By Evan Osnos
At ten o’clock, artillery blasted a fifty-six-gun salute, as President Xi Jinping watched from a high balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square, known to the outside world as the site of a student-led uprising that was crushed in 1989. (In China’s official history, the movement and the crackdown have been reduced to a footnote.) Xi is sixty-six years old, with a full, reddish face, neatly combed hair, and an expression of patient immovability. Since taking office, in 2012, he has redoubled political repression and suspended term limits on the Presidency, so he will run the country for as long as he chooses. For this occasion, instead of his usual Western attire, he wore a black Mao suit. “On this spot, seventy years ago, Comrade Mao Zedong solemnly declared to the world the establishment of the People’s Republic of China,” he said. “That great event thoroughly transformed China’s tragic fate, ending more than a century of poverty, weakness, and bullying.”
Whenever Chinese leaders stage a public spectacle, it provides a chance to assess their self-portrait. In 2008, when Beijing hosted the Olympics, the opening ceremony celebrated Confucius and ignored Mao; the organizers wanted to project confidence but not brashness, a posture that China described as “Hide your strength and bide your time.” Eleven years later, China no longer hides the swagger. On the balcony, to Xi’s right, was the politburo’s reigning propagandist, Wang Huning, a former professor who once travelled the United States and honed a prickly theory about dealing with its people. “The Americans pay attention to strength,” he wrote, after attending a football game at the Naval Academy. “Football has some strategy, but it’s not elegant; mainly, it relies on strength.” He added, “The Americans apply that spirit to many fields, including the military, politics, and the economy.”
In the stands around Xi, uniformed volunteers demonstrated the optimal technique for waving a miniature flag—short, vigorous strokes—and stressed the value of a friendly “countenance” for the camera. But nobody needed much coaching; for many in the crowd, this was a day of unaffected pride in China’s new wealth and power. When I started studying Mandarin, twenty-five years ago, China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s. It is now twenty-four times the size it was then, ranking second only to America’s, and the share of Chinese people in extreme poverty has shrunk to less than one per cent. Growth has slowed sharply, but the country still has legions of citizens vying to enter the middle class. It is estimated that a billion Chinese people have yet to board an airplane.
Xi’s speech gave no acknowledgment of the headlines—China’s heavily criticized internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, protests in Hong Kong, a grinding trade war with the United States. In his telling, the momentum of history was beyond question. “No force can shake the status of our great motherland,” Xi said. “No force can stop the advance of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.”
To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth. Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights, free speech, and privacy. In the lead-up to the anniversary, the government demonstrated its capacity for social surveillance. At the Beijing University of Technology, where students trained to march in the parade, the administration extracted data from I.D. cards to see who ate what in the dining hall, and then delivered targeted guidance for a healthy diet. In the final weeks, authorities narrowed the Internet connection to the outside world, secreted dissidents out of town, and banned the flying of drones, kites, and pet pigeons.
From the balcony, Xi presided over fifteen thousand goose-stepping troops and phalanxes of tanks and jets—five hundred and eighty pieces of equipment in all. For nearly a century, the U.S. has been the dominant military power in the Pacific, as it has in much of the world. Xi sees this as an unacceptable intrusion. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia,” he has said. To achieve that, China has strengthened its military to the point that Pentagon analysts believe it could defeat U.S. forces in a confrontation along its borders.
The most anticipated moment of the day was the début of a state-of-the-art missile called the Dongfeng-41, which can travel at twenty-five times the speed of sound toward targets more than nine thousand miles away, farther than anything comparable in the American arsenal. Watching the missile roll by, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic state newspaper, tweeted, “No need to fear it. Just respect it and respect China.” Hu, a seasoned provocateur, added a sly jab at the travails of democracy: above a picture of the missile, he wrote that China was just fine forgoing the “good stuff” of electoral democracy on display in “Haiti, Libya, Iraq and Ukraine.”
When I visited Hu that week, at his office across town, he was in a buoyant mood. The pageant was less about military hardware, he said, than about “self-confidence.” He offered a pitying contrast with the United States. “You overestimated your abilities to transform the world,” he said. “You can’t simply write the screenplay for the future. China, India, the rest of the world—everyone will have a hand in the script.” He pointed to America’s pressure on China over trade. “They thought China was going to throw up the white flag,” Hu said. “But China kept up the fight. It appears that the ability to inflict pain on China is not what you thought it would be.”
Ilived in Beijing for eight years, starting in 2005. For the past six years, I have lived in Washington, D.C. This fall, I went back and forth between the two capitals, to gauge what lies ahead for a relationship that is more dangerously unstable than it has been since 1972, when Richard Nixon clasped Mao’s hand in Beijing, setting the course for China’s opening to the world. I talked to those who forged the relationship, and those who would remake it—in politics, business, security, entertainment, and technology—and found them startled by the depth of the rupture and the speed with which it has grown. “The relationship is in free fall,” a senior White House official told me. Deng Yuwen, a former top editor of a Communist Party journal who now lives in the United States, told me that when he talks to officials in Beijing they spare him the bluster. “They are very, very worried that the relationship will continue to deteriorate, that the economic impact will hurt people’s confidence and further growth, that it could have effects beyond their grasp,” he said.
Some level of tension is endemic. Ever since 1784, when the first American merchant ship landed in China to trade ginseng for tea, the two sides have cycled through what John Pomfret, the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,” calls “rapturous enchantment followed by despair.” But the union has always been derived from mutual benefit. Buyers in Canton generated fortunes for the Astor and the Delano families; Christian missionaries built China’s first universities and hospitals. The Cold War pulled the countries apart—the Party feared “Coca-Colanization”—but eventually the People’s Republic needed cash and foreign know-how. On December 13, 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced China’s Open Door policy, inviting in foreign businesses and encouraging Party members to “emancipate their minds.” Two weeks later, the first bottles of Coke arrived.
Eight American Presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, employed a strategy known as “engagement,” based on the conviction that embracing China politically and economically would eventually make it more profitable and liberal. Despite China’s flagrant abuses of intellectual property and human rights, the strategy enabled the largest trading relationship between any two countries in the world, with an estimated seventy thousand American companies doing business in China today. In 2005, the George W. Bush Administration loosened visa policies, encouraging a huge influx of Chinese students, who now make up the largest group of foreign undergrads in America. Microsoft opened a five-hundred-person research center in Beijing, its biggest lab outside the United States. In speeches to Americans, Communist Party officials adopted a romantic expression more often used in love poems: “There is some of me in you, and some of you in me.”
Donald Trump wants none of that. He has always despised trade deficits. In 1988, when America was flooded with imports from Japan, he told Oprah Winfrey, “They are beating the hell out of this country.” In 2016, as a Presidential candidate, he adapted his talking points to a new power in East Asia. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said, at a rally in New Hampshire. Though he occasionally rhapsodized about strongman rule (“Maybe we’ll want to give that a shot someday”), Trump rejected the basic theory of engagement. “You better start uncoupling from China,” he said, in 2015. “It’s going to bring us down.”
Trump’s idea of “uncoupling”—pushing factories to leave China, reducing the flow of students and technology—was a fringe position, found mostly in hawkish books such as “Death by China,” by Peter Navarro, a fiery economics professor who joined Trump’s campaign as an adviser. But, once Trump was in office, his confrontational approach attracted surprising bipartisan support. American businesses complained that Chinese hackers were stealing trade secrets, that Chinese officials were forcing them to hand over technology, and that state subsidies to Chinese rivals were making it impossible to compete. American politicians objected to Xi’s brazen roundups of human-rights lawyers, activists, and ethnic minorities.
In March, 2018, with a tweet declaring that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump announced sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from China and other countries. Beijing retaliated, and soon trade was yoked by billions of dollars in new taxes. The hostilities multiplied. In September, a Chinese warship and an American destroyer came within fifty yards of each other in the South China Sea, the two navies’ worst near-collision on record. Nine days later, Xu Yanjun, an employee of China’s foreign-intelligence agency, was extradited from Belgium to the U.S., on charges of conspiring to steal aerospace secrets. (Xu has pleaded not guilty.) In October, 2019, the U.S. blacklisted Chinese technology firms and Party officials for their involvement in the detention of Muslims in Xinjiang. That same month, China turned away an American congressional delegation. “For years, the two were kicking each other under the table,” Minxin Pei, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, said. “Now all the kicking is out in the open.”
Members of the Trump Administration have taken direct aim at China’s ambitions. Last fall, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that America and its allies must insure that “China retains only its proper place in the world.” During a visit to Europe, he said, “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 Administration’s argument, in its bluntest form, frames China as a hardened foe, too distant from American values to be susceptible to diplomacy. In April, Kiron Skinner, Pompeo’s director of policy planning, said in a public talk, “This is a fight with a really different civilization.” She added that China represented “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” (The comments caused an uproar. In August, Skinner left the State Department.) Behind closed doors, Trump aides dismiss Skinner’s invocation of race. But they also liken China to such sworn enemies of America as Iran and the Soviet Union, and argue that only hard-line pressure can “crush” its expansion.
Half a century after Henry Kissinger led the secret negotiations that brought Nixon to China, he still meets with leaders in Beijing and Washington. At the age of ninety-six, he has come to believe that the two sides are falling into a spiral of hostile perceptions. “I’m very concerned,” he told me, his baritone now almost a growl. “The way the relationship has deteriorated in recent months will feed, on both sides, the image that the other one is a permanent adversary.” By the end of 2019, the Washington establishment had all but abandoned engagement with China. But there was not yet a strategy to replace it.
In the void, there was a clamor to set rules for dealing with China in business, geopolitics, and culture, all surrounding a central question: Is the contest a new cold war?
To some in Washington, after eighteen years of unwinnable slogs in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the prospect of reprising the Cold War—the last major conflict that Washington won—offers the familiar comfort of an old boot. In March, 2019, the Committee on the Present Danger—a group, first formed in the fifties, that encouraged an arms buildup against the Soviets—was relaunched, with a focus on China. Its events have featured Senator Ted Cruz, the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and, notably, the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Washington’s best weathervane for political opportunity. In October, Gingrich published “Trump vs. China,” his thirtieth book since leaving office, in 1998. Discussing the book at the National Press Club, Gingrich told his audience, “If you don’t want your grandchildren speaking Chinese and obeying Beijing, then this is a topic we better have a national dialogue about.” He called China “the greatest threat to us since the British Empire in the seventeen-seventies, much greater than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”
For Gingrich and his allies, China is an existential menace, which demands the kind of aggressive military expansion and broad campaign against tyranny that thwarted the Soviet Union. Their bluster belies the fact that the U.S. strategy in the Cold War was largely predicated on avoiding direct conflict. In the opening moments of the Soviet contest—what Orwell warned would be the “peace that is no peace”—Americans faced what appeared to be a Manichaean choice: appeasement or a world war. The diplomat George Kennan perceived a third option, which he described, in Foreign Affairs, as the “firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Kennan’s theory of containment became America’s defining strategy in the Cold War.
In September, Odd Arne Westad, a Yale historian, published an essay in Foreign Affairs that served as a contemporary sequel to Kennan’s missive. He, too, urged patience. “If the United States wants to compete, it must prepare for a long campaign for influence,” he wrote. When I spoke to him recently, he argued that containment is not an option; China is too rich, and too intertwined with the American economy. But he suggested that Gingrich’s idea of clashing civilizations was also wrongheaded. “The Soviet leaders’ position was that it was necessary to see American power destroyed,” he said. “That’s not China’s game. I have yet to find a single person in the leadership who actually believes that.”
Westad is clear-eyed about the risks of China’s rise, but he is most alarmed by alarmism itself. The leaders of the two countries are both hasty, intransigent, and not very well informed about the other side’s goals. The U.S. wants to preserve its influence and to balance trade. China seeks, above all, to expand its power in East Asia, as Germany did in Europe more than a century ago. “The United States is not necessarily damaged by China retaking its historical place within eastern Asia,” Westad said. But when these kinds of changes happen too quickly, or when the partisans overreact, the results can be disastrous. “It all depends on timing. That’s what the Chinese have to realize—and haven’t, I think.” He is worried that China and the United States will separate into two distinct blocs, increasingly mistrustful and prone to conflict: “It can happen, as we’ve seen in Europe, in ways that unleash generations of warfare.”
When the parade wound down in Beijing, I walked east—back through security and past Mao’s mausoleum, where farmers from distant provinces still line up at dawn to glimpse his remains, held in a crystal coffin. Then I headed north, toward the lakes that once served as the emperors’ pleasure gardens, but I discovered that police had sealed off much of downtown. Every time I tried to turn, they waved me away. A cop encouraged a cluster of pedestrians to keep going east. “I don’t know where the restrictions end—I just know my area,” he said. I shuffled on, like a mouse in a maze; twenty minutes became an hour, then two hours. I noticed that we were being herded along the vanished route of the old city wall, a symbol of imperial anxiety that stood for more than five hundred years, until the nineteen-sixties, when it was removed to make room for modern transportation. As I walked, I took to counting surveillance cameras; there are now an estimated eight hundred thousand in the capital, nearly triple the number in place a decade ago. (In Hong Kong, protesters have attacked the cameras, as symbols of Beijing’s control.)
Every capital city prizes security, but in Xi’s Beijing it has been elevated to a state religion. Chinese leaders, for all their projections of confidence, see peril everywhere: a precarious economy, an aging population, an Arab Spring-style revolt in Hong Kong, an ethnic insurgency. In a speech last year to the National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang mentioned “risk” twenty-four times, twice as many as on the same occasion three years earlier. In 2018, China surpassed the Soviet Union as history’s longest-surviving Communist state, a distinction that fuels both pride and paranoia.
Chinese leaders have been alarmed by American support of popular uprisings—first the “color revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc and then the Arab Spring—and they resent America’s efforts to deepen its influence in Asia. In November, 2011, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State, announced a plan to “redirect some of those investments to opportunities and obligations” in Asia. As part of the “pivot,” as it was known, Obama expanded America’s military presence in Australia, and worked to build the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among twelve nations—China not among them. “To China, it was an effort to exclude,” Deng Yuwen, the former editor, said. “All of those things appeared to be targeting China from different perspectives—economically, geopolitically, militarily.”
Xi believes that orthodox commitment to Communism is paramount as his country fends off Western influence. In a speech in 2013, he asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” His answer: “Their ideals and convictions wavered.” In Beijing, an ideological revival is in flamboyant effect. Since June, the Party has been waging an old-fashioned dogmatic crusade, known as a “Correct the wind” campaign. In a modern twist, ninety million Party members have been given an app loaded with Xi’s speeches, quizzes about his life story, and videos on history. (The app keeps track of what they finish.) “Xi Jinping thinks the whole place slacked off ideologically,” Geremie Barmé, an independent historian and translator, said. “This campaign is something the Communists have done a number of times when they feel things are a little bit out of control.” Instead of city walls, the Party relies on digital defenses; day by day, censors purify the Internet of subversive ideas, and facial-recognition technologies track people’s comings and goings.
Under Xi, market reforms have stalled, and schools have replaced books by Western economists with tracts published by the Marxist Theory Research and Building Project. Some Party élites question whether Deng Xiaoping’s openness went too far. “As the Party returns to the idea that its absolute power is the only thing standing between China and chaos, the United States, and the embrace of markets, is increasingly seen as an enemy,” Westad said.
The more Trump’s Washington questions engagement, the more Xi’s Beijing perceives a hostile foe. The current leaders, in both places, cast themselves as defenders against humiliation and threats from the outside. In both cities, it has become easier to be a hawk than a voice of moderation.
I visited Yan Xuetong, an influential foreign-affairs scholar at Tsinghua University, who has a kindly laugh that belies the sharp edge of his views. He predicted the emergence of separate, competing economic and political blocs—the polarization that Westad fears. “We will have a two-centered world,” he said cheerfully, “like two yolks in one egg.” I puzzled over the image, trying to make out how such a curiosity would survive. But Yan was pleased with his analogy, and extended it into a distinction between the current scenario and the Cold War. “The relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was like two eggs in one basket—they were separate economically—but this time you have two yolks competing for support from the egg white.” He paused and tried out a different analogy. “Maybe the right term is a duopolistic world—like Boeing and Airbus, two companies in a zero-sum competition.”
I wanted to hear Yan’s sense of the protests in Hong Kong, which had expanded into the very kind of unrest that terrifies the government. After four months of street demonstrations against Communist Party control, violence was growing. On the day of the parade in Beijing, demonstrators seeking to overshadow events in the capital clashed with police, and, for the first time, an officer shot a protester with live ammunition. Yan saw no prospect that Beijing would compromise. “Violence will become a common phenomenon,” he said. “Like the Palestinian kids firing on Israeli police, but not as grave.” The comparison struck me as odd, until I realized that, from Beijing’s perspective, Israel’s sequestering of the West Bank and Gaza has led to an agreeable scenario: a chronic but confined insurgency that does not threaten the country’s over-all security.
Instead of running from confrontation, the Party has rallied around it. Xi emphasizes the importance of “struggle,” and state television has conspicuously rebroadcast old Korean war films depicting battles with American troops. An essay celebrating self-reliance during the starvation of the nineteen-fifties became a viral hit, under the title “A Guide to Eating Tree Bark.”
“The Party believes that, if you take one step backward, everything will unravel,” Barmé said. “The struggle, not the resolution of it, is the way of maintaining unity and primacy.” A struggle properly controlled—in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Washington—can be a political asset. In internal speeches about dealing with America, Party officials call for a precise balance: the goal should be to “struggle but not smash” the relationship—to exploit the tension without letting hostilities get out of control.
Thirty years after Coca-Cola symbolized the arrival of American business in China, the company became a symbol of a darker turn in the relationship. In early 2009, Coke was negotiating a $2.4 billion deal to buy China Huiyuan Juice Group—the largest-ever foreign takeover of a Chinese company. But, on March 15th, the F.B.I. alerted Coke executives that hackers had broken into their system and were rummaging through e-mails about the negotiation, recording keystrokes, and controlling their computers remotely. Three days later, the talks were dead. Security firms eventually traced the breach to hackers who worked from a twelve-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai: Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army.
For as long as the American intelligence community had been online, it had been hacking foreign governments. China did that, too, but its hackers also plundered foreign businesses, looking for an advantage in negotiation, for blueprints to copy, and for other commercial shortcuts. In 2007, agents of the Chinese military hacked the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin and stole tens of millions of documents related to America’s most expensive weapons system, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. A notably similar Chinese plane, the J-31, appeared soon thereafter. (China denies stealing the plans.) The Chinese hacking of American businesses exposed a deep clash of perceptions: America was starting to see China as a near-peer, intent on flouting rules laid down mostly by the West. But China still regarded itself as a scrappy latecomer, using whatever tools it could to protect and improve the lives of a vast population.
That clash extends far beyond hacking: China has invoked its status as a “developing country” to erect barriers against foreign competitors, and to coerce American companies into sharing technology. Eventually, those practices turned some American businesses from ardent advocates for good relations into fierce critics. When China joined the World Trade Organization, in 2001, it agreed to a schedule for dropping tariffs and opening markets. But that schedule ended in 2006, and so did the momentum toward opening. Arthur Kroeber, the managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing, said, “Almost immediately, I started hearing complaints from foreign companies about how conditions had changed to create advantages for domestic Chinese firms.”
Chinese leaders resented the idea that they should heed the West’s demands. At a dinner hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, a rising nationalist, Bo Xilai, spoke to foreign executives. “I’d never seen any Chinese leader be so patronizing to that crowd,” John Holden, a former chairman of the chamber, recalled. “He essentially said, ‘You complain a lot, but we know you’re making money here, so just get over it.’ ” (Bo was later imprisoned on charges of corruption and abuse of power.) When the global financial crisis struck, in 2008, it gave Chinese skeptics of capitalism a powerful argument against American-style reforms.
These days, the most acute standoff between the two countries is over who will dominate the next generation of technologies. Until recently, executives in Silicon Valley tended to belittle China’s potential in tech, arguing that rigid controls in politics and education would constrain radical innovation. But that view no longer prevails. Under a plan called Made in China 2025, Beijing has directed billions in subsidies and research funds to help Chinese companies surpass foreign competitors on such frontiers as electric vehicles and robotics. A Pentagon report commissioned under Obama warned that the U.S. was losing cutting-edge technology to China, not only through theft but also through Chinese involvement in joint ventures and tech startups. It prompted Congress, in 2018, to tighten rules on foreign investment and export controls.
The technology dispute escalated later that year, when the Trump Administration expanded an attack on Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of fifth-generation (5G) networking equipment, warning that the Chinese government could use the equipment for spying and hacking. In December, at the request of the U.S., Canadian authorities arrested Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, as she changed planes in Vancouver. Meng, the daughter of the company’s billionaire founder, is known in China as the “princess” of Huawei; when border agents detained her, she asked incredulously, “Because of my company, you are arresting me?” She was charged with committing fraud to help Huawei violate sanctions against trade with Iran. While awaiting trial, she was allowed to live in one of the two mansions that her family owns in Vancouver, worth a combined sixteen million dollars. Days after Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadians—Michael Kovrig, a diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, a consultant—and accused them of stealing state secrets. After more than a year, neither has been permitted to see a lawyer.
In May, the Administration took its largest step yet against Huawei: the Commerce Department blacklisted it from buying American microchips and other technology—a blow to Huawei’s ability to make the smartphones and networking equipment that it sells around the world. And yet the campaign against Huawei has been hampered by the Administration’s diplomatic isolation. The U.S. has asked sixty-one countries to ban Huawei equipment, but only three—Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—have agreed. A European diplomat told me that, despite credible concern about the use of Huawei’s products in spying, the campaign has been ham-fisted—a demand for us-or-them loyalty at a time “when you’re slapping tariffs on your European allies.”
Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, supports efforts to stop China’s theft of trade secrets, but he calls Trump’s broader strategy “erratic and incoherent.” China’s gains in technology should be “a new Sputnik moment,” triggering huge investment, he said. The U.S. does not have a 5G alternative to compete with China’s, a failure that cannot be blamed on spying. As a share of the economy, America’s federal investment in research and development has fallen to its lowest point since 1955. Warner said, “We’ve always steered away from industrial policy, but we may need to make public-private investments, or government investments, in ‘democracy 5G.’ ”
If America does not compete with China’s advances, it risks losing a voice in deciding the ethics of some unsettling new technologies. Since 2017, China has erected an unprecedented digital and physical enclosure around Muslims in its Xinjiang region. It is estimated that more than a million people have been interned in facilities known officially as “vocational training centers.” Millions more are tracked every day by facial-recognition cameras, fingerprints, cell-phone patterns, and biometric data, collected through a program of mandatory exams known as Physicals for All. Multiple provinces have taken to collecting DNA samples, in order to “improve population management and control,” as one police notice put it. The prospect of China extending, or exporting, the Xinjiang model has exposed the stakes in the future of intrusive technologies. Warner said, “The situation that’s playing out in 5G will soon play out in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.”
When Trump first imagined “uncoupling”—or “decoupling,” as it became known—the term evoked a divorce. But a complete decoupling is implausible. “Total revenue of U.S. companies and affiliates in China in 2017, for one year, is five hundred and forty-four billion dollars,” Kroeber told me. “What’s the chance these numbers can go down eighty or ninety per cent? Almost no chance. We can remove a few of those tangles, but the cost to the U.S. economy of removing them all would be unacceptably high.”
Some companies—Nintendo, GoPro, Hasbro—have accelerated plans to build factories in places such as India, Vietnam, and Mexico. But most American C.E.O.s want more access to China, not less. Amid the trade war, Starbucks announced plans to open three thousand new Chinese stores by 2023—an average of one every fifteen hours. Tesla opened a plant in Shanghai that will build a hundred and fifty thousand cars a year. Elon Musk, the company’s founder, has called the plant a “template for future growth.”
The Trump Administration’s efforts to force China into major concessions have faltered, as U.S. negotiators bickered openly over strategy. In February, both countries were said to be drawing up memorandums of understanding on six major issues, including cyber theft and intellectual-property rights. But, in a meeting with Chinese officials in the Oval Office, Trump undercut his top negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, by disputing the legitimacy of that step. “I don’t like M.O.U.s, because they don’t mean anything,” Trump said. Lighthizer, flustered, said, “We’re never going to use M.O.U. again,” drawing laughter from Chinese negotiators.
Trump’s advisers also fundamentally miscalculated the effect of their actions. In July, 2016, Navarro, who went on to become the White House director of trade and manufacturing policy, predicted that the mere threat of tariffs would force China to capitulate. “The purpose is not to impose tariffs,” he told me at the time. “The purpose is to use the threat of tariffs as a way of getting the attention of any trading partners that cheat, and, basically, encouraging them to play by the rules, knowing that Trump, if they don’t, damn well will follow through on that promise.” A tariff program, he said, is “kind of like the military—if it’s strong enough, then nobody messes with you.” By October, 2019, tariffs had been in place for fifteen months, suppressing investment and weighing on the American economy. The Department of Agriculture had allocated twenty-eight billion dollars in aid to farmers for lost exports—more than twice as much as taxpayers spent to bail out the auto industry a decade earlier. Researchers estimated that by the year’s end the tariffs would have cost the average U.S. household thirteen hundred dollars.
With a Presidential election a year away, Trump’s trade war was becoming a political liability. The Chinese side was in no rush to resolve it. In September, an American billionaire investor told me that he had advised the President to show progress, if he wanted a strong economy on Election Day. “You have to have a deal done by the end of the year,” the investor said. “If you get a deal in March or April, by then the economy’s already gone.” The next month, negotiators abruptly announced what they called “phase one” of a trade deal. The terms, finalized in December, called for both sides to cut tariffs; China also agreed to buy more farm exports, energy, and manufactured goods from the U.S., in return for which Trump would suspend upcoming tariffs. On Twitter, Trump had hailed it as “the greatest and biggest deal ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country.” But the truce did not resolve the core disputes, such as technology transfer, and, outside the White House, it was mostly seen as the end of a wasteful stunt. “Trump was looking for any possible excuse not to put on the tariffs that he had threatened,” Kroeber said, “so he got a promise from the Chinese to buy soybeans and some other stuff, and he packaged this.”
In China, the deal was greeted warily, with no expectation that it would relieve the standoff. Chinese analysts have described their side’s approach as da da, tan tan—“fight fight, talk talk”—a pointed expression that Mao used in the nineteen-forties to describe his strategy when Americans pressured him to stop fighting the rival Nationalist Army. Mao always assented to their requests for talks, even as he steadily gained ground on the battlefield. In the end, he won.
Chris Johnson, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asked a group of Chinese contacts what their government got from Trump’s push for a deal at any price. “Their response was ‘Time,’ ” he said. “Reading between the lines, they meant time without new tariffs in the near term, and time to prepare for what they presume is an inevitable larger confrontation.”
Beijing in July is an open-air sauna, windless and smothering beneath the monsoon clouds. In the summer of 2005, when I moved there, a pale disk of sun barely peeked through the pollution—but, for the teen-agers at my neighborhood basketball court, the game was always on. Smog, sun, rain, it didn’t matter: they were vamping, attempting to dunk, swimming in oversized Kobe Bryant jerseys, trying out American laji hua (trash talk).
For previous generations, showboating on the court had been so anathema that Chinese basketball teams were barred from keeping statistics for individual players. But the National Basketball Association recognized the surging potential of a China that was opening itself to outside culture. In 2002, a giant from Shanghai named Yao Ming was the first pick in the N.B.A. draft, and, that year, the league opened its China office, with a single employee. By 2005, surveys of Chinese young people showed that basketball was edging out soccer as the most popular sport. That fall, when I met Mark Fischer, a lanky American running the N.B.A.’s operation in China, he told me, “The sky’s the limit for basketball here.”
Nearly fifteen years later, much of that prediction is true. China is the N.B.A.’s most lucrative domain outside the U.S.; the China operation has been valued at more than four billion dollars, and star players earn a fortune in sneaker deals. Klay Thompson, of the Golden State Warriors, stands to make eighty million dollars in ten years from Anta, a Chinese brand, according to ESPN. But, last fall, the N.B.A. discovered a limit of a different kind in China. On October 5th, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a slogan to his personal Twitter feed: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” He later deleted the tweet, but China’s state media had already begun reporting on it, and the stories set off a cascade of outrage. Chinese sponsors pulled funding from the Rockets, merchandise disappeared from e-commerce sites, and state television cancelled broadcasts of games. Chinese commenters flooded Morey’s Twitter account with angry notes, including “N.M.S.L.”—Chinese slang for “Your mother is dead.”
Rather than coming to Morey’s defense, the N.B.A. issued an obsequious statement in Chinese: “We are extremely disappointed in the inappropriate remarks made by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey.” LeBron James—a frequent visitor to China on behalf of Nike, which makes more than one and a half billion dollars a year there—urged his colleagues to watch their words. He told reporters that Morey was not “educated on the situation,” and that his tweet risked harming people “not only financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually.”American fans were appalled. Online, people posted images of James’s head photoshopped onto hundred-yuan notes.
Ultimately, the N.B.A.’s commissioner, Adam Silver, reported “fairly dramatic” financial repercussions from lost business in China, but he rebuffed a request to fire Morey, and emphasized the league’s commitment to free expression. He told an audience in New York, “These American values—we are an American business—travel with us wherever we go.” But the N.B.A. kerfuffle exposed a larger phenomenon: China’s market had become so crucial to American institutions that they were blandly accepting demands for censorship and submission. When the Eastman School of Music, at the University of Rochester, was preparing for a tour of China, it could not get visas for South Korean students. It discovered that Beijing had blocked visas for South Korean performers since 2016, as punishment for a diplomatic dispute. Instead of postponing the tour, the school decided to leave all the South Koreans home, fearing what the dean called “a negative impact on Eastman’s reputation within China.” (After a public outcry, it abandoned the tour.)
China is not exporting a state ideology in the manner of the Soviet Union. But it wants to make the world more amenable to its ideology, so it has demanded extraterritorial censorship, compelling outsiders to accept limits on free speech beyond its borders. For years, Hollywood studios have agreed to cut material from their films to get them into China. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Oscar-winning movie about the band Queen, was released in China in 2019 only after it was reëdited to remove any mention of Freddie Mercury’s sexual orientation.
Judd Apatow, the filmmaker and comedian, told me that Americans intended to introduce freedom to China, but instead traded it for Chinese money. “I think it happened very slowly and insidiously,” he said. “You would not see a major film company or studio make a movie that has story lines which are critical of countries with major markets or investors. The question becomes: what’s the result of all of this? The result is, there are a million or more Muslims in reëducation camps in China, and you don’t really hear much about it.”
In October, Quentin Tarantino refused to modify the Chinese version of his film “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” after relatives of the late martial-arts star Bruce Lee complained about an unflattering portrayal of him, so China cancelled its release. Apatow said, “Quentin Tarantino is successful enough, and has the power and final cut, but very few people are in that position of strength. What you don’t hear about is all of the ideas that get killed at the earliest pitch stage, at all of the studios and networks, because people don’t even want to consider dealing with it.”
Accepting censorship for profit rests on the tempting logic that reaching Chinese buyers with a bowdlerized portrait of the world is better than not reaching them at all. In fact, censored imports have helped acclimate Chinese citizens to a parallel reality, in which Freddie Mercury was not gay, and in which nobody in the N.B.A. cares about Hong Kong. When Chinese consumers erupt at something like Daryl Morey’s tweet, it indicates not a growing awareness of what the rest of the world thinks but a growing seclusion from it.
For forty years, the two sides strained to look past their underlying political differences, but, as their contact intensified, ignoring the contradictions became more difficult. By the end of 2019, a web of cracks had appeared throughout domains that were once integrated. At least ten American colleges had closed outposts of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese-government-funded cultural program. In Beijing, the government had issued an unprecedented order, directing public institutions to remove all foreign computer equipment and software within three years. In Silicon Valley, some companies concluded that entering China had become all but impossible. Last year, Facebook, which had been asking China for years to let it operate there, abandoned the effort. Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, acknowledged the barriers before him, saying, “We will be blocked in China for a long time.”
In Beijing, it often feels as if a universe of ideas is reconstituting itself, with China at its center. I visited Joan Xu, an American screenwriter with an office at a WeWork downtown. She wore a slate-blue silk shirt and jeans, and handed me coffee in a mug with a WeWork slogan: “Do what you love.” Xu’s parents emigrated from China to the U.S. to attend graduate school in economics. She was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Maryland. “I grew up in white suburbs with other lawyers’ and professors’ kids,” she said. In 2003, when she was fourteen, the family moved to Beijing. Her mother became a professor at Peking University, and Xu entered a prestigious middle school, where she had to catch up by learning to read and write Chinese. “Before that, I was very much single-culture,” she said. “Now we were memorizing poems written two thousand years ago. That was just mind-blowing to me, coming from an American education, where two hundred years is old.”
After high school, she returned to the U.S. to attend Harvard, where she sang in an a-cappella group and reëmbraced American life. In her application, she described wanting to be “a U.S.-China bridge” who might bring the countries closer together. “Everybody was, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’ ” she said. She loved Harvard, where she majored in political science, but a tone in her classes surprised her. “My sophomore tutorial was themed ‘Democracy.’ It was basically a whole year of every famous professor coming in and giving a lecture about why democracy is the only legitimate form of governance.” She told me, “It felt like the political classes in high school in China, where everyone knows it’s propaganda. It didn’t encompass the world I’d known.”
Xu moved back to Beijing in 2012, and eventually started working on co-productions between Chinese and American filmmakers. “It was, like, ‘Oh, this is the future! The two greatest countries producing culture together.’ ” Her optimism has since waned. “It has become pretty clear in the last few years that the Hollywood-China co-production is not a thing. It still happens financially; it just didn’t happen creatively.” A breaking point came in 2016, with the release of a historical fantasy called “The Great Wall,” directed by Zhang Yimou; it starred Matt Damon as a warrior with Chinese comrades, all fending off monsters. In the hype preceding its release, the producer hailed it as “a new kind of film.” Afterward, USA Today judged it “a complete train wreck.” Xu told me, “No one has attempted to do a large-scale creative collaboration like that again.” She went on, “It was already, conceptually, about as middle ground as a blockbuster had gotten. So, it was just, like, ‘O.K., there is no middle ground. Culturally it’s just too different.’ ” Chinese audiences will watch Chinese movies, or American blockbusters, but the combination doesn’t work.
Xu still wants to be bicultural, but she finds it increasingly difficult to combine both sets of values. “All of my friends who are similar to me in Beijing, in every one of our industries, ‘U.S.-China’ is not a thing anymore,” she said. “We’re basically seen as just China people now.”
Xu told me she is “pro-China,” and I asked what she meant. “Most people who are within the sphere of the West kind of reflexively look at China and see, ‘Oh, wow, totalitarian dictatorship, oppression, no human rights, suffering.’ Just evil, right? To be ‘pro-China’ is simply to realize that’s not right; there is much more going on. It’s not perfect, but it’s just simply an alternative system.” She went on, “I would say that the ideals of human rights are not bad to aim for, but it’s not a universal, God-given thing. It was something that was consensus-driven at a certain point in Western history. If you look at Chinese social progression, things are genuinely getting better for most people, despite the problems. It’s more of a battle of narratives about values.”
It’s an argument one often hears in Beijing, and also among foreign investors and executives who seek business there. Google developed a prototype of a censored search engine called Dragonfly, which would have blocked thousands of words and phrases, including “human rights” and “student protest.” The C.E.O., Sundar Pichai, said, in 2018, “I think it’s important for us, given how important the market is and how many users there are.” (After protests by employees, Google announced that it had halted work on the project.)
Xi Jinping promotes the view that China’s system presents an alternative to free-market democracy—what he has called “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.” He has found some fertile markets for that view, in an era when Trump has reduced aid spending, separated children from parents at the border, and called migrants “animals.”
And yet China’s sprint for soft power has been less successful than one might assume. The scale and posture of its new power has aroused a backlash, even in places where it offers the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure push larger than the Marshall Plan. In Malaysia, which once welcomed a surge of Chinese investment, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has grown concerned about “a new version of colonialism.” Mahathir cancelled Chinese projects worth almost twenty-three billion dollars, seeking to avoid the fate of Sri Lanka, which defaulted on heavy Chinese loans and eventually agreed to give Beijing control of a major seaport for ninety-nine years.
When I spoke to Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican ambassador to Beijing, I mentioned Westad’s prediction of a “long campaign for influence.” Guajardo told me that, for all of Trump’s harm to the reputation of the U.S., it has not lost the campaign in Latin America, because Beijing’s ventures can be heavy-handed or self-serving. Chinese investors have been criticized for importing workers for infrastructure projects, instead of generating local jobs, and for seeking control of large swaths of national territory. “The Soviets were going after the hearts and minds of the local populations,” Guajardo said. “The Chinese could care less.”
In the contest for hearts and minds, America has no better chance to make its case than to foreign students who come for higher education—including an estimated three hundred and seventy thousand from China in the most recent academic year, four times as many as a decade ago.
Last fall, I spent time with three Chinese undergraduates at American University, on the lush outskirts of Washington, D.C. Xu Tong, who grew up in Harbin, in China’s frigid northeast, was still marvelling at how different Washington is from her home—no skyscrapers, few people, old trees. In China’s new cities, the trees are spindles. “Washington feels like a garden,” she said. A generation ago, Chinese students tended to study on scholarship, but now many subsidize the education of Americans by paying full freight. Xu was surprised by the thriftiness of American classmates. “Maybe it’s because China is new to money, and everyone attaches great importance to enjoyment, but students here seem to spend very little money,” she said. “When we go out, we take Uber, but they take the subway.”
Lai Ziyi, who grew up in Jiangxi, in southern China, had assumed that the U.S. capital city would be under intense security. “But there are shooting incidents,” she said. When she told her parents, they freaked out, and so Lai scrambled to assure them that her campus is near the Department of Homeland Security. “They said, ‘O.K., fine.’ ”
More than four years had passed since Lai applied to college in America, and the hostilities had startled her. In recent years, the U.S. has prosecuted at least half a dozen Chinese students and scholars for spying or for stealing scientific research. In 2018, Ji Chaoqun, an electrical-engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was charged with acting as an agent for China’s Ministry of State Security, and accused of trying to recruit spies among engineers and scientists. (Ji has pleaded not guilty.) Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that China has enlisted “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”
Trump offers an impressionistic version of these facts. Discussing China over dinner with C.E.O.s, he reportedly said that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.” In 2018, the U.S. government advised university administrators to be vigilant against the theft of biomedical secrets, and it cut the duration of visas available to Chinese graduate students working on advanced technology. Some schools believe the scrutiny is excessive. In an open letter in June, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote that the cases of wrongdoing “are the exception and very far from the rule. Yet faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge—because of their Chinese ethnicity alone.”
Lai told me, “My dream was to be a lawyer.” But when she tried to combine a degree in law with aerospace or chemical engineering she was advised to look elsewhere. “These are sensitive majors,” she said. “If you study for a master’s degree, you would get restrictions from the American government.” She has no regrets about coming, but the longer she stays in America, the more she feels tempted to recede into a community of Chinese students. It reminded me of some of my experiences studying in China—the tug between loneliness and curiosity, the intensifying effect of life far from home, which can make you more patriotic than you were when you left. Watching the unrest in Hong Kong had convinced Lai that the Beijing government was right to condemn the protesters. “Most of them are just full of violence. And, as a Chinese person from the mainland, I love my country, and I don’t think these things should happen anymore.”
When Zhao Yuchen arrived in America, last August, he was the only foreign student on his floor, and he cherished the isolation; it helped him make friends with Americans, as well as with students from Japan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Mongolia. At nineteen, he is tall and confident. He grew up in Taiyuan, in China’s coal country, where his father sold mining equipment. Neither of his parents went to college, but they supported his decision to study in America. “My father doesn’t like the Chinese education system,” he told me. “He thinks it can’t improve my creative thinking.”
Zhao wandered the museums run by the Smithsonian, and he savored the sudden absence of control. “It’s free,” he said. “I can express what I want to say, and I don’t need to fear the teacher’s reaction.” He stayed up late scouring the uncensored Internet for facts about the Cultural Revolution and the massacre at Tiananmen Square. An uncle of his had taken part in the democracy demonstrations, but they’d never talked much about it, he said. In China, he’d asked in school about the demonstrations. “My teacher just told me, ‘You’re wrong.’ ”
As he read—about Taiwan, about the war with Japan, about relations with the U.S.—he began to doubt the history he was taught in high school. “It can change my whole attitude toward my Party, if what the books say is true,” he said. When he talks with friends back home about his discoveries, they mock him for being “brainwashed by America,” he said. “Americans think that free speech and freedom of press is basic for people. But in China we think the community, the country, is the first thing we need to think about. Most ordinary Chinese people don’t understand why democracy is so important for America. They’ll say, ‘Yes, America brings democracy to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to lots of countries. But these countries are getting killed now.’ They say, ‘We’re not democratic, but we live in a peaceful country. We have a good living standard.’ ” He feels that his countrymen are too quick to dismiss what he loves about life outside. “They’ve lost their basic ability to think independently, I think.”
Spending time with Zhao reminded me that, for all the failed promise of our bicultural experiment—the train wreck of “The Great Wall,” the nationalism that going abroad can foster—the revelations that Chinese people can experience here are too valuable to be forsaken. If America closes its doors to Chinese students, it will not only deprive us of their talent and ambition; it will sacrifice the power of our uncensored world.
In Beijing, I had lunch with Xue Qikun, a quantum physicist who is one of China’s most decorated scientists. An elfin figure with a warm, discursive manner (asked for a brief summary of his work, he spoke for thirty-two minutes), Xue worked in Japan and the U.S. before returning to teach at Tsinghua University. He believes that Americans overlook the benefit of their country’s reputation as a magnet for researchers. “In addition to our learning something from the U.S. professors, the U.S. professors learn something from us,” he said. “We have thirty years of hard work and experience.” After the Second World War, Xue noted, the U.S. “collected all the best people in the world.” Now European postdocs are coming to China to work with him. If the U.S. squeezes out Chinese scholars, both sides will suffer, he predicts. “We can work hard by ourselves—no problem at all—but then you’ll lose good people,” he said. “If you cut off, you send a big signal to everyone in the world.”
The risk of espionage on campus is real. But there is also a risk in Trump’s exaggerated talk of spies, the F.B.I.’s warnings of “nontraditional collectors,” and the political opportunity exploited by Gingrich and others—a risk that Susan Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China Center, at the University of California, San Diego, calls “an anti-Chinese version of the Red Scare.” China’s state press trumpets those moves at every opportunity (“Spying Bogey Demonizes Chinese in US,” as a headline in the Global Times put it), because they advance the Communist Party’s argument that American pressure is born not of reason but of anxiety over a rival that is, in the words of Kiron Skinner, “not Caucasian.”
The closest that China and the United States have come to an actual fight in recent decades was in 1996, in a squabble over the island of Taiwan—the land mine at the center of the relationship. Taiwan has resisted Communist control since 1949, and America has pledged to defend it from attacks. In March, 1996, Beijing, fearing that Taiwan was moving toward independence, fired ballistic missiles into the waters off the coast. President Clinton responded by sending in two aircraft-carrier groups, the largest show of force in Asia since the Vietnam War. Chinese leaders backed down—and started working to prevent such a capitulation from ever being necessary again.
At first, progress was haphazard. In 1998, China bought the rusting hulk of an unfinished Soviet aircraft carrier, which had been abandoned in Ukraine at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and announced plans to tow it to Macau and turn it into a floating casino and hotel. Instead, the Chinese Navy restored it, and in 2012 commissioned it as the country’s first carrier. Last month, China launched a second carrier, and it is expected to build several more in the next decade.
It has also acquired new missiles, air defenses, submarines, and cyber weapons that can scramble the electrical grids of an opponent. The U.S. still spends more than twice as much on defense each year, but if a similar crisis emerged today China would not need to back down; in war games commissioned by the Pentagon, China routinely wins battles with America over Taiwan. In 2018, Admiral Philip S. Davidson, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress, “China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.” The risk is not theoretical. In January, in Xi’s first major speech about Taiwan, he said that the island “must and will be” reunited with China eventually, and warned that China reserves the right to use force against any “intervention by external forces.”
As remote as a clash may seem to Americans, a certain fatalism about the tension has crept into conversation in Beijing. Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, told me, “To some extent, it was doomed to happen”—because, he explained, America fears a challenge to its supremacy. Once the trade war began, in the summer of 2018, many in Beijing ascribed it to America’s basic unwillingness to accept China’s rise. The People’s Daily declared, “Whichever country becomes America’s most important competitor, America will try to contain it.”
But Shirk traces the roots of today’s conflicts to political decisions in Beijing a decade ago, and the effect they had in Washington. “I don’t buy that it was inevitable, and this did not begin with the Trump Administration,” she said. “What we’re seeing today is the result of specific choices.” In the aughts, China’s President, Hu Jintao, had a weak hold over the politburo; to avoid a repeat of Mao’s dictatorship, the Party practiced “collective leadership,” in which top bosses divvied up powers, from intelligence-gathering to propaganda to the manufacturing of steel. Over time, each sector became an aggressive fiefdom, taking greater risks to win resources and advance China’s ambitions. “Nobody checked anybody,” Shirk said. Parts of China’s vast government “started overreaching to the point that policies have snapped back and harmed the country.”
Chinese hackers, for instance, at the behest of various agencies—military, intelligence—roamed farther and wider. In 2014, they stole the private records of twenty-two million U.S. government employees and their relatives from a server at the Office of Personnel Management. It was more alarming than the usual breach; foreign spy agencies could use those records to identify people who work covertly as U.S. employees, or have secrets that would make them vulnerable to blackmail. The following year, Xi promised Obama to curtail hacking, and it briefly died down, but China’s cyberattacks have since resumed, including “widespread operations to target engineering, telecommunications, and aerospace industries,” according to a 2018 report by the U.S. intelligence community.
A similar dynamic has played out on China’s coast. For years, Beijing coveted control of the South China Sea, for natural resources and strategic terrain. In 2012, it seized a reef near the Philippines called Scarborough Shoal—China’s boldest use of force in the area. The Administration considered it a minor diplomatic dispute, and did not want to risk violence in order to push China back. Some national-security officials contend that this leniency encouraged China to make further forays into disputed territory. “ ‘No-drama Obama’ didn’t want any messiness,” a former U.S. official said. “Today the Chinese say, ‘We can’t believe you didn’t react.’ ” In 2014, China started building artificial islands atop seven reefs in the South China Sea, as markers of territory and staging grounds for weapons. Obama pressured Xi to stop, and, in the Rose Garden, Xi said that China had “no intention to militarize” the islands. But the military construction never ceased; China calls the islands “necessary defense facilities.”
China’s maneuvers radicalized members of America’s national-security community, in a cycle that Shirk calls “overreach and overreaction.” Paul Haenle, a retired Army officer and an Asia adviser to Bush and Obama, said, “If you talk to folks in the Pentagon, they say they’re no longer debating whether or not China is an enemy. They’re planning for war.” Haenle, who now directs the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, continued, “That really worries me. It’s a change. If you talk about coöperation, you’re ‘naïve.’ Eventually the pendulum has got to swing back, because the key question is: how can we be both a strategic competitor with China and a strategic coöperator?”
The most dangerous frontier between Chinese and American power today is the contested terrain of the Western Pacific: Taiwan, the South China Sea, and a series of shoals and islands that are unfamiliar to the American public. In the South China Sea, the U.S. protests China’s claims by deploying warships and jets close to the artificial islands, while Chinese vessels and planes try to scare them off, a game of chicken that has produced, by the Pentagon’s count, at least eighteen unsafe encounters since 2016—near-collisions at sea or in the air that could have killed troops. Adding to the risk, the U.S. and Chinese militaries have abandoned some lines of communication, and failed to agree on sufficient rules of conduct at sea, the kinds of measures that prevented minor incidents from escalating into catastrophe during the Cold War.
Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said the United States must make realistic decisions about where it is prepared to deter China’s expansion and where it is not. “If we think we can maintain the same dominance we have had since 1945, well, that train has left the station,” he told me. “We should start by racking and stacking China’s global ambitions and determining what we can’t accommodate and what we can, then communicate that to the Chinese at the highest levels, and operationalize them through red lines we will enforce. We’re not doing that. Instead, what we’re doing are things that masquerade as a strategy but, in fact, amount to just kicking them in the balls.”
By the end of 2019, nearly two years into the new era of confrontation, China and America were moving steadily toward a separation that is less economic than political and psychological. Each side had embraced a form of “fight fight, talk talk,” steeling for a “peace that is no peace,” as Orwell had it.
But Henry Kissinger considers America’s contest with China to be both less dire and more complex than the Soviet struggle. “We were dealing with a bipolar world,” he told me. “Now we’re dealing with a multipolar world. The components of an international system are so much more varied, and the lineups are much more difficult to control.”
For that reason, Kissinger says, the more relevant and disturbing analogy is to the First World War. In that view, the trade war is an ominous signal; economic polarization, of the kind that pitted Britain against Germany before 1914, has often been a prelude to real war. “If it freezes into a permanent conflict, and you have two big blocs confronting each other, then the danger of a pre-World War I situation is huge,” Kissinger said. “Look at history: none of the leaders that started World War I would have done so if they had known what the world would look like at the end. That is the situation we must avoid.” Westad agrees. “The pre-1914 parallel is, of course, not just the growth in German power,” he said. “What we, I think, need to focus on is what actually led to war. What led to war was the German fear of being in a position where their power would not strengthen in the future, where they were, as they put it in the summer of 1914, at the maximum moment.”
On each side, the greatest risk is blindness born of ignorance, hubris, or ideology. If the Trump Administration were to gamble on national security the way that Navarro did with his botched predictions on trade, the consequences would be grave; if Xi embraces a caricature of America determined to exclude China from prosperity, he could misperceive this as his “maximum moment.”
The most viable path ahead is an uneasy coexistence, founded on a mutual desire to “struggle but not smash” the relationship. Coexistence is neither decoupling nor appeasement; it requires, above all, deterrence and candor—a constant reckoning with what kind of change America will, and will not, accept. Success hinges not on abstract historical momentum but on hard, specific day-to-day decisions—what the political scientist Richard Rosecrance, in his study of the First World War, called the “tyranny of small things.”
To avoid catastrophe, both sides will have to accept truths that so far they have not: China must acknowledge the outrage caused by its overreaching bids for control, and America must adjust to China’s presence, without selling honor for profit. The ascendant view in Washington holds that the competition is us-or-them; in fact, the reality of this century will be us-and-them. It is naïve to imagine wrestling China back to the past. The project, now, is to contest its moral vision of the future. ♦
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