https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/07/trumps-new-realism-in-china/?utm_source=Hoover+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=58579411c1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_08_06_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_21b1edff3c-58579411c1-73895885Trump’s New Realism in China
Critics aside, the administration does have a strategy, and it is based on reciprocity.
BY MICHAEL AUSLIN
JULY 7, 2020, 4:16 PM
This summer, as the international travel industry began its struggle to rebuild after collapsing during the c****av***s p******c, Beijing maintained a near-blanket ban on U.S. airlines flying into China while allowing Chinese carriers to fly freely from American airports back home. By the beginning of June, with Chinese flights increasing on American soil, Washington announced that it would block Chinese passenger air flights into the United States in retaliation for the prohibition. Within one day of the announcement, Beijing indicated that it would relax its restriction. The episode was the latest evidence that the Trump administration does have a coherent China policy—and it is based on reciprocity.
Critics of the president describe his White House as vacillating wildly or barreling toward an outright break in ties with China. In his new book, for example, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, at the moment the most visible of the critics, claims that President Donald Trump’s China policy is “chaotic,” reflects “incoherence,” and is “not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy” but rather in domestic political calculations. Yet the example of the airline ban, among others, offers a different interpretation. And although it is too soon to judge the ultimate effectiveness of a reciprocity strategy, it represents a potentially fundamental shift in Washington’s approach to Beijing, overturning four decades of diplomatic practice.
Since the opening of relations with China in 1979, the U.S. government, as well as businesses, universities, cultural organizations, and the like, has pursued open-ended engagement. In the first 20 years of formal diplomatic ties, Washington was eager to explore how far relations with Beijing could develop, and China appeared to present little threat and vast opportunity. Focused on the global struggle with Moscow, Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, along with their advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, welcomed China as a counter to the Soviet Union. For his part, China’s then-paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, saw economic ties and normalized political relations with Washington as key elements in his strategy to repair the destruction wrought by Mao Zedong’s rule. Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not significantly destabilize U.S.-Chinese relations, despite being ordered by Deng, who is still celebrated in the West as China’s most important reformer.
By the turn of the millennium, both Washington’s and Beijing’s bets had paid off. China had fully entered the international community, notably joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), while the Soviet Union had long since disappeared. China’s economic modernization was rapidly changing global trade and production patterns, placing it at the center of the world’s economy and bringing it unimagined wealth. One of many optimists about China, then-President Bill Clinton asserted in 2000 that getting China accepted into the WTO was the best opportunity since the 1970s to create “positive change” that would reshape the country’s politics and society, as well as its economy. Signs of growing civil society were celebrated in the West as evidence of neoliberal development. Yet a darker side of Chinese modernization soon began to appear.
At home, the Chinese C*******t Party (CCP) and its Leninist model proved far more enduring than Western observers assumed. Instead of a wealthier country naturally becoming more liberal, as modernization theory presumes, the CCP revitalized its authoritarian rule starting around 2009. Over the past decade, it has eroded civil society inside China and attempted to limit foreign, especially Western, influences. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s infamous Document No. 9 in 2013 made clear the party’s determination to resist any type of liberalization and that it saw itself in a long-term ideological struggle with the West. In foreign affairs, too, Beijing moved to assert its dominance in Asia by the 2010s and was beginning to challenge Washington for global preeminence. Using mercantilist trade practices, widespread espionage, cyberattacks, a relentless military expansion, and a global influence campaign, Beijing increasingly pressured nations throughout Asia and took advantage of open societies for unfair advantage.
Even prior to the 2016 U.S. p**********l e******n, then, China had become one of the United States’ primary foreign-policy concerns. A rebalancing in U.S.-Chinese ties began before Trump took office. President Barack Obama’s much lauded “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific led, by the end of his term, to a significant deterioration in Sino-U.S. relations without much success in changing Xi’s policies. The Trump administration picked up the nascent shift in U.S. policy and accelerated it during its first three years, even as it pursued high-level diplomacy with Beijing. From trade to cyberattacks and the South China Sea, the Trump approach fused both liberal and conservative dissatisfaction over the direction of China’s growth into a broad-based challenge both to Beijing and to long-held assumptions about China at home.
Distinct from critics like Bolton, whose main charge against Trump’s China policy was an apparent haphazardness, others who favored continued engagement with China claimed that he was bent on a radical dec**pling of economic and even political ties with Beijing. A review of his administration’s actions leads to a different conclusion: that it has adopted instead a fairly measured realist policy. The policy’s short-term implementation may appear uneven, as in cases like the on-again, off-again sanctions against the telecommunications company ZTE, but its overarching goals are consistent and, in the main, acted on. This approach was laid out explicitly in the 2017 National Security Strategy, helmed by then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which called for a “principled realism” in responding to China’s competitive policies.
At its core, the new approach reflects the gap between the reality of Xi’s China and the China that Western policymakers and business leaders assumed would develop through global integration. The National Security Strategy thus attempted to fit U.S. policy to the facts on the ground or, in Confucian terms, strove for a “rectification of names” (zhengming), a concept popularized by Xunzi, one of the three leading figures of the early Confucian school, after Mencius and Confucius himself. As an American policy approach, rectifying names is an attempt to accurately represent the state of affairs inside China and the relationship between China and the United States.
Beijing’s actions make it increasingly difficult to talk about cooperation after years of predatory Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. businesses and individuals or in the face of rampant theft of intellectual property, much of which comes from China and costs American businesses up to $600 billion a year, despite promises by Beijing to halt such practices. Broken promises not to militarize territory in the South China Sea have shifted the balance of power in one of the world’s most strategic waterways, and Beijing’s intimidation of Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other countries in the region has increased with its military power. Similarly, Beijing’s recent so-called “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” personified by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, abandons diplomatic niceties for rhetorically aggressive and threatening browbeating. That Beijing considers itself to be in a strategic competition with the United States is made clear in major speeches by Xi, in which competition with the Western capitalist system forms the core of the CCP’s worldview.
Despite Trump’s inclinations, his China team—including such disparate personalities as McMaster and Bolton, Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell, Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer—faced powerful headwinds that aimed to put relations back on the path of the kind of engagement pursued by previous administrations. By the dawn of 2020, signs of an emerging modus vivendi, such as the winter agreement on a “phase one” trade deal, seemed to presage a return to the pre-Trump status quo, prioritizing stability in the bilateral relationship over radical reform.
But any return to the old policy was swept away by the c****av***s p******c. As the p******c swept from China across the globe, shuttering economies and locking down societies, charges and countercharges traded between Washington and Beijing over responsibility for the C****-** catastrophe led to a precipitous downward spiral in relations, revealing the dearth of trust and cooperative relations between the two nations. More significantly, the chilling of relations seems to have spurred the administration to fully embrace a policy of reciprocity as a more viable means to shape Beijing’s actions.
Continued