[Follow live updates on the upcoming meeting between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.]
No relationship is more influential on the planet than a couple. No relationship is more tense and distrusting, across a wide and consequential array of issues.
China and the United States are deeply at odds about how people and economies should operate. Both countries compete for influence and technology and seek to gain military advantages in cyberspace, space, and land. Their rivalry is more complicated than that of the Cold War. They are also business and trade partners.
That complexity will be in full play when President Biden holds a virtual summit with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, has called managing the relationship with China “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.” Yet China has vexed American policymakers ever since Mao’s armies took control of the nation — “liberated” it, in the Communist Party’s parlance — in 1949.
In the years that followed, the party drove down the economy to ruin. The government changed its course and China became much, much wealther. Now, Mr. Xi, China’s leader since 2013, wants to restore the nation’s primacy in the global order.
“The East is rising,” Mr. Xi has said, “and the West is declining.”
These are the key fronts of the contest that is defining the era.
Dominance around Pacific
Since the end World War II, the United States used its naval and aerial might to maintain order throughout the Pacific region. This is not a status that China will tolerate for the long-term.
As China has built up its military presence in the region, the Biden administration has sought to widen America’s alliances with Australia, Japan, India and other nations. Beijing regards such actions as dangerous provocations meant to secure American “hegemony.”
Taiwan, a democratic, self-governing island that is considered Chinese territory by the Communist Party, is a major flash point. Mr. Xi has vowed to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” a project that includes bringing Taiwan under Chinese control. China has flown more warplanes into Taiwan’s airspace, a sign that it is not ruling out the possibility of annexed the island.
American presidents have long been vague about how forcefully the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense. This “strategic ambiguity” is meant to avoid provoking Beijing and signal to the island’s leaders that they should not declare independence with the idea that America would have their back.
Both former President Donald J. Trump’s administrations have increased U.S. assistance to Taiwan. American warships have traversed the Taiwan Strait. Training with the Taiwanese military has been done by small teams of troops.
Asked in October whether the United States would protect Taiwan, Mr. Biden said bluntly: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
The White House quickly stated that his remarks did not indicate a change of U.S. policy.
Commerce has strength
Technically, the Trump administration’s trade war is in pause. But the Biden team has continued protesting China’s economic policies that led Mr. Trump to begin imposing tariffs on Chinese goods, including Beijing’s extensive support for steel, solar cells, computer chips and other domestic industries.
“These policies have reinforced a zero-sum dynamic in the world economy,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in October, adding that “China’s growth and prosperity come at the expense of workers and economic opportunity here in the U.S.”
The cycle of tariffs and counter-tariffs that began in 2018 showed how interconnected the two countries’ economies are — and how vulnerable they remain if either side goes further to “decouple” them.
The tariff fight has prompted Mr. Xi to declare that China’s economy needs to be driven primarily by domestic demand and homegrown innovation and only secondarily by exports, in what he calls a “dual circulation” strategy.
Officials in Beijing claim that this does NOT mean China is closing its doors to foreign investment or exports. The current climate of economic nationalism has already sparked new interest in domestic brands and increased investment. Chinese consumers are increasingly intolerant of foreign companies that fail to toe the party’s line on Hong Kong, Tibet and other hot-button issues or are otherwise seen as disrespectful to China.
Hollywood studios have largely stopped making movies featuring Chinese villains. One of China’s biggest recent blockbusters, a government-sponsored epic, celebrates a bloody victory over the Americans during the Korean War.
High-Tech Supremacy
Silicon Valley’s internet giants have mostly been shut out of China for years. The latest one to leave was Microsoft’s LinkedIn, which in October gave up trying to run its service under Beijing’s censorship requirements.
Many other American tech companies do business in China, including Apple and Qualcomm, Qualcomm, Intel, and Qualcomm. This feeds all kinds of concerns in Washington: that Chinese agents are siphoning the companies’ technology and secrets; that the products they make in China are vulnerable to cybermeddling; that they are compromising on professed values in playing by Beijing’s rules.
It’s a vicious cycle. The Trump administration’s crippling of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, has made Beijing more conscious of how easily the United States can use its economic clout to limit China’s access to advanced technology.
“Technological innovation has become the main battleground in the global strategic game,” Mr. Xi told a conference in May. China, he has said repeatedly in recent years, needs to achieve “self-reliance.”
This has led to U.S. officials being more vigilant about preventing sensitive American know-how from getting into Chinese hands. Washington agencies are more vigilant about Chinese tech investments in America. Chinese-born scientists who have worked in America since 1996 were arrested for allegedly concealing their ties to China. However, the Justice Department has dropped some of these cases.
Human Rights and Freedoms
The Communist Party’s leaders have for decades bristled at outside criticisms of their authoritarian governance, calling them intrusions on national sovereignty. But as the party under Mr. Xi has doubled down on its iron-fisted approach to dissent, China’s confrontations with the United States over values and freedoms have become more frequent.
Washington has imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over Beijing’s sharp response to the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The Commerce Department has restricted U.S. exports to companies involved in China’s crackdown in Xinjiang, the northwestern region where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities have been detained for re-education and indoctrination.
Beijing officials insist that America need not see China’s ascent as a threat. In September, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, that America’s “major strategic misjudgment” was behind the two nations’ deteriorating relations.
Mr. Wang cited a Chinese saying: “He who tied the knot must untie it.”
“The ball is now in America’s court,” Mr. Wang said.
Source: NY Times
