Reluctant Rival: Beijing’s Approach to US-China Competition

[Stranagor]

Reluctant Rival: Beijing’s Approach to US-China Competition

It’s not a battle that China seeks, but if pushed it will defend its interests and its right to development.

globalasia.org

By Wang Dong
Published: December 2021 (Vol.16 No.4)


In the past few years, US-China relations have witnessed a dramatic downward spiral not seen since normalization. America’s four-decade-long policy of strategic engagement with China has been largely abandoned. Washington has begun to view China as its biggest competitor and adversary, a revisionist, authoritarian power that is bent on challenging American primacy. As the bilateral relationship sours, the China narrative in the United States has become anything but rational; indeed, it has become a mixture of emotion, misperception, fear, anxiety, prejudice, self-righteousness and even paranoia.



The Donald Trump administration launched a disruptive trade war against China, pursued a damaging decoupling of the two economies, imposed sanctions on Chinese high-tech giants such as Huawei and ZTE, carried out a witch-hunt of scientists accused of “stealing” American technologies on behalf of the Chinese government, attacked Beijing on Xinjiang and Covid-19, and publicly called for a new Cold War against China. One may suggest that Trump’s China policy came very close to neo-containment. The Trump era also witnessed the revival of neo-McCarthyism in the US.



US President Joe Biden’s administration inherited Trump’s idea of strategic competition between China and the US, and it still sees China as the biggest rival to US leadership and hegemony. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tripartite framework, describing the US-China relationship as “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” has become the de facto China policy of Biden’s administration, with strategic competition as its hallmark. But unlike Trump, Biden has chosen a policy mix of limited competition and partial decoupling with China to prevent the conflict from escalating into a new Cold War. Another characteristic of Biden’s China policy that separates him from Trump is that Biden has been much more effective in mobilizing allies to join hands in countering China.



The bipartisan consensus on engaging China since normalization, which I label as the “old engagement consensus,” contained an epistemological fallacy that viewed China as the “other,” the one that is to be “transformed” and “integrated” into the US-led international order, with the implicit expectation that China would over time gradually become like the US, economically and even politically. This fallacy is similar to the one in an ancient Chinese fable called “kezhou qiujian” (to carve a mark on the boat to find one’s sword). The story is about a gentleman from more than 2,000 years ago. One day, the man was about to cross a river, so he boarded a ferry. In the middle of the river crossing, he accidentally dropped his sword into the water. The man then took out a knife and carved on the gunwale, “This is the place where I dropped my sword.” When the ferry reached the shore, the man jumped into the water from the mark on the gunwale in hopes of retrieving his lost sword. Not surprisingly, he failed. Now many US analysts believe the policy of strategic engagement with China failed.



It failed for a reason. The expectation inherent in the “old engagement consensus” — that China would be gradually transformed and one day become like the US — is like the mark the man engraved on the gunwale. What the elites in the US should do is to treat China on an equal footing and with respect, rather than as the “other” that is to be “transformed.” While Biden and top administration officials have publicly confessed that Washington no longer seeks to change the political system in China, elites in the US have now shifted from one extreme to another, viewing China as an authoritarian power that is determined to challenge and replace American hegemony. Hence, the vow to “compete” with China in defending US primacy.



When Trump won the 2016 US presidential election, many in China had high expectations of him, believing that as a businessman-turned-president, he’d be someone with whom China could “strike a deal.” Beijing’s hopes ran high when Trump made a state visit to China in November 2017, coming back with a US$250 billion deal. Then he made an abrupt about-face, taking Beijing by surprise. The December 2017 National Security Strategy report labeled China as the main competitor, and was quickly followed by a trade war. Refusing to cave in to Trump’s “trade bullying” (maoyi baling zhuyi), China took a tit-for-tat approach. When Biden took office, China wasn’t hopeful that he could completely reverse the relationship but still had hope that he might help stabilize it. Indeed, it can be said that “bringing China-US relations back to a positive track” (tuidong Zhongmei guanxi chonghui zhenggui) remains the key goal of China’s policy toward the US under Biden.



Watching Biden’s every move closely, Beijing was sensitive and indignant when the US administration claimed it would deal with China from a “position of strength.” On issues involving its core interests, Beijing has made it clear it will not bow to pressure from Washington. During Biden’s first high-level China-US meeting — in Anchorage, Alaska, last March — Chinese senior political leader and top diplomat Yang Jiechi, along with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, warned their US counterparts, Blinken and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, that the United States was not qualified to speak to China “from a position of strength.” Meanwhile, Beijing was reluctant to reciprocate Biden’s posture of seeking “long-term, stiff” competition with China. At the Tianjin talks in July, China told the US it “should not fantasize about making demands of China on issues of co-operation while infringing on China’s core interests” and criticized Blinken’s tripartite framework for seeking rivalry. From Beijing’s perspective, “competition” is merely a codename for the contest for hegemony, a game that Beijing has no interest in playing. That is precisely why it has explicitly opposed US efforts to define the China-US relationship as one of competition.



On Nov. 16, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a three-and-a-half-hour virtual summit with Biden, the US president’s first since taking office. In a meeting called “candid, constructive, substantive and productive,” the two exchanged views on a wide range of bilateral issues including trade, energy security, cyber, military-to-military relations and Taiwan, as well as regional hotspots such as Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear issue, and the North Korean nuclear issue. They agreed that the two great powers shared responsibilities in tackling global challenges such as climate change and the pandemic. Xi went to great lengths to explain China’s “development path and strategic intentions,” making it clear that China has no interest in competing for hegemony with the US. While yielding no major breakthroughs, the summit helped ease tensions, as the two leaders expressed willingness to manage their differences and stop the bilateral relationship veering into open conflict or, worse, a new Cold War.



Four Areas of Contention



In examining these issues, we must look at China’s approach to four main areas of contention:



The realm of geopolitics. The Biden administration inherited Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy, focusing on marshalling a network of regional allies and partners such as Japan, India and Australia to counterbalance China. Many in China view the Indo-Pacific strategy as one of encirclement and containment of China. After elevating the so-called Quad (the US, Japan, India and Australia) into a leader-level summit, the US announced an enhanced trilateral security alliance with the UK and Australia, somewhat awkwardly called AUKUS, which, among other things, seeks to help Australia build a nuclear-powered submarine fleet in the coming decades. Facing the Biden administration’s strategic moves, ideally, China’s rational approach would be to try to drive a wedge between the US and its allies and partners such as Japan, Australia and India.



However, hamstrung by several complicating factors such as the pandemic, territorial disputes (China-India border disputes and China-Japan disputes over the Diaoyu Islands) as well as trade disputes, China saw instead a rise in tensions with Japan, Australia and India. With Washington ratcheting up strategic pressures against China, Beijing opted to hedge the strategic risks by strengthening its strategic partnership with Russia, including stepping up its military co-operation and elevating the scale and sophistication of China-Russia joint naval exercises in the region. While trying to maintain a durable deterrence posture, China also tried to avoid further escalation of border disputes with India. Meanwhile, it has also stepped up its engagement with countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On Nov. 22, 2021, the date that marks the 30th anniversary of the China-ASEAN Dialogue, China and ASEAN officially announced the establishment of a China-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. In short, encountering increasingly fierce geopolitical maneuvers orchestrated by Washington, Beijing believes that a stable neighboring environment remains the basis on which an overall strategy toward the US should be anchored.



The realm of geo-economics. The Biden administration is using what might be called “selective multilateralism” to try to dent China’s expanding economic influence. For example, it pushed the G-7 parties to launch the “Build Back Better World” (B3W) Partnership, a major strategic initiative to counter the Belt and Road Initiative. It has also promoted the reconstruction of global industrial chains to reduce reliance on China’s supply chain. In key economic areas, “selective or precise decoupling” and “de-Sinicization” have been enforced. On the one hand, Biden signed the Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains to assess supply-chain resilience in four major economic areas related to China: semiconductor manufacturing, new energy batteries, rare minerals and pharmaceutical supplies. On the other hand, the US has stepped up co-ordination with its European and Asian allies to create a US-centric supply chain excluding China.



In response, Beijing has repeatedly made known its opposition to the US decoupling policy. Seeing the growing uncertainties and risks in the global market, Beijing has developed a “dual circulation” (shuang xunhuan) strategy aimed at building a new development pattern that prioritizes “domestic circulation” (meaning expanding its domestic market) and sees domestic and international circulation reinforcing each other. Exploiting its advantage of having a full range of industrial categories and systems and the pivotal position it occupies in global supply chains, Beijing aims to upgrade its industrial system and supply chains so as to withstand potential external uncertainties and shocks. In an April Foreign Affairs article, I argue that instead of pursuing a damaging, complete decoupling of the two economies, Washington and Beijing might be able to recouple their economies on a new basis of reciprocity. Coincidentally, or perhaps not a coincidence, I find that the term “recoupling” that I coined in my Foreign Affairs essay got into US Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s recent conversation on Biden’s trade policy in which she acknowledges that decoupling the Chinese and American economies in an era of globalization is unrealistic. Rather, according to Tai, the question to ask is “what are the goals we are looking for in a kind of recoupling?” When Tai mentioned the term “recoupling,” most observers in China responded positively, despite the difficulty of resolving US-China trade disputes. China has also continued to bolster efforts to promote regional free trade, such as taking the lead in concluding the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and officially applying for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade agreement, deals the US hadn’t participated in or had abandoned.



The realm of high tech. Acknowledging that a complete decoupling is unprofitable to US interests, the Biden administration nevertheless believes the key to prevailing in the strategic competition against China is to protect its technological edge. Adopting a “small yard, high fence” strategy, the Biden administration is trying to decouple selectively in key technological fields including artificial intelligence, 5G, quantum computing, bioscience, etc. In the modality of a “precision strike,” the competition with China will continue. “Small yard, high fence” means that the US government identifies specific technical and research areas directly related to national security (small yard), and delineates appropriate strategic boundaries (high fence) to protect its technological competitiveness. The US government would then tighten the blockade on core technologies in the “small yard” and reopen itself to China in some areas that are not in the “small yard.”



Facing Washington’s tough measures, Beijing has put a premium on the development of science and technology, and the training of talent related to these areas. In a Politburo meeting in July 2021, the Chinese leadership emphasized the need to stimulate scientific and technological innovation, strengthen the resilience of the industrial chain and speed up basic research to solve “neck-choking” (qia bozi) challenges, meaning the US blockading supplies of key technologies and products. At the Central Talent Working Conference in September 2021, Xi called for the nation to vigorously train and use “strategic scientists.” Not coincidentally, the newly appointed Minister of Education, Huai Jinpeng, is a renowned computer scientist.



The realm of ideology and values. The Biden administration has built what it calls an “alliance of values” to confront China. Using ideological rhetoric, Washington again has engaged in a process of “othering,” which also involves dehumanization and demonization, framing China as an authoritarian, repressive and aggressive power that stands in opposition to the “liberal, democratic world” represented by the US and its allies. The US has continued to attack China on issues such as the origin of the Covid-19 virus, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. By touting the so-called rules-based order, Washington has made no secret of its attempt to frame Beijing as a “rule breaker” in the existing international order. Worse still, underneath the rhetoric of values and rules, one may detect an implicit sense of racism in the approach to “compete” with China. For instance, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a September interview with CNBC that the US needs to work with Europe to “slow down China’s rate of innovation.” Most recently, EU High Representative Josep Borrell Fontelles told a forum in November that “We Western people, the US and EU, we have been ruling the world … We were the masters of how technology was working … If we are no longer standard-setting we will not rule the 21st Century.” This Western-centric superiority and public arrogance could not be more appalling. Yet the inherent racism has been coated in an ideological discourse that is used to justify and rationalize efforts to maintain Western dominance of the world. In this regard, China has countered by strongly rejecting what it called “lies” fabricated by the US. Beijing also repeatedly calls for upholding and promoting “common values of humanity” defined by peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom. Facing Biden’s value diplomacy, Beijing is trying to build a counter-narrative that centers on “common values of humanity,” and to enhance its links with the world at an ideational level.



In short, China is a reluctant rival. Beijing is not willing to take the initiative to provoke conflict with the US, nor does it crave hegemony. Rather, it hopes that China-US relations can stabilize. However, in the face of Washington’s heavy-handed strategies of competition in defense of US hegemony, Beijing sees no choice but to resolutely defend its own right to development. It recognizes that in a long-term standoff between China and the US, neither country can replace or overthrow the other. The two great powers have to learn to co-exist. China is reluctant to enter the game of “competing” or contesting for global hegemony. Nevertheless, it is prepared to defend its rights and interests. For now, stabilizing China-US relations and preventing them from spiraling into a new Cold War remain the key goals of China’s policy toward the US.