U.S.-North Korea relations are likely for the rest of 2020 to follow the adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

On the U.S. side, the Trump administration appears to have shifted focus away from North Korea, except to claim success in de-escalating tensions as part of President Trump’s re-election campaign. The president has downplayed North Korea’s short range missile tests as “very standard,” and tweeted well-wishes to Kim Jong-un upon his reappearance after a long, potentially health-related absence from public view.

The administration’s apparent desire to keep U.S.-DPRK relations on the back burner seems likely to continue throughout the rest of the year. The administration has little to gain from putting North Korea into the headlines, or making its combination of maximum pressure and high-level diplomacy into a campaign issue between now and November. For instance, the latest U.N. Panel of Experts report concludes that North Korea continues to advance its nuclear and missile programs, and that the regime has developed robust evasion strategies to bypass the sanctions regime. These factors, plus the logistical demands of a re-election campaign, make another Trump-Kim summit in 2020 unlikely.

How North Korea approaches the U.S. for the rest of 2020, by contrast, depends on how much North Korea has to gain from renewed confrontation versus a period of relative quiet. Complete inaction by the DPRK is unlikely: North Korea continues to test short-range missiles, having likely interpreted the administration’s comments to mean that these tests fall short of the U.S. threshold for response despite their costs to U.S. forces and allies in East Asia. Such tests allow Kim Jong-un to continue making technical improvements to North Korea’s missile program. Moreover, they also give Pyongyang a means to respond to lower-level U.S. or international actions — such as exercises — in a way that maintains consistency with domestic rhetoric but keeps the risk of military escalation relatively low.

What about testing long-range missiles or warheads? Absent compelling technical reasons to test, Pyongyang’s logic will likely be based on how it sees the strategic game heading into a second Trump or new Democratic administration in 2021. Here, it’s not clear what North Korea gains from confrontation: Any crisis comes with risks, and the current international environment appears to be tolerable enough for North Korea. If that interpretation is accurate, Pyongyang’s best bet is probably to sit tight until it has more information on what the U.S.-DPRK chessboard will look like in 2021.

Unforeseen events could, of course, throw off this calculus in unanticipated ways. Perhaps North Korea’s suspected COVID-19 outbreak will heighten the need for sanctions relief so much that a provocation in search of assistance seems like Pyongyang’s best bet. Or perhaps Kim Jong Un will have another health scare, and North Korea’s uncertain line of succession will again generate risks for internal and international stability. Neither of these scenarios is farfetched — meaning that, as ever with North Korea, U.S. strategy must also prepare for the unexpected.

       

On Friday, May 8, Foreign Policy at Brookings hosted a virtual event to address such issues. Brookings President John R. Allen and Jason Matheny, founding director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), introduced the event, which complements the latest installment of papers in the Brookings series on “Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World.”

To kick things off, Chris Meserole, deputy director of the Brookings Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, moderated a discussion on global technology infrastructure. Brookings Governance Studies Senior Fellow Nicol Turner Lee discussed the “race” to deploy 5G wireless networks and associated standard-setting competition, calling for the development of a coherent U.S. national strategy focused on research and development and better coordination with competitors to Chinese telecom giant Huawei.

Brookings Economic Studies Fellow Aaron Klein then described how consumer financial transactions in China have shifted toward digital payments on platforms such as AliPay and WeChat Pay, which link social media with digital commerce, reducing the role of banks in the process. Klein discussed the export of these payment systems beyond China and highlighted potential national security implications.

Brookings Foreign Policy Senior Fellow Frank Rose focused on the implications of China’s ambitions and achievements in outer space. Rose noted China’s longstanding commitment, dating back to the Cold War, to establish space leadership to bolster its strategic capabilities.

Brookings Foreign Policy Nonresident Senior Fellow Sheena Chestnut Greitens identified China’s growing export of surveillance technologies and the parallel growth in demand from countries with a wide range of political systems. She highlighted privacy and data collection concerns and the potential implications of data integration.

Carrick Flynn, research fellow at Georgetown’s CSET, noted the strategic advantage the United States has over China in advanced semiconductors, which China needs for its surveillance technologies and state-of-the-art weapon systems. Flynn discussed the potential effectiveness of targeted export controls, particularly as China seeks to achieve self-sufficiency in advanced chip production.

The second panel on U.S.-China technological competition, moderated by Brookings and Georgetown CSET Fellow Tarun Chhabra, focused on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, alliance management, and technology regulation. Michael Brown, managing director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, underscored China’s ambition to restore its historical dominance in East Asia and discussed a broad spectrum of policies the U.S. should pursue in a 21st century “superpower marathon.”

Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, highlighted Beijing’s aspirations for integrating artificial intelligence systems into weapon systems as a significant component of its military modernization efforts.

Scott Moore, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Global China Program, addressed both China’s ambitions to surpass the United States in biotechnology, and its prospects for related competition and cooperation, particularly amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

Georgetown CSET Senior Fellow Andrew Imbrie addressed ways the United States could increase cooperation with its network of allies and partners to address the technology-related challenges China poses.

Brookings Governance Studies Visiting Fellow Tom Wheeler, former chair of the Federal Communications Commission, expressed concern that large technology firms are leveraging U.S. competition with China to ward off regulation. He argued that Washington should pursue a much more “pro–competitive” orientation and regulatory reforms that incentivize a shift away from the current focus on short–term profits toward a longer–term approach that spurs greater investment in innovation.

The panel concluded with a discussion on increasing private and public funding for research and development and fostering a more strategic approach toward allied engagement on research collaborations, as well as global norm- and standard-setting.

       

Executive summary

Countries and cities worldwide now employ public security and surveillance technology platforms from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The drivers of this trend are complex, stemming from expansion of China’s geopolitical interests, increasing market power of its technology companies, and conditions in recipient states that make Chinese technology an attractive choice despite security and privacy concerns. Both “push” and “pull” factors contribute to growing use of Chinese surveillance technology: countries that are strategically important to the PRC are comparatively more likely to adopt it, but so are countries with high crime rates.

Major questions remain about the implications and advantages that China could derive from these developments, including how dominance in this sector and access to data could shape the contours of strategic competition between China and the United States. Questions also remain about what impact these technologies will have on data privacy/security, human rights, and democracy. There is relatively little correlation between the level of democracy in a country and the likelihood that it will adopt Chinese surveillance technology, but we do not yet know whether introduction of that technology will somehow subsequently corrode democratic institutions or civil liberties. While leaders in adopting countries share some concerns about data security, civil liberties, and democracy, many of them also focus on these platforms’ potential to solve urgent public problems, such as violent crime. Understanding the impacts of these technologies will be important for crafting effective policy.

This evidence also suggests that a one-size-fits-all message from U.S. policymakers about the risks of Chinese technology needs to be differentiated and adapted to each country in which such concerns are raised. These messages need to be paired with a nuanced understanding of the priorities and incentives of the officials making adoption decisions — often subnational officials rather than foreign policy or national security experts. Finally, the U.S. must address Chinese technology companies’ ongoing efforts to shape the global regulatory environment; to do so, policymakers will need to articulate and execute a comprehensive strategy to promulgate standards compatible with American values and interests.

       

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) crackdown on Uighur and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has attracted intense scrutiny and polarized the international community. At least 1 million people, maybe as many as 1.5 million, have been detained in a large network of recently constructed camps, where they undergo forced reeducation and political indoctrination.

These developments have shaped not only Chinese domestic politics but also international politics and debate. Chinese authorities have put pressure on Uighur diaspora networks, increasing surveillance and pressuring other countries in which Uighurs live to repatriate them to China. Beijing has also attempted to build an international coalition in support of its policies: When 22 countries sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council asking China to stop its involuntary internments in Xinjiang, that letter was countered by another letter from 37 countries defending the government’s “counter-terrorism, deradicalization and vocational training policies.” The issue has also fueled U.S.-China tension and resulted in U.S. sanctions against Chinese individuals and companies.

What is happening in Xinjiang is deeply concerning and abhorrent. Trying to change it, however, is difficult. Any attempt to do so requires a full and clear understanding of the threat perceptions that are driving China’s behavior in the region, particularly this most recent strategy of intensified collective repression.

Understanding China’s Repressive Strategy in Xinjiang

CCP policy in Xinjiang escalated sharply in spring 2017, after XUAR Party Secretary Chen Quanguo returned from a large, publicly reported Central National Security Commission symposium in Beijing. The timing of this escalation is puzzling, given that public security officials had been saying for some time that their strategy was working and that there had been less reported violence involving Uighurs in Xinjiang, or anywhere in China, in the period just before the CCP changed strategies.

A number of domestic factors have contributed to China’s long-standing security buildup and repression in Xinjiang: political violence and contention involving the region’s Uighur population; the CCP’s turn toward more assimilationist “second-generation” minority policies under President Xi Jinping; and the personal leadership of XUAR Party Secretary Chen. The increase in repression that took place in early 2017, however, was also motivated by China’s external insecurities — most notably, the belief that the CCP had to act to prevent terrorist networks from diffusing back into Xinjiang from abroad.

Two intersecting trends contributed to that heightened insecurity. First, the CCP noted with concern a handful of contacts between Uighurs and Islamic militant organizations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in 2014-2016 — including arrests in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as up to 5,000 Uighurs fighting alongside various militant groups in the Middle East (numerical estimates of Uighur participation over the past five years have varied widely). Objectively, the capabilities of Uighur groups abroad, and their actual connection to incidents of violence in Xinjiang, are questionable. Western experts are skeptical, and even the most generous estimates of Uighur militant capability do not imply that insurgency inside Xinjiang is present, or even imminent. Moreover, the contacts that occurred in 2014-2016 were limited to a dozen or so individual cases. Nevertheless, these contacts shifted the possibility of cooperation between Uighurs and Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East from wholly theoretical to an emerging operational possibility. In 2015 and 2016, leaders of militant groups in the Middle East, including some affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, also made statements indicating a desire to target China.

These developments appear to have gotten the CCP’s attention. Leaked documents published in November 2019 by the New York Times quote President Xi as saying, “East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.” Thus even if the Chinese party-state uses the rhetoric of terrorism to deflect or reduce international pressure and justify repressive actions (which we believe they do), internal documents appear to confirm that senior party leaders, including Xi himself, do fear terrorist threats from abroad destabilizing their rule at home.

The other trend that contributed to the CCP’s strategy shift was a change in how the party assesses the nature of domestic threats to regime stability. In 2014, Xi promulgated a new “comprehensive security” framework, which warned that events abroad could threaten stability at home and called for heightened vigilance. Working under this framework, party officials focused on Xinjiang concluded that a much larger percentage of the population was vulnerable to jihadist infiltration than previously estimated. They compared it to a virus: Even people who showed no sign of radicalism could be “infected” by an extremist virus unless they were properly “inoculated.”

Together, these two developments reshaped how China conceived of counterterrorism and its associated domestic security policies. Globally, China increased its counterterrorism activities abroad, including visits by military delegations to the Middle East and regional counterterrorism cooperation with Southeast Asian countries. The CCP also focused on targeting diaspora networks to cut off a vector by which terrorist threats could reenter China; meanwhile, they proposed, detention and reeducation should make the population psychologically and politically resilient to jihadist infiltration.

As a result, the CCP is imprisoning and involuntarily reeducating huge numbers of people who have shown no inclination toward anything other than normal Uighur cultural or Muslim religious practice, on the basis of threat perceptions that may or may not be accurate. (Nondemocracies often get threat assessments wrong, because they have trouble obtaining good information to begin with.) The very metaphor of vaccination, ironically, makes that clear: People who are demonstrably “symptom free” are nevertheless being swept up in detention and reeducation on a massive, intensive scale.

China’s policy of “preventive repression” in a counterterrorism context took a threat that was likely at a very low level to begin with and sought to ensure that it would never materialize into anything more significant. The consequences of this approach have reverberated inside China and around the world.

Implications for Current Policy

U.S. policy with respect to Xinjiang should balance two principles: acknowledging that there is some genuine concern about terrorism on Beijing’s part, and pushing back on the use of that concern to justify indiscriminate repression and collective punishment. These principles are not contradictory, but combining them will require careful action on the part of U.S. and international policymakers.

Engaging with the CCP’s perceptions of the terrorist threat does not mean uncritically accepting how the CCP has chosen to respond. Nor does it suggest — as a recent Foreign Affairs piece argued — that the United States should provide domestic security assistance to China to help it fight terrorist threats “without resorting to repression.” For both moral and practical reasons, that would be unwise: The United States would be taking on some responsibility for China’s domestic security behavior without the ability to control, or even have full knowledge of, what is being done in America’s name.

U.S. rhetoric and policy can and should focus on the huge number of innocent people who are caught up in China’s counterterrorism dragnet. It is vital that policymakers communicate to the people who have suffered from these policies, and their loved ones in China and abroad, that the United States and the international community see that the CCP’s policies are targeting and punishing innocent people who are not “terrorists” in any reasonable definition of the word. And it is vital that the international community continue to find ways to apply pressure to China over the human rights consequences of its current approach, as well as limit its attempts to alter current international human rights norms in a direction favorable to Beijing.

At the same time, American policymakers and other advocates have, over the past year, shifted toward a simplistic “it’s not counterterrorism” argument that dismisses CCP insecurities out of hand. Arguing over whether what is happening in Xinjiang is counterterrorism may not be helpful, especially when it appears that the CCP in fact perceives it (at least partly) that way. The United States might not have a great shot at persuading the CCP to change course by engaging on a counterterrorism basis, but the chances of success are probably greater than if the issue is framed solely as a matter of human rights.

Moreover, even if the CCP’s emphasis on counterterrorism is largely instrumental, there are risks to the current approach. Dismissing China’s assertion of security concerns sets up the CCP to dig in and display graphic images of violence to prove that it faces a real threat. If the CCP’s presentation is convincing to (non-Uighur) domestic audiences in China and/or to audiences in other countries, U.S. dismissals could backfire. This approach also risks reinforcing narratives that Uighurs are dangerous, that Western critics are either naive or don’t take threats to Chinese lives as seriously as they take threats to their own, and that the CCP has an obligation to ensure safety and stability that Western critics are dismissing unfairly. None of these is a helpful narrative for U.S. foreign policy, or for the key objective of minimizing human rights violations in Xinjiang.

One alternative is for the United States and other democracies to collectively say that terrorist threats, no matter how real the CCP perceives them to be, are not a blank check for massive human rights violations. That way, the U.S. — and European democratic counterparts, whose actions on Xinjiang have thus far been more limited than those of the United States — could continue to pressure China on the human rights violations emerging from Xinjiang but do so without getting bogged down in an unhelpful “is it counterterrorism” debate.

Moreover, these countries could stress that indiscriminate repression and false positives in the use of police violence commonly backfire — meaning that even if all the CCP cares about is regime preservation, the strategy it has adopted in Xinjiang is an incredibly risky one. Uighurs who have been targeted after living their lives as “model citizens” may conclude that if they’re going to be repressed anyway, they might as well challenge the CCP.

This kind of approach may be particularly important for countries that must now choose whether and how they take a stance, and what, concretely, they are going to do about the opposing stances taken by the United States and China on this issue. Acknowledging that there are some counterterrorism issues at stake would allow countries that are concerned about counterterrorism and seek to be respectful of human rights to align clearly with the United States, weakening international support for and the legitimacy of China’s preferred approach. It would allow the United States to emphasize more credibly that China’s linking of international terrorism with policies of domestic repression poses an unnecessary conundrum for countries that seek genuine collaboration with China to reduce common terrorist threats. Mass internment of Chinese Muslims makes it harder, not easier, for many countries — including both democracies and countries with sizeable Muslim populations — to justify and craft law enforcement and counterterrorism cooperation with China. Turkey’s recent criticism of China’s Uighur policy, which it called “a great embarrassment for humanity,” provides one example of this dynamic.

However, if cutting off counterterrorism cooperation with China increases other countries’ own terrorism risk at home, then these countries will face significant and potentially difficult trade-offs. (Countries that conduct significant counterterrorism cooperation with China were notably mostly absent from either U.N. letter adopting a public stance on Xinjiang.) To be sure, the United States is unlikely to convince every country that cooperates with China on counterterrorism to dramatically change its approach — especially since some of those countries are well known for their own human rights violations — but at least the United States would be on the record as trying to offer realistic alternatives.

Using these principles could constructively address the problem of foreign fighters from Xinjiang in Syria and the broader Middle East. This is not a China-specific challenge but a global one — as yet, however, there is not a common democratic or international proposal for how to resolve it. If the United States and other democracies don’t create a solution, then China will likely work bilaterally with countries to simply repatriate its own nationals for punishment and reeducation — creating additional human rights violations while also leaving the broader global issue unsolved.

Rather than ceding to China’s initiative on this issue, the United States and its partners should lead the way on creating an international solution that addresses valid security concerns among the countries that foreign fighters have come from but that is also fully compatible with human rights — meaning that it does not rest on repatriating individuals to countries where they will likely be persecuted or executed without trial. And by addressing the origin of what China claims is its principal security concern, the United States and the international community would remove one of the CCP’s primary internal and external justifications for its current policies, making them harder to defend at home and abroad.

In sum, the United States and the international community can and should keep the focus on China’s massive human rights violations in Xinjiang. To do this effectively, however, they must engage — carefully, strategically and wisely — with China’s counterterrorism arguments.

       

On January 16, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings convened a panel of experts to discuss the past, present, and future of China’s Xinjiang policies. Brookings President John R. Allen opened the discussion and provide framing remarks about events in Xinjiang. A panel of experts examined all aspects of China’s approach to Xinjiang and offer perspectives on how the United States and the rest of the world might respond. Following the conversation, panelists answered questions from the audience.