- Washington’s Chinese hawks, especially Republicans in the Senate, can’t get the president to focus on any issue in China other than trade.
- This was painfully clear this week when an hour-long speech Trump was to deliver on Hong Kong turned into a campaign complaint speech. Hong Kong was mentioned for about 43 seconds.
- As the week progressed, the White House made more aggressive pronouncements against China, but that was it: pronouncements.
- According to the laws of trumpism, China’s hawks cannot break with their leader, so all this makes them seem insignificant.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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It has to be difficult being a Chinese hawk in Washington these days.
Despite all the aggressive talks coming out of the White House, China’s hawks, hardliners who want to aggressively confront Beijing, are mostly just getting that: talking. And when the White House decides to do more than just talk, it’s usually too little too late.
To illustrate my point, let’s talk about Hong Kong City, a semi-autonomous special administrative region of China. On December 5, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, an open hawk from China, wrote an opinion piece on Fox News explaining the Hong Kong Law on Human Rights and Democracy. The law, recently signed by the president, authorized sanctions against people who violated Hong Kongers’ rights and ordered an annual report on the state of democracy in the territory.
Trump said little about the situation, just as he had said little about Hong Kong, which had been harassed by social unrest, throughout the year. No, like the president before him, he made speeches about defending democracy or human rights or the United States as a brilliant city on a hill. In a June 2019 interview with Time, the most he said about the protesters was that they seemed effective.
As the year progressed, China became more aggressive, but Trump never showed any real interest in Hong Kong, no matter what his Republican colleagues said. Finally, last month, China passed a security law that prohibits secession, subversion, and collusion with foreign forces, or more simply, any political activity that displeases Beijing.
Even after this move to disembowel any semblance of democracy in Hong Kong, Trump’s nonchalance was on display this week when President Trump delivered a speech in the Rose Garden of the White House that was supposed to be about human rights. in Hong Kong. The president spent about 43 seconds talking about China’s invasion of city rights, focusing instead on how the United States was losing to a fierce trade competitor, and spent the rest defending his reelection. Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic candidate Joe Biden, even received a greeting.
For Trump, his reelection depends on pleasing his base. He thinks his base will be pleased to see the sale of agricultural products enshrined in his Phase One trade agreement with China. And so this trade deal is paramount, and the things that hawks like Rubio want (a focus on human rights and China’s invading power in Asia) are just aftermath for Trump.
This is why being a Chinese hawk has to be tough in Washington right now. Sure, you can say all the things you want to say, but the President’s real support is fleeting or non-existent. Plus, Republican hawks are too reckless to break up with the President. That means being a Chinese hawk is more work.
To pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Law, Rubio and other hawks had to deal with the lack of support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, who reportedly delayed the bill. last year so that Trump could close his trade deal.
Speaking loudly, saying nothing
Of course, maybe there was no way to stop what was going to happen to Hong Kong. After Beijing passed the national security law limiting civil society in Hong Kong, it also summarily declared primaries for the city’s pro-democracy party illegal after the fact. In a city of 7 million, more than 600,000 people participated in those primaries, and they could have changed power in the Hong Kong legislature. China could not have that.
So maybe there was nothing the US could have done to save Hong Kong, China was too committed to help the island.
But Hong Kong is not the only problem that makes China’s hawks appear ineffective. On Tuesday, Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell delivered a speech calling on China for its military construction in the South China Sea and threatening sanctions against the Chinese companies involved.
This sounds fierce, but the US has basically been saying the same thing about the South China Sea for 10 years, and we haven’t yet come up with a plan to curb China’s influence there. Here’s the Washington Post on the same subject in 2010 (h / t Bill Bishop, Sinocism):
“Faced with a Chinese government increasingly determined to test the strength and capabilities of the United States, the United States unveiled a new policy that rejected China’s claims to sovereignty over the entire South China Sea. It rejected the demands Chinese that the US Army end its long-standing policy of conducting Army exercises in the Yellow Sea. And it is pressuring Beijing not to increase its energy investments in Iran when Western companies leave … “
Under Trump, we should note, China has increased investment in Iran. And when it comes to the South China Sea, this return of the United States is repeated more aggressively. This is what it looks like when the White House does not have a real action plan.
Also in the senseless actions department, the New York Times reports that the Trump administration is considering banning 92 million members of the Chinese Communist Party from entering the United States.
On the one hand, the United States is not exactly an attractive destination at the moment, given the way the President has surrendered in the fight against the coronavirus. And on the other hand, banning millions of Chinese from entering the country will not matter one iota to Beijing. This was supposed to be a sign that the gloves were coming off in the White House, and maybe they did, but now China knows they were covering soft little hands. There is nothing that Chinese hawks can do about it.
