The Daily: China Is Taking Notes

June 10, 2022

Welcome to the weekend. In a recent episode, we asked, "Is the U.S. changing its stance on Taiwan?" As you heard, it's a question that snowballs, quickly, into bigger questions about China's ambitions, American strength and the shifting balance of global power.

They're themes we've covered for years on The Daily. So, in this newsletter, we wanted to bring those threads together to help you make sense of this moment. First, we created a China playlist to help you learn more. And, below, we have China experts weigh in on some of these questions, too.

The big idea: The lessons China is learning from Ukraine

The Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper into one of those from our show on America's shifting foreign policy.

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President Biden said last month that he would use the U.S. military to defend Taiwan if China attacked the island.Doug Mills/The New York Times

While the war in Ukraine "will have no winner," China may come out ahead.

The invasion is a real-life war game, one that defense ministries in both Western and Eastern Hemispheres have been playing for years — testing what happens when a rising superpower goes on the military offensive.

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Now, China gets to take notes as Russia stumbles into uncertain geopolitical terrain, provoking global hostility. "It's the most strategic-thinking country in the world," Martin Jacques, the author of "When China Rules the World," said. "The Chinese are very serious students. They're paying close attention."

So what lessons is China learning from the invasion of Ukraine? Here are two, according to the experts we spoke with:

Lesson one: The developing world's silence is China's strength

Between Brexit and Trumpism, relations have been strained between some Western states for years. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, the band got back together — uniting to impose sanctions on the former and arm the latter.

Soon after, the consensus emerged that the war was one of the best things to happen to liberalism in recent memory, enough to "get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy," Francis Fukuyama said.

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But as Western democracies united behind Ukraine, much of the world remained silent — afraid to upset Russia or its allies. In a vote at the United Nations General Assembly on whether to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council, 58 countries, including India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt and many across Africa and Asia, abstained.

Other countries have been forced to go further, pandering to President Vladimir V. Putin in an effort to maintain relationships vital to their state security. For example, with many of the world's poorest countries facing alarming levels of hunger and starvation, the leader of the African Union met with Putin to ask him to lift Russia's blockade on urgently needed cereals and fertilizer from Ukraine.

"China is immensely involved, engaged and invested in these developing countries," economically and in terms of prospective influence, Jacques said. Seeing their silence, he added, will affirm that in the long run, Western states may not carry the power they once did in the developing world.

To many observers, the influence of China in developing nations today illuminates the extent of America's declining influence. Even as Washington tries to step up its game, it is still far behind, mistaking speeches for impact and interest for influence in a world where just 13 percent of the population lives in a liberal democracy.

"This moment affirms China's strategy," Jacques said. "And they're willing to play the long game."

Lesson two: Sanctions can hurt

The United States, the European Union and their allies have placed extensive sanctions on Russia as part of a multipronged strategy to constrain its behavior. Many Western countries are taking action to halt their energy trade with Russia and to cut the country off from vast parts of the global financial system.

Western governments have also banned transactions with Russia's central bank and sovereign wealth fund, forcing Russia to enact strict restrictions on capital flows to prop up the value of its currency. Finally, some countries have also frozen the assets of Russian officials and oligarchs, banned exports of advanced technology to Russia and cut some Russian banks off from SWIFT, essentially barring them from international transactions.

Western nations willingness to impose sanctions on Russia, even at their own economic peril, will make China think twice before seeking to similarly expand their own territory, according to experts.

Taiwan is banking on Chinese caution toward the prospect of sanctions keeping the island safe. Joseph Wu, Taiwan's foreign minister, said his country hoped the world would enact sanctions against China if Beijing invaded the island, just as it has done against Russia for its war on Ukraine.

"Trade and economic development still absolutely comes first for China," Jacques said. "Putin started a war which is going to do a lot of harm to the Russian economy. But the Chinese are not like that at all. They think differently."

"The cost to them is just too great," he added. "And the benefits are not large enough to make it worthwhile."

While Jacques thinks the economic risks will likely keep China from invading Taiwan in the short term, he said that reunification was most likely inevitable as China grows in strength, invoking a line from the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who once told President Richard Nixon, "We can wait, maybe even a hundred years."

From The Daily team: A conversation with an Afghan general

Brig. Gen. Khoshal Sadat was Afghanistan's top police official. "We're not cowards," he said of the nation's security forces.Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

We recently sat down with senior Daily producer Rachel Quester to talk about one of her favorite episodes of the show that she's had a hand in making. Rachel's pick is "A Conversation with an Afghan General," one of a number of episodes we made last year amid the American withdrawal from — and the fall of — Afghanistan.

Here's what she had to say about making the episode.

Why is this episode among your favorites?

When Afghanistan fell, the team really kicked into gear and felt like not only telling listeners what was going on but doing that through voices on the ground and those who were actually experiencing it. We did that by telling stories about people like R., an outspoken critic of the Taliban who was trying to flee and interpreters and their military equivalents.

How did the episode come about?

I was really curious about this thing we were hearing over and over again — and President Biden even came out and gave a speech saying as much — that, basically, the Afghan army just laid down their arms, that they weren't fighting. That kind of left me with a question: Would someone in the Afghan army agree with that assessment? With a lot of blame being put on their shoulders, what's their perspective of what happened? Does that feel like a fair critique? So that was a voice I really wanted to hear from.

How did you end up finding that voice?

Producer Lynsea Garrison and I had started to poke around to see what voices we could find, and eventually we came up with a list. One name on that list was General Khoshal Sadat — he had been featured in a story from 2019 because he was this up-and-coming, star, young general in the Afghan army.

We reached out to him and ended up having a phone call where I was getting his story for basically an hour. At that time, our focus was so on what had happened in the immediate sense, but it became very clear from his perspective that it was a way more complicated picture than to say that the Afghan army laid down their arms. Later, I asked him if he would do an on-the-record, formal interview for the show, and he said yes.

Can you talk a bit about producing that interview? What was it like watching that conversation happen?

The interview itself kind of took a turn. It was an unexpected conversation in the best way possible. Rather than focusing on the present, the general ended up talking us through his entire experience. He grew up under the Taliban, and his military career mapped onto and told the story of the 20-year war effort in Afghanistan. I think we struck gold, basically. It was kind of unexpected and completely riveting.

How did you deal with that unexpected turn during the taping?

All of us in the taping — Michael Barbaro, the producers and editors — were on the same page about going with him, that eventually we'll get to questions about the present, but he wants to take us on a journey, so let's just follow that journey with him. We ended up talking to him for three and a half hours.

Are there any moments that stick out to you from the process?

I think at the end of the episode, I remember this in the taping — he had this total moment of grappling, which I love. When Michael mentions that General Sadat left the war effort, he has a very human reaction, and you feel like he didn't have a choice, which leads to the most surprising part of the episode: when he says that we need to give the Taliban a chance.

He said that he's a very violent person and has killed and been in hand-to-hand combat with more of the Taliban than anybody he knows, and yet he says that we have to give them a chance because what else are we going to do? In my mind, that was a fighter realizing there wasn't a fight anymore, and that's a really hard conclusion for somebody who has based their entire life on that to have to come to. We didn't expect him to go there, and he did. It was provocative, and it was complicated, but it was him personally coming to a conclusion, which was surprising and unexpected.