China can barely contain its excitement over the imminent accession of President-elect Joe Biden. Beijing’s state media is full of optimistic analysis suggesting that the Trump administration’s China constraint strategy will soon end.
Whether this is true or not — at least to a degree, Biden’s appointments of Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan suggest it is — it’s interesting to see just how openly China is banking its prospects on a specific group — what it calls the “elites.”
In a telling Global Times editorial on Wednesday, the regime’s primary international mouthpiece called on Biden to abandon President Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy of constraining Chinese hegemony. This would be in the United States’s favor, the Central Foreign Affairs Commission-led outlet said, because “a binary system in the Asia-Pacific region between China and the U.S. is certainly not welcome and will encounter opposition and barriers. That is not what the Washington elites want to see.”
It’s rare to see Xi Jinping’s foreign policy machinery speak so honestly about its perception as to how the country can best restore an American appeasement policy toward it. It’s the economy, stupid.
Or, actually, it’s not. It’s the leveraging of economic access in a limited nature but extraordinarily lucrative form. Focusing on banking institutions and multinational exporters, China knows its dangling over trade barriers versus access offers massive bang for the buck. More importantly, Xi’s dictatorship knows that these U.S. interests tend to be major influences on Washington politics. It’s for this reason that China’s most favored Americans are the ones who have feet in both business and political worlds.
Take former President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for example. A Wall Street titan, Geithner is also close to the Biden establishment. And he’s very willing, presumably for a fee, to preach China’s “win-win” narrative to Democrats back home. The beauty, as Beijing sees it, of its focus on cultivating “elite” influencers is that the sales pitch has an easy political salience. It allows politicians to keep the big donor class happy, with a focus on political narratives that seem, on paper, to make sense to Americans: Isn’t it in our interest, these influencers suggest, to cooperate with China and create jobs rather than to risk a war over South China Sea waters that few Americans could find on a map? At the very least, let’s return to high-level dialogue, they say, leaving out the rather important observation, that is, of China’s use of dialogue as a way to burn time and create political space for its adversarial interests.
It’s not just Geithner.
Multibillionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio is China’s best messenger. When he’s not playing philosopher on Twitter, Dalio is writing articles that could have been written by Xi or supporting Xi at summits in Shanghai. But the most effective pro-China point that Dalio, Geithner, and company are making is that which they don’t even say: their incarnate encapsulation of China’s “win-win” pledge.
Highly successful American capitalists, investors, and political operators (and, in Dalio’s case, philanthropists), lend credibility to the idea that China is an obvious economic partner rather than an evil communist authoritarian imperium. They suggest that communist China is a country offering massive investments and means to make money rather than a political system in which millions of innocent people are thrown into concentration camps, sometimes sterilized, and then spewed out as serfs. Or they imply that Hong Kong is a city made stable for new investment by the Chinese Communist Party’s national security crackdown, ignoring new gulag proof that Xi’s treaty commitments are worth as much as his carbon emissions pledges. Or they say that technology firms such as Huawei are a means to low-cost, high-quality 5G infrastructure rather than deniable access points for People’s Liberation Army intelligence officers. Or they argue that China’s seizure of the near entirety of the South China Sea is a reflection of misguided historical insecurity rather than a 21st-century replication of Japan’s 1930s imperialism.
Of course, this juxtaposition of the influencers’ pretense and reality is exactly why elites should be wary of China’s easy gifts. They might look good, but they’re only fuel in the engine of a dedicated enemy.
