[There is no sign, though, that the rivalry between the United States and China will reach the same kind of equilibrium. For one thing, Japan is a democracy that has a military alliance with the United States, while China is an authoritarian nation that most likely seeks to displace American military dominance of the western Pacific. In China’s competition with the United States, a rancorous trade war has persisted for a year, and issues of national security are bleeding by the week into economic ones. Some senior American officials are pushing for “decoupling” the two economies.]
By
Edward Wong
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President Trump in a
dinner meeting with President Xi Jinping of China during
the Group of 20 summit
meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in December.
Credit Tom Brenner for
The New York Times
|
WASHINGTON
— When President Trump meets
President Xi Jinping of China this week to discuss contentious trade issues,
they will face each other in another nation that was once the United States’
main commercial rival, seen as a threat to American dominance.
But the competition between the United States
and Japan, which hosts the Group of 20 summit this week for the first time,
settled into a normal struggle among businesses after waves of American anxiety
in the 1980s. Japan hit a decade of stagnation, and in 2010, China overtook it
as the world’s second-largest economy.
There is no sign, though, that the rivalry
between the United States and China will reach the same kind of equilibrium.
For one thing, Japan is a democracy that has a military alliance with the
United States, while China is an authoritarian nation that most likely seeks to
displace American military dominance of the western Pacific. In China’s competition
with the United States, a rancorous trade war has persisted for a year, and
issues of national security are bleeding by the week into economic ones. Some
senior American officials are pushing for “decoupling” the two economies.
The main elements in relations — economic and
commercial ties — have become unmoored, and few agree on the future contours of
the relationship or the magnitude of the conflicts.
For American officials, the stakes seem much
higher now than in the race with Japan. Most economists estimate China will
overtake the United States as the largest economy in 10 to 15 years. And some
senior officials in Washington now view China as a steely ideological rival,
where the Communist Party aims not only to subjugate citizens but to spread
tools of authoritarian control globally — particularly surveillance,
communications and artificial intelligence technology — and establish military
footholds across oceans and mountains.
Though Mr. Trump incessantly praises Mr. Xi —
he said they “will always be friends” — the idea of China as a dangerous
juggernaut, more formidable than the Soviet Union, has become increasingly
widespread in the administration. It was articulated by Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo during a visit to the Netherlands, part of a weeklong trip across Europe
this month in which he talked about China at each stop.
“China has inroads too on this continent that
demand our attention,” he told a news conference in The Hague. “China wants to
be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its
authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.”
The National Security Strategy issued by the
White House in December 2017 sounded the alarm: The United States was
re-entering an era of great power competition, in which China and Russia “want
to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” But since then,
Mr. Trump and cabinet officials, distracted by Iran and other foreign policy
matters, have failed to outline a coherent strategy.
That has left administration officials
struggling to piece together an approach to China that has elements of
competition, containment and constructive engagement, none of them sharply
focused.
Mr. Trump’s closest advisers on China are
split on strategies. His top foreign policy officials, John R. Bolton and Mr.
Pompeo, have pushed for tough policies, as has Peter Navarro, the trade adviser
and creator of a polemical book and documentary film, “Death by China.” In the
opposite camp are tycoons — among them Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,
Stephen A. Schwarzman and Steve Wynn.
Midlevel bureaucrats are formulating their
own ideas. The view of a drawn-out ideological conflict was laid out in stark
terms by Kiron Skinner, the head of policy planning at the State Department, in
a talk in Washington on April 29.
“This is a fight with a really different
civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that
before,” she said. “The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way, it was a
fight within the Western family.”
Now, she said, “it’s the first time that we
will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
Many analysts have tried to discern whether
the striking remarks point to a new policy direction. Officials say privately
that is not the case.
While there has been bipartisan praise in
Washington for the administration’s tougher line — with measures ranging from
tariffs to sanctions of Chinese technology companies — critics say they see
strategic ambiguity without the strategy.
“The economic and security and technological
and even scientific components of the U.S.-China relationship are now being
conflated,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of government at Cornell
University who studies Chinese politics and nationalism. “What’s worrying to
many is not being able to decipher different levels of risk and how far and how
quickly the efforts to indiscriminately decouple the United States and China
will go.”
That idea of decoupling rests on the premise
that two economies so intertwined poses a significant security risk to the
United States. The linking accelerated when China entered the World Trade
Organization in 2001 and in recent years had seemed irreversible. But Mr.
Trump’s hard-line trade advisers want the two nations to unwind their supply
chains, which means some American businesses exit China, and others stop
selling components to Chinese companies.
Mr. Trump is narrowly focused on cutting the
trade deficit with China, which many economists say is not meaningful. But his imposition
of tariffs and the general uncertainty around the economic relationship are
forcing some American companies to rethink keeping operations in China. And
putting Chinese companies, notably Huawei, the giant maker of communications
technology, on what officials call an entity list to cut off the supply of
American components is having an effect.
“After a long period of globalization and
squeezing out economic efficiencies, you do see national security rising to the
forefront,” said Daniel M. Kliman, director of the Asia-Pacific Security
Program at the Center for a New American Security.
That has not gone unnoticed in China. This
spring, with trade tensions rising, Chinese state-run television began showing
old Korean War films depicting American aggression. Newspapers ran editorials
on the war.
Wang Wen, executive dean of the Chongyang
Institute for Financial Studies at the Renmin University of China, said in an
interview that the new model for United States-China relations was “fight but
not break.”
The fallout from the struggle is widening.
Chinese security officers have arrested two Canadian men on charges of spying
in apparent retaliation for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, a top Huawei
executive, on an extradition request by the United States. The F.B.I. has been
canceling visas of Chinese scholars suspected of intelligence ties.
Some observers say they fear a new Red Scare.
“Rather than proclaiming a ‘whole of society’
threat from a hostile ‘civilization,’ U.S. officials would be wise to emphasize
the value that immigrants from China and other countries have brought, while
establishing policies to safeguard against theft of intellectual property,” Ms.
Weiss said.
The case of Huawei is at the nexus of
concerns in Washington over both Chinese economic dominance and security
threats. The Trump administration has been pushing countries to bar Huawei from
developing next-generation 5G communications networks, arguing it poses a
national security risk. Huawei, a private company, denies the charge.
But the reluctance of even close allies to
adopt a ban, except for Australia, shows how nations are unwilling to
jeopardize their economic relations with China. That includes Japan, where the
government has not issued a ban and is trying to strengthen ties with China in
other ways — at the G20 in Osaka, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to host a
dinner for Mr. Xi.
The Trump administration has also been
pushing countries to reject China’s Belt-and-Road infrastructure projects and
what American officials call “debt diplomacy,” with mixed results.
Some American companies are trying to bypass
the limits set by the Trump administration on their dealings with China.
Semiconductor companies, for example, have found a legal basis for sidestepping
the Commerce Department prohibition on selling components to Huawei.
But the administration itself sometimes pulls
punches on China in the name of economic relations — a sign that the
traditional foundation of the relationship still stands to a degree.
Since last year, the administration has
debated imposing sanctions on Chinese officials for their role in interning one
million or more Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Though Mr. Pompeo and other
officials have pushed for the sanctions, the Treasury Department, led by Mr.
Mnuchin, has opposed them for fear of derailing the trade talks. So the
administration has taken no action.
China’s extraordinary human rights abuses in
Xinjiang are one major reason many American officials have abandoned any notion
of a future turn toward liberalism within the Communist Party.
For their part, Chinese officials have seized
on the Trump administration’s actions to argue that the United States is trying
to stop China’s rise. On Tuesday, People’s Daily, the official Communist Party
newspaper, ran a commentary urging citizens to fight for the nation’s dignity.
“The Chinese people deeply understand that
the American government’s suppression and containment of China is an external
challenge that China must bear in its development and growth,” the paper said,
“and it is a hurdle that we must overcome in the great rejuvenation of the
Chinese nation.”
Motoko Rich and Ben Dooley contributed
reporting from Tokyo. Luz Ding contributed research from Beijing.
