Biden Is Now a China Hawk—With Limits
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/03/biden-is-now-a-china-hawk-with-limits/
Joe Biden seems to have concluded that China has become America’s sworn enemy. In April he ran on ad that depicted Donald Trump as a stooge who had “rolled over for the Chinese” in the midst of a pandemic for which the Chinese themselves may well have been responsible. In his one-on-one debate with Bernie Sanders, Biden claimed that China’s communist regime had made only “marginal” improvements in national well-being over the previous 40 years, cutting short any further comment with a curt, “China is an authoritarian dictatorship.”
Biden sounds a lot like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who in a speech earlier this mocked what he called “the old paradigm of blind engagement” with China, accusing President Xi Jinping of seeking “global hegemony of Chinese communism.” I wrote earlier that a President Biden would rally the world’s democracies against a rising authoritarian threat. Does he, like Pompeo, foresee a new Cold War with China?
Actually, he doesn’t. Biden has simply learned that beating up on China has become a cost-free way to prove your toughness. That wasn’t true even when he left office; his new bellicosity demonstrates how very quickly the consensus on China has shifted both in the broad public and among policymakers.
In a series of articles in Foreign Affairs, Ely Ratner, who served as Biden’s deputy national security advisor and now heads the China team of his foreign policy advisors, accused a generation of officials in both parties—himself included—of indulging in “hopeful thinking” about China. China had spurned the American offer to take its place as a “responsible stakeholder” in the global order. In China the United States faced not merely a competitor, but a rival.
This conclusion is by no means universal. Fareed Zakaria has argued that China is behaving just as other rising powers have done in the past, including the United States, and that American policy-makers have come to regard that behavior as intolerable only because China is far more powerful than other rivals to American supremacy. But both Biden and his advisors are committed to the engagement-has-failed line of thinking. Many of them, including Ratner, praise the language of Donald Trump’s 2017 national security strategy, which states, “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
Biden wants to stand up to China without provoking a new Cold War. He and his advisors recognize that they will not make progress on transnational issues like climate change or pandemics without the active engagement of the world’s biggest economy. For that reason, they deprecate Secretary Pompeo’s Cold War-era ideological diatribes as well as the fantasy of economic “decoupling” which Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, entertains. Washington will need to limit its vulnerability to China by, for example, replacing global supply chains of sensitive products with domestic ones even as the two countries remain intricately linked in the world’s economy.
Biden’s China policy would begin with domestic renewal. Biden insists that the United States can out-compete China if it makes strategic investments in infrastructure, research and development, health care, education and training. That may be another example of hopeful thinking. China’s growth rate, though slowing, remains about triple that of the United States. Several years ago, China became the world’s largest economy as measured by “purchasing power parity”; within a few years it is almost bound to be the largest by any measure.
But this may be the wrong metric. In a world governed by rules, supremacy is ultimately determined by who holds the pen. Perhaps, as Graham Allison concludes in Destined for War (2017), that power, too, will likely pass to China. But that is hardly a tolerable conclusion for those who, like Biden, believe devoutly in the “liberal world order” fashioned largely by Washington after World War II. That order was built on alliances, with the alliance of Western democracies at its core, and it is those institutions and networks that provide the counterweight to China. In an article last year, Julianne Smith, who preceded Ratner as Biden’s deputy national security advisor, and Torey Taussig, observed that Germany, France, and other European states, long more trusting of China that the United States, have been deeply disturbed by China’s cyber-espionage into their economies, its repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, and its crackdown in Hong Kong. French President Emmanuel Macron had used the occasion of a visit by Xi to declare an end to “European naiveté” about China.
Europe shares the American critique of China’s theft of intellectual property, its massive state support of export industries, its currency manipulation, its insistence on gaining access to the technological secrets of foreign investors—what I described in my previous article as the “geo-economic” agenda. Yet when he began his assault on China’s trade policies soon after taking office, Donald Trump attacked the Europeans in even harsher terms instead of making common case with them.
This was—assuming that Trump actually cared about the opportunity—a wasted opportunity. What would have been obvious to almost any president save Trump is that Western democracies are bound together not only by their geo-economic interests but by their values—and that China threatens those values. Biden is eager to join that contest, and he would do so from within a revitalized liberal order. He has called on “the Free World”—a favorite phrase—”to come together to compete with China’s efforts to proliferate its model of high-tech authoritarianism.”