The Office of Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State (DOS) issued a research report on Tuesday November 17, which summarized the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), analyzed the ideological roots behind the behavior and the vulnerabilities that the Chinese Communist regime faces, and provided suggestions on how the United States should respond to China’s challenges.
The report, titled “The Elements of the China Challenge,” states that “awareness has been growing in the United States — and in nations around the world — that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition. Yet few discern the pattern in China’s inroads within every region of the world, much less the specific form of dominance to which the party aspires.”
The report characterizes the Chinese Communist regime as “modeled on 20th-century Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.”
The report is composed of five sections: the China Challenge, China’s Conduct, the Intellectual Source of China’s Conduct, China’s Vulnerabilities, and Securing Freedom.
The report said, “The CCP aims not merely at preeminence within the established world order — an order that is grounded in free and sovereign nation-states, flows from the universal principles on which America was founded, and advances U.S. national interests — but to revise the world order fundamentally, placing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the center and serving Beijing’s authoritarian goals and hegemonic ambitions.”
The report concludes that “meeting the China challenge requires the United States to return to the fundamentals. To secure freedom, America must refashion its foreign policy in the light of ten tasks.”
The ten tasks include:
1. “Securing freedom at home by preserving constitutional government, promoting prosperity, and fostering a robust civil society,” 2. “Maintaining the world’s most powerful, agile, and technologically sophisticated military while enhancing security cooperation,” 3. “Fortifying the free, open, and rules-based international order that it led in creating after World War II,” 4.“Reevaluating its alliance system and the panoply of international organizations,”
5. “Strengthening its alliance system by more effectively sharing responsibilities with friends and partners and by forming a variety of groupings and coalitions to address specific threats to freedom,”
6. “Promoting American interests by looking for opportunities to cooperate with Beijing, subject to norms of fairness and reciprocity,”
7. “Educating American citizens about the scope and implications of the China challenge,”
8. “Training a new generation of public servants — in diplomacy, military affairs, finance, economics, science and technology, and other fields — and public-policy thinkers who not only attain fluency in Chinese and acquire extensive knowledge of China’s culture and history,”
9. “Reforming American education, equipping students to shoulder the enduring responsibilities of citizenship in a free and democratic society by understanding America’s legacy of liberty,”
10. “Championing the principles of freedom through example; speeches; educational initiatives; and public diplomacy.”
The 70-some-page-long report contains more than 20 pages of footnotes, accounting for almost half of the main body of the report.
Source: State Department,
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20-02832-Elements-of-China-Challenge-508.pdf