A serious trade strategy
Mike Watson
On a recent trip to Tokyo, the message from our Japanese hosts was clear:
China
is pulling most of Asia into its economic orbit, Japan cannot reverse this trend on its own, and the United States is not helping. The Japanese are famously polite, and true to form, they put things too mildly. In reality, the U.S. is not merely standing still. We are underwriting China’s economic gains in Asia.
Economic growth is the first, second, and third priority in much of South and Southeast Asia. For some countries, creating jobs is vital for maintaining social stability. In others, such as Indonesia, policymakers are determined to raise living standards before their working-age population shrinks. Most Asian countries, particularly in the Southeast, appreciate U.S. security cooperation, but they see China as a better source of trade and investment. In effect, the U.S. military is spending money to protect Chinese investments. This is not a strategy for long-term success.
Luring Asian countries out of China’s orbit with carrots will be more effective than trying to push them out with sticks. There are some easy ways to do this, such as energy exports: Most countries in Asia are energy importers, and the U.S. is one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world. We can offer Asian countries cleaner and reliable sources of energy to help them reach their economic potential, but we cannot do that unless oil and gas producers know that investments in U.S. energy will be secure from future regulatory changes.
Another way to do this is through smart trade. For too long, Chinese companies have stolen American intellectual property, copied American products, and destroyed American jobs. Many Chinese firms that make big profits in the U.S. plow that money into technologies that the Chinese military uses to threaten American forces. These bad actors should not be allowed to benefit from access to American markets. A smart trade strategy would replace them with companies from friendly and neutral countries.
Creating strong defenses against unfair and dangerous Chinese behavior and entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would make the U.S. compete with China more effectively. In addition to protecting American jobs and even reshoring some jobs from China, it would help Americans take market share from Chinese companies and pull Asia out of China’s orbit. We can prevail, but not if we’re paying the other guy’s checks.
— Mike Watson is the associate director of the Center for the Future of Liberal Society at the Hudson Institute.
***
Credibility
Anne Pierce
The overarching deficit in U.S.-China policy is our lack of credibility as a champion, never mind the leading champion, of freedom. Post-World War II American foreign policy wasn’t perfect, but it was morally, strategically, and militarily convincing. Reeling from the horrors and devastation of fascism and “total war” and faced with Soviet atrocities and conquests, the United States resolved to stop expansionist aggression in its tracks and counter extremist ideologies with ideas of political liberty and human worth. Universal rights initiatives flourished, while defenses and alliances grew. In word and deed, the U.S. promoted an economically open, democratically oriented, rules-based international order.
But after America “won” the Cold War, it displayed naive and incoherent policies and an unenergetic and unreliable commitment to principles. We stand with allies, then we don’t. We say we’re for human rights but equivocate. We rely on deterrence yet allow military capabilities to deteriorate. Imperial China has little reason to believe it will meet serious, sustained resistance. China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization despite human rights violations and technology theft and took shrewd advantage of the West’s hope that economic interaction would mitigate tyranny and aggression. China observed America’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, failure to enforce “red lines” in Syria, appeasement of Russia and Iran, and cruel, feckless abandonment of Afghanistan. China weighs the Biden administration’s timid support for Iran protests and quiet response to China’s own protests. President Joe Biden is encouraged by renewed “dialogue” with Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping, but Xi has seen Western negotiators fall for gestures and promises of adversaries who use “talks” to buy time and cover for antidemocratic schemes.
China notes our erraticism, as when the U.S. “pivoted” to Asia to contain China until reality forced attention to other global threats, until China’s worsening aggression inspired a re-pivot, until Russia launched all-out war on Ukraine. Failure to arm Ukraine and staunchly deter and sanction bellicose Russia before Russia’s assault sent a dangerous signal to China vis-a-vis Taiwan. China sees the West’s too little, too late assistance to Ukraine and plans accordingly.
Xi perceives a United States that won’t do enough to stop China from invading Taiwan or to counter China’s genocide, militarism, and expansionism. He foresees few consequences for China’s collusion with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, subversion of democracies, and feverish anti-American propaganda. If the U.S. wants to prevent the escalation of atrocities and hostilities and avoid war, it must first be convincing.
— Anne R. Pierce is the author of books and articles on American presidents, American foreign policy, and American society. Follow her @AnneRPierce.
***
A policy of reciprocity
Michael Auslin
Much of the American debate over U.S.-China relations is undergirded by moral concepts: On the one side is a preference for engagement and encouragement of a country both important and evolving. On the other is containment, if not a rollback, of an increasingly totalitarian regime that threatens liberal values around the globe. The disappointment on all sides with the results of a half-century of U.S. policy toward China reinforces these ur-beliefs, leading to an intellectual stalemate and a reactive U.S. policy. Perhaps the best way to break the deadlock, as well as place U.S.-China relations on a realistic footing, is to adopt a strategy of reciprocity.
The Trump administration’s China policy was largely based on reciprocity, and a large chunk of that was maintained by the Biden administration. Neither administration explicitly articulated reciprocity as the core of its strategy, however, and the Biden team continues to talk about cooperation and “guardrails” even as it acknowledges the crystalizing China threat.
COUNTERING CHINA’S GRAND STRATEGY
One benefit of an explicit reciprocity strategy is that it avoids moral questions while responding to “secular” actions. A reciprocity approach would base policy on discrete U.S. interests, avoiding the traps of either hoping unrealistically for cooperation from Beijing or attempting fully to sever (“decouple”) America from China.
An advantage of reciprocity is that it is transparently transactional: It rewards Chinese actions that do not harm U.S. interests and imposes costs on those that do. It can further reduce the specter of unmet expectations and hence the disappointment that has arisen from misunderstanding the Chinese Communist Party’s ultimate goals. Moreover, reciprocity avoids the chimera of personalizing the relationship with China’s leaders (Xi Jinping, for the foreseeable future). Beijing certainly holds no love for American presidents, and neither should U.S. leaders pretend they have any type of meaningful bond with Xi or his cronies. Instead of trying to change China or Xi, a reciprocity strategy would instead aim to change U.S.-China relations while retaining for Washington the ultimate sanction of how to respond to Beijing.
Operationally, reciprocity would focus on responding to both structural and tactical imbalances in the relationship. Thus, tactical Chinese actions such as industrial espionage or influence campaigns would be identified and countered, while structural issues such as diversifying supply chains would become a priority, and questions of long-term access for Chinese researchers in America would depend on reciprocal access inside China. Where reciprocity constricts intellectual, government, or military exchange, it clarifies specific areas of imbalance in the relationship, keeping U.S. policymakers focused on concrete harms.
Reciprocity offers the best chance of realistically protecting U.S. interests. It remains an open question whether American elites who have benefited from access to China, always on Beijing’s terms, will support such a policy. Regardless, having tried most other options, it is time to try reciprocity.
— Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat distinguished research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an author, most recently of Asia’s New Geopolitics, and the host of the Pacific Century podcast.
***
Political will
Michael Cunningham
Even as America has become less naive about the threats the Chinese Communist Party poses to U.S. national security, too little has been done to combat these threats. This isn’t because policymakers don’t know how to defend America from the CCP. In many cases, they simply lack the political will to do so.
To be sure, U.S. policy toward China has hardened considerably since the Trump administration. The government no longer actively encourages U.S. businesses to expand in China and contribute to the country’s development. An array of sanctions and entity lists have been released, and Congress is constantly churning out new bills targeting Beijing.
But to date, these actions have proven insufficient. Like using a Band-Aid to treat a broken limb, lawmakers project the image that something is being done to address the problem, but they fail to address its root causes. In many cases, politicians seem more interested in portraying themselves as tough on China than in doing the necessary work to develop effective solutions to complex problems.
For example, few would deny that the U.S. government’s greatest responsibility is to provide for America’s defense. And yet Washington is watching our greatest geopolitical rival rapidly modernize its military while our once-unmatched armed forces increasingly
fall behind
. Rebuilding the U.S. military will require making tough choices and reallocating funds from wasteful domestic programs, yet no one wants to abandon pet projects.
Meanwhile, U.S. businesses continue to export sensitive technology to China, and American private equity continues to fund Chinese artificial intelligence companies that supply their country’s military and security services. Too many are more concerned with their bottom line than the safety and security of the U.S. If they’re not willing to change course, members of Congress must do more to force their hand when national security interests are at stake.
America needs to move away from a Band-Aid-style approach to China policy and truly get serious. Some industries with dual-use civilian and military applications need to be more tightly regulated, and policies must be strictly enforced.
Not all long-standing problems will be rectified overnight. This includes complex problems such as securing critical supply chains. Nevertheless, we as a country must muster the will to prioritize national security over political and business interests, and today that will is sorely lacking.
— Michael Cunningham is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
***
A strategy to choke China’s techno-authoritarianism
Rebeccah Heinrichs
China poses the biggest external threat to Americans and our way of life, yet there are many policies the U.S. government has been slow or unwilling to take. But the Chinese people’s heroic protests against the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive lockdowns in the name of “zero COVID” finally present an opportunity to end our allowance of U.S. capital that funds Chinese technology — the backbone of the CCP’s techno-authoritarianism.
Companies that Americans associate with anodyne purposes, such as recreational drones, security cameras for home protection, or social media apps, are used by the CCP to surveil, punish, and coerce the Chinese people, as well as amass data in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Chinese leader Xi Jinping knows that data is power. The lockdowns, and what I fear will be terrible crackdowns on the protests, are all possible because of the CCP’s abuse of technology against its own people.
Take Hikvision. The U.S. should be ending all U.S. capital flowing to support this company whose main utility is totalitarian control of persecuted groups. Hikvision’s technologies are the
foundation
of the Uyghur genocide, lining mosques and detention camps, including artificial intelligence designed to detect Uyghur faces instantaneously. It is also the cornerstone of Xi’s export of repression into authoritarian hands the world over.
The Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which the Trump administration began to turn the screws on and the Biden administration has continued, is adapting to U.S. sanctions and creating new products to sell and export. The victory laps about its diminishing effect globally have been premature. And, of course, the social media app TikTok is nothing but a tool for data harvesting.
Despite the recent statements of President Joe Biden and other world leaders, such as Germany’s Olaf Scholz, there can be no effective reset with China because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China is backing Russia’s war economically and with political cover. The threat from China has global reach, as it is methodically bolstering U.S. adversaries from Russia and Iran to North Korea and Venezuela.
The U.S. approach to China is best described as scattershot policies and a reluctance to cut off what we know are the means of CCP techno-authoritarianism that can be exported globally. While the Biden administration has made some meaningful efforts to limit the export of certain chips and manufacturing equipment to China, our overall strategy has remained one of half-measures and reluctance.
The hard truth is that liberals are still hopeful about China’s rise because their supporters in Hollywood, Big Tech, and the climate change zealots who need cheap Chinese solar panels don’t really mind CCP statism and value China’s cheap labor and massive market. Meanwhile, populists on the Right want to focus on China as a strictly regional problem and refuse to see that China’s tentacles reach globally. We cannot ignore entire geographic regions when China has decided that no country or region is trivial.
So until we see this for what it is, our China policy will be confused, our approach to other countries ill-advised and ineffective, and our efforts to weaken malign CCP activities on our shores slow at best. We should work doggedly to choke out China where it hurts most.
—Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics.
***
Skin in the game
Jonathan Schanzer
Democrats and Republicans may agree on the threats associated with the rise of China. But Washington is abysmal at helping America’s allies navigate this new great power competition. Washington has consistently failed to compete for the infrastructure bids it seeks to block China from winning. To add insult to injury, when China expectedly wins its bids, America comes down on its allies like a ton of bricks.
One prime example is the
Port of Piraeus
in Greece. In 2016, Chinese firm Cosco took a two-thirds stake in Greece’s largest port, which Chinese leader Xi Jinping described as “an important hub for China’s fast land-sea link with Europe and for connectivity between Asia and Europe.” In other words, Piraeus became an important asset for Beijing’s
Belt and Road
Initiative. Washington predictably registered its disapproval. But it turned out no U.S. firm even competed. What did we expect?
A similar story was reported out of Israel, where in 2015 the Shanghai International Port Group
won a tender
to operate the Haifa Port for 25 years. Critics in Washington
howled
about how the port was too close to the base where U.S. warships from the 6th Fleet dock. Israel addressed this problem directly with Washington, and the Navy still docks in Haifa. But once again, the U.S. failed to compete.
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After taking significant heat from the Haifa Port episode,
Israel admirably rejected
a bid by the state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation to build the green and purple lines of Tel Aviv’s light rail system. It was hailed as a victory for American policy. But in a bizarre twist of fate, it turns out that CRRC has been operating light rail systems in major U.S. cities,
such as Boston
.
Israel has recently gone a step further by
toughening its screening
of foreign investments. America needs to encourage such steps from others.
More importantly, Washington needs to stop wagging a finger at our allies and get in the game. That means competing for the projects we want China to lose. That could include teaming up with allies to share the burden. But we must lead by example, which includes purging problematic Chinese companies from infrastructure in the U.S. if we want our allies to do the same.
— Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
