On both sides of the Pacific, fears are mounting that the US and China could be heading for a total collapse of relations and even direct conflict in the coming months.
As the two powers ordered the closure of each other’s consulates in Houston and Chengdu last week amid allegations of espionage, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo called for an end to the “compromise,” a policy that has defined relations between United States and China for almost five years. decades, and is considered one of the most important foreign policy achievements of the Republican establishment in recent history.
“We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change,” Pompeo said in a speech on Thursday at a chosen site, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda. Nixon was the first president to arrive in China in 1972.
It is a dramatic shift in relations between the US and China, which for decades has overcome the fundamental differences between capitalist democracy in the United States and the Leninist autocracy of China, not only to coexist, but also to anchor the global economy and cooperate on critical issues such as climate change and the pandemic. prevention.
That era seems to be over.
There is now a bipartisan consensus in the United States on the need for a tougher China policy. Even China’s academics and policy makers who have spent their lives building closer ties to China in the belief that such a commitment would induce democratic reform have been disappointed.
At the same time, they say that the Trump administration’s “gavel” approach, which appears to be intended to start another cold war and leaves no room for dialogue, is counterproductive and false in its alleged concern for the Chinese people. It is also dangerous and could lead to direct conflict, they say.
“There are ways to handle the relationship without exploiting it,” said Deborah Seligsohn, who has served as a US diplomat for more than two decades, primarily in Asia. “There are ways to weigh the advantages and disadvantages. It doesn’t have to be so antagonistic. “
President Trump’s China policy has been repeatedly weakened and often appears inconsistent or random, with much of a blockage in the trade gap and virtually no attention to human rights. According to former national security adviser John Bolton, Trump once pleaded with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him be re-elected and gave tacit approval to the concentration camps Xi was establishing to retain Uighur Muslims. He called Xi “good friend” for months in the global pandemic.
Now, as the elections approach, he appears to have given free rein to China’s hawks.
In addition to the consulate closings, the United States last week accused two Chinese citizens of hacking Chinese intelligence agencies and arrested a Chinese investigator who had hidden in the San Francisco consulate. She was part of a large network of Chinese industrial spies spanning 25 cities, the United States Department of Justice said.
The two countries have also clashed in recent weeks over tech, business, student and journalist visas, the coronavirus pandemic, the South China Sea, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
For nearly half a century, American officials, business, and civil society have increasingly invested and intertwined with China, helping it recover from its Mao-era traumas and become the world’s second-largest economy.
That relationship began in 1972 when President Nixon surprised the world by traveling to the Chinese adversary for a long time to seek cooperation as a balance against the Soviet Union. Formal diplomatic relations were established seven years later. However, once the Soviet Union dissolved, the United States needed a new justification for the “compromise,” said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society Center for Relations between the United States and China.
“We had this idea: ‘There is an inevitable and inevitable course of history, and China will be on the right side. It will have to change, “almost like Marxist determinism,” Schell said.
That hope was palpable, especially in the 1980s, Schell said, a time when China was opening up economically and politically, with a vibrant reform movement that included students, workers, and a broad cross-section of Chinese society. That movement was crushed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
At the same time, economic reforms continued. And American corporations flocked to China, taking advantage of China’s cheap labor, while policy makers told themselves that political reform would surely follow.
“This is the evangelical side of the United States,” said Schell. “We think that the persuasion of the American proposal would inevitably change a country like China. … We had the internet, the market, whatever. We thought we would have the knife in the oyster and open it immediately.
That did not happen. The Communist Party became increasingly totalitarian under Xi, who crushed civil society, removed its own term limits, silenced dissent, threw Muslim minorities into concentration camps, and imposed the Chinese police state in Hong Kong. .
Meanwhile, China has moved up the supply chain and is competing to compete with the US in high-tech fields including artificial intelligence and space travel, sometimes cheating or stealing, according to US officials.
Some Chinese observers say the expectation of changing the Communist Party system has always been a sham.
“It is absurd,” said Wang Yong, a professor of international studies at Peking University. “These Americans are overconfident and they excel. They think they can change other countries, and as soon as it does not conform to their ideals, they change their faces and want to suppress it. “
The Chinese government says that US hostilities are mainly motivated by insecurity towards China’s rise as a great world power and its challenge to US hegemony.
“The current difficulties facing the Sino-US relationship are created by one hand entirely on the US side,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Friday in a meeting with the German foreign minister. “Their goal is to disrupt China’s development progress, and they will take any action to do so, without an end result.”
In his speech, Pompeo stated that the United States government was interested in helping the Chinese people, for whom the United States could be a “beacon of freedom” and that it should distinguish itself from the ruling Communist Party. But that is unconvincing to most Chinese audiences who have watched closely how Trump is pushing a “United States first” foreign policy and seeking to crack down on civil rights protests in the country.
American soft power, the appeal of its institutions, society and culture, has held sway over Chinese society, Wang said. But it has deteriorated especially this year, with Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus, which he blames on China. in often racist terms, and the continued exposure of racism and police brutality in the U.S.
“The United States is no longer the embodiment of an ideal political system in people’s hearts,” said Wang. As internal discontent increases in the United States, many Chinese observers generally susceptible to the American system have become disillusioned and fearful of the Trump administration increasing pressure on China as a distraction.
“Right now, the United States is too chaotic and fragmented. They urgently need a strategic enemy, like the Soviets or Japan in the past, to unite the internal public, “he said. “China is the most convenient enemy.”
However, Xi is also overreaching, said Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state and current president of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. Xi has virtually no restrictions on her power, she said, and has fostered nationalism and her own strong-man image to reunite the Chinese amid economic problems and the pandemic.
“In the past few weeks alone, he’s also fighting with everyone in the world,” Shirk said. “We have a kind of extreme behavior without control on the part of both leaders. It’s very dangerous.”
The usual way to defuse the conflict would be for the two presidents to talk on the phone, as previous American presidents did in times of crisis, Shirk said. But Trump and Xi have not spoken since March, US officials say.
“Every day, we take another hit in China,” he said. It almost seems like the US administration wants China to do something “really radical like breaking diplomatic ties,” he said, which would unleash more than four decades of laborious diplomacy.
In the absence of an escalation between the two leaders, China could practice moderation and “just try to wait until the elections,” Shirk said. He suggested that a Biden administration could be less aggressive, or at least more rational, than the Trump administration.
Before November, either side could take intermediate, albeit provocative, measures, such as expelling diplomats or closing an embassy, a goal higher than a consulate.
China could also put pressure on Trump financially. If Xi threatens to stop buying the soy beans Trump presumes he is selling to benefit American farmers, a key part of Trump’s voter base, the U.S. president could back down. Similarly, Trump may back down if he sees the stock markets fall, as did the major U.S. stock indices on Friday.
Or there could be the worst case scenario, some Chinese and American experts now fear: the two countries could fall into direct military conflict even before the elections.
“In Trump’s desperation for re-election, it could precipitate a shock, a military shock,” Schell said.
“I am extremely concerned about China’s arrogant inflexibility in the South China Sea,” he added, also pointing to Xi’s positions in Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong thus far. For Xi, those are “core interests,” Schell said: “End of story. Shut up. No negotiation.
Shirk said a complete collapse, hitherto “unthinkable”, could be increasingly possible depending on the behavior of the current administration.
“They are willing to sacrifice American national security and global peace,” he said. “If it is an electoral strategy, they are really playing with fire.”
The writer His Times staff reported from Beijing and the writer Wilkinson from Washington.
