Can China Pull Off Its Charm Offensive? | The War in Ukraine Could End Sooner Than Expected | The U.S.-Japan Alliance, and more

All five German citizens were arrested last year and remain in pre-trial detention. Authorities uncovered a similar plot by another, larger far-right group last month. Its members were also adherents of the Reich Citizens movement that believes the current government is illegitimate and that the German constitution of 1871 is still in force.

Meta: Azov Regiment No Longer Meets Criteria for Dangerous Organization on Facebook, Instagram  (Daryna Antoniuk, Yahoo News)
Azov Movement “has strong ties to far-right extremists in many EU countries and the U.S.,” said Alexander Ritzmann, a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, in an interview with Euronews. The Azov Regiment that is fighting against Russian invaders is something completely different, he added. Azov Regiment “was fully integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and since then operates under the command of the Ministry of the Interior,” Ritzmann said.

China’s New Anti-Uyghur Campaign  (James Millward, Foreign Affairs)
Starting in late 2017, Uyghur and Kazakh émigrés from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China began hearing frightening reports from relatives and friends at home—or began losing contact with those relatives and friends entirely. Through early 2018, journalists and researchers began to flesh out the story: in the vast Central Asian territory annexed by China in 1949, also known to many exiles as Eastern Turkestan, the government was rounding up people who do not belong to the country’s Han ethnic majority (including the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group) and locking them in camps. At their peak, these facilities interned between one and two million people, and detainees were subjected to psychological and physical torture, rape and sexual assault, forced administration of pills and injections, persistent hunger, and sleep deprivation. Beijing at first denied the existence of what Chinese government documents and signs on the facilities labeled “concentrated educational transformation centers,” but officials later admitted to establishing “vocational training centers,” which they claimed would end extremism and alleviate poverty.
With their clear echoes of genocides in the twentieth century, the camps prompted outrage from international organizations, human rights groups, and governments—some of which sanctioned Chinese companies and officials in response. Although the Chinese Communist Party dismissed the criticisms as “lies,” it appeared to respond. By 2019, authorities had moved many of the internees out of the camps, announcing that they had “graduated.” This suggests that the CCP does, in fact, care about international opprobrium.
But the change was largely cosmetic, and most of the internees have not been freed. Many of the camps have simply been converted into formal prisons and detainees given lengthy prison sentences, like several hundred thousand other non-Han people who have been imprisoned since the start of the crisis. Over 100,000 other internees have been transferred from camps to factories in Xinjiang or elsewhere in the country. Some Uyghur families abroad report that their relatives are back home but under house arrest. And Beijing has also been forcing tens of thousands of rural Uyghurs out of their villages and into factories under the guise of a poverty alleviation campaign. Today, the total numbers of non-Han Chinese people in coerced labor of one form or another may well exceed the numbers interned in camps from 2017 to 2019.

The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Facing a New Era of Extreme Danger  (Paul J. Smith, National Interest)
The old days in which the U.S.-Japan alliance was based on a hierarchy are clearly over. Japan is emerging as an equal partner.

Mao’s Strategy Inspires Afghan Guerrillas and Chinese Planners  (Benjamin R. Young, Foreign Policy)
Mao’s theories of warfare have had a profound influence on generations of so-called Third World insurgencies—even as they transformed into a set of rhetorical cliches at home.
Mao’s military philosophies grew out of his experiences as a revolutionary leader in the Chinese Civil War. Mao’s ragtag band of communist guerrillas was malnourished, poorly clothed, poorly armed, and poorly trained. As Chinese propaganda proudly states, the Red Army of the 1930s was constantly on the verge of starvation and dissolution but overcame these odds to become a mighty fighting force. In 1934, the National Army (also known as the Kuomintang) pinned communist forces in Jiangxi province. However, Mao led his forces in a strategic and difficult retreat into Yan’an in Shaanxi province. This arduous journey, known as the Long March, later became a key part of the hagiography surrounding Mao during China’s Cultural Revolution. In present-day China, Yan’an is referred to as “the cradle of revolution” and has become a key destination for China’s red tourism industry.
Despite losing a vast swath of his fighting force during the Long March, Mao believed that his small mobile army could defeat larger enemy forces and that his rear base in the mountains of Yan’an was vital for the consolidation of his rebel forces. Mao’s tactics of protracted asymmetric warfare combined with rural encirclement of enemy forces slowly weakened the defenses of the Nationalists. Mao’s three phases of guerrilla war—the strategic defensive, stalemate, and strategic offensive—allowed the Red Army to steadily gain more support among the rural peasantry and bolster its ranks with more fighters. The protracted nature of Mao’s guerrilla struggle dealt a major blow to the morale of the Nationalists.
Mao also preached the importance of fighting for the people to his troops. Mao understood that by arousing the revolutionary consciousness of millions of Chinese workers and farmers, they could gain new warriors for their anti-imperialist movement. As Mao said in a May 1938 lecture to his comrades, “The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people.” While Mao’s eventual victory was not purely from the application of these principles—a secret cease-fire with the Japanese, Nationalist incompetence, and the handover of Manchuria by the Soviets were all critical advantages—they nevertheless kept the movement alive in dire times.

Can China Pull Off Its Charm Offensive?  (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
One of the alleged advantages of autocracies is their supposed ability to turn on a dime in response to changing conditions. If one person has supreme power and doesn’t have to worry about bureaucratic rigidity, a pesky press, domestic opposition, influential interest groups, an independent judiciary, and all those other messy appurtenances of democracy, then in theory they can just issue a new edict and set the ship of state on a new course.
This image of agile and adaptive autocrats is probably mistaken, or at least incomplete. Even seemingly unchallenged dictators usually worry about potential rivals, competing power centers, and whether distant officials will implement directives effectively. Tyrants sometimes get stuck with failing policies because underlings won’t tell them what is really going on, or they refuse to change course because they don’t want to appear weak. Moreover, those supposedly sloth-like, dysfunctional democracies can sometimes act with surprising vigor and swiftness, especially in an emergency.
China is now trying to mend fences with the outside world as part of a broader effort to improve its global image, reignite economic growth, and disrupt U.S. efforts to unite several key countries into a loose anti-Chinese coalition. Will this latest “charm offensive” work?