David Sanger's China thriller

Sensationalistic journalism about foreign countries is bad for America

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So which country is more responsible for last week’s much-publicized dustup between the US and China at a meeting of top diplomats in Anchorage?

Was it American officials, who publicly criticized China in the week before the meeting, sanctioned 24 Chinese officials on the eve of the meeting, and opened the public portion of the meeting with more criticisms? Or was it Chinese officials, who in response unloaded on America?

Depends on which newspaper you read. The Washington Post’s headline was, “Biden administration shows appetite for high profile fights with China and Russia,” and its story, accordingly, emphasized the aggressive rhetorical stance toward China taken by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. The New York Times headline was “Testy exchange in Alaska Signals a More Confrontational China,” and its story, by Steven Lee Myers, pointed the finger more at China. That headline has since changed, and a co-author has been added, but the basic story line remains.

The next day the Times reinforced that story line. David Sanger, doing one of his big-picture deepthink pieces, suggested that we may be headed for something like a new Cold War with China and Russia. And, in keeping with his tendency to avoid blaming America for things, he implicitly depicted the fundamental responsibility for deepening US-China tensions as lying with China. Here’s his lede:

WASHINGTON — Sixty days into his administration, President Biden got a taste this week of what the next four years may look like: a new era of bitter superpower competition, marked by perhaps the worst relationship Washington has had with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with China since it opened diplomatic relations with the United States.

It has been brewing for years, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China took sharp turns toward authoritarianism. But it blew up in open fashion this week, after… the Chinese, meeting with the United States for the first time since the new administration took office, lectured Americans about the error of their arrogant view that the world wants to replicate their freedoms.

I have a question. The idea here seems to be that China’s “sharp turn toward authoritarianism” is the core reason that enduringly bitter relations with China may now be in the cards. But why would authoritarianism make bitter relations so likely? After all, there are authoritarian nations we cooperate with closely—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many others.

Sanger’s answer, to the extent that it’s discernible, is one that is common in American foreign policy circles these days and seems to motivate the Biden administration’s policy toward China: unlike Egypt and Saudi Arabia, China has the desire and means to export authoritarianism globally. Whereas the fear during Cold War I was that the US would be encircled by communist (and generally authoritarian) countries, the fear that’s helping to usher in Cold War II, apparently, is that the US will be encircled by authoritarian (but not necessarily communist) countries. 

The idea that China wants to spread authoritarianism far and wide and is capable of doing so is, like so many of the angles Sanger organizes his articles around, a real attention getter. And, though I think fear of this happening is dangerously overblown in foreign policy circles, I’ve seen some evidence supporting some versions of the idea. But Sanger’s version of the idea leaves me baffled. The power of “the Chinese,” he writes,

… arises from their expanding economic might and how they use their government-subsidized technology to wire nations be it Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, with 5G wireless networks intended to tie them ever closer to Beijing. It comes from the undersea cables they are spooling around the world so that those networks run on Chinese-owned circuits.

Ultimately, it will come from how they use those networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling other nations facial recognition software that has enabled them to clamp down on dissent at home.

Wait, what? I’m open to arguments that letting China control too much of the global communications infrastructure could be dangerous. What I don’t understand is the specific danger Sanger is sketching out. He’s saying that if, say, China builds a country’s 5G network, China will then be able to pressure the country into becoming more repressive? Like, it will threaten to cut off the country’s broadband if the government doesn’t buy China’s facial recognition technology and use it to persecute dissenters? That seems kind of farfetched!

Fearing I was somehow missing Sanger’s logic, I crowdsourced my puzzlement on Twitter: Could anyone explain to me how exactly Sanger’s scenario could plausibly unfold?

Many tried, but no one succeeded. One common answer was this one: Maybe authoritarian countries will use China’s facial recognition technology to become more effective authoritarians.

And, yes, that could happen. Or, alternatively, these authoritarians could use Google’s or Microsoft’s or Amazon’s facial recognition technology. (Call me old fashioned, but I’m patriotic enough to think a red blooded American like Jeff Bezos can compete with anyone in the world when it comes to making repressive technology! And, promisingly, Amazon’s facial recognition software is called ‘Rekognition’.)

My point is that, whoever these authoritarian countries wind up buying their repressive software from, you won’t have to strongarm them, via control of their 5G networks, into buying it. They’ll do that anyway! After all, they’re authoritarians—you can count on them to scour the world for the best in authoritarian technology. And if China somehow uses its 5G muscle to get authoritarians to buy Chinese software even though it’s not the best—well, that’s good, right? Less effective authoritarianism?

So back to the question I have for Sanger: not how China gets authoritarian governments to buy authoritarian software, but how China gets governments to be more authoritarian than they would want to be in the absence of Chinese leverage. If Sanger’s 5G/facial recognition scenario is to be judged coherent, that’s what it needs to explain.

Happily (kind of), Sanger did finally weigh in on the question. It happened after scholar/blogger Dan Drezner replied to my twitter query with a version of the answer I just dismissed—that countries which are already authoritarian will buy authoritarian software from China. Drezner tweeted: “I read it [Sanger’s piece] as a ratchet effect. If a country became more authoritarian China would be eager to supply tech that would reinforce the local regime.” Sanger then quote-tweeted Drezner, adding:  “You read it right, @dandrezner… ”

Nice try. But, as I replied on Twitter, this ‘ratchet’ scenario just isn’t the scenario laid out in Sanger’s New York Times piece. In the ‘ratchet’ scenario, phase one is for an authoritarian country to freely choose to buy Chinese facial recognition software. But in the Times piece scenario, the first step is that China’s control of digital infrastructure will “make other nations dependent on Chinese technology.” Then, “once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism” via facial recognition software and other authoritarian technologies.  

These are two different scenarios, and if Sanger had wanted to convey the first one in his piece he could have done so simply and straightforwardly. But of course, it’s a less scary scenario than the idea that Chinese digital networks being built even as we speak are making “other nations dependent on Chinese technology,” paving the way for China to flip the master switch and make them authoritarian!

The incoherence of a single passage in a single David Sanger piece may seem like a small thing—especially compared to, say, the world’s drift toward Cold War II. But the two are related, because this is not an isolated case.

One reason Sanger has become such a prominent and influential national security reporter is because he’s so good at doing this—so good at sensationalism, often sensationalism that, as here, can strike fear into the hearts of Americans. It’s par for the course that he would mash up scary images—facial recognition technology! China-controlled global communications infrastructure!—as if he were writing the script for a B-grade movie, rather than writing for a supposedly A-grade newspaper.

In fact, he did somewhat the same thing a couple of weeks ago, in an article on Russian and Chinese hacking that I critiqued in this newsletter last week. As the best known national security correspondent at America’s most influential newspaper, he is singlehandedly playing a significant role in America’s drift toward Cold War II.

Moreover, Sanger is not an isolated case. Though he’s one of the most influential fearmongers in national security journalism, and one of the most adept, he’s certainly not the only one. Indeed, an incentive operating on journalists broadly—maximize clicks—encourages appealing to human emotions, certainly including fear of foreign threats.

Unfortunately, the world can’t afford for its discourse to continue to be so deeply corrupted by traffic-hungry journalists. There are too many pressing global problems to solve and too many questions to answer en route to the solutions. One of these questions is whether China is indeed bent on, and capable of, spreading authoritarianism around the world. It’s a genuinely important question, and it should be addressed with the help of good reporting and calm, cool analysis. Apparently the New York Times is not the best place to look for those things.