Shane Leary joins Miles Yu to discuss the overwhelming international diplomatic response to the 2024 Taiwanese election, and what this means for Taiwan's place on the global stage. They then turn to Chinese Premier Li Qiang's visit to Davos, where he attempted to woo elites with questionable economic figures. Finally, they cover a new study from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which ranks China as the worst country in the world because Beijing jails both citizen and professional journalists.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world’s future.
Transcript
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from Hudson Institute's China Center.
Shane Leary:
It's Tuesday, January 23rd, and we have three topics this week. The first is Miles’ account of the incredible international attention the 2024 Taiwanese election has garnered, and what this tells us about the evolving Taiwan paradigm. Second, we discuss PRC Premier Lee Chang's visit to Davos and the CCP’s attempt to woo elites with less than credible economic figures. Finally, we discuss a new study from the committee to protect journalists which ranks China as the worst country in the world for jailing both citizen and professional journalists. Miles, how are you?
Miles Yu:
Very good, Shane.
Shane Leary:
Wonderful. Well, so for our first topic, I'd like to go back to the 2024 Taiwan election and William Lai and the DPPs victory. Miles, now that some time has passed, we've had some time to digest the victory itself in the range of diplomatic reactions to this election. I want to ask you about those reactions. What stood out to you in terms of international response?
Miles Yu:
Well, this time the international response is unusually voluminous and significant. First of all, China's response is also very peculiar. China's response to the Taiwanese election is always very timely and vicious, but this time the Taiwanese election is so transparent, so fair and free. They really didn't have much to say, otherwise they can make a fool of themselves. So the most pointed point the Chinese state official said about Taiwanese election is, “You know what? This is a three-way race. The winning candidate president-elect Lai Ching-te got only 40% of the vote, so it's not enough to represent the Taiwanese people.” So in our words, they try to delegitimize his victory. And China had this kind of peculiar logic. Of course, implicitly in this kind of a rebuttal is that, “You see, Xi Jinping won his presidency with a hundred percent of the vote. Therefore, the Chinese Communist Party obviously represents the real Chinese people, every one of them.”
However, this campaign was pretty inspirational to a lot of people. That's why the Chinese government tried to block as much as they can. As usual, that is expected, but there's really no major negative vicious campaign against the Taiwanese election process, per se. The Communist Party brings the hope as if it didn't happen, but the Chinese people pay a lot of attention to it. So much so that the CCP propaganda department had to respond with its own infomercial against Taiwan's infomercial. The most famous, most influential political campaign ads was a four minute infomercial produced by the winning team at DPP, which is basically about a short distance drive featuring incumbent President Thai as the driver. And now in the middle of the road, she changed the driver seat and give it to the president, elected Lai and saying that Taiwanese democracy journey is long. We have gone so far and got to keep going, whatever we have been doing.
So that infomercial piece is titled “On the Road.” So the Chinese propaganda put out another one it said “Forever on the Road” featuring Xi Jinping as the only driver in the car. So it's very, very peculiar. But, international response. Back to your question was really extraordinary and obvious. Taiwan government said so far, president-elect Lai has received congratulations from over 1,400 VIPs in 106 countries in the world. This's extraordinary, which is in sharp contrast to every single election in the past. This is open, this is direct. In their congratulations notes, this international VIP is including leaders from the us, uk, Japan, and as a matter of fact, all of the G7 countries, the Philippines, Singapore, et cetera, et cetera. There are several major themes. One is obviously congratulations to President-elect Lai, but most importantly, the congratulations notes also send hearty greetings to Taiwan and their people.
The Japanese Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yoko issued a very long congratulations statement in which she said, I quote “For Japan, Taiwan is an extremely crucial partner and an important friend.” That's pretty strong language. And all of this congratulations stress the free and fair democratic process in Taiwan. I think the oblique message to China is this: all this VIP send their congratulations notes to President-elect Lai to stress the importance of a peaceful resolution to the tensions along the Taiwan Strait. So it's kind of the dig to China, and of course China went into a full panic mood. They issued protests, démarches, and warnings to all these countries that sent notes to Taiwan. And it's kind of like acting like a cry baby. Particularly harsh on the Philippines, because the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, issued a personal insult to the President of Philippines, President Marcos Jr., urging him to say, “Read more books, you should study more. He will be learning a lot if he do some due diligence and study more.”
Shane Leary:
To follow up on this, I mean there have been cross rate tensions for decades now. Why has the reaction to this particular election been so significant? And I mean, have previous Taiwanese elections garnered this degree of attention?
Miles Yu:
No, I mean there are few expected congratulations notes to the winner in the past. You say, for example, in the last two year elections, president Tsai Ing-wen won both of them and there were only a couple of countries sent the note in the open because they didn't want to enrage China. This time you got one or six countries send notes to Taiwanese for their election success. Well, the reason this year is very different. The reason for this year is offering good feelings, open express by international committee is very complicated. First of all, the election itself was a mind-bogglingly exciting, free, fair and civilized. So the world literally was in awe. So many people watching this tiny island democracy that practiced such an extraordinary sort of show, such extraordinary enthusiasm for this. And yet when the election was over and everybody recognized the legitimacy of this result.
So it really is amazing educational as well as inspirational. Secondly, congratulating Lai shows the world's recognition of Taiwanese government's legitimacy. Legitimacy comes only from fair election. So implicit in those congratulations is that the CCP regime is not legitimate, because nobody elected Xi Jinping to supremacy. And, of course, recognizing Taiwanese government's legitimacy is just one step closer to recognize the Taiwan sovereignty and statehood. This is why it's very important. Another thing is also the reason why Taiwanese election this year is particular eye-catching is because of China's own doing. That is China pretty much chased out all the major international media outlets out of China. Most of them went to Taiwan. And you have this huge concentration of international media outlets in Taiwan covering China. And of course what happened locally is going to get a lot of attention. So there's a lot of reporting about Taiwanese election this year as opposed to in the past election cycles.
But more importantly, Taiwan is no longer a tiny island without clout, without significance. Taiwan has become a high-tech giant, a leading country in semiconductor and also a leader in next generation high-tech innovation and design. So it is also economic upstart and a rules-abiding responsible global citizen. So it's not, “Taiwan is just the exporter of bubble tea and other Taiwanese sweet candies.” So Taiwan is a very important part of the international community and plays a crucial role as Taiwan's security is also somebody else's security too. So that's why Japanese Foreign Minister said very well for Japan, for example, Taiwan is an extremely crucial partner and important friend.
Shane Leary:
For our next topic. PRC Premier Li Qiang went to Davos touting China's economic comeback. He brought with him the largest entourage the PRC has ever sent to the event. Why are CCP officials so interested in it?
Miles Yu:
Well, because China is in a very isolated position in the world. China’s so-called economic miracle is gone. The reason is that the Chinese government has lost credibility. Its economic policy has become the scourge of global growth. That's why China sent a 140 person delegation, including the ministers of main government bureaucracy led by Premier Li Qiang to Davos. And this is basically he's trying to regain the trust of international community, regain trust in China's economic policies. And so, by so doing that, he had to make a lot of phony statistics and just a lot of hot air there.
Shane Leary:
What is Davos for our listeners?
Miles Yu:
Well, Davos is also known as the World Economic Forum, which basically is the brainchild of the Swiss billionaire Klaus Schwab. And Davos is an elitist, pro-CCP, anti-market and billionaires’ club, literally. And Davos claims to be the protector of global order. Yet they're perfectly willing to destroy the earth in order to save the environment, to annihilate the national economy in order to reach the kumbaya of globalization, to redistribute other people's wealth to seek social justice and income equity. The biggest sin of Davos in my view is that it is the most enthusiastic advocate for the creation and protection of the biggest contradiction of our times. That is: to allow the world's biggest non-market economy, China, to enjoy the full membership of the global free market system. Davos is so pious and faithful to this abomination that they cannot tolerate any criticism and then Davos acts hypocritically.
I mean last year, you may know this, Davos asked me to write an article about the global economic system and China's role in it. So when I finished it, they rejected it because the Davos leadership said the content is not good, too hostile to China. I was talking about the economic reality. So I probably was somewhere else. That's why the CCP usually send a huge delegation to Davos. Xi Jinping himself normally would go, but this time is China's new Premier Li Qiang. So in the Davos conference this year, Premier Li Qiang made two main points. Number one, he told the world economic leaders that China's economy is in very good shape. Indeed, Premier Li Qiang said that, for 2023, China's GDP growth was 5.2%. So the second point he made was China's market is still full of potential because there was a lot of rich Chinese people with increased purchasing power.
China has a middle income population of over 400 million, Premier Li QIang assured everyone. And he further boasted that in the next few years, this 400 million middle income population will double to over 800 million strong. And their purchasing power is going to be very, very enormous. Neither of these two claims is real. They're false. They're phony without credibility. So much so that when Li Qiang uttered those points. The international economic circle responded with a negative interaction. The same day when Li Qiang made those remarks, the stock market failed dramatically. That day, Hong Kong stock dropped by 3.71%. That's huge drop. Shanghai's stock exchange dropped by 2.09%. So is the London stock exchange dropping by 1.48% and Paris Bourse dropped by 1.07% as well. So you can see the distrust in the Chinese government economic policy, in it's ability to right the wrong course, has deepened. The reason why I say these two points were fake, untrustworthy, is because, let's just say this, the 5.2% GDP increase was just a fantasy.
No sane and ethical economist or political figure could responsibly bring this up. The Rhodian Group, which is an economic research think tank issued a report particularly rebuttal pointed out that at the best China's GDP growth in last year is not 5.2, but 1.5% and that's very, very presumptuous in a way. China's economy is in terrible shape. The consumption trade and foreign direct investment all went down dramatically. As a matter of fact, international investment in China has gone negative. In other words, there's more international investment out of China than into China last year. And you have this unemployment rate at the alarming high, unemployment used to hover somewhere between 20 to 45%. In this kind of situation, and the premier of China still had the guts and the chutzpah to say there was a 5.2% increase, which is basically unbelievable.
Now another one, he said there is right now 400 million strong middle income population in China. That one is highly impossible as well. According to China's own statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics, average median number of disposable income for all 1.4 billion Chinese for 2023 is a mere 2,753 yuan. That is about $400 a month. China's foremost financial paper, Cai Xin says people with a monthly income over $700 a month account for only 5% of the population. That's roughly about 72 million people. Overwhelming majority or about 964 million people, that's close to a billion people in China, or 69%, 69% of the entire Chinese population, make under $300 a month. So between the 5% of people making about $700 a month and the 69% making under $300 a month or roughly about 400 million Chinese, they're making between 300 and $700 per month, average about $500 a month. So anybody who's not crazy or intellectually dishonest can say that the average income of the nation, that $400 a month in concert with 400 million middle income class.
So the question therefore is China has had the nearly three decades of tremendous economic growth, mostly double digit annually. Where has the enormous wealth and money created by such a sustained economic growth gone? Well, the answer is that the wealth has obviously not been shared by the Chinese people. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party’s government has taken a lion's share of the benefits of this growth, which is why in China the state is getting richer and richer, but the people are getting poorer and poorer in relative terms. So the good news is that even Davos could not buy a snake oil salesman Premier Li Qiang’s crazy statistics.
Shane Leary:
This just seems like such a tone deaf approach. From my perspective. Western businesses have sort of three primary concerns with the Chinese economy right now. There's a sort of lack of credibility in their statistics. There's a lack of transparency in data and then there's a lack of trust in them politically, there's a political concern in terms of the environment for businesses operating there. This approach of just touting new statistics doesn't seem to attend to any of these. Are they really that sort of blind to the circumstances or what do you make of that?
Miles Yu:
Okay, so you ask a very, very good question. It actually points to this new development in China that is the Chinese Communist Party really runs country with basically two branches, right? One is the Chinese Party apparatus; that is the propaganda, the ideologically tuned body. Xi Jinping is basically the head of that branch. There's another one, which is the state council, which runs the country. It is a governing body. So traditionally economy, domestic policies is done by the State Council, by the governing body, with some kind of an economist there, some people who are more practical and pragmatic. However, two years ago Xi Jinping took over. He said that, “You know what, I'm going to centralize all the governing decisions, including economic decisions in the Communist Party Central Committee, in my hand.” So he's now basically replacing the ideological wing of the Chinese government with the pragmatic wing of the state council. So that's why all these things you see is basically a script produced by this Communist Party Central Committee. Though they confuse propaganda with the economic data and that's the problem. So it's nothing surprising to me at all, but this is the sad situation in China.
Shane Leary:
No, and that makes perfect sense. I mean, ideology and loyalty seem to have overtaken practical concern. So for our last topic, miles, I want to ask. China, according to a new study, has been ranked as the worst country in the world in terms of jailing journalists. This is from the Committee to Protect Journalists based out of New York. According to them, China accounts for 32% of the world's total journalists imprisoned and nearly half of the journalists China has jailed are Uyghurs. So Miles, I imagine this doesn't come as a surprise, but I'd still like to ask, what are your initial thoughts on this?
Miles Yu:
You're absolutely right. This is not a surprise because year after year after year, China’s press freedom always ranked at the bottom or near the bottom — it normally is number two, number three from the bottom. So it's among the worst of all the nearly 200 countries in the world. This is the biggest national shame for China. So there's a consistency. This is not just by CPJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists, all other press Freedom Watchers, including Reporters without Borders and the Human Rights Watch, they all rank Chinese press freedom as abysmal year after year. That's a consistency. This statistic you cited, China accounting for 32% of worldwide journalists persecuted, put in jail. Those were mostly professional journalists. In China, the press freedom is also indicated by this tremendous growth of citizen journalists. That is, there's a lot of ordinary citizens in the age of smartphone and they just go around and they're reporting what's going on in China.
Those account for tens of thousands each year put in jail by the Chinese government. Also being jailed for expressing opinion online is China's specialty and its dubious honor of being number one worldwide. Each year about 80 to 90% of all people in the world who go to jail for online posting are Chinese. Think about that. That is a very chilling reality. China actually right now has laws that prosecute those making critical comments online in foreign countries. In other words, if you are a Chinese citizen or if you are just anybody, you live in Japan, you live in the UK, you live in the United States. If you post something on your Twitter account, for example, critical of Chinese government, and when you go to China, Chinese government has a legal reason to basically put you in jail. Not only that, Chinese government also said they have the legal jurisdiction to arrest anybody anywhere in the world. This is crazy. Hong Kong's national security law says precisely that. There was a Hong Kong citizen who was a student, she was studying in Japan, and she post something, she actually retweeted somebody else’s tweet critical of the Hong Kong government’s bad acts. So when she went back to Hong Kong, she was promptly arrested and tried, and I think she's now in jail. This is a really, really bizarre case. So that's why China's press freedom is not just China's business. It should be concerning to every citizen of the world.
Shane Leary:
Well, miles, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to doing this again next week.
Miles Yu:
Thank you very much, Shane. See you next week.
Shane Leary:
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of China Insider. If you enjoy the show, please share with your friends and colleagues and for our Chinese language audience, be sure to come back and check out our monthly Chinese language episodes, which are released on the same channel as well as the Hudson Institute YouTube channel. For more research and analysis from the China Center, be sure to find miles on X and then head on over to hudson.org where you can read and watch more on these and other pressing issues around the globe. Finally, please review and subscribe wherever you are listening from to help grow the show. From all of us at China Insider, we'll see you next week.