Senior Fellow and Director of the China Center Miles Yu speaks about China’s international influence Thursday in the Amphitheater.
SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
As Miles Yu prepared to exit the Amphitheater stage yesterday morning, Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Jordan Steves read one final comment from an audience member before the venue filled with a round of applause. It read: “I am appropriately terrified.”
Although the former Trump administration principal China policy adviser joked his lecture was only the opening act for Josh Groban, the seemingly extreme audience feedback was the speaker’s intention from the start. Yu began his lecture by reflecting on his identification of the two crucial developments that arose in the past decade, the first being the United States’ shift in strategic focus.
“Since the time of Bill Clinton … our strategic focus, our doctrinal focus and focus of strategic resources has always been on Europe,” Yu said.
However, following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, this focus shifted to threats in Asia, such as Russia, North Korea and China.
“The United States is a global power of great consequence, facing national security threats by the hundreds each day,” Yu said. “… After a 2017 visit of Trump to China when China was saying, ‘The West is in decline, the East is rising,’ … the U.S. President and his entire team was shocked by China’s ambition and intent … A few months later, in December 2017, the White House wrote out its first national security strategy for the Trump administration.”
This shift in security strategy was a direct result of the second major development of the past decade: China’s position as the United States’ primary security threat. In his analysis of China’s rise to prominence, Yu looked through the lens of “Columbo,” a television show he watched while learning English in the 1980s. In this mystery series, the titular lieutenant solves murders by looking for motive, means and opportunity. Yu described the five “I’s” motivating the People’s Republic of China.
“One is the assumption that China’s party is infallible,” Yu said. “… Secondly, the party is invincible … The third ‘I’ is that the triumph of communist cause is inevitable … Number four … is leadership … Chinese leadership is really a constant idea of telling the world what to do and how to behave … The last ‘I,’ China believes the global order [and] world system is based on injustice; … it’s not fair that the Western world dominates.”
After completing his breakdown of the motive behind China’s threat to U.S. national security, Yu discussed the means with which China achieved that position. Although he mentioned the economic and military strength of the country, Yu specifically pointed to a situation he closely observed at the turn of the decade.
“When I was asked to investigate COVID in the early months of 2020, after the first outbreak, it horrified me to find out how much more advanced China’s biological weapons research has gone, and the COVID origin is intrinsically related to the biological research that is very deadly,” Yu said. “… China has the capability to reach this global goal and to realize this global ambition.”
Finally, Yu shifted focus to the final prong of “Columbo” murder mystery investigations: opportunity. He referenced the Code of Federal Regulations that outlines six official foreign adversaries: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
“If you analyze all six of them, China stands out as the only foreign adversary that has not been excreted from the global free trading system,” Yu said. “ … That is the opportunity that no other foreign adversary has enjoyed, not even the Soviet Union. … Export control to China is very difficult to implement because China is so integrated into our system. You cannot buy any home security camera or Wi-Fi router without buying something made in China, and all your home security information will be transferred on a regular basis back to a service somewhere in China.”
In addition to exploring the motive, means and opportunity behind China’s power, Yu added a fourth prong to the discussion, which he referred to as the united front. In addition to hard and soft power, Yu said China maintains this front with sharp power.
“[Sharp power is] the power of coercion, the power of manipulation and power of disinformation,” Yu said. “… In the old days, when the Soviet Union wanted to put state propaganda to the West, usually you would get the senior officials on ‘60 Minutes’ or ‘Channel 4’ in the U.K. … China’s government rarely does that; they promote proxies, always some professor from Harvard, some bigshot from Washington, D.C., and several other people.”
As the Trump administration’s former China policy adviser, Yu aligns with the president’s approach of taking preemptive measures to stave off perceived threats to the nation.
“Many people portray Trump’s China policy as a reversal,” Yu said. “That’s nonsense … As a president, you have to do something to prevent major countries from direct blowout. … [Mutually assured destruction] is one reason why [during] the Cold War, the Soviet Union and United States did not go head-on. … We are in a similar situation with China. That’s why [Trump] wants Xi Jinping to be a friend. All adversaries of the United States, Trump always calls [his] best friends.”
Yu finished his lecture on the subject of Trump by discussing the goals of his second term: to “enhance homeland and hemispheric security,” to deter foreign adversaries, to promote burden-sharing with allies in NATO and to “rebuild America.”
“Every one of the four agendas has China behind it,” Yu said. “… We are living in a very dangerous world. This is one of the reasons I’m here today — to scare you.”
