CHINAwatch

New Cold War: De-risking US-China conflict

A June 2020 Hinrich Foundation report authored by research fellow Dr. Alan Dupont offers seven insightful recommendations (Chapter 4):

(1) Protect democratic values and interests;
(2) Maintain a military edge;
(3) Manage decoupling to minimize disruptions; 
(4) Reform the WTO; 
(5) Strengthen international cooperation, middle-power diplomacy and "back channels"
(6) Develop new cyber and tech rules, protocols and agreements 
(7) Integrate economic and security policy.

These recommendations have a great deal to commend themselves. They may, however, benefit from the following additional perspectives -

(a) Does China really want to dominate the world, with all the obligations, costs and pushback implied? Would achievement of its China Dream be better realized by upholding multilateralism and a global "community of common destiny"? If so, instead of baiting an awoken lion by stroking fears of a global "China Scare", would there be room to encourage greater mutual understanding and learning between the West and China as regards governance and norms, without necessarily negating one or the other? 

(b) As for decoupling, it's true that the idea has gained much further traction thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. So essentials like certain medical supplies and equipment plus products and components directly affecting national security are likely to see changes in their supply and value chains. But totally "cutting the Gordian knot" seems impossible, as Dr. Dupont quotes from John Lee of the Lowry Institute (page 28). This will become even more apparent with the coming Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest trading bloc, of which China will be a key Member. China has also indicated it may well join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Click here At many more countries already have China as the largest trading partner by far, the vast majority of nations do not want to be forced to choose between the United States and China. 

(c) As the world's Superpower, the United States already possesses overarching global military dominance on multiple fronts. It has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier battle groups compared with China's nascent and miniscule version. It has some 800 military bases in 70 countries and territories, compared with China's only spot in Djibouti. It's nuclear stockpile is some tenfold over China's. Would stroking fears about US global military edge risk a "security spiral" with China and Russia, feeding into the American "military-industrial-complex" vested interests at the expense of much-needed improvements of homeland infrastructure, healthcare and education? 

(d) A looming new Cold War with the United States and the global  Coronavirus backlash have taught China a huge lesson. Its coming Five Year Plan (2021-2025) is likely focused on improving its own people's livelihood and environment. Click here  Would cooperation with China on global issues of common interests such as Climate Change, denuclearization, anti-terrorism, water scarcity, poverty relief, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and reform of China's Belt and Road Initiative, be more productive in de-risking US-China conflict?         

Worsening Australia-China relations and what to do about it

As highlighted in this live TV interview on 9 June, China has warned citizens not to travel to Australia due to increasing hostility towards its nationals.

As Australia-China relations are plummeting, Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister (1988-96), and currently with the Australian National University, offers a nuanced yet realist view of how to engage with a perceived "increasingly-assertive" China to achieve a truly win-win relationship.

Read his article How Not to Respond to China dated18 June, 2020 on an online platform of the Asia Global Institute, a University of Hong Kong think-tank. 

The Struggle for Power: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century

Leading up to the more robust, realist, and all-of-government pushback against China in the latest White House report United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China is the above 14-chapter book, The Struggle for Power: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century

The relatively concise, 14-chapter book was compiled earlier in 2019 by a team of distinguished American experts and scholars including Joseph Nye, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Pillsbury, Graham Allison, Elizabeth Economy, and David Shambaugh. The tome is a good read to understand the intensifying dynamics in US-China rivalry for economic, military, technological, and ideological dominance. 

 

United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China

It's now commonly thought that the "Thucydides Trap" confronting rivalling Great Powers has now well and truly sprung.  A "New Cold War" is happening in all but name between the United States as world hegemon and China its existential challenger. To understand America's perspective, the above White House report released on 20 May, 2020 is as timely as it is instructive. 

The Report outlines a robust, realist, results-based pushback on all fronts against China as the greatest threat to American national interests including the free, open, and rule-based world order led by the United States.

Its apparently-benign Conclusion reads as follows -

"The Administration’s approach to the PRC reflects a fundamental reevaluation of how the United States understands and responds to the leaders of the world’s most populous country and second largest national economy. The United States recognizes the long-term strategic competition between our two systems. Through a whole-of-government approach and guided by a return to principled realism, as articulated by the NSS, the United States Government will continue to protect American interests and advance American influence. At the same time, we remain open to constructive, results-oriented engagement and cooperation from China where our interests align. We continue to engage with PRC leaders in a respectful yet clear-eyed manner, challenging Beijing to uphold its commitments."

Concrete pushback against China across the board is already in full swing. This includes a massive tariff war, tightening chokehold on Huawei (the lodestar of China's 5-G advance), restricted academic access to US technological research, measures to decouple from China's supply chains, increase in "Freedom of Navigation Operations" in the South China Sea, stepped-up development of hypersonic weaponry, ratcheted-up criticisms of China's perceived human rights violations (Xinjiang), questioning China's Belt and Road Initiative, its green energy credentials, its rhetoric in building a global "Community of Common Destiny", and most recently, refusing to recognize Hong Kong's "One Country Two Systems"

The Report denies any sinister motive of regime change or China containment - 

"Our approach is not premised on determining a particular end state for China. Rather, our goal is to protect United States vital national interests, as articulated in the four pillars of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS). We aim to: (1) protect the American people, homeland, and way of life; (2) promote American prosperity; (3) preserve peace through strength; and (4) advance American influence."

"Even as we compete with the PRC, we welcome cooperation where our interests align. Competition need not lead to confrontation or conflict. The United States has a deep and abiding respect for the Chinese people and enjoys longstanding ties to the country. We do not seek to contain China’s development, nor do we wish to disengage from the Chinese people. The United States expects to engage in fair competition with the PRC, whereby both of our nations, businesses, and individuals can enjoy security and prosperity."

To Beijing, however, the Report's rhetoric masks a blatant attempt to interfere with and discredit China's chosen development path. Warts and all, China's own model has proved remarkably successful for the Chinese nation and its people. Fear of China's increasing economic clout and influence sustains the rhetoric of a global "China Scare". It ignores China's lack of willingness and capacity to take over America's global leadership. It is tone-deaf to China's repeated warnings that its model doesn't suit every nation. It flips China's national defensive strategy to an offensive military posture.  It underplays China's leading contribution to solar, wind and hydroelectric energies under the Paris Agreement (which the United States has torn up). As for the Belt and Road Initiative, it is meeting a glaring global deficit in infrastructural connectivity. It is being embraced by a host of countries including Western nations such as Italy and Greece, while China has acknowledged important room for improvement such as debt-sustainability, transparency and corporate governance.

Beijing is now widely condemned for trying to enact for Hong Kong's national security bypassing Hong Kong's legislature. This ignores a gaping national security loophole in Hong Kong's mini-constitution (Basic Law). This loophole has been created by decades of fierce opposition to enacting Hong Kong's national security safeguards (Article 23) under the Basic Law. The same anti-Beijing legislators now stand on the high horse that such law should be enacted locally.

The absence of sufficient national security safeguards became all too evident in Hong Kong's recent violent protests. Symbols of Beijing's sovereignty have been ransacked, police stations fire-bombed, and ordinary citizens with opposite views publicly lynched. Flags, slogans, and demands calling for Hong Kong's "independence" became a common sight. Prominent activists were lauded and given high-level meetings with very senior officials of hostile foreign powers. A generation of Hong Kong people have been brainwashed into total loss of a sense of nationhood. Many have been turned into radical subversives, aided and abetted behind the scenes by opportunist hostile foreign forces. 

In the eyes of many Chinese people, China's many failings notwithstanding, America's double-standards about democracy and human rights are glaring. Apart from friendly relations with Arabian autocracies, the White House's attitude towards current "George Floyd" protests against deep-seated American racism and social inequalities stands in ironic contrast to America's support and encouragement given to Hong Kong's remarkably similar fiery unrests. 

While the Report rightly flags up legitimate alarm and fears of a rising "authoritarian" China, it begs the question if China's real intentions are misread.  Taken to conclusions, such misreading may turn out to be the fuse igniting a catastrophic powder keg that may engulf the whole world. 

The Decline of the West: What is it and Why might it matter?

Published on 11 April 2020 by the Asia Global Institute, the above Paper by Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia, traces the Rise of the West, including its ideas and values and the creation of a liberal, albeit hegemonic world order underpinned by US dominance and the Bretton Woods Institutions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. This liberal world order has been embraced by and beneficial to most nations, including China. 

The Paper also synthesizes the Rise of the Rest, especially an increasingly powerful and assertive China which seems to question and undermine American hegemony. At the same time, rampant America First exceptionalism is scattering to the winds much of the ideas and values that uphold the global commons.  This poses the question whether the world will converge into a one-size-fits-all, Fujiyama's "End of History" model, and if not, what would become of the world order. 

While the West largely understands what the world's current hegemonic superpower wants, not many outside China really understand what China wants. While "international collective-action problems" like terrorism and climate change may offer some grounds for cooperation between rival great powers, misreading and misjudgement, especially after the occurrence of the Coronavirus pandemic, are likely to translate into fear and a security spiral that may spin out of control.

If sad chapters of history are not to repeat themselves, it is timely and instructive to deconstruct The China Mirage.  

"The China Mirage" - Timely revisit of America's tragic misreading of China

Author James Bradley's 2015 eloquent introduction to his seminal book The China Mirage is a timely reminder of the critical need for Americans to really understand what China, a fifth of humanity, is all about as a nation, and what its people and leaders want, if only to avoid misjudging China again to the detriment of all, America included. 

As a follow-up, award-winning journalist John Pilger's documentary The Coming War on China is a dark revelation of the dangerous paranoia and inhumanity into which the world's most powerful democracy can sink with a twisted narrative of China inflamed by American pride and prejudice. 

US: China secretly conducting small nuclear tests

Live TV interview with Press TV on 16 April, 2020. 

 

China succeeds in mass extraction of combustable methane hydrates in the South China Sea

According to a Weixin report (in Chinese) on 22 October, 2019, using a semi-submersible drilling platform (Blue Whale One) measuring 117m x 92.7m x 118m tall in the South China Sea, China achieved the world's first breakthrough in extracting scalable quantities of methane hydrates ("inflammable ice"). The project's inception was reported in the South China Morning Post on 19 May, 2017

The strategic significance is obvious. As the largest energy consumer, China has to rely on oil and gas imports over long distances through "choke points" (e.g. the Strait of Hormuz and the Malacca Strait) vulnerable to foreign powers. On the environmental front, China is the world's largest coal consumer, contributing to carbon emissions and smogs in many Chinese cities.

Methane hydrates are a lot less polluting but ten times more energy- rich per unit compared to coal, oil, and natural gas. It is estimated that one cubic meter of methane hydrates is equivalent to 160 cubic meters of natural gas.

The global reserve of methane hydrates is twice as much as all other known fossil fuels combined, enough for 1,000 years of human consumption. China's gas hydrates reserve is estimated at 100 billion tons of oil-equivalents, of which 80% lies in the South China Sea.

The successful extraction marks a significant milestone in utilization of alternative sources of energy for China. It also explains why China has been so assertive to safeguard territorial claims in the South China Sea.

State of The Play on US-China Competition - Center for Strategic and International Studies

Audio interview with Steve Hadley, former National Security Advisor, on 8 October, 2019, touching on the debate on U.S.-China competition.  "Is the Washington panic on China out of step with how the rest of the country views China? How can we best encapsulate the current state of the relationship? Are China’s domestic politics or foreign policy shapeable".

China at 70 has much to celebrate, but its biggest challenges lie ahead

Cary Huang's column of 29 September in the South China Morning Post gives an up-to-date catalogue of China's impressive achievements under the Communist Party of China. In just seven decades, what would have taken the West centuries, a poverty-stricken, internationally weak, and backward Chinese nation has been turned into an economic and geopolitical powerhouse, a leading engine of global growth projecting influence across continents and oceans. A video clip From Ashes to Prosperity shows what breathtaking transformation the nation has undergone since the ravages wrought by the Japanese invasion. 

Huang mentions that "per capita GDP rose from just US$200 in 1979 – when 80 per cent of Chinese lived in absolute poverty in rural areas – to around US$10,000 last year, firmly in middle-income territory." This is singularly instructive, as China seems to have successfully escaped the much-hyped "middle-income trap". 

At his latest address at the United Nations, President Trump suggested that as the world's second largest economy, China is already an advanced country. It cannot pretend to remain a developing nation, thereby gaming the international trading system. Huang's observation is timely that "China is still neither an advanced nor a developed country. Nor can it properly be described as a rich nation. It is a developing giant on the world stage." His assertion is supported by China's GDP per capita below the worldwide average of US$11,570, not to mention backwardness in many other metrics, including the environment and institutions. 

This helps to debunk popular Sinophobia that China is a global superpower threatening to impose an authoritarian model on the rest of the world. "To be a true superpower, a country must wield global influence in many, varied spheres: in economics, in science and technology, in military matters and in soft power." In economics, China perhaps scores an A. But the country still lags far behind the United States in global military capabilities and behind many Western advanced countries, big and small, in scientific breakthroughs. "China has just three Nobel Prizes; one for science, one for literature and one for peace (the last of which was awarded against Beijing’s will)," Huang observes. 

Above all, "Today, every single nation to have joined the 36-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been not only a market economy, but also a free democracy." Despite its dramatic ascendancy, China's massive deficit of soft power stands in the way of its achievement of great power status. No matter how well China may excel in other fields, and how more influential China becomes globally, this deficit in soft power of universal appeal is likely to remain a stumbling block along the nation's ambitious trajectory. 

The concentration of power under President Xi may be necessary to combat corrupt interests and political detractors in order to steer the nation on course to realize the China Dream of becoming a fully developed nation by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China. However, with the rapid rise of a university-educated middle class, the goal's realization is likely to depend on a willingness to embrace modernity in governance – democracy, freedom and the rule of law.