James Chau
Up until a few weeks ago, there was new momentum in the U.S. China relationship. Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden had a phone call, and there had been talk that the United States could ease some of the trade tariffs against China. Suddenly, however, we're in a situation where the relationship has taken a decisive turn. Can some level of workable trust be rebuilt?
Wu Xinbo
Trust, relates to two factors. One is intention. The other is capability. For China, the first question is the U.S. strategic intent toward China, because from Donald Trump to Joe Biden they all talk about strategic competition with China. They have defined China as a strategic competitor, and even a rival of the United States. And the U.S. has launched this kind of strategic containment or suppression against China politically, economically and militarily. For China, we have deep concerns of the U.S. strategic intentions toward China.
The second factor is capability — whether President Biden has the capability to deliver the “good things” he talked about in relations with China. From time to time in his exchanges with President Xi, he said he wanted to have a workable relationship with China and to avoid conflict. But if you look what he has been doing, the problem is that sometimes he's not able to manage U.S. domestic politics — for example, Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Biden was not supportive of it, but he couldn't dissuade her from making the trip. And Biden's national security team was divided on China, for example on the tariff issue. Some people suggested the tariffs should be reduced or removed; some insisted that tariffs should be kept in place as leverage against China.
Biden is not able to manage the internal politics that lead China to question whether he has the capability to manage relations. Essentially, after the Pelosi episode, China has much less confidence that Biden has good relations with China in mind — or even workable relations with China.
James Chau
Let's look at the consequences of Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, which triggered days of military exercises around the island. Some people in the West have called this an overreaction. Do you think that's the case? Or was it an appropriate, rational response?
Wu Xinbo
My understanding is that the military drills don't just target Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, per se. But it targets the broader context in which the U.S. has changed its Taiwan policy fundamentally in the last several years. It actually started with the Trump administration, which played the Taiwan card against China. The Biden administration continued this policy line by raising the level of official contact with Taiwan, providing increasing military support to Taiwan, and trying to raise Taiwan's international profile.
So Nancy Pelosi's visit provided an opportunity for China to fight back by taking diplomatic and military countermeasures. What China has been doing is not a response to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan but is also intended to curb the dangerous trend, as we see it, in America's Taiwan policy, which, in the view of Beijing, is trying to hollow out the “one China” policy commitment made by the U.S. after normalization between the two countries, and also to make sure that the U.S. understands China's signal in a serious way.
James Chau
Why does China insist that the Taiwan question remain at the core of its relationship with the United States, which at the end of the day, is thousands of miles away on a different continent?
Wu Xinbo
Well, it's simply because the U.S. has been the most important external factor on the Taiwan issue since 1950. Despite its commitment to Beijing after normalization that the U.S. would have only unofficial, economic and cultural relations, U.S. relations with Taiwan have been conducted at the official level from time to time. In recent years, the U.S. has raised the level of official contact with Taiwan and provided even more substantive military support. So that is why in Beijing's view the U.S. stands as the most important obstruction to China's pursuit of national reunification with Taiwan.
James Chau
Let's put this in global context now, because the world is struggling with an economic downturn, multiple disease outbreaks and a degradation in the natural environment. Yet we're here talking about China and the United States. Can they rise to the moral responsibility by solving the major challenges humanity faces today?
Wu Xinbo
Well, let's remember that before Donald Trump, China and the U.S. had very effective cooperation on multilateral issues, from public health to climate change. But things began to change during the Trump administration. One is that, because of domestic politics, the U.S. didn't want to cooperate with China on multilateral issues.
The Trump administration viewed the outbreak of COVID-19 in China as an opportunity to slow down China's rise. It played up this issue as political leverage for domestic reasons — for example, for the midterm elections in 2020. Another reason is that the U.S. is now taking an increasingly geopolitical approach to cooperation with China on multilateral issues because it views China's rise on the international stage as a threat to the U.S. influence. It adopts a kind of zero-sum approach and is becoming unwilling to cooperate with China on these issues.
For Beijing there is also a change. Beijing fears that the U.S. does not respect China's core interests, such as the Taiwan issue, so its willingness to cooperate with the U.S. on those third-party factors is declining. This time, China, in response to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, has declared a suspension of China-U.S. cooperation on climate change. Cooperation between two countries on multilateral issues require, as always, political will. And Beijing just believes this kind of political will is lacking.
James Chau
We're listening to you. My concern is that the growing absence of cooperation will lead to a rising likelihood of military conflict between the United States and China. Do you share those concerns? Or do you think we're still very far from the tipping point?
Wu Xinbo
I think, at the moment, that both Beijing and Washington do not want to see a major military conflict. On the other hand, the risk is rising, simply because the U.S. is pursuing its so-called strategic competition with China, not just economically and diplomatically but also militarily. And this has made it very dangerous for the two militaries to manage encounters in the western Pacific, especially around Taiwan. On the other hand, Beijing must take a firmer approach to defend its core national interest on the Taiwan issue, and also in South China Sea. This has made it more difficult for two sides to take necessary precautions to reduce the risk of military conflict. Sometimes military conflict occurs not because they are planned but because some incident occurred in which the two sides were not able to manage these incidental clashes. They can escalate into major crises and finally into major conflicts. This is something that people in both countries are worried about today.
James Chau
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says the United States would do well to adopt some of the style from Richard Nixon's era by being a bit more flexible to defuse a confrontation between the U.S. and China, and between Russia and the rest of Europe. Are we seeing the world emerge into polarized camps because of what is coming out of Washington right now?
Wu Xinbo
Washington today is mainly playing two cards vis-a-vis China and Russia. One is the geopolitical card. So it's pursuing a so-called geopolitical strategy, trying to get its regional allies and friends on board against China, and even to bring its NATO allies into the camp. That is creating more and more geopolitical division between the U.S. on one hand, and China and Russia on the other. The second card is “value”. Biden defines U.S. competition with China as between democracy and autocracy. Washington hosted the so-called Democracy Summit last year, not just to promote the value of democracy but more important to isolate China and Russia on the world stage.
As a result, the world is becoming more divided between the U.S. and its allies on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. However, there are also some countries — most of ASEAN, for example, or countries in Southeast Asia — that do not want to take sides between two camps. So they are actually trying to pursue a sort of third way, becoming a sort of third camp.
On certain issues, they may join the United States. On other issues, they may join China. I think there will be more countries taking the third way and joining this sort of camp. We no longer have an integrated world driven by globalization and global cooperation on global governance. More and more, we are torn apart by geopolitical and ideological fights between Washington and Beijing and Moscow.
James Chau
Last, we spoke about the moral responsibility of China and the United States. Surely that responsibility is also tied to many multilateral frameworks, such as the G20, the World Trade Organization and even the United Nations. What is the future of all these groups?
Wu Xinbo
Well, unfortunately the growing geopolitical and ideological fight against China, Russia and other countries by the U.S. and its allies has worked to hinder the operation of multilateral frameworks, be it United Nations, WTO or G20.
In the United Nations Security Council, you will see more and more vetoes cast by the U.S. and its allies, as well as by China and Russia, making the UN Security Council less efficient and effective in promoting world peace and security. Within the WTO, as we have seen, the U.S. during the Trump administration, decided to paralyze this body because it's not happy with the way it works.
So far, the Biden administration has not changed Trump's policy of paralyzing the WTO settlement resolution mechanism. It is making it more difficult for a multilateral mechanism such as the G20 to operate smoothly. As we have seen, given the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the U.S. has insisted that the G20 should not invite Russian President Putin to attend. When the Russian minister spoke, the U.S. and its allies just boycotted it. The G20 is supposed to be a body for international economic governance, one that bridges differences in political and security realms. Yet today it has been hijacked by geopolitical fighting. So, that is a very, very unfortunate.
What will happen in the future? There may be a rise in other types of multilateral arrangements. Countries may decide to make new arrangements to pursue their goals in security and economy. For example, the BRICS mechanism has decided to include more countries — perhaps Indonesia or Argentina — to promote economic governance. Also, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is also including other regional members in a joint effort to deal with regional security challenges. The U.S., of course, is trying to create other types of multilateral arrangements that exclude China and Russia. The world overall is becoming not only more divided but also more fractured.