[Rather than beginning a final term next month as a lame duck, Mr. Xi will govern with new authority to pursue his agenda of making China a global power even if it risks putting Beijing in conflict with Washington and triggering a new Cold War after 40 years of mutual engagement, the analysts said.]
By Jane Perlez
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With
presidential term limits abolished, Xi Jinping has new authority for his drive
to make China a global power — even if doing
so risks conflict with
Washington.
Credit Pool photo by Mark Schiefelbein
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BEIJING
— Having cast aside presidential term limits,
China is bracing for relations with the United States to enter a dangerous
period under the continuing leadership of President Xi Jinping, intending to
stand firm against President Trump and against policies it sees as attempts to
contain its rise, according to Chinese analysts.
Even before the announcement on Sunday that he could
rule for the foreseeable future, Mr. Xi had ordered the Chinese military to
counter the Pentagon with its own modernization in air, sea, space and cyber
weapons, the analysts said, partly in response to Mr. Trump’s plans to
revitalize American nuclear forces.
Rather than beginning a final term next month
as a lame duck, Mr. Xi will govern with new authority to pursue his agenda of
making China a global power even if it risks putting Beijing in conflict with
Washington and triggering a new Cold War after 40 years of mutual engagement,
the analysts said.
“In the Asia-Pacific, the dominant role of the
United States in a political and military sense will have to be readjusted,”
said Cui Liru, former president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International
Relations, a think tank under the Ministry of State Security that often
reflects official thinking. “It doesn’t mean U.S. interests must be sacrificed.
But if the U.S. insists on a dominant role forever, that’s a problem.”
Asked if conflict was likely in the region, Mr.
Cui said: “I don’t exclude that possibility. In this transitional period, it
depends on how the two sides handle it.”
He added that it was “not normal for China to
be under U.S. dominance forever. You can’t justify dominance forever.”
Mr. Xi appears to share the view of many
Chinese analysts and military officials that the United States is a superpower
in decline — and that China must step into the vacuum it leaves behind.
He has accelerated the military’s plans to
build a blue-water navy, increased spending on weaponry in outer space, and
established China’s first military bases abroad. He has promoted a global
infrastructure program to extend Beijing’s influence and ignored Western
concerns about human rights, which have diminished under the Trump
administration.
The move in Beijing to scrap constitutional
limits on presidential terms comes as former officials in Washington have
expressed growing remorse about the longstanding bipartisan push for trade with
China — which they now worry has allowed Beijing to prosper at America’s
expense.
Mr. Xi’s emergence as a strongman has driven
home the disappointment among American policymakers that China has not become
more open and democratic as it has become more wealthy. At the same time, Beijing
has rejected pleas for fairer terms of trade, angering both Democrats and
Republicans.
President Trump himself has veered between
sharp criticism of China on trade and lavish praise of Mr. Xi. He congratulated
Mr. Xi on his “extraordinary elevation” at a leadership congress in October and
likened him to a “king.”
Mr. Xi’s attitude toward China’s place in the
world was echoed Tuesday in the state-run newspaper, Global Times, which
proclaimed in an editorial that “the country must seize the day, must seize the
hour.”
“Our country must not be disturbed by the
outside world or lose our confidence as the West grows increasingly vigilant
toward China,” it said.
In some respects, Mr. Xi’s move to extend his
rule in tandem with his drive to make China a dominant global power should not
have surprised the United States, Chinese analysts said.
“It is now clear Xi’s agenda to rebuild an
Asian order with China at its center is here to stay,” said Hugh White, a
scholar and former defense official in Australia who has argued that the United
States must be prepared to share power with China in the Asia-Pacific region.
“I think Xi is impatient,” Mr. White added. “He
wants China to be the predominant power in the Western Pacific. He wants to do
it himself and for it to go down in history as his achievement. That makes him
formidable.”
At the same time, analysts said, Mr. Trump has
shown little interest in global institutions and ripped up an ambitious trade
pact that included more than a dozen Asia-Pacific nations as one of his first
acts in office.
“Xi is exploiting the space that America
voluntarily abandoned,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international
relations at Renmin University. In contrast, he said, “China speaks again and
again of globalization as a good thing.”
Most worrying for the United States, analysts
said, was the strategic competition emerging in Asia, where China is seeking to
challenge American military dominance that has been the status quo since World
War II.
“China’s military objective is to break through
the first chain of islands,” said Mr. Cui, referring to the waters beyond Japan
and Taiwan where the Chinese military wants to establish a presence.
Chinese military experts have also emphasized
the importance of dominating nuclear, space and cyber technologies, said
Phillip C. Saunders, a China expert at the National Defense University in
Washington.
Their views mirror those of American
strategists who also see these fields as critical to success in modern war, he
said.
The Trump administration announced this month a
new nuclear policy calling for revitalization of the nation’s nuclear arsenal
to counter Russia and to a lesser degree China — an approach that has upset
Beijing.
“Trump is obsessed with strategic forces,” Mr.
Shi said. “He is determined to maintain American military predominance in face
of China’s strategic buildup. That will make the relationship more profoundly
confrontational.”
The United States has also tried to build a
stronger “Indo-Pacific” coalition with Australia, India and Japan as a
counterweight to China’s rise. The four democracies would increase military
cooperation and invest in infrastructure to compete with Chinese projects in
the region.
But Chinese analysts said that Beijing did not
believe the effort would amount to much because the United States was unwilling
to spend money on the projects.
“In the short term,” Mr. Shi said, “China does
not care about it because the ability to form a real coalition is limited.”
Follow Jane Perlez on Twitter: @JanePerlez.