The Intelligence Community Would Benefit from Opening the Aperture on China

Posted: March 27th, 2024

By Phuong Hoang

Phuong Hoang, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Global Politics and Societies in the National Intelligence University’s Caracristi Institute and leads NIU’s “China and Beyond” research initiative.

By Josh Kerbel

Josh Kerbel is a professor of practice and co-director of the Center for Futures Intelligence and Anticipatory Thought in NIU’s Caracristi Institute. The views expressed here are theirs alone.

OPINION — Recently, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) created an important new position: the National Intelligence Officer for China. (Previously, the National Intelligence Council’s China portfolio fell under the auspices of the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia.) It was an eminently sensible action. China occupies an outsized and yet still growing place in the United States’ strategic landscape and having an NIO dedicated exclusively to it will bring much needed focus.

That said, a danger also comes with such intensifying focus: it can lead to excessively narrow, siloed, and artificially discrete perspectives that miss or avoid the increasing complexity (interconnectivity and interdependence) that characterizes the China challenge. China is deeply intertwined with the world beyond it. Every problem or opportunity in the world today has a China aspect, requiring the Intelligence Community (IC) to maintain a complementary—synthetic or holistic—perspective.

The IC historically has struggled with the development of such synthetic perspectives because our formative experience—the Cold War—didn’t demand it, as our adversary was comparatively discrete or contained, unidimensional (largely a military issue), and entirely closed (necessitating a dependence on classified reporting). Moreover, our deeply ingrained cognitive and implicit biases tended toward an analytical or reductive perspective at odds with such synthetic and “big picture” perspectives.

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Among countless examples of when an excessively narrow focus contributed to unanticipated outcomes and unintended consequences regarding China, let’s first consider the direct line that was long drawn from economic liberalization/growth to China’s political liberalization and buy-in to the existing international order. That assessment was fundamentally rooted in a narrow, linear, and causal argument that largely ignored a slew of important factors—historical, social, technological, and so forth—that could have drawn into question the inevitability of that causal chain. Instead, the assessment washed out the true complexity of China’s situation and rendered it in simplistic terms.

Unfortunately, this tendency to reduce the complex to the simplistic is not a bug in our analytic history, it’s a feature. A second example is the ongoing overly militarized framing of the “China challenge” when other aspects and dynamics, particularly economic, are in play. An imbalanced focus on China’s military modernization risks undervaluing China’s global economic power and influence as a primary realm of US-China competition. Third, a laser-beam focus on China’s successes—its economic growth, military modernization, and increasing global influence—overlooks the major vulnerabilities facing China, including the unintended consequences of its one-child policy for China’s future demographic situation, economic growth, and security posture.

Given the above, it is vital that the IC puts in place the mechanisms, processes, and procedures necessary to ensure that it builds, nurtures, and maintains complementary synthetic perspectives of China. In particular, this will mean confronting some of the IC’s longest held tendencies—especially in the informational, geographic, and functional realms.

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Informationally, this means looking beyond the classified environment. In a world of exponentially increasing information, valuable insight from unclassified sources, including but not limited to academic research, can help inform our understanding of China. China sees OSINT as the core of its intelligence collection, and the IC must further leverage OSINT—now viewed as supplementary to classified reporting—to compete strategically.

Geographically, this means looking beyond China proper. In a world of greater connectivity, China is increasingly present and influential. Thus, the IC cannot allow itself to be constrained by China’s geographic boundaries—it must also look at China in the context of its larger regional and global relationships, as well as those of other Asia-Pacific and global actors.

Also, functionally, this means looking beyond traditional IC foci on China. In addition to examining traditional topics, such as pressing political-military developments and leadership issues, the IC must also explore the full range of emergent issues with a China nexus, including demographics, climate change, pandemics, infosphere contamination, economic contagion, migration, urbanization, technological development, and proliferation.

Some will say the IC is already doing this. We, however, would politely contend that, although the IC has made extensive strides in examining increasingly varied aspects of China, it still mostly does so in discrete bits in accordance with our prevailing account structures and “lanes in the road”. Although the mosaic of China created by the IC is more complete and has greater fidelity, it’s still highly segmented in keeping with the IC’s inclination to reduce—or to focus.

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All told, the IC still has long way to go before it will have sufficiently resisted that inclination and opened the aperture on China, blurring the lines between what are too often thought of in distinct terms. A more holistic inclination is a vital complement to the IC’s traditional analytic disposition, especially in a highly complex world where the organizing principles we have traditionally employed—political, economic, social, military—grow ever more indistinct.

Finally, it’s important to note that fighting the inclination to excessively reduce the complex to the simplistic does not apply only to the IC’s views of China. This reductionist inclination infects the IC’s—and indeed the broader U.S. Government’s—views of almost every strategic issue. Nowhere is this more manifestly problematic than in our piecemeal efforts to understand and deal with the range of discipline/category-spanning emergent phenomena—climate change; migration; urbanization, infosphere contamination, economic contagion, pandemics, etc.—that increasingly dominate the national security threat spectrum. So, while we’re thinking about how it might distort our understanding of and policy response to China, we would also do well to consider how to address this problem in a much larger sense.

These are the views of the authors and do not represent the views of the ODNI.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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