Denials and semantics aside, there is little doubt that a new US-China "Cold War" is playing out.
A US-bipartisan "China Scare" is in full swing in the name of national security and the US-led global liberal order.
US allies are pressurized to fall in line, pushing back against China on all fronts, targeting trade, high-end semiconductors, Artificial Intelligence (AI), bio-tech, investments. and ideology, including human rights and democracy. Global supply and value chains are being disrupted, aside from Covid-19 repercussions. Most of the world's nations have China as their largest trading partner; they find themselves in a quandary.
Will a scheduled Biden-Xi video meeting next month achieve a meaningful breakthrough in the US-China Cold War?
Don't hold your breadth. Here's why.
A Dangerous Decade of Chinese Power Is Here, warn Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, and Gabriel Collins, the Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. They venture that Beijing knows time isn’t on its side and wants to act fast, for example, on Taiwan.
The AUKUS Dominoes Are Just Starting to Fall, warns Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy on 18 September, 2021.
Will China’s New Missile Lead to Escalation or Stability?, ask Emma Ashford, a senior fellow in the New American Engagement Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Scowcroft Center. Would China's successful launch of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) provoke an arms race—or a more stable mutual deterrence relationship? A globe-circumnavigable nuclear-armed FOBS could bypass US defense systems concentrated in the northern hemisphere by mounting a guided attack via the South Pole.
In The Inevitable Rivalry, John J. Mearsheimer, father of "offensive realism" argues in Foreign Affairs (November/December 2021) that America and China are trapped by The Strategy of Great Power Politics. Through a policy of "engagement", the United States had for decades helped China to integrate with the global trading system, in the mistaken belief that China would become more liberal like many democracies. Instead, according to Mearsheimer, “Washington now faces its most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history.” "The new U.S.-Chinese rivalry is not ending anytime soon. In fact, it is likely to intensify, no matter who is in the White House".
In The New Cold War, Hal Brands and John Gaddis argue in Foreign Affairs (November/December 2021) that "echoes of history" reminiscent of the managed relatively-stable relationship with the former USSR under Mutual Assured Destruction could offer a clue to the US tectonic contest with China: "the patient management of internal threats to our democracy, as well as tolerance of the moral and geopolitical contradictions through which global diversity can most feasibly be defended".
Much of the anti-China narrative centers on its demonization as an assertive aggressor, unwilling to follow Deng Xiaoping's wise counsel of "hiding one's light under the bushel, and binding one's time". Its state-backed "predatory" trade practices and lack of market reciprocity are thought to be compromising foreign businesses; its militarized island-building in the South China Sea threatening "freedom of navigation"; its Belt and Road Initiative entrapping host countries with over-indebtedness and environmental damage; and its policies on Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong sacrificing human rights and democracy. Some assert that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) needs to rely on external aggression to shore up its legitimacy.
Such rhetoric ignores the fact that the United States has all along been the world's biggest aggressor without peer. Up to now, including the disastrous wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been at war for 225 out of 243 years since its founding in 1776.
It is also blind to the reality that as the second largest economy closely connected to the world, China can no longer "hide and bind". Its economy has been a boon to foreign businesses. Decoupling notwithstanding, many are staying put, producing for the exploding China market.
Neither is the CCP monolithic. A raft of new legislation has been enacted, targeting violation and "forced transfer" of intellectual property. More sectors including financial services are open to majority foreign ownership.
The South China Sea is a critical artery for China's economic life-blood of international trade and energy imports. China is only too eager to keep it open and free.
Apart from sovereignty claims, China is compelled to erect defenses against encirclement of the First and Second Island Chains (read US bases in Okinawa and Guam) as well as the Strait of Malacca Choke Point controlled by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. In many ways, China's Belt and Road Initiative is also a pivot to the west, hedging with overland energy pipelines across Eurasia and Russia.
Despite recent setbacks, there is no doubt that Belt and Road projects meet host countries' dire needs for infrastructure, including power plants, roads, highways, schools, hospitals, and digital connectivity. More projects are partnering with other stakeholders, including the World Bank, subject to tighter Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) safeguards, including debt sustainability. They are now required to be "coal-free".
As for Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong, these are critical matters of national sovereignty, separatism, and terrorism.
For Hong Kong, following two years of near-anarchy by violence-infested "protesters", aided and abetted by foreign powers, the city is returning to law-and-order stability under the Basic Law, Hong Kong's mini-constitution with enshrined national security safeguards. Visit Chapter 7 - One Country Two Systems Revisited: A Personal Real-Life Perspective, in an anthology published by the UK liberal-democratic think-tank Paddy Ashdown Forum .
Meanwhile, China's pro-government civil society is mushrooming. Within four days of a recent freak flooding in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, Beijing Blue Sky Rescue, part of China’s largest nonprofit civil rescue organization, helped evacuate 200,000 people from Weihui, a small city nearby. Millions of volunteer groups have long been taking part in serious disaster relief, including 1.4 million volunteers during the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake. They are also playing an active role in ecological preservation, poverty relief, and other civic activities.
According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center report, perceived authoritarianism notwithstanding, the CCP tops the world in terms of people's support for their government, multiple ranks above the United States. It hardly needs to rely on external aggression for legitimacy.
All the CCP wants now is to realize the China Dream of achieving the Two Centenary Goals - growing a moderately-well-off economy by 2021, the centenary of the founding of the CCP, and becoming a "strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country" by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The first Goal has practically been achieved.
For a glimpse of why a more constructive relationship with China could benefit both sides, visit with a critical eye a YouTube video Why the World Needs China by Cyrus Janssen, an American YouTuber and entrepreneur now based in Canada, his pro-China background notwithstanding.
With a DNA of American Exceptionalism, and City Upon a Hill, the United States, as guardian of the global liberal order, is unlikely to concede power-sharing with a rising China under an "authoritarian regime" it poorly understands or desists from understanding, as highlighted in a TikTok video, a crie de coeur, of Peter Walker, retired senior partner of McKinsey. Download VID-20211030-WA0004
This is unlikely to change anytime soon until both sides learn how to accommodate each other, perhaps when China overtakes the United States as the world's largest economy by 2031 (according to Bloomberg Economics).
As for comprehensive power, at the end of the day, while China has to address the West's real concerns, "the United States needs to accept it may be returning to a more equitable state of affairs, one in which mutual deterrence is maintained, at the cost of the United States no longer being so far ahead of the pack", as Emma Ashford insightfully observes in Foreign Policy.
