A growing rivalry between the United States and China is a clash between democratic nations and a communist regime that doesn’t respect human rights, U.S. officials said.
The Peoples Republic of China "is big and aggressive, and trying to make the world safe for their own brand of authoritarianism, and that is a very important and concerning trend we need to pay attention to and work with our like-minded partners to counter,” a senior State Department official told the Washington Examiner.
That assessment comes amid a series of disputes between Washington and Beijing, including a trade war, tensions over western support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong , and China's crackdown on Uighur Muslims . Such disputes about free speech and human rights are energizing “a systems conflict” between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States, U.S. officials and analysts said. The conflict is playing out in smaller countries around the globe.
“The last thing China wants [to see] is long-term, stable pro-U.S. liberal democracies that have a strong tradition in the rule of law and a strong, norms-based political system because that's harder to crack,” Patrick Buchan , a former Australian defense ministry adviser, told the Washington Examiner.
U.S. officials increasingly are open about highlighting that split. “Ideology matters and liberal democracy, in my opinion, is a direct threat to a more authoritarian approach, which is what we're seeing out of Beijing,” David Stilwell , the State Department’s lead official for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said last week at the Wilson Center.
China looks at how it would benefit from third-nation instability, one analyst said.
“What it wants to see is chaotic democracy, that being, it does not want to see long-term stable democracy in third party countries because that potentially keeps the United States as a stable partner for third-party countries,” Buchan said.
But the ideological disagreement is central to the rivalry, said Stilwell, who emphasized the American belief that government exists to secure the "inalienable rights" of people. Chinese Communist officials have the opposite view, he said, citing the mass "reeducation" camps for Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. And Chinese officials maintain that they are respecting human rights by protecting the public from terrorist threats.
“So, in this sort of inverted governance model, the government is providing for the people with their human rights — three square meals a day and the chance to get rich,” Stilwell said. “It’s hard to disagree with that, but on the other hand, that does not comport with what we believe, in that human rights are individual. And that's what we signed when we signed the UN Charter — individual human rights.”
Stilwell’s remarks drew criticism in Beijing. “It is never China's intention to change the U.S.,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Monday. “Likewise, the U.S. should not dream of changing China. It should learn to respect the legitimate right to development of China and other countries with an inclusive and equal attitude.”
China has punished the NBA in recent weeks in retaliation for a pro-Hong Kong tweet that was sent by the general manager of one of the teams. American officials think that China will use investments in poorer countries to be even more coercive in strategically-significant locations.
“The Chinese government uses market access as leverage to export their brand of censorship globally,” the senior State Department official told the Washington Examiner. "For smaller countries that are highly dependent on PRC loans or infrastructure, it would not be surprising if they get a lot of pressure to vote a certain way in an international organization. The PRC uses their economic clout for very brazen political purposes well beyond the norm."
