The first superpower summit of the second Cold War: How to build a floor for the bilateral relations between China and the U.S.
SHANGHAI — The rare face-to-face meeting between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies will take place during what some are calling “the first superpower summit of the second Cold War”.
Three years ago, the leader of China shook hands with the U.S. president. Donald Trump was in the White House, the COVID-19 pandemic was months away and relations between Beijing and Washington, while experiencing friction over trade, were on much firmer ground.
Today, trust is low, the rhetoric is a lot more irritative, and disputes remain in areas including trade, technology, security and ideology.
There’s not going to be a joint statement here. A senior official in the U.S. administration told reporters this week that the meeting was not being driven by deliverables. “The president believes it is critical to build a floor for the relationship and ensure that there are rules of the road that bound our competition.”
The leaders of the two largest economies have not been able to reverse the downward slide in ties since Biden took office.
“I don’t think one meeting is going to rescue or really even redefine the relationship,” says Evan Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University and former White House China advisor. If they’re lucky and it goes well, maybe they can bend the trajectory a bit.
Biden said on Wednesday his goal for the meeting is to get a deeper understanding of Xi’s priorities and concerns, and “lay out what each of our red lines are.”
It’s all been there with regards to China, whether it’s on Taiwan or interdependence in technology or our views of the international order. What divides us, has divided us for a while,” Kennedy says. “But the lack of travel, the lack of direct communication, makes solving those problems almost impossible.”
“Those who play with fire will perish by it. It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this,” Xi warned Biden over the summer, when the two leaders met virtually.
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The use of force is still an option, despite the Communist Party chief’s insistence that China’s preference would be for peaceful reunification.
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan raised eyebrows. Beijing responded with sanctions and large-scale military exercises around the island.
Biden will likely try to assure Hu that the United States is not in favor of Taiwan independence and thatWashington’s policy about Taiwan has not changed. Analysts say Xi is likely to remain skeptical — particularly with the Republican Party projected to take control of at least the House of Representatives following the midterm elections.
“I think the Biden administration will be less flexible or maneuverable” on China, says Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said he would like to visit Taiwan if he becomes majority leader. Such a move could be disastrous, warns another Chinese expert on international relations.
The Chinese lost their face when Pelosi went. Next time, maybe they will just take action,” says a Chinese expert on international affairs, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized by his university to speak to the media.
The committee is one of the few areas where the Congress and the White House can find common ground. The Biden administration has reinforced the already tough stance toward China that ex-President Donald Trump adopted later in his presidency. President Joe Biden, for instance, last year signed a new law that will allow the government to spend $200 billion in a bid to claim the leadership of the semiconductor chips industry – a critical sector that could decide the economic race between the US and China in decades to come.
Chris Miller, the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, states that the US imposed a number of tough export controls on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “There’s really a lot of similarities, to be honest.”
The U.S. says it is trying to keep technology out of the hands of China’s military and security agencies, but experts say they could have a bigger impact.
In China’s case, enforcing the restrictions could be difficult, though. Microchips are small and easy to smuggle across borders. It is a work in progress to get other countries that are in the complex supply chain on board for total enforcement.
As with the latest Covid-19 drama, China has reacted angrily to US criticism – all of which it appears to view in the wider context of its belief that every US policy is aimed at depriving it of its rightful global influence.
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Experts think the Bali meeting might yield a commitment to opening more channels of communication, if Biden andXi can muster the political will.
The lack of communication is a serious and dangerous problem, says Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Kennedy visited China this fall and claims he is “the only think tanker from Washington that’s been to China since the outbreak of the pandemic.”
He believes that there is a chance to take a bit of a gamble now that China’s Party Congress and the U.S. elections are over.
But Zhu warns that nobody should expect too much from this summit. He says that a discussion may help to deepen understanding, but that’s it.
The current situation is similar to the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union distrusted each other.
The experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis made the two sides believe in strategic restraint, which often isstitutionalized through arms control agreements.
Yet a decision by China to throw in its lot with Russia in Ukraine would amount to a radical change in foreign policy – and another massive plunge in US-China relations. The US and the EU would likely retaliate with sanctions on Chinese firms, which could make Beijing nervous as the country’s economy slowly recovers from years of Covid isolation.
The new disagreements are so fraught that the recent unprecedented diplomatic showdown over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental US is not even the most recent or intense cause of strife.
It is in this politicized atmosphere that the GOP-controlled House is debuting a new bipartisan select committee on competition with China during a primetime hearing on Tuesday night, just as Washington-Beijing tensions have rarely been worse.
The committee’s work will be based on the premise that after years of trying to integrate China peacefully into the global system as a competitor not an enemy, the US is switching to a tougher stance in a belief that a new generation of Chinese leaders is trying to dismantle the US global order and international law.
Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, the new committee’s chairman, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Tuesday’s hearing would not focus specifically on the latest drama – after the Department of Energy assessed with low confidence that the Covid-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak in the Chinese city of Wuhan. He said that finding, which is a minority view among US intelligence agencies, could be examined in a future hearing but that he wanted to show Americans on Tuesday that the threat from China was “not just an over there problem, it’s … right here.”
“We want to understand what we got wrong about the Chinese Communist Party and what we need to understand about it going forward in order to get our policy right,” the Wisconsin Republican said.
On CBS News on Sunday, Gallagher warned: “We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a tennis match. This is about what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in Xinjiang-lite or do we want to live in the free world?” The US has accused China of genocide in the Chinese region, a charge that it continues to deny.
China objected to the reemergence of lab leak theories in Washington, warning that Americans should stop suggesting that China might have been involved with the virus and stop talking about the issue of origin.
“There is a bottom line here, which is that neither lab leak, nor spillover – i.e. animal origin – can be ruled out. Tom Frieden is the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But it didn’t take long for Republicans to claim political victory in the wake of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal report about new intelligence causing the Department of Energy to believe with low confidence that a lab leak was to blame. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been accused of spreading conspiracy theories about the pandemic, tweeted, “Conspiracy theorists – 100 Media – 0.”
Cotton is a Republican from Arkansas. Being proven right doesn’t matter, as China’s lab leak shows. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.”
It doesn’t mean the world was deliberately exposed or that the virus came from a laboratory.
The danger of a proxy war between China and Russia, as outlined by the United States Ambassador to Russia and the National Intelligence Council
The issue has become an excuse for Republicans to target scientists and government health experts in a way that still shows the huge gaps in Covid-19.
No costs have been incurred for China’s support of Russia. This (would be) the first time – it is a very important crossroads,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, said on CNN Monday.
A proxy war between China and Russia is not in the interests of the United States, according to a statement from the US Ambassador to Russia.
His comments were a reminder that everything in Washington is ultimately political. The US and China relations are one of the most politicized issues.
Divisive debates about how to address the nation’s debt limit or tackle border security have dominated the first few months of a divided Congress. But many Republicans and Democrats agree that focusing on the U.S.-China relationship needs to be a top priority.
Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the panel, says his constituents often reach out to him with concerns about China’s massive influence.
“Everyone seems to have their own stories, whether they are a small business person or whether they’re concerned about the crackdown on dissent or human rights,” he told NPR.
Gallagher is worried about TikTok’s ability to influence the flow of information that Americans see and share, telling NPR “it can be used to influence the news, what people see and talk about, and, therefore, to interfere in our society and our politics and our very democracy. So I think we’re nearing a very dangerous inflection point here.”
“The algorithms are also controlled ultimately by the CCP. It’s deeply disturbing that you now have the user data and the algorithm under the control of the same people.
TikTok has been working to convince U.S. users their data is secure and is attempting to reassure the Biden administration as well by launching a public relations offensive with meetings in Washington with the company’s CEO Shou Zi Chew.
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There is an egregious chapter in Chinese government’s efforts to spy on U.S. interests that has been seen by many lawmakers. Congress wants a comprehensive plan to deal with rising security threats and the incident raised the level of alarm.
“This is not a military challenge. China has used its commercial, military and technological applications in ways no other nation has so it’s a multifaceted challenge,” Rubio said.
Gallagher traveled to Taiwan last week on an unannounced trip and met with top Taiwanese officials. The officials also visited the bipartisan House delegation.
Krishnamoorthi said they want to do everything they can to deter Taiwan from being attacked. “We don’t want open hostilities to break out in that part of the world, which could lead to very severe consequences for the region.”
The House foreign affairs panel has a hearing on Tuesday with top Biden administration officials to discuss the threat that Chairman Mike McCaul says comes from the Chinese Communist Party.
Van Hollen is working with Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney and the pair argue that developing nation status for China is outdated, maintaining that a country with the second largest economy in the world shouldn’t get any edge in trade agreements.
There’s a limit to what Congress can do if it wants to insist on strategy when dealing with China.
“I think we need to develop a more comprehensive and tactical strategy and that’s something that’ll not be done by Congress,” he said. “That’s something done by State Department, other agencies of government and, in my view, outside experts who offer perspective that you wouldn’t get from within the buildings of government.”
Skills training for U.S workers is something Congress can do, Krishnamoorthi thinks, in order to make them competitive in fields like Artificial Intelligence. He also says the U.S. immigration system penalizes those who come to innovate but are forced to leave because they can’t get visas.
“This is the U.S. shooting itself in the foot repeatedly on immigration and now it has real world consequences when adversarial regimes take advantage of our weaknesses and it comes back to haunt us.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159132544/congress-zeroes-in-on-china-as-economic-and-security-threats-loom
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