Opinion: Is China working toward collaboration, competition or conflict?
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The war in Ukraine and the political battles at home have raged unabated for what now seems forever. Meanwhile the sporadic flareups between the U.S. and an ascendant People’s Republic of China have been relegated to a secondary priority.
China has enthroned its President Xi Jinping for a third term, has expelled market advocates from its Communist Party, and exercised its geopolitical muscle to conduct large-scale maneuvers simulating an invasion of Taiwan due to a visit from retiring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most recently, President Biden has conferred in person with Mr. Xi in Bali with further consultations scheduled with Vice President Harris and other officials. What comfort or at least guarded optimism should this renewal of communications at the highest level provide the U.S. going forward?
Both China and the U.S. have reasons domestic and foreign to ease their escalating tensions. The U.S. has limited tools to quell inflation without engendering a recession and faces a declining middle class amidst growing inequalities in income and resources. On the other hand, China’s daunted economic rise has slowed due to its reoccurring COVID lockdowns, curtailment of market forces, unstable investment and real estate sectors, rising unemployment and aging demographics.
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Both nations have shifted gradually from competition to containment with an increasingly hostile and strident view of the other’s ideologies and ambitions. Pointing to our mix of individual rights and capitalism as being decadent and exploitative, China has sought partnerships and allies as part of a new global order focused on collective goals rather than personal freedoms. In his speech to the Party Congress, Mr. Xi warned of “dangerous storms” ahead and ordered leaders to prepare for “an era of struggle.”
Similarly, Mr. Biden has revved up his rhetoric challenging China’s assertiveness and has restricted the transfer of conductor chip technology to China. Mr. Xi replies that Washington is imposing double standards and is weaponizing technology.
The danger over the near future is Taiwan. Mr. Xi has spoken, and China has acted, with increasing belligerence toward its island neighbor, as reflected by the expanded scope, intensity and frequency of recent military exercises surrounding the island. China has the largest Navy in the world and a military 10 times that of Taiwan’s. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin does not view an invasion as imminent, largely because of China’s dependence upon international trade and supply chains and the price China would pay in overcoming Taiwanese defenses. In addition, an invasion would risk the potential destruction of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry that supplies 70 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, which would set back economies around the world.
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The short-term risk of conflict has been heightened by close encounters of a blurred kind, when the warships or aircraft of one nation enters or seeks to enforce territorial waters or airspace claimed by the other. The recent dialogue between Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden at minimum creates a channel for diplomatic resolution of missteps that inevitably will occur.
The more serious danger over the longer term is that the political systems in both countries have moved toward dysfunction in balancing priorities and crafting policy. Our nation has three starkly divided branches of government disrupting any sustained continuity of strategy to address challenges here or abroad. In contrast, Mr. Xi has solidified his iron control by forging a team devoid of disparate voices and advocates of private development and consumer choice. While America’s political parties focus on outrage and investigation, China clamps down on dissent and disease. In very different ways, both our centrifugal forces and China’s centripetal forces undermine flexible governance and compromise among competing views.
The challenge for Washington is how to encourage Beijing’s cooperation on trade and environmental issues, while preventing its further territorial expansion, its technological advances, and its alignment with Russia. This will require a diplomatically nuanced balance of collaboration, competition, and deterrence of conflict. Progress is within reach in the management of climate control and trade dispute, although more difficult in the restraint of human rights violations and North Korea missile tests.
The U.S. would be wise to bolster its ties with governments throughout Southeast Asia and to upgrade its military forces in that region, while avoiding overheated rhetoric and unnecessary provocations in its support of Taiwan. The polestar is to recognize the immense challenge to our way of life posed by the most powerful autocrat in the history of the world.
Joe McGuire is a local attorney, a member of several volunteer boards, and a prior visitor to six cities in China.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: China: Collaboration, competition or conflict?
