CLSC Dialogues
CLSC Dialogues – Ep 30 – COL Kyle Marcrum and Sheena Chestnut Greitens – China’s Community of Common Destiny and the Global Initiatives
Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, visiting faculty at the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College and an associate professor at the University of Texas—Austin, joins the CLSC Dialogues to discuss the People’s Republic of China’s four Global Initiatives and her recent publication on China’s mobilizational initiatives. Keywords: China, Global Initiatives, Community of Common Destiny COL Kyle Marcrum Welcome to the CLSC Dialogues, a production of the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or the Department of War. I’m Colonel Kyle Marcrum, the Director of Global Research here at the US Army War College, and your host for today’s conversation. Today I’m joined virtually by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, visiting faculty at the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College. She is concurrently an associate professor at the University of Texas—Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program and serves as editor in chief of the Texas National Security Review. Dr. Chestnut Greitens research focuses on China’s internal security and foreign policy. She is the author of two books and is currently writing a book on how the prioritization of regime security shapes China’s grand strategy. Sheena, thank you for joining us today. Sheena Chestnut Greitens Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Marcrum So, you write a lot about China’s global initiatives, and I was wondering if you could describe these global initiatives for us and what China’s goals are for these initiatives. Chestnut Greitens Yeah. So, these global initiatives are something that Xi Jinping started announcing in the first half of the 2020s. And he has four major initiatives. That’s how Chinese scholars and Chinese state media refer to them. The first one he announced was the Global Development Initiative. That was followed by the Global Security Initiative, which is the one that I’ve focused most on a little over a year later. That was followed by a Global Civilizational Initiative, and then finally the Global Governance Initiative, which was announced last fall during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China itself. And these four initiatives form part of what Xi Jinping has talked about for several years as a phrase that’s translated as “community of common destiny” or “community of a shared future for mankind”. There are a couple different ways of translating the Chinese phrase, but this is really, I think the best way to describe it is Xi Jinping’s vision for global order. The initiatives have been described as strategic, the strategic guidance for implementing that vision and turning it into a reality. So, it’s really about the wiring of the international system, about global governance, but just about how global politics is organized and to make it compatible with China’s vision and China’s priorities. So, in the case of the Global Security Initiative—maybe it’s helpful to give an example for one of these for your listeners—The Global Security Initiative is both the security pillar of the Community of Common Destiny, and Chinese scholars tell us it’s also the external projection of Xi Jinping’s comprehensive national security concept, which is this thing he announced in 2014. It’s his concept of how to make the Communist Party secure and safe in power at the top of China’s socialist system. So, it is a regime security concept, and the Global Security Initiative is the external projection of that. And Chinese scholars, sources, white papers are really clear that that’s what the Global Security Initiative is and what it’s doing for China’s national security strategy. Marcrum Maybe we can zoom out a little bit here and kind of start with the basics on it. You mentioned the Community of Common Destiny, and as the editor in chief of the Texas National Security Review, the Texas National Security Review paper by Liza Tobin is still kind of the standard about the Community of Common Destiny. Can you talk about briefly what is the Community of Common Destiny? What does Xi Jinping mean when he says that? And what are they trying to accomplish? Chestnut Greitens The Community of Common Destiny is really Xi Jinping’s vision for transforming global governance, right? And so, it’s got a kind of a funny English translation that sounds grandiose but, frankly, these concepts are pretty vague, especially when they first get announced in Chinese as well as in English. And so, I think, you know, for me, watching how we talk about the Community of Common Destiny and the Global Security Initiative, there’s been a little bit too much of a tendency to dismiss them as empty rhetoric, because this is how China makes policy, right? And maybe we’ll get into this later, but they start with slogans, and then the implementation often takes several years to fill in. That’s very unlike a policy rollout in the US context or, or European context. And so, when you hear a phrase like that and it seems important, but it’s fuzzy, it’s worth sort of saying, okay, what’s the principle or the vision? Because that’s what the Community of Common Destiny has been. It’s Xi Jinping’s vision for transforming the international environment to make it compatible with and friendly to China’s domestic governance model and China’s emergence as a global leader. And so, it’s a really central concept, and has been since the late 2010s, for China’s foreign policy framework and its overall national security strategy. It’s a way of building the new type of major power relations or new type of international relations that will facilitate China’s rejuvenation by 2049. And so, Xi Jinping, this is something Xi Jinping has been talking about as the guiding vision for China’s foreign policy for years now. Just to be clear, right, when you talk about the phrase community of common destiny, as with a lot of things in Chinese political discourse and political talk, Xi Jinping didn’t come up with the term. I think Hu Jintao has been using it since 2007, 2008. But Xi Jinping was the one in a speech in Moscow in, I think 2013, I’d have to check, to really bring it back and make it this central organizing principle of China’s foreign policy and China’s vision for how the world should run. And that vision is about making the world compatible with China’s approach to security for the party in power. And so, it’s really a way of articulating a vision of world order that makes the world safe and friendly to the Communist Party. Does that answer your question? Marcrum No, that absolutely does. You know, that’s really interesting— Chestnut Greitens And I will say, I think the Liza Tobin piece, I was not involved in in that particular TNSR piece. That was before my time. But I do think it’s a great read and would encourage everybody to go look it up at TNSR.org. Marcrum Yeah, it’s [a] fantastic piece and I still it’s still required reading here at the Army War College when we talk about, you know, community of shared—or the shared future for mankind, shared community of common destiny, however, we want to translate this phrase, it’s still the standard for it. But I think it’s an interesting point that you raise. And this is the, you know, one of the reasons I asked that question is a lot of times we hear from people that China is not really looking to change the world order. But then we have things like the Community of Common Destiny and these other things that in your paper you describe them as “mobilizational initiatives”. And you briefly talked about how they create this slogan, and then everything falls out below it. Can you talk a little bit more about that with the Global Security Initiative? And how is China implementing using the Global Security Initiative? How are they doing that to accomplish this new global world order? Chestnut Greitens Yeah, absolutely. So, I think this is a key point that’s led to some real misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the Global Security Initiative, because what, the way that the Global Security Initiative works, I think, is—and we have a paper coming out with two great colleagues, Isaac Kardon and Cameron Waltz, in China Quarterly that’s going to make this argument later this year—but the piece, in that piece we argue and, I think, show that China is a Leninist party state. And in the Leninist party state, you use mobilizational campaigns to pursue change. That’s actually there’s a long history of experts on China and on Leninist party, Communist party systems, looking at how you get policy change done in a system that’s run by a Communist party or a single party Leninist system. And these mobilizational campaigns, we call this campaign style governance. So, there’s a big slogan. The party sort of mobilizes everybody toward that goal. And mobilization governance has a couple of features. It is a strategy for change, right? So, first of all, that’s really clear from the process alone. And China, I will say, I don’t think there’s any debate that China wants to change global governance. When you read what they say about the four major initiatives, that’s very clear. One of them is a global governance initiative that talks about how global security governance has many inadequacies and must be reformed. Right? This is a case where I don’t think I think we can just take them at their word. They’re saying it and they’re doing it, and the rhetoric and the activities line up. And I think we need to be careful about what kind of change they mean and not mirror image and assume that they’re going to do it the same way we’re going to do it. But first...
