From Grey-Zone Intimidation to Control: Gao Zhikai’s Path to Reunification (Part 1)

"I believe that from [Lai's] seventeen points, it should be clear to us that the reunification of the motherland cannot be endlessly delayed. Decisive action must be taken."

Among China’s establishment intellectuals engaging with Western media, few defend Beijing more pugnaciously than Gao Zhikai (高志凯), better known internationally as Victor Gao.

A Yale Law School graduate, later admitted to the New York Bar, Gao worked at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s, acting as an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping. Since then, he has held senior positions across investment banking, regulatory bodies and corporate management. Gao now serves as vice-president of the Beijing-based think tank Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG).

What distinguishes Gao from many of his scholarly peers is his readiness to debate and confront China's critics abroad in unvarnished, even provocative English. He not only deploys his assured diction, quick retorts and courtroom style to reinforce official talking-points, but often pushes them into more hawkish, headline-grabbing territory—such as when he warned Australians that acquiring nuclear submarines could turn their count…