Category Archives: China

Measuring American Foreign Policy for ‘Competition without Catastrophe’: The Alaska US-China Summit

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With President Biden’s first official news conference last Thursday March 25th, the news conference brought the curtain down on the first meeting of top foreign policy officials from the United States and China. The public side of the Summit was a rather fiery uncooperative back and forth between the leading government officials from both China and the United States. We are led to understand, however, that the private meetings that went on into the next day were more productive. And with both encounters past, the shape of the competition between China and the United States began to take some public shape.

For some time now we have been made aware that a more confrontational  approach in US-China relations was likely. As David Sanger describes in a recent NYT article, the ‘Washington beltway’ view has crystallized around a far more competitive foreign policy with China. And the Biden foreign policy has reflected, seemingly, this rare political consensus:

For a president barely 10 weeks into office, casting the United States as confronting a global struggle with the Chinese model has some clear political benefits. One of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans is the need to compete head-on with Beijing.

William Galston at Brookings reviewing American public opinion toward China underscores how American public opinion has turned against China particularly after the Trump years:

All things considered, the Biden administration will enjoy substantial public support if it places competition with China at the center of its foreign policy, and it will pay little price for the blunter rhetoric its senior officials employed during the recent meetings in Alaska with their Chinese counterparts. On the other hand, most Americans have not focused on the military dimensions of this emerging relationship and are not prepared for a possible conflict over Taiwan.

Advisors to Joe Biden during the election period, and many of these same folk now as officials for President Biden, are describing and clarifying US policy toward China that they had previously written about pre-election. The dominant position as articulated by the senior policy folk such as Jake Sullivan, now National Security Advisor to the President and Kurt Campbell now the ‘Asia Tsar’ is strategic competition, or slightly more poetically, ‘competition without catastrophe’ the title of their consequential 2019 FA article. Continue reading →

China-West Relations: Reading the Dynamics and Getting the Mix Right

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China-US relations are at a critical juncture in fashioning global order relations in the 2020s.  As Joe Biden approaches inauguration day, there is increasing speculation on what approach he will take toward China.  Theories abound.  There are those in foreign policy circles who are seen as “restorationists” (see Thomas Wright at TheAtlantic for these terms) who tend to have a greater focus on the cooperation component of the relationship.  There are “reformists” who have come to the conclusion that competition and rivalry must define the path for US-China relations.  There are those who see China as the culprit in job loss, technology theft, trade imbalances, the pandemic, climate change and other hits on American pre-eminence.  And there are many with cultural, societal and business ties to China who hope for a period of predictability, and hopefully opportunity.

Clear-eyed self-interest and deep understanding of the new political dynamics need to guide Biden foreign policy. For Biden and his team, it is not just a question how to reframe US international relations after Trump, but how to shape them in response to changed circumstances, domestic constraints, and new defining elements in the global landscape. 

For starters, Asia is more pressing than Europe, the Indo-Pacific region more demanding than the trans-Atlantic, China is more important than Russia, social and environmental issues are more compelling than trade and financial policies, and domestic pressures everywhere mean that international policies are now constrained by and tethered to internal conditions affecting ordinary people.  Global inter-connectivity may be vividly evident, but domestic politics are dominant in defining strategic thrusts.

Biden and his team seem to “get” most of these circumstances, constraints and defining elements.  But, it is not clear that the incoming Administration has yet stared down the underlying political dynamics that will define geopolitical relations among leading powers, especially how to approach China in ways that makes sense to the other significant global players, that will be effective with China and with domestic political constraints. For this, the various “schools of thought” contending with each other to define the overall narrative for US relations with China, each by themselves are less helpful than combining them to address the complexity and importance of this most crucial relationship.

The starting point has to be a clear understanding that China does indeed have strategic interests in meeting US dominance in the Pacific. Additionally, China does use the state and public resources to advance its economic dynamism, does use techniques for internal control which violate international norms on human rights, and does have the scale, scope and dynamism to be a challenger to US predominance, a rival in the Pacific and a competitor in the global economy.  There is no doubt that this is the reality of China today.  The hardening of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule in the last four years is real and worrisome. 

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Washington’s Unfounded Fear of Biden Collaboration with China

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The Washington Beltway remains in a ‘tizzy’ over the direction of Biden foreign policy. Will Biden commit to the bipartisan ‘full-throated’ competition with China. Here, Ryan Hass of Brookings describes that continuing nervousness on the part of the foreign policy establishment over a possible Biden strategy : 

 

There are a variety of causes for these concerns. Some security-focused experts worry that the Biden administration will prioritize cooperation with China on climate issues above other strategic concerns. Others fear that by signaling interest in cooperation, the United States will show lack of resolve for long-term great power competition with China. Proponents of viewing the U.S.-China relationship as an entrenched ideological struggle worry that cooperation could dilute the focus on what they describe as each side’s irreconcilable ambitions. Some have shared concerns that Beijing will withhold cooperation on climate issues unless it receives American concessions in other areas of the relationship, for example, on Hong Kong or Xinjiang. Others worry that the Chinese are wily negotiators who will hoodwink their earnest American counterparts if given the opportunity. Still others argue that engaging the Chinese as peers on climate issues provides undeserved validation of China on the world stage and legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party at home.

Besides Ryan Haas at Brookings, concern about Biden’s China policy has also been raised by his colleague,  Thomas Wright. In TheAtlantic. Tom has suggested in a recent article that Biden’s choice of John Kerry as special presidential envoy on climate change may well create problems for the new Administration on the critical China file.  

Competition with China will likely be the most difficult foreign-policy issue that President-elect Joe Biden will face. What he decides to lead with and the precise mix of areas in which he engages and confronts Beijing are critically important. This is why Biden’s choice of John Kerry as a special presidential envoy on climate change might create a problem for the incoming president on China policy.

In discussions with Biden colleagues, Wright comments that they expressed concern over Kerry diplomacy. Kerry’s single-minded focus on climate change could, according to these colleagues, bring climate policy progress but sacrifice other security-related US-China matters. As Tom described his conversations with these Biden folk:

A former Obama administration official told me, “China’s diplomacy is a constant search for leverage, and Kerry will deliver a load of it in a wheelbarrow right to their front door every day.

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Declaring Engagement Dead!

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Opinion and analysis writing often seems to come forward in ‘waves’. It is almost never just one piece but a veritable series of similar narrations that seeks to identify the trends.  This wave-like writing certainly is evident when it comes to US foreign policy making and in particular the rising tensions between the two leading powers – the United States and China. There was a first wave of  ‘New Cold War’ articles, that as I suggested along with some of my V20 colleagues seemingly impacted partisans of both Parties in the United States. Then, there was the wave US-China trade war tensions. And now we see the current wave in the ‘Rising US-China’ tensions and the return to a view that this may indeed be a new sorta ‘Cold War’ and dire predictions of decoupling between the two leading economies and the ‘deer in the headlights’ of US allies trying to avoid choices between the two.

This newest wave of US-China tensions has been orchestrated in part by the Trump Administration with speeches from senior officials William Barr, the Attorney General,  Robert C. O’Brien, National Security Advisor,  Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, Mark Esper Secretary of Defense and, finally with the icing on the cake the speech by  Michael Pompeo the  current Secretary of State at a highly significant location – the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum at Yorba Lind, California.

It is interesting that these declarative words all began with the Donald Trump’s actions – the chaos, the denigration of multilateralism, the strong-arming of allies and the threats to end key alliance relations of the liberal order – NATO, US- Japan and US-Korea security treaties. While these initiatives and threats heralded Trump’s America First policy they have been superseded most recently with the targeting of China. It reflects, one suspects, the ‘Hail Mary’ approach that Trump seems to have chosen with falling numbers on his reelection. It is China ‘all the time’, by these officials, attacks on the Communist Party of China and even the targeting of regime change by these US officials.  Additionally, and I don’t think prematurely US foreign policy analysts are at the same time attempting to anticipate a foreign policy under a Biden Administration. But we’ll save that examination for another moment.

Meanwhile the language is barely restrained . As my CSIS colleagues Scott Kennedy and Matthew Goodman conclude in a recent post:

Through a series of speeches and tough actions, the Trump administration has clearly signaled that it views a Xi Jinping-led China as an existential threat to the West, and hence, is trying to mobilize its friends and allies to form a united front against Beijing.

Here is William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States describing China and its current ambitions in a speech he delivered on July 16th:

… that is, the United States’ response to the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.  The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world.  It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.

The objective is according to Barr, clear:

The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.

And, the dire views of Barr are only amplified, indeed ‘accelerated’ a now favored term in this ‘Age of the pandemic’ by Mike Pompeo:

But I have faith we can do it. I have faith because we’ve done it before. We know how this goes. I have faith because the CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made – alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and predictable rule of law.

And as pointed up above the location of the Pompeo speech was no accident. It is the Nixon library – the archive of the President that set in motion along with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the dramatic alteration of US policy toward Mao’s China – one of the seminal diplomatic events of any President in the post WWII period. And why deliver the speech there? Well, to pronounce that policy a dramatic mistake:

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, it’d be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.  But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

This puts the end of the decades long engagement. ‘Engagement is dead’.

But is it?

Image Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Trying to Understand Xi’s China: Kerry Brown in Episode 28: ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump.

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Most international relations specialists would concur, the most consequential relationship, now, and for the foreseeable future, in the Global Order is that between China and the West. Yes, I do not say the U.S. Instead it is the much vaguer term, the West. That does not mean that many do not see this as primarily a U.S.-China rivalry. But for others this not a retelling of the Cold War.

For instance the Vision 20 principals: Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and myself, here at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto recently  launched the CWD Project, or the China and the West Dialogue Project.

Our first collective effort, assisted mightily by Professor Kevin Gallagher, Director, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University, is to hold a first preliminary workshop on March 20th at Boston University. That first preliminary workshop is designed to examine the relationship the changing Global Order. We see this an inquiry into the complex set of relationships with Europe, North America, China and other actors in Asia. A number of former officials, China experts and international relations experts will gather to examine the current relationships and the way forward.

Among the China experts we are so very pleased to welcome to the CWD is Professor Kerry Brown. His insights into China policy making and politics are well known. I was therefore pleased to welcome him here to the Global Summitry’s podcast series to talk about China’s political  leaders and the policies to the West. Come listen to Episode 28 in the series, ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump’.

Kerry has served in both the public and the academic sectors. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. Kerry Brown is currently Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute, Kings College London. Before that 2012-2015 Kerry was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Kerry has written a great deal about Chinese politics and its foreign policy. Recent works include: “China’s World: What does China want?”; “China’s Dream: The culture of Chinese Communism and the secret sources of its power”; and “The world according to Xi: Everything you need to know about the new China”.

 

 

United States and its Course of Action With China – A Coming Podcast with Susan Thornton

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Errors have been made. And inconsistencies have occurred. But the current Trump policy toward China and its apparent encouragement  of a renewal of ‘the Cold War’ – in this instance with China – is simply stupefying. And very likely dangerous. As the Editorial Board of the Washington Post (WP) put it on August 6th:

Still, the risks are real, and Mr. Trump’s approach inspires no confidence that he has some strategic objective in mind, as opposed to the continuation of conflict with China for its own sake. We don’t expect the president to announce his negotiating goals in advance. He should, however, base policy on objective economics, not a general anti-China animus.

A low-level policy debate has  been encouraged in the WP pages and more broadly in the academic and policy publications.  Hopefully, the politicians – especially all those folk running for the Democratic nomination for President – have, or will pay attention to these debates and will respond in a thinking way to the destructive Trump policy.  There are a variety of views expressed in the WP – all worth considering.

The spark to this debate began with an open letter that was published in the WP Opinion section.  The ‘Scholars’ Statement ‘was published on July 3rd: “China is not the enemy”  M. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy,  Michael D. Swaine , Susan A. Thornton and Ezra Vogel were the five principals that organized this statement on U.S.-China relations.  All  the principals are well known China hands, either academics or policy folk. After completing the Statement the principals then opened the opinion piece for signature and scholars and policy folk signed on. There were many signatories including an historian from Georgetown, James Millward . I mention him specifically because he critiqued the  Statement. And In his critique he identified a response to the Statement published on July 18th in The Journal Political Risk, titled “Stay the Course on China: An Open Letter to President Trump”. This Letter was penned by James Fanell, Captain USN (Retired), and former director of Intelligence & Information Operations U.S. Pacific Fleet.  This Letter too was opened to signature. As the title implied the Letter supported President Trump and the China actions his Administration has implemented: 

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Collaborative Leadership Stumbles; A Dangerous Political Fuse Has Been Lit

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Well all the columns and opinions have been written, I assume,  over the Chinese G20 Summit. Other than congratulating the Chinese leadership for having pulled it off – and there is something to be said for that – the general conclusion to be drawn from these many pieces was that little was achieved with the major concern – coordinated economic growth by all the G20. The communique was a classic instance of bureaucratic ‘gobbledegook’.   While the yardsticks were moved on a number of issues, no bold announcement by the G20 Leaders was made.  As my colleague, Colin Bradford declared in his Brookings blogpost, “2016: The year for leadership that wasn’t for the China G-20”

2016 may have been the year that teed up the need for new direction, fresh initiatives, and strong leadership, but the contrary interests of G-20 member countries seem to have missed this opportunity at Hangzhou. Whereas some of the keywords for an ambitious transformative approach are in the Hangzhou G-20 communiqué, there is evidence of avoiding commitments, ducking the big ideas, and mouthing the right words but dodging the verbs and adjectives that contained ambition.

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At the Crossroads? – The Hangzhou G20 Summit and After

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With the annual G20 fast approaching (September 4th-5th in Hangzhou China) it is worthwhile reflecting on the progress, or lack of it, that the G20 Leaders gathering has accomplished since the successful efforts to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the Great Recession.

For a number of G20 cycles now, observers have recognized that the G20, notwithstanding the urging of many experts and former officials, has failed to make the transition to a steering committee. Meanwhile, G20 process has become heavily freighted with endless recommendations, statements and communiques from a growing variety of expert and non-expert corners.  The question is not whether the G20 finally will be a success because of the hosting by China’s leaders.  The Chinese Leaders know how to run a summit.  They have approached this Summit with great effort and seriousness and should be commended for their efforts. But really,  it will not be Chinese leadership that is likely to reveal G20 progress or not.

The Editors at the EastAsianForum in a very recent post,  “Making the Hangzhou G20 summit relevant” have once again put their collective finger on the issue:

But the fundamental purpose of the G20 is to set the strategic direction. The worry is that the G20 is drifting away from this role and becoming more like an international think tank than the steering committee for the global economy that it was set up to be. The G20’s deliverables are increasingly bureaucratic, focused on commissioning reports, holding meetings, developing strategy papers, publishing high level principles and high level policy documents.

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A Reform Agenda for China’s G20 Summit

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Chengdu FM July 2016 copy

Coordination and harmonization are keys to collective action in global governance.  The jury remains out as to exactly what China’s hosting can accomplish with respect to either.

ANU’s Adam Triggs recently wrote that there were only three practical things that any G20 Leaders’ summit can accomplish:

… it can share information and best practice policies between countries; it can reform global governance by either reforming existing institutions like the IMF or creating new ones; or it can undertake what Oxford University’s David Vines calls ‘concerted unilateralism’, where countries implement policies (fiscal, monetary or structural) to suit their own economies, but do so collectively.

As a number of us suggested in our V20 Hangzhou gathering at Zhejiang daxue in the spring, Leaders also can, and should extend, their efforts beyond what is described above. Indeed in our collective view there is nothing more critical than having G20 Leaders direct their message to their own publics.  They need to signal their publics as to what is critical in their G20 efforts.  As our Blue Report to the Chinese leadership urged:

Together, G20 leaders can make clear and powerful statements which can signal the path of economic progress to all actors around the world. … Leaders at G20 Summits can strengthen their connection with their publics by devoting more attention to the content and the modes of communications from the summit platform.  … Key ideas could be summarized and Leaders could speak in more direct ways to their publics.  … G20 Leaders understand that globalization requires fair and updated rules that can elicit trust, a sense of fairness, and certainty.

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China and a People-Centred G20

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So it is evident there is much anger out in ‘election land’ and among the many electorates these days. The distemper is widespread.  The ‘oddest’ of campaigns of course is the Presidential race  – just 98 days away – in the United States.  A campaign driven in part by the Republican nominee who has abused his opponents and his putative friends – all in the name of ‘no more political correctness’. We are reminded constantly that rising inequality and plodding economic growth across the established powers and increasingly among the rising powers has led to growing frustration and anger from those in the 99 percent. Whether you are looking at global GDP, global trade, or global investment, all these measures of possible global prosperity look anemic. At a minimum these measures signal that the global economy has in fact not really recovered from the Great Recession.

Gideon Rachman of the FT suggested very recently that there is a strong link between those supporting Donald Trump in the US and those who voted in favor of leaving the EU in the UK referendum. As Rachman concludes in assessing these Brexit voters:”The second [parallel] is the way in which the Trump and Brexit campaigns have become vehicles for protest votes about economic insecurity. The third is the chasm between elite opinion and that of the white working class.” While it is of course much harder to identify frustration and alienation from governments in authoritarian societies, it is not hard to believe that there is much anger lying ‘just below the surface’ in states with authoritarian regimes and high degrees of inequality such as in China and Russia and in more democratic developing ones such as Brazil and South Africa.

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