Chinese Think Tank Report: China Faces Tiananmen-like Global Backlash Over Virus

Here is more from Reuters:

An internal Chinese report warns that Beijing faces a rising wave of hostility in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak that could tip relations with the United States into confrontation, people familiar with the paper told Reuters. 

The report, presented early last month by the Ministry of State Security to top Beijing leaders including President Xi Jinping, concluded that global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the sources said.

As a result, Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment led by the United States in the aftermath of the pandemic and needs to be prepared in a worst-case scenario for armed confrontation between the two global powers, according to people familiar with the report’s content, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the matter.

The report was drawn up by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, China’s top intelligence body.

CICIR, an influential think tank that until 1980 was within the Ministry of State Security and advises the Chinese government on foreign and security policy, did not reply to a request for comment. 

In related US coronavirus news, the Washington Post notes that Kevin Hassett, a former scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), led an internal White House team to build an economic model to guide response to the pandemic.

Chinese Think Tankers Targeted by DHS

Here is more from the Washington Post:

Alarms over the souring relationship went off in Beijing this year when Department of Homeland Security agents at the San Francisco airport stopped a half-dozen senior Chinese researchers, including some employed by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations — an influential think tank that answers to China’s intelligence agency. The agents confiscated the researchers’ laptops and phones and demanded their passwords, according to two people familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Outraged Chinese scholars suspected the searches were politically motivated and wrote to the State Department saying they would cancel future trips to the United States, according to a copy of an email from the think tank seen by The Washington Post. (The institute later resumed travel to the United States after receiving State Department assurances.)

The article notes that the Chinese have reached out to long-standing contacts at US think tanks in order to better understand the Trump Administration.  China has even dispatched a number of former government officials for "Track 2" meetings with US think tankers, but those meetings have not been very useful because "Washington's most prominent think tanks are populated by establishment figures who lack close ties to [President] Trump."

Hudson Institute China scholar Jonas Parello-Plesner recently said that CICIR is "an acknowledged part of the Chinese Ministry of State Security: the equivalent of the CIA running a front-end think tank."