Why the world needs a saner US approach to China

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Why the world needs a saner US approach to China

a group of people standing in a room: Workers start to cover the name of the US Consulate General in Chengdu with white board on July 27, after Beijing closed it in retaliation against the Houston closure. Photo: Simon Song

© SCMP Workers start to cover the name of the US Consulate General in Chengdu with white board on July 27, after Beijing closed it in retaliation against the Houston closure. Photo: Simon Song

US President Donald Trump’s decision to close the Houston consulate appears to be another step in his administration’s plan to paint China as an existential threat to bolster his re-election prospects.

The move is in keeping with his tendency to justify a Cold War-like global posture towards Beijing accompanied by crude, zero-sum policies supposedly needed to distract Americans from their mounting troubles at home and to justify ever larger defence budgets. I hope the American people do not fall for these gambits, but there are signs that they might be doing so.

There is no question that China is undermining US interests and contributing to this genuine free fall in relations. Beijing is stealing intellectual property (although this is less of an issue than it used to be), limiting foreign investment and trade in ways non-compliant with the World Trade Organisation, and bullying and intimidating neighbours while building a military designed in part to counter US military capabilities, especially in Asia.

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And, of course, the Chinese government is engaged in a level of domestic repression that is completely anathema to democratic states.

All that said, China also remains a critical, indeed increasingly important, nation for addressing a host of serious transnational threats, from climate change to pandemics. And while Beijing excessively props up its domestic firms with state support, its trade and investment practices have contributed hugely to global growth and benefited many countries, including the United States, while also producing some job losses in declining manufacturing sectors.

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Such positive effects are more imperative than ever, amid the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. But you would never know any of this if you only listened to Washington’s propaganda.

The Trump administration and its enablers in the Congress should not think for one second that demonising China will not undermine US and European efforts to deal with these transnational and developmental concerns.

Equally important, while Xi Jinping’s government in many ways represents a dead-end throwback to Leninist repression, Chinese society remains in transition, with an ever more cosmopolitan middle class and considerable intellectual ferment beneath the surface.

Although their views are hard to measure, many Chinese intellectuals and some ordinary Chinese citizens seem to oppose the gross excesses of Xi’s government and would favour more moderate policies.

And Xi himself is no Stalin or Mao in terms of his hold on power. His top-down, controlling decision-making in many areas and his overly assertive foreign policy could backfire, reducing his power or even bringing him down.

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The US and the world need a sane policy that can effectively deter or mitigate Chinese threats, build incentives on both sides to pursue cooperative solutions to ever-growing transnational problems, and reduce the tendency to view every issue through the prism of worst-case thinking.

And this needs to be done in ways that do not alienate the Chinese people. Despite Trump’s crude and simplistic attempts to separate the 90 million members of the Communist Party from the Chinese public at large, his sledgehammer efforts to contain and weaken the Chinese economy are having the opposite effect, bolstering support for Xi and the Communist Party and deepening anger towards the US.

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The chest beating, strident language and punitive threats of out-of-control US officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, trade adviser Peter Navarro and others do not constitute a serious long-term strategy. Closing the Houston consulate at short notice just invites tit-for-tat Chinese retaliation, in a race to the bottom that will serve no one’s interests.

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Ultimately, any effective US policy towards China requires genuine international coordination. US friends and allies must take the lead in arguing for a tough but balanced posture towards Beijing that preserves the gains of the past, incorporates new approaches, and pushes back against Washington’s increasingly extreme and irrational stance.

Such international initiatives will have little effect on the deeply incompetent Trump administration. But it could serve to shape the views of what is hopefully an incoming Biden administration.

There is an opportunity here to transition to a reality-based policy that seeks a greater level of consensus from and support for other countries, and does not use China policy as a domestic political weapon. Let us hope that the damage done by the Trump administration is reversible.

Michael Swaine is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the most prominent American analysts in Chinese security studies

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