Though the United States seeks to confront its internal vulnerabilities, heightened awareness of them is driving a preoccupation with the challenge from China, and a tendency to overstate the nature and scope of that challenge.
THE BIDEN administration is right to characterize China as engaged in “stiff competition” with the United States. But the stiffness of the challenge stems not simply from Beijing’s global ambitions, massive resources, ruthless tactics, and Communist mindset. The U.S.-China competition is also keen because the United States has unilaterally squandered much of its competitive edge and is not bringing its best game to the playing field. Quite the contrary. Its economic, technological, and military advantages are at risk; its politics are polarized and dysfunctional; and its social fabric is fraying. Though the United States seeks to confront these vulnerabilities, heightened awareness of them is driving a preoccupation with the challenge from China, and a tendency to overstate the nature and scope of that challenge. This has magnified American threat perceptions, fueling a tendency to blame Beijing for problems that are largely made in the USA.
THE NARRATIVE has taken hold that the U.S. economy was hollowed out by job losses to China. Beijing, we are told, has been eating the United States’ lunch for decades. No doubt Beijing has engaged in a wide range of mercenary and often unfair trade practices aimed at scoring points for China and boosting its competitive advantage. But the United States itself has created opportunities for China to do so both fairly and unfairly. Can the Chinese be blamed for the loss of American jobs when U.S. companies voluntarily relocated them in pursuit of the comparative advantage China offered in terms of labor and operating costs? It is also true that Beijing’s economic diplomacy—especially under its “Belt and Road Initiative”—is opportunistically scoring points against the United States, often at the expense of transparent business practices and good governance in the countries China targets. But the United States, for whatever reasons, is not offering those countries many viable or attractive alternatives in terms of comparable levels of infrastructure investment and financial aid. As China scholar Evan Feigenbaum has observed, “whining isn’t competing.”
A more recent and obvious example is the obloquy directed at Beijing over COVID-19. Yes, the virus originated in China, and Beijing probably did less than it could have to contain its spread internationally. But it remains unclear how much of this lapse was attributable to the inevitable spread of a new virus before the accumulation of data makes its existence apparent, or to the systemic reluctance of Communist apparatchiks to acknowledge and report bad news. The latter explanation does not negate the former. More importantly, the severity of the subsequent impact of the virus within the United States was primarily America’s own fault, particularly given that Washington had several weeks of advance warning that Chinese leaders themselves did not possess. In short, Beijing bears some responsibility for COVID-19 reaching the United States, but there is no credible evidence that Chinese leaders intended for that to happen, and it would be ludicrous to try and hold them accountable for how the response to the outbreak was bungled after the virus arrived in America.
Fears have also arisen about Beijing’s “influence operations” in the United States, which have been characterized as “covert, coercive, or corrupt” and as designed to subvert democratic institutions, free speech, and even U.S. sovereignty. But this grossly exaggerates both Beijing’s intentions and its potential for success. Most Chinese influence operations in the United States are aimed simply at promoting Chinese views and interests through public diplomacy, lobbying, and cultural and academic programs. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Beijing’s influence efforts during the U.S. 2020 presidential election campaign were aimed at “shaping perceptions of U.S. policies and bolstering China’s global position” rather than actually changing the outcome of the election. Certainly, Beijing exploits the openness of the United States in pursuing its influence agenda, and is also engaged in covert operations in the United States toward various ends. But whether China’s overt influence activities succeed in winning hearts and minds depends on how susceptible Americans really are to Chinese propaganda. If they are, that is another homegrown vulnerability—already apparent in the widespread embrace in the United States of disinformation and conspiracy theories. But as China scholar Susan Shirk has observed, “the harm we could cause our society by our own overreactions” to Chinese influence operations—by launching another “Red Scare”—is far greater than the damage being perpetrated by those operations.
Finally, alarmist reports from various sources routinely highlight Chinese advances in the military, technology, space, and cyber realms that threaten U.S. national security. Most recently, these have featured Chinese developments in hypersonic missiles, nuclear weapons deployment, and artificial intelligence. These all pose serious challenges to the United States that need to be confronted, but the dangers are exaggerated when China’s possession of military capabilities is equated with aggressive intentions, or when it is presumed that Beijing is determined to assert global supremacy in every sector. (Chinese leaders probably judge that sharing technology leadership with the United States and other countries is more achievable and sustainable.) More fundamentally, the U.S. fear of being outcompeted by China in these sectors is due in part to the recent erosion of longtime American advantages through inattention, misplaced priorities, and/or resource constraints.
NONE OF this is meant to disparage the magnitude of the challenge from China. On the contrary, the U.S.-China competition is severe, structural, and systemic. China is challenging the United States’ post-Cold War status as the sole superpower, the wealthiest and most influential country in the world, and the putative leader of the international order. It is offering its governing model of authoritarian socialism as a viable alternative to democracy. And it is mobilizing its state sector to maximize every Chinese competitive advantage over the United States in trade and technology. But none of these challenges is existential or insuperable. Beijing is not seeking to eliminate U.S. power, wealth, and influence or to eradicate democracy and capitalism. Rather, it seeks a multipolar world in which China is also a “leader,” its interests are secure, and its governing model is accepted as legitimate. Even this vision, however, represents an extraordinary challenge to a United States whose political and economic models are stumbling, whose international reputation has eroded, and whose interests are not wholly secure. These vulnerabilities lend themselves to magnifying the China challenge into a zero-sum or winner-take-all contest in which neither side would find coexistence with the other system tolerable.
The historical context of these trends is important. The fact is that the United States, even before its recent domestic travails, was having more than its share of trouble acknowledging and adjusting to shifts in the global balance of power since the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the global financial crisis. Whether or not one subscribes to the notion that the United States is in relative strategic decline, it clearly no longer is (if it ever was) a global hegemon that can set the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world at will. The United States no longer enjoys “primacy” either globally or in the Western Pacific, and this further amplifies the perceived threat from a more powerful and competitive China. The prevailing U.S. response to these new historical circumstances, however, seems to fluctuate between denial that U.S. primacy has been lost, and a tacit acceptance that it has—but with a determination to restore and sustain it, presumably into perpetuity. Perhaps the latter is possible, but only if America first gets its domestic house in order.
In the meantime, the United States seems to be resisting acknowledgement of its relatively diminished historical position in the world, and channeling its discomfort and domestic insecurities into a zero-sum contest with China—based on a faulty depiction of Beijing’s intentions and an apparent rejection of any symmetry in the U.S.-China relationship. This mindset is reflected in multiple aspects of the Biden administration’s approach to Beijing.
First and foremost is its overarching priority on competition, with only occasional acknowledgement of the potential for or utility of bilateral cooperation. This emphasis on stiff competition flows predictably from the intensity of the Chinese challenge and the increasingly apparent gaps in U.S. competitiveness. But the deemphasis on cooperation seems to indicate an aversion to interactions that Beijing might use to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities and score points against Washington. Perhaps more likely, Biden’s reluctance to publicly promote cooperation with China—except on a handful of transnational issues like climate change—probably reflects a desire to avoid appearing accommodative or weak in dealing with Beijing when the United States is so politically divided and the “China threat” narrative has been so strongly embraced by both sides. But this risks negative long-term consequences. Although substantial cooperation with Beijing will ultimately be imperative, Biden appears unwilling to accept the domestic political risks of pursuing it—or at least of doing so explicitly and trying to defend and explain it.
This helps explain the administration’s overall position on “engagement” with China. Only rarely is the word used to refer to constructive interaction with Beijing. Instead, it is generally avoided on the grounds that “engagement” was an earlier policy approach that failed because it was based on false premises—particularly the notion that it would yield political liberalization in China. Accordingly, Kurt Campbell, the White House coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs, declared in May 2021, “the period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.” Another White House official said in November 2021 that “the Biden administration is not trying to change China through bilateral engagement” because “we don’t think that’s realistic.”
This equates engagement with a policy of regime change in China, which is not historically accurate, and which bypasses or denies the potential utility of engagement in pursuit of other bilateral or strategic goals. As a result, the Biden administration has relegated “engagement” with Beijing to the same category as “cooperation”: something Washington cannot advocate (at least not rhetorically) because public and/or Congressional opinion would not support it.
ANOTHER ASPECT of the Biden administration’s approach to China that reflects homegrown insecurity is, paradoxically, its repeated assertions that Washington must deal—and is dealing—with Beijing from a “position of strength.” Aside from the fact that the premise is highly debatable, given the combination of the United States’ internal disarray and its diminished international credibility, these assertions seem to belie a lack of confidence underlying them. Although the United States still exceeds China in virtually every measure of national strength, it is the narrowing of that gap and the current trajectories of the two sides that now frame the strategic dynamic, including and especially the calculations of other countries. In short, there is much global skepticism about whether the United States can convincingly maintain that it is approaching China from a “position of strength,” especially if this is meant to suggest that Washington has the upper hand and can thus dictate the terms of U.S.-China relations.
This is reflected in two recurring themes from the Biden administration: its call for “guardrails to ensure that [U.S.-China] competition does not veer into conflict,” and its pursuit of an international environment and international rules that are “favorable to our interests and our values.” The administration has not provided a clear explanation of the “guardrails” metaphor, but it appears to refer to setting boundaries on Chinese behavior, and thus reflects Washington’s efforts to set the terms of the relationship. This at least is how Beijing interprets it, as indicated by Chinese vice foreign minister Xie Feng immediately after the November 15 “virtual meeting” between Biden and Xi Jinping. Xie said that any setting of guardrails “should be done through consultation on an equal footing, agreed and adhered to by both sides, rather than one side imposing conditions on the other.” Similarly, the Biden administration’s emphasis on upholding a global order that is “favorable” to U.S. interests and values, although it sounds reasonable and even desirable, essentially retains the notion that the United States would continue to enjoy global primacy—which, as noted earlier, is probably historically obsolete.
Washington’s assertion (or assumption) that it retains the upper hand in the U.S.-China relationship, to whatever extent it conceals a fear that this may longer be correct, reflects further resistance to the idea that the United States’ global position has weakened. This defiance is accompanied by an apparent disinclination to acknowledge any U.S. role in contributing to the downturn in the relationship. Instead, Beijing is held wholly accountable on the grounds that it is China’s hegemonic ambitions, coercive diplomacy, predatory trade practices, and autocratic nature that have created the strategic competition between the two countries. China certainly merits ample blame—and for those reasons—but not exclusively. Moreover, the balance sheet is more symmetrical than is generally recognized. Washington routinely criticizes Beijing’s litany of grievances against the United States, notwithstanding the symmetry of Washington’s own regular list of grievances against China (on such issues as Taiwan, Hong Kong, trade, and human rights). Similarly, the U.S. side disparages Beijing’s perennial insistence that Washington “tied the knot and must untie it,” while asserting that Beijing bears the burden of repairing the relationship. Presumably, this is partly because U.S. domestic politics would not abide any acceptance of American blame or responsibility.
This is reflected in the U.S. approach to the highly contentious issue of Taiwan. Washington focuses inordinately on the potential threat of a Chinese military attack against the island, rather than address the possibility that Beijing’s escalating rhetoric and saber-rattling are a response (at least in part) to actions by Washington itself that arguably violate the historical U.S. commitment to a “one China policy.” Incremental upgrades in U.S. interactions with Taipei, and reinterpretations of Washington’s normalization commitments to Beijing, raise valid questions about what substance remains to that policy. As Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in October 2021, Washington should “pursue a real one-China policy, instead of a fake one” and should “truly implement the one-China policy and put it into action, instead of saying one thing and doing the opposite.” Washington, however, has recalibrated its “one China policy” in response to domestic political pressure to adopt a harder line toward Beijing. The Biden administration is now captive to those pressures, because any flagging of rhetorical or substantive support for Taiwan would reinforce the notion that Biden is soft on China, or intimidated by it. As a result, Washington appears more inclined to inflate the imminent danger of Chinese aggression than to confront the dilemmas inherent in its own policy toward the Taiwan issue.
AMERICA’S SENSE of domestic vulnerability also exacerbates the ideological component of the U.S.-China competition. The Biden administration has repeatedly framed the contest as a struggle between autocracy and democracy. For its part, Beijing is obviously seeking to legitimize its governance model, and has even seized upon the claim that China’s model is proving superior to democracy in meeting the needs of the people governed. Indeed, this was the central theme of Beijing’s public criticism of Biden’s December 2021 “Summit for Democracy.” This would be an obviously ridiculous argument if democracy in the United States was not as compromised and at risk as it has become over the past several years. Indeed, the internal threats to American democracy are now more real and substantive than any threat posed by Chinese autocracy; and any threat from the latter exists only because of the currently exposed frailties of the former. Here again, domestic U.S. dysfunction is inflating both the threat from China and American vulnerability to that threat.
All of this is abundantly apparent to the rest of the world, including U.S. allies and partners. The Biden administration has highlighted the vital importance of working with like-minded countries in confronting the strategic competition from China. But to be like-minded, other countries would need to share Washington’s assessment of the nature and the scope of the Chinese challenge. U.S. allies and partners generally agree that Beijing is ruthless and predatory in its international behavior, and are troubled by its efforts to globally legitimize its autocratic system and its way of doing business. At the same time, many of them appear less convinced than Washington is that Beijing is seeking global hegemony, and more attentive to the reasons why China is scoring points against the United States internationally. Moreover, many U.S. allies and partners appear to be uncomfortable with elements of what they see as Washington’s overly confrontational approach to Beijing, refusal to acknowledge the relative diminution of American power and influence, and exaggerated fears of China—all of which they too probably attribute in part to America’s internal vulnerabilities. In sum, they almost certainly judge that Washington is not in a position to dictate the terms of either the U.S.-China relationship or China’s engagement with the rest of the world.
THIS DYNAMIC—in which U.S. domestic dysfunction is fueling inflated fears of China and, to some extent, being unduly blamed on China—carries two downside risks. To whatever extent America attributes its domestic problems to Beijing, this can only divert the United States from addressing the internal causes of those problems. It is easier to deflect responsibility than to accept and confront it. Second, it will be very difficult to manage U.S.-China relations as long as Washington is using an inaccurate assessment of Chinese motives and intentions as the basis for exaggerated threat perceptions. This essentially mirrors Beijing’s own flawed assessment that the United States seeks to contain China and overthrow its Communist regime.
These circumstances can only push U.S.-China relations further down an adversarial path. Washington’s inflation of Beijing’s strategic ambitions, insistence on exclusive Chinese responsibility for bilateral tensions, and avoidance of American vulnerabilities are reinforcing its hard line against China. Beijing is almost certain to respond in kind, as it sees in this U.S. approach a validation of its own presumptions that Washington has malign intentions toward China, expects to set the terms of the relationship, and is averse to cooperative coexistence. The United States’ domestic insecurities, and its external channeling of them, are thus contributing to an increasingly hostile U.S.-China relationship. And the polarization of American politics is hampering the pursuit of a more rational and constructive approach to Beijing.
Arresting and reversing this trend will require both Beijing and Washington to retreat to a more realistic and pragmatic posture toward each other. For their part, Chinese leaders will need to manage their own domestic political pressures to avoid appearing “soft” on the United States. They must similarly avoid overestimating China’s relative strength and leverage in the bilateral relationship. Washington, on the other hand, will need to recognize the new historical balance of power, the limits this imposes on U.S. leverage over China, and America’s own accountability for the economic and political vulnerabilities that have eroded U.S. strategic competitiveness. This includes recognizing the seriousness of both the United States’ domestic political crisis and the erosion of its international reputation.
This does not mean the United States must resign itself to accommodating China’s global wish list. On the contrary, the United States retains the ultimate competitive advantage in the superiority and proven track record of democracy and capitalism over the autocratic socialist model that Beijing is promoting. Unless America has lost confidence in itself and its inherent strengths and values, there is little reason to fear strategic competition with China over the long term. Nor should it fear the possibility of near-term coexistence with Beijing’s autocracy, with which the United States has already coexisted for more than seventy years. Moreover, Beijing’s insistence on the longevity of its governing model is still very much a gamble—and U.S. engagement with China may yet have an impact on that bet. The primary task ahead for the United States is to restore and renew its own model, and prepare to compete against Beijing’s within a new strategic framework—one in which the contest is not necessarily winner-take-all. In this regard, the Biden administration is correct to emphasize that “building back better” at home is the core prerequisite. The challenge from Beijing will be formidable as long as China has its act together and the United States does not.
In the meantime, the Biden administration should find a way to overcome the domestic political constraints that have hindered a more rational and constructive approach to dealing with Beijing. This means adopting a more accurate assessment of the nature of the challenge from China, and moving to supplement the competitive approach with more cooperative elements and dialogue. Blinken has declared that the U.S.-China relationship will be “competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, and adversarial where it must be.” But this formulation risks excluding areas where the relationship ultimately will need to be collaborative, and overlooking areas where it need not be adversarial.
The Biden-Xi meeting in November appears to have prompted some incremental steps in a collaborative direction: agreements to relax restrictions on journalist visas, reinvigorate cooperation on climate change, resume some trade and bilateral military talks, and consider strategic stability talks. Both leaders voiced a desire to expand diplomatic interactions. The official Chinese readout of the meeting quoted Xi as saying that the two sides should “fully harness the dialogue channels and mechanisms between their [various policy] teams,” and the White House readout said Biden and Xi “discussed ways for the two sides to continue discussions in a number of areas, with President Biden underscoring the importance of substantive and concrete conversations.” As former Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel noted, the Biden-Xi meeting was an opportunity to shift U.S.-China relations “to a cooperative footing” and to “kick-start serious engagement, with all the probing, explaining, testing, negotiating and perhaps even compromising that diplomacy entails.” Russel added that the relationship is “in dire need of such diplomacy.”
Yet Washington seems apprehensive about following this path too eagerly, presumably because of the domestic political risks of appearing accommodative toward Beijing. The Biden administration emphatically set low expectations for “deliverables” or “breakthroughs” from the Biden-Xi meeting, and highlighted a determination to avoid getting drawn into “unproductive dialogues.” And it apparently remains reluctant to openly characterize its nascent rapprochement with Beijing as the resumption of either “cooperation” or “engagement”—instead continuing to underscore that the U.S. approach to China is focused on “managing the competition.” As noted above, this appears to reflect both a disinclination to publicly advocate any kind of accommodative approach to China, and an effort to keep the focus on Beijing as the source of tensions in the relationship.
But Washington has contributed to those tensions, which have been exacerbated by U.S. exaggeration of the China threat as a consequence of American domestic maladies and unease. To sustain the post-summit momentum toward a less hostile and more constructive path for U.S.-China relations, the United States will need to confront its own share of accountability for bilateral mistrust, tackle the domestic problems that have reduced its competitiveness, and overcome its resistance to expanding the cooperative element of its relationship with Beijing. The competition will become all-consuming if both sides allow it to. Recognizing the need and the opportunities for cooperation, and actively pursuing it, could and should provide the real “guardrails” in the U.S.-China relationship. A confident and competent America can simultaneously rebuild its competitiveness against China while at the same time pursuing a better relationship with it.
IN DECEMBER 2020, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi—who subsequently became two of the architects of the Biden administration’s China policy in the National Security Council—wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs about the need to refute “declinism,” which they defined as “the belief that the United States is sliding irreversibly from its preeminent status.” The United States is indeed sliding from its preeminent status, but this may yet be reversible. In any event, Campbell and Doshi rightly observed that “decline is less a condition than a choice” and that the United States historically has exhibited “an unusual capacity for self-correction.” That capacity for self-correction—America’s “resilience”—is arguably facing its most severe test in fifty years, both internally and from China. Campbell and Doshi asserted that “the need for the United States to rise to the China challenge” could be the catalyst for reversing both the perception and the reality of U.S. decline. If America fails to demonstrate the strength and unity of purpose to compete effectively with China, it will have only itself to blame.
Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).