As China Rises, Biden Struggles to Resp

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

On March 19, American and Chinese officials met in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss a range of security and human rights issues. It didn’t go well. The new Biden administration’s strategy to curb Beijing faces a stiff challenge as China uses its economic, diplomatic and military might to deflect criticism.

The relationship between the two countries got off to a bad start when the new People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, snubbed the U.S. as the chief global agent of capitalism and imperialism and forged an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Washington retaliated by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the new Chinese government and continuing to uphold the Republic of China, confined to the island of Taiwan, as the sole legitimate representative of the Chinese people, and denying the Communist regime one of the five permanent seats at the UN Security Council until 1971.

Relations grew more cordial in the 1970s, and the Beijing regime was recognized in 1979. China also emerged from the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution and began its swift rise as a major economic power.

China’s leaders aimed at the creation of a mercantilist, state-capitalist system, guided by a Communist Party holding a monopoly of power, modelled after Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the early years of the Soviet Union.

Lenin characterized it as an economic system that would include a free market and capitalism, but subject to state control.

While China and the U.S. have found some common ground on issues of trade, key issues remain unresolved, the potential for troubling divergence is real, with China now an economic powerhouse, a military force in Asia, and a potential rival to U.S. hegemony.

President Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. In March of 2018, China's parliament amended its constitution, broadening his power and scrapping term limits.

China has become more authoritarian under Xi. He has carried out a massive crackdown on China’s Uighur minority in Xinjiang; launched campaigns of repression in Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet; and stifled dissent among intellectuals, lawyers, artists, and religious organizations across China.

He has come to believe that China should no longer fear any sanctions that the United States might impose in response to violations of human rights. In his view, China’s economy is now strong enough to weather them.

Anyhow, the promise of peaceful reunification with Taiwan under a “one country, two systems” formula has evaporated as the Taiwanese look to Hong Kong, where China has imposed a harsh new national security law, arrested opposition politicians, and restricted media freedom. 

The Chinese think that the United States’ role in their region for the past 75 years has been unnatural and is therefore transient.

China is aiming to become the dominant force in the Asia-Pacific, strengthening its hand toward Taiwan and international disputes in the East and South China Seas. Championing what he calls the Chinese Dream, a vision to restore China’s great-power status, Xi has gone further to push military reforms than his predecessors.

Beijing intends to complete its military modernization program by 2027, with the main goal of giving China a decisive edge in all conceivable scenarios for a conflict with the United States over Taiwan.

So the possibility of war exists, since for the United States to back away from a fight would mean abandoning its commitment to a democratic ally at tremendous reputational cost.

Chen Yixin, the secretary-general of the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, on Jan. 15 stated that “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” has become a global trend and “changes of the international landscape are in our favor.”

A powerful figure within the China’s Communist apparatus, he is expected to succeed Xi Jinping as the country’s next leader and his remarks reflect Beijing’s growing belief in its inevitable rise as the world’s sole superpower.

China now occupies that place in the American mind that Germany and the Soviet Union once held: an ideological opponent that has the ability to threaten the United States’ position in a key region and perhaps elsewhere too. Can President Joe Biden improve matters? Not so far.