School of War - Ep 168: Nadège Rolland on China’s Vision of Strategic Space

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Nadège Rolland, Distinguished Fellow, China Studies, at the National Bureau of Asian Research and author of Mapping China's Strategic Space, joins the show to discuss how to better understand the geopolitical premises of China’s strategic elites. ▪️ Times      •      01:36 Introduction     •      02:04 Strategic space      •      05:05 Mao’s strategic vision       •      11:12 Origin points       •      17:10 Geopolitical dimensions      •      20:25 Finding answers      •      26:35 Encirclement        •      33:55 Core interests      •      38:56 China’s end goal      •      45:37 Multilateralism        •      49:04 Risk and overextension  Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Every strategist or political leader has, in effect, a mental map of the world with which they work, an understanding of physical space and what matters or doesn't matter within it. How does this process of forming a vision of strategic space work? And what can we learn about the mental maps of China's strategic elite? Really interesting conversation today. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war. This Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii. live in history.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches, there's a fight on the landing ground, we'll fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be welcoming to the show today, Nadge Roland, who is Distinguished Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. She spent many years before that as an analyst, senior advisor on Asian and Chinese strategic issues to the French Ministry of Defense, author of many, many publications on these matters, author most recently of mapping China's strategic space from the National Bureau of Asian Research, a really fascinating report, which is part of a broader project. And I hope that. hope we can get into all that today. Nadesh, thank you so much for joining the show.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Aaron. I want to start with a very broad sort of definitional question just to help listeners orient themselves on what we're talking about before we get into the report's specific findings about China's understanding of space. But when you talk about how leaders imagine space or think about space strategically. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Can you give us some examples maybe from American or French strategic history that could illustrate that or just give us a bit of an introduction? Yeah, sure. Actually, the introduction of the report talks about an equivalent to what the Chinese strategists are thinking about using the 1940s CFR group of civilians who have

just in a few weeks after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, started to think about the post-war conditions and told the State Department, which back then didn't have a policy planning office, that they could help in thinking about what the world would look like and decided after many iterations and conversations and workshops and group discussions, that the U.S. needed to have what they called a grand area, which comprised basically most of the world that they had to have access to

in order to get access to materials, resources, markets. And that also went with another provision, which was having to defend that space against the expansion of Nazi Germany. So what the Chinese strategists are talking about in their own way and slightly differently than the Council of Foreign Relations strategists of the 40s, is something similar to that. So a space that doesn't really coincide with their national borders or the reclamation of lost territories.

after the fall of the Qing dynasty, but something that it's much bigger than that, and that would allow China to grow, to thrive, to expand, to survive, and to establish itself as a great power on the global stage. And just as your American example picks up on a moment in American history or the history of American strategic thinking, which is a moment of great change, right? So your report is charting changes in the Chinese conception of things.

I mean, obviously, if you go back 100 plus years from 1941, you're in the era of the Monroe Doctrine, of America dealing with the French Empire, the British Empire, and just of necessity thinking in more defensive terms. And transitioning there in the mid-40s to a fundamentally different vision of the world and the American role in the world. And let's do the same, as you do in the report, the same sort of chronological sketch of China's evolving vision.

You go back to Mao at the start of the report. How does Mao think about or how did he think about strategic space? Yeah, I guess the main difference between the two processes is that in the case of the American example, this reflection really starts with the beginning of a war. So whereas in the Chinese example, this is a process that takes decades and is going to evolve over a very long period of time. And that sort of vision outside of China's national territory of what this sort of sphere of influence, because this is sort of what we're talking about, looks like already starts with Mao at a time when China was.

very, very weak and very poor, but he had this idea that he sort of comes back to over a decade in the 60s and 70s, that the world is divided in three worlds. It's the three worlds theory in which he really sort of applies a very geopolitical vision that is meant to counter and circle the imperialist powers. So the first, The first world is the combined superpowers, U.S. and USSR. The second world is sort of an intermediate zone in which you have the allies of the U.S., in Europe, in Asia, Canada, Australia are part of the second world. And the third world is everything else.

It's the oppressed countries from the imperialists that if they unite together, will be able to counter and circle the imperialist powers. So that's the beginning of, to me, it's the beginning of a geopolitical thinking that immediately goes at the sort of the global level. And that's the first inklings of a geopolitical or geostrategic thinking at the global level in the modern era. But then for a long time, geopolitics in China, is forgotten because it is associated with imperialist expansion and the way that Western

powers expand and that's bad and that's rejected. It's not that the Chinese strategies don't think geopolitically. It's just that it's the discipline itself is not allowed in the PRC for a couple of decades. But then at the end of the Cold War, there's a renewal of interest in the discipline of geopolitics, both as a way to, again, understand those fundamental shifts that are happening. This time, it's not the rise of superpower. It's the demise of one. And geopolitics give some keys for Chinese strategies to start thinking about those enormous changes that are happening in the world.

And so for a decade, roughly, they're revisiting and relearning the basics of classical geopolitics, and they're going to not only translate, but also study all the great classics, from McKinder to Spightman, to Mahan, et cetera. The decade, starting around 2000, 2001, opens a different center of interest that's related to geopolitics, but that's more focused on power and the various aspects of power.

Soft power is one of them. They spend a lot of time examining it, what it means, how do you acquire it, how do you invest in it, and what benefits can you gain from having it. They spend a lot of time also quantifying their own comprehensive national power they invent indexes and ways to calculate that in order to compare China's power to other great powers on the global stage. So they're transfixed by this idea of power. This is a moment after the turn of the 20th century where they really feel their oaths and everybody else can see that too. and international institutions are already seeing China as the next big power and probably overtaking the U.S. at that point.

So there's a lot of discussions about what that means for China and what the world should look like once China has become this great power. And so again, trying to figure out how China's own geopolitical position is going to influence the kind of power it's going to become is at the heart of those discussions throughout the first decade of the 21st century. One of I think the really useful subsidiary contributions of your report is outlining the way in which the strategic logic that results, in the Belt and Road Initiative and everything we sort of deal with today under Xi Jinping, precedes Xi substantially. And I know amongst professional China watchers and those who are serious and were paying attention at the start of the 21st century, that that's a commonplace and not particularly remarkable. But out in the broader world, I have heard many, you know, prominent American figures who

were, you know, fairly hawkish on China today say things to the effect of, well, it's really when Xi came on the scene that everything changed. may be true in some ways, but certainly in the evolution of, just call it China's geopolitical aggressiveness or aggressiveness in geopolitical terms, you chart a much longer story with much deeper roots. Yeah. So Xi Jinping is really an accelerator, but he's not really revolutionary in that sense. Even though he puts in his own mark and says, you know, this is a new era, et cetera, we can talk about that. But I came to this question of delineations of China's strategic space, really from my research on the Belt and Road back in 2014, 2015, where those underlying geopolitical

undertones were quite prominent. And I kept, you know, going back to it, the definition of those corridors, the Silk Road Economic Belt, and 21st century maritime Silk Road, I mean, this continental and maritime elements of the Belt and Road, all of that really just screams geopolitics. I was expecting to see a lot of those discussions happening around after 2008, frankly, because this is also one of the markers that most China watchers have really seen as a moment when things have started changing in China's strategic thinking. So that already predates Xi Jinping. It's when Huchintao is in power. We can see a lot of assertiveness in the South China Sea starting in 2009, 2010. And I was expecting, I came to the project thinking, okay, this seems to be the key four years, like before he arrives to power when all of this thinking is really starting to happen. And the more I looked, the more I had to go back and back and back in time in order to trace the origin story of this.

thinking in space. And 2001 is another really important marker for various reasons, including the 9-11 attacks, but also China's entry into WTO. So this feeling of its own power and combined with some weaknesses on the U.S. side, that's also a theme that is recurrent throughout this long period. then going back at the end of what we call the Cold War, and then even understanding, like realizing that those discussions started even before the Soviet Union collapsed in the mid-80s. Already, some military thinkers were starting to envision that China is going to become a great

power and it will have to have a military tool that will have to accompany this rise and start to define what it means in spatial terms. Of course, when I say space, this is not outer space. It's all elements of territories, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible. And so I was really shocked to discover that it's a sort of a murmur. It's a conversation that is happening in the background, and then it intensifies when some events are happening. But it's been, it's always been there. I genuinely don't say this about every think tank report that we discuss on the show.

I wouldn't say it about most. But the report really is, I mean, it's an elegantly written intellectual history that I found really compelling. And I really do recommend it to listeners. Thank you. And to your point about how it's, there's a little bit of. this military dimension to things, but there's also these, these other dimensions. This is something that I personally just struggle with conceptualizing as how do you marry in your head? Sort of easy to understand very longstanding understandings of space from the military perspective. You know,

you have a border, but you need to defend it. So do you let the bad guys come in? And if you have a lot of strategic depth, do you have a big country? Or do you defend them forward of your border? And what do you need a buffer zone? And what is required to defend that? That's all very long. longstanding, fairly easy to understand stuff. And it undergirds a lot of traditional geopolitical theory. There's more to traditional geopolitical theory in Spikeman and the hand and so forth, but it undergirds a lot of that. But even there with those authors, you're getting inquiries into supply chains in a way and economic factors that extend beyond purely military considerations and the role of commercial life and strategy and all of these things. And then, you know, things get

really complicated in the second part of the 20th century because now we have nuclear weapons, which seems to suggest that these considerations of space and time matter less, because you can push a button and everything goes in a few minutes. And then you have, you have stuff that just boggles the mind as you try to understand it in space. You know, as the internet effect geopolitical calculations. Like that's a really hard. It's just all of, you layer so much stuff on top of the old original very, you know, sort of straightforward frontier considerations. And it starts to fry your brain a little bit. And by fry your brain, I really mean fry my brain because I really do like, this is like an ongoing

project for me is trying to like visualize all this or understand all this. And the best evidence that I have that that project is important and I shouldn't just wash my hands of it because, you know, geopolitics is kind of, it's a bit out of date considering everything else that's come down the pike. Is that the Chinese are apparently obsessed with it. That's the great proof to me that actually this is all we're thinking about. Yeah, well, I think all the questions that fry your brain also fry their brain. And so they're trying to wrestle with all that.

And the first papers that they write in the mid-80s, late 80s, are struggling with the various dimensions of the space as well. And it is complicated or enabled by the advances in technology. and they're very much aware of that. And then as they move forward and you trace the way their thinking evolves or changes or adapts, there are the dimensions that are added to the sort of linear or flat map. And yes, the cyberspace is added to it. Another component that adds to the frying brain is also the ideological component. That really transpires a lot in their discussions really from early on.

Our view politics would probably very simply have in mind the, well, it's a map and then the continental powers and maritime powers and their pivot areas and things like that. Okay, fine. But the way they're thinking about it is that, again, that multidimensional space, out of space, maritime, internet. But there's also that ideological component that's very present. And when they're talking specifically at the turn of the 21st century, they're talking about space being squeezed. What they mean by that is sort of a very amorphous perception of threat that is, a mix of military presence, but also of increasing color revolutions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

And when you're like, okay, how does that have to do with geopolitics as we understand it? Well, I think that's just a reflection of how Beijing and the strategic community over there is thinking about the threats to the regime. therefore to the to the prospect of the of the country as a whole. So that's a dimension that's also that was also very striking to me that is completely associated with the more territorial, if you will, dimensions of geopolitics. So you've mentioned maritime versus land,

this sort of tension in traditional geopolitical thinking a few times now. when the Chinese make this geopolitical turn, this turn to traditional geopolitical theory, I guess what, beginning in the in the 80s, but really explicitly more recently in the period you're out in the early aughts and right before she shows up. What do they think they learn? You know, how do they, what examples seem to them to be most apt for ways of thinking through China's dilemmas and situation? What do they find in this literature?

Yeah. So that's also interesting in the sense that sometimes you need. actually to read things that have nothing to do with China that don't talk about China in order to find answers to that question. So what I mean by that is you're very rarely are going to find a paper that says in its title or even in its demonstration or argument. Here's what China should do. But what you will find is a historical example.

or this or that power rising and lessons to be learned. Something like that. And perhaps at the very end of the conclusion, you will have one sentence that says, oh, and by the way, this would be interesting for China to look at because of the lessons and the mistakes to avoid and the lessons that we could learn from that. But they never say, this is what we need to do.

That's maybe a long answer. to your question, but China's geopolitical position is of what they call a composite land-sea power because it has both this huge, like massive or this continental mass, but at the same time, it has a maritime, it has a coastal face. And so in that sense, it is a little bit like Germany in the 19th century. Similar situation, continental depth and a little bit of a coast that is actually also prevented from accessing the oceans directly. China has the first island chain in front of its maritime space. That's one of the first constraints to its expansion. So the strategic community revisits the history of those also hybrid continental maritime powers

and finds that they were in a very difficult situation historically. But again, they're not really, the authors who are looking at those historical examples don't really say, I mean, they basically say we need to be careful of not opening two fronts and because this would be catastrophic. They're in a bind because if they want to expand on their maritime flank, then the maritime superpower or hegemon is going to see it with a lot of concern and they're going to try to balance this maritime expansion. But at the same time, if they just look towards the continent,

they're going to be pressed and constrained by local countries or regional powers. So it creates a lot of geopolitical problems for them. I think the conclusion, as we have seen it evolve on the ground, and that's not the sort of intellectual discussions, but more of, okay, so what did it do with that? is trying to break what they feel is a strategy of containment and encircurement from the U.S. And basically trying to do that from every single strategic direction you can think of. And so you need to break through the first island chain to go to the ocean. That's something that most Americans I've heard about by now,

what they're trying to do in the South China Sea, to try to push and expand their control of the maritime area in order to expand towards the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. That's something that people have spent a lot of time studying, examining, analyzing in the U.S. But there's also that continental part that is super important for Beijing and consolidating its backyard, specifically with Russia, is really key to being able to expand in a 360-degree fashion. So the expansion is not just maritime. It's both continental and maritime, and it really radiates China at the core, and you can draw arrows all around China.

this is the direction of expansion. Well, as some of the authors who you cite as sounding cautionary notes a couple of decades ago may have expected, it's got all of our attention now. Yes. And the whole world is paying attention. And this language that you're using of, you know, breaking through the first island chain and breaking containment and encirclement and all this kind of stuff is a matter of open conversation in 2024 to include on the American side where people openly, policy makers

openly talk about, you know, how do we modify Cold War Europe policies of containment for the more complex situation. We deal with China and so forth. But what's so fascinating about what you just laid out is these concerns and considerations are being discussed 20 years ago. Yes. And maybe that's my next question is help us understand in a way that's sort of like a, I don't know if this is an ideological question or just a question about just the nature

of politics and strategic thinking. But why? Why in the year 2001, 2002? are there Chinese writers writing about the need to break out of encirclement? I don't think very many Americans at the time thought that they were encircling China. And I think there's an interesting ideological question on the American side there we could get into. So help us understand that. Yeah.

So the alliance system that basically allows the U.S. to project power and to be physically militarily present in Asia through military, basis is one of the reasons why Beijing fills this encircurement. So the military presence is one of the factors. 2001, well, it's basically the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the global war and terror and the deployment of U.S. troops and Western military troops in Central Asia. Afghanistan, bases also through Central Asia. And so China is looking at this and thinking, okay, not only now we have bases in Japan and South Korea, but they're also encircling us from Central Asia. So it accelerates this important.

of their strategic space being constrained. Around that same period of time, something is happening in Eastern Europe, where you have a series of color revolutions, countries, people who are demanding that their political regimes evolve into a more democratic direction, including in Central Asia as well.

And Beijing looks at said this and sees that this is part of, basically there's the black hand of the U.S. behind all those democratic movements. They cannot just fathom that this is a call from the people who are fed up with autocratic regimes. They think that this is, it's a scheme and that the U.S. has been encouraging those democratic movements and that basically it's going to have a domino effect that the the principal target for those movements is Russia and it's containing it's about containing the Russian influence but by extension because Russia is China's neighbor it also affects China itself so there there too you have

that sort of physical military sense of containment you also have that ideological sense of containment. And both are very much intertwined around that time. And then it's an interesting thing because the perception of that compression, both from the maritime flank and in Central Asia, doesn't disappear when the U.S. leaves Afghanistan. It actually reappears in the form of, oh, now they're getting out of Afghanistan, so they're going to come and pressure us on our maritime plank even more. And the Obama administration's pivot to Asia or rebalancing to Asia is also read through those lenses of this is a strategy of containment.

It's a continuation of the U.S. strategy of containment of China. This is not something that is read as, oh, it's going to help the development of Asian markets or anything or anything like that. It's read as a threatening and a threatening policy that is meant to contain China and prevent its rise. This is also something we're talking about having to go back in time in order to see the origins of this thinking, but that feeling of U.S. hostile maneuvers against China and basically everything that U.S. does or does not do are perceived as being targeting China and preventing it from achieving its rightful objectives of rejuvenation, rise, and finding or refining its place at the center of the world. And that goes back. Yeah, that goes back a long, long way.

I mean, these are my words, not yours, but you sort of point to varying degrees of paranoia or solipsism, you know, on the Chinese side. There is on the American side, you know, some of the actions you describe, you know, there is a, I'm not sure what the one word summary of it is, but there is a kind of thoughtlessness or a lack of attention to context that seems to me to be kind of endemic to a lot of these decisions. You know, I was in Afghanistan. I, I, I was in Afghanistan. Spent time in Kyrgyzstan at Manas. Yes. So all the things you're talking about, and I paid attention to the debates at the time,

and I've paid attention to discussions of Afghanistan since up to and including the withdrawal in 2021. China does not factor into those debates or discussions. It does. I mean, it's an extremely limited in passing fashion. I mean, the Indo-Pakistan rivalry barely factors into those discussions, even if in retrospect the war in Afghanistan was really kind of about, I mean, I can make this case a greater length. But it really is kind of about Indo-Pakistani rivalry in certain respects. And it's amazing to me.

It's always been amazing how little that mattered or how little it was discussed, the American policy discussions of the war there. So there is a particular American way of doing these things that have dimensions that will be perceived in a certain way or that might actually objectively be a certain thing. But in our minds, sometimes we're not as aware of those objective. consequences we might otherwise be. Sure. And that's, I don't think that's a problem.

I think as a great nation, you're just following your, you know, your national objectives, wherever your national interests go. And therefore, you don't really think about, okay, what are the regional powers going to think about what we're doing? I think that's fair game for a great power. And I think that China is basically doing the same thing. You remind us in the report of this fascinating moment in 2007 when a senior PLA, I guess, a PLA Navy Admiral is chatting with then Admiral Keating, the commander of PACOM,

and sort of almost sort of casually suggests, look, you guys, you've got Hawaii, you take everything up to Hawaii, we'll take everything West of Hawaii. It's like where it's like 1941, 42 again. It's like, let's just what the Imperial Japanese did, let's just sort of agree to that and call it good. And it's an amazing moment. It's hard to evaluate, you know, how serious it was. I imagine that PLA Navy admirals don't freelance this kind of thing. It seems to me like it would be bad for business if you were a PLA Navy Admiral.

But talk about that moment, if you would, and what it indicated and what it indicates about Chinese aspirations. Yeah, so I guess that comes at a point. I mean, a couple of things. You're right. PLA officers at that level. don't really freestyle. And it's more about trial balloons that they send out. But there should be a collection of these moments,

a catalogue of these moments somewhere because you could see that it's just like this idea of, was it, core interest? Like the South China Sea is a core interest that was supposed to have been said to Hillary Pinton, but then there was, oh, no, it's an error of translation. I mean, everybody was trying to analyze whether this had been said or not said or what was the context. No, it's a mistake of translation or whatever.

This is also an example of that. And there was another military officer who talked about milking Los Angeles at some point. I can't remember exactly. But same thing. It's like, oh, my God, this guy is really freelancing and he's not. this is not serious and he's a rogue element. Well, it turns out he's not that rogue because he got a promotion after that. Anyway, so those things matter.

They're part of signaling and they are meant to test the waters and see the reaction and, you know, just see if you can push a little bit further the red lines. And then there's a lot of plausible deniability because, yeah, okay, It's that one person, but it's not really an official, like, general secretary who's saying it. The moment when this particular event happens, I think, just reflects also some discussions back in China where they're starting to try to delineate more carefully that strategic space that would be needed for China's rise. And one of the areas that is very important, obviously, is being able to have this freedom of maneuver in the Pacific Ocean. Pacific and Indian Ocean are very early on around that time.

They're starting to be defined as areas, strategic directions, areas of expansion. And it's encapsulated very clearly in the science of military strategy that's published. in 2013. You talk in the report about Chinese aspirations to use international law or international governance institutions to further their geopolitical aims. And totally by chance this morning, I was on Twitter, X, spending more time there than I should. And totally by chance I came across this new report by two Chinese scholars called containment

and hedging the U.S. strategic perspective on China. China's Polar Silk Road Initiative. Ah, there you go. It's very, it's a couple weeks old, I think. Jia Jiao and Hying Liu, who appear to be at the School of International Affairs and Public Administration, Ocean University, China. And I just, I just read the abstract, but it's so relevant to what we're talking about because it speaks to, you know, I, I enjoyed it.

I was chuckling as I read it because I was just coming off of reviewing your report in preparation for this. Because it speaks to a kind of information war dimension to everything we're talking about as well. So here's the abstract. the U.S. Strategic Community views China's polar Silk Road Initiative as a geopolitical maneuver linking China's Arctic activities with goals of geopolitical control, resource clundering, security threats and potential debt traps. In response, the, you know, in parentheses,

paranoid, U.S. strategic community emphasizes containment and hedging, et cetera, et cetera. However, China's activities focus on multilateral governance, sustainable economic cooperation and scientific research challenging the prevailing perceptions held by the U.S. strategic community. The U.S. strategic community's negative perceptions of the Polar Silk Road Initiative have constrained China's diplomatic discourse power, security stands, and economic activities in the Arctic complicating its regional partnerships. To address these challenges, China could reinforce its contributions to Arctic governance through multilateral cooperation, particularly in climate monitoring, environmental protection, and clean energy initiatives. There's just so,

much there. I actually kind of like, I don't know if you're a fan of the movie Anchorman, Nadegh, but when Will Ferrell, the protagonist comes home and his dog, Baxter, has eaten all of the food in the refrigerator. He says, I'm not even mad. I'm just impressed. And I'm like, the dexterousness and the plates that are spinning in this abstracts for out of rhetorical level are just fascinating to me. And I immediately reminded me of what you're talking about in, in the report. I mean, I could go on to unpack what I just read, but maybe I'll just toss it to you. Welcome to my world. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's really interesting. So when I was doing the research for my book on the Belt and Road, I wrote a couple of emails to people at the NDAU, National Defense University and Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, asking them if we could talk about Belt and that was, yeah, 2015. And they said, oh, yeah, of course, which, yeah, no problem. And then a couple of days later, I'm sorry, no, this is, this is not a military project. And so we're not, we're not going to talk about it.

It's like, okay, interesting. But yes, it's, it's that gymnastics, it's quite interesting also, that sort of cognitive contortions. Because those thinkers, what they really are talking about is China's expansion. They're not talking about the form that that, that, expansion could take or will take, you know. But they really are talking about an expanded sphere, and that takes, again, multiple dimensions. It's not necessarily that they're thinking about it in terms of military conquest and, like,

owning some territories or the way the, you know, the Mongolian hordes used to do across Eurasia. or that the European powers did in starting in the 16th century. It's something that I still cannot really put my finger on. And probably they don't either. You know, they're just, but they are really obsessed with that. It's like they feel like they're under a lot of constraint. And whether this is true or a fact or whether it's in, it's their perception. In the end, doesn't really matter.

The conclusion is the same for them. They need to break it. They need to make sure that they have enough space. They feel like they're choked. And Xi Jinping said it even last year. You know, there is suppression, encircumment, and containment from the U.S. and the U.S.-led West. So it cannot be clearer than that. Those three words that he uses also point to.

a different kind of pressure on China. Suppression, it's the economic suppression, it's the economic sanctions, the lack of access to high tech and markets, et cetera. The containment is about the ideological as much as everything else, and the encircurement is more like the military, physical presence of the U.S. in Asia. So everything is really read through those lenses, and then they're trying to find solutions to address that. But it also seems like it's a sort of, of an objective that isn't finite, you know. It's like, what is the angle of that? It's the disappearance of the threat altogether. in all its forms. So basically, China cannot be at peace and reason until and unless the US is out of the

way. If you, you know, if you go to the logical expansion of that thinking, we're squeezed, we're suppressed, we're encircled, we're encircled, we'll contain. What we want is to be expanding, rising and being at the center of this space in which we basically are seen as the new ruler or whatever the form it's going to take. And the only power, the only thing that prevents us from achieving this aim, well, it's the US-led West. So what to do about it? There's another factor that comes into play, which is how to realize this dream of the great rejuvenation without starting a full-out war, because China is still not strong enough to basically win it. So there's a lot of factors, and I feel like my own brain is

being fried right now, just because of all the elements that all the plates that that are twirling above my head. Well, there's a lot in what you just said. You know, one of the things, just not to be overly obsessed with this amusing little abstract, but one of the things that really strikes me in it is, you know, the sort of step one is these paranoid Americans are upset about our totally legitimate activities in the Arctic. No mention of why, you know, maybe the total militarization of the South China Sea,

extraordinarily aggressive military activity, targeting the Philippines, Taiwan, of course, you know, like maybe, maybe that's got our concerns raised a bit, but never mind all that. These people are, these people are crazy and they're worried and they're trying to constrain us, which is totally unfair. And so, and then in the rhetoric of this piece, what we actually recommend is, you know, an emphasis on multilateralism, climate, et cetera, et cetera. And that, to me, was sort of musing and shameless, but in a way, in a way accurate as a description of the things the Chinese are actually doing.

And I take it to be a kind of almost tongue in cheek at the highest strategic level, a kind of tongue in cheek throwing back in the American face what they see as the tools of American hard power. Yeah. That is to say that we, they see us, maybe this is more accurate in recent years. Maybe there's more self-awareness. But I would say 20 years ago, when Americans talked about multilateralism and, you know, international institutions and international law, like we really mean it. we really meant it at least. We still do mean it. I think there's a dawning awareness of the hard power implications of all of these things under

frankly Chinese and Russian pressure today. But I mean, in a very, in a much less complicated way, Americans traditionally sort of mean these things when they say them. And I take that this to be a kind of tweak, a tweak of an American or Western audience or a design to make the case to a certain portion of a Western audience. That actually China is the true. Yes. protector of multilateralism as opposed to these sort of reckless Americans.

I don't know if you would agree with that. Yeah. So that's another project I did four years ago on China's vision for a new world order. And what was really striking was the fact that multilateral institutions came very prominently, again, as a factor of how the U.S. has asserted its own power. And I guess it's not so much the legitimization saying here, China is the true believer and supporter of multilateralism.

That's sort of the propaganda line that they are trying to sell out. And the U.S. is making it easier for them to sell that, as you said, as they sort of shrink away from their participation in multilateralism. institutions. But what's interesting also is how do they really think about those institutions and the norms that those institutions support? Basically, they see it as a, it's very pragmatic. It's not like you can have the sort of institution architecture, but the norms can change because of the power, of who is in power and who controls the norms and the narrative. So that's why when they say, you know, we want to support multilateralism, I think it's the

structure, but not the norms that underpin the international order. Of course, they are not comfortable with international norms that support human rights and liberalism and democratic values and transparency and rule of law, et cetera, et cetera, these are antithetical to the CCP. So they, and they feel like those norms prevail, not because they are universal, but because they're just a manifestation of the power of the United States who believes in those values. And so if you change that great power, that hegemon, and you have a different set of values that this new hegemon believes in and supports, then the order changes. And you don't

need to change the structure. You just need to change the norms and the narratives that they support. Last question for you. You said a few minutes ago that if you take these lines of Chinese strategic thinking to their logical conclusion, that logical conclusion is, you know, the world's really only safe with the American threat in some way eliminated. I mean, that could mean, that could mean a lot of things. But in America, at least in America that no longer is capable of containment or as containment or whatever. Well, that's that's grand ambition and bold ambition that in some way starts to pick up steam right with the Chinese perception 15, 20 years ago that America was in decline. China's on the

rise. So there's a sort of naturalness to the evolution. How did the Chinese, think about their own assumption of risk, and how would they come to understand themselves to be overextended? That's my, that's another, we could talk for another hour or two on that, but that's my, that's my question I want to close with. There's a few thinkers that are very much inclined to think about overextension and the risks of it. So what we've discussed for the past hour is really things, it's a mental map. It, it's, it doesn't, it doesn't, exist in reality. That sort of sphere of influence, that's quasi-global when you go and take a look at the project and the report, you will see we have tried to put this in maps just to visualize it,

and you can see the scope and scale of it, and it's really massive, but it only exists in the depths of their imagination so far. China doesn't have the power to exert. any kind of control over all those spaces as much as they would like, it gives them a direction of, again, of effort. Where do their interests need to be protected and their presence being developed and increased? But there's a risk also that's underlined by some thinkers, but not the majority of overextension. Because like any other power, they have finite resources and they, you know, they don't want to put everything on, on this kind of expansion, which, again, has not really been realized yet. So there's a, there's a question that I asked at the end of

the report, which is, okay, so if this expansion was, basically has reached its sort of maximum scope at a time when China's power was really on the rise and everybody agreed on that. And now we are at a time when its material resources and economic prospects might be slightly different than they were 10 years ago. How does that affect the calculation of those strategic elites in China? So are they going to, is this mental map that's quasi-global going to show shrink down and go back to regional. It really never was. As we go through this intellectual history, we can see that it was never, trying to never really saw itself as a regional power in East Asia. The map was immediately quasi-global. So that would be a possibility. Another possibility, which is,

I think, the direction that Beijing has been taking in the past three to four years, And it goes back to this idea of space as being multidimensional and that untangible part of space being really important. It's the ideological space. And it could stay at the quasi-global level, but instead of pouring millions into the development of critical infrastructure in the developing world, like it tried to do with the best. Belt and Road, it will now be more trying to shape the governance norms. And again, going back to this idea of different values and model, which is, I think, encapsulated in this idea of a civilization. Beijing has put forward the global civilization initiative.

people don't pay attention to that one as much as they do to the global security initiative and development initiative. But that's the space in which I think Beijing is going to put more effort in the years to come to continue to assert its influence in order to counter the U.S. dominance. Nadej Rolande, author most recently of Mapping China's Strategic Space from the National Bureau of Asian research. This was a really fascinating conversation. I really do recommend the report, which again, it has all the visuals that you're talking about as well, which we can't really do here current format. And thank you so much for coming today. It was lovely to chat with you. Thank you

very much, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.