A chill in U.S.-China relations
Paper: II
Mains: General Studies- II: Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations.
Context
- Slew of recent announcements on China by U.S. President Donald Trump is a clear indication that the competition between the U.S. and China is likely to sharpen in the post-COVID world.
- On May 29, the Trump administration said it would revoke Hong Kong’s special trade status under U.S. law.
Key Details:
- The administration passed an order limiting the entry of certain Chinese graduate students and researchers who may have ties to the People’s Liberation Army.
- The U.S. President has also ordered financial regulators to closely examine Chinese firms listed in U.S. stock markets, and warned those that do not comply with U.S. laws could be delisted.
- The Trump administration said it would revoke Hong Kong’s special trade status under U.S. law.
- The U.S. President has also ordered financial regulators to closely examine Chinese firms listed in U.S. stock markets, and warned those that do not comply with U.S. laws could be delisted.
- The U.S. government has decided to bar passenger planes from China from June 16.
- A trade war which President Donald Trump launched in 2018 is yet to be resolved fully.
- Trump and other officials in the administration have been attacking China over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Complicit in China’s rise
- Americans have had a strange fascination for China ever since the early 1900s when Protestant missionaries decided that it was God’s work to bring salvation to the Chinese.
- Even after the Chinese communists seized power, the Americans hoped to cohabit with Mao Zedong in a world under U.S. hegemony.
- The Chinese allowed them to believe this and extracted their price. U.S. President Richard Nixon gave China the international acceptability it craved in return for being admitted to Mao’s presence in 1972; President Jimmy Carter terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to normalise relations with China in 1978;
- President George H.W. Bush washed away the sins of Tiananmen in 1989 for ephemeral geopolitical gain; and Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate had criticised Bush for indulging the Chinese, proceeded as President to usher the country into the World Trade Organization at the expense of American business.
- All American administrations since the 1960s have been complicit in China’s rise in the unrealised hope that it will become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ under Pax Americana.
Disguising its real purpose
- The Chinese are hard-nosed and unsentimental about the U.S.
- They have always pursued America with a selfish purpose, albeit couched in high principle.
- They have spoken words that the Americans wanted to hear — anti-Soviet rhetoric during the Cold War and market principles thereafter — to disguise their real purpose of thwarting U.S. hegemony. Ever since Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles spoke in 1958 of weaning China and other “satellites” away from the Soviets through regime change, known as “peaceful evolution”, every Chinese leader from Chairman Mao to President Xi Jinping has been clear-eyed that the U.S. represents an existential threat to the continued supremacy of the communist regime.
- Mao put it best, when he told high-ranking leaders in November 1959, that the “U.S. is attempting to carry out its aggression and expansion with a much more deceptive tactic… In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system.” (Memoirs, Chinese leader Bo Yibo).
- The collapse of the Soviet Union only reinforced this view and strengthened China’s resolve to resist by creating its own parallel universe.
- China is building an alternate trading system (the Belt and Road Initiative); a multilateral banking system under its control (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, New Development Bank); its own global positioning system (BeiDou); digital payment platforms (WeChat Pay and Alipay); a world-class digital network (Huawei 5G); cutting-edge technological processes in sunrise industries; and a modern military force.
- It is doing this under the noses of the Americans and some of it with the financial and technological resources of the West.
- Voices of caution have been few and far between, among them political scientist John Mearsheimer, who wrote in 2005 that the rise of China would not be peaceful at all, but the world chose to believe General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Hu Jintao’s assurances about “peaceful rise”. When satellite evidence showed that China was building military installations in the South China Sea, China’s Southeast Asian neighbours and the U.S. preferred to believe assurances to the contrary given by Mr. Xi on the lawns of the White House in 2015.
The Hong Kong question
- Will Hong Kong become a game-changer in the post-COVID world?
- China’s decision to enact the new national security law for Hong Kong has been condemned in unison by the U.S. and its Western allies as an assault on human freedoms.
- Why is this significant? The points of divergence, even dispute, between them have so far been in the material realm.
- With Hong Kong, the U.S.-China rivalry may, possibly, be entering the ideological domain.
- For some time now there are reports about Chinese interference in the internal affairs of democracies. Countries in the West have tackled this individually, always mindful of not jeopardising their trade with China. Hong Kong may be different.
- It is not only a bastion for Western capitalism in the East, but more importantly the torch-bearer of Western democratic ideals.
- Think of it as a sort of Statue of Liberty; it holds aloft the torch of freedom and democracy for all those who pass through Hong Kong en route to China. This is an assault on beliefs, so to speak.
Is it same as the USA- Soviet Union?
- There are similarities between the current crisis and the Cold War.
- The political elites of both China and the U.S., like the Soviet Union and the U.S. back then, see each other as their main rivals.
- One can also see this antagonism moving from the political elite to the popular perception — the targeting of ethnic Chinese professionals and others in the U.S. and of American individuals or entities in China is a case in point.
- But there are key differences as well. Proxy conflicts between the U.S. and China are not seen as one witnessed during the Cold War between USA and Soviet Union. The world is also not bipolar any more.
- There are third parties such as the EU, Russia, India and Japan. These parties increasingly have a choice whether or not to align with either power as they see fit and on a case by case basis.
- This leads to a very different kind of international order than during the Cold War.
- Ties between China and the U.S. are still not as bad as they were between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
- Beijing and Washington are still economically and financially entangled.
- Today, from trade and technology to the pandemic and Hong Kong, the battle lines have been drawn — China, which the Pentagon called “a revisionist power” in 2018, is the main rival of Washington, a position which the Soviet Union held during the Cold War.
- The possibility of a military confrontation is very low. But the era of cooperation, peaceful trade and pragmatism that had defined U.S.-China partnership since President Richard Nixon’s reset in the 1970s seems to have made way for an aggressive leadership contest and deepening mutual mistrust.
How the US- China relationship evolved?
- President Jimmy Carter terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to normalise relations with China in 1978;
- President George H.W. Bush washed away the sins of Tiananmen in 1989 for momentary geopolitical gain;
- Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate had criticised Bush for indulging the Chinese, proceeded as President to usher the country into the World Trade Organization at the expense of American business.
- All American administrations since the 1960s have been complicit in China’s rise in the unrealised hope that it will become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ under Pax Americana.
- But every Chinese leader from Chairman Mao to President Xi Jinping has been clear-eyed that the U.S. represents an existential threat to the continued supremacy of the communist regime.
- Mao put it best, when he told high-ranking leaders in 1959, that the “U.S. is attempting to carry out its aggression and expansion with a much more deceptive tactic… In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system.”
- The collapse of the Soviet Union only reinforced this view and strengthened China’s resolve to resist by creating its own parallel universe.
China is building:
- An alternate trading system.
- A multilateral banking system under its control (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, New Development Bank);
- Its own Global Positioning System (BeiDou);
- Digital payment platforms (WeChat Pay and Alipay);
- A world-class digital network (Huawei 5G); cutting-edge technological processes in sunrise industries; and a modern military force.
- It is doing this under the noses of the Americans and some of it with the financial and technological resources of the West.
- What was believed to be a peaceful rise is inherently a clash with USA. Its military expansion in the South China Sea and direct hostility with allies of USA means China is turning hegemonic. This is a challenge to American power, influence and interests.
How has US responded?
- S. is already at war with China, says a few officials from the Trump administration.
- But a few have also cautioned that this should not escalate into cold war as USA is still entangled to China’s supply chains.
Significance of Hong Kong to the west
- It is the last bastion for Western capitalism in the East, but more importantly, the torch-bearer of Western democratic ideals.
- Think of it as a sort of Statue of Liberty; it holds aloft the torch of freedom and democracy for all those who pass through Hong Kong en route to China.
- The new law passed by China is an assault on the very idea of democracy and liberty. Hong Kong now is caged under the authoritative regime of Communist China.
Conclusion:
- This comes on the back of not unreasonable demands that China should come clean on its errors of omission in the early days of COVID-19, when greater transparency and quicker action might have prevented, or at least mitigated, the pandemic.
- In the months ahead, more information may become public, from sources inside China itself, about the shortcomings of the regime, that will further fuel a debate on the superiority of the Chinese Model as an alternative to democracy.
- Will this form the ideological underpinning for the birth of a new Cold War?
- That will depend on who wins in Washington in November; on whether profit will again trump politics in Europe; and on how skilfully the Wolf Warriors of China can manipulate global public opinion.
- The lines are beginning to be drawn between the Americans on the one side and China on the other. A binary choice is likely to test to the limit India’s capacity to maintain strategic and decisional autonomy.