Wooing business leaders and avoiding conflict: What’s on Xi’s agenda as the Chinese leader heads to California
Analysis by Simone McCarthy, CNN - Updated 4:44 AM EST, Wed November 15, 2023
Hong Kong (CNN) — Xi Jinping arrived in San Fransisco on Tuesday for a highly anticipated summit with US President Joe Biden — where the Chinese leader will likely try to bolster his country’s troubled economy and push back on perceived US efforts to suppress it.
That Xi is on his first trip to the US in six years — a four-day visit that includes his attendance at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation international forum — is remarkable in itself.
The leaders of the world’s top two economies have not spoken since they last met on the sidelines of another international gathering in Bali, Indonesia in November 2022.
To arrange this meeting, their governments have had to navigate a number of contentious issues: from the handling of an allegedly rogue Chinese surveillance balloon to Beijing’s targeting of international businesses, and tit-for-tat restrictions over high tech.
Expectations for major breakthroughs at Wednesday’s meeting are low.
Xi is heading into the summit as he struggles to revive a faltering Chinese economy yet to fully rebound after his strict pandemic controls were relaxed, with the property market in crisis and record youth unemployment.
The economic woes, combined with the unexplained removal of two hand-picked officials at the top of his government, have tarnished the image that Xi projected the last time he met Biden, when he’d just consolidated power and started a norm-shattering third term leading China.
Biden, meanwhile, finds himself strapped with international challenges from the war in Ukraine to the latest conflict in Gaza. Another global flashpoint involving China is the last thing he would want to see, especially as he vies for re-election next year.
“At a time that they both face domestic challenges and foreign policy challenges, there’s less incentive for them to try to go after each other and a bit more incentive for them to stabilize their relationship,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.
Xi’s agenda
Despite the challenges he faces at home, the insulated Chinese leader may see himself in a stronger position relative to Biden. Beijing views the US as plagued by deep political polarization and on the decline globally.
“Xi thinks the US wanted to improve the relationship with China and he responded. They sent those delegations to him … (after he) put pressure on the US government,” said Suisheng Zhao, director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at the University of Denver, referring to visits from American officials to Beijing over recent months.
Beijing believes the US is the one that “should make a correction” in its attitude toward China. In its eyes, if “you are coming to us and talking to us, then you should (move in) our direction,” he said.
One issue at the top of Xi’s list, analysts say, is the US push to diversify supply chains to reduce reliance on Chinese manufacturing, an economic engine, and its efforts to restrict China’s access to the types of advanced American technology vital to the country’s high-tech industries and modernization of its military.
Beijing sees these efforts, which include restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to China and bans on some US tech investments in China, as blatant actions to suppress its rise — not the narrow, targeted national security measures the Biden administration claims them to be.
Chinese officials have hit back with their own controls on natural materials used to make tech products.
Xi will ask Biden to clarify and define the scope of the US approach on tech restrictions, analysts say.
He is also likely to push Biden for assurances on American policy toward Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that China’s ruling Communist Party claims and has vowed to unite with.
The US has ramped up support for the island in recent years amid increasing aggression from China. The issue is becoming only more acute ahead of an impending presidential election in January, in which Beijing hopes to see Taiwan’s Democracy Progressive Party (DPP), which opposes closer ties with China, lose power.
“(Beijing) knows the election is coming. They are telling America in every single way possible that this is a redline issue, don’t touch it, and you better reign in the DPP candidate so that he doesn’t trigger a war we have to fight,” said Stimson Center’s Sun.
The trip to California will also be an opportunity for Xi to pitch American businesspeople on the idea that China remains a place of opportunity and is committed to the pro-business reforms that have driven its meteoric rise in recent decades.
Xi is expected to underscore that point during an address to American industry leaders at a dinner this week, though Beijing has yet to confirm the appearance.
Business confidence in China has cratered in recent years following the strict pandemic controls and as Xi ramped up state control over the economy and expanded an already vague and far-reaching anti-espionage law. A slew of raids and detentions affecting international companies have increased concerns from Western firms about the risks of doing business there.
‘Positive signals’
The lead-up to Xi’s American visit has been marked with signals that China is hoping to smooth prickly relations.
In recent weeks, China has hosted elderly American members of the “Flying Tigers,” a group of fighter pilots and servicemen who helped China fight the Japanese during World War II, for a commemorative ceremony in Beijing. The event and the group’s subsequent tour around China was widely covered by state media.
The pages of party mouthpiece People’s Daily also included pieces calling for better ties. One editorial, written under the pen name Zhong Sheng, which is reserved for important foreign policy pronouncements, praised the “huge potential for cooperation between the two countries.”
The turn-around from the usual anti-US rhetoric has been so swift that some Chinese social media users have taken note, prompting wisecracks on platforms with one user writing: “Ok, will stop hating the US for now, and wait for further notice.”
Chinese public sentiment toward the US appears to have softened in recent months too, according to monthly surveys conducted by business insight firm Morning Consult. From April to October, the share of Chinese adults who view the US as an “enemy or unfriendly” fell 9 percentage points to 48%, the survey found.
Meanwhile, the visit from four cabinet-level US officials to Beijing over the summer has already sparked further lower-level talks and reciprocal trips, in a significant step forward toward restoring lines of communication slashed by Beijing in protest of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan.
‘Unfeasible in practice’
But when it comes to whether any of those talks, and the summit between Biden and Xi, will result in concessions on the core issues that drive tensions between the US and China — like Taiwan, Beijing’s claims in the disputed South China Sea or efforts from both sides in the name of protecting national security — analysts are skeptical.
“Although both China and the United States hope to prevent their competition and confrontation from drastic deterioration … and both sides attach great importance to preventing military conflicts with each other, none of them is prepared to grant any significant and lasting concessions,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at China’s Renmin University.
Even on international issues, where both have a stake in ensuring global stability, it’s unclear how much coordination there can be.
After nearly two years of war in Ukraine, the US appears to have little hope left that Beijing will pressure close partner Russia to end its invasion.
When it comes to the latest conflict in Gaza, even if Biden asks China to help pressure its trade partner Iran to not get involved, coordination could be “unfeasible in practice,” according to Shi.
China also remains wary of sharpening American rhetoric during the upcoming US elections, when both Republicans and Democrats may want to appear tough on China to appeal to voters.
All this means that while China and the US are likely to resume positive interactions following the meeting, their ties will remain fragile, analysts say.
Those interactions won’t “solve the fundamental conflict of national interests between the two,” said Sun in Washington. “So, the question people will ask is, how genuine and how sustainable is this?”
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UK sees ‘incredible acceleration’ in military capabilities from Ukraine war
Defense companies are testing prototype arms and gear on eastern European battlefields.
BY SAM SKOVE - STAFF WRITER - NOVEMBER 14, 2023 12:48 PM ET
ABOARD HMS PRINCE OF WALES — Supporting Ukraine has led to a sharp increase in the British military’s technological capabilities, thanks to captured Russian technology and Ukrainians' battlefield observations, Britain’s armed forces minister said.
Costly experience and the acid tests of combat have brought about an "incredible acceleration in Western military capability," James Heappey said while visiting the United States aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, a British aircraft carrier visiting Norfolk last week, in part to test F-35s.
Britain is learning from information shared by Ukraine, including data gained from compromised Russian equipment, Heappey said. Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine began to capture highly sophisticated Russian electronic warfare systems and other sensitive equipment.
Britain is also closely observing how donated British weapons and gear—cutting-edge prototypes as well as standard-issue kit—are performing on Ukrainian battlefields. (Poland is doing much the same with donated armored vehicles.)
"You learn very quickly what works and doesn't work,” said Heappey. “The pace of defense innovation within NATO countries is kind of where you expect it to be in wartime.”
Britain has led efforts to send more experimental equipment to Ukraine, in part through its International Fund for Ukraine, which has a mandate to procure “priority” equipment for the war-torn country by skipping the standard procurement process.
The fund has sent a variety of systems that have only been recently developed, such as MSI’s Terrahawk Paladin. The counter-drone system entered serial production in January, said product manager Robert Gordon at London arms show DSEI. The U.S. has also sent a variety of experimental or newly designed anti-drone systems to Ukraine.
Some UK companies are using reports from Ukrainian troops to improve their products far more quickly than would otherwise be possible, Heappey said.
“It turns out that these companies that were patiently working away with the British Army, on a sort of five-year horizon, were accessing the latest information on Russian [electronic warfare] capabilities," he said. The companies are “rapidly evolving their drone capability and getting it to the Ukrainians within five weeks.”
Battlefield observations are even changing the British military’s general concept of how future wars may be fought.
One key lesson, Heappey said, is that modern armies need to move away from perfectly engineered but easily destroyed weapons and instead focus on cheaper weapons whose sheer number and variation can overwhelm an adversary’s decision-making capabilities.
He pointed to Ukraine’s obliteration of one of Russia’s advanced S-400 anti-aircraft systems by using drones to attack radars before sending in cruise missiles.
The lesson for Britain is that “you don't have to blow billions of pounds’ worth of taxpayers money on everything being the most exquisite imaginable” weapon, he said.
The HMS Prince of Wales’ own namesake is in some ways a potent reminder of the need to keep pace with modern military technology. A World War II battleship built for an era of gunnery, the first Prince of Wales was sunk by Imperial Japanese airplanes mere days after it reached the Pacific.
Britain is looking for defense manufacturers to mimic the Ukraine weapons development experience, Heappey said, with an emphasis on speed, affordability, and quickly learning the lessons of the battlefield.
Britain is also working on making its own forces less vulnerable to the tactics that have taken out Russian forces, particularly the use of long-range precision weapons. Ukraine has routinely used a combination of intelligence and Western-donated long-range missiles to wipe out Russian supply dumps and headquarters.
In the future, the British military must “hide to survive,” Heappey said, echoing similar statements by U.S. officials. “If you’re found, you’re dead.”
With Ukraine’s own generals admitting a southern counter-offensive has stalemated and flagging U.S. public support for Ukraine, it is unclear how much longer Western support will continue.
Heappey pointed to Ukraine’s success in clearing Russian vessels from the Black Sea as evidence that Western support should go on.
“What's been happening in the Black Sea is every bit as significant as what was happening in Kharkiv Oblast last year,” he said, referring to swift Ukrainian territorial gains in September 2022. The wider donor community continues to believe Ukraine can win the war, Heappey said.
Amid some criticism of international efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers, Heappey said that Ukrainian contacts at all levels of Ukraine’s military had been happy with the types of training they’ve received from Britain.
Britain has trained more Ukrainian soldiers than any other nation: 30,000 since June 2022. The program teaches basic battlefield skills such as dressing wounds and weapons handling.
The five-week program is far shorter than the 14-week bootcamp afforded the British Army’s own recruits. Ukraine’s urgent and continuing need for new troops forced UK trainers to pare training to the essentials, Heappey said.
“Fundamentally, what the Ukrainian Armed Forces is asking for is a set of basic infantry skills that give pretty new recruits…the best chance possible of surviving,” he said.
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Could the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza be Palestine’s ‘black swan’ moment?
LONDON: As the missiles and bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, reducing entire neighborhoods to wastelands and pushing the death toll to ever more obscene heights, buried in the rubble of the bloody history of the world’s longest-running war may be found clues as to how the current conflict might end and the impact it might have on the political landscape of the Middle East.
That, at least, is the view of UK-based Israeli historian and political scientist Dr. Ahron Bregman.
The author of half a dozen books about Israel’s seemingly never-ending wars, he believes there is a chance that in this latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian saga something significant might be stirring — a “black swan” moment, a metaphor used by political theorists and financial analysts alike to describe a rare, unexpected and unpredictable event that has dramatic, unforeseen consequences.
Israel has been at war for 75 years, ever since David Ben-Gurion, the Polish-born head of the World Zionist Organization, declared the foundation of the state on May 14, 1948, the day the British mandate for Palestine came to an end.
For its own political reasons, Britain had championed the foundation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine since 1917, when its government issued the Balfour Declaration, pledging its support for “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”
But the first voices warning of the inevitable consequences of “dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country,” as one member of the British House of Lords put it in 1920, were raised in Britain.
The harm this would do, said Lord Sydenham in a debate on the Palestine Mandate in the House of Lords on June 21, 1922, “may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”
To date, it has extended for three-quarters of a century.
The list of conflicts that have flowed from what Lord Sydenham described as “a gross injustice … opposed to the sentiments and wishes of the great majority of the people of Palestine,” is a long one.
The opening act in the long-running tragedy still being played out today was the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, preceded by a civil war between the Arab and Jewish communities and triggered by the outrage in the Arab world at the UN Partition Plan for Palestine.
Adopted by the UN General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947, this allocated 56 percent of the land to the Jews, even though at that stage there were still twice as many Arabs in Palestine.
Despite attempts by commentators, governments and even some of the players to frame the Palestinian conflagration as a battle between competing religious ideologies, the central theme of all the subsequent conflicts has remained consistent: land.
As Bregman wrote in his 2010 book “Israel’s Wars — A History Since 1947,” “when viewed from a historical perspective, these separate, short wars can be seen as one continuous conflict where territory — first the land of Palestine and then lands seized by Israel in subsequent wars — is the main, though not exclusive, trigger to repeating conflagrations.
“The balance sheet, after more than 60 years of Israeli-Arab conflict, indicates that on the battlefield there has been no clear victor — neither Arab nor Israeli.”
And yet, he believes, despite the untrammeled horror of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, and Israel’s uncompromising and increasingly widely condemned military response, the current conflict may yet prove to have reset the dial, paving the way, finally, to a two-state solution.
At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied that Israel is planning to reoccupy Gaza, vacated by his predecessor Ariel Sharon almost 20 years ago, this is precisely what hawks in his government have called for.
“There are extreme people in the government who wish for a return to rebuilding the Jewish settlements in Gaza that Ariel Sharon evacuated in 2005,” said Bregman.
But this, he believes, will not be how this current conflict ends.
“Sharon understood that you can’t have 8,000 settlers living among 1.8 million, at the time, hostile people and you can’t now have settlers living among 2.2 million Palestinians, who will be even more hostile after the destruction we are now seeing.
“Besides, any return to the Gaza Strip by Israel would be opposed by the entire international community, mainly the United States, on which Israel is now very dependent.”
For many, the scenes of Palestinians fleeing their homes in Gaza have awoken painful memories of the Nakba, the forceful displacement of more than half the Palestinian population before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The fury of the Israeli response to the events of Oct. 7 has also conjured up memories of the 1967 Six-Day War, by the end of which Israel had seized the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, vastly expanding its territory at the expense of hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs.
But Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London who has written extensively about the Arab-Israeli conflict, looks to another episode in that long saga for a clue to how events might now play out.
Fifty years ago, in October 1973, a surprise attack was unleashed on Israel by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt, motivated by a desire to recover the land seized by Israel in 1967.
The Ramadan War, or Yom Kippur War, ended in victory for an Israel heavily backed by American arms, but it set in motion a chain of events that changed the political and territorial landscape.
“Before the 1973 war, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat offered the Israelis a peace proposal: Withdraw in the Sinai, not completely, but by 35 km, and we will embark on a peace process,” said Bregman.
The proposal was rejected by Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, and Sadat went to war.
“And then something very interesting happened. After the war, the withdrawal sought by Sadat was exactly what happened. In 1974, the Israelis withdrew in the Sinai, exactly 35 kilometers.”
This in turn led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the signing the following year of the historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which became the first Arab state to officially recognize Israel and won back the entire Sinai Peninsula.
The treaty, which earned Sadat and Menachem Begin, then Israel’s prime minister, the Nobel Peace Prize, was widely condemned in the Arab world at the time as a betrayal of the Palestinians and led to Sadat’s assassination in 1981.
“But after the 1973 war, the Israelis were willing to do things they weren’t prepared to do before, because of the war,” said Bregman.
“This was a black swan — and maybe what we are seeing now will be a black swan as well, which could change everything.”
Bregman, who has lived in the UK since 1989, returns regularly to Israel to visit family and is intimately familiar with the country’s military, political and intelligence landscape.
He served in the Israel Defense Forces for six years, taking part as a major in the 1982 Lebanon War, later worked as a parliamentary aide in the Knesset and wrote “The Spy Who Fell to Earth,” the 2016 bestselling book about espionage between Egypt and Israel, later made into a Netflix documentary.
“Do not misunderstand me,” he said. “What happened on Oct. 7 was barbaric, on par with Daesh at the highest point on the scale of evil.
But if you look at it from a purely military point of view, it was a very successful operation for Hamas. They surprised the Israelis big time. Now, I imagine many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are angry with them because of the destruction. But in the long term, this will be regarded as a major event in the mythology and history of the Palestinian people — a major event after years of humiliation and Israeli victories.”
The current phase of the conflict, he believes, will end soon, “in a few days, or weeks, because the Americans will stop the Israelis” — Biden will fear losing his election if they continue. But it is in what could happen next that the beating of the wings of the black swan can be heard.
There are several possible outcomes, of which Netanyahu’s declared intention to destroy Hamas completely is one — and, in Bregman’s view, impossible: “Hamas is as much of an idea as it is a group of people.”
But, he says, “if you want to kill an idea, you must put forward a better one, and a better idea for the Palestinians would be — ‘Here, you are going to have your state.’”
Under current circumstances, that seems an extraordinary prospect. But that, said Bregman, is precisely the nature of a “black swan” scenario.
“It’s not nice to say, but the Israelis got a bloody nose and that brings me back to 1973. It was the bloody nose of 1973 that shook up the Israelis and made the Sinai 1 and Sinai 2 agreements happen.”
He speculates that, under US pressure, Israel could facilitate the return of the Palestinian National Authority to Gaza, where it lost control to Hamas in 2006. In this scenario, the aging Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestine president, would be replaced.
“Israel could, for example, do something brave and release from prison Marwan Barghouti,” Bregman said,referring to the Palestinian leader sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, but who is seen as a potential unifying candidate.
Under Barghouti, or someone like him, said Bregman, “you could have the Palestinian Authority ruling the two areas again. Of course, the right in Israel would be very reluctant, because Netanyahu’s entire policy has been ‘divide and rule’ — it was he who wanted to keep Hamas in power and made them powerful.”
But one effect of the Oct. 7 attack, he believes, is going to be a seismic shock that could shake Israel’s political landscape to its foundations.
“After this phase is over, after the return to civilian life of the Israeli army reservists, there are going to be massive demonstrations in Israel, far bigger than anything we’ve seen before,” he said.
“There is so much suppressed anger in Israel right now. I can feel it. The Israelis keep it inside them for now because there’s a war going on, but it will be released.”
That anger has been generated by the failure of the military response to the Hamas attack, the perceived mishandling of the hostage crisis by the government, and the increasing long-term unease over the provocations of the settler movement and repeated incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by Jewish religious extremists, supported by right-wing ministers including Itamar Ben-Givr, the national security minister.
It was these provocations that were cited by Hamas leader Mohammed Deif as the trigger for the current conflict. On Oct. 11 a Hamas source told Reuters that planning for the attack had begun in May 2021, provoked “by scenes and footage of Israel storming Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, beating worshippers, attacking them, dragging elderly and young men out of the mosque.”
The demonstrations in Israel, said Bregman, “will be massive, and it will be interesting to see whether Netanyahu will survive, but the current cabinet doesn’t represent the real Israel and the extremists who were allowed into government will probably have to go,” in turn paving the way for a more pragmatic Israeli government and, ultimately, the possibility of a single Palestinian authority responsible once again for both Gaza and the West Bank.
“Then, all of a sudden, you have the basis of a two-state solution, and in my view, this is the end game to which the Americans are now trying to push the Israelis.”
Bregman concedes that such a historic outcome is not certain but, he believes, would be more palatable to many in Israel than the alternative options, which range from strengthening and deepening the “ring of steel” around Gaza to imposing a West Bank Area B situation, in which Hamas is allowed to continue running civil society but Israel controls security.
Certainly, said Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, author of “The Iron Cage" and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” a continuation of the status quo cannot be contemplated.
“If Israel and the US end this war they are collectively waging as they have every previous one — 1982, 2006, 2008-09, 2014, etc. — allowing for no possible political solution involving Palestinian national rights and an end to occupation and settlement … it will be sowing the seeds of another inevitable war,” he said.
On Aug. 11, 1919, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the enthusiastic supporter of Zionism whose declaration of 1917 paved the way for generations of misery, wrote a shocking memo that underscored the British Empire’s contempt for the Arabs of Palestine.
Zionism, he wrote, “be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
Perhaps now, after almost a century of pain and suffering, the Hamas assault on Israel might prove to be the impetus for Israel and the world finally to recognize that the age-long traditions, present needs, and future hopes of the Arabs of Palestine are of equal importance to those of the Jewish people.
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