No clear path to US-China reconciliation

DENNY ROY

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Plenty of analysts, including Americans, argue that improvement in US-China relations depends on the United States adjusting its behavior to accommodate Chinese concerns.

This curiously absolves Beijing of equivalent responsibility. It also deflects the important question of whether the government of the People’s Republic of China has trapped itself into an inability to make the policy changes that could resuscitate bilateral relations.

Cornell University professor Jessica Chen Weiss, in a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs, acknowledges the dangers of “aggression” and “coercion” by the PRC but limits her specific policy recommendations to the United States. Weiss says Washington should:

halt acts that seem to encourage de facto independence by Taiwan;

stop “reflexively opposing” Chinese international initiatives;

cease targeting Chinese technology firms; and

work through international groupings that include China rather than those that exclude China.

A December 2022 report by the Quincy Institute recommends that Washington eventually withdraw US forces from South Korea and rescind the US-ROK alliance, abandon AUKUS, limit the Quad to non-military activities, cease courting India as a security partner and stay out of a Taiwan Strait war because a “US defeat” would be “almost certain” and because defending Taiwan is not a vital interest for either the United States or Japan.

Political commentators Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky call upon Americans to stop using China as an imaginary enemy for domestic political purposes and to “abandon the desire to permanently preserve our hegemony.” They add that “The US needs to stop needlessly stoking conflict” and start to “think about how things look from the Chinese perspective.”

Jonathan Tepperman, former editor of Foreign Policy, advises that the United States should “push back against China’s bad behavior” – but that the best way to do so would be “by toning down [US] ideological rhetoric, as well as by abandoning [US] attempts to decouple the US and Chinese economies.”

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs opines that the US government should “stop putting Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong at the center of our relations with China” so that the United States and China together can “get along and settle crucial global problems” such as climate change.

To some extent, these commentaries echo the PRC government’s position, which places the blame for poor bilateral relations and the onus for improving them entirely on the United States.

The premise that unilateral concession-giving by Washington is the only way to rehabilitate Sino-US relations is wrong.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in a combination file photo. Photos: AFP / Nicolas Asfouri and Nicholas Kamm

Washington has legitimate regional and global interests, some of which are at odds with the PRC’s agenda and behavior. These interests include protecting friends and allies and standing up for international legal and ethical principles that are widely shared.

If any government deserves having the international community comply with 100% of its demands, it is certainly not that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Beijing is routinely deceptive and non-transparent, flouts international law when it conflicts with China’s self-interest, breaks international agreements, practices economic coercion, carries out illegal activities on a large scale and still denies it is implementing mass incarceration of Chinese Muslims.

The “14 grievances” that the PRC government presented to Australia in 2020 included Chinese displeasure about the following actions:Canberra enacting legislation to prevent foreign interference in Australian elections;

Australia’s “call for an independent inquiry into the Covid-19 virus”;

Australia “peddling lies around Xinjiang” and accusing China of cyber-attacks; and

“unfriendly” reporting about China in Australian media.

A year later, the Chinese government similarly gave visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman what the PRC media called a “List of US Wrongdoings that Must Stop,” a tally of alleged indignities that was clearly designed to please a domestic Chinese audience.

Practical political necessity might compel a weaker country to unequally accommodate a stronger country’s preferences, but that situation does not apply here. The United States is economically, militarily and diplomatically stronger than China and also has more soft power and more and better security partners.

A reasonable expectation is that Beijing and Washington should negotiate an understanding in which both sides make concessions in the interest of achieving a more robust peace.

Both PRC and US officials have expressed the desire for rapprochement, but this is unlikely to occur without adjustments of policies by one or both sides. It is seriously questionable whether Beijing is willing and able to make compromises on any of the issues that cause the most tension in China-US relations.

Taiwan has become the most prominent and dangerous flashpoint. The PRC policies that especially alarm Americans are China’s military (both nuclear and conventional) buildup and threat to use force if necessary to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s rule.

The PRC government is fundamentally committed to both of those policies. A renunciation of either is unimaginable. The PRC leadership seems to believe (probably correctly) that, absent the threat of military force, Taiwan’s people would vote to declare formal independence from China.Pro-Taiwan independence activists call for a referendum during a demonstration in Taipei on October 20, 2018. Photo: AFP / Sam Yeh

Leaders as well as the general public in China believe a wealthy state should have commensurately strong military forces – fuguo, qiangbing – especially given the lesson of the “century of humiliation” and the aspiration to eventually displace the United States as the leading power in eastern Asia and the western Pacific.

The next most dangerous flashpoint is the South China Sea. The bilateral dispute arises from the PRC’s claiming as its territory what the United States considers international waters and airspace.

The trend over the last three decades has been for Beijing to state that claim with increasing forcefulness, enlarge its capability to enforce that claim and operate its maritime military and quasi-military units aggressively. There is no visible leeway for Beijing to climb down from that posture.

US politicians have highlighted concerns about other policies that the Chinese government is equally unlikely to change. One is the persecution of Chinese Uighurs. The PRC is not budging from its position that this charge is a “lie” and an “attempt to smear China.”

Nor will Beijing willingly discard any of these bedrock principles of its rule:its aspiration to lead the world in crucial advanced technologies;

the basic features of its economic system; and

the CCP’s monopoly over political power in China.

Perhaps senior officials from the two countries can be more flexible in private than their public stances suggest. Increasingly, however, the bilateral hostility is multi-dimensional: strategic, economic, and ideological. Despite the mutual desire for reconciliation in principle, there is no clear path to achieving it in practice.

We are left with PRC officials futilely repeating their non-solution that “The US should reflect on its mistakes and correct them.”