CAN CHINA STILL EXPORT ITS PEOPLE´S WAR ? / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Can China Still Export Its People’s War?

Dusting off Mao’s Cold War playbook won’t help Beijing.

By: Phillip Orchard

Earlier this summer, as the Indian government scrambled to curry support both at home and abroad for its bare-knuckle standoff against China in the Himalayas, it began reviving another unrelated longstanding grievance with Beijing: China’s alleged covert support for Maoist rebels in restive parts of northeastern India. 

Among other recent incidents, according to New Delhi, China deserved blame for a deadly attack on security forces in June by far-left separatist groups in Manipur state, which borders Myanmar. 

In July, ahead of the Myanmar government’s latest long-odds attempt to broker peace with the alphabet soup of ethnic separatist groups ringing the country, the powerful chief of the Myanmar military called out China for arming some of the most powerful rebel groups. 

Two weeks ago, Indian media, citing sources in both the Indian and Myanmar governments, reported that China has been smuggling arms to various insurgent groups in the region through a network of militants along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Among other goals, according to the sources, Beijing was seeking to derail Indian-backed infrastructure projects in Myanmar that ostensibly would compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

These sorts of developments – combined with warnings from the U.S. and some of its friends (including India) that Beijing is using Chinese apps like TikTok and college student groups to spread communist ideology in the West – certainly make it sound like the Cold War is rising from the grave. 

And China may indeed have increasing cause to dust off its Mao-era playbooks for waging proxy wars and stoking ideological struggle abroad. 

The country, after all, is in quite a strategic fix as outside powers grow ever-warier of its rise and ambitions. It’ll need every tool available to keep its adversaries divided, preoccupied and leery of confrontation. 

The fractured geography of South and Southeast Asia gives it numerous internal cleavages in strategically important states on its periphery to try to exploit.

In truth, though, outside of a couple of areas in its periphery where its covert influence operations have never stopped, Beijing is neither capable of nor particularly interested in playing a global, U.S.-Soviet-style covert destabilization game. 

Nor would it realistically have any hope that the modern Communist Party’s ideology could cultivate a substantial base of supporters, much less inspire other countries’ masses to remake their governments in Beijing’s image. 

But its new weapons of influence are arguably far more potent and better-suited for the hostile environment it’s facing today than Maoism ever was.

Little Red Books for Everyone

Under Mao, exporting revolution was a core part of Chinese strategy. With the country war-torn, preoccupied with reclaiming its buffer states and perpetually dealing with internal crises of its own making, it couldn’t afford to do much in the way of providing substantial material support to like-minded groups in distant proxy conflicts on the scale of the Soviets and the Americans. 

To the extent it did get its hands dirty, it was typically in places where it feared either spillover across its border or occupation by a foreign military power – e.g., Indochina and Korea. It also occasionally provided limited amounts of arms, financial assistance and training to sympathetic militant movements farther abroad, but never on a scale needed to truly tip the balance of power.

Mostly, though, China leaned on Maoist ideology as a way to cultivate foreign support. And it was a powerful tool indeed. The beauty of Maoism is its ability to mean whatever any particular class struggle-based political movement needs it to mean. It is not a particularly rigid or coherent doctrine or blueprint for seizing and wielding power so much as a loose, sometimes self-contradictory collection of sayings, ideas and diagnoses of social ills. 

But what this sacrifices in intellectual rigor it more than makes up for in mutability. It provides a neat framework for understanding power structures and social discontent, plus organizing principles that can be incorporated easily into other ideologies. 

Elements of Maoism, for example, can be seen in an unlikely range of social movements, including nominally religious ones like the Taliban, the Islamic State and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Still, Mao’s ideological reach rarely had much effect on China’s strategic position. It did not, for example, prove capable of eradicating deeper geostrategic tensions with Moscow, Hanoi or even Pyongyang. 

Beijing was never able to wrest control of the global communist movement from Moscow amid the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s and 1960s, and most communist countries fell firmly in the Soviet sphere as a result – including those in China’s backyard. 

Maoist successes in places like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and to a much lesser extent Indonesia were relatively short-lived, ultimately ushering in hostile governments and a long-standing wariness of Chinese interference.

Thus, almost as soon as Mao was gone, Deng Xiaoping set about implementing a dramatic reorientation of China around principles that would resonate in just about any capital: getting rich and keeping enemies at bay through traditional realist strategic maneuvering. 

And this meant facilitating a rapprochement with the West, particularly the U.S., which meant China couldn’t be seen as aiding Soviet aims by exporting revolution. Maoism was still emphasized at home, of course – or at least the principles Deng thought would cement party rule were emphasized. 

But Beijing largely shut down Mao-era efforts to foment class struggle and support like-minded militant groups abroad.

Game’s the Same, Just Got Less Fierce

China has stuck with this approach ever since, albeit with a few notable exceptions – none of which were driven by ideological affinity. It continued to support the Khmer Rouge even after it was driven from the capital, for example, but this was a strategic move in coordination with the U.S. aimed mainly at countering Soviet-backed Vietnam. 

Since China still felt compelled in 1979 to invade Vietnam, where Chinese forces performed poorly, and since it cemented Vietnamese influence in Phnom Penh for a generation, one could argue this backfired. Backing an ousted regime that killed off 20 percent of its population in just four years is not exactly a great way to engender public goodwill or position yourself as a long-term friend to regional governments.

Another exception is in Myanmar, where well-armed rebel groups in the country’s north and northeast have long taken advantage of borders with China (and, to a lesser extent, Thailand) to raise funds, sell contraband, procure weapons, flee attacks and so forth. 

The strongest of these groups, the United Wa State Army, grew out of the armed wing of the Communist Party of Burma, which had received substantial Chinese support in the 1950s as Mao sought to stamp out a fledgling insurgency being organized by U.S.-backed remnants of the Kuomintang in Shan state. Since then, the UWSA has grown into one of the world’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations. 

While it’s believed to have begun sourcing most of its arms from China about two decades ago, Beijing’s relationship with the group is uneasy, at best. 

China isn’t particularly thrilled to have such a group corrupting officials and moving narcotics across its border – particularly one that’s proved strong and independent-minded enough to occasionally frustrate Beijing’s moves to use it to gain leverage over Naypyitaw. And it's an open question just how much of the weapons and financial support that it gets from China is actually sanctioned by Beijing. 

Nonetheless, to keep Myanmar from moving too close to India or the West, Beijing has been keen to position itself as an indispensable power broker in the interminable peace process between Naypyitaw and the rebel groups. 

Since nearly all of the major ethnic armies in Myanmar rely on UWSA support to some extent (the UWSA was named in the aforementioned Indian reports about Chinese-backed arms smuggling networks), China cannot afford to shun the group.

Finally, there’s India, which credibly accuses China of providing safe haven to prominent Naxalite leaders and giving them free rein to raise support and facilitate arms flows into India through largely ungoverned spaces in Myanmar, Bangladesh and northeast India. 

Chinese leaders have tacitly admitted to this by making the case that, since India hosts the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan exiles – even incorporating Tibetans into Indian forces in the Himalayas – fair is fair. Either way, the various separatist groups (some of them Maoist) allegedly receiving Chinese support are at most a perpetual irritant to New Delhi and a modest drain on military resources that could ostensibly be redirected into something more important, like naval development. 

They pose little risk of fundamentally destabilizing the Indian core or undermining Indian control over territory where it actually fears Chinese incursion, such as the Siliguri Corridor. China stands to gain relatively little leverage from supporting them, especially compared to its far more lucrative investment in India’s chief source of concern: Pakistan.

Not Your Father's Cold War

Otherwise, there’s little evidence of much Chinese support for opposition political movements in the region, particularly violent ones. Not that Beijing would be short of opportunities to back such movements if it wanted. The fractured geography of South and Southeast Asia, along with the extreme levels of social disruption and inequality that have come with the globalization boom, makes the region awash with ethnic and demographic fault lines.

Consider the Philippines. The archipelagic country, which functions as something of a gatekeeper to vital sea lanes to the Western Pacific, presents perhaps the foremost strategic problem for China. Naturally, China is desperate to pull the U.S. treaty ally into its camp, or at minimum keep it from allowing the U.S. or another hostile power to set up naval or missile bases there that could be used to impose a blockade on China. 

The Philippines also just happens to be home to a dizzying array of rebel groups, including the New People’s Army, proud facilitators of the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Yet, such groups do not appear to have played any part in China’s ongoing efforts to put the squeeze on Manila.

Its approach to the Philippines illustrates quite a bit about what China actually needs from such states and what tools it thinks might actually be effective. For one, it tells us that Beijing doesn’t think there would be much return on investment from supporting such groups. This is, in part, because few realistically have the potential to be much more than an irritant to their governments. 

The threat posed to Naypyitaw by the United Wa State Army and the other rebel groups in Myanmar is rare, in other words. The New People’s Army, for example, is considered a spent force, having effectively devolved into a decentralized collection of local criminal syndicates rather than something capable of mobilizing the Philippine masses against Manila. 

Moreover, the strongest militant groups in the Philippines, as in much of South and Southeast Asia, are Islamist. Beijing fears anything that would strengthen such groups to the point where they could funnel support to ethnic Uighur militants in Xinjiang and along China’s western borders.

For another, Beijing’s handling of the Philippines tells us that China realizes its ideology no longer has mass appeal. To be sure, with inequality and social disruption soaring across the globe, the environment is as receptive as ever to an ideology focused on class struggle. 

But the Communist Party of China can no longer take advantage of this, because it can’t really hide the fact that it's turning China into an imperialist, wealth-obsessed autocracy treating its neighbors as little more than commodity depots. 

Even the New People’s Army’s parent political organization, the Movement for National Democracy, has been harshly critical of the Duterte administration’s embrace of Beijing’s neocolonialism. 

To the extent that Chinese messaging and disinformation operations can be at least modestly successful, watch a couple of tactics in particular: One is targeting overseas ethnic Chinese communities with nationalist narratives. 

Another is using its growing control over information technologies to censor unflattering news about China, tout Chinese aims as benevolent and projects like the Belt and Road Initiative as mutually beneficial, and sow discontent with Chinese adversaries. (Consider, for example, the way Beijing flooded social media channels overseas with conspiracy theories about the U.S. and COVID-19.)

Finally, it tells us that China thinks the risks of openly attempting to foment rebellion in its periphery far outweigh the potential rewards. Economically, what China needs is open markets for its manufactured goods and emerging technologies, steady supplies of commodities and receptiveness to Chinese investment. Militarily, China needs allies, which at present are very few. 

But at minimum, it needs to keep regional states on the sidelines of its disputes with major outside powers. Diplomatically, it needs to beat back deep-rooted regional suspicions that China’s rise will be inherently incompatible with peace and stability and persuade its neighbors that the best bet for a prosperous future is a China-centric regional order. 

Attempting to destabilize its neighbors, in most cases, would quite likely only undermine these aims, driving them to seek out outside military support, generating suspicion of Chinese technologies and investment, and raising the political risks for regional leaders of cozying up to Beijing. 

The few attempts it has made in recent years at putting its thumb on the scale of another country’s political landscape have backfired, underscoring the reality that pinning one’s geopolitical strategy on any particular regime makes for a flimsy strategy.

For Beijing, then, the best course is likely to continue leaning heavily on the more traditional tools of statecraft it has already been wielding with some efficacy. This means cultivating economic dependencies through investment and market access. It means deepening inter-elite financial ties to ensure pro-China sympathies across countries’ political spectra – something bearing abundant fruit in the Philippines and elsewhere. 

It means tilting the military balance of power with regional states ever more in its favor, declaring that might makes right in territorial disputes, and exposing the limits of America’s interest in coming to their defense. 

It means providing authoritarian-minded regimes in the region with the technological tools and financial resources to cement their control and shield themselves from public discontent. 

In truth, it means making itself an indispensable partner in helping governments put down rebellions – as it did in Nepal in the mid-2000s, when it helped arm the government in its fight against Maoist rebels.

Ultimately, these efforts may not be enough to win long-term friends to the extent needed to establish the new regional order it craves. But Beijing has already succeeded in making regional states, even some powerful ones, exceedingly reluctant to bandwagon against China in meaningful ways. 

No one in the region wants a new cold war, but least of all China. 

Because if China finds itself having to fight in the manner the last one was waged, it’ll quite likely already have lost.