A consistent China policy continues to elude the U.S.
Lack of clear plan for rivalry with Beijing leaves crucial allies and partners bedeviled
I spent last week on the East Coast of the U.S. where every conversation focused on the intensifying competition with China. Yet for all the attention and the rising decibel level there remain far more questions than answers and the struggle to articulate, much less implement, a response continues to bedevil policymakers.
If allies, partners and observers are confused about the U.S. approach to China, that is understandable: The most generous assessment would be, as one expert explained, that the U.S. has “a China policy, but not a plan.”
For sure, all view China as a competitor. This is either a geopolitical struggle between two global powers — China’s preferred framing as it allows Beijing to paint the U.S. as a bad guy, leading others astray — or, in Washington’s favored version, a fight between China and a coalition of like-minded nations.
The latter perspective animates the call for “friend-shoring,” which, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in a speech last month, relies on allies and partners to build more resilient supply chains. National security adviser Jake Sullivan was clear in a speech last week. “We will unapologetically pursue our industrial strategy at home — but we are unambiguously committed to not leaving our friends behind. We want them to join us. In fact, we need them to join us.”
That is music to the ears of those partners, but it won’t be enough to mollify them. Legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act look like (and are) industrial policy that will advantage U.S. companies over friendly competitors and they are howling in response. New bilateral mechanisms for economic security consultations, like the Japan-U.S. Economic Policy Consultative Committee or the U.S.-South Korea Next Generation Critical and Emerging Technologies Dialogue, announced during the state visit of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to Washington last week, are designed as much to ease those tensions as they are to shore up defenses against technology leakage.
Chinese aims are debated. All agree that Beijing’s pre-eminent objective is ensuring that the Communist Party can rule without fear of being overthrown. As one student of the Cold War explained, “Xi Jinping’s greatest fear is waking up and seeing Mikhail Gorbachev in the mirror.” After that, the debate begins.
For one group, China seeks regional hegemony and aims to supplant the U.S. as the leading power in Asia. Chinese ambitions were revealed in 2007 when a top Chinese Navy officer proposed to the then head of U.S. Pacific Command a deal to divide the Pacific. “You, the U.S., take Hawaii East and we, China, will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean. Then you will not need to come to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean and we will not need to go to the Eastern Pacific,” the officer reportedly told Adm. Timothy Keating. While the offer was dismissed as freelancing, seeds were sown. The speed with which Beijing punishes governments that disagree with its policies and priorities reinforces the belief that China wants to be first among nations in Asia.
A second, much smaller group asserts that China’s goal is replacing the U.S. as the world’s leading power. Writing in these pages in 2020, strategist Hal Brands noted “a growing body of evidence, assembled and interpreted by talented China experts, that the Chinese government is indeed aiming for global power and perhaps global primacy over the next generation — that it seeks to upend the American-led international system and create at least a competing, quasi-world order of its own.”
Most China hands dismiss this as fantasy, but Brands cites Xi himself, who has declared that China is offering “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind” and would, by 2049, “become a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence” and would build a “stable international order.”
While global superpower status is a distant concern, a growing number of observers worry that China is prepared to upend the regional order if forced to do so over Taiwan. Few believe that is either imminent or desired by Beijing. Still, there remained a split in views when asked to contemplate China’s relations with the West if the “Taiwan problem” was solved. Bloody-minded realists argue that China’s strength is the problem when dealing with the U.S., regardless of ideology, political structure or long-standing territorial claims.
There were forceful denials that the U.S. seeks to throttle the Chinese economy. Sullivan encouraged that view in a speech last year in which he explained the need to “revisit the long-standing premise of maintaining ‘relative’ advantages over competitors in certain key technologies.” While the U.S. had maintained a “sliding scale” approach to stay only a couple of generations ahead, the strategic environment has changed and “Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”
Sullivan seemed to backtrack in remarks delivered last week at the Brookings Institution, insisting that the administration has taken “tailored measures” that are “focused on a narrow slice of technology” — those that could tilt the military balance — “and a small number of countries intent on challenging us militarily.” Washington is, he argued, “simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.” Nevertheless, one expert conceded that the Biden administration aims to stunt the Chinese economy “in the micro sense.”
As always, the Biden administration remains open to talks with China and continues to harbor hopes of cooperation. Those prospects are slim as Beijing is reluctant to talk without the U.S. first acknowledging its mistakes and shouldering the blame for the deterioration in the relationship. Officials complain that China refuses to even pick up the phone when they call.
Room for diplomatic maneuver is reduced further by the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, where partisanship and seeming agreement on the need for a hard line against China reinforce each other. There are cracks in the consensus and dissenters work quietly behind the scenes to take the sharpest edges off anti-China policy — but few are prepared to object publicly. The ever-insightful Dan Drezner writes that Yellen and Sullivan are “clearly trying” to “ease off the bipartisan outbidding on hawkishness on China.”
There was one topic on which everyone agreed: The government and the business community are talking past each other when it comes to China policy. Views differed on which was ahead and which was lagging, however. There is a recalibration of the balance between economic and national security interests; calling for “economic security” tends to obscure more than it reveals.
U.S businesses have been critical for some time of Chinese behavior and complained of a Chinese market tilted toward domestic companies, but they haven’t pulled up stakes. Some maintain hopes of serving that massive market. Others remain committed to a business model that relies on supply chains that stretch through China.
Experts scoff at the notion that those production networks can be “de-risked,” much less decoupled, with any confidence. Any attempt to do so would push consumer prices through the roof and the threat of contamination to the supply chain would persist. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to help U.S. companies that toe its increasingly hard line by warning foreign competitors to not “backfill” gaps created by U.S. sanctions. Those competitors are bristling in response.
Amid the confusion there is talk of “the new Washington consensus,” an attempt to provide intellectual coherence to the disparate strands of U.S. policy toward China and the threat it poses. Sullivan’s remarks are a start, but it will take far far more than one speech to fill that yawning gap.
Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions” (Georgetown University Press, 2019).