TRUMP ALARMS CHINA WITH ‘COLD WAR’ RHETORIC IN STATE OF UNION ADDRESS

[Despite a state visit last November during which Trump gushed about the lavish welcome he received and his bond with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, his administration has repeatedly signaled in recent weeks a new cynicism about China’s role in the world and the threat China represents.]

By Siman Denyer

President Trump chats with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony

in Beijing for Trump on Nov. 9, 2017. (Andy Wong/AP)

BEIJING — China raised alarms Wednesday over what it called President Trump’s “outdated Cold War mentality” after an address that described Beijing as a global rival and set a tougher line against China’s economic and military reach.

The president’s language in his State of the Union address represented a fundamental reappraisal of the U.S. relationship with China — one that has been building for years but has crystallized since Trump took office last year, experts say.

Engagement — long accepted as the path to a safer world and a freer China — has been replaced with a chillier sense of strategic competition.

On Wednesday, China’s Foreign Ministry called on the United States to abandon its “outdated Cold War mentality,” manage its differences with Beijing and realize that “win-win” cooperation is the only viable option.

A Chinese foreign policy scholar called Trump’s language “alarming and provocative,” while state media warned that “malicious rivalry” and further enhancement of American military might would only end in disaster.

“Around the world,” Trump said, “we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy and our values. In confronting these horrible dangers, we know that weakness is the surest path to conflict, and unmatched power is the surest means to our true and great defense.

Beijing was not pleased to be spoken of as a danger in the same breath as rogue regimes and terrorist groups, but Trump’s language did not come as a complete surprise.

[Trump calls for ‘unmatched power’ against China and other perceived rivals] 

Despite a state visit last November during which Trump gushed about the lavish welcome he received and his bond with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, his administration has repeatedly signaled in recent weeks a new cynicism about China’s role in the world and the threat China represents.

“The idea of engagement has underpinned the U.S.-China relationship for decades,” Bill Bishop wrote in his Axios China newsletter. “Now the U.S. government appears to have declared engagement has failed.”

The change was spelled out most clearly by the White House in its National Security Strategy dated December 2017.

“For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the postwar international order would liberalize China,” the document says. “Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.”

Among the complaints: that China gathers and exploits data on an unrivaled scale, and that it spreads features of its authoritarian system around the globe, including corruption and the use of surveillance. At the same time, China is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, second only to that of the United States

In its National Defense Strategy released last month, the Pentagon argued “that the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by ‘revisionist’ powers.”

“It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions,” the document says.

Specifically, it calls China a “strategic competitor” that uses predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing the South China Sea, a region where China claims full sovereignty despite strong opposition from the United States and its Southeast Asian allies.

And in a significant reevaluation of the economic relationship, the U.S. trade representative even argued that it had been a mistake for the United States to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 “on terms that have proven to be ineffective in securing China’s embrace of an open, market-oriented trade regime.”

Daniel Rosen of the Rhodium Group, long a leading advocate of engagement with China, calls the Trump administration’s position a “sea change in perceptions of U.S. interests.”

Frustration with China for not opening its markets further to foreign firms has been building, and the idea that its entry into the WTO might not have been handled well has been the subject of dinner-party debate even among executives from multinational companies here for the past year.

Such sentiment has been further fueled by the feeling that China is walling itself off from the global Internet and trying to control cross-border data flows on which businesses depend.

Domestically, President Xi has buried the idea that a more prosperous China would ultimately become a more liberal, freer China: He has ruthlessly used the power of the state to step up surveillance and crack down on civil society, the legal profession and any hint of dissent.

Abroad, Xi makes no secret of his desire for China’s voice to be heard more clearly on the world stage: His assertion of maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea and his ambition to spread Chinese influence through his country’s global Belt and Road investments are just two examples of a more confident, assertive nation

But the shift in Chinese attitudes also predates Xi and can be traced back to the Western financial crisis a decade ago, experts say.

Since the crisis, the Communist Party has come to believe more strongly that its economic system offers a better model than that of the West, with markets allocating some resources but with the party ultimately in control of the economy.

For years, engagement with China had made sense, Rosen argued in a recent essay: China had been gradually converging with Western norms in its embrace of private enterprise, market forces and foreign businesses, and in its withdrawal of the state from the economy.

But those trends have stalled or gone into reverse.

Enter Trump, a president singularly obsessed with the U.S. trade deficit with China and numbering among his advisers men such as economist Peter Navarro and Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, who have long warned of a threat from Beijing.

Andrew Polk, a partner at the research firm Trivium China, says the rethinking of engagement has been a structural trend, “but the conversation has been put on steroids under Trump.”

Nor is it a conversation being heard only in Washington: In Germany, there are growing concerns about China’s attempts to divide and conquer the European Union by wooing its poorer nations. In Australia, there are widely expressed fears of Chinese interference.

So far, Trump has not definitively translated his words into action, partly, he says, because he is seeking China’s help in isolating North Korea.

But he imposed import tariffs on solar panels and washing machines last month, and expected action over intellectual property theft and steel and aluminum imports has left many here worried about a trade war.

The possibility of U.S. military action against North Korea, China’s neighbor and traditional ally, could lead to a more troubling confrontation involving the world’s most powerful nations

Rosen wrote that the shift in the U.S. attitude to China will lead to stepped-up confrontation over trade and investment, but he warned that it will also make it harder for the two powers to cooperate in areas where they need to find common ground, whether over North Korea or the environment and climate change.

“This shift in US-China relations is a serious concern,” he wrote. “In a relationship predicated not on the expectation of convergence but of rivalry and competition, opportunities for cooperation will be missed.”

Liu Yang and Amber Ziye Wang contributed to this report.

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@ The Washington Post