the power of validating our assumptions

an anecdote on China

I had the privilege to discuss China with the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs this morning. They really were interested in demographic trends but I wanted to consider internal contradictions within the contemporary China.

What I mentioned during the talk that gave me great satisfaction, however, was an incident that occurred in May 2012. My trips to China have always been part of the National War College education which forces students each to study a country or a theme for their entire ten month academic program, culminating with writing a relevant national security strategy. This is quite a challenge for those choosing something they have never considered; these are the intriguing students because applying analytical skills is what their follow on jobs require. Spending a ten months honing a personal approach to strategic thinking encourages them to appreciate that looking at a topic with completely fresh eyes may provide vital solution if their approaches are grounded in rigourous, well-developed analysis on ends-ways-and-means of accomplishing something for the nation. That is what the National War College began doing when its doors opened in September 1946.

For most of its history, the College required—on behalf of and for the U.S. taxpayer—that students not only learn about a topic but validate what they learned by travelling to the relevant country to see whether their assumptions about the country, about their understanding of the place, and their solution to a vexing national security concern were correct. One of the most fundamental mistakes we make as humans and that countries make collectively is to assume their thoughts are always correct without validating assumptions. What am I talking about? Making sure that my understanding of an issue matches how that issue appears on the ground. Making sure that a country really looks the way we think it does is rather important for making strategy to address that country.

In May 2012, I traveled with a dozen students and two attaches, representatives of the U.S. Army in this particular year stationed at the Beijing Embassy. Attaches are eyes and ears of a country’s military overseas. Their jobs can be tough but are vital to helping the services validate their understandings of the global environment one country at a time. Attaches set up the itinerary for National War College visits and travel with the delegation.

I always took students to Bejing and then as far outside of the capital as I could get our PLA hosts to allow us to go. I wanted the U.S. students, many of whom go on to senior positions, to see that not all of China looks like Stalinist buildings nor the Forbidden City in the capital. I also wanted them to see that it’s a huge geographic expanse with many variations, just as true in our own country. I was particularly keen to get U.S. students to ‘western China’ which Beijing defines as anything west of the city of Xi’an, home of the terra cota warriors; I personally think Xi’an is pretty central but it’s definitely not Bejing. I particularly relished taking students on the five hour flight to Xinjiang, the furthest western province because I wanted them to see areas the Chinese did not really want us visiting. Beijing was not enthusiastic about us seeing the province where the Communist Party has been attempting to induce Han, the ethnic group which constitutes 91% of China’s population, to overwhelm the Muslim Uyghurs who dominate the province, thus watering down the composition of possible opposition in the province..

(Five years after that final of several visits, the Communist Party started incarerating Uyghurs in ‘reeducation camps’ so I do not ever expect to validate anything on the ground in Xinjiang again. I don’t every expect to go to China at all and I am fine with that, though sorry to miss the type of anecdote I am conveying because what I heard in a five minute period later in the 2012 trip leaves me a bit optimistic about the future for the country in some ways.)

After we departed Xinjiang, we went Lanzhou, a city of over 4 million in the interior; I had never heard anyone say they had visited to see conditions on the ground. I am sure people had been there but part of the value of National War College and other U.S. military delegations going to China was forcing Beijing to take us to places where the attaches find it hard to get permission to travel. The People’s Liberation Army may throw obstacles in the attaches’ way but it is much harder to tell a visiting educational delegation that they cannot see Lanzhou in Gansu province without us doing precisely the same to them here. So, I asked for Lanzhou and surprisingly got it as an approved stop.

We spent a day validating the horrible air, water, and overall physical environment near Lanzhou because of its concentration of chemical industries. It is a pretty barren landscape surrounding the city but the encroaching desertification of northern and central China means this area has some of the worst water and air in the country. It also has a Hui, or Han Muslim population which is different from even the minority group of Uyghur Muslims in the west.

Our second day in Lanzhou drove several hours to the Labrang Buddhist monastery, not far from the Gansu-Qinghai provincial boundary. Undoubtedly the CCP officials authorised this travel because it was a bus ride on a miraculously good highway in the middle of the country, evidence of a Party success in modernising China. Make no mistake, however, this is interior China a couple of days’ drive from Shanghai or Beijing. It is also a portion of the country with a significant Buddhist population, meaning primarily Tibetans. We toured the monastery, then several students decided to climb to a pretty overlook on a surrounding hill. They took off and I ambled behind them. Notable was that our People’s Liberation Army minders, designated officials who interact with foreign military visitors, were really unhappy about this walk yet they did not accompany us, providing us a bit of space.

I only climbed about halfway up the hill because I am slow. I decided to sit looking across the valley because it was pretty. This was a pretty open area above the monastery and the Buddhist prayer wheel which was such a prominent feature of the area outside the monastery itself.

In my many visits to China, I truly was astonished by what happened over the next five minutes when a weathered-skinned woman appeared out of no where. She could have been 40 or she could have been 79; her weathered skin and hands showed a hearty worker accustomed to the harsh conditions, whether heat we were feeling that May afternoon or the frigid winters so common to the area.

It was not as if there were a lot of folks walking to the overlook on a Saturday afternoon, and especially not people coming upon a red-haired ‘round eye’ which I clearly was. She stopped right in front of me and smiled broadly. She started speaking to me in what clearly was not Mandarin so I assumed it was Tibetan which meant we were at an impass.

I looked around to see if she had anyone with her who could translate as this woman wanted to speak with me. I saw no one at first but then realised a younger woman and man, along with their barely walking child (a daughter, I believed) came up behind the older woman. The guy smiled but drifted away along a path.

What surprised me was how friendly they were. China’s system de facto discourages foreigners from interacting with the average population. A self-regulation resulting from fear that the many layers of police will investigate why a foreigner is speaking creates a powerful and pervasive disincentive to these instsances. (In Xi Jinping’s China a decade later, the disincentive would likely be supported by interrogation about what we discussed) Yet, these people obviously did not care.

The most memorable moment occurred next, however. These women clearly wanted to know where I was from. Neither they nor I had the vocabulary in a common language so I raised my shoulders in a shrug. The younger woman who I assumed the daughter pointed to me and said quite clearly ‘Obama’ with a smile. I realised she meant that I was an American so I said nodded. She smiled as broadly as she could while repeating Obama several times to show her approval. She then pointed to the ground and spit, meaning disapproval with the Han government of Hu Jintao and the Chinese Communist Party who she clearly did not see as favourably as she saw Obama.

Wow. In an era where one party attempted to overthrow an election outcome in the United States, this exchange a decade ago probably doesn’t seem all that radical to us i the United States. But, it in fact was quite radical.

This exchange told me several things. She knew Barack Obama’s name yet he had never been to Gansu. The U.S. President visited Beijing and Shanghai in mid-November 2009, almost three years before this exchange. It seems unlikely the CCP-run news service Xinhua would have replayed television reports of the visit repeatedly so the original event must have made an impression on her. She obviously had some sort of positive reaction that stuck with her over a period of time. I wasn’t surprised by her feelings about China’s government: Hu Jintao’s behaviour towards the Tibetans was historically appalling, serving as the Provincial CCP secretary in Tibet in particularly repressive 1989. Additionally, Hu’s had been a Party apparatchik in 1960s Gansu itself; she could have heard of him through family lore, although I have no idea. Yet her disdain was strong, risky both to show it to a foreigner and to make such an action publicly, appeared both spontaneously and heartfelt.

The older woman, her daughter, and the baby disappeared as quietly as the arrived. They were smiling and attempting to communicate with me for the few minutes we were all there but it seemed longer than it must have actually been. I sat for several minutes thinking about the exchange before heading back towards the prayer wheel where we were to regroup as a delegation. I also did not want to call attention to this trio for fear their interaction with me could come to the attention of our supposedly absent minders. I cannot stress how much this was on my mind. As odd as this exchange was in 2012, it is absolutely unimaginable a decade later after Xi Jinping began methodically wearing down of society through deploying surveillance technology unbiquitously as well as the expanding repression against minorities in the People’s Republic.

My anecdote is just that, a single example of an exchange between me and a mysterious family in western Gansu province. Yet it conveyed the power of the U.S. president. That was not a partisan power: it was the power as an example of something far different from the supremely vile, exploitative, repressive regime ruling there. This incident also reminded me of why it matters that Americans travel, especially the President who has to decide where to spend his precious time. We need to see and be seen as I suspect that family remembers me having been there. We would never interact again but someone from Obama’s country was in Labrang.

This also reminded me of why validating with their own eyes is crucial for U.S. military officers (and faculty). This visit did not change the world but it expanded our understanding. That matters, it matters indeed. And in such a highly charged global environment, little steps grow into bigger ones. It behooves us to know the most we can through seeing the world rather than assuming we know the world. This also allowed us to recall that China is not just the Communist Party or Xi Jinping or the entrepeneur Jack Ma. It is millions of individuals just as true in this country.FIN