July is a terrifying month for the Chinese Communist Party. Anniversaries in Hong Kong and Tibet highlight the weakness of authoritarian Chinese communism. Recent statements coming from Beijing on the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday are defensive to the point of sounding ridiculous: According to the Chinese government, “The Dalai Lama must reincarnate in China, according to the laws of the People’s Republic.” Apparently, there’s a section in the Chinese constitution governing the afterlife.
This month also marks the fifth anniversary of the annexation of once democratic Hong Kong. It’s worth reviewing why Beijing annexes buffer states like Tibet and Hong Kong. Authoritarians can’t afford to share borders with free and democratic neighbors. Rather, the undemocratic People’s Republic needs to keep bad ideas and influences out, while at the same time keeping its people in. Normal interstate borders aren’t enough. The People’s Republic developed the Great Firewall to create a cognitive buffer. Similarly, it maintains geographic buffers with contiguous countries to insulate itself. Borders are difficult to control, and China has the longest land border in the world at 14,000 miles. Buffer zones create defense in depth, eliminating the need to patrol distant, inhospitable frontiers.
Why not just build another Great Wall? Because walls can be scaled. A large part of the border between North Korea and Northeast China is the Yalu River: It is difficult to patrol and easily crossed in the winter when it’s frozen. China’s buffer zones are made up of annexed, non-Han majority territories, which the CCP automatically treats as suspect. In these regions, the CCP uses subversion and favors to create a class of minority collaborators who do the patrolling and monitoring for it. Collaborators speak the language, know the culture, and are more effective at pointing out possible troublemakers. Nowhere is this more visible than in Xinjiang, where a cadre of Vichy Uyghurs identify targets for monitoring, arrest, incarceration, and worse.
On the occasion of the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday, it’s worth a look at an important and tenuous buffer region: Tibet, once an independent state before the Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded and annexed it in 1950. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetans’ spiritual and political leader, fled across the Himalayas in March 1959 to bordering free India, where he has remained in exile. Beijing hopes to name a more malleable Tibetan leader who lives under its direct control inside China to help pacify Tibetan “separatists.”
A similar strategy was employed in restive Hong Kong. Prior to annexation on July 1, 2020, Beijing bribed and threatened an entire class of Hong Kong residents (pro-establishment, as opposed to pan-democrats) to cede control of the territory slowly in the name of preventing even worse outcomes. Many freedom-loving Hong Kong citizens have been arrested retroactively in groups since annexation (the “Hong Kong 47” is a good example) for activities that were legal prior to annexation. In August 2020, 12 Hong Kong citizens attempted to flee to Taiwan by boat, only to be arrested for trying to leave. Free countries struggle to manage flows of people hoping to enter. Beijing struggles to keep people from leaving.
How can the Chinese government presume to tell a religious figure where he will reincarnate, or require citizens to receive permission to leave? Authoritarian governments tend to be tone-deaf, due to their need to keep themselves and their citizens isolated from ideas and information that challenge their rule. Might-makes-right rule is the lowest form of governance (contrary to the four volumes of President Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China) — authoritarian rule is far less advanced than systems confident and stable enough to cede control to the governed through elections. Unlike the first Cold War, in today’s connected world, nonsensical authoritarian diktats are readily accessed and mocked outside information firewalls, undermining CCP claims of legitimacy. Beijing needs physical and cognitive buffers to keep its people respectful and compliant.
A survey of China’s periphery demonstrates the authoritarian’s need to isolate itself cognitively through the Great Firewall, pacify reluctant citizens through constant propaganda and indoctrination, and create geographic buffer zones by developing armies of willing minority collaborators.
(Peter Parks/AFP/Getty)
The CCP needs to justify its rule continuously through state-run organs cranking out cringe pro-CCP propaganda, much of it aimed at minority populations in border regions. Chinese television (“government” is redundant) begins each day with a recitation of the general secretary’s triumphs. “Xi Jinping” will be heard dozens of times in the first five minutes of the daily newscast, the hallmark of a cult of personality that strives to validate the party secretary for life. Schools teaching regional minority languages other than Chinese have been under great pressure to close. A recent story detailed how Tibetan preschoolers are taken from their homes and placed in Han Chinese boarding schools. The United Nations calls this cultural genocide.
These tactics would seem doomed to fail. Chinese friends tell me, “If the government says it’s black, you know it’s white.” However, if a lie is told often enough, early enough, it becomes true no matter how bizarre: People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP, published a serious article titled “Kim Jong-un Named Sexiest Man Alive,” a story lifted from the satirical media outlet The Onion. Or recall that the soundtrack chosen for China’s first Tiangong space station launch was “America the Beautiful.” Ensconced in their hermetically sealed information cocoon, the editors of People’s Daily and CCTV were unable to understand The Onion’s satire or recognize their poor choice of music because asking critical questions is dangerous. Information buffers may work, but they have an enormous downside.
Of all the recent messaging coming out of the Communist Chinese propaganda machine, the language on Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation has been the most bizarre. A proudly atheist Marxist government declaring that “the Dalai Lama must reincarnate in China, according to the laws of the People’s Republic,” demonstrates the lengths the CCP must go to shore up its questionable legitimacy.
Beyond cognitive buffers, geographical buffers demonstrate yet another level of authoritarian paranoia and dysfunction. Authoritarian Russia’s reckless invasions of Ukraine sought to preserve physical separation from both democratic Ukraine and NATO, for the same reasons the Soviet Union annexed Eastern Europe: to keep its incarcerated people ignorant of a better life in free countries. Why is the powerful Chinese government so concerned about the Dalai Lama’s afterlife? His continued existence in exile threatens stability in annexed Tibet.
A survey of Chinese border buffer regions — Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, North Korea, and Hong Kong/Taiwan — demonstrates how Beijing seeks to maintain stability and prevent embarrassing mass exodus.
Maintaining stability in Tibet requires collaborators backed up by an enormous security presence. The same is true in Xinjiang, to the north of Tibet. In 1951, the newly established People’s Republic of China annexed the Central Asian state of East Turkistan and immediately began the work of creating a compliant buffer state. Tourists in Xinjiang are told, “The people of Xinjiang are 90% minority and 10% majority.” Let that sink in. Turkic Uyghurs share more with Central Asian and even Middle Eastern cultures than with Han Chinese culture, making the occupation difficult. Beijing goes to extreme lengths to anticipate and eliminate “Uyghur separatists,” even before they’ve done anything, by deploying loyal Han colonizers to recruit Uyghur collaborators, forcibly live with noncollaborator Uyghur families in their homes to prevent secessionist activities, destroy Muslim Uyghur culture by prohibiting the celebration of Ramadan, forcing Muslims to smoke and drink alcohol, and for those suspected of future terrorist leanings, lock them down in massive “Vocational Training Camps.”
Once in these camps, women are given drugs that effectively sterilize them. Uyghur language and culture are being eliminated in what the U.S. government determined to be a literal and cultural genocide, all to create self-policing buffers that insulate core China from adverse outside influence.
Inner Mongolia is no different. Although Mongols once ruled China during the Yuan dynasty in the 14th century, today, Beijing controls the southern half of the traditional Mongolian territory, as the province of Inner Mongolia. Independent Mongolia survived World War II, pinched between the Soviet Union and China, but Beijing carved out the province of Inner Mongolia as a buffer and has subjected the Mongolian minority to the same harsh treatment as Tibet and Xinjiang. Tibetan Buddhism is also practiced in Mongolia, which the CCP considers a threat. As in Tibet and Xinjiang, traditional religious, language, and cultural training is controlled and slowly eliminated, as documented by Los Angeles Times reporter Alice Su in 2020. Her firsthand reporting critical of the CCP’s treatment of ethnic Mongolians led to her harassment by PRC security services and eventual deportation. Buffer regions are designed to keep dangerous ideas out and bad news in.
(Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty)
As an aside, the buffer concept doesn’t seem to apply to the shared border with authoritarian Russia, and Beijing doesn’t mind seeing its people settling in Russia’s eastern province, which annoys its “no limits” friends in Moscow. Sparsely populated farmland in Russian Siberia attracts Chinese emigres, relieving population pressures in China and leading to the staking of territorial claims for the eventual reincorporation of territory taken from China by Russia following the Opium Wars. With this territory comes the strategic port of Vladivostok, which, until 1860, was known as Haishenwei.
Next in the survey of Beijing’s periphery comes North Korea. Although it is not currently a democratic state, reunification would see a free, democratic, and unified Korea on China’s border. Many tabletop exercises on North Korean instability conclude that Beijing would actively oppose unification of the peninsula under democratic South Korean rule, preferring to prop up a failed North Korean buffer state, as Beijing could not tolerate a burgeoning South Korean economy and vibrant democracy on its border. The frontier is easily crossed, especially in the winter when the Yalu River freezes, so it would be much more difficult for the CCP to control the movement of people and ideas.
North Korea provides a convenient and cooperative, although troublesome, buffer. Open hostility between North Korea and China is not unusual — Beijing exerted every bit of its diplomatic muscle, engaging the U.S. to help, to stop North Korea’s third nuclear test in March 2013, to no avail. And yet the PRC continues to prop up the Kim regime because it considers the threat of a contiguous free market democracy to be even greater than a nuclear North Korea. In the same way, Kim is not eager to reunite and face crimes against humanity charges as the International Criminal Court threatened in 2014. And so Beijing has a willing collaborator in the North Korea buffer zone.
For 75 years, refugees from North Korea have escaped into Northeast China, where human rights groups work to resettle them in South Korea. Beijing often prevents this and forces refugees back into North Korea, where they face certain inhumane punishment. The CCP understands that having citizens flee the country is embarrassing to authoritarians, as the exodus defeats the narrative that North Koreans have “nothing to envy” (the title of an excellent book by Barbara Demick on North Korea’s near collapse in the 1990s). Those who live in free countries have trouble understanding why a government would prevent its people from leaving. This is because the outflows of people to democratic countries would be significant, undermining authoritarian claims of legitimacy.
Anticipating this, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (Article 13) defines emigration as a human right. Based on experiences following the Bolshevik Revolution, UDHR Article 13 recognizes the harm caused by Soviet policy that prevented its people from fleeing oppression. This flaw in authoritarian rule was most visible in Berlin in 1961 when the Soviet bloc suddenly and very visibly sealed its borders, not to keep people out but to keep its people in. China is a signatory to the UDHR and, in fact, sent a representative to help draft it, yet Beijing violates it routinely. Free countries struggle to control flows of people into their countries. China exerts greater effort to keep them from leaving.
Finally, July 1 marks the fifth anniversary of the PRC turning Hong Kong into yet another buffer state. In 2020, Beijing abrogated the Joint Declaration, a U.N.-held treaty with the United Kingdom guaranteeing Hong Kong 50 years of autonomy, after only 23 years. This was in response to summer 2019 protests in then-free Hong Kong that struck at the heart of CCP legitimacy. Hong Kong collaborators, the pro-establishment camp, could not stop grassroots protests against increasing PRC infiltration and subversion. The Chinese people watched with interest and envy as Hong Kong soccer fans booed the Chinese national anthem and openly protested Beijing’s failure to abide by the Joint Declaration’s guarantees of autonomy. Beijing could not allow this open defiance to continue. Hong Kong’s shared border with Guangzhou contrasted a free, democratic society with authoritarianism in a way that made Hong Kongers exercising their right to free speech a significant threat to CCP rule. Even if Beijing could use the Great Firewall to block news from Hong Kong, Chinese visitors to Hong Kong could observe democratic freedom firsthand.
Following annexation, in August 2020, Beijing no longer tried to maintain the façade of autonomy. Twelve Hong Kong dissidents attempted to flee to Taiwan by boat. Prior to July 1, they were free to do so. Seeing the authoritarian juggernaut that was coming, the 12 left Hong Kong but were intercepted by the Chinese coast guard, arrested, and charged with “illegally entering Chinese waters” (!) even though they were clearly trying to leave. After Beijing abrogated the Joint Declaration, vocal critics like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and many others have been prevented from leaving and were eventually arrested. Such is the fate of the residents of a buffer state.
The survey of China’s troubled periphery ends with Taiwan, which will continue to beckon freedom-loving Chinese people. Sitting 100 miles off the PRC’s eastern coast, Taiwan demonstrates that contrary to CCP denials, the Chinese people thrive under democratic rule. PRC citizens watch Taiwan’s elections with great interest and quietly wonder why they can’t have a voice and a choice in their own governance. The Taiwan Strait provides a geographical buffer for the PRC, but even the Great Firewall can’t prevent the Chinese people from aspiring to something better.
As in other border areas, the CCP actively seeks to subvert Taiwan’s democratic governance by cultivating collaborators. Certain elements of the Kuomintang party are clearly doing Beijing’s bidding. CCP agents take advantage of human greed to get elected representatives and business leaders to put personal financial interests ahead of national interests. Although many speculate on Beijing’s plans to attack Taiwan militarily, the CCP’s political warfare strategy uses information and economic weapons to achieve the same end, without the cost and risk. If Taiwan’s citizens elect a pro-Beijing government, Taiwan’s fate will look very much like that of Hong Kong.
US MUST GO ON OFFENSE IN CHINA
So, what is to be done? The solution is easy, really. Rather than focus on China’s strengths in the Taiwan Strait and eastern seaboard, the buffer regions described above highlight the inherent weakness of an unpopular, authoritarian government. Disaffected groups inside China, and diaspora who fled annexation, like the Dalai Lama, and now sit just outside the western border, are looking for rhetorical and material support from the outside. The Soviet experience in Afghanistan during the 1980s is illustrative — an unpopular occupying force had a difficult time operating where it wasn’t welcome. Guerilla attacks on Soviet forces inside Afghanistan, along with other disruptive activities inside the Soviet Union, eventually forced the Soviet military into a humiliating withdrawal, which has been suggested to have led to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
In October 2013, a vehicle with three Uyghurs crashed into the rostrum at Tiananmen Square — the three occupants and two bystanders were killed, and the CCP learned that its pacification campaign wouldn’t be allowed to focus only on former East Turkistan (Xinjiang). Authoritarian rule sows the seeds of its own demise. Buffers can’t stop this.
Retired Brig. Gen. David Stilwell is the Fox fellow for future pacing threats at the Institute for Future Conflict and was a defense attache to Beijing and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assistant secretary of state for Pacific affairs. He is “wanted” under an active arrest warrant in China.