china

Why Xi Jinping Is Courting Kim Jong-un

It’s not about nuclear weapons, leverage with President Trump or the trade war.

.. Such vagueness should come as no surprise since obtaining a compromise from Mr. Kim never was the purpose of Mr. Xi’s trip. China’s president did not travel to North Korea to prove to Mr. Trump that only the Chinese government can broker a deal with Mr. Kim or to gain bargaining power in the trade dispute. In keeping with the long, tangled history of Chinese-North Korean relations, Mr. Xi traveled to Pyongyang to lure back into China’s fold what he sees as a difficult and wayward subordinate.

China may be North Korea’s largest trade partner and a formal defense-treaty ally, but tension and distrust have characterized relations between the two countries for decades. Strains reappeared in recent years after Mr. Kim tested nuclear weaponsand seemed to pull back from China while repositioning North Korea closer to the United States and South Korea. China, for its part, has gone along with the latest punishing international sanctions against North Korea.

.. It’s against this backdrop that Mr. Xi’s visit last week must be understood — as reflecting the Chinese government’s anxiety that Mr. Kim might be tempted to defect, as it were, to the other side.

The foundations of the China-North Korea alliance dates back to the 1950-3 Korean War, when Mao Zedong sent off legions of young Chinese men to drive United States-led troops away from China’s border. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were wounded or killed, including one of Mao’s sons. But Mao himself never made the brief journey to Pyongyang, even long after the fighting stopped. For all his rhetoric about socialist revolution and brotherhood, he looked upon Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s first leader (and Mr. Kim’s grandfather), as something of a little brother, and like Chinese emperors of yore, expected the Korean leader to come to him.

Kim Il-sung resented the asymmetry and as a hedge maintained ties to the Soviet Union after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s: He needed Mao, but didn’t think Mao could be trusted. Sure enough, come 1972, China welcomed President Richard Nixon in Beijing and began rapprochement with the United States, while North Korea remained violently opposed to the presence of the several tens of thousands of American forces stationed in South Korea.

After Mao’s death in 1976, the patterns of Chinese-North Korean diplomacy, like so much to do with China, changed. Mao’s successors were more interested in developing China’s economy than in big-power politics. In 1978, the leaders Hua Guofeng and then Deng Xiaoping made North Korea their first overseas destination. But this flurry of diplomacy belied the emergence of new tensions in the alliance: The two countries’ political systems and approaches to economics and foreign affairs began to diverge.

By the mid-1980s, China was barreling down the path of “reform and opening-up,” as the official line went, and it wanted a stable international order, thinking that this would be more conducive to its own growth. But Kim Il-sung saw China’s burgeoning links to capitalist economies as a betrayal of the socialist trading bloc, and his government is suspected of having ordered assassination attempts and terrorist attacks abroad.

Then came what the North Korean government considered to be an unforgivable act of treachery: In 1992, as Communist regimes were collapsing across Eurasia, the Chinese government normalized relations with South Korea, leaving Kim Il-sung diplomatically isolated and economically in the dust.

After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, his son and successor Kim Jong-il asserted some measure of independence from China by not visiting for six years. He finally made a trip in 2000, soon before hosting the South Korean president for an unprecedented meeting and while preparing to bring President Bill Clinton to Pyongyang — or, only once it seemed like détente with South Korea and the United States was within grasp.

Several Chinese leaders, in turn, visited Pyongyang in the early 2000s, trying to project the image of a special relationship. Yet something was resolutely changing: The North Korean government was now doggedly pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, not only to defend itself against the threat of regime change suddenly posed by a hostile Bush administration, but also to emancipate itself from its unreliable and bossy ally.

After Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008, raising questions about his succession, he traveled to China repeatedly, hoping to win its leaders’ support for his plan to pass power to his son, Mr. Kim. But then Mr. Kim did not visit Beijing for more than six years after taking over. It was only in March 2018, as he prepared for meetings with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and then, he hoped, with Mr. Trump, that he went to China. With the prospect of better relations with South Korea and America in the air again, Mr. Kim could finally visit Mr. Xi from a position of strength, and all the more so because by then North Korea had acquired a nuclear and ballistic deterrent. He visited China four times in little more than a year — and now has hosted its president in Pyongyang.

The sight of tens of thousands of North Koreans lining the streets and wildly cheering the motorcade ferrying Mr. Kim and Mr. Xi should not deceive us. Even as these formal comrades smile for the cameras, they eye each other warily, as their predecessors did for many years. China is losing its grip over North Korea, its partner who would not be a vassal.

‘Little Fresh Meat’ and the Changing Face of Masculinity in China

The embrace of a more fluid form of masculinity shows that many Chinese are frustrated with the traditional ideas pushed by the establishment.

Mr. Cai belongs to the tribe of “little fresh meat,” a nickname, coined by fans, for young, delicate-featured, makeup-clad male entertainers. These well-groomed celebrities star in blockbuster movies, and advertise for cosmetic brands and top music charts. Their rise has been one of the biggest cultural trends of the past decade. Their image — antithetical to the patriarchal and stoic qualities traditionally associated with Chinese men — is changing the face of masculinity in China.

Innocent as they may seem, the little fresh meat have powerful critics. The state news agency Xinhua denounces what it calls “niangpao,” or “sissy pants,” culture as “pathological” and said in an editorial last September that its popularity is eroding social order. The Beijing newspaper’s decision to include Mr. Cai in its profiles apparently prompted the Communist Youth League to release its own list of young icons: patriotic athletes and scientists, whom it called the “true embodiment” of the spirit of Communist youth.

The government attacks on this evolving idea of masculinity have triggered a strong counter-backlash from fans of the celebrities. And in online essays and posts, defenders of the young men make clear that their preference is more than a youthful countercultural fad. At its heart, the embrace of a more modern, less rigid form of masculinity represents frustration with traditional ideas of manhood.

“The ridiculous condemnation of ‘sissy pants’ men shows the gender ideology of a patriarchal society that equates toughness with men and fragility with women,” a journalist who goes by the name Wusi wrote in an online essay in September, voicing a widely shared opinion.

The official push of traditional masculinity — including reinvented school curriculums and the sponsorship of boys-only clubs — is motivated in part by worries that the decades-long one-child policy produced a generation of timid and self-centered male youth ill equipped to fulfill their social responsibilities.

And in the context of China’s increasing power, the establishment’s preoccupation with promoting old-fashioned, Hollywood-style manliness also has a political message. Just as patriotic intellectuals a century ago argued that national strength derives from the virile energy of the youth, present-day Chinese nationalists see their ambitions take the shape of a macho willingness to fight for righteous causes.

This vision is on display in the 2017 action thriller “Wolf Warrior 2.” The movie, featuring a former People’s Liberation Army soldier caught in an African civil war, showed him putting the lives of local civilians above his own while single-handedly beating American-led mercenaries. The goal of the story, said Wu Jing, its director and lead actor, in media interviews, is to “inspire men to be real men.” The movie went on to become China’s top-grossing film in history.

There is little question about who in real life is meant to best personify the masculine chauvinism characterizing the official line today: Take a stroll down a city street or switch on the television at news hour — and you are greeted by the face of President Xi Jinping with a perennial look of self-assurance and determination.

The fans of the little fresh meat are much like their global peers in having the world at their fingertips. The Great Fire Wall has done a good job of keeping overtly politically sensitive information out of China but has had the effect of directing young people’s attention to the realm of culture. With an appreciation for everything from Japanese cosplay to American art-house films, many young Chinese people, like their counterparts around the world, see gender norms as intrinsically fluid and the insistence on prizing traditional masculine traits hopelessly out of date.

Chinese feminists have joined in supporting the shifting ideal of masculinity. Many of these feminists are successful women with large disposable incomes; their tastes and purchasing power have contributed to the rise of the young idols. In their eyes, the appeal of those idols is defined primarily in the negative, by their lack of the attitudes and behaviors symptomatic of entrenched male privilege.

Both the cultural hipsters and feminists appear united in their conviction that gender expression is unequivocally a matter of individual choice. And this flies in the face of the refrain from state media that holds that traditional masculinity is the bedrock of national strength and that this masculinity “crisis” bodes ill for the country’s future. An article posted on the WeChat account of a major Communist Party committee last fall argued that at a time when China is bedeviled by nuclear threats at its border and a trade war from across the Pacific, the country does not want to see its men “shrieking while refreshing their makeup.”

In the past few weeks, with state media awash in patriotic rhetoric urging China to “man up” in the face of the escalating trade war, the little fresh meat fever has continued unabated.

The Konka Group, a Chinese maker of home electronics, an industry embroiled in the trade dispute with President Trump, released a commercial last month starring Lu Han, one of the best-known idols. Zhou Bin, the company’s chief executive, said in media interviews that the decision was prompted by Mr. Lu’s enormous popularity among millennials, who have become its core consumer group.

The commercial was widely applauded on social media. Fans quipped that the popularity of little fresh meat, rather than a sign of national weakness, may signal the foundation of its strength. “Youthful, modern and fashionable,” one user summed up the idols’ appeal in a post on Weibo. “That is what we love.”

Secretive Bilderberg Meeting Draws Pompeo and Kushner

BERN, Switzerland — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a weeklong trip to Europe where he is raising sensitive issues with national leaders — from Iranian missiles to Chinese technology to the economic collapse of Venezuela — but the most colorful conversations could take place this weekend out of public earshot in a secretive conclave at a Swiss lakeside resort.

In Montreux, on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, political and business leaders from Western nations are gathering for the 67th Bilderberg Meeting, an annual forum in which participants agree not to reveal exactly what was said or who said it. It is a shadow version of Davos, the elite annual winter conference in the Swiss Alps that President Trump has attended once but has also criticized.

The State Department has not even put the Bilderberg Meeting on Mr. Pompeo’s public schedule, though a senior official confirmed he was attending Saturday.

.. No doubt those culinary treats will be on hand at venues in Montreux, to fuel discussion on 11 central topics now hotly debated in countries around the globe:

the future of capitalism,

the weaponization of social media,

artificial intelligence,

Brexit,

China,

Russia and so on.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, is another top administration official planning to attend. The 130 or so participants also include King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands; Stacey Abrams, the American politician; Henry Kissinger, the former senior American foreign policy official; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and David H. Petraeus, the retired general. Some top bank executives are on the list, too.

On at least one subject, climate change, many of the participants are expected to have radically different views than Mr. Pompeo. In early May, the American secretary, speaking at a meeting of the Arctic Council in Finland, praised the changes caused by the melting of ice in the Arctic Circle.

“Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” Mr. Pompeo said, while noting the abundance of undiscovered oil and gas, uranium, rare-earth minerals, coal, diamonds and fisheries in the Arctic.

What Mr. Pompeo, Mr. Kushner and the other Bilderberg attendees actually say to each other will be a mystery to most of the public, thanks to the meeting’s use of the Chatham House Rule, which states that although attendees can tell the public what was discussed, generally, participants must not reveal who said what.

The rule was devised in 1927 by the eponymous policy institute in London, when many people feared that the practice of “secret diplomacy led to the horrors of the First World War,” said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House. The idea, he said, was to encourage officials and experts to speak frankly together, in private, and then to share what they discussed with the public.

“It’s actually not a rule of secrecy, it’s a rule of openness from an era when everything was secret,” he said.

The Bilderberg Meetings used to hold news conferences and distribute synopses to attendees, but discontinued the practices in the 1990s and 2000s. Organizers do not plan to reinstate them, a spokesman said.

Still, the Bilderberg’s reputation for secrecy fed conspiracy theories soon after the first meeting, held in 1954 to strengthen ties between North America and Europe, at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. In a book published a decade later, the right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote that the “secret kingmakers” of America and a “select assortment of foreigners” met at Bilderberg events, and exercised influence over American affairs.

In 1971, “Bilderbergers” appeared in “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” a book by Gary Allen that argued that international bankers and politicians had taken decisions out of elected officials’ hands. Mr. Allen’s book has been cited as an inspiration by Alex Jones, the internet conspiracy theorist who has ranted about “globalists” trying to engineer a “new world order.”

Most of the conspiracy theories around the group center on fears that a “one-world government” will take control of a nation’s domestic government, said Anna Merlan, a journalist and the author of “Republic of Lies,” a book about conspiracy theories.

“You can see a lot of the same concerns about Masons or communists,” Ms. Merlan said, adding that there was often an anti-Semitic cast to the theories. Some are more esoteric than others. Mr. Jones’s version, she said, “is like a medieval conspiracy, the idea that elites meet in secret to undertake occult rituals to solidify their bonds.”

A Bilderberg spokesman said he believed that the theories were driven by people’s desire to make sense of complex trends like globalization, and that they have been given new life by the rise of the internet. On its website, the organizers expressed regret, anonymously, about the tenacity of the “wild allegations” against it.

“While these claims lack any and all merit,” the site said, “we regret to see that many continue to flourish online and in social media groups.”

U.S.-China Trade Standoff May Be Initial Skirmish in Broader Economic War

The United States is increasingly wary of China’s emerging role in the global economy and the tactics it uses to get ahead, including state-sponsored hacking, acquisitions of high-tech companies in the United States and Europe, subsidies to crucial industries and discrimination against foreign companies.

The Trump administration has begun trying to limit China’s economic influence in the United States and abroad, warning about China’s ambitions in increasingly stark terms. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, compared China’s ambitions to Russia and Iran in a speech in London last Wednesday, saying Beijing poses “a new kind of challenge; an authoritarian regime that’s integrated economically into the West in ways that the Soviet Union never was.”

China, whose ambition is to dominate industries of the future, is pushing back. A column on Saturday in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper stated, “The United States is again waving the club of tariffs after misjudging China’s strength, capacity and will, further escalating trade friction between our two countries.”

The piece was written under the pen name Zhong Sheng — the “voice of China” — a name used when the paper publishes comments on foreign affairs that are authoritative.

Restraining China’s ambitions and methods is a tricky task — and there is concern that the Trump administration’s effort is creating a new red scare, fueling discrimination against China and its citizens that could ultimately hurt the United States. As many as 30 Chinese professors have had their visas to the United States canceled in the past year, or been put on administrative review, according to Chinese academics and their American counterparts.

“We’ve got decades of painful negotiating with China ahead,” said David Lampton, a China scholar at Stanford University. Mr. Lampton said a trade deal, if reached, would do little to resolve the bigger conflict. “It’s just a skirmish in an ongoing battle.”

.. While a trade deal could calm some tensions and establish more good will between the two nations, it is unlikely to achieve many of the ambitious goals that the administration has set for itself. Mr. Trump’s advisers, in particular the United States trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, have been focused on what the administration calls China’s practices of “economic aggression.”

But the administration has struggled to address the immensity of the problems in the text of a trade deal. People close to the talks say that the negotiators appear powerless to force any changes that aren’t in China’s interest.

Mr. Liu, who is leading China’s team in the trade negotiations, hinted at that uphill battle in a video statement released by the official Xinhua news agency.

Despite punishing tariffs already on nearly half of Chinese exports to the United States, Beijing is still resisting many of the most significant changes that the administration seeks. It has been reluctant to roll back subsidies for advanced manufacturing industries or to make public commitments to stop cybertheft.

Instead, a trade deal between the two countries seems more likely to bring change around the margins — tens of billions of dollars of soybean purchases, some tariffs lifted and changes to the text of Chinese laws or regulations that the country might ultimately disregard, particularly once another administration occupies the White House.

“This is a decades-long endeavor,” said Robert Daly, the director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. “This can’t be waved away over cake at Mar-a-Lago.”

The notion that the United States has one last shot to change China’s behavior is held by an array of people on both sides of the political spectrum. But it is an aggressive notion of American power to upend a rival system that has delivered prosperity for its people and put China on course to be the world’s largest economy.

Many in China see the United States as a declining power bent on enforcing its will on a world that no longer cowers before its hegemonic might. The troubles in American democracy and the long economic slump after 2008 persuaded many in China that its instincts to chart its own course were correct. In the eyes of many Chinese, their country is simply reclaiming its historic status as a dominant regional power in Asia.

It has also projected power across Asia, Africa and elsewhere while the United States has, on many fronts, retreated from its post-World War II commitment to the global order. But it has done so with little application of military force, in sharp contrast to what many in China see as American militarism.

Many in China have sought to avoid a trade conflict, which could have a larger impact on their economy than the United States’. But they have long thought the United States would have a difficult time accepting a true peer in economic, technology and military power, so consider the management of conflict with the United States to be an inevitable result of their own rise.

While the Trump administration accused China of breaking a trade deal, China’s resistance to the emerging terms stemmed from its belief that the United States was asking too much and offering too little in return. Many of the changes the United States seeks would limit what Chinese officials regard as a tried-and-true approach of using tens of billions of dollars from state-owned banks and government investment funds to turn previously small industries like car production or solar panel manufacturing into the largest industries of their kind in the world.

And the Chinese view some of the Trump administration’s demands as infringing on their sovereignty and giving America too much power over their economy — including requiring the country to codify changes through legislation in the National People’s Congress. To the increasingly nationalistic public in China, the American requests are reminiscent of 19th century history of unequal treaties forced on the country by foreign powers.

Mr. Trump on Saturday suggested China was simply delaying a deal in the hopes that a Democrat would win election in 2020 and continued his pugilistic approach, saying “the deal will become far worse for them if it has to be negotiated in my second term. Would be wise for them to act now, but love collecting BIG TARIFFS!”

In the United States, China’s unwillingness to bow to America’s demands is uniting lawmakers like the Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.

That is a significant shift from the prevailing view in the United States since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 that close economic engagement with China would produce an increasingly democratic country that would be closely tied to an international economic order founded mainly on Western liberal ideals.

That has not happened.

China has indeed grown in prosperity, leaping into the ranks of what the World Bank defines as upper-middle income countries. Its economy is now bigger than any other country except the United States. Its manufacturing sector is now bigger than those of the United States, Germany and South Korea combined.

But in the last five years, China has veered toward increasingly repressive authoritarianism at home and a rapid military buildup. The State Department estimates that Beijing has put 800,000 to two million Muslims in hastily built internment camps ringed with barbed wire in northwestern China. The Chinese government has built an archipelago of air bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea in between Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. And China now has the world’s largest navy and has conducted

China has indeed grown in prosperity, leaping into the ranks of what the World Bank defines as upper-middle income countries. Its economy is now bigger than any other country except the United States. Its manufacturing sector is now bigger than those of the United States, Germany and South Korea combined.

But in the last five years, China has veered toward increasingly repressive authoritarianism at home and a rapid military buildup. The State Department estimates that Beijing has put 800,000 to two million Muslims in hastily built internment camps ringed with barbed wire in northwestern China. The Chinese government has built an archipelago of air bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea in between Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. And China now has the world’s largest navy and has conducted military exercises as far away as East Africa and the Baltic Sea.

On the economic front, the competition is even fiercer. Trump administration officials warn that China is trying to dominate the global 5G infrastructure that will be the basis for future mobile communications and is competing to set other technological standards that will determine which global companies win.

China is extending low-cost loans and building infrastructure around the globe through its One Belt, One Road program, which critics warn is making poorer countries beholden to China. It is out-investing the United States in some high-tech industries, and is gaining dominance in certain segments, like mobile payment, new energy vehicles and areas of artificial intelligence.

While American companies have long hankered for access to China’s growing market, their position has begun to shift as they see China’s practices and treatment of foreign companies. A survey released by the American Chamber of Commerce in China in February showed that the majority of its members favored retaining tariffs on Chinese goods while trade negotiations continued.

China’s own experts say that the Beijing leadership has been caught off guard by the pace of change in American perceptions of Sino-American relations.

“Even if there is some kind of agreement between Xi and Trump, in the long run the strategic bilateral relationship is already in trouble,” said Zhang Jian, a professor in the School of Government at Peking University. “There is no coming back, even if there is a deal.”