作者：JIM GARAMONE  来源：美国国防部网站

The United States is following the tenets of the National Defense Strategy and prioritizing resources to the Indo-Pacific theater, Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper said during a virtual speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

During today’s presentation, Esper said the U.S. military is emphasizing the three pillars of the Indo-Pacific strategy: preparedness, strengthening partnerships and promoting a more networked region.

He also said the Trump administration "looks forward to working with the United States Congress to establish a Pacific Deterrence Initiative that will prioritize our investments, maintain a credible deterrent and demonstrate an enduring whole of government commitment to the region."

China is seeking to overturn the current values-based international order that has provided peace for more than 70 years, Esper said, noting that the system is based on shared values and long-established economic ties with allies and partners in the region.

The devastating worldwide effects of the coronavirus pandemic reinforce the need for a rules-based international order rooted in transparency, openness, honesty and other shared values, the secretary said. "In this era of globalization, the antidote to a viral contagion is communication and collaboration, not disinformation and deception," he added.

While the United States and its allies and partners are working in this time of plague to support one another, the Chinese Communist Party continues to engage in systematic rule-breaking, coercion and other malign activities, Esper said. "Most concerning to me," he added, "the People’s Liberation Army continues its aggressive behavior in the East and South China Seas."

China’s excessive claims in the area affect all trading nations and neighbors such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, Esper said.

"Most recently, Beijing advanced national security legislation that violates its commitment to the Hong Kong people to enjoy a high degree of autonomy, calling the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, a statement of policies rather than the treaty that it is," the secretary said.

China has also conducted large-scale exercises simulating the seizure of Taiwan. The secretary called this a destabilizing activity that significantly increases the risk of miscalculation.

"Make no mistake, the [Chinese Communist Party] has been engaged in this sort of behavior for many years," Esper said. "But today, its true intentions are on full display for all to see."

The United States and allies and partners in the region call on China to stop its destabilizing actions and abide by the international laws and norms that China arguably benefited most from since World War II.

"While we hope the CCP will change its ways, we must be prepared for the alternative," he said. "Together, we must uphold the free and open system that has secured peace and prosperity for millions and defend the principles that undergird it — namely, respect for sovereignty and independence for all nations, regardless of their size, peaceful resolution of disputes, mutual adherence to international laws and norms, and the promotion of free fair and reciprocal trade."

The military plays a role in this whole-of-government approach in the region. "We’re not only prioritizing the development and deployment of game-changing technologies such as hypersonic weapons, 5G and artificial intelligence, but we’re also investing in platforms critical to the Indo-Pacific and transforming the way we fight," the secretary said.

The Navy is building a more survivable, adaptable, sustainable and larger fleet. The Marine Corps is focused on becoming leaner, faster, more lethal and precise and more geographically distributed in the Pacific. The Army has prioritized long-range precision weapons to stay ahead of China’s growing anti-access, area-denial capabilities, the secretary said. "The Air Force continues its focus on enhanced stealth capabilities and the advancement of joint all domain command and control – a vital initiative that will link any sensor to any shooter in the battlefield in real time," he added.

To weave all these changes together, the U.S. military is developing a new joint warfighting concept – and ultimately, a doctrine – for the 21st century, Esper said.

America’s greatest advantage not only in the Indo-Pacific region, but also worldwide, is its network of allies and partners, the secretary said, promising that the United States will continue to cultivate partners moving forward.

"I want to highlight our increased defense cooperation with India, one of the all-important defense relationships of the 21st century," he said. "We conducted our first ever joint military exercise last November," Esper said. "As we speak today, the USS Nimitz is conducting combined exercises with the Indian navy in the Indian Ocean, demonstrating our shared commitment to stronger naval cooperation and supported by free and open Indo-Pacific."

Bilateral relationships are good, but multilateral cooperation is better, Esper said. "We are encouraging indo Pacific nations to expand their own intra-regional security relationships and networks of like-minded partners," he said.

Japan, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia and others are working more closely together, the secretary said, calling it a trend that needs to continue.

Esper called China "a country with a storied history, a rich culture and a wonderful people" and said no Indo-Pacific nation wants to see conflict with China.

"We are committed to a constructive and results-oriented relationship with China and within our defense relationship to open lines of communication and risk reduction," he said. "I’ve personally spoken to my [People’s Republic of China] counterpart on multiple occasions. And before the year is out, I hope to visit the PRC for the first time as secretary in order to enhance cooperation on areas of common interest, establish the systems necessary for crisis communications, and reinforce our intentions to openly compete in the international system in which we all belong."

来源时间：2020/7/23   发布时间：2020/7/21

旧文章ID：22437

作者：Ezra Voge  来源：Washington Post

Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University.

The “Rabbit Chairman” is the author of a popular Chinese blog with 1.5 million readers. He is one of several influential Chinese bloggers I knew when they were students. In one of his recent posts, the Chairman quoted Sun Tzu, the famous war strategist — “If you know yourself and know your enemy, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” — to explain how Americans are losing their conflict against China because we don’t “know the enemy.”

The Rabbit Chairman argues that the United States lost the war in Vietnam because many Americans mistakenly thought the North Vietnamese were old-fashioned communists. In fact, after they took power and were responsible for governing the country, they became nationalists.

U.S. officials are now attacking the Chinese Communist Party — and reportedly weighing a sweeping travel ban against members — without realizing its complexity and diversity. It is no longer the party that exemplifies the communist goals of Stalin or Mao. After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, the party was transformed into an organization to represent the nation. The Party includes people who have been pro-American, including business people, scientists and intellectuals. But when Americans attack the Communist Party as a whole, members — particularly those who would like to see more democratic procedures — rally to support the Party and, by extension, the nation.

In the half century since I became a professor of East Asian studies at Harvard, I have had the pleasure of teaching many Chinese students, some of whom stayed in the United States and others who returned to China. I have also come to know many Chinese students and faculty who studied at Harvard but were not my students. I have visited China at least once a year over the past four decades and have often met those students and scholars who returned home to China.

Many were excellent students in the United States. They were open to new ideas and enjoyed the intellectual freedom. In the past several years, as U.S.-China relations have become more polarized, returnees have faced new constraints on their freedom in China. Many find creative ways to stretch their freedom while staying out of trouble. They want to be loyal to China while remaining friends of the United States. But when they read of Americans attacking China with accusations that are not true — such as saying that the coronavirus was purposely engineered in a Wuhan laboratory — this strengthens their patriotism and willingness to support the Chinese government against Washington.

Many returnees have advanced important policies, such as establishing rules that required payments to American firms for intellectual property or standards applied by institutions such as the United Nations. Former premier Zhu Rongji fought to gain membership in the World Trade Organization so that China would be forced to make internal changes that meshed with those of international organizations. China chose as the head of its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) someone who had served in both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and who wanted to make the AIIB one that followed world standards. The lawyer he hired to write the rules for the AIIB was an American woman, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School. However, not only did American government officials refuse to join the AIIB, but they also urged our allies to do the same. Many Chinese concluded that the United States was not concerned with principles but only with retaining international power.

Our Americans sent to China by the Fulbright program have done a marvelous job of establishing academic relationships and making important connections. Now the United States has said that it would be suspended. Americans who took part in the program and Chinese friends who responded positively now feel abandoned by the country that once sought their friendship.

How would we feel if we were in the position of those tens of thousands of Chinese who had returned home and worked hard to prepare China for better adherence to international rules and who then read that prominent Americans claim that engagement had failed? I can tell you that many who had fought to respond to American requests and felt proud of their successes in adopting international standards — often against domestic resistance — feel as if their valiant efforts and successes are seen by prominent Americans as worthless. Many are members of the Communist Party. Americans ignorant of their sacrifices for international rules are pushing them toward anti-American nationalism.

In recent years, U.S. policy and political rhetoric toward China have been dominated by officials with limited knowledge of developments in that country. It is not in the United States’ interest to turn the Chinese into enemies. If we want to encourage them to work with us for our common interests, we need some fundamental rethinking of our policies. This in turn requires that high officials be willing to support our friends in China and learn more about its internal dynamics.

来源时间：2020/7/23   发布时间：2020/7/23

旧文章ID：22421

作者：Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian  来源：Axios

A researcher who lied about her affiliation with a Chinese military university entered the Chinese consulate in San Francisco after being interviewed by the FBI on June 20 about alleged visa fraud and has remained there, according to an FBI assessment in court filings dated July 20.

Why it matters: Using a diplomatic facility to shelter someone charged with a federal crime could cause serious tension between the U.S. and China, especially as the U.S. is seeking to crack down on Chinese espionage and research theft.

"It is highly unusual for a Chinese diplomatic post to associate so closely with a suspect in an intellectual property theft-related case," said Minyao Wang, a New York-based lawyer who has worked on IP theft cases related to China.

"Sheltering a defendant in a criminal case by using the diplomatic immunity of a consular building, if true, is really extraordinary."

Context: On July 21, the U.S. told China that it must close its Houston consulate within 72 hours.

State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the move was intended to "protect American intellectual property and American’s private information."

Details: According to documents filed on July 20 in the San Francisco division of the U.S. district court for the Northern District of California, Tang Juan came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa and was a researcher at the University of California, Davis.

On her visa application, Tang stated that she did not have any affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese military.

But an investigation revealed that she worked at the Air Force Military Medical University (FMMU), a PLA-affiliated university in China, and she is considered to be active military personnel.

After obtaining a warrant, the FBI searched her home and found evidence of her affiliation with the PLA.

On June 26, Tang was charged with visa fraud.

Tang appears to have taken refuge inside the San Francisco consulate.

Federal prosecutors wrote that "at some point following the search and interview of Tang on June 20, 2020, Tang went to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, where the FBI assesses she has remained," according to court filings.

"As the Tang case demonstrates, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco provides a potential safe harbor for a PLA official intent on avoiding prosecution in the United States," prosecutors stated.

What they’re saying: "We made the Chinese government aware that she is a charged individual, so it unquestionable that they know the defendant is a fugitive from Justice," a Department of Justice official told Axios.

The Chinese embassy in Washington, DC and the Chinese consulate in San Francisco did not respond to a request for comment.

The State Department declined to comment.

The big picture: Federal prosecutors believe this isn’t an isolated case.

Tang’s case is listed among several similar recent ones that appear "to be part of a program conducted by the PLA — and specifically, FMMU or associated institutions—to send military scientists to the United States on false pretenses with false covers or false statements about their true employment," the court filing states.

At least one among this group of cases involved a military scientist who had allegedly been directed by military superiors to steal information from a U.S. institution.

In other cases, the Chinese government directed military scientists to destroy evidence, and had helped them leave the U.S, according to court filings.

Related: The White House issued an executive order on May 29 barring entry to certain Chinese students and researchers from PLA-linked universities, stating that they are at "high risk of being exploited or co-opted by the PRC authorities" to serve as "non-traditional collectors of intellectual property."

The bottom line: If the FBI’s assessment is correct, the San Francisco consulate’s decision to shelter a fugitive affiliated with the Chinese military is highly provocative behavior that goes against basic diplomatic conventions.

来源时间：2020/7/23   发布时间：2020/7/23

旧文章ID：22420

作者：Nick Wadhams and Peter Martin  来源：Bloomberg

Donald Trump spent the first three years of his presidency balancing the demands of hardliners who wanted a crackdown on China against his own desire to pursue a trade deal and cultivate a stronger relationship with Xi Jinping.

The unexpected order Wednesday to close the Chinese consulate in Houston made one thing clear: the hawks are now in charge.

Eager to blame China for the Covid-19 pandemic and fed up with what U.S. officials call a history of espionage and intellectual-property theft, Trump has allowed a small group of advisers led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to push U.S. policy toward its most antagonistic in decades. The result is a series of sanctions, restrictions and condemnations that culminated in the Houston decision.

“Despite the overall message that the administration was tough on China we saw very much the opposite until we had a pandemic to contend with,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. “They actually pursued a very narrow China policy up until spring.”

The battle has now been opened on a range of fronts: China’s tightening grip over Hong Kong, its treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, its infiltration of technology and the theft of intellectual property. In nearly every policy realm, the U.S. is pushing back harder. It’s banning Chinese academics and expelling Chinese journalists and warning that the U.S. needs to cut its dependence on Chinese goods.

U.S. Move on Houston Consulate Risks American Footprint in China

Pompeo’s team, along with Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger, are the key architects of the change. They’re finding a more willing audience in the White House for their argument that the U.S. needs to strike back after what they see as decades spent ignoring China’s behavior, criticizing both Republican and Democratic administrations for being naive.

According to one person familiar with internal discussions, Pompeo and his advisers have come to conclude that a capitalist, democratic U.S. and a Communist, unelected leadership in China are fundamentally at odds and cannot coexist.

“America is engaging in a response to Chinese Communist Party and aggression in a way that America has not done for the past 20 years,” Pompeo said on June 19. “We responded to their military, use of military force, by moving back. We responded to their use of diplomatic coercion via retreating. Donald Trump is not going to permit that, and we made that clear.”

U.S. Officials Await Retaliation for Houston Consulate Closure

A total of roughly 700 diplomats are normally assigned to the U.S. embassy and five consulates in China

With the Oval Office offering little restraint, Pompeo’s team has orchestrated an unprecedented roll-out of attacks on Beijing, calling on every senior official in the executive branch to join the fray. That has included speeches by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, FBI director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Bill Barr, who lambasted Hollywood and companies such as Apple Inc. for succumbing to China’s will. Pompeo has even given more latitude to his spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, to call out China in unusually harsh terms, as she did last year in referring to the country’s “thuggish regime.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington urged the U.S. to show restraint Wednesday, comparing the administration to a car going the wrong way down the road. “It’s time to step on the brakes and return to the right direction!” the embassy said in a tweet.

Pompeo has taken the campaign on the road, with trips to the U.K. and Denmark this week aimed at coalescing a global coalition to oppose China. On Thursday, he’ll visit the presidential library of Richard Nixon — who was responsible for the re-opening with China in 1972 — for a speech that’s expected to cast the U.S.-China fight as the ultimate clash of civilizations.

Fueling the new hawkishness is a group of advisers around Pompeo who have laid out a China approach in far more aggressive and confrontational terms. They include Assistant Secretary David Stilwell and two China-born American scholars pulled from the world of academia: Miles Yu and Mung Chiang.

Yu is a history professor who has focused on China’s military at the U.S. Naval Academy and has long flagged concerns about Beijing’s efforts to expand its capabilities and influence. Chiang is on leave from his post as the dean of the college of engineering at Purdue University.

Both men bring skepticism about previous efforts to engage China in order to get it to embrace Western values. They’re joined by a key outside adviser, Michael Pillsbury, who wrote a 2015 book titled “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”

The group isn’t winning all its arguments: a proposal that emerged at the State Department to undermine Hong Kong’s dollar peg got little traction. A recommendation that the U.S. pursue a free trade agreement with Taiwan — a move which would infuriate Beijing — has gone nowhere. Trump also hasn’t given his sign-off to another idea to bar entry to the U.S. to members of China’s Communist Party.

What Hong Kong Losing Its U.S. ‘Special Status’ Means: QuickTake

Yet the days of Trump heaping praise on Xi, even as Covid-19 began to spread, are gone, replaced by an atmosphere of unrelenting negativity. According to numerous people familiar with the conversations, even moderate voices are ignored in administration meetings. Vice President Mike Pence vetoed the idea of serving as a back channel to China, wary of getting in the middle of an unstable and bifurcated policy, according to a person familiar with the proposal.

The newly hawkish tone, while shared in Congress, has sparked concern from Democrats and Republicans outside the government who argue that it’s largely a fiction given the revelations of John Bolton’s book, “The Room Where it Happened.” Bolton, who left the White House last year, argues that Trump only saw China through the lens of his own electoral chances, never cared about human rights in China and didn’t mind if Xi locked up Uighurs.

“This is partly electioneering,” Max Baucus, a former U.S. ambassador to China and ex-Democratic senator from Montana, told Bloomberg Television. “Clearly China creates a lot of problems for the United States, but this is the wrong way to handle it. If Pompeo thinks he is going to change Chinese behavior, he is gravely mistaken. Statements like his and others very much weaken the hands of reformers in China and very much strengthen the hands of hardline hawks in China.”

Several former diplomats as well as more centrist Republicans and Democrats argue that the U.S. needs to cooperate with China to get things done on all sorts of matters, including counter-terrorism, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. They also worry the new tougher strategy will just cause Chinese officials to dig in their heels even further.

‘Toward Hostility’

“The worry that I have is that only Xi Jinping could bring the Republicans and Democrats together in the American congress,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Council on Foreign Relations this week. “My worry is we’re going to move too far toward hostility.”

Many in Beijing see the tougher U.S. moves as a last-ditch, and hopeless, attempt to halt the progress of a country that has been catching up to the U.S., in terms of overall economic might.

“If anyone in Washington believes that applying more pressure to China will force China to succumb, they are indulging in fantasy,” said Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese diplomat and translator for Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. “Washington needs to come to terms with a China which will eventually outgrow the size of the United States in about 10 to 15 years.”

— With assistance by Brendan Scott, and Daniel Ten Kate

来源时间：2020/7/23   发布时间：2020/7/23

旧文章ID：22419