Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

Lighthizer in the Lead

After Buenos Aires, Lighthizer took over the lead role in trade negotiations from Mnuchin at Trump’s direction. Navarro was largely cut out of the process. Lighthizer and Liu He conducted shuttle diplomacy for five months, ironing out the details of a lengthy agreement that would include Chinese commitments to buy US agricultural goods, open market access to US financial firms, and change a series of Chinese laws to show a commitment to end unfair trade practices like intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer.

But in early May 2019, Liu He returned a draft with a huge chunk of the agreement (all the proposed legal changes) crossed out. On May 6, Lighthizer said the Chinese were not ready to make structural changes yet, and so there would be no deal, for now. Inside the administration, this was known as “the Big Renege.”

Although the talks would go on, the hardliners had another break in the weather to push forward something that had been sitting idle for months, an escalation of the fight against Huawei. With no trade deal imminent, Trump went along. On May 15, he signed an executive order effectively banning the US government from doing business with companies that are beholden to foreign adversary governments—that is, Huawei. He also signed off on Wilbur Ross placing Huawei on a Commerce Department list of banned entities. But even as he acknowledged the threat, he kept saying it could be negotiated away.

“Huawei is something that’s very dangerous. You look at what they’ve done from a security standpoint, from a military standpoint, it’s very dangerous,” Trump said in the Oval Office on May 23. “So it’s possible that Huawei even would be included in some kind of a trade deal. If we made a deal, I could imagine Huawei being possibly included in some form of, or in some part of, a trade deal.”

The restrictions on Huawei had implications for both Chinese and American firms that supplied Huawei with everything from semiconductors to chips to software. It also had huge implications for countries that were already lousy with Huawei equipment and planning to buy more to build their 5G infrastructure. The Trump administration was making decisions that affected them, without consulting them, and then telling them afterward to go along.

And none of Trump’s officials working on this problem could promise that Trump would stay the course. During a call on June 18, Xi brought up the Huawei restrictions and told Trump they should be removed as part of the trade deal. They discussed it again over dinner on June 28 at the G20 Summit in Osaka. The next day, Trump seemed to completely reverse his stance.

“US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei,” he said at a press conference, adding that this means “equipment where there’s no great national security problem.”

Huawei tweeted out, “U-turn?” Pottinger was apoplectic. The whole thing was a mess. But the national security team had another big problem. For months, they had been pushing for measures to respond to China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. For them, an important part of standing up to China was calling out their human rights violations and standing up for American values.

During the Trump-Xi dinner in Osaka, the subject of China’s “reeducation camps” for Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang Province had come up. Evidence was piling up about mass detention, forced indoctrination, and other human rights violations against the over one million innocent people in these camps. Confronting Xi about these brutal abuses would not only be the moral thing to do; it also would ensure that Xi understood the West would not be able to ignore mass atrocities on such a large scale.

But Trump didn’t care about the plight of the Uyghurs. Bolton wrote, “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

9

New World Order

In October 2014, Xi Jinping had traveled to Xinjiang, where he made a series of historic speeches. In full view of the United States and the rest of the international community, he had laid out his new plan to counter what he called the rise of “ethnic separatism and terrorist violence” in this far northwestern province of China. His declaration had grim implications for the majority of the residents of Xinjiang—and for Uyghurs living around the world and their families. The policies that Beijing went on to enact in Xinjiang would serve as a preview of the repressive system that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would surely enact if it could extend its control even further beyond its pre-World War II borders. It was the harbinger of a new world order—with Chinese characteristics.

In Xinjiang, which came into the possession of the CCP in 1949 after Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army with extensive support from the Soviet Union, twenty-five million ethnic minority citizens live at the time of this writing under various levels of Chinese government control and repression. The largest minority group among them, the Uyghurs, numbers about eleven million. They practice Islam and speak a Turkic dialect. Their unique language, culture, art, and traditions give them a distinctive national identity, which in turn earns them the resentment and suspicion of the Chinese authorities.

Similar to what it had done in Tibet, Beijing was seeking to develop the resource-rich and strategically import ant region of Xinjiang by importing Han Chinese by the trainloads and slowly but surely clamping down on the locals’ rights to practice their religion, speak freely, or have any control over what was happening in their homeland. But unlike with Tibet, not all Uyghurs confined themselves to nonviolence, and some trained in Afghanistan and Syria, coming back to Xinjiang to stage attacks.

On the second day of Xi’s trip there, two Uyghurs blew themselves up at a train station, injuring eighty people. But Xi’s speeches, as revealed later by the New York Times, show that he had already been planning—well before his trip—a brutal crackdown using mass surveillance, mass internment, political indoctrination, and forced labor. And he didn’t care what the world thought about it. “We must be as harsh as them,” Xi said in one of his speeches, “and show absolutely no mercy.”

In 2016, Xi appointed the CCP’s top man in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, to be the new party chief in Xinjiang. Chen quickly issued orders to “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” purging any local officials who didn’t obey. He began constructing a network of what he called “vocational skills, education training and transformation centers.” But based on what could be seen from satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting, they were identical to prisons. The region’s already omnipresent networks of AI-powered cameras and other surveillance tools were tasked with identifying entire classes of people to jail, based on the most random and previously innocent behaviors, such as refusing to eat pork or having a beard.

Years later, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists would release a series of internal documents it called “the China Cables,” which revealed how Chinese authorities used technology to justify interning people they suspected of future crimes. They also persecuted Uyghurs living abroad, tracking them and trying to get them deported back to China for jailing. Anyone with exposure to the West was a prime target. Entire communities of academics, artists, students, and authors were disappeared. Leaked manuals detail instructions for the prisons to prevent escapes, indoctrinate inmates, and, above all, keep the entire system a secret from the outside world.