One by one, the United States has achieved the basic tenets of Xi Jinping’s vision of a rising China ready to assume the mantle of the superpower.
Within weeks, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on punitive policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang’s western China region. He took further steps to stifle Chinese innovation by cutting it off from American technology and pressuring allies to look elsewhere. Then on Monday, he challenged China’s claims in the South China Sea, setting the stage for a more acute confrontation.
“The power gap is closing and the ideological gap is widening,” said Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, adding that China and the United States had entered an “ideological spiral “descending in the years doing.
“Where’s the bottom?” I ask.
For years, officials and historians have dismissed the idea of a new Cold War between the United States and China. The contours of today’s world, the argument went, are simply incomparable to the decades when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in an existential struggle for supremacy. The world was said to be too interconnected to easily divide into ideological blocks.
Now, lines are being drawn and relationships are in free fall, laying the groundwork for a confrontation that will have many of the characteristics of the Cold War, and the dangers. As the two superpowers clash over technology, territory, and influence, they face the same risk of small disputes that turn into military conflicts.
The relationship is increasingly imbued with deep mistrust and animosity, as well as the strained tensions that come with two powers vying for primacy, especially in areas where their interests collide: in cyberspace and outer space, in the narrow from Taiwan and the South China Sea, and even into the Persian Gulf.
And the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with China’s recent aggressive actions on its borders, from the Pacific to the Himalayas, have turned existing fissures into chasms that could be difficult to overcome, regardless of the outcome of this year’s US presidential election. year.
From Beijing’s perspective, the United States has sunk relations with what China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said last week was its lowest point since countries reestablished diplomatic relations in 1979.
“China’s current policy in the United States is based on misinformed strategic miscalculations and is full of McCarthyist excitement and whim and fanaticism,” said Wang, evoking the Cold War to describe the current level of tensions.
“It seems that every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student is a spy, and every cooperation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda,” he added.
Domestic politics in both countries has hardened opinions and given ammunition to hawks. The pandemic has also increased tensions, especially in the United States. President Trump refers to the coronavirus with racist tropes, while Beijing accuses his administration of attacking China to devalue its failures to contain the virus.
“What cooperation is there between China and the United States at the moment?” said Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore. “I can’t see any substantial cooperation.”
Both countries are forcing other nations to take sides, even if they are unwilling to do so. The Trump administration, for example, has lobbied its allies, with some success in Australia and, on Tuesday, in Britain, to resign from Chinese tech giant Huawei as they develop 5G networks. China, facing condemnation for its policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, has brought countries together to make public demonstrations of support for them.
At the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, 53 nations, from Belarus to Zimbabwe, signed a statement in support of China’s new security law for Hong Kong. Only 27 nations on the council criticized him, most of them European democracies, along with Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Such blocks would not have been unknown at the height of the Cold War.
China has also wielded its vast economic power as a tool of political coercion, cutting off imports of beef and barley from Australia because its government called for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic. On Tuesday, Beijing said it would sanction US aerospace maker Lockheed Martin for recent arms sales to Taiwan.
With the world distracted by the pandemic, China has also exercised its military might, as it did by testing its disputed border with India in April and May. That led to the first deadly confrontation there since 1975. The damage to the relationship could take years to repair.
Increasingly, China appears ready to accept the risks of such actions. Just a few weeks later, she asserted a new territorial claim in Bhutan, the mountainous kingdom that is closely allied with India.
With China threatening ships from Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia in the South China Sea, the United States sent two aircraft carriers through the waters last month in an aggressive show of force. The additional risk seems inevitable now that the State Department has made China’s claims there illegal.
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, said on Tuesday that the US statement would undermine regional peace and stability, claiming that China had controlled the islands at sea “for thousands of years,” which is not true. . As he said, the Republic of China, then controlled by the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, only made a formal claim in 1948.
“China is committed to resolving territorial and jurisdictional disputes with directly related sovereign states through negotiations and consultations,” he said.
This is not how your neighbors see things. Japan warned this week that China was trying to “alter the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.” He called China a more serious long-term threat than a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Michael A. McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia and professor of international studies at Stanford University, said China’s recent maneuvers appeared to be “overextended and exaggerated,” comparing them to one of the most difficult times of the Cold War.
“It reminds me of Khrushchev,” he said. “He is lashing out, and suddenly he is in a Cuban missile crisis with the United States.”
A backlash against Beijing appears to be growing. Tensions are particularly clear in technology, where China has tried to compete with the world in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and microchips, while severely restricting what people can read, watch or listen to within the country.
If the Berlin Wall was the physical symbol of the first Cold War, the Great Firewall could well be the virtual symbol of the new one.
What started as a divide in cyberspace to isolate Chinese citizens from unauthorized views of the Communist Party has now proven to be a foreboding indicator of the deepest fissures between China and much of the western world.
Wang, in his speech, said that China had never tried to impose its way on other countries. But it has done exactly that by having Zoom censor conversations that were taking place in the United States and by launching cyber attacks on Uighurs around the world.
Its controls have been hugely successful in the country in stifling dissent and helping to sow domestic internet giants, but have gained little influence from China abroad. India’s move to block 59 Chinese apps threatens to hamper China’s biggest overseas Internet success to date, the short-video meme-laden TikTok app.
Last week, TikTok also closed in Hong Kong due to China’s new national security law there. US tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter said they would stop reviewing data requests from Hong Kong authorities when evaluating the law’s restrictions.
“China is big, it will succeed, it will develop its own technology, but there are limits to what it can do,” said James A. Lewis, a former US official who writes about cybersecurity and espionage for the Center for Strategic Studies. in Washington.
Even in places where China has managed to sell its technology, the tide seems to be turning.
Beijing’s recent truculence has now prompted the UK to block new Huawei equipment from entering its networks, and the Trump administration is determined to disconnect the company from the microchips and other components it needs. To counter, Beijing has redoubled efforts to build homegrown options.
Calls for a complete decoupling of China’s supply chain from American tech companies are unrealistic in the short term, and would be hugely expensive in the long run. Still, the United States has moved to bring Taiwan’s microchip manufacturing, crucial to Huawei supply chains and other Chinese technology companies, closer to its backyard, with plans to support a new Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing plant in Arizona.
Foreign Minister Wang urged the United States to back down and look for areas where the two countries can work together. However, pessimism about the relationship is rampant, though most Chinese officials and analysts blame the Trump administration for trying to divert attention from its failure to control the pandemic.
“It is not difficult to see that under the impact of the coronavirus in this American election year, several powers in the United States are focused on China,” wrote Zhao Kejin, professor of international relations at Tsinghua University, in a recent article. “The China-United States relationship faces the most serious moment since the establishment of diplomatic relations.”
Although he avoided the idea of a new Cold War, his alternative formulation was no more reassuring: “The new reality is that relations between China and the United States are not entering ‘a new Cold War’ but are sliding towards a ‘war soft. ‘”
The reports and investigation were contributed by Claire Fu in Beijing, Lin Qiqing in Shanghai, and Motoko Rich in Tokyo.
