China: A risky debate in Presidential campaign
Get ready for the China rumble as Donald Trump and Joe Biden vie over who's tougher on the world's only other superpower.
It's sort of a reprise, in reverse, of the political fight 75 years ago: Who Lost China, when it went Communist, as if somehow it was ours to lose. It took decades and a couple wars before that changed under the leadership of an arch-communist, Richard Nixon.
The 2024 version, with a no-holds barred Presidential race, could cause damage. In peacetime foreign policy rarely holds much sway in national elections. Current crises in Ukraine and the Middle East attract more attention.
I am not a foreign policy reporter or anywhere close to a China expert; I have traveled there a relatively small number of times and have a few close friends.
Common political sense, however, assures China soon will take center stage in the political debate; it lends itself to both cheap demagoguery and serious concern.
The Xi Jinping regime does a lot of bad stuff: it’s propping up Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine, constantly threatens Taiwan, plays unfairly on economics and trade matters, represses some of its citizens, and is a primary source for sending the lethal Fentanyl drug to the United States,
China should be held accountable for these transgressions.
It also is a powerful country, economically, militarily and politically. It is an important player on big issues. Our policy should be smart as well as tough. Joe Biden realizes that; he has to avoid the temptation to try to out-tough Trump who has no limits.
It's worth considering that when the anti-China fever took off almost a decade ago that country was a growing, confident colossus, on course to overtake America as the world's largest economy with an eye to dominating Asia. Those designs still are there, but the clout and confidence are diminished.
"In 2017 the question was how to we catch up or match them," notes Jude Blanchette, who has lived and worked there and is a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Now the question is how do we sustain our lead. In the strategic competition we are winning."
The Chinese economy today is sluggish, its spectacular growth only a memory, sky high youth unemployment, an unsettling demographic outlook with an aging and decreasing population and Beijing’s total covid lockdown backfired, culminating in a sense of malaise.
That's the takeaway of two friends who recently visited and understand China.
One, Evan Osnos, the talented New Yorker reporter who worked in China for eight years, noted, that "feeling of ineluctable ascent has waned." There is a nostalgia for the not too long ago, one entrepreneur told him.
Chinese worry the economic and social difficulties, Osnos writes, are not an aberration but the new normal.
Scott Moore, who heads the University of Pennsylvania's Global China project. meeting with different groups found similar sentiments. The lingering impact of the COVID lockdown has left a "mass trauma," Moore noted.
"Something pretty fundamental has shifted in the relationship between state and society, in the form of underlying mistrust and grievance."
Given the disarray and division that so often marks American politics these days it's hard to comprehend but it may be worse in China.
That raises the question of whether this makes the dictatorial regime of Xi Jinping more or less aggressive externally. Nothing will change what Blanchette observes is Xi's "deep cynicism toward America and the West."
China hawks predict a full-fledged effort against Taiwan might be used to distract from domestic problems, but for a country that's traditionally has been cautious in external adventures these internal challenges more likely will cause China to be less assertive --unless they feel provoked. Biden and Trump's steep tariffs may not be good policy but they're just part of the contest as is banning the ownership of Tik-Tok.
Military matters are of a different order.
China's growing military strength is real. Nevertheless, while they have more ships, retired Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied commander, says with our more sophisticated weapons and vast superiority in nuclear carriers, "if you want to ask which hand of cards with which you want to play battleship in the Pacific, I'm going with the U.S."
An accidental incident in the South China Sea and reckless rhetoric is a risk. A respected Chinese scholar told Evan Osnos that if in the American political election candidates jockey for taking the harder line on China it could heighten the chance for a violent confrontation.
Retired Marine four-star General John Allen, whose commands included the Pacific, concurs saying while we have to hold China accountable, we need to remember that "confrontation can lead to conflict."