China facing big insecurity making it aggressive toward the world

?CHINA’S AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR ON THE GLOBAL STAGE: GLOBAL FALLOUT

China’s aggression, coupled with the rise of its military, could result in a “military accident. China has been flexing its geopolitical muscles over the past year, which has caused its relationships with several countries to deteriorate. Asia Society warns of danger from China’s aggressive ‘’ wolf warrior diplomacy. International pressure has not eroded domestic support for the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the United States. The Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 100th year since its founding, and an analyst has warned of the “immense danger” from?Beijing’s increasing aggression on the global stage. Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations saw China’s aggression along with the rise of its military could result in a “military accident, even a military clash. “If that could spell the end of China’s dream, it could destroy the global market system, and upsetting of many things which will bring a massive danger, that China’s wolf warrior diplomacy. China's aggressiveness seems bent on doing what it wants to do regardless of what anyone else thinks. This is the danger.

Red flags fly in front of the Great Hall of the People as the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) opens on May 22, 2020, in Beijing, China.

China was activating its geopolitical muscles whereas much of the world was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally, this has created sour its relationships with several countries. China, inter alia, ??imposed trade sanctions on Australia, ?a?military clash with India?along the border the two countries share, and has effectively taken control of parts of the disputed South China Sea, which several Southeast Asian countries have overlapping territorial claims. Chinese diplomats overseas have also become more aggressive against other countries, both in person and on social sites like Twitter but are banned on the mainland. Some analysts have labeled the approach “wolf warrior diplomacy” after nationalistic Chinese action movies of a similar name. China becomes successful and more wealthy and more powerful and has managed to alienate one country after another. International pressure has also been increasing in China. The U.S. under President?Joe Biden?is keen to rally its allies to call out China’s alleged human rights abuses and non-market practices. In March, the U.S., and its allies — including the?European Union, the U.K., and Canada —?smacked sanctions on Chinese officials?for alleged human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the western region of Xinjiang. Beijing retaliated with sanctions of its own.

The U.S. and the U.K. are among countries that have strongly condemned China’s clasp on Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997. But that pressure has not eroded domestic support for the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese President, Xi Jinping, said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. The Chinese government does not allow and forced its people to judge their country “against its own its history and its own experience” so most Chinese have forgotten any interest in comparing with the rest of the world. Most Chinese people have unable to increase their vision broad. They are having their standards of living, their standards of technological well-being, health outcomes, and educational outcomes improving, then they tend to support the Chinese government. They feel criticisms from outside of China, including criticisms about Hong Kong and Xinjiang, are widely seen as attacks on China that are intended to keep China down. Top of FormActions by other players includes China’s neighbors, and the United States became the prime reason for Beijing’s insight into the international environment and responses to it.

Foreign commentary on China’s international behavior routinely characterizes it (in varying measures) as aggressive, coercive, expansionist, and nationalistic—especially under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping. This is usually attributed to the inherent nature of the CCP and/or of Xi personally. Although the adjectives are often appropriate, what is frequently overlooked or dismissed is the extent to which Beijing is responding to external stimuli or other players’ actions. Indeed, in virtually every case of Chinese assertiveness or belligerence, it is not hard to identify what Beijing felt the need to react to. For example, Chinese saber-rattling and ultimatums regarding Taiwan are in part a predictable response to cumulative actions by both Taipei and Washington that have retreated from or eroded prior historical understandings with Beijing about what “one China” means and does not mean. Though CCP leaders have long been prepared to postpone their pursuit of unification if those understandings were operative. Beijing’s ongoing crackdown in Hong Kong was prompted in part by the local authorities’ failure—after more than twenty years—to enact national security legislation (as required by Hong Kong’s Basic Law) and to maintain public order in the wake of protests such legislation and in favor of democratic electoral reforms. Some protesters had become violent, demanded faster political reform than Beijing had promised, rejected potential paths to compromise, or openly advocated Hong Kong’s independence, their control, and Chinese sovereignty at risk. Similarly, Beijing’s ruthless crackdown and tactics in Xinjiang, although an extreme overreaction, was triggered in part by a series of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists.

There is also a reactive and defensive element to Beijing’s aggressive behavior in all its territorial disputes—in which China has not been the only assertive and nationalistic player. In the South China Sea, the action-reaction cycle that led over time to Beijing’s massive reinforcement of its infrastructure and military presence has also featured efforts by rival claimants to bolster their own positions while similarly resisting any constraints on their freedom of action. In the East China Sea, Beijing’s increased operational presence over the past decade was driven in part by Tokyo’s “nationalization” of the disputed Senkaku Islands in conjunction with an apparent retreat from what some scholars assert was prior Japanese acknowledgment of the existence of a territorial dispute and willingness to shelve it. Finally, the U.S. view of aggressive Chinese behavior on the Sino-Indian border is largely driven by Indian tactical reports, whereas Chinese accounts of “who started it” might be no less credible.

In each of these territorial disputes, it is worth noting that it probably was not in China’s best interests to unilaterally provoke tensions—unless Beijing in each case was intentionally looking for an excuse to reinforce its military position at the expense of its diplomatic reputation. It is more likely that CCP leaders, preoccupied with myriad domestic challenges—including perennial fears of internal unrest—preferred (as they frequently assert both publicly and privately) to maintain a peaceful external environment that allows them to focus on their domestic priorities. Precisely for that reason, Beijing has long prepared to keep its territorial disputes and aspirations on the back burner. But when other disputants take steps that alter the equation in ways that challenge or erode China’s position, the Chinese feel compelled to react, and often do so disproportionately.

Of course, in all these cases—including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang—there have been good reasons for the United States to be sympathetic to parties on the receiving end of China’s coercive behavior. When Beijing assaults human rights or acts aggressively toward—or scores points against—U.S. allies and partners, Washington will appropriately take its stand. At the same time, an accurate and objective assessment of such situations and formulation of the most effective U.S. response would consider the underlying interactive dynamics. It is not unreasonable for Beijing to expect or at least to seek that other countries have some understanding of its perspective and the circumstances under which it is acting. U.S. moral or material support for the targets of Chinese assertiveness should not come at the expense of recognizing what and how actions by those other players—and Washington itself—contributed to Beijing’s behavior. At the very least, disregarding the Chinese point of view will hinder mutual understanding and constructive response to disputes and crises. On the contrary, it usually reinforces Beijing’s belligerent tendencies (as we are now seeing with Moscow on the Ukraine issue). China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” amply reflects this reactivity. It is true, as has been widely noted over the past few years, that many Chinese diplomats have grown increasingly vituperative in their rhetoric, especially but not exclusively toward the United States. But this has been reactive in two respects. First, it has partly been a response to an increase in vitriolic comments about China by foreign diplomats, most notably former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who also mirrored (if not prompted) Beijing’s resort to misinformation when Washington and Beijing were trading blame for the spread of Covid-19. Some Chinese diplomats apparently thought they should give as much as they got in terms of polemics.

More importantly, “wolf warrior diplomacy” almost certainly has reflected Beijing’s view that its perspective on international issues has been disregarded, particularly by Washington. Chinese diplomats routinely protest what Beijing sees as challenges to China’s sovereignty, security, and stability and the lack of reciprocity and accommodation in U.S.-China relations. But under the Trump administration, and so far under the Biden administration, they have frequently seen their complaints dismissed as invalid, self-serving, exaggerated, or aimed at blaming Washington for bilateral tensions. Those U.S. criticisms are often well-grounded, and Beijing has often been similarly dismissive of American talking points. But clearly, both sides have some valid concerns about each other, and both sides escalate the rhetoric when they perceive that the other is rebuffing their concerns.

This aspect of Beijing’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” was recently explained by scholars who examined the transcripts of Chinese Foreign Ministry speeches over the past two decades. They?found ?that rhetorical hostility increased along with—and usually in response to—growing external criticism of China, which eventually prompted calls by Xi to enhance China’s defensive “fighting spirit” in answer to foreign “scolding.” Beijing has thus been reacting to what it sees as international disdain of its point of view and its expression of Chinese interests and concerns. To whatever extent those interests and concerns are legitimate, Beijing’s frustration is predictable—even when its response is arrogant and obnoxious.

Researchers at the International Crisis Group (ICG) highlighted the reactive component of Chinese international behavior nearly a decade ago when its?analysis coined the term “reactive assertiveness” to characterize China’s actions in the South and East China Seas. ICG defined this as “responding forcefully to perceived provocations,” or when “Beijing uses an action by another party as justification to push back hard and change the facts on the ground in its favor.” Although this was an accurate description, over time, the narrative of Chinese “assertiveness” eclipsed the “reactive” part of the equation in most foreign commentary, perhaps because Beijing was deemed to have only “perceived” provocations and was so blatant in “pushing back hard.” There has also been little inclination in Washington to assign any blame to smaller parties when China’s behavior and relative weight usually make it easy to portray Beijing as the bad guy. Consequently, despite scholars’ efforts to refute its historical validity, China’s “new assertiveness ” became the prevailing meme.

But the reactive element of Chinese behavior has always been instrumental and acknowledging it is crucially important. Beijing goes on the offensive not just when it feels the urge or sees the opportunity but when it perceives the need. Even the CCP’s recent abandonment of Deng Xiaoping’s longstanding guidance for China to “hide its capabilities and bide its time” was as much a response to Beijing’s assessment of an increasingly problematic and even hostile external environment, as it was the result of a calculation that China had greater capabilities with which to pursue its interests and security. That combination has set the stage for the CCP’s increasingly forceful reactions to what it genuinely views as challenges by other players to China’s security and sovereignty and disregard for its strategic perspective. Again, none of this is meant to excuse Beijing’s aggressive and coercive behavior or to absolve it of China’s ample share of the blame for tensions along its periphery. The CCP leads a nasty authoritarian regime and is ruthless in its exercise of power both domestically and abroad. And even when Beijing has valid international concerns, it routinely overplays its hand or resorts to the bluntest policy instruments and the least subtle forms of diplomacy. Nonetheless, strategic empathy—which is wholly distinct from sympathy—remains crucial to understanding Chinese behavior and to de-escalating crises, and averting conflict. Within that framework, actions by other players—including China’s neighbors and the United States—are key drivers of Beijing’s perception of the international environment and responses to it. Failure or refusal to recognize this can only lead to flawed diagnoses of the challenge China represents and flawed prescriptions for dealing with it.

Many ask why Beijing behaves so badly internationally, and in ways that have been counterproductive to its interests and reputation by sparking backlash from other countries. It is not just because it is in the CCP’s nature to do so. It is primarily because Chinese leaders, like national leaders elsewhere, see challenges and even threats to their country’s interests, security, or sovereignty—beyond the risks that they perceive to the CCP regime’s control and tenure. We should not be surprised if Beijing acts in defense and pursuit of China’s national interests and sometimes attributes its need to do so to the actions of other countries. Mutual understanding and constructive relations between the United States and China will be exceedingly difficult to achieve if Washington overlooks or denies the defensive and reactive component of Beijing’s strategic mindset.

THE AGE OF 'GREAT CHINA

China to become more aggressive before peaking. Emerging powers that begin to wane are prone to desperate gambles. Japan?"has taken very impressive leadership roles" on the global stage to deter an increasingly aggressive?China. It will soon enter a period of decline due to its aging population and lack of resources, the country risks becoming aggressive toward others in its rush to achieve economic and diplomatic goals. The neighboring countries are wary of rapidly emerging powers beginning to stagnate and becoming overbearing, a situation he calls the "peak power trap." Because of President Xi Jinping's personal motivation to leave a legacy, the most intense phase of the U.S.-China confrontation over the Taiwan Strait came in the late 2020s.

?Looking back at modern history, when rising powers have confronted either an economic slowdown or strategic encirclement, these "formerly rising" powers that are starting to stagnate become much more aggressive. In the worst-case scenario, Imperial Japan in the 1930s suffered both and went into World War II, and Imperial Germany prior to 1914, terrified of declining relative to Russia and France, ended up launching World War I. As these cases demonstrate, when [rising nations'] power peaks, they tend to become risk accepting. China seems to be already headed well down that path. Even if China is a peaking power, it means America's competition with China becomes more intense soon. The No. 1 threat is the military, simply because the U.S.-China war could be a huge one between two nuclear-armed great powers. Even if a war over Taiwan began and it was intended as a short, local war, because neither side can afford to lose and both sides have lots of capabilities, they could hammer each other for months. Historically, great power wars tend to last a lot longer than the combatants thought at the start. Over the long term, the spread of digital authoritarian technologies is also extremely troubling. Monitoring its people through millions of cameras and facial recognition makes a dictatorship so much more efficient and effective than [any have] ever been in human history. Authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian governments all around the world are lining up to buy China's systems. The level of global democracy is creeping downward every single year. These new digital technologies could accelerate [the decline] as they make a dictatorship a lot easier to sustain.

The late 2020s to early 2030s. China's power would hit its very peak and start to slow down its growth at the time. There are many factors for this. First, even if you separate out so many other issues, a demographic problem alone is going to cripple China's rise. China will have lost more than 70 million working-age adults and gained more than 100 million senior citizens just by the early 2030s. Second, Chinese President Xi Jinping is turning 80 in 2033. It is going to have a looming succession crisis, regardless of whether he installs himself as dictator for life. Third, all the loans that China has doled out through its Belt and Road Initiative, a lot of those are going to mature and come due in the early 2030s. Debt collection is a nasty business. All the hearts and minds that China has won by extending these loans, will going to reverse and there will be a backlash. There are two main reasons. First, the economic and military gap between the U.S. and China is much larger than most people think. That is because most people measure the gap with indicators like GDP or military spending. Those indicators exaggerate the power of countries with big populations. However, you need to consider the downside of having a big population. When you subtract out all the costs of feeding, policing, and cleaning up while protecting 1.4 billion people, it sucks away a lot of China's wealth as well as a lot of its military power. The second reason is that China is going to face several headwinds going forward and they are more severe than the problems that the U.S. has. China will have a much older population while losing a lot of working-age adults over the next 30 years. China is suffering a severe scarcity of resources such as water, energy, food, etc. When you look at the international environment that China confronts, it is much more hostile than it was for the last 40 years. In East and Southeast Asia, countries like Japan, even Vietnam, and the Philippines start to become very suspicious and scared of China and counteract its power. All of these will push against China over the long term. On the other hand, The United States is free of a lot of these problems.

The late 2020s is a scary time. Now, China is still churning out warships at a rate we have not seen for many countries since World War II. In the late 2020s, the United States is about to retire a lot of its workhorse warships, submarines, and bombers. Because of the wars in the Middle East and the budget constraint after the financial crisis, the U.S. has delayed the modernization of the air force and navy over and over. The U.S. is still living off the investments it made in the 1980s. As a result, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait will shift even more in China's favor in the short term. In the long term, though, things are going to get worse for China. Both the U. S. and Taiwan have extremely ambitious plans to strengthen their militaries. The U.S. is working more closely with Japan, which seems to be more interested in getting involved in the Taiwan Strait. This means that the long-term trends seem to be not very favorable for China, but short-term trends are in China's favor. This creates a dangerous window of opportunity. With its slowing growth, it will be harder for China to keep up with this level of military modernization. In addition to these strategic reasons, President Xi has his personal reasons for his legacy. All of these are pushing China in the same direction. The point is that the most dangerous period would come much sooner than most people think. Most people, at least in the United States, think of the U.S.-China competition as a 100-year marathon, a new Cold War which will last for decades. Most people assume that we have plenty of time to get our house in order. However, we think the most intense phase of this competition is probably going to happen just in the next few years. It changes the kind of decisions you would make as a policymaker. You need to focus on getting things out in the short term, rather than assuming you would have a lot of time to invest in research and development and domestic renewal. These are great things, but we do not have much time.

?The No. 1 priority is reestablishing deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. We advocate that the U.S. should get as many forces as possible near and around Taiwan immediately to slam shut this window of opportunity for China. Whatever it means -- keeping existing ships out there, repurposing barges, putting missile launchers on them, or using drones -- any kind of force that can serve as a missile launcher or a sensor would be unbelievably valuable. It is important we do not let China have the prospect of an easy victory over Taiwan and prevent China from being tempted by that. Of course, this is a very risky proposition because by doing so you may ultimately push China to become even more aggressive in the short term. You do not want to push China back into the corner where it feels like there is no option. Even though it is exceedingly difficult to balance, China has already gone so far down this repressive and aggressive route, and it seems determined to make moves. Therefore, deterrence is the priority. When it comes to cooperation with the U.S. allies, there are lots with the amount of change [that has] happened just over the last year on this front. The U.S.-Japan alliance is increasingly an explicit anti-China alliance at this point. With AUKUS, the U.S. is bringing in Australia with new military capabilities. The sort of reinvigoration of the Quad is another move. It is not doing things only in the military sphere. It can provide alternatives to Chinese products, vaccines, or financing in areas such as Southeast Asia.

The Japanese government is investing more in the military, trying to reroute supply chains away from China, trying to double down on the U.S.-Japan alliance, and creating a united front against China with the G-7. Japan is doing all those things and it has taken very impressive leadership roles, for example, in getting the Quad up and running. Hopefully, all these things happening faster and with more energy.

?China is more aggressive because it is more insecure

Two years ago, the?Galvan valley clash?came amid a period of intense Chinese People’s Liberation Army activity across different theatres. In March 2020, as WHO declared Covid a global pandemic, Chinese jets intensified drills along the?Taiwan Strait. The Liaoning carrier conducted take-off and landing exercises in the Bohai Strait and would later sail past Taiwan. The PLA Daily hailed the drills, boasting about war preparedness amid the pandemic. China’s geopolitically less secure than it was during the 2020 LAC clash. Its response: more aggression. Beijing’s ambitions are about to crash into its problems.

The greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur at the intersection of ambition and desperation. Xi Jinping’s China will soon be driven by plenty of both. The cause of that desperation: a slowing economy and a creeping sense of encirclement and decline. But first, we need to lay out the grandness of those ambitions—what Xi’s China is trying to achieve. It is difficult to grasp just how hard China’s fall will be without understanding the heights to which Beijing aims to climb. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is undertaking an epic project to rewrite the rules of global order in Asia and far beyond. China does not want to be a superpower—one pole of many in the international system. It wants to be?the?superpower—the geopolitical sun around which the system revolves. That ambition is now hard to miss in what CCP officials are saying. It is even more obvious in what the CCP is doing, from its world-beating naval shipbuilding program to its effort to remake the strategic geography of Eurasia. China’s grand strategy involves pursuing objectives close to home, such as cementing the CCP’s hold on power and reclaiming bits of China that were ripped away when the country was weak. It also includes more expansive goals, such as carving out a regional sphere of influence and contesting American power on a global scale. The CCP’s agenda blends a sense of China’s historical destiny with an emphasis on modern, 21st-century tools of power. It is rooted in the timeless geopolitical ambitions that motivate so many great powers and the insatiable insecurities that plague China’s authoritarian regime.

Although China’s drive to reorder the world preludes Xi, it has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Now, CCP officials outwardly evince every confidence that a rising China is eclipsing the declining United States. Inwardly, however, Beijing’s leaders are already worrying that the Chinese dream may remain just that. China’s grand strategy is typically found more in a rough consensus among elites than in detailed, step-by-step plans. Yet there is ample evidence that the CCP is pursuing a determined, multilayered grand strategy with four key objectives. First, the CCP has the eternal ambition of every autocratic regime: to maintain its iron grip on power. Since 1949, the Chinese regime has always seen itself as being locked in a struggle with domestic and foreign enemies. Its leaders are haunted by the Soviet collapse, which brought down another great socialist state. They know that the collapse of the CCP-led system would be a disaster—and probably fatal—for them personally. In Chinese politics, paranoia is thus a virtue rather than a vice. As Wen Jiabao, then China’s head of government, once?said, “To think about why danger looms will ensure one’s security. Thinking about why chaos occurs will ensure one’s peace. To think about why a country fall will ensure one’s survival.” The CCP has historically gone to enormous lengths—plunging the country into madness during the Cultural Revolution, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of its own citizens amid the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989—to protect its power. And the goal of perpetuating the CCP’s authority is at the core of every key decision. Xi’s fundamental purpose, as a reporter summarized one official’s explanation?in 2017, was “ensuring the leading role of the Communist Party in all aspects of life.” Second, the CCP wants to make China whole again by regaining territories lost in earlier eras of internal upheaval and foreign aggression. Xi’s map of China includes a Hong Kong that is completely reincorporated into the CCP-led state (a process that is well underway) and a Taiwan that has been brought back into Beijing’s grasp. Elsewhere along its periphery, the CCP has outstanding border disputes with countries from India to Japan. Beijing also claims some 90 percent of the South China Sea—one of the world’s most commercially vital waterways—as its sovereign possession. Chinese officials say that there is no room for compromise on these issues. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Xi told?then-U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis in 2018.

The CCP’s third aim is to create a regional sphere of influence in which China is supreme because outside actors, especially the United States, are pushed to the margins. Beijing probably does not envision the sort of outright physical dominance that the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The CCP envisions, rather, using a mix of attraction and coercion to ensure that the economies of maritime Asia are oriented toward Beijing rather than Washington, that smaller powers are properly deferential to the CCP, and that the United States no longer has the alliances, regional military presence, or influence necessary to create problems for China in its own front yard. As Xi said?in 2014, “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.” Other officials have been more explicit. In 2010, then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told?10 Southeast Asian countries that “China is a big country, and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” An aircraft flies above a white snowy mountain. India's beef with China sizzles at over 10000 feet and the Pentagon wants to help India in the mountaintop brawl.

The final layer of Beijing’s strategy focuses on achieving global power and, eventually, global primacy. State media and party officials have explained that an increasingly powerful China cannot comfortably reside in a system led by the United States. Xi has talked?of creating a global “community of common destiny” that would involve “all under heaven being one family”—and presumably obeying the fatherly guidance of the CCP. Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency,?makes no bones?about who will shape global affairs once China’s national rejuvenation is achieved: “By 2050, two centuries after the Opium Wars, which plunged the ‘Middle Kingdom’ into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and re-ascend to the top of the world.” The struggle to “become the world’s No.1 … is a ‘people’s war,’” the nationalist newspaper?Global Times?declares. “It will be as vast and mighty as a big river. It will be an unstoppable tide.” The four layers of the Chinese grand strategy all go together. The CCP argues that only under its leadership can China achieve its long-awaited “national rejuvenation.” The quest for regional and global power, in turn, should reinforce the CCP’s authority at home. This quest can provide legitimacy by stoking Chinese nationalism at a time when the regime’s original ideology—socialism—has been abandoned. It can deliver prestige, domestic as well as global, for China’s rulers. And it can give China the ability, which it is using aggressively, to silence its international critics and create global rules that protect an autocratic state.

Chinese grand strategy thus encompasses far more than the narrowly conceived defense of the country and its ruling regime. Those goals are tightly linked to the pursuit of an epochal change in the regional and global rules of the road—the sort that occurs when one hegemon falls, and another arises. “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his book?Diplomacy, “they aspire to?be?the international system.” That is the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today. Americans might be surprised to find that Chinese leaders view the United States as a dangerous, hostile nation determined to hold other countries down. Yet even as China has, in many ways, flourished in the Pax Americana, its leaders have worried that Washington threatens nearly everything the CCP desires.

It cannot escape the attention of Chinese policymakers that the United States has a distinguished record of destroying its most serious global challengers—Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—as well as a host of lesser rivals. Nor can Chinese officials forget that the United States is poised to frustrate all the CCP’s designs. From Mao Zedong to Xi, Chinese leaders have seen the United States as a menace to the CCP’s political primacy. When the United States and China were avowed enemies during the early Cold War, Washington sponsored Tibetan rebels who fought against that regime, while also supporting Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek and his claim to be China’s rightful ruler. In recent decades, American leaders have insisted they wish China well. But they have also proclaimed, as then-U.S. President Bill Clinton said in 1997, that the country’s authoritarian political model puts it “on the wrong side of history.”

After the Tiananmen Square massacre, and in response to CCP atrocities against the Uyghur population more recently, the United States even led coalitions of countries that slapped economic sanctions on China. The CCP sees through the subterfuge, one Chinese politician?explained: “The U.S. has never given up its intent to overthrow the socialist system.” Even when the United States has no conscious design to undermine dictators, it cannot help but threaten them. America’s very existence serves as a beacon of hope to dissidents. CCP members surely noticed that protesters in Hong Kong prominently displayed U.S. flags when resisting the imposition of authoritarian rule in 2019-2020, just as the protesters in Tiananmen Square erected a giant sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty 30 years earlier. They howl?in anger when U.S. news organizations publish detailed exposes of official crimes and corruption in Beijing. Things that Americans view as innocuous—for instance, the operation of nongovernmental organizations focused on human rights and government accountability—look like subversive menaces to a CCP that recognizes?no?limits on its own power. The United States simply cannot cease threatening the CCP unless America somehow ceases to be what it is: a liberal democracy concerned with the fate of freedom in the world.

The United States stands athwart China’s road to greatness in other ways. The CCP cannot make China whole again without reclaiming Taiwan, but the United States shields that island—through arms sales, diplomatic support, and the implicit promise of military aid—from Beijing’s pressure. Similarly, the United States obstructs China’s drive for dominance in the South China Sea with its Navy and its calls for freedom of navigation; its military alliances and security partnerships in Asia give smaller countries the temerity to resist Chinese power. Washington maintains a globally capable military and bristles when China tries to develop something similar; it uses its heft to shape international views of how countries should behave and what sort of political systems are most legitimate. Beijing must “break the Western moral advantage,” noted ?one Chinese analyst, that comes from determining which governments are “good and bad.” To be clear, China does not reject all aspects of the U.S.-led order: The CCP has brilliantly exploited access to an open global economy, and its military forces have participated in United Nations peacekeeping missions. But Chinese leaders nonetheless appreciate, better than many Americans do, that there is something fundamentally antagonistic about the relationship: The CCP cannot succeed in creating arrangements that reflect its own interests and values without weakening, fragmenting, and ultimately replacing the order that currently exists.

Even at moments when Beijing and Washington have seemed friendly, then, Chinese leaders have harbored extremely jaded views of U.S. power. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms relied on U.S. markets and technology, argued that Washington was waging a “world war without gun smoke” to overthrow the CCP. Such perceptions, in turn, lead to a belief that realizing China’s dreams will ultimately require a test of strength with the United States. The CCP faces a “new long march” in its relations with the United States, Xi said in 2019—a dangerous struggle for supremacy and survival. Xi is right that the countries are on a collision course. The CCP’s grand strategy imperils America’s long-declared interest in preventing any hostile power from controlling East Asia and the western Pacific. That strategy is activating America’s equally long-standing fear that a rival that gains preeminence on the Eurasian landmass could challenge the United States worldwide. China’s drive for technological supremacy is no less ominous: A world in which techno-autocracy is ascendant may not be one in which democracy is secure.

The basic reason why U.S.-China relations are so tense today is that the CCP is trying to shape the next century in ways that threaten to overturn what the United States has achieved over the last century. This raises a deeper question:?Why?is Beijing so set on fundamentally revising the system, even if doing so leads to dangerous rivalry with the United States? The answer involves geopolitics, history, and ideology. In some ways, China’s bid for primacy is a new chapter in the world’s oldest story. Rising states typically seek greater influence, respect, and power.

A U.S.-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after World War II, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” in which a divided China was plundered by rapacious foreign powers. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap. “Since the Opium War of the 1840s, the Chinese people have long cherished a dream of realizing a great national rejuvenation,” Under CCP rule, China “will never again tolerate being bullied by any nation.” When xi invokes the idea of a CCP-led “community of common destiny,” Chinese primacy is the natural order of things. ?A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington. But the fact that the country is ruled by autocrats committed to the ruthless suppression of liberalism domestically turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”

The infamous Document No.9,? a political directive issued at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP perceives a liberal world order as inherently threatening: “Western anti-China forces and internal ‘dissidents’ are still actively trying to infiltrate China’s ideological sphere.” They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from Chinese borders. When the United States became a world power, it forged a world that was hospitable to democratic values. When the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, it imposed communist regimes. In great-power rivalries since antiquity, ideological cleavages have exacerbated geopolitical cleavages: Differences in how governments see their citizens produce profound differences in how those governments see the world. Xi acknowledges touts Beijing’s power, that there are many ways in which “the West is strong, and the East is weak.” He warned, even in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, of “looming risks and tests.” He declared that China must make itself “invincible” to ensure that “nobody can beat us or choke us to death. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is another China, one beset by multiplying problems at home and multiplying enmities abroad. Economic growth has slowed to a crawl. Productivity has collapsed, while debt has ballooned. Xi’s government is careening into ruinous totalitarianism. Water, food, and energy resources are becoming scarce. The country faces the worst peacetime demographic collapse in history. “The volume, the number of Chinese intercepts at sea and in the air have increased significantly over five years. The strong comments from Milley underscore the Biden administration's efforts to make countering China a key strategic priority, and they come as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to be?preparing to lead a congressional delegation to Taiwan?a self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own territory. President Joe Biden has suggested the US military believes a potential trip by Pelosi and other lawmakers would pose security risks.

?After a detailed review, Milley is seeking to gain a detailed understanding of all interactions between the two militaries, especially any that could be deemed "unsafe" or "unprofessional" due to Chinese aircraft or ships operating too close to US military assets. ?Interactions between the two militaries are so sensitive that incidents are often not made public. For example, in June, a US C-130 transport plane being operated by US special forces had some type of encounter with Chinese aircraft, but the Pentagon has yet not confirmed. In recent incidents, the Australian government said that a Chinese warship allegedly used a laser to "illuminate" an Australian Air Force jet in what Canberra called a "serious safety incident." it strongly condemns the "unprofessional and unsafe military conduct." Pilots targeted by laser attacks in the past have reported disorienting flashes, pain, spasms and spots in their vision, and even temporary blindness.

?China is adamant its military is defensive. "The development of China's national defense aims to meet its rightful security needs and contribute to the growth of the world's peaceful forces," the country's 2019 defense white paper said. "China will never threaten any other country or seek any sphere of influence. “The US, for its part, appears to be stepping up its operations in the South China Sea. Earlier this month, a US Navy?warship challenged Chinese claims?to disputed islands in the South China Sea, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement -- the second operation of its kind this week.

?CONCLUSION

China's insecurity is very deep. The USA which made China a big exporter in the world now the same country now not assisting China due to various reasons, inter alia, the gross human right violation to not allowing their citizen to become liberal and broad-minded. Losing Made in China dominance shivers the government.