Sam Kaplan

Program Summary: Sam Kaplan, “Challenging China: Smart Strategies to Encourage its Liberalization,” February 11, 2021

By Merrill Mayer

Sam’s new book, Challenging China: Smart Strategies for Dealing with China in the Xi Jinping Era will be released in spring 2021. At Sam Kaplan (samkaplanauthor.com), there are links to a variety of places to buy the book. The Amazon link is here.

Challenging China: Sam Kaplan’s slide presentation

What to do about expansionistic China? This is one of 4 most important issues dealing with China

Sam Kaplan
Sam Kaplan

Escalator Incident: In President Xi’s visit to Seattle in 2015, Chinese security unilaterally turned off escalator in Westin Hotel. This was against US law–and one example of a very different demeanor from past cooperative visits.

Power Consolidation:

  1. More power in inner circle. More closed and more oppressive
  2. Xi gave speech to make sure China doesn’t go the way of USSR
  3. Human rights deteriorated. Uighurs in internment camps Forceable sterilization of Uighur women. Lots of crack downs. People arrested. Internet censorship

Threats:

  1. Xi wants to replace liberal world order with authoritarianism. .
  2. China more expansionist. China claims territorial waters more more than 1000 miles from its borders.
  3. China wants to make it easier to spy on citizens via telecommunication. They export this technology. More vocal about Taiwan and possibly invading.
  4. Hong Kong crack down. New Security law prevents free speech
  5. China has companies with world wide impact like TikTok. TikTok even collects key strokes from phones when using the app

Economy:

  1. China very successful economically which gives it great leverage in the world. However, GDP per capita is lower than other Asian countries like South Korea
  2. Very sophisticated mobile payments big stride in biotechnology.
  3. Brought many out of poverty. Increasingly large middle class
  4. Many business people in Africa. Factories in Africa. Benefits these countries economically
  5. China has demographic issues with aging population. China’s population will be older than US’s population in 20 years. This results in end of high GDP growth rate.

Policies to deal with China -Improve our country:

  1. Improve infrastructure
  2. Put human rights at forefront of our policy. Carter and Reagan did this
  3. Multilateralism – build alliances. However multilateralism could be difficult as US stepped back from world stage. Plus economic ties other counties have with China deter this. Countries see America in decline for example the DC riots, poor response to COVID-19.
  4. If we are able to liberalize China, we could see more improvements in the world such as medical and economic.