DAVID P. GOLDMAN
China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet President Biden Nov. 15 in San Francisco with four high cards in his hand. Policy advisers close to Xi express an unprecedented kind of confidence in China’s strategic position.
First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers.
Third, the Gaza war provoked by Hamas on October 7 gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally. China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States.
And fourth, the US military wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theatre advantage in firepower.
Mutual fear of war
In the background of the Biden-Xi summit is a fear – shared by both sides – that a US-China confrontation could lead to war.
Henry Kissinger told the Economist last May: “We’re in the classic pre-World War 1 situation where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”
A prominent advisor to China’s Communist Party, Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, told “The Observer” on November 9, “The world today has entered an era of great struggle: the old order dominated by the West. It is disintegrating, but the new order has not yet been established.” Jin compared the world situation to China’s bloody Warring States period (475 BCE to 221 BCE).
A major concern on the American side is the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal to a projected 1,000 warheads by 2030, from just 220 in 2020. A November 10 commentary in Foreign Affairs warns, “Chinese analysts are worried that the United States has lowered its threshold for nuclear use – including allowing for limited first use in a Taiwan conflict – and that the US military is acquiring new capabilities that could be used to destroy or significantly degrade China’s nuclear forces.”
Newsom shows how to pull back
A foretaste of the Biden-Xi discussions came from the October 25 Beijing visit of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden withdraw for health reasons or in response to Congressional investigations of his personal and family finances. A widely-circulated scenario for the upcoming presidential race foresees Newsom replacing an ailing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Significantly, Newsom has been quoted as saying that he had “expressed my support for the One-China policy … as well as our desire not to see independence” of Taiwan. Newsome spoke of “renewing our friendship and re-engaging [on] foundational and fundamental issues that will determine our collective faith in the future.”
Newsom’s clear rejection of Taiwanese independence contrasts with Biden’s earlier statements that although the US is “not encouraging their being independent,” independence is “their decision.” Biden had also declared that the US has a “commitment” to defend Taiwan, drawing protests from China’s Foreign Ministry. Biden is likely to sound more reassuring – that is, more like Newsom – in San Francisco.
PLA might, assertiveness grow
The growing assertiveness of China’s navy and air force in the South China Sea also worries the US military. China in effect dared the United States to get into a scrap by suspending the hotline between the militaries of the two nations. Last month a Pentagon official complained complained that Chinese warplanes had conducted 200 risky maneuvers near US aircraft since 2021.
The conventional arm of the PLA Rocket Force “is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal.
Chips war boomerangs
America’s restrictions on high-end chip exports to China failed to prevent Huawei Technologies from offering a new smartphone as well as Artificial Intelligence processors with performance comparable to or close to what’s achieved by the products of Nvidia and other US designers. On November 7, Reuters reported that the Chinese Internet giant Baidu had ordered 1,600 of Huawei’s 910B Ascend AI chips, reportedly on par with the Nvidia A100 Graphics Processing Unit, the most popular AI processor.
Nvidia, meanwhile, has offered a new set of chips for the Chinese market scaled down to conform to new Commerce Department restrictions announced last month. As Semianalysis, a consulting firm, reported on November 9, “To our surprise Nvidia still found a way to ship high-performance GPUs into China with their upcoming H20, L20, and L2 GPUs. Nvidia already has product samples for these GPUs and they will go into mass production within the next month, yet again showing their supply chain mastery.”
Exploiting the Gaza crisis
With its leading economic presence in the Muslim world, China sees the Gaza war as a rallying point for sentiment against the United States and its allies. “The voice of the Global South has become louder and louder, the Arab world in the Middle East is moving toward reconciliation, and the voice of the Third World continues to grow on the international stage,” wrote Jin Canrong in the cited ”Observer” piece on November 9. “China can be seen in these landmark events, and these countries have increasingly high expectations and calls for China.”
China’s President Xi Jinping, right, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas shake hands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in June 2023.
Significantly, Jin included Israel as part of the core of Western countries:
Everyone keeps talking about the West, but what exactly does the West mean? The West refers to three big countries and four small countries. The three big countries are the United States, Europe, and Japan, and the four small countries are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. They are a small, closed circle that other countries cannot enter. There is a group of right-wing intellectuals in China who still dream of joining the West. Even if they demolish the Forbidden City and build the White House in its place, they will not be able to get in. If they go in, they will be servants guarding the palace, like Japan and South Korea.
Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been a consistent American ally, buying most of its military hardware from the US and jointly developing a variety of weapons systems, but it has not acted as a core member of the Western alliance. Unlike New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, Israel does not belong to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing group. And it refused to provide lethal aid to Ukraine.
Israel and China: what might have been
Israel and China, moreover, both have problems with Muslim terrorism and have held informal discussions on possible cooperation – none of which have led to practical agreements.
In 2019, I attended a closed-door seminar with prominent Chinese and Israeli security specialists, under Chatham House rules (speakers cannot be identified). A prominent Chinese policy advisor asked the Israelis to help China explain its policy towards the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province to the American government.
A former top Israeli official responded
Will Israel help China with the US? We have experience in this regard. It’s no longer a secret. The Egyptian ambassador to Washington said publicly that Egypt could not have gotten through the last four years of the Obama administration without the support of Israel. We helped with Congress and the White House. The success of [Egyptian president] El-Sisi against the Muslim Brotherhood was important. But if we help China, we have to ask, why? You expect us to defend your policy toward Uyghurs. Will you defend our policy vs Hamas? No. Why should we defend you? Change your policy first. You can’t expect Israel to do anything when you are condemning Israel.
The Chinese spokesperson protested that China has 20 million Muslims whom it doesn’t want to provoke by voting with Israel at the United Nations, not to mention more than 50 Muslim embassies.
The ranking Israeli in the room retorted that the Indian President, Modi “has more Muslims than you do, and he voted with the US at the UN! India changed policy. It has good relations with Iran, which we don’t like. States like China as well as India are big enough to do what they want. It amazes me that, unlike India, a strong country like China is still explaining that they are too weak to vote against the 57 Muslim countries in the UN. It doesn’t hold water after the experience of India.”
The Chinese advisor responded: “I have witnessed great changes taking place in the US. It is not as tolerant as before. China has become more confident, sometimes overconfident. We face difficult domestic issues. China is turning left domestically, and the US is becoming more conservative.
“Domestic politics have taken a different direction,” he continued, referring to the Trump Administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports. But the Chinese advisor added, “Israel will play a positive role because Israel has a great relationship with the US. Chinese people admire Israel and the Israeli people. Most Chinese people have a good impression. We also have a large Muslim population, and they are pro-Arab. This is a fact.”
China’s darker view
The above are extracts from my verbatim notes on the conversation. This was a rough-and-tumble negotiation, but not a hostile one. China’s tone has changed markedly since then, with a sharply hostile tone towards Israel across all Chinese media.
China’s perception of American intentions has changed in the meantime. In his November 9 “Observer” interview, Jin Canrong added,
Although the world order is chaotic everywhere, the most dangerous element by far is the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Ukraine is an agent and puppet of the United States. American politicians and media have publicly called the Russia-Ukraine conflict a “Proxy War.” There are 193 United Nations member states and more than 200 countries and regions on the planet, but the ones that truly have strategic independence and the ability to destroy each other are China, the United States, and Russia, two of which are in a state of military confrontation.
Sadly, Jin’s harsh words about the US role in the Ukraine war are justified. Regime change in Russia through a sequence of color revolutions on its border has been an obsessive theme of neo-conservative policy since Washington backed the 2004 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.
China and the Global South
China sees an opportunity to push back against the United States and is drawing on its heightened standing in the Global South to undermine American geopolitical influence. Since the cited conversation in 2019, China’s exports to the Global South have roughly doubled
Washington has few cards to play, and Biden is likely to respond to his weakened position by back-pedaling on Taiwan.
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