How much engagement is too much engagement with the Chinese Communist Party? How do we hold the CCP accountable? What kind of policy has ever worked to change CCP behavior? Authors of the new book Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure James Fannell and Bradley Thayer join host Miles Yu to answer these questions by looking back at the history of failed American policy toward China to ensure we learn lessons for effective engagement with China in the future.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world’s future.
Episode Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute, China Center. I'm Miles Yu, senior fellow and director of the China Center.
In this week's segment of China Insider Interviews, I'm thrilled to welcome retired United States Navy, captain Jim Fennell and Dr. Bradley Thayer to discuss their newly released book Embracing Communist China, including a larger conversation of the involving threat that the PRC poses to the United States and national security interests. For our listeners, captain Jim Fennell served 29 years in the military and was the former director of intelligence and information operations for the United States Pacific Fleet. He's now a government fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and funding members of the Committee on President Danger: China.
Also with us today is Dr. Bradley Thayer, director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and widely published author involving topics on US-China relations and competitions, China's grand strategist and historian of communist thought, including the origin development and the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. His most recent works include understanding the China threat and how China says the world Han Centralism and the balance of power in international politics. Fact, Thayer is also a founding member of the Committee on President Danger China. Jim and Brad, thank you both for being here with us today.
Bradley Thayer:
Well, thank you. It's our pleasure.
Miles Yu:
Let's jump right in here. Why don't we start with a brief overview for our listeners highlighting the key recommendations and perhaps we can focus a bit more on the catalysts that brought this research about.
Bradley Thayer:
Certainly Miles. Happy to and thank you very much for the opportunity to reach your audience. Jim and I, really from very different backgrounds, have talked about for some time an obvious issue, which is, how did we get to where we are? How did this happen? How is it that China could rise year after year and nothing is done about it. Washington DC has a robust intelligence community, of course, military looking at threats around the world, think tanks obviously devoted to strategic thought, and yet year after year, the enemy arose each year becoming stronger while the United States did nothing to stop it or to act in response, really until the Trump administration, as you well know, of course, where many measures were taken to address the threat posed by our enemy, the Chinese Communist Party. So we decided to write a book on it. Again, our backgrounds became such a, we always say that we're like peanut butter and chocolate, right, Jim, to produce the book, and we're very grateful of course to have the opportunity to work with, of course our publisher, and to Steve Bannon for providing the forward to the book.
Miles Yu:
I'm going to ask you, which one of you is peanut butter? Which one is chocolate? But Jim...
James Fennell:
Yeah, clearly today, by every measure across all domains of national power, China is a peer competitor or a leader against us in many areas. For instance, they had the largest navy in the world today. How did that happen? How is it possible that we went from 25 years ago when the Congressional Research Service said that the US Navy was 76 major combatants larger than the PLA navy, and today that's flipped and inverted and China is ahead of the United States by a greater number, much greater number. So we are in a position where China has been able to achieve great strength and we wanted to know why did that happen? How is it possible that that happened? And there's a lot of reasons that we go through in the book, but one of them is based upon this idea that we deflated the threat, the intelligence community largely, but also from our think tanks and the academic community, downplayed the threat of the Chinese for the Chinese Communist Party for these past 30 plus years.
And so, it kind of inculcated our culture in the national security community that when we saw something from China, whether it was in 2013 when I was still on active duty watching the first indications of building seven islands in the Spratly’s, the natural inclination of the IC and the establishment national security community was to just ignore that and to say, well, that's probably nothing. Don't worry about it. Then when they were built, then they were said, well, they're not going to militarize them because Xi told Obama that. And yet every time there was a consistent pattern of underestimating the PRC, underestimating their intentions. And so that's part of the rational or part of the explanation of why we're in this position. Brad can talk more about the Deng and what his strategy did and how brilliant it was, but we're finding ourselves in a place today that we have to acknowledge that we miss this, if we don't acknowledge that we miss this, then we can't move forward like we were able to do in the Cold War with the Soviets.
Miles Yu:
That's very important. I read your book and I think one of the most important things is that our nation right now is in a stage of how to counter the China threat, but I don't think there is enough reflection on what has gone wrong in order to come up with a better strategy. History is a prologue. If you don't understand history, we cannot do things right at present and we can definitely not win the future. So that's why I think your book is very, very important. But of course, let's just say it is not necessarily a blame game. We're all responsible for this. This nation is very good at reflecting on what went wrong after a catastrophic strike like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11. But sometimes we had to figure out what has to be done to change your habit of doing things. So, one of the things that you talked about quite a bit, it's very interesting, is the Alliance structure in containing PRC and Xi Jinping. Can America alone stand up to the PRC if some of our strategic allies are not on board. What can be done to appeal to them? Alliance insurance is very critical. Us, we say we have a lot of allies of the world, which is definitely strength to our own system. China does not have it, but China is actively seeking new alliances with North Korea, with Iran, with Russia in particular, right? So, with some of the countries in the middle who are struggling, straddling I should say, what's your take on that Alliance? Can we do it alone?
Bradley Thayer:
Well, Miles, we have a very important issue because the United States has to fight the CCP, not by itself, but with allies around the world. Part of the genesis of the book was to do that, if you will, analysis about why we failed, allies want to have confidence in the United States and confidence that the United States is able to discern threats clearly and act robustly against them. And as we document in the book, we didn't do that for a generation while countries, partners like India or key allies like Japan, were left scratching their heads, figuratively, thinking through why is the United States not taking the steps necessary to deal with what is for them as well as for the United States, an imminent security threat. And so the issue really becomes down to, allies are important, but allies have to have confidence in American willpower and American strategic capacity, which is so important.
And so analyzing why we failed and coming out with an analysis that this is why we did and we're quite happy to recognize that the engagement school, of course, became so damaging and contributed to what we call in the book ‘threat deflation,’ where again, year after year we're deflating the threat, we're dismissing it. Again because of the genius of Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party strategy, which is commonly called hide and buy, right? But an expert political warfare strategy that was able to make Wall Street, universities, of course, think tanks, his partner, actually partners with the Chinese Communist Party to support their rise and to fund it actually, and to allow increasing trade ties entry into the World Trade Organization, which led to their rocket fuel and incredible growth, which then of course was able to transfer into military power diplomatic might and in technological might and so many other areas.
So our allies want to look for the United States for confidence leadership. And that leadership requires recognizing that the mistakes that we made in the past we're correcting and we're moving away from an engagement strategy towards one of recognizing the enemy for what he is and taking measures against them. So with respect to this issue, of course, allies are critical and partners are critical. Partners like Taiwan and India, again are extremely important in every sense in a military sense. They provide Beijing with a multiple front war problem and complicate their strategic calculus. In the economic sense, of course, our allies aid us in so many ways through trade, through security, relationship and other partnerships that we're able to form with them. Their location, of course, is so important in a geostrategic sense, but also in a political warfare sense. Most importantly, the dispositive question of the 21st century is going to be whether the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, defines the 21st century as one of a century defined by tyranny, the tyranny that they represent or whether it's going to be decided by the United States and freedom and the international order that the United States created in conjunction with the British and that so many allies enjoined in the decades afterwards, is sustained, which is so important.
So, allies need to see America's leadership and they need to have confidence in the United States, and they need to also recognize, of course, that now is the time to support the US and to encourage the United States, the Biden administration in particular, to take many measures against the Chinese Communist Party, ideally to evict them from power of course. But that political warfare component is so important because the United States has so many advantages. Allies around the world, obviously not just in the Indo-Pacific, but around the world who have, if you will, voted with their feet in conjunction with standing with the United States and not being enticed away by the promises of Belt and Road initiative or other measures that Beijing undertakes to undermine the United States.
Miles Yu:
You mentioned about American leadership. You cannot say there is no American leadership. During the Trump administration, we led the way to change the global dialogue on China. We made China the number one national security threat to the United States by extension also to the world. Many of our Allies are not with us, particularly from the European countries. So they have a profound suspicion about our motives and they try to be very opportunistic. They actually [are] overjoyed by the tension of China and United States, so they could sign separate trade deals with China, [letting] China play one against each other. So transatlantic relationship was not really that smooth, right? So Jim, you live in Europe in a wonderful country with Switzerland with a wonderful traditional neutrality. So when I say friendly allies, that kind of opportunistic, I didn't mean to say Switzerland, you have big country like France, like the UK.
They were not with us a hundred percent. I mean, I just read the report this morning. There was a report from the parliament, I believe, they're saying, the British arms dealers, the British government was supplying China with all the highly advanced weapons, while, in the meantime, they seem to be on our side. So that's the problem with Allies. So leadership, yes, but I think more importantly is really a coalition of willing[ness] and you have to really share some kind of common methods in the Cold War, which is much easier for us to fight the Soviets because Soviet system was completely separate from the rest of the world, the free trade system. We had the Paris Coordinating Committee, COCOM to exercise, to exercise all the western democracies, export control to Eastern Bloc. Now we can, the United States can impose sanctions however severe we do, but our friends and allies do not necessarily go along with us.
However, most of friends and allies we have had in the world are the victims of Chinese communist parties, aggression, Japan, India, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines. So they are the ones that have no ambiguity about taking sides [with] the United States. That's where I think leadership really matters. And I think we're showing that more and more. And I just came back from Europe. I feel very strongly. I went to Eastern Europe, I went to Czech Republic, absolutely a hundred percent with us, very strong. I went to some other Western countries. They have their strategic autonomy. You never know how the mind works.
James Fennell:
I agree. That's my experience living in Europe. It's exactly in the west. They'll have their strategic interests and they'll play off one against the other. In the book. We do very much point out that it was the Trump's administration that broke this headlock, if you will, that the engagement community had on US-China relations that had just everything was as former secretary of state Pompeo said, blind engagement. I like the phrase ‘unconstrained and unaccountable engagement.’ We had that policy for so many years and you guys broke that. And we started to see things in the alliance structure change. Like for instance, the reinvigoration of QUAD. That was something that really took off. And now it's because of the return as we call neo-engagement with the Biden administration. We're watching these things erode in front of our faces, and right now we're facing probably one of the most critical challenges is with the Philippines, and Beijing is knuckling down on the Philippines.
And what's happened now over the weekend is, is that we're watching President Marcos have to back off and say, well, we're not going to manage any more resupplies to second Thomas Shole to the Sierra Madre unless it's approved by the president. So Beijing got what it wanted. It escalated this very tactical issue that's been being done for 25 years, the resupply of a rusted out World War II amphibious ship. Now it's become a presidential issue, which is exactly what Beijing wants. They want to stick the knife and divide Philippine politics. And that's starting to happen. And it's because, as Brad said, our leadership was lacking because we were ambiguous about how to characterize China. We wanted to have, this administration says they want to compete and cooperate. You can't do both. When somebody says they want to destroy you, which is what the Chinese Communist Party says they want to do to the United States.
Miles Yu:
You're absolutely right. I think you notice that China actually likes to bully particular countries with some unique ties with the United States. First of all, they bully Japan, will not fail, and they bully South Korea. They played South Korea brilliantly, particularly during the Park administration. And we almost lost South Korea because they played South Korea against Japan and therefore United States. Now, South Korea didn't yield for the most part, particularly on key issues like thought missile, defense system deployment. They didn't give up to the Chinese bully. And now the Philippines, the country as weakest, if you consider all the three countries, because those are only three countries in Asia that have mutual defense arrangements with the United States. So their ultimate enemy is United States. They try to isolate the United States, try to kick us out of the East Asia and South Asia. This is exactly what the Japanese imperialists were doing in the thirties. They wanted to establish some kind of a greater co prosperity sphere for East Asia. Once they realized the United States will not allow you to do it, and they basically want to eliminate United. That's why Pearl Harbor took place. China, I think is very much repeating that course. So let's just move on a little bit. You talk about the issue of domestic politics, Wall Street, in your book, about how the domestic economic sector manufacturing sector influence American policy toward China, both in historic terms and contemporary terms. What's your take on that? What's your recommendation on that?
Bradley Thayer:
Well, indeed it does, and again, it was only the Trump administration that took measures to fight engagement. This pernicious idea, which still governs the Biden administration and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC. Wall Street, of course, is key to the story. When we're looking at how the United States made its greatest strategic failure, it made it because the Clinton administration recognized that they could open the doors through most favored nation trade status, permanent most favored nation trade status, which they recognized after two good years of the Clinton administration. If you remember, Miles, as I do, the 92 campaign where Clinton-Gore said that they were criticizing the Bush administration for coddling dictators from Baghdad to Beijing. And for two years of course they worked with Nancy Pelosi, who at the time of course was very strong on human rights in the wake of Tiananmen, to ensure that there were a year-to-year renewal of most favored nation trade status.
Well, the Clinton administration recognized that they could tap into that wealth as Wall Street was tapping in with investment and trade into China, profiting enormously shifting American jobs from the United States, from Indiana, Ohio, of course throughout the United States into the People's Republic of China, decimating American economy in the guise of essentially ‘engagement.’ A key idea also in the book as we talk about the end of history moment, and there was Francis Fukuyama's famous argument he made in 1989 and then in a book in 1992 where he said, of course that history was at an end in a Hegelian sense and that we knew what worked. That was democracy and capitalist economics, and that was essentially the political system and economic system that would disseminate throughout the world. All countries were on the path to democracy and capitalist systems. Of course, China didn't get the word.
The Chinese Communist Party was determined to make, of course, their new economic policy to open up to allow Wall Street to come in, the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Europeans, and so many others, but to allow the Chamber of Commerce, if you will, to pave the way for American industry to move in and shift manufacturing to the People's Republic of China, which was disastrous for us in so many respects. So that sadly still continues where there still is, despite obviously a recognition that it's easy to get into China, but it's hard to get out of China with your investment. It's set the stage for, again, this generational period, Miles, of where wealth was transferred. Knowledge was transferred by legal and illegal means to the PRC to allow them, again, to grow their economy and convert that to military power. So that problem remains with us today. We still, through new engagement, have not addressed the fundamental issue. That's the cause of our greatest strategic failure, which is the need to separate the United States, its wealth, its intellectual knowledge, its investment, its trade from the People's Republic of China.
Miles Yu:
Lemme just want to clarify about the Trump administration's policy toward China. We're not really about anti-engagement. Engagement is good. You cannot ignore China, but engagement not on China's terms. What Trump administration tried to do, particularly Secretary Pompeo tried to do, very clearly, is that we do not want to engage China on China's terms, that is only certain areas we can engage, trade, technological, transfer, cultural exchange, but in so many other aspects, we're not allowed to engage China on human rights, industrial and military espionage, intellectual property rights, global security, the Taiwan Strait, those were the forbidden areas we're not supposed to touch. That was the framework of 1972 set up by Richard Nixon and Kissinger with Chinese leadership. So what the Trump administration want to do is that we want to engage China full spectrum, every aspect that involves the US-China relationship. And that is very critical to not only to US national interest but global security.
We have to engage China, right? You cannot expect United States to send nothing when the Chinese government lack up 1 million Uyghurs in the concentration camp. You cannot, United States not engage you on your obligation of liberty, autonomy of Hong Kong, right? You cannot really not allow United States to engage you on issues like regional security, bullying Taiwan, bullying South Korea, Japan. So those are things that we all want to engage with you. And so that's the root of the tension between US and China during Trump administration because China does not want to be treated like any other normal country. They want to take advantage of the United States, sort of a goodwill and naivete, if you might say. But we insist on something that's very, very decent, which is full spectrum engagement with China. People often misunderstood the Trump administration as a very radical right when we're left wing, some kind of emotional reaction to global affairs without calculation. No, the Trump administration of foreign policy is radically moderate. We go back to the basics, we go back to the first principle of governance, domestic and foreign.
James Fennell:
The problem when we say and talk about the engagement school and the engagement strategy being a death nail for the United States up to this point, it's not that we say zero engagement. I use the phrase ‘unconstrained and unaccountable.’ We do not, and we have not for 40 years, had accountability for our engagement. For instance, when you read the annual DOD report to Congress on the state of the PLA, you go back and read appendix A or I think it's appendix A, every year. It lists all the engagements literally, and I was involved with this, the Navy, the army, the Air Force Marine Corps have engagements with the PRC from the commanders of each of those individual services all the way down. And then it goes across from the N one, the administrators, the N twos have engagements, the N threes, the operators, the N four, the N five, the N six, and you play that across all the services.
And then you go out to Indo Paycom and they have the same thing in the J codes. J 1, 2, 3, 4, all everybody is engaging, and that's just the Department of Defense at in state department at in treasury, at in commerce at all FBI, DOJ, you have a nation that's out of control with engagement. So we agree with you, there should be engagement with China, but it should be very much controlled, limited and with very specific measurable accountability points, which no administration until the Trump administration had ever done. And we are back into full scale, full throated engagement. Again, the gravy train of the think tanks and governments. There used to be what we talked about, a conga line for the generals in the admirals to go to China. They just wanted to get their trip to China so that they could check it off and say, I've been to China and it was never measured against.
So general, what does this trip to China do for US national security? And when we were talking about economics in this vein, just recall, we are now facing the Chinese navy that's larger than ours, and that growth came from the economy of Western firms going into China and helping them build their navy. Just back and look at what happened. Every year in March, they have the National People's Congress and the Chinese government always puts out their projection for their GDP growth for the year and what their defense spending will be on the PLA. Remember, in 2020, they delayed the MPC to May because of COVID, and for the first time in 28 years, the Chinese Communist Party could not tell the world what the GDP growth for the PRC would be for that year. But you know what? They could tell the world, we will grow the PLA by 6%.
They always prioritize spending on the PLA, and we are living under the results of that. Not only do they have the largest navy, in the last three and a half years, they built 350 ICBM silos in central and western China, that have put American citizens across this fruited plane at risk, air force cyber, the whole works. Because they are, as they call it, comprehensive national power. And while they'd like to get what they can get through nonviolent means they have prepared themselves to use violence, and we are not prepared for that. So when we talk about engagement, that's fine, but let's not deceive ourselves. We have to have a calculated strategy. You guys in the Trump administration brought back the word reciprocity. There has to be these hardball measures when we come to talk with the Chinese, just to talk for talking sake is useless. It's actually worse than useless. It destroyed our advantage that we had coming out of World War II and the Pax Americana that we had.
Miles Yu:
Well, I just don't want to add two points to all the points that you Brad made over there. I will even go even beyond COVID, beyond even Mao, right? If you look at the Chinese Communist party rule in the last close to 75 years is basically a sad history of chaos, atrocities, and basically political turmoil. But the one consistency, and that is the People's Liberation Army, particularly in their arms development. Armament has never stopped even during the height of cultural revolution, China never stopped its development of nuclear bombs, hydrogen bombs and satellites, space programs. They actually advanced. So that is consistency. Despite all this political turmoil, the catastrophes, it's going on. So that's why military strength is essential to the Chinese Communist Party. High command number two, you talk about the engagement with calculated awareness alert. That's true. But remember, I'm not here to distract Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon was brilliant when he was not in office. He had a hiatus between the defeat by Senator Kennedy in the 1960s, and he came back to win in 1968. So toward the end of 1960s, about ‘65, ‘66, particularly after cultural volution, Richard Nixon believed China was a country that got mad. There was a cultural revolution that was totally very, very disruptive and the threat to the global peace. So he developed the idea of engagement, but engagement with a purpose. Their purpose was to induce change. He wrote a very famous article in Foreign Affairs in 1967 before the election. He said, we got to engage China isolated China's dangerous to global peace. We have engaged China to induce change and fully for that. When he got into office, he forget the purpose of that engagement. He want to engage China for the sake of engagement to get the US out of Vietnam War.
Some of the very immediate things to play the China card. China never become the ultimate destination. A purpose of the Americans policy toward China is a conduit through which to reach some other goals: defeat the Soviet Union, get views out of Vietnam. And so that's what happened during the Trump administration. Secretary Pompeo gave a brilliant speech in July 2020 at the Nixon Library to basically contrast the Nixon's approach to what needs to be done. He acknowledged the brilliance of Nixon's approach to China. In the meantime, he gave a new meaning to engagement, that is, with a purpose. With a purpose. The purpose is to facilitate change because if that regime in Beijing is not changed, that regime is going to change all of us. That's why engagement must have a purpose. In addition, to be alert,
James Fennell:
We'd probably go a little bit to the point that is we did engage, and they didn't change our behavior. We have 40 plus years of evidence that shows that engagement did not change our behavior. And you just said what remained constant through 75 years of hard power.
Miles Yu:
Yeah, because we give up the condition for engagement, right? You mentioned about President Clinton. It was President Clinton that made the devastating catastrophic decision to de-link human rights with trade. I mean, listen, human rights are such an important issue. Human rights were the beginning of the demise of the Soviet Empire. We'll start with 1976, the Helsinki Accords, because through that accord, we forced Soviet Union to engage the West on human rights, even though it's a very small basket of that. But it's the beginning. It was the beginning of forced Soviet Union to deal with the real issue of human rights, and that's why we support the [inaudible]. We support Zelensky, we support solidarity. All started with that kind of theoretical understanding. We forced Soviet Union to do this, and we don't have that. The last US assistant Secretary of state in charge of human rights to meet with Chinese dissidents in China was Mr. John Shattuck.
That was during the Clinton administration. Ever since, no US Senator Official until Secretary Pompeo, [has been] willing and courageous enough to meet Chinese dissidents, that is basically absolutely atrocious to me. So that's why when Secretary Pompeo was in office in the State Department, he made virtually every group of dissident. In addition to meeting with Chinese diplomats and senior officials, he met with people from Falungong, the Uyghur group, people from Tibet, people from Hong Kong, people from all the religious persecuted people in China. He also made the scholars and scholars. I know this because I have arranged all of them.
James Fennell:
That, if you want to classify that as engagement.
Miles Yu:
Engaging with the purpose, engaging with confidence. United States has enormous impact upon the Chinese government behavior. We have enormous impact among Chinese people. Chinese people aspire to be treated with due respect, just like American citizens. We have such a powerful leverage. The leverage is there. We are never willing to use it, and that's the problem we have. So we should not be afraid of a Chinese communist regime, and we should do it with confidence as Americans, be proud and we shall overcome. So our time is running out, but I'm have one question, last question for you, for both of you. If you could briefly summarize from a domestic perspective, especially given the pervasive CCP coercion campaigns targeting American citizens, how can the US counter the PRC’s political warfare campaign that's been conducted on American soil?
Bradley Thayer:
It's a hugely important issue and thank you for raising it. So much needs to be done in the realm of political warfare. What needs to be done, I identify is really active measures, really are offensive measures, the sword, but also the shield. We have to protect dissidents here in the United States from the operations Fox Hunt and its derivatives and many other steps that the PRC has taken to reach into the United States to affect, to influence directly and then indirectly, of course, Chinese citizens, dissidents as well as Chinese Americans in the United States. That has to be identified and that has to be stopped. Individuals who come into the United States are protected and they have to feel that they're protected. They have to actually be protected from nefarious actors from the Chinese Communist Party. But then offensively, we could see what Beijing has done with respect to laws, Hong Kong, what they're recently doing now in Taiwan in terms of talking about execution of those who further separatism as they identify, Miles, this has to be called out.
Why is it that this regime is violating sovereignty of countries around the world? While it proclaims, of course, that that's sacrosanct in its own mind, why is it that this regime has to suppress, crush, threaten, coerce, dissidents, individuals who've left China, the Chinese diaspora? Why is it that they need to do that? They need to do it because they're illegitimate and they know they're illegitimate. And so calling attention to this, again, putting them on the back foot and seeing it, the reality as it is, is so important. Or we'll have that great line. It takes the greatest effort to see what's in front of one's nose, right? Well, to see what's in front of our nose is that the regime is illegitimate. The Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate, and the US, its Allies and partners around the world as well as people of goodwill around the world have to say so and act accordingly.
James Fennell:
Yeah, I'll take the military perspective on this. A pet peeve for me is that one element of political warfare is information warfare. And for too long, we talk about the status quo in the Far East and the Taiwan Strait, and we have been losing the information war to the PRC when it comes to talking about what's going on militarily. And so I would like to see the US government, in particular, our military, the Department of Defense, to spend more time focusing on reporting on what the PLA is doing in the Far East. Like for instance, what's happening down in the South China Sea, we get snippets from the Philippines. If a Chinese carrier or a class SSBN transit through the Taiwan Strait will get a report from Taiwan, if the Chinese Surface Action Group goes outside the first island chain into the Philippine Sea, the Japanese will report on it.
But we are still reluctant inside the Department of Defense and inside our government to report out on bad behavior of what the Chinese are doing. And sometimes it's just reporting out the facts of what they're doing. We should have been doing that two decades ago so that people could have the documents, the documented facts of how the status quo has been altered by the PRC. Our relationship with the Taiwan is based upon, there would be no change in the status quo by either side. Well, who's changed the status quo? It's been the PRC and the PLA. They've dramatically altered the military balance of power in the Western Pacific. And we have kind of sat there and just watched it inside closed channels inside the classified world. But we haven't taken the political warfare and understood Chinese communist political warfare to the extent that we are in a battlefield to show and inform people of who's doing what.
And so what happens? China created the South China Sea Probing Initiative, a think tank that actually reports on American movements, and they're actually gaslighting the world by saying it's America that’s the aggressor in Asia when it's actually the PLA that's the aggressor. So for me, that's a particular area that I hope that if there's a next Trump administration that we can get to this idea of informing the world, really, we don't have to give up sources and methods. We can do this by a very discreet way of just disciplined, diligent reporting on what they're doing so that people can really around the world understand who the aggressor is.
Miles Yu:
Yeah. Well, 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute is a nonpartisan institute. So not only we hope next Trump administration, but also next democratic institution machine will also implement what you're just saying. So our US policy toward the Taiwan strait toward China basically is use of force to change status quo. Jimmy just said something very, very important. That is there are many ways to change status quo, not necessarily by use of force, but also by use political warfare, some other legal law fair. So we should oppose any attempts to change the status quo, right? You mentioned about we have to figure out what's in front of our nose. What's in front of my nose is a clock. So we are very, very apologize that we are short of time. So thank you very much both of you for this great contribution to the China dialogue, and hopefully readers will learn tremendously from your wisdom and your sage analysis. Again, the book is Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure by Jim Fennell and Bradley Thayer. Thank you.
Bradley Thayer:
Thank you, Miles. Thank you. It's our pleasure.
James Fennell:
Thanks a lot, Miles. It's great to see you.
Miles Yu:
Thank you for listening to this episode of China Insider. I'd like to thank our executive producer, Philip Hegseth, who works tirelessly and professionally behind the scenes for every episode. To make sure we deliver the best quality podcast to you, the listeners, if you enjoy the show, please spread the words for Chinese listeners. Please check our monthly review and analysis episode in Chinese. We'll see you next time.