How U.S., allies can confront the China challenge

How U.S., allies can confront the China challenge

 

By JULIAN GEWIRTZ

Politico

07/22/2020 06:52 PM EDT

 

Xi Jinping should be losing sleep: Across the globe, America’s allies are pushing back hard on Beijing. The past 10 days have seen revealing shifts for many allies that are deeply intertwined with both the United States and China. The cozy status quo is disintegrating: British officials have announced that they will exclude Huawei from the UK’s 5G network, called out China’s “gross, egregious human rights abuses” against Uighurs, and suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong. They may even work with a fellow U.S. ally, Japan, on a 5G alternative.

 

Meanwhile, Japan is moving ahead with plans to pay firms to relocate production from China, and Canada’s Parliament is studying Magnitsky sanctions against Beijing. But these allies all want to maintain their massive economic relationships with the world’s most populous country, and they certainly don’t want to take orders from the United States. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted this week that he refuses to be “pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe.”

 

 

— The Trump Factor? This is a major opening for the United States to forge an allied approach to one of the most important challenges of the century. But will Trump take it? The Trump administration is ramping up on all fronts against China, as POLITICO wrote this week — including, most recently, the dramatic order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in London earlier this week to talk China, and the U.S. and the EU have even launched a strategic dialogue on China. But doubts about U.S. commitments remain, and your host is reminded of what Trump reportedly told John Bolton: “The EU is worse than China, only smaller.” Buckle up.

 

I’m Julian Gewirtz, your host this week while David Wertime sips wine out West. In my day job, I’m a scholar of Chinese politics, history and U.S.-China relations. I’ve always wanted to host an episode of Jeopardy, but hosting the China Watcher newsletter is basically just as fun.

 

THE CHINA WATCHERS

Big question: What should the U.S. actually be doing with our allies? I asked a group of leading China watchers to propose one concrete policy idea that the U.S. and its allies should pursue to more effectively address the China challenge.

 

Secure Cyberspace: At their most basic, alliances are about military support, but the Council on Foreign Relations’ Mira Rapp-Hooper, author of an excellent new book on the past and future of American alliances, Shields of the Republic, argues that they also need to expand their scope into non-traditional areas where China has been investing. She told me, “Washington and its allies can share intelligence and craft declaratory policies that improve their ability to deter cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and major, state-backed political interference campaigns.”

 

An Allied Tech Agenda: Shaping the emerging “‘two worlds’ of digital platforms and underlying technological infrastructure” — one liberal and democratic, and the other authoritarian — is another crucial area for collaboration, says Tarun Chhabra of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “We need a technology alliance agenda [including] pooled R&D investments (such as an ‘allied In-Q-Tel’ focused on emerging technology that advances liberal democratic values); better coordinated industrial policy and antitrust regulation; privacy-preserving data-sharing; energetic norm-building and technological standard-setting; and tailored, coordinated technology transfer restrictions, investment controls and export controls.”

 

Build Bridges: Others see big opportunities to respond to China’s multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). “The EU and the U.S. should create a joint investment fund that would support investment projects abroad and counter China’s BRI,” said Julianne Smith, director of the Asia Program and the Geopolitics Program at the German Marshall Fund — building on work on infrastructure development already underway in the region and welcoming Japan and Australia.

 

Ahoy There! With new reports of China rapidly expanding its amphibious assault capabilities, Lindsey Ford of the Brookings Institution said the U.S. should urgently prioritize working with Japan, Australia, and European powers to “better coordinate their defense planning and investments to sustain a strong allied maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific.”

 

Negotiate Together: Miriam Sapiro, former deputy U.S. Trade Representative, called for a “united front” on trade negotiations that would push China to implement market reforms like eliminating illegal subsidies: “If the United States can tackle this successfully with the EU and Japan, that’s a powerful combination, whether or not the rest of the WTO goes along,” she told China Watcher.

 

REALITY CHECK: Making these ideas happen won’t be easy, because when it comes to China, the interests of America’s allies are overlapping but not identical. For one, their economic dependence on China isn’t going away. China alone accounts for 26 percent of Australia’s trade with the world; it is also the largest trading partner of Germany (7.1 percent of German exports in 2018) and Japan (19.5 percent of Japanese exports in 2018). A “united front” is attainable, but it will take real work to get there.

 

Past Is Prologue: “United front” or western humiliation? To some in China, this all sounds familiar. Back in 1900, an uprising against the imperial powers (and especially foreign missionaries) stormed across northern China and marched on Beijing. A group of imperial powers intervened to suppress this “Boxer Rebellion,” occupied Beijing, and engaged in looting and pillaging. Those foreign powers — known as the “Eight-Nation Alliance” — are stock villains in Chinese “patriotic education” designed to keep fresh this historical trauma. As countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Japan, criticize the National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong, Chinese internet users are resurrecting the Eight-Nation Alliance.

 

— Invoking it today reveals a view that many in China hold — that rich countries have always sought to “humiliate” and “gang up” on China. Chinese netizens even circulated a map comparing the Eight-Nation Alliance and the countries that have criticized Beijing’s move on Hong Kong (with thanks to writer Shen Lu).

Eight nations WDIDO

 

Point taken. But the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of the lively and concise Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, observes that this comparison has been trotted out before when Chinese leaders and media want to gin up nationalist sentiment, including after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The malleability of invoking the Eight-Nation Alliance “never ceases to amaze me,” Wasserstrom said.

 

HONG KONG WATCH

 

The effects of the new National Security Law are tearing through a city that sits at the heart of international trade and financial networks. First, social-media companies like WhatsApp and Facebook stepped back from Hong Kong, and media organizations announced plans to move parts of their Hong Kong operations elsewhere in Asia. Now, Reuters reported this week that international banks — including Credit Suisse, HSBC, and UBS — have started “examining whether their clients in Hong Kong have ties to the city’s pro-democracy movement.” Those with such ties might face greater difficulty accessing banking services.

 

— This is “part of a larger trend in which foreign multinational companies are proactively censoring and taking actions to adhere to Beijing’s definition of what their core national interests are,” explained Ashley Feng, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, “even if it contradicts the foreign policies of the countries where they were founded and headquartered.”

 

— What might be next? As one possibility, Feng pointed to the shipping and transportation sector: “Hong Kong isn’t just a financial hub, but a transshipment hub as well. Foreign companies could be caught in the crosshairs of different export control regulations between the United States and China.” Last year, when the U.S. rolled out new restrictions on Huawei, Chinese state media made threats against FedEx, among other companies.

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

 

Watch out: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is gearing up to deliver a major speech on China on Thursday afternoon. This comes as the culmination of a series of administration speeches — National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Attorney General William Barr and others — that have sought to make a forceful case that the Chinese Communist Party poses a mortal threat to the American way of life. Of course, this is also part of Trump’s “blame China” campaign strategy.

 

— What to look for: Pompeo will tout recent moves — such as the consulate closure in Houston, indictments against Chinese hackers and pushback on the South China Sea — and may announce new measures regarding Hong Kong, human rights, espionage and allied coordination. At the center of the speech will be the Cold War-style revival of the notion of the “free world” against “Communist” China. As Pompeo said last week, “What the CCP does to the Chinese people is bad enough, but the free world shouldn’t tolerate Beijing’s abuses as well.”

 

— The irony: Veteran China watcher Bill Bishop observed on Twitter that Pompeo is delivering his speech at the Nixon Presidential Library — which honors the president who met with Mao Zedong and launched the U.S. and China into the era of engagement that Trump has unceremoniously terminated. Bishop asked wryly, “Will this be some sort of cosmic circle-closing that pushes us into the next chapter?”

 

Whither “Phase One”? For weeks, D.C. nabobs have been speculating about whether the U.S.-China trade deal would collapse, given China’s meager purchasing numbers and the high levels of tension between the two countries.

— But, in an interview with China Watcher, Clete Willems, the former deputy head of the National Economic Council in the Trump administration, offered a spirited defense of the deal. “The reason the deal will hold is that it’s in China’s interest,” he said. “China doesn’t want to see this [relationship] completely spiral out of control.”

— Even if China is still far short of purchasing targets, Willems argued that “China is largely meeting the structural requirements under the deal in agriculture, in intellectual property, in financial services, and in other areas. ”

 

Although many experts say that the deal kicked meaningful structural reforms down the road, several analysts agreed that the Chinese side has been sending signals that it intends to fulfill its “phase one” commitments. “Too many fronts are deteriorating right now,” said Dan Wang, an analyst at Beijing-based research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. “We shouldn’t expect that China would want to look like the reneging party on trade, even as it pushes back on other fronts.”

Hot from the China Watchersphere

Xi’s new economic guide: “Dual-circulation theory?” In the South China Morning Post, commentator Wang Xiangwei describes a new idea with increasing clout in Beijing: “dual circulation theory.” What does it mean? Official media say that it’s an economic model based primarily on relying on China’s massive and varied domestic market, bolstered by international exchange, to manage the risks of a volatile world.

 

The human costs of U.S.-China rivalry. In a poignant essay, longtime China correspondent Ian Johnson wrote in the New York Times about being kicked out of China earlier this year. “People like me built our lives around a premise: that the world was interconnected and that it was a worthwhile calling to devote one’s life to making other cultures a tiny bit more intelligible,” he writes. With U.S.-China rivalry and the Covid-19 pandemic, that premise seems newly thrown into question.“Simply by sheer coincidence, my time in China largely matched the era of engagement that is now ending,” Johnson told me.

 

— Johnson’s essay is circulating widely among users on Chinese social media who can get access to the New York Times, notes Shen Lu. One reader even translated it into Chinese for those who don’t read English and have a way to leap over the Great Firewall. Many commenters lamented over the end of the era of engagement between China and the U.S. One comment reads, “This piece shows rare tenderness in this chaotic world; it’s like an elegy for the golden age.”

Translating China

Your “Made in China” face mask may have been made by forced Uighur labor. The New York Times published a bracing exposé that should remind us all that what happens in Xinjiang affects the world we live in. For example, the reporting team “traced a shipment of face masks to a medical supply company in the U.S. state of Georgia from a factory in China’s Hubei Province, where more than 100 Uighur workers had been sent.” Those workers “are required to learn Mandarin and pledge their loyalty to China at weekly flag-raising ceremonies.”

 

— What to watch: Building up domestic American capacity to produce PPE has become a matter of great concern to members of both parties. But so far, most arguments have focused on the importance for U.S. national security. Expect human rights and labor rights concerns to become a bigger part of the conversation.

 

— The poetry of Chinese laborers: There’s no more moving way to understand the human beings behind “Made in China” than to read the poems of Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn factory worker and poet who committed suicide in 2014 and remains a cult figure. “I’m swallowing an iron moon, / a screw they call it,” Xu wrote in one poem. “I can’t swallow any more.”

 

As U.S. universities struggle to develop plans for school reopening amid the pandemic, they’re facing another problem: barriers to Chinese students returning to the United States for the fall semester. There are approximately 369,500 Chinese college students studying in the U.S.; they are a major presence (and source of revenue) at American schools, contributing an estimated $13 billion to the U.S. economy. Foreign nationals who have been in China are still prohibited from traveling to the United States.

 

— The few American universities with campuses in China are finding ways around this problem. NYU Shanghai announced this week that 2,300 Chinese undergraduates and 800 graduate students from NYU (and NYU Abu Dhabi) will be able to enroll in Shanghai, where schools are already mostly reopened. NYU Shanghai’s Vice Chancellor Jeffrey Lehman told China Watcher, “We are glad that our presence here in China will enable us to ensure that thousands of students from our sister campuses . . . can continue their NYU educations despite the barriers to international travel.”

The Next Frontier

China’s blockchain chicken farms (yes, you read that correctly): Xiaowei R. Wang, a scholar at UC-Berkeley, has been exploring the Chinese countryside in search of the next big technology stories. In Blockchain Chicken Farm—And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside (forthcoming in October), Wang writes about a Farmer Jiang in the mountains of rural Guizhou who sells free-range chickens advertised as “raised on the blockchain.”

 

— What does that mean? Each chicken has a QR code bracelet on its leg and lives under heavy surveillance, Wang told me, with information stored on a proprietary blockchain. Buyers can scan the QR code to know everything about their poultry’s origins.

 

— It’s a gimmick, but it speaks to “a very palpable concern in China about food safety, which has been one of the biggest governance issues manifested in the day-to-day lived experience,” Wang said. Plus, with Xi Jinping declaring that China should lead the future of blockchain technology — and even the Chinese central bank developing a cryptocurrency — savvy farmers are riding a much bigger wave.

Farmer Jiang on his blockchain chicken farm. | Xiaowei Wang

 

— The changing role of technology in rural China is one of the great stories that few people in the United States — or even in China’s glittering megacities — know much about. Around 40 percent of the Chinese population lives in the countryside, an estimated 564 million people. Apps such as Kuaishou (a short video sharing platform similar to TikTok) and Pinduoduo (an e-commerce platform) are dominant with users in the countryside, although few Americans have ever heard of them.

 

China is continuing to develop in unpredictable ways. As China remains an explosive subject at the center of the 2020 presidential election, I’ll be keeping Farmer Jiang in mind: not as a symbol of coming Chinese technological supremacy or dystopian avian surveillance, but rather as a hard-working human being, far from Beijing’s corridors of power, with a quirky idea — trying, more than anything else, to put food on the table.

 

That’s all for this week. Next week, David Wertime will be back behind the host’s podium — and I’ll be back to dreaming about a gig on Jeopardy.

 

Thanks to: Editor John Yearwood, Luiza Ch. Savage, Shen Lu, Daniel Lippman, Tarun Chhabra, David Wertime.

Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? (Reasoned) complaints? Email davidwertime at politico dot com.

« View Archives

 

About The Author : Julian Gewirtz

Julian Gewirtz is an Academy Scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.