that would have seemed inconceivable a few years ago. Take Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who effectively reversed Japan’s relations with China, from barely hidden hostility to cooperation, during a state visit to Beijing in October 2018, when China and Japan signed over 50 agreements on economic cooperation. Meanwhile, structural factors keep widening the gap between the two global front-runners, China and the United States, and the rest of the world. Already, the two countries’ military spending dwarfs everybody else’s. By 2023, the U.S. defense budget may reach $800 billion, and the Chinese one may exceed $300 billion, whereas no other global power will spend more than $80 billion on its forces. The question, then, is not whether a bipolar U.S.-Chinese order will come to be but what this order will look like. At the top of Beijing’s priorities is a liberal economic order built on free trade. China’s economic transformation over the past decades from an agricultural society to a major global powerhouse—and the world’s second-largest economy—was built on exports. The country has slowly worked its way up the value chain, its exports beginning to compete with those of highly advanced economies. Now as then, these exports are the lifeblood of the Chinese economy: they ensure a consistent trade surplus, and the jobs they create are a vital engine of domestic social stability. There is no indication that this will change in the coming decade. Even amid escalating trade tensions between Beijing and Washington, China’s overall export volume continued to grow in 2018. U.S. tariffs may sting, but they will neither change Beijing’s fundamental incentives nor portend a general turn away from global free trade on its part. Quite to the contrary: because China’s exports are vital to its economic and political success, one should expect Beijing to double down on its attempts to gain and maintain access to foreign markets. This strategic impetus is at the heart of the much-touted Belt and Road Initiative, through which China hopes to develop a vast network of land and sea routes that will connect its export hubs to far-flung markets. As of August 2018, some 70 countries and organizations had signed contracts with China for projects related to the initiative, and this number is set to increase in the coming years. At its 2017 National Congress, the Chinese Communist Party went so far as to enshrine a commitment to the initiative in its constitution—a signal that the party views the infrastructure project as more than a regular foreign policy. China is also willing to further open its domestic markets to foreign goods in exchange for greater access abroad. Just in time for a major trade fair in Shanghai in November 2018—designed to showcase the country’s potential as a destination for foreign goods—China lowered its general tariff from 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent. Given this enthusiasm for the global economy, the image of a revisionist China that has gained traction in many Western capitals is misleading. Beijing relies on a global network of trade ties, so it is loath to court direct confrontation with the United States. Chinese leaders fear—not without reason—that such a confrontation might cut off its access to U.S. markets and lead U.S. allies to band together against China rather than stay neutral, stripping it of important economic partnerships and valuable diplomatic connections. As a result, caution, not assertiveness or aggressiveness, will be the order of the day in Beijing’s foreign policy in the coming years. Even as it continues to modernize and expand its military, China will carefully avoid pressing issues that might lead to war with the United States, such as those related to the South China Sea, cybersecurity, and the weaponization of space. NEW RULES? Indeed, much as Chinese leaders hope to be on par with their counterparts in Washington, they worry about the strategic implications of a bipolar U.S.-Chinese order. American leaders balk at the idea of relinquishing their position at the top of the global food chain and will likely go to great lengths to avoid having to accommodate China. Officials in Beijing, in no hurry to become the sole object of Washington’s apprehension and scorn, would much rather see a multipolar world in which other challenges—and challengers—force the United States to cooperate with China. Chinese leaders worry about the strategic implications of a bipolar U.S.-Chinese order. In fact, the United States’ own rise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides something of a model for how the coming power transition may take place. Because the United Kingdom, the world’s undisputed hegemon at the time, was preoccupied with fending off a challenger in its vicinity—Germany—it did not bother much to contain the rise of a much bigger rival across the pond. China is hoping for a similar dynamic now, and recent history suggests it could indeed play out. In the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency, for instance, relations between Beijing and Washington were souring over regional disputes in the South China Sea, reaching a boiling point when a Chinese air force pilot died in a midair collision with a U.S. surveillance plane in April 2001. Following the 9/11 attacks a few months later, however, Washington came to see China as a useful strategic partner in its global fight against terrorism, and relations improved significantly over the rest of Bush’s two terms. Today, unfortunately, the list of common threats that could force the two countries to cooperate is short. After 17 years of counterterrorism campaigns, the sense of urgency that once surrounded the issue has faded. Climate change is just as unlikely to make the list of top threats anytime soon. The most plausible scenario is that a new global economic crisis in the coming years will push U.S. and Chinese leaders to shelve their disagreements for a moment to avoid economic calamity—but this, too, remains a hypothetical. To make matters worse, some points of potential conflict are here to stay—chief among them Taiwan. Relations between Beijing and Taipei, already tense, have taken a turn for the worse in recent years. Taiwan’s current government, elected in 2016, has questioned the notion that mainland China and Taiwan form a single country, also known as the “one China” principle. A future government in Taipei might well push for de jure independence. Yet a Taiwanese independence referendum likely constitutes a redline for Beijing and may prompt it to take military action. If the United States were to respond by coming to Taiwan’s aid, a military intervention by Beijing could easily spiral into a full-fledged U.S.-Chinese war. To avoid such a crisis, Beijing is determined to nip any Taiwanese independence aspirations in the bud by political and economic means. As a result, it is likely to continue lobbying third countries to cut off their diplomatic ties with Taipei, an approach it has already taken with several Latin American countries. Cautious or not, China set somewhat different emphases in its approach to norms that undergird the international order. In particular, a more powerful China will push for a stronger emphasis on national sovereignty in international law. In recent years, some have interpreted public statements by Chinese leaders in support of globalization as a sign that Beijing seeks to fashion itself as the global liberal order’s new custodian, yet such sweeping interpretations are wishful thinking: China is merely signaling its support for a liberal economic order, not for ever-increasing political integration. Beijing remains fearful of outside interference, particularly relating to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, as well as on matters of press freedom and online regulations. As a result, it views national sovereignty, rather than international responsibilities and norms, as the fundamental principle on which the international order should rest. Even as a new superpower in the coming decade, China will therefore pursue a less interventionist foreign policy than the United States did at the apex of its power. Consider the case of Afghanistan: even though it is an open secret that the United States expects the Chinese military to shoulder some of the burden of maintaining stability there after U.S. troops leave the country, the Chinese government has shown no interest in this idea. Increased Chinese clout may also bring attempts to promote a vision of world order that draws on ancient Chinese philosophical traditions and theories of statecraft. One term in particular has been making the rounds in Beijing: wangdao, or “humane authority.” The word represents a view of China as an enlightened, benevolent hegemon whose power and legitimacy derive from its ability to fulfill other countries’ security and economic needs—in exchange for their acquiescence to Chinese leadership. BIPOLARITY IN PRACTICE Given the long shadow of nuclear escalation, the risk of a direct war between China and the United States will remain minimal, even as military, technological, and economic competition between them intensifies. Efforts on both sides to build ever more effective antimissile shields are unlikely to change this, since neither China nor the United States can improve its antimissile systems to the point of making the country completely impervious to a nuclear counterattack. If anything, the United States’ withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty will encourage both sides to build up their nuclear forces and improve their second-strike capabilities, ensuring that neither side will be confident it can launch a nuclear attack on the other without suffering a devastating retaliation. The threat of nuclear war will also keep Chinese tensions with other nuclear-armed powers, such as India, from escalating into outright war. Proxy wars, however, cannot be ruled out, nor can military skirmishes among lesser states. In fact, the latter are likely to become more frequent, as the two superpowers’ restraint may embolden some smaller states to resolve local conflicts by force. Russia, in particular, may not shy away from war as it tries to regain its superpower status and maintain its influence in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Faced with calls to reform the UN Security Council, fraying powers such as France and the United Kingdom may seek to buttress their claim to permanent membership in the council through military interventions abroad. In the Middle East, meanwhile, the struggle for regional dominance among Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia shows no signs of abating. Across the globe, secessionist conflicts and terrorist attacks will continue to occur, the latter especially if competition between China and the United States reduces their cooperation on counterterrorism measures. China’s emphasis on national sovereignty, together with Western societies’ turn away from globalism, will deal an additional blow to multilateralism. In the economic realm, export-driven economies, such as China, Germany, and Japan, will ensure the survival of a global liberal trade regime built on free-trade agreements and membership in the World Trade Organization—no matter what path the United States takes. On other matters of global governance, however, cooperation is likely to stall. Even if a future U.S. administration led a renewed push toward multilateralism and international norm setting, China’s status as a junior superpower would make it difficult for the United States to sustain the strong leadership that has traditionally spurred such initiatives in the past. Differences in ideology and clashing security interests will prevent Beijing and Washington from leading jointly, but neither will have enough economic or military clout to lead on its own. To the extent that multilateral initiatives persist in such a world, they will be limited to either side’s respective sphere of influence. China’s emphasis on national sovereignty, together with Western societies’ turn away from globalism, will deal an additional blow to multilateralism. The European Union is already fraying, and a number of European countries have reintroduced border controls. In the coming decade, similar developments will come to pass in other domains. As technological innovation becomes the primary source of wealth, countries will become ever more protective of their intellectual property. Many countries are also tightening control of capital flows as they brace for a global economic slump in the near future. And as concerns over immigration and unemployment threaten to undermine Western governments’ legitimacy, more and more countries will increase visa restrictions for foreign workers. Unlike the order that prevailed during the Cold War, a bipolar U.S.-Chinese order will be shaped by fluid, issue-specific alliances rather than rigid opposing blocs divided along clear ideological lines. Since the immediate risk of a U.S.-Chinese war is vanishingly small, neither side appears willing to build or maintain an extensive—and expensive—network of alliances. China still avoids forming explicit alliances, and the United States regularly complains about free-riding allies. Moreover, neither side is currently able to offer a grand narrative or global vision appealing to large majorities at home, let alone to a large number of states. For some time to come, then, U.S.-Chinese bipolarity will not be an ideologically driven, existential conflict over the fundamental nature of the global order; rather, it will be a competition over consumer markets and technological advantages, playing out in disputes about the norms and rules governing trade, investment, employment, exchange rates, and intellectual property. And rather than form clearly defined military-economic blocs, most states will adopt a two-track foreign policy, siding with the United States on some issues and China on others. Western allies, for instance, are still closely aligned with the United States on traditional security matters inside NATO, and Australia, India, and Japan have supported the U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, these states still maintain close trade and investment relations with China, and several of them have sided with Beijing in trying to reform the World Trade Organization. This two-track strategy shows just how far down the road to bipolarity the world has already advanced. And the fundamental driver of this process—the raw economic and military clout on which American and, increasingly, Chinese dominance rests—will further cement Beijing’s and Washington’s status as the two global heavyweights in the coming decade. Whether or not the United States recovers from its Trumpian fever and leads a renewed push for global liberalism is, ultimately, of little consequence to the outcome: opposed in their strategic interests but evenly matched in their power, China and the United States will be unable to challenge each other directly and settle the struggle for supremacy definitively. As during the Cold War, each side’s nuclear warheads will prevent proxy conflicts from easily escalating into a direct confrontation between the two superpowers. More important still, China’s leadership is acutely aware of the benefits its country derives from the status quo, for now—it is chief among the conditions for China’s continued economic and soft-power expansion—and will avoid putting these benefits on the line anytime soon, unless China’s core interests are in the balance. Chinese leaders will therefore work hard to avoid setting off alarm bells in already jittery Western capitals, and their foreign policy in the coming years will reflect this objective. Expect recurring tensions and fierce competition, yes, but not a descent into global chaos. ................
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